Marroo didn’t touch Dhret for three nights after signing up for the tournament, at least not the way he had been. It wasn’t terribly difficult for those first three nights. His work with the veil left him exhausted in ways physical exercise never could. He typically collapsed into their bed at the end of the day with almost as much relief as he’d once felt when he escaped from the drudgery daily life into her arms. He dreamed, frequently, after work with the veil, but rarely remembered more than an impression of the dreams when he awoke, phantasmal shapes of sharpened steel battling flesh and blood over a corpse while a sense of corruption prowled just beyond the darkness. It didn’t take much imagination to guess at the substance of such dreams.

Sometimes he tried to write, but that never showed up in his dreams.

On the fourth day, his usual veil induced dreams were interrupted by violence.

He slashed at his son, with swords both real and spiritual. Physical matter crashed together as spiritual breath slammed together at the edge’s of the boy’s aura. External meridians blazed around the boy as he met his father’s spirit with his own, un-cowed by the overwhelming power of the man in front of him. Their swords leapt apart, clashed together, danced again as they shifted back and forth in the training room. The pressure of their competing spirits made the striking posts creak and swing on their chains while the walls of the room groaned and the hinges on the door rattled with every wave of dissipating breath.

The boy glared at him as he struck with enough force to kill him, if he allowed the strike to hit.

An Adept did not feel, not at the apex of his power. He did not, at least, feel as other people felt. What he felt was the will of his icon, the power of a sword made real through the channel of his own being, pressed into the world by his spirit, which itself was pressed into the shape of the very thing he’d dedicated his life to serving. It gave him an overwhelming desire to cut, to divide, to separate what did not belong from the world, to divide it into what was worthy and what was not, and to remove all that did not deserve to live from existence, but if he felt anything, if he felt anything that was not his icon’s voice impressed into his spirit, it was pride, pride, as he attempted to cut weakness from this boy, and met only resistance.

When the sword finally landed on the boy’s upraised arm, it landed as an admonition instead of a killing blow, yet his eyes jerked open.

Marroo’s spirit boiled around the room, spinning spiritual razor’s half manifested around its edges. Her jerked his breath away from the sword under the bed but it still took him a moment to still the whirling storm of swords. New lines appeared in the ceiling as he pulled at his spirit, their ragged curtain twitched and shed, and a pile of books toppled as one of the books was cut nearly in two.

“I am not a sword.”

He sat up and closed his eyes. His spirit stilled. Marroo pulled air into his lungs, and the breath followed, filtering through his meridians until he felt the unformed knives of breath slide into his flesh, outlining his bones, his veins, the fibers of his muscle and the contours of his inner organs.

Dhret turned over in her sleep and her chest rose and fell gently with her breathing. Her spirit burned peacefully at her center. Marroo let his own breathing regulate as he held the veil, reached out with his spiritual sense to the now distant spiritual world, and waited for his awareness to close the distance between himself and the other adepts.

The corrupted adept appeared first, followed shortly by the others, each still at the edges of his spiritual horizons amidst the clutter of the city’s millions of other spiritual signatures. Each distant, even the adept who’d ambushed him not long before.

He was not a sword.

He opened his eyes, but found it difficult, in the dark, to dispel the memories of being the man who’d taught him to touch the sword. He wanted to roll over and lose himself in Dhret’s arms, but crossed his arms over his chest instead, found the place where he’d been cut when his father used his sword to “admonish” him, and studied the dark floor.

There were new cuts in the floorboards, and, when he turned away from them, new cuts in the wall as well. He touched one of them, followed it until it stopped only a few feet from Dhret’s sleeping figure. Then he climbed out of bed and pulled on his clothes. He was careful not to wake the girl as he pulled his father’s sword from beneath its blanket of used books and clambered out of their window into the night.

The night lacked its usual darkness. The New Year was approaching. The orbits of the Midnight Plains always shifted around this season and a line of daylight slashed across the Northern Horizon casting the entire city into twilight instead of the usual absolute darkness. That twilight made it easier, when he slung his father’s sword over his bike and pedaled into the air, to pick his way through city streets.

He flew away from the rotting adept. It was useful to feel him at all times. It made avoiding him absurdly easy, even if he lingered mostly along the same border of the Iblanie territory, shifting only occasionally to chase Marroo’s signature when he dropped his veil close to a border.

Marroo kept his veil tight all the same as he pedaled through sleepy airtraffic or followed bands of glowing familiars zipping through the streets on their master’s errands. Occasionally one or two of the digital sprites paused to look at him, one shaped like a glowing violet smile, a green pigeon, a pale blue eye that blinked at him, before they zipped away as sparks, back into the flowing river of sparks moving between the streets.

A drake howled at him from the darkness as he passed a nest situated on top of an electrical pole that buzzed with power moving through the cabling.

The wastes belonged to none of the sects.

They sat like a black scar across the city’s nightscape, a pool of darkness outlined by a trillion specks of light. In the twilight cast by the slash of daylight to the North Marroo made out the contours of shattered towers and ruined streets below him as he crossed the boundary into the wilds and heard the breeze whisper in the weeds and stunted shrubs that colonized the streets as the rush of the city’s airtraffic fell away behind him.

He flew for an hour above the wasteland, over cracked streets and shattered suburbs, broken towers and cratered mountains of rubble while grass and stunted forests whispered in the breeze. Broken towers rose like teeth in rotting gums from hollow streets and Marroo chose one of these to land on after he’d left the populated city far behind.

When he listened with his spiritual sense, he felt no one for a dozen miles in any direction, heard nothing but the wind whistling as it passed through the tower’s hollow contours, and felt nothing but the spiritual residue of the force that shattered this section of the wasteland generations before.

Adepts fought here. Decades ago, perhaps even centuries. Their power had faded with time but he could still feel it in the craters and ruins they’d left behind. A touch like something smoky and burning, an impression of something sharp like his father’s icon, a crater that gave him the sense of liquid moving like blood through a man’s veins, all of it distant, so distant that it seemed more an impression of an impression, words carried from the distance by the wind, snatched away before he got a clear sense of what was said. The shattered tower he occupied sat at the edge of such a crater, caught in the blast and shortened by most of its length, the rubble from most of it’s remains turned into projectiles that shred the towers behind it across the ancient street from the crater that ruined it. Marroo could see the marks from the ancient battle, could make out the scars, if not the details or the lives lost by the conflict. The scale of it, when he stood at the peak and surveyed the vast swath of darkness that was the wastelands, beggared his imagination, and he put it aside.

He took his time surveying the tower he’d chosen. At seventy or eighty feet high, it was the tallest of the remaining ruins that cut squares into the wilderness of this part of the wastes. The floors had long ago slumped to the ground at the center of the tower, leaving four walls to rise like an open maw directed towards the sky. Those walls were thick enough to provide Marroo a platform for his bike and a path he circled letting his spirit reach through his veil to sample the spiritual graveyard that surrounded him.

When he finished his circuit he returned to his bike and retrieved the sword he’d come here to dispose of.

He lifted it as though he lifted his father’s body and carried it in front of him to the spot he’d chosen.

A crack ran the length of one wall in the shattered tower, a spot where the floor had tried to tear away a bit of the wall on it’s way into the depths and left a long gap where the wall had partially succumbed. He leapt onto the crack and followed it until it reached the tower’s highest remaining point along its northern corner.

He held the sword, for a long time, in front of himself as he stood over that crack facing the light that edged the darkness.

“I am not you.” He told the sword.

The wind sighed through the broken stone in answer, and he sensed the reek of ancient powers rising from the hole beneath him.

“I don’t want your pride.”

He closed his eyes and pulled the sword close to his chest. He turned from the line of daylight and made another circuit of the ruin while the whistle of the Midnight Plains drifted down to him occasionally on the breeze.

When he stopped he stood once more at the tower’s highest point with the sword pressed to his chest and his eyes closed the line of daylight in the distance. He opened his eyes to look at the sword and pulled it away from his chest to turn it this way and that in his hand. He felt his icon resonate through his veil with the item in his hand and felt the poison adept far away along the distant line of night. He took the handle of the sword and felt the spirit within rise like a sea at his touch.

He pulled it free and the daylight caught fire as it reflected form the length of it’s blade. His own reflection was warped in the blade when he turned it to examine it in the twilight. It could have been any face that looked out at him from the sword, any pale skinned boy with dark hair, any pair of silver eyes that met his, or just one.

“I can’t be like you.” He whispered.

He thought of the cuts in the floor where a baby’s crib might have sat, the cut near Dhret’s head, and the book split in half by the partially manifested blades.

“I can’t be a father like you.”

“I can’t.”