It took very little time for the sparring with his father to impact Marroo’s school work.

“How can you be failing at your classes?” His father demanded at the dinner table when his mother brought the topic up. “Don’t you sleep?”

Six year old Marroo studied his plate without answering and thought of the happy times when there had been no rock, and no classes, and no fencing with his father until his hands curled painfully at night. Before they’d moved to this place, and before he’d started having nightmares.

His father closed the displayed grades with a disgusted flick of his wrist and glared across the table at his son. “Do you think I had it as easy as you do boy?” He grated. “Do you think me or your mother had a familiar whisper this stuff to us while we slept? We didn’t have a bed to sleep in, or a roof over our heads to keep us safe at night. We had to learn these things the hard way, through reading and practice, while fighting just to stay alive.” His father stood, taking his plate with him. “I train you every day.” He said. “I cannot make you grab the advantages we give you, but you will not survive long beyond these walls,” he pointed to the house around them, “if you don’t learn to take them while you can.”

Marroo’s sleep was not improved by further administrations of the stone.

His mother’s approach was different.

“These won’t teach you long division.” She told Marroo as she handed him a chapter book with a picture of a boy following his familiar into a dark cave. “But if you bring your score up.” She tapped the clip on his nightstand where his familiar lived. “Then you can bring it to me and I’ll give you another one.”

Marroo spent the night devouring the book, instead of listening to his familiar’s lessons, and the next morning dragged himself through his father’s exercises struggling to stay awake as much as to feel his breath moving through the meridians he hadn’t yet cleared, but he dreamed of the boy from the book instead of the stone the next night, and in the following days, as he returned books with increasing speed, sometimes reading two over the course of a single day, his grades improved and his mother’s library expanded as the books he consumed stacked up beneath the shelves that held those he wasn’t yet allowed to read.

Marroo cleared his first meridian at the age of eight. The experience was exquisitely painful, as painful, even, as the stone which had taken to gathering dust on the shelf of his father’s training room after his first two years of training. Breath surged in his chest. His head pounded and his vision narrowed. When he opened his mouth to scream no words came out. Instead, breath blew from him in a tide. He felt as though he would be torn from his body with the rush, as though he would be carried to the far corners of infinity before he dissipated. He felt like he would scream for an eternity.

When he became aware of his surroundings again his father was chuckling quietly.

“The core is the hardest to clear.” His father grated with a rare smile. He rose from the mat they always sat on for their breathing exercises and slapped a hand on Marroo’s shoulder. Marroo’s breath felt hot and fluid inside of him and he wanted to run to his mother or hide under his blanket, but his father pointed to the striking post and told him to hit it. “Use your breath.” He told Marroo. “Use it until you don’t feel you can anymore.”

Marroo didn’t feel like he could use it now. He stood in front of the post, undecided whether he should use an excuse to try and get out of the exercise or try to capture the breath galloping inside of him as he’d been instructed.

“Go on boy.” His father said. “It will come easier now.”

Marroo did.

The post swung hard on its rope when he struck it with his palm.

“Again.” His father said, and Marroo did so again. He felt the breath rise as his palm swung forward and blow out with the strike to slam the post backward.

Again

Again

On the fifth try, his breath gave out and he staggered backwards. His father’s chuckling sounded like glass grinding in his throat. “Four is good.” His father said. “Four is a start.”

Two was the most he’d ever been able to do in a row before.

“Sit and breath.” The old man paced the room while Marroo sat and did as he’d been told. He restabilized the aura running through him shaken up by the heavy use of his breath. “You’ve cleared your first Meridian, the core.” His father tapped his own chest. “The heart, lungs, stomach, kidneys. I didn’t clear the core until I was twice your age. It is easier when you are young. You have less to overcome than I did at sixteen, but I had no teacher. If I’d had one.” He growled something low in his throat that might have been a word. “But I’d cleared the other three by the time I met your mother, and from there it was no hard thing to touch the Icon. I’d lived by it for so long by that time that it hardly mattered that I didn’t know how to project or control my breath. I looked for the blades, and they were there. It will be the same for you.”

Marroo closed his eyes.

“How do you feel?”, his father asked.

Scared, but that answer would bring out the stone. Marroo kept his eyes closed and breathed a few more times before he answered. “My chest is all shaky.”

His father made a grating noise and Marroo snapped his eyes open to find his father smiling as he chuckled again. It was the most animated Marroo could remember seeing his father.

“You are stronger now.” His father said. “Advanced cultivators can jump buildings, run on water or through walls, they can be cut and not bleed and balance atop a sword’s hilt for hours. Some say it was a cultivator who built the worlds. It will take you time to master your new strength.”

“Can you do those things?” Marroo asked.

“Some of them.” His father said, no longer smiling. “You though. You’ll be able to do all of them.” He knelt in front of Marroo and put a finger under Marroo’s chin with the kind of gentleness Marroo had only ever seen him use with his mother. He lifted Marroo’s face towards his and studied his son, turned his face to the left and right as though looking for something in it. “You have done well today.” He said. He put a rough hand to Marroo’s cheek, then rose. “Yes. Soon it will be time to show you, but not today. No training today. Today we celebrate, with your mother I think. She should see the results of our hard work, and you should have a chance at the childhood I never had.”

He took Marroo too a zoo, got him sweet ice, and looked at fabulous caged animals from other parts of the bottom and even, supposedly, from the midnight plains and the worlds beyond. It felt strange to spend time with his father when he wasn’t training, and he was glad when they finally returned home and he could retreat back to his room, and his books, and the adventures he never expected to have.

With each meridian he cleared, Marroo learned new ways to use his breath, not just projecting it out of himself, but moving it interiorly as well, to heal wounds, and amplify the senses, to accelerate his thoughts and his movements, and to sense the aura of his father’s breath moving in the air around him. Then when he turned ten, his father showed him how it could be used to kill, and the nightmares he’d escaped in his mother’s books returned.

When Marroo closed his eyes at night, he saw red. It stained the carpet, the walls, the ceiling. He saw bits of his friends and family spattered across the carpet and his father standing over all of them looking down at Marroo while the world swirled with unseen knives of projected breath. “You’ll be able to do all this.” He told Marroo, and Marroo jerked awake in a cold sweat.

Marroo read more books, and enjoyed them less. He began to avoid his bedroom regardless of the hour, even sneaking out to watch the shadow of the midnight plains moving across the core instead of sleep, or to read by the reflected light of the bottom’s horizon.

“You’re sloppy.” his father told him when they sparred in the mornings. “Rub the sleep out of your eyes boy. Your enemies won’t give you the benefit of rest.”

His classes slumped again, and this time there was no discussion of it around the kitchen table. His mother took the books he returned to her but didn’t give him new ones so that he was forced to reread the entire collection he’d amassed since beginning to read at the age of six.

“Your grades aren’t good.” She told him when he returned one of the children’s fairytale collections he’d read years before. “I thought we had a deal.”

Marroo gave her a noncommittal shrug and scuffed at the floor where it was still marked from his father’s anger at the start of their training. He looked away from the mark without looking at his mother.

“Not sleeping well?” She asked him. She put a hand to his cheek, but Marroo stepped back and scowled at the wall. She sighed, and slid his fairytales back onto the shelf, but didn’t move to pull another one down.

“Can I pick my next one?” He asked. For her, the book shelf was something sacred, a part of the house he wasn’t allowed to touch without her express permission, though it was a permission she often gave. One that came with small lessons about organization, and, when she found him placing books spine up with their pages spread, about taking care of the things he was entrusted with.

His mother ran her hands along the books near the middle of the shelf until she came to one he hadn’t read yet, tucked in at the end of the rows he’d always thought of as “her” books.

“Your father has been in charge of your training so far.” His mother told him absent mindedly. “As he should.” Looked at the cover of the book in her hand with a far away look for a moment before turning back to him. “He knows what he’s doing, but, there are things I can teach you too.” She showed him the cover. Warrior of Metba, the title said, the seventh book in a series he’d loved before his father showed him what it was really like to be a warrior, what it meant to kill. Now it just seemed, childish, and unreal.

“Books are wonderful escapes.” His mother said as she flipped idly through the book. “But some books can be more than that, if you read them right.” She slid the book in her hands back onto the shelf then reached above it for a battered paperback from the very top shelf. “This is one such book.” she showed it to him. Its cover showed a tiny painted dragon doing battle with a group of even smaller men in armor with shields and laser pistols.

Marroo reached for it and she held it back.

“It’s a delicate book.” She said. “So you have to promise you’ll be very careful with it.”

“I will.” Marroo said.

“Adult books need to be read like an adult.” She added. “Can I trust you with this?” She offered it to him again, not like a mother offering a reward, now, but like a mother offering her son something she’d guarded all her life.

He nodded and she dropped the book into his hands. The battered pages and cracked spine felt light in Marroo’s hands compared to the weight of his mother’s regard for it.

“I think you’re old enough.” She said as she turned back to the shelf. “Come back when you’ve finished it.”

“What makes this book so special?” He asked as she perused the shelf for something else. She pulled a book down and thumbed it open as she answered without looking at him. “It will help you decide who you want to become.”

His father didn’t share that perspective.

“You’re a weapon.” His father told him as he paced around Marroo.

Marroo moved through the forms he’d been taught.

“You must think of yourself as a weapon.”

Marroo finished his kata and came to a resting position facing the striking post. The practice session came at the end of a three day stretch when his father had spent most of his time out of the house on some assignment, days Marroo spent trying not to imagine him surrounded by spinning blades and flying blood while Marroo lost himself in his books.

“What do these forms mean to you?” His father grated when he came to stand in front of Marroo.

Marroo didn’t answer until his father snapped his fingers at him and the answer stumbled out of Marroo’s mouth. “They are how you fight.” He said.

“Fight.” His father snorted. He went to the rack of practice swords hung on the wall and pulled one down. He turned it sideways to examine its blade. “When you hold the sword, you must become its extension.” He said. “It is easy to drive your breath through your fist or through a leg. Such things are a part of you, but a weapon is much harder, and takes far more breath, but when you make the sword’s purpose your own, you become a part of it as much as it becomes a part of you. You do not fight with a sword.” He performed a short kata, as though in demonstration. The blade moved as fluidly as the wind in his hands, spilling breath from its edge like a spiritual echo of the moving blade until his father ended with a brutal sweep in the direction of the striking post. The post split across the center, as clean as if he’d cut it with a razor, despite the fact that he was at least ten feet away.

“What is the purpose of the sword?” Darro asked his son.

“To cut.” Marroo replied on reflex.

His father stood in front of him again. “Not, to fight.” He lifted the practice sword. “As an adept, you make the sword’s end your own. It may serve you in a fight, but the end is not to fight. Every movement should have a purpose. You slash, to maim or parry.” He demonstrated, following the movements of Marroo’s kata. “And stab to kill.” The sword shot out, twisted viciously, and whipped back into the Kata’s starting form. “Now show me again.” His father demanded. “And this time, think where you would place each cut on an opponent that was trying to kill you.”

When he was done, his father nodded. “Better.” he grated. “But still uncertain. That will change when you learn to kill.”