Carter’s day off is not a day of rest. It is a day of self punishment.
He is on the main training ground, alone.
The large, outdoor rectangular field, usually busy with activity, is empty. Silent. The afternoon sun of the Sky Dimension casts long, stark shadows across the gray flagstones.
The other recruits are elsewhere. Paige is with them in the Great Archive. Yulian is in the mess hall.
Others are resting in their rooms. But Carter cannot rest. The memory of almost killing his friends is a fresh, bleeding wound. Pain is the only anesthetic he knows.
He pushes himself through a series of drills. Relentless. Punishing. His body screams in protest.
His muscles burn. His lungs are on fire. Every joint aches with a deep, profound exhaustion. But he ignores it. He pushes harder.
He needs to prove it to himself. To the angry, whispering ghosts bound to his hands. He needs to show them he is in control.
He stands in the center of the courtyard. His chest heaves. His body is slick with sweat.
He looks at a training dummy fifty feet away. Its straw stuffed form is a silent, impassive effigy of his own failure.
He has been studying his Lexanomicon. He pores over the complex grammars of other languages.
Trying to force the knowledge into his head. He has a plan.
A complex, multi stage spell. It is a fusion of his English affinity and the Mandarin he has been struggling to learn.
It is a spell of creation and motion. A simple test of control.
He raises his hands. The weight of Atlas and Archer is a familiar, menacing presence. He takes a deep, shuddering breath. He begins to cast.
He speaks the English Base. The words are crisp and clear. His intent is focused. “A shard of stone…”
He feels the magic gather. The raw power of creation pulls at the flagstones beneath his feet. He can feel the spell forming. Stable. Controlled. But then, he begins to speak the Mandarin Effect. The foreign, unfamiliar syllables are a clumsy, dissonant chord in the symphony of his spell.
“…that flies with the speed of a striking falcon.”
The moment the foreign words leave his lips, everything goes wrong.
The whispers in his mind, which had been a low, angry hum, erupt into a deafening, chaotic roar.
“FOOL!”
The voice of Atlas bellows. Raw, explosive pressure builds behind his eyes.
“POWER IS NOT TO BE SHAPED! IT IS TO BE UNLEASHED!”
“Let go,” Archer hisses in his ear. A cold, seductive promise of deadly, surgical precision.
“Stop thinking. Stop trying. Just… let us.”
His focus shatters. The delicate, intricate structure of the spell collapses in on itself. The raw, untamed magical energy has nowhere to go.
It explodes outward. It is not a controlled shard of stone. It is a violent, uncontrolled blast of pure, concussive force.
It rips through the ground in front of him. It gouges a deep, ten foot crater in the solid flagstones. A shower of shattered rock and superheated dust flies in all directions.
The shockwave hits him like a physical blow. It lifts him off his feet. Sends him flying through the air. He lands hard on his back.
The impact is a jarring, brutal shock. It knocks the wind from his lungs. He lies there, dazed. Gasping for air. His ears are ringing. His body is a single, throbbing symphony of pain.
He has failed. Again.
Carter pushes himself up. His muscles scream in protest. He looks at the crater. At the smoking, blackened stone.
A wave of pure, unadulterated despair washes over him.
It is a cold, heavy, suffocating thing that settles in his chest. It steals his breath. His will. His hope.
He is a failure, a danger to everyone around him, a walking disaster. Gendric loves to remind Carter that has the power of a god, but the control of a frightened child.
And Gendric was right. Carter uses his magic like a frightened rabbit.
He collapses back onto the stone. The fight is completely gone out of him. He is done and can’t do this anymore. Carter lays there feeling less like a mage, and more like the victim of an unbreakable curse.
Footsteps approach Carter, as he lies on the training ground’s stone floor.
“You know, for a guy who almost got crushed by a couple of rocks, you seem determined to bring the whole damn ceiling down.”
The voice is a familiar, sarcastic drawl. Carter pushes himself up onto his elbows.
Head throbbing, as he looks up to see Killian Faust leaning against a pillar at the edge of the training ground. Killian emerges from the shadows.
As if he’s been there the whole time. Standing with his arms are crossed, and with an expression that is unreadable. He doesn’t look angry, but disappointed that Carter would give up so easily.
“What do you want?” Carter mutters. The words taste like ash and failure in his mouth.
“To stop you from killing yourself before the Order gets the chance,” Killian replies.
He walks over to Carter, and stops a few feet away. He looks from the deep crater in the floor to Carter’s bruised and exhausted form.
“What was that? Some new form of explosive meditation?”
“I was trying a Mixed Spell,” Carter says. His voice is a low, defeated whisper.
“I lost control.”
“No, you didn’t,” Killian says. His voice is suddenly serious. Direct.
“You never had it in the first place. That’s your problem. You’re trying to fly a hurricane like it’s a paper airplane.”
He crouches down, with a gaze that is intense. “Your problem isn’t a lack of power, Carter. It’s that you have too much. You’re trying to strong arm a force that won’t be bullied.”
“You’re fighting against your own fundamental nature.”
He gestures to Carter’s hands. “You think those things are just tools? Weapons? They’re not. They’re a part of you now. And you’re trying to command them like a king commands his subjects.”
Killian shakes his head. “It doesn’t work that way. Not for us.”
Carter looks up. A flicker of confusion is in his eyes. “Us?”
Killian sighs a long, weary sound. He summons his own grimoire, Artemis. The sleek, familiar black pistol materializes in his hand from his Lotus Ring. A soft hum of power.
“This thing,” he says. His voice is a low, almost reverent murmur. He runs a thumb over the cool, smooth metal.
“It has a will of its own. It’s not as… loud as yours. Not as angry. But it’s there.”
“A quiet, stubborn, predatory instinct. For years, I fought against it. I tried to force it to obey my every command.”
“To be nothing more than an extension of my own will.”
Killian looks off into the distance as his eyes are lost in an intimate memory.
“My progress stalled. I hit a wall. I was powerful, but I was rigid, predictable. And then, one day, I got into a fight I couldn’t win. I was outmatched, outmaneuvered.”
“I was about to die.”
“And in that last, desperate moment, you know what I did?”
He looks back at Carter. His gaze is sharp and penetrating.
“I let go of it all.”
“I stopped trying to control Artemis,” he continues. His voice is a low, intense whisper. “And I started to listen to it.”
I stopped trying to dictate its every move. I chose to guide its power. To trust its instincts as much as I trusted my own. We became partners.”
He stands up. The pistol dissolves back into his ring.
“You’re trying to be the master of two wild. ancient beasts Carter. And it’s tearing you apart. You need to stop trying to put them on a leash.”
He turns to leave. His parting words hang in the air. Heavy with a significance Carter is only just beginning to understand.
“You need to be their partner…”
Later That Evening…
Killian’s words hang in the air long after he is gone. A quiet, profound revelation in the silent, empty courtyard. Carter lies on the cold stone. The advice replays in his mind.
Be its partner.
For three months, he has been trying to force his will upon the grimoires.
He treated them like enemies. Like dangerous, caged animals. He had to dominate them into submission.
He has been fighting a war on two fronts. Against his own fear. Against the very tools he was meant to wield. He has been losing badly.
Hours pass. The bright, clear sun of the Sky Dimension begins to dip below the horizon of the floating city. It paints the endless sky in brilliant, fiery strokes of orange, pink, and purple.
The training ground is bathed in the soft, ethereal light of twilight. Carter is still there. His body is bruised and aching. His energy is depleted. But a new, quiet resolve has settled over him.
He pushes himself to his feet. He looks at his hands. At the faint, ghostly outlines of Atlas and Archer. He no longer sees them with fear. He sees them with a new, dawning understanding.
He doesn’t try to cast a complex spell. He doesn’t try to force his will. He simply closes his eyes. For the first time, he truly listens.
He reaches out with his mind. Not with a command. With a quiet, tentative offering. A truce.
For the first time, the angry, chaotic whispers that have been a constant, tormenting presence in his mind resolve into something coherent.
They are not just mindless rage and hunger. They are voices. Ancient, powerful. Filled with a profound, aching loneliness.
He feels the essence of Atlas. A spirit of pure, explosive, earth shattering power. It is not evil at all, it just IS. The embodiment of pure force. The raw, untamed power of a tectonic plate. Or of a volcanic eruption. It does not want to be controlled…
It wants to be unleashed.
And he feels the essence of Archer. A spirit of pure, predatory hunger. A spirit that isn’t cruel, it is efficient. Archer carries the cold surgical precision of a striking snake. And the silent, patient hunger of a stalking wolf. It does not want to be aimed by its master… It wants its master to hunt with it.
Carter doesn’t try to silence them anymore. He doesn’t try to fight them. Now he simply… accepts them. He accepts the rage of Atlas, and he accepts the hunger of Archer. He takes them in as a part of himself.
Then his eyes opened.
Carter looks at one of the straw training dummies fifty feet away. While he holds up his right hand, the one bound to Archer. He focuses on manifesting a spell, no speech, just pure thoughts.
Letting the grimoires tell him what to cast.
Carter now being guided by the hungry, predatory instincts of the living weapons. Now staring at the training dummies, he imagines them as a real life target.
Then it begins, Archer makes its intent clear in his mind. Carter speaks the Spell Tag. His voice is no longer a hesitant question. In a more confident whisper.
“Archer.
“Devour.”
A single, perfect, and completely silent ribbon of purple and black flame erupts from the unicorn blade of the chain dagger. In lighting speed the flames manage to devour the very light around it. It does not roar. It does not crackle. It is a sliver of pure darkness. A void of nothing, and it streaks across the courtyard, hitting the training dummy directly in its head.
The dummy does not burn.
It dissolves.
The very matter is unmade by the dark, hungry fire of Archer. The form of the straw dummy unravels into nothingness.
And in a single, silent instant, it is gone. A faint, dissipating wisp of black smoke is all that is left behind.
Carter stares at the empty space where the dummy once stood. His arm is still outstretched. The black flame on the tip of his dagger extinguishes. As if it were never there. The whispers in his mind are silent. For the first time since he arrived, they are not screaming. They are… content.
A slow, tired, but undeniably triumphant smile spreads across his face. It is a look of quiet, terrifying, and newfound confidence. He is not their master, he is a partner who listens.
And they are just getting started.