The moon hangs high and pale over the Academy, a single, unblinking eye watching my failure.
It is well past midnight. The dorms are dark, the windows like dead eyes in the stone face of the buildings. The silence of the Sinwade Mountains is heavy, broken only by the distant, mournful cry of a wind howling through the passes and the rhythmic, ragged sound of my own breathing.
I am in the training yard. The same yard where, hours ago, Proctor Evanora took fifty of us apart like we were made of wet paper.
My side still throb with a dull, persistent ache where the flat of her foot kissed me even though the medic healed me whole. But despite the late hour I cannot sleep.
Every time I close my eyes, I see the white blur of her robe. I feel the humiliation of hitting the dirt. I hear her voice, calm and clinical, dissecting my weakness.
"You rely on your Marks like crutches...."
She was right. And that pisses me off more than the beating. I swing my sword. A horizontal slash. It cuts the air with a dull whoosh. It feels sluggish. It feels wrong. I grit my teeth and swing again going into my normal drills
All still wrong.
I stop, resting the tip of my steel blade in the gravel, leaning on it like a cane. Sweat drips from my nose, spotting the dry earth.
For the last three months, I have been surviving on instinct and power. I have as the Proctor said used my powers of illusions to win. When I fight I trap them inside their own minds and that's that. I no longer ever feel the need to attempt to out duel anyone anymore.
But Evanora stripped that away. She made it "meat and metal." And when it came down to just the meat, I was spoiled.
I try to flow into a stance from Cain's battle art Aether flow
I shift my weight to the balls of my feet, raising the sword high in a guard meant to mimic the crest of a wave. It is a stance designed for fluid, downward strikes, for dancing around an opponent's guard like wind moving through reeds.
Now that I am more accustomed to using the sword I can feel my feet land heavy when I attempt to flow into the stances Cain taught me. The gravel crunches loudly. The swing is powerful, yes, but it lacks the weightlessness that Cain had. It lacks the unnatural acceleration that his Wind Mark provided.
Without the wind to carry me, I am just a boy posing in the dark. I rember what he said when he was teaching me "One real battle is worth more than a thousand hours of training."
And boy have I had a lot of battles. In these past months. I attempt to utilize Cain's art again but stop after the first few moves. This is why I gave it up in one of my first lessons with Evanora, Cain's Ather flow was a perfect foundational battle art… for those talented enough to make use of it, of course.
Why bother, the voices whisper, sounding bored.
"Shut up," I snarl at the empty air.
I abandon the stance. I try another battle art taught to me be a year three Evanora had teach us a few weeks ago. A defensive posture meant to deflect heavy blows.
I pivot, imagining an invisible opponent swinging a mace. I try to parry and redirect.
But my movements are rigid. I am fighting my own momentum. Cain's style was built on the concept of flow continuous, unbroken motion. This form however is disgusting I am fighting with gravity.
I growl in frustration, a guttural sound that tears at my throat.
I swing the sword wildly at an invisible enemy, putting all my anger into it.
Crack.
I hit a wooden training dummy I hadn't realized I drifted close to. The blade bites into the wood, sending a shockwave up my arm that rattles my teeth.
I stand there, heaving.
"It doesn't work," I whisper to the night. "It doesn't fucking work."
I let the sword drop to my side.
I am going into the Deployment Qualifiers tomorrow. I will be facing the best of the Second Third and fourth years. They will have their Marks. They will have their experience. And if my illusions fail what do I do?
I am dead. I am "easy meat." Evanora is completely right as she usually is. WIthout marks of power the fundamentals are everything, having a battle art that you can use is key to staying alive and utilizing the physical augmentation part of awakening as an Elite.
I start pacing the yard, dragging the tip of my sword behind me.
The yard is dimly lit by a few torches set into the stone walls. They flicker with light, casting long, stretching shadows across the ground.
I watch my shadow.
It elongates as I walk away from the light, stretching out like a giant, distorted monster. It shrinks as I turn back, puddling under my boots like a pool of ink.
I stop. The shadow stops.
I raise my arm. The shadow raises an arm.
I move my sword in a slow circle. The shadow mimics the movement, tracing a silent arc on the gravel.
There is something hypnotic about it.
My shadow doesn't have weight. It doesn't have muscles to tire. It doesn't have bones to break. It moves perfectly in sync with me, yet it glides over the rough terrain without stumbling. It pours itself over the rocks, dips into the divots, and stretches up the wall.
It is graceful.
"Graceful," I mutter, turning the word over in my mouth.
Cain's art was graceful. It was beautiful. That's what I loved about it. The elegance. The idea that violence could be art.
But Cain's grace came from the Wind. It came from being lighter than the world.
My grace...
I look at the shadow. It is dark. It is flat. It is heavy, in a way. It clings to the earth.
I resume my drills, but this time I watch the ground. I watch the shadow fight.
I lunge. The shadow lunges.
But because of the angle of the torchlight, the shadow's lunge looks different. It looks... extended. Warped. When I pull back, the shadow seems to retreat faster, snapping back into the darkness.
It is elusive.
Insidious, I think. Shapeless.
A thought strikes me, a spark in the exhaustion-fogged darkness of my mind.
I have been trying to force an identity onto my fighting style. Cains battle art is one of fluidity for example.
But what if I don't need a identify?
I stop moving, staring at the black silhouette stretching out from my boots.
The shadow takes the shape of whatever casts it. If I stand like a king, it is a king. If I crouch like a beast, it is a beast. If I disappear, it vanishes.
It has no form of its own. It borrows.
I frown, my brow furrowing.
"A battle style without form," I whisper. "How can that work?"
A style is, by definition, a doctrine. It is a set of rules. Step here. Strike there. Parry like this. It is a structure you build your house on. If you remove the foundation, the house collapses. If a style is constantly changing, how can it be stable? How can you drill it? How can you master it?
I swing my sword slowly, watching the shadow mimic me.
It cheats, the voices whisper. It copies.
I freeze.
The sword hangs in the air.
It copies.
I let out a breath, a puff of white mist in the chill air. The answer is so simple I almost laugh. It's so obvious it's stupid. Why had I not guessed earlier?
What is the fundamental nature of a shadow? Two things. One: It lives in the dark. Two: It imitates the object that blocks the light.
It doesn't create. It reflects. It steals the form of the thing standing in the light and twists it into something dark.
Imitation.
I feel a shiver go down my spine, and it has nothing to do with the cold.
The foundation of the Shadow Style - my style - should not be about memorizing a thousand different moves to counter every situation. That's impossible. The foundation should be to steal.
To steal the enemy's strength. To steal their form. To use the very thing that makes them strong to destroy them.
The voices suddenly slither in my mind in all their unholy glory "We have changed our mind" They no longer sounded bored but... intrigued. "Is this what you are seeking young Reaper?
They show me a vision.
It is vivid, overlaid onto the grey gravel of the yard like a hallucination.
I see a circle of blinding, pure light, surrounded by impenetrable, suffocating darkness. And in the center of that light, a woman.
She is dressed in rags, a slave by the look of her, with iron cuffs on her wrists. But she is not cowering.
She is dancing.
Her every move is full of indescribable grace and clear, but elusive purpose. Her young body is flexible and lithe, bending in ways that seem impossible, but beneath the skin, I see the corded muscle of a predator. She is trained as much as a warrior as a dancer. Her skill is not just performance; it is lethal.
It is mesmerizing. I stand there, sword hanging limp in my hand, unable to look away.
The young woman weaves a beautiful pattern with her movements, their cadence and nature simultaneously firm and flowing, sharp and gentle, clear and unpredictable. She spins, and the light catches the iron of her cuffs, turning them into weapons.
She dances alone, but she is not alone.
Around her, in the circle of light, ten shadows stretch out from her feet.
She moves with them. She dances with ten partners, effortlessly controlling both her own body and the ten shadows cast by it. She feints left, but her shadow lunges right. She drops low, but her shadow looms high.
At times, it is hard to tell which one of them is real. Is she the girl? Or is she the darkness stretching out to kill the light?
Her dance is… insidious. Shapeless. Everchanging.
I freeze, my breath caught in my chest.
The vision fades, bleeding back into the reality of the training yard. But the image is burned into my retina. This was it.
This was the source and origin of the battle style I wanted to create. It wasn't just about copying the enemy. It was about becoming a multitude. It was about moving with a fluidity that had no fixed form, a style that existed in the spaces between strikes.
Do you see? the voices whisper, purring with satisfaction.
I look down at my own shadow, stretching long and distorted across the gravel and I slowly push myself up from where I was leaning. I relax. I let my knees unlock. I let my shoulders drop. I become heavy, yet weightless
I take a step.
Usually, my boots crunch loudly on the loose gravel. But this time, I focus on the girl's footwork. I roll my weight from the outside in, sliding the sole of my boot over the stones rather than pressing down on them.
There is no crunch. Just a faint, whispering shift of dust.
I swing the sword.
I don't aim for power. I aim for the empty space where an enemy's neck would be. I let the blade lead me, twisting my body to follow its momentum rather than forcing it.
Whoosh.
It's silent. It's fast.
I move again. A pivot. A thrust. A low sweep.
My feet no longer land heavy. I am not fighting gravity anymore; I am cheating it. I am moving in the spaces between heartbeats. The strikes... they call to me. It doesn't feel like I'm memorizing a pattern of attacks.
I spin, my blade carving a silent arc through the night air, and for a split second, I feel it.
The elusive purpose. The formless malice.
I stop, the tip of my sword hovering inches from the ground. I am breathing hard, sweat stinging my eyes, but I am grinning. It isn't perfect. It is clumsy compared to the girl in the vision. But it's a start.
I know, with a sudden, sobering clarity, that this will not be easy. I haven't mastered anything tonight. I have merely found the door. It will take years maybe decades to fully develop this. To turn this raw idea into a doctrine that can stand against a Swordmaster like Evanora.
But I have the foundation. And for now, that is enough.