Chương 33: Dragonbone

The two boxes hung in the air in front of me side by side, where no one else could see them. [Impenetrable Skin] and [Healing Factor]. I had to pick one. It was already in me — the blood had seen to that before I'd finished swallowing — and the only thing left to decide was what it would make of me.

"Do you feel something?" my father asked, watching my face closely.

"I... yes, I think so." He nodded, satisfied as I looked back at the two boxes. [Impenetrable Skin]. Skin that turned a blade, thickening year on year until nothing short of a spell got through. There was a plain sense to it. A body that couldn't be opened was a body no one could take anything out of. In a fight it was a safe pick, because you didn't have to survive a wound that never happened. But I'd never been the one getting hit.

Bellos had spent years teaching me how not to be where the blow landed, and it had worked; the entrance trials had only made me more sure of it. I'd watched that whole field of students and known, without any particular arrogance, that if I were serious not one of them would lay a finger on me. And that was before [Greater Focus]. With it, the idea of standing there and letting something connect hard enough to matter felt less like a plan and more like a failure on my part. Besides, I liked my skin the way it was.

The texture was fine, and I didn't especially want it going to leather. Which left me with [Healing Factor], I supposed. That one closed wounds instead of refusing them without the help of mana. It meant bleeding first, every time. A pain the skin would have spared me. But from what I understood, it did more than close cuts. It meant the more it evolved, the less I'd fall ill, and while I'd rarely been sick, I hadn't forgotten the last time.

Nine years old, three nights of it, Nana staying up beside my bed reading to me long after the rest of the house had gone to sleep so I wouldn't lie there alone with it. She'd been kind about it, but It had still been miserable. And there was the practical side, which I liked better the longer I looked at it. A body that mended fast was a body that recovered from training fast.

I could push harder, longer, and be ready again sooner, and that meant getting stronger quicker than anyone who had to wait on sore muscles and healing bruises the ordinary way. So I chose the [Healing Factor]. The box immediately folded shut and something warm moved through me, starting low in my spine where the blood had settled and spreading out to the ends of me. Ding! New skill acquired: [Healing Factor] — Lv. 1 (0%) (Rank S) Effects include: — Wounds close without mana or effort. Rate scales with skill level.

— Gradual immunity to illness, infection and poison. — Slowed aging. Extended lifespan. Note: At level 1, you will heal 1. 5 times faster than normal. Grows through use. The body learns healing by healing. So, get hurt often. I... I wasn't unhappy with this result, all things considered.

"Howl?". I blinked, and the Pit came back into focus around me. My father stood watching me with his head tilted, and I understood he'd been calling my name — more than once, probably — while I stared at the System.

"Yes," I said.

"I'm fine. I got the Healing Factor."

"... Healing what?"

"Healing Factor it's the System's way of—" I caught myself, realizing nobody knew about the System.

"... The troll's healing," I said instead.

"That's what the blood gave me. The fast healing, not the skin." My father frowned.

"And how would you know which one it gave you? The blood doesn't announce itself."

"Erm..." aaah, I should have just played coy. Why did I have to even talk? Stupid, stupid Howl.

"I just know." He held my eyes a moment too long, weighing me the way he had across the table earlier, probably deciding how much of what I'd said was worth taking seriously while I stayed still and offered nothing more. Then he smiled. Whatever he'd decided, he folded it away somewhere and let the warmth come back up over it, then he turned from me to the tiers and raised one hand, and his voice went out across the whole Pit.

"My son has taken the blood of a troll; and the gift has chosen him!" The Pit erupted. Then, out of the noise, the stands pulled together into one voice, and it came down over us all at once:"CONGRATULATIONS, YOUNG LORD!"

"Oh. Thank you." I said in normal volume.

"YOU ARE MOST WELCOME, YOUNG LORD!"

"Whoa, the fu—" My father turned to look at me, one eyebrow raised.

"—the fully unexpected nature of that," I said quickly.

"Of them hearing me, I mean. From all the way down here." I laughed nervously.

"I... uh, I didn't think anyone could actually hear me." My father's smile came back then.

"They're among the finest we have. They listen when it matters and stay out of the rest. Your thanks mattered to them, so they caught it." I stood there with the heat crawling up my neck, wishing the sand would take me, when behind me the troll dragged in another breath, so I turned toward the sound. My father followed my eyes to it.

"And what will you do with it," he said, "now that you've spared it?" This tale has been unlawfully lifted without the author's consent. Report any appearances on Amazon. Oh... I hadn't thought that far.

"Could he... be freed?"

"Absolutely not."

"Why not?" He looked at me with a stern face, and said nothing. I understood that this was one of those things he wasn't going to bend on, so I didn't push.

"Then..." I looked at the troll, and I thought of the mountain, where I'd spent the week training, all that quiet and open space with nobody wanting anything from me. It was as far from a cage as anywhere I knew.

"Could he be kept up on the mountain? Until I'm back from the academy, at least." My father studied me a moment.

"An acceptable solution, I suppose." He snapped his fingers and the far gate opened then the same two men came out of it, moving quick, and they had the chains with them, the heavy shackles swinging from their fists as they crossed the sand toward the troll panting in the middle of it.

"I don't want him chained!"

"There are people living on that mountain," my father said.

"Would you have a wild troll loose among them?"

"Then wall part of it off." I was sure of it already.

"A stretch of the slope, barriered with magic, somewhere it can move and be fed and otherwise left alone. It won't be near anyone." He considered it longer than the rest.

"Fenced, fed, and forgotten." A small nod.

"That can be arranged." The two handlers had reached the troll. It felt them coming — the head came up, the breathing quickened, it got an arm beneath itself — and then the nearer man raised a hand and said a word I didn't catch, and it went out of the troll all at once. The head sank. The arm gave. It let them work, and I made myself watch every second of it.

"There's still a little time," my father said.

"Your carriage is waiting beyond the gate, but the academy will keep a quarter hour for a son of this house." He turned from me to the stands, and his voice climbed back into the one that filled the Pit.

"And there is one more thing to be done here, in front of all of you, before he goes." As soon as he said it, something moved at the gryphon gate and a man came through it. Right on cue, again. It couldn't just be luck; they had to be back there waiting for their word the whole time. I wondered if they rehearsed it. Whether the man walking out now was nervous behind the door, going over his part. It nearly got a laugh out of me, despite the situation.

The man was old and grey-bearded, but there was nothing frail about him; the years had left him thick with muscle instead of stripping it away, his bare forearms as wide as a normal man's calf. He carried a long box of dark lacquered wood, silver at the edges, the gryphon worked into the lid.

"Master Russo," my father said.

"The finest hand in the estate's forges, and the man I trusted with this." Russo inclined his head to me, not to my father, and opened the box across his own two arms. Inside, on dark cloth, was a stick. It was pale, smooth, about the length of my hand, and made out of a material I didn't recognise: something between marble and bone with a faint light living under the surface. Three glyphs sat etched in a line along it, filled with a dark metal I couldn't name.

"Ashenveil, young lord," Russo said.

"Heartwood off a tree that grew five hundred years across a ley line and turned to stone doing it. A hundred times the strength of steel, a fraction of the weight. It does not chip, nor crack, nor break. And it carries mana cleaner than anything else in the kingdom. Feed the first glyph, and see." Perplexed, I took the stick from the cloth, pressed my thumb to the first glyph, and let the mana go. It immediately grew.

Both ends silently ran outward at once, the pale wood lengthening from the centre until I held a full staff, tall as my chin, the balance sitting exactly where my hand wanted it. The mana I'd fed in was still moving through the length of it, coming back to me clean, as if the thing were already part of my own channels.

"Oooh..." I had never seen anything quite like this.

"The centre," Russo said, smiling at my reaction.

"Press, and turn." So I found the join, pressed, twisted and the staff came apart into two weighted halves, one for each hand, the glyphs glowing faint at the break.

"Two glyphs left," Russo went on.

"The second lengthens it thirty feet in either form. The third holds a ward, charged and waiting. Spend it once, recharge it overnight. For the day something gets closer than it should." I brought it back together. Down to the stick, out to the staff, and back again. It was silent every time, the material warming under my hands.

"Three years I have been at the estate," Russo said.

"This took the better part of the last one, and it is the finest thing to leave my hands in all of them." He stepped back as my father turned toward me.

"Russo is Velhari," my father said.

"A people of the Grey Provinces who have shaped metal since before this kingdom had a name; they hail from the line of Beallon, the first to ever put hammer to heated steel, or so they hold, and so their work makes easy to believe. The finest weapon-shapers on the continent, every one of them, and of the six men alive who can work ashenveil, Russo is the first."

"You honor me, my Lord," Russo said with a bow.

"There is no greater house on the continent to serve, and none I'd be prouder to have done this work for." My father smiled and gave him a firm nod, before looking at the staff in my hands.

"There is a custom, Howl, older than this house. A weapon of true worth is given a name, and the naming falls to no one but the one who will carry it. Every Axiom who ever lived has done it." I stared at the staff with renewed interest.

"So." My father went on.

"What will you name it?" I kept my eyes at the material, trying to find an inspiring name. It was pale ivory sliding to grey, a grain in it that was not quite wood and not quite stone. It looked like bone, mostly; bone with the sheen of marble and old dark metal running through it in veins. There'd been a hero in one of Nana's books who carried a staff: a long white staff cut from the rib of a dragon, pale as bone and stronger than any steel, and the story called it Dragonbone.

I'd made her read me that one more times than she probably cared to. And now I was holding something white, and near enough to bone, that a dragon might as well have given up a rib for. It was hard to hide my excitement.

"... Dragonbone." I looked at my father, certain after I said the world.

"I would call it Dragonbone." My father looked at me a moment, and then something pleased settled over his face.

"Dragonbone," he repeated.

"A fitting name. Strong. It will carry well." He set his hand on my shoulder.

"May it guard you where we cannot, answer when you call, and may the day come when men hear the name and know the house before you've said a word of it." He nodded firmly once.

"It's a good name, son."

"Thank you, Father." Ding! [Weapon Acquired] Dragonbone — Rank S Ashenveil staff. Dual configuration. Extensible (30 ft). Integrated defensive ward (1 charge, overnight recharge). Bonded to: Howl Aridis. I let the text go before it could show on my face, collapsed Dragonbone down to the pale stick, and closed my hand around it. My father turned back to the stands, and his voice went up over all of them.

"House Aridis presents the weapon of its Axiom. Dragonbone!" The name came back at me from the whole ring of the Pit at once, thousands of voices closing around it, and then something after it I half-caught, a line they all seemed to know — long may it serve, long may he carry it — landing together, like everything else these people did.

"... Thank you," I said. I couldn't make out a single face up there. However far the stands were, however the light fell, they stayed a mass and never once a person, and I wondered if that was arranged too, part of whatever this whole afternoon had been built to do to me. It was meant to impress. I could feel it being meant to impress.

And it left me cold in a spot I couldn't quite locate; because for all of it, the noise, the naming and the year Russo gave to that staff, I'd have traded the entire hour to just sit somewhere quiet with my father. Or the mother I hadn't seen. Or a brother, a sister, any of them. This was a great deal of thunder standing in for the one thing I'd actually wanted.

"Come," my father said.

"I'll walk you to your carriage."

"Thank you, Father." The troll was gone. Taken off through the far gate while the crowd was busy with me, and I hoped, wherever they were putting it, that it would be alright. But I couldn't hold onto the worry, because Sartheon was already filling my head, and I'd been looking forward to it for longer than I'd admitted to anyone. I'd see Rael and Eydric again. There were towns and villages all around the academy, I'd heard, the sort that held festivals.

There'd be missions to places I'd only read about, with ruins, treasure and distant lands with names I couldn't pronounce yet. I'd fight. I'd eat things I had never tasted. And maybe if I was lucky, I'd finally see the ocean, which still didn't seem like it could be a real thing, that much water in one place with an entire world living underneath it. I wanted all of it, every last piece, so badly I could hardly stand still.

Ahead of us the great obsidian doors of House Aridis began to part, and behind me the Pit had broken into applause, all of it for me. Light came through the widening gap, more of it every second, falling across the dark floor and reaching toward my boots as I walked into it knowing that on the other side I'd be free for a while. I couldn't wait.