Stubborn Blade
5th Searing 122
5th Searing 122
“We should be practicing more academically stimulating arts… like alchemy.” Erishti suggested, not for the first time. It floated nearby, about two feet above the flat sand. Ilphas brushed sweat from his brow and glanced over at the Aidolon. Ilphas himself was stripped to the waist and his dark skin had a sheen of sweat glistening in the midday sun. He had dropped his pack nearby and the katana lay in the sand twenty feet away. Red robes and other students of the College of Sands walked through the courtyard around them. A few students were using the sandy space for practical training in any number of magics. A few more were lounging in the sand with tomes and scrolls.
Ilphas felt at home here amongst peers as he practiced his own craft. So it was with jovial cheer that he quipped back at the crotchety spirit. “Just because you will never hold a blade doesn’t make it worthless, you octopus!” He knew Erishti would not find the jibe humorous but could not resist.
Erishti never found anything humorous. Ilphas had once tried to explain humor, and Erishti had seemed genuinely interested, but could never acknowledge it with a suitably human response.
“I may hold your sword yet.” Erishti said cryptically.
Ilphas laughed and turned back to face the katana laying dormant. He raised his hand and began to gather aether into it.
“What are you doing, anyway?” Erishti asked, bobbing towards another student who sat nearby. Its pinkish eyestalks were stretching forward as it tried to see the scroll the student had.
“It’s called a Returning.” Ilphas said, breaking his concentration but diverting Erishti from pestering the stranger. “The casting is supposed to physically summon my Pact bound weapon to my hand… I have not yet mastered it.”
Erishti watched him struggle to gather the aether and direct it silently.
The aether made the skin tingle in his hand as though it had recently recovered from numbness. It danced through him, leaving a fleeting itching sensation. The connection to the pact weapon, the point at which his mind focused, pulsed. The Siltori pushed the aether into the connection. At the same moment his mind reached out and sent the command to the katana.
Unlike a normal mundane weapon, the katana was infused with his aether. It was more akin to a limb than a tool. Because of that it would move if he manipulated that aether. The command sent from his soul to the piece inside the katana. The aether exploded from his hand, the itching sensation going with it.
The Pact katana rolled over towards him. Well, one needed to learn the steps before they could dance with their feet. It must be the same with Reaving.
He stared at the katana, frowning. Then he glanced about quickly to see if anyone had been looking at the attempt. Erishti had. The eldritch spirit drifted over to the katana and was staring down at it closely with most of its eyestalks.
Ilphas sighed and frowned as the spirit drifted back to the place it had been hovering. It was almost worse that Erishti did not even deign to comment on the attempt rather than say something else disparaging. The Siltori watched his Aidolon for a moment before turning back to the katana.
“So will you bring it to your hand this time?” Erishti asked.
Ilphas closed his eyes. “Yep.”
In the practiced manner that only one bonded by arcane powers to Erishti could, Ilphas shook off the spirits’ outlandish antics. The mage raised his hand again. The aether swirled within and with practiced easy he ushered it to his palm. It seemed his irritation was just enough to brush the complacency away, like dust from a carpet.
What was left was a defiant, sharp focus. The sun shone down, but not with uncomfortable heat. The Tower of Lore manipulated their entire campus to look and feel like whatever they wanted. The sheer, raw power of that enchantment was staggering. Ilphas looked at the katana. To belong here was to harness power, to tame that within which could use it. Summoning the katana was a first step on a lifelong journey within these walls.
The odd relief came again as the aether left his hand and sought to command the katana. The blade rolled again, but the mage did not relinquish his command of its reality. He felt the weight of it as it lifted from the sand as if he were holding it aloft. Nothing else existed in that moment save for the blade and the hand. Not the College of Sands campus, not the other students, not Erishti. It was just that connection, and it did not waver.
The hilt slammed into his palm and he felt the familiar silken weave of the grip. Instinctively his fingers wrapped around the hilt. All at once, senses rushed back into prominence. Ilphas let out the breath he did not know he had been holding. Sounds rushed back in and the Siltori blinked in the sunlight. He let the sword drop to his side and looked around.
Erishti was looking at him with all of its eyestalks. “I see, a success.” It bobbed a bit after the statement. Ilphas felt a wry smile play on his lips. Perhaps the eldritch, far realm equivalent of a congratulations? Probably it was as close as he would ever come to one from the spirit.
“Yep.” Ilphas breathed.
Knees bent and left and right feet dragging in the sand away from each other, the Siltori settled into the the first stance of the Jeyet, the Badger. The katana stood poised before him, easily still in his practiced hands. In that moment, staring down at the shard of silver that was the katana’s naked steel, the Siltori remembered his first lessons with the blade long ago and in a different patch of sand. Then it had been heavy and even this basic stance had caused struggle. A smile heavy with the pain of nostalgia broke the smooth neutrality of his ashen skinned face.
The blade lunged forward with his left foot in a quick attack. With a quick backhand slash he brought his right foot in front of him again and settled into the harder stance of the Viper. He felt the pressure in his knees and his pelvis below his torso. The strain of the very physical exercise somehow cemented the Pact, as if handling the blade as it was meant to be held in its most mundane form reaffirmed their relationship.
It was the weapon, and he the hand that held it.
Ilphas looked out at the empty space ahead of him, envisioning an enemy. With the blade held over his head he let out an explosion of breath. Stepping forward and striking downward any the same time he felt his foot slam into the sand. The katana sang as it rent the air. Shifting his pelvis forward over the center of his gravity and slipping the katana behind him, the Siltori slid into the Scorpion stance.
This pose was especially deadly in practiced hands as the blade was hidden from the enemy next to its sheath. Breath burst from him in a grunt of effort as the katana shot out in a horizontal slice and stopped before him. Ilphas sighed and relaxed his body.
He stood in front of the scabbard where he had placed the katana originally. Replacing it in the sand, he turned back to Erishti. The spirit had been watching these movements with most of its eyestalks.
“I think I’m ready to go again, actually.”
“What of Lorier’s alchemical assignments?” Erishti intoned.
The spirit seemed wholly unimpressed with him. Sometimes he wondered what had prompted the mysterious eldritch thing to agree to the Aidolon contract in the first place. It was perhaps that no mortal was interesting enough to warrant appreciation to any eldritch being. Vaguely Ilphas wondered if his father had been forced to deal with such a spirit, or were his own more amiable.
“I said I’d get to it after. This is equally important.” He pointed out to the spirit, a slight tonal edge in his voice. For the thousandth time then Siltori told himself not to take the thing’s dismissive nature personally. He interpreted the flat tone of Erishti’s personality through the lens of his own mortal world… A world the spirit was not native to.
“I was to make sure I can succeed dependably. Then we will go map out the prime reagents listed for this week’s coursework. Deal?” He smiled cheerily.
Erishti turned its eyestalks away from Ilphas then. “Agreeable.” It intoned as it went back to people watching.
“Why do you love staring at strangers so much.” Ilphas asked the spirit as he walked back to his starting position.
“Strangeness is the guise of knowledge.” Erishti said immediately.
That caught Ilphas off guard. Erishti was not prone to proverbial speak. That meant it was a genuine truth for the thing. Sometimes the creature seemed so normal in perspective that it made Ilphas think that somewhere in that alien soul there was a similarity. Perhaps a similarity that would teach him of the nature of all beings, gods and mortals alike.
