The journey to the Highpeak Monastery was a solitary trek through lands that grew increasingly wild and steep. Kaelen moved with a relentless pace, the void-touched crystal a heavy, pulsing weight in his pack. Each step away from the capital, from Lyra, felt like a betrayal, yet each step was also a movement toward the future he had to build. The Aethelgard knowledge provided him with endurance techniques, ways to regulate his breathing and metabolism to sustain a forced march that would have exhausted a normal mage days ago.
She will be there. The warrior in emerald. The vision showed her training in the monastery's central courtyard, her movements a blend of martial grace and a nascent magical talent she doesn't yet understand.*The memory was clear: a woman with sun-bronzed skin and black hair tied back in a practical braid, her eyes the color of forest moss, sharp and focused. She moved with a spear, her form flawless, but the Aethelgard senses in his mind could see the faint, untrained aura of dimensional affinity shimmering around her. She was a natural, a potential master of the spatial manipulation arts, wasting her talent on simple combat drills.
The Highpeak Monastery came into view, a stark, beautiful structure built into the side of a sheer mountain face. It was a place of discipline and silence, where warrior-monks sought physical perfection and spiritual clarity. To them, magic was a crutch, a distraction from the purity of the body's potential. The irony that one of their own possessed a magical gift of immense power was not lost on Kaelen.
He was met at the gate by a stern-faced monk who looked him up and down, his expression making it clear that robed scholars were not a welcome sight. "The monastery is closed to outsiders. Our grandmaster is in deep meditation."
"I am Archmage Kaelen of the Royal College," Kaelen stated, his voice carrying an authority that made the monk straighten slightly. "I am not here to disturb the grandmaster's meditation. I am here to see one of your disciples. A woman named Anya."
The monk's eyes narrowed. "Sister Anya is one of our most dedicated. She has no time for distractions from the lowlands."
"This is not a distraction. It is a matter of fate," Kaelen said, and before the monk could protest further, he reached out with a sliver of his will, not to compel, but to *suggest*. It was a subtle Aethelgard technique, a nudge to the man's perceptions, making the idea of allowing him passage seem reasonable, even prudent. The monk blinked, his resistance fading.
"Very well. You may wait in the courtyard. I will inform Sister Anya that she has a... visitor." The monk turned and led him through austere stone corridors into a large, open courtyard paved with smooth river stones.
And there she was.
Just as the vision had shown him. Anya moved through a complex spear form, her body a study in controlled power. Her emerald-green training robes flowed around her like water. Each thrust, parry, and spin was executed with breathtaking precision. But Kaelen saw what the monks could not. With every movement, the space around her *rippled*. It was a minute distortion, a natural, unconscious warping of reality that allowed her to move faster, strike harder, and anticipate her imaginary opponent's moves with uncanny accuracy. She was bending the rules of the world to her will without even knowing it.
He stood silently, watching her complete the form. As she finished, coming to a rest with the spear held perfectly still, her chest rising and falling with steady breaths, her eyes found his. They were indeed the color of deep moss, and they held no welcome, only a guarded curiosity.
"You are not a monk," she said, her voice low and melodic, yet firm.
"I am Kaelen. An Archmage."
Her expression tightened with immediate distrust. "We do not truck with mages here. Magic weakens the spirit and the body. It is a shortcut that leads to ruin."
"Is it?" Kaelen asked, taking a step forward. He didn't approach her directly, but began to slowly circle the courtyard's perimeter. "What if I told you that you use magic with every breath you take? That the speed of your strikes, the clarity of your focus, is not just discipline, but a natural gift you were born with?"
Anya's grip on her spear tightened. "You speak nonsense. My skill is earned through blood, sweat, and years of practice. Do not insult me by claiming it is some... magical fluke."
"It is not a fluke. It is a potential." He stopped and faced her fully. "You manipulate space, Anya. Unconsciously. You create tiny pockets of compressed air to move faster. You extend the effective range of your spear by a fraction of an inch by bending the distance between you and your target. You are a spatial adept, a talent so rare my people have only recorded a handful in our entire history."
He saw the flicker of doubt in her eyes, the memory of impossible feats she had written off as luck or intense focus. "Prove it," she challenged, raising her spear and settling into a combat stance. "If what you say is true, show me."
Kaelen almost smiled. This, too, was in the vision. "Very well." He didn't adopt a stance of his own. He simply stood, his hands at his sides. "Attack me."
Anya didn't hesitate. She lunged, her spear a blur of motion aimed straight for his shoulder, a non-lethal but punishing strike. Kaelen didn't move. Instead, he exerted the barest fraction of his will, using an Aethelgard spatial principle.
The spear point stopped a hand's breadth from his robe. It did not hit an invisible shield. Instead, the space between the tip of the spear and his body stretched, elongating into an impossible distance. Anya stared, her eyes wide with shock, as she pushed forward with all her strength, her muscles straining, but the spear simply would not close the final, tiny gap.
"What... what is this?" she breathed, her confidence shaken.
"This is what you do," Kaelen said softly. "You just don't know how to control it yet. You are using a sledgehammer when you should be using a scalpel." He released the effect, and the space snapped back to normal. Anya stumbled forward, catching herself before she fell.
She stared at her spear, then at him, a tumult of emotions warring on her face—confusion, fear, and a burning, insatiable curiosity. "How?"
"That is a long story," Kaelen said. "A story about a dead civilization, a coming war, and the people who must stand against it. I am here because you are one of those people, Anya. Your gift is not a crutch. It is a weapon. One that the world desperately needs."
He reached into his pack and pulled out the void-touched crystal. It pulsed with a soft violet light. "I am building a device to warn us of an enemy that consumes worlds. For that, I need starlight silver. I was told the monastery has some, used to inlay the eyes of the statue of your founder."
Anya was still reeling, her worldview shattered. The strict, magic-is-weakness dogma of the monastery was crumbling before the evidence of her own eyes and the strange, powerful presence of this Archmage. "The silver is sacred. It is not to be given away."
"Is it more sacred than the lives of everyone in this world?" Kaelen asked, his voice grave. "The enemy I speak of does not care about your discipline or your traditions. It will unmake you, this monastery, and these mountains into nothingness. The silver can be part of what saves us."
He saw the internal conflict in her. The lifelong training screamed refusal. But the newly awakened part of her, the spatial adept who had just seen the fabric of reality bend, understood that he was speaking a terrible truth.
"Why me?" she finally asked, her voice barely a whisper. "Why are you telling me this?"
"Because the path to securing that silver will be dangerous," Kaelen said, the vision clear in his mind. "The grandmaster will not relinquish it. Others may try to take it by force. And because..." he met her gaze, and for the first time, he allowed a hint of the personal connection he had seen in the vision to show in his eyes, "...you are meant to walk this path with me. Not as a follower, but as a partner. Your gift is the key to mastering the dimensional aspects of the Aethelgard arts."
Anya looked from his intense face to the pulsating crystal in his hand, then back toward the main hall where the grandmaster meditated. She was at a crossroads, the comfortable certainty of her life behind her, a terrifying, unknown future ahead. She thought of the impossible space-stretch, of his words about a coming war, of the conviction in his voice.
She lowered her spear, the tip clicking against the stone floor. "The grandmaster will never agree," she said. "We will have to take it." The words felt both treasonous and right.
Kaelen nodded. The second thread was now in his hand. The emerald guardian had joined the cause. The journey to the monastery was over. The journey toward war had just gained its first general.