A warm wind swirls over the head of the young man sitting atop the ramparts of the outer wall. He stares silently off into the distance, his gaze tracing the mountain ridges before settling quietly onto some far off patch of sky riddled with thin wisps of clouds. The sky is like the sea today, a vast, penetrating blue, and just as eternal. The oceanic feeling overtakes him as he lounges, his back firmly against the pale stone while his langs hang loosely off the edge, and the calm washes any thoughts from his mind. Moments like these, weather like this - brief reminders of freedom - they are to be savored. There are not so many innocent pleasures left to men anymore. He closes his eyes and feels the warm sunlight on his eyes, and the wind gently buffet his brown locks.
The outer wall encircles a vast estate - almost a forest in its own right, with fields and brooks and game - and if you walk far enough inwards, you come to the inner wall, which guards the grounds of the academy. To August, however, it was more a camp than an academy, and he was less a student and more a specter, flitting in and out of whatever room or building he wished, whenever he wanted. But he could not leave the boundaries of this outer wall, even if he wanted to - and this was not a matter of obligation. The moment any part of his body crossed the boundary of the wall, it grew numb and cold, as if it was frostbitten. If he held it longer - which he never did - the restraining mark would begin to disintegrate the flesh. He was bound to these grounds. The ramparts were too high off the ground for an escape in any case - jumping off would be suicide even without the tattoo burned into his back.
August didn’t know if he believed in the faith of the Hanoans, but for them it was a holy day, and nothing of note was to happen at the academy until nightfall, so he packed a simple lunch - tart cranberries, mild goats cheese, a sealed glass jar of milk, another of mead, and for the main: an aromatic baked meat pie he snuck out of the kitchen early in the morning - and trekked the half-hour to the outer wall to spend the day. He had packed a book - a volume of the early history of the Hanoan empire - but he didn’t really plan to read today. There was pleasure in the possibility of just flipping through the pages and looking over the maps and pictures that the printers of this nation loved to add to their volumes, but the historical text was still too dense and packed with archaic terms to make reading enjoyable enough to spend the day on. The Hanoan language, while not as difficult, strictly speaking, as his mother tongue, was still new to him, all too painfully new.
He popped a cranberry into his mouth and chewed absentmindedly, enveloping himself again in the oceanic veil above him. He was on his back now, and no mountains or fields split the earth and sky. There was just vast, airy blue. His memory drifted back to the blue of the ocean that ringed his native land, so far away now, and the cataclysms of the past weeks threatened to pull him out of his blissful stupor. Don’t think of home, he murmured to himself. Don’t think of home.
But memory is not the lapdog that our thought is, this he knew. The monks of Allavia boast of their control over thought - their uncanny ability to silence the inner storm of language - but those are just games of word and will. Nobody, not even they, can beat back the tide of memory - thoughts that are not just language or picture, but emotion, too. Impression. When the world speaks to us, when it speaks through us - who are we to silence it?
Images danced through his head, flitted up into the sky before his eyes and dissolved in the blue of the sky, which became the blue of the sea - the sea of his childhood, the coast of his home town. And now he was sailing that very sea, much shorter, with hair that is blond, not brown, clinging tightly to a rope as thick as his arm as he struggles to hoist the sail while his father laughs beside him. He pats him on his sun-bleached head, his hand covered with thick oarsman callouses, and lifts August into his arms. Salty wind sting his eyes. Tears sting his eyes.
And now his father floats away into the sky. He is older, alone in the boat, buffeted by storm and wind. The sea is gray and jagged, and the meager catch he worked all morning to bring up is flung overboard. He hangs on to the mast before a massive wave lifts him into the sky and flings him against the rocky coast. The sharp rock cuts through his leg, gouging flesh and striking bone. The pain is like snake venom in his lungs and stomach. A sob wracks his chest. He lifts the mead to his mouth and drinks - long, burning gulps.
His head is shaved - the locks his father caressed gone. A stern-faced man stares him down as he heaves iron up and down - up and down, over and over, until his arms give out. The man glances him over and shakes his head sadly while scribbling something on his ledger. How quickly everything changes - how easy to breach the narrow bounds that shackle one day to the next. He finished the rest of the sickly sweet mead in one swallow, polishing off the rancid aftertaste of cheap spirit with the milk. He feels woozy.
This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.
How wondrous - a memory surfaces that stands out from all the rest. The first time he had seen magic, the first time he had felt it. If one happy moment had come from the war it was this - he was unfit for infantry, but in magic the military had found some promise in him. He lifts his palm to the sky, utters the word in his mind’s tongue, in a language fully alien to him, sees the sigil burn itself into the air above it. It glows a vivid green, painting a symbol incomprehensible in a script long forgotten, before shattering, releasing a gale that shoots from his hand up into the sky. It was just like that, one year ago, that he discovered he could cast.
Before he could enjoy this newfound gift, he was whisked away to a base by the front lines, worked without end, pumped full of all kinds of vile drugs. He was forced to memorize the basics of this ancient language that few could interpret and nobody could understand, to strengthen his body for the recoiling forces of casting, train his mind and memory, military strategy, leadership, and many other things. There were nights without end that were a haze of frantic and desperate faces staring down at him from the lectures pulpit, piling more and more on him, until it was over - he was on the front line, moving continually towards the capital of his island nation. And here not even the tides of memory could dredge up the drug-induced hysteria we call war. There are moments that stand out, but as symbols - not memories. They represent something every soldier can identify with. Their experience was collective - they were a wave of men and steel and light that sometimes broke through the enemy and sometimes broke against them. And as a caster, he was right there in the thick of it, until the Defendo of Belania was over and the war was lost.
The trial he remembered clearly. The anxiety of the verdict was nothing compared to the months of hand-to-hand combat he had just been through. He felt nothing when his generals were hanged, and even less when he was spared. They had carved the restraining mark into his back and brought him across the sea, to their land, and he did not resist. The man who took charge of him - Leoff de Toumb - he had seen him before on the battlefield, faced him eye to eye before the city was captured and the remaining forces surrounded and forced to surrender, traded with him, spell for spell. In the hills surrounding his home capital, he had felt the overwhelming speed and force of his magic firsthand.
His thoughts drifted away from the murkiness of the war to De Toumb. He was impossible to crack - silent, brooding, middle aged but already with graying hair and a sour look on his face. But in the trial he had spoken to defend him against the death penalty, the standard for enemy casters captured by the Hanoans. He had struck a deal with the military - what kind of deal August did not know, and he did not know whether to be thankful or spiteful. It was difficult for him to hate, especially a man who had shown his enemy such good will. It is not like fought out of any conviction to defend his motherland - he fought because that was what he was supposed to do, because he felt it was honorable, because his father had left of his own will to fight and never returned. The defeat had not destroyed his sense of duty, and he did not hate his enemy when he stood against them in the field. He merely wished that the outcome could’ve been different, he would've been a hero then, not a slave.
And with these thoughts he drifted fitfully off to sleep, as the midday sun sank lower and lower, beckoning twilight to cast her starry net across the darkening horizon. The warm, gentle wind changed to a colder, firmer breeze, and lulled the youth out of his dreaming. De Toumb was sitting beside him, staring, much like August had, into the mountainous horizon, fading quickly against the honey-orange sky illuminated by the descending sun. It skirted the jagged edges of the far-off looming darkness, and, without another glimmer, vanished behind the mountain wall. The cloudless sky lit up with stars, and the rosy glow of sunset was brushed aside by the silver moonglow. They sat in silence, De Toumb polishing off what was left of the cheese and pie. Deep purple darkness blossomed above them as the last hints of sunlight were swallowed the night, making the stars almost twinkle with fervor. The moon was far more solemn on the mainland, where no crashing waves broke the stiff silence of dusk. But August needed this stillness - a stillness he had not felt once in this year of feverish and unyielding calamity. In the still darkness, he was beginning to remember who he was before the war had whisked his father away from the fishing boat - the face of the boy who clung joyfully to a mast that seemed so tall and ropes that seemed so thick, and to the neck of a father who seemed so invincible.
De Toumb stood, and the scraping of cloth on stone broke their silence.
“It is time.” he said, and, lifting his hand, sent two glowing green sigils circling around his arm. He took August by the arm, and stepped off the edge of the rampart. As they fell, the sigils shattered, calling up the winds to meet their descent and soften their landing. Without even breaking a twig, they stepped onto the academy grounds.
“The dreams of a Magus are never without meaning,” he said. “Tell me of yours.”
And as they made their way back to the towering inner fortress that stood among the great oaks of the inner wall, August spoke of carefree summers on the coast, and the marvel of sudden summer storms that raged over the surface of the sea, and of the two infinities that meet at the horizon as one stares out into the distance while on a boat. And in his dream the sea and the sky merged together and swallowed him, and he floated, weightless, in that vast ocean of blue.
