“Again.”

Kendrick let out the breath in his lungs, closed his eyes, and conjured up that same feeling he had in the tavern. It was a willful feeling, a feeling of determination. There was no logical or rational explanation for it—it just sort of happened. That made it that much harder to replicate reliably.

Another orb of light appeared, but this one was larger in volume and far less dense than the first one—nearly the size of his head and practically transparent. It lasted only for a brief moment before fading into the nothing whence it came.

“How am I getting worse at this?” Kendrick wondered aloud.

They stood in a forest clearing not far down the road from the tavern. Kendrick saw that this world seemed to have a relatively familiar day and night cycle, with one sun in the sky now beginning to descend from its midday apex, and he could hear birds chirping in the trees nearby. The Ecumene was not such an alien place to him after all.

“Slow down a moment,” said Sahni. “The aurimeter is barely moving. You may have exhausted your aura for the time being. Perhaps he should take a short rest?”

“She may have a point,” Bellara agreed. “Unassisted, you wouldn’t be able to expend your last aurum even if you tried, but there’s no sense in you burning up your reserves like this. Take a break.”

Kendrick nodded. “Fine then. I’ll pass the time... doing some other training.” He dropped to his hands and knees and started doing modified push-ups, with his knees still touching the ground.

Bellara walked over and stood next to him. “What is this that you’re doing? What do your people call it?”

“These are called push-ups.” Kendrick was still grunting with the exertion. “Do they have these in your land?”

“Yes. They’re a favorite exercise among conventional, non-magical soldiers. Except here, you’re not supposed to touch your knees to the ground when doing them.” Bellara wedged her boot under his knee to pry it off the ground, causing him to collapse.

“Oh, well, that’s, um,” Kendrick fumbled. “That’s... We do them with our knees in my world. It’s also a very private exercise, so I think I’ll stop now.” He stood up, massaging his shoulders and pectorals.

“You’ve made a fair amount of progress for your first day.” It seemed to pain her to concede that to him. “I’ll grant you that. But you have a long way to go.” She held out her hand and flexed her fingers; a ball of light materialized in her hand. “Sahni, what’s the reading on this?”

The quiet one pointed the aurimeter at the glowing orb. “10. Are you sure you’re feeling well enough to burn off that much?”

“I can already feel my aura coming back. Now, Kendrick, pay attention.” Bellara clenched her forefinger and middle finger together while bending the others into her palm. The aura she conjured tightened from a fairly loose sphere into a flatter oval shape. “This... is how...” She clenched her fingers harder and the aura sharpened at the edges slightly. One end even narrowed into a point. Then there was a quiet crack and the whole thing disappeared. “Aldiel damn this. Well, you get the idea. Once you conjure the aura, focus on changing its shape. Feel the edges in your mind and concentrate on compressing it. Understood?”

“I suppose,” Kendrick said with a shrug.

“The Psysword is designed to make that easier for you, but you should try it unassisted first. It will help you get better acquainted with your aura. Then when you use the blade, it will be that much more powerful!”

“Where did you get that thing, anyway? Does everyone have these?”

“We sort of... borrowed it.”

“We stole it from Redrune Academy’s Hall of Artifacts,” Sahni blurted out. “It’s believed to be centuries old. Possibly millennia. No one really knows for sure. We’re carrying stolen property.” She averted her eyes and twisted locks of her aqua hair.

Bell rolled her eyes. “That’s one way to put it, if you want to be a worrywart.”

An ancient artifact, Kendrick mused. And they’re entrusting it to me? They must really be desperate.

Some more time elapsed while they all waited for Kendrick’s aura to recharge. Sahni showed him two different species of edible fruit that were common in the woods of Kanthos, the continent where they lived; one of them was a deep greenish orb-shaped fruit that hung from trees like apples, and the other was a pointed golden berry that grew on bushes. Sahni warned him not to eat any unripe red berries, or any overripe green ones, as eating either would cause anyone to “empty his body at both ends” as she put it with an embarrassed laugh. Kendrick secretly hoped that they wouldn’t have to do too much foraging in the near future.

“Wait a moment,” Sahni suddenly interjected.

Bellara, who had been practicing some sort of martial art, stopped to listen. “What is it?”

“I felt a little tickle.” Sahni pulled out the aurimeter and pointed at the needle, which trembled ever so slightly. “See that? Something’s coming. It feels close, though.”

“I see it,” said Bell. She reached into her bag, drew the bladeless sword, and handed it to Kendrick once again. “Change of plans. You’ll be getting some firsthand combat practice today.”

“What? What’s happening? Wait, I can’t—”

“Your aura should be back up by now. Do the same thing you were doing before, but feel your aura move through the crystal in the blade. You can do this.”

Kendrick tapped his lens and then returned his shaky grip to the hilt of his weapon. He scanned his surroundings until he could get a read on the target.

BELLARA

{72}

HUMAN WITCH

He turned his head.

SAHNI

{66}

HUMAN WITCH

And then—

SHADE

{3}

“I see it!” he blurted out. At the edge of the woods, where the swaying shadows of trees gave way to the sunlit clearing, a black mass peeled off of the darkness and crawled on all fours across the ground. “Uh, how do I do this? Okay, think! Think!” He closed his eyes to concentrate, then immediately sprang them open to keep track of his approaching assailant.

“You’re overthinking this,” Bellara told him. “Let it come naturally. You were doing it earlier unassisted.”

“I-I... Listen, I don’t know if I can do this.” Kendrick’s arms trembled with the weight of his armament and the weight of what was expected of him. I have to try something. I can’t keep asking them for help. They need my help, that’s why they brought me here. Okay. Focus...

The shade rapidly closed the distance between them and was now reaching its dark arm toward Kendrick’s ankle. He cried out in panic and raised the Psysword over his head.

Thwack. He brought it down toward the ground—the crossguard was still in the air. Something had emerged from the crystal.

Bright white aura flowed and jostled like water from the crossguard of the Psysword. It wasn’t quite blade-shaped—more like an oblong club of sorts, maybe as long as his forearm—but it was far from the loose blobs of energy he had conjured previously.

“That’s it!” Sahni exclaimed. “Kendrick, you’re doing it!”

Bellara ran up behind him. “You’re almost there. You’re channeling. Now, concentrate on sharpening the edges so that—”

Thwack! Thwack! Thunk! Thwack!

“Take that, you shadowy bastard!” Kendrick growled. He took his club of aura and beat the shade repeatedly, bashing his weapon against the ground where the shade lay. It contorted several times, reaching out incorporeal hands in vain to try to defend itself, until finally it crumpled up like a bug and dissolved into the individual shadows of grass blades around it.

Bellara stooped to observe the dirt where the shade had been. “That... works, too.”

“Kendrick, you did it!” Sahni declared joyfully, running up and hugging him from behind. “You manifested your aura! You channeled it! You slew your first emissary of darkness!”

Still riding the adrenaline high, Kendrick saw what looked like vapor pouring out of his mouth with each breath. Something warm and wet trickled out of his right nostril.

“I did it,” he said, his voice suddenly echoing, the horizon suddenly tilting sideways. “What’s wrong?” Did I say that or did someone else? Kendrick thought.

Then there was darkness.

***

The room was illuminated only by the fading daylight filtered through the clouds. Gentle rain tapped almost imperceptibly against a glass window. The walls, floor, and ceiling were white. This place was different somehow. Different, but familiar.

There was a bed in the room, to the right. Behind, the windows, the soft rain falling. Ahead, a closed door. To the left, a door slightly ajar, dim light spilling impotently into the darkness it contained.

We need to get out of here.

The person lying in the bed looked at him.

A noise at the door.

***

“Kendrick, it’s okay! Kendrick, stop!”

It took him a few moments to realize he was yelling—what he was saying, and to whom, he didn’t know.

He was lying on the grass with something soft supporting his head. The angle of the sunbeams filtering through the trees had changed, angling slightly, and the lukewarm air had grown hot and almost stifling in his absence.

Bellara restrained him, straddling him as she held both of his wrists down against the ground. He could feel his face warming; it was not the weather’s fault.

“He’s awake,” she said finally, jumping to her feet. “The thrashing seems to have stopped. I knew he’d be all right.”

“He’s only all right because I healed him,” Sahni protested. She spoke with a candor and volume that Kendrick hadn’t seen from her before, a break from her usual soft-spoken and timid demeanor. “Do you mean to run our guest into the ground on his very first day?”

“It’s his very first day,” Bellara countered. “This is only the beginning—he's bound to have a few missteps here and there. This is how a person learns!”

“What happened?” Kendrick asked.

They looked at each other. Bellara started to say, “You, erm, had a tiny bit of an accident—”

“You were hemorrhaging aura through the Psysword,” Sahni cut in. “You’ve learned to channel it but you haven’t learned to control the rate of its flow yet. It was pulling the aura right out of you, it was leaving your body with every breath you took—the aurimeter showed you were down to your last aurum and still purging, you could have died!”

“Sahni, it’s okay,” said Bellara. The redhead placed a hand on her friend’s shoulder and tried to soothe her frenzied, hyperventilating state. “It’s okay. He’s okay. We’ll keep a closer eye on him next time and we won’t let that happen again. All right?” The blue-haired one looked away, wearing frustration and worry on her face, but she nodded.

Kendrick touched his nose—the dry, crusted remnants of blood still adhered to his skin, but he felt fine now. Strangely enough, every vivid detail of his dream had somehow been etched into his memory as if chiseled into stone. The way the room looked, the taste of the air... it was all so different from this place.

The only detail he couldn’t recall was the face of the person in the bed, but that was only because he didn’t focus on the face in his dream.

“It shouldn’t be an issue in the future,” Bellara went on reassuringly. “With his aura increasing, he’ll have more reserves before he nears zero. Plus, once he learns to control the flow better, he won’t burn it off all at once.”

He thought back to the moment before he collapsed, the vapor escaping his mouth—it wasn’t just his breath after all. It must have been his own magical energy seeping out of his body.

“I hope you’re not still thinking of dragging him to Oakenpost today,” Sahni said, crossing her arms. Then her demeanor softened again. “I mean... Are you? He fainted, and come to think of it, I’m tired myself. We woke up well before dawn to conduct the ritual last night...”

Bellara steeled herself for the argument. “It’s a small infestation that would normally be handled by the town witch—the town witch we promised to help, I should add. I could almost certainly handle it myself. We bring him along, let him get some practice, and stop him before he overexerts himself.”

“If you really insist on it... I suppose we can...” Sahni shot an apologetic look at him and mouthed the words “I’m sorry.” He got the impression that when Bellara made up her mind, it would be easier to change the tides than convince her otherwise.

“It’s settled then,” Bellara said with a grin. “Kendrick, take a moment to compose yourself, and then we’re off on a short hike to a nearby town that’s been having a rather irksome infestation of shades. Mostly, people have been reporting nightmares and other psychic disturbances. You won’t be in any danger—I'll be there to dispatch any rogue shades you can’t handle, and Sahni will be here to heal you if need be. But we won’t let you get back to the point that you collapse again. Understood?”

Kendrick nodded through his slowly clearing daze. “Clear as...” His gaze fell to the Psysword lying in the grass. “...crystal.” He reached for the weapon, but Bell’s hand was already there—he pulled his away with a jolt.

“I think I’ll carry this for now,” she said, “just to be safe.” She crouched down and offered him a hand to help him up. “I have one last question, though. Just what in the Ecumene were you dreaming of just now?”

He stood with her help, relieved to be upright on his own two feet again, but plagued with questions about what he’d just experienced. We need to get out of here. Was it him who said that, or someone else? “I... I don’t know.”