The air drifting in from the highlands with a sharp as needles, icy and bone-chilling, constant stream of breezes from the northern winter lands, never seems to sit; it carries the weight of thousands of a thousand unspent breaths.
I stand in the center of the grey and slate-tiled, cold courtyard floor, my feet bare against the frost rimmed stone, the cold seeping into my flesh and bones through the rough-skinned soles of my tired feet. To any observer, I was a statue frozen in motion, merely a boy standing still. But beneath the surface of my bipolar looking, sweat-slicked and goosebump ridden skin, I am a howling furnace. My Vitreous Chamber, the crystalline lattice woven around my brain stem, thrums non-stop with a low agonizing frequency. It feels like a sharp and rough-edged shard of ice is vibrating at the speed of sound within me, a constant and brutal reminder that I am more than a mere boy; I am a Conductor.
I take a deep breath in, pulling the freezing mountain air deep into my expanding lungs, letting the frosty air sit within my body. This is the Intake. I stretch my left hand out slowly, careful not to accidentally spill out any air from my straining lungs, my palm facing outwards to catch the first rays of the warm and soothing sun after a small fluffy cloud blows by. My right hand stays pressed firmly against the rough and stony, freezing outer walls of the castle. I am the Bridge.
The gradient hits me like a physical blow, as it always does, as if a large force bumps into me from all directions bluntly and forcefully; the heat from the warm noon sun, and the cold from the air in my very lungs, as well as the castle wall beneath my right hands firm press, surge towards each other within my body, almost as though they are electrical currents within a system of wires, using my very nervous system as a highway. I feel the 'Flux' roar throughout my veins, a searing but golden pressure that wants to burst out of my pores.
"Hold it Caelen… just- hold it…" I whisper in a grunting tone through my gritted teeth.
"Don't waste- don't spend it… just, hold."
I begin shifting into the 'Stance of the Iron Radiator'. My knees slightly bending, my spine as straight as my fathers castle walls that stand tall and proud before me, I retract my shoulder blades to expose the high density of capillary beds amongst my back. I mentally reaffirm myself to the facts; this is the most important part of OUR way. Unlike those rumours of the Sunder-Commune, a group of reckless and impudent thieves who burn their lives for mere seconds of stolen power, we of House Valerious practice Thermal Temperance.
I can feel waste heat within me rapidly building up at an exponentially increasing rate. This is the tax that the universe demands for the privelage of my power. My internal temperature continues to climb, from 38 degrees… then 39 degrees… now 40 degrees! My blood feels like liquid lead, thick and simmering, heavy and scalding. It's simply excruciating, staying awake during this process is taking up more mental power than I currently want to admit to myself.
"VENTING!" I roar out with a hoarse, concentrated voice.
Snapping my arms down rapidly so my palms face the tiled ground, the heat suddenly ejects, not simply leaving me, but screaming out of my body. A violent shroud of white steam erupts out of my skin towards the frosty tiles, shimmering in the golden rays of warm light protruding from the sun. Once the steam lands, the frost in the courtyards once-frosty ground, vanishes into a perfect circle around my bare, now warm, feet; the frost and ice turned instantly to vapour.
"Precision is lacking, My Lord." A voice dry as the parchments hidden in the library drawers crackles out from the shadows.
Hannes, or Master Hannes, the ex-head of our knight forces and my personal trainer, steps into the light. He is a small man, grey but not yet white hair, always dressed in polished armour sets with a confident and proud stance, his own vitreous chamber so calcified by age that it looks like a grey tumour at the base of his skull. He holds up a 'Flux-Gauge', its needle vibrating confidently in the 'red-zone.'
"You vented 4% of your stored potential into the atmosphere as raw noise." Hannes mutters with an unimpressed tone, tapping the gauge.
"In a real skirmish against a Boiler-Drake, that 4% is the difference between a shattered shield and a melted face. You are the heir to the Earldom, Caelen. You cannot afford to be noisy."
"I am not trying to be a weapon, Hannes," I speak, my voice raspy from the steam still burning and sitting thick in my tired throat.
"I am trying to be a Regulator."
"The world does not want to be regulated." Hannes counters.
"It wants to burn."
Suddenly he's interrupted by the heavy thud of a cane on cold stone, echoing throughout the mostly empty courtyard. I turn around, my heart sinking. My father, Earl Valerius, stands on the balcony. He looks like a man made of ash, nothing like the once tall and proud, and I fathomable powerful man I hear about in stories of old. The sickness he holsters, Crystalline Atrophy, is eating him from the inside out. His chamber is failing, unable to process the waste heat of his very own heartbeat.
"Caelen." He called, his voice a ghost of the thunder it once was.
"Come. The border has bled."
I take a deep intake of the icy air and then begin to walk towards him, my steps confident but heavy, tired from my lunchtime training; my body still radiating a dull, orange warmth. Here in our land, we live in a curated peace. We are told that the borders between kingdoms are a divine boundary, and that the land owned by human beings on this earth, is stable and fruitful. But as I look now into my fathers sunken eyes, I can see the truth of the map I've seen many times before within the strategy room. We are a tiny glowing dot in a world of war and turmoil and pure unfiltered chaos.
"The Sunder-Commune has crossed the OakHaven line."
My father speaks solemnly, his voice almost worried, he leans heavily on the stone railing, using it to support his weak body and hold himself upright.
"They've deployed their engineers. They don't use stances, Caelen. They're using kinetic debt as some sort of a currency. They strike with the force of ten men and then hide in the stasis, waiting to strike again. They are an anarchist plague, thriving on the very entropy we seek to prevent."
"They must be desperate father…" I return softly, always trying to see the light and good in everything, even a group of vile ungodly anarchists.
"They say they have no heat left in the north, that they don't get enough supplies, or that the borders are being attacked by-"
"They say many things to justify their theft!" My father snaps and cuts me off sharply, before coughing, causing a cloud of grey soot to escape his lips.
"The council, they continue to tell me that you are unworthy of my seat, that you are untested, and you may not sit in the position that is currently my own… You will march to the OakHaven front, and there you will meet the heirs of the other 7 great houses of our kingdom - the chosen eight is what the public calls you, who are no more than mere boys as of yet. For the sake of our honour, our people's honour, my own honour as your father, and your honour as the very man who will succeed me, you must prove that a man who respects the Law of the Loom is superior to a man who breaks it."
I look out over our prosperous valley. The smoke from the chimneys rises in straight, orderly lines. It is truly a masterpiece of balance, the second most northern of territories, against all odds able to survive in the icy permafrost winters that hit non-stop all year round. Yet here I am being sent to destroy the only other society that had found a way to survive in the northern lands, be it by usurping a prior society that survived the harsh lands in a more peaceful and loving manner.
"I will go," I speak, the words feeling like a Kinetic Withdrawal, a promise I don't yet have the strength to keep. "But I will not use Debt. I will not borrow from a future I haven't earned."
"We shall see…" my father whispers hopefully, his eyes turning toward the distant, shimmering white horizon where the large mountains seperate us and the harsher north, where my newfound enemies lay, the peaks of each towering rock touching the sky itself. "The Loom has a way of making us all debtors in the end."
…
I didn't know back then, that he was right. I didn't know that I would eventually stand alongside seven others, our bodies broken, our souls drained, staring at a man who sat upon a throne of pure, blinding light; a man who called himself the "Main Regulator" and treated us not as heroes, but as a mathematical error he had to delete.
…
For now, I am just a son. And I am starting to overheat.