The hay bale behind the school was pockmarked and surrounded by loose stalks from where they had been tearing arrows free, repeatedly. They were getting better, but Dalliance wasn’t getting happier about it.
“Okay, I give up,” said Earnest, “what’s got your tail in a knot?” Dalliance didn’t rise to the bait. His fingers hurt.
“It’s just,” he admitted, “I feel like I could’ve been doing better.”
“I’m sure you could have,” Earnest said. “What have you been trying to do? What is the goal? To be the most powerful wizard ever, or did you want to become a wizard and get out of your dad’s house?”
Dalliance stared at his friend.
“I’m just saying,” Earnest continued, “if your goals’s changed, that’s okay. But just because you had a different goal before doesn’t mean anything went wrong. It just means you’ve got a different goal now.”
“Okay, listen then,” Dalliance said, his voice tight with resolve. “I’ve got a different goal. I don’t want to be weak anymore.”
He thought of his Da. The axe.
The arrow sunk home with a thunk.
“That’s a good goal. So you’re going to max Grit?”
Dalliance gave him an offended look.
Earnest burst out laughing and stepped away from the bale with his arrow in hand. “Well, if you’re not doing Grit, then it’s Might or Agility."
"I’ve got this problem,” Dalliance admitted, “where if I predict something’s going to happen, I still can’t react fast enough to do what I’m supposed to do about it.”
“Well, that sounds like an opportunity,” Earnest said. “Maybe start there.”
Dalliance huffed and sunk another arrow.
“I don’t know why you weren’t doing this the whole time,” Earnest complained.
Dalliance sunk a third, dead center. There was a little divot there now.
“I think I’ve been going about things wrong,” Dalliance said. “After tiering up, I have all of this ability to bank experience now, and I think I should’ve been building up myself physically as well.”
He sighed and rolled his eyes at his own admission. “I just realized I’m not doing everything perfectly,” he muttered. “In yet another way.”
An arrow from Earnest’s bow disappeared to the fletching in the bale, a little left of center.
“I’m not doing everything perfectly,” mocked Earnest.
“Have you considered glasses?” Dalliance quipped.
“Don’t test me.”
The pair trudged forward through the trampled grass, and Earnest inspected the results of his shot.
“I may need them,” he muttered.
Sterling’s horse bore the knight’s son past them at a steady canter, slowing to a walk as he pulled around to Mister Best’s barn.
“Do you think he’s tiered up yet?” asked Dalliance.
“Oh yeah, no question,” Earnest speculated. “He was playing fast and loose with his points as long as half a year ago. He’s gotta be by now.”
The taller boy was taller still, these days, and tanned too. Dalliance doubted it was related.
Dalliance felt for his belt, where the reassuring but unfamiliar weight of the training mail he’d been given sat in its pouch. There had to be a better way than this.
A chime resonated in his mind.
[Through persistence comes achievement. You have been awarded one (1) experience point for your dedicated study of archery. From those with responsibility, consideration must precede action.]
The pair had been shooting all morning.
“Finally. Well, I win. Next time?”
“I hadn’t known we were competing,” Earnest said. “I thought we were practicing together.”
[Good hustle. For out-shooting your friend, you have gained one (1) experience point.]
“That’s insulting,” Earnest said. “I was spending time with my friend, and here you are, milking me for experience points.”
This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road. If you spot it on Amazon, please report it.
Dalliance raised his Agility to Level One. It felt much the same as the first time he had leveled it up, a downside to the Tiering Up system he had never considered. The resetting of his skills to 1% had been painful as well, though Topaz said he was likely to increase his understanding of wind magic soon.
He had felt it himself, even just shooting arrows with Earnest. He’d seen the wobble of the arrow through the air and felt . . . something. It was hard to say what. He was aware of its flight, sort of, as if the winds themselves wanted him to know there was an arrow in the air prior to its arrival.
That didn’t make sense to him analytically, and yet it made perfect sense intuitively.
The four winds seemed . . . friendly.
When understanding came, it came all at once.
Clockwise, counter-clockwise, up and down. The winds were spiraling through the empty space of the void, the hollow world. Spiraling up from the widest point to the narrowest, and down from the widest point to the narrowest, moving like the core of an apple toward the sun at the center, then up or down. At which point, they would cross the shards, the god-islands, the heavens—their motion relative to the sun, not to him. What seemed east and west was really north or south.
“Hello, north wind,” he told the wind.
It eddied and swirled playfully around his head.
A loose thread in his thoughts returned to the augury from forever ago, to the priest speaking of the benefits and power of the "north wind," when Dalliance was now pretty sure it had actually been the eastern wind.
He wondered how many Aeromancers knew but refrained from correcting the augurs.
It was probably all of them.
The following night, everything else clicked.
Perhaps it was just knowing the names. The chant, which had once felt like meaningless syllables, was now clear. It was an invitation to the winds to ease his burdens.
And the winds came.
Before his outstretched hand, the four winds struck, spinning upon themselves into a vortex, condensing downward into invisibility as the spell was born. Dalliance sensed something invisible, something that lifted the log, as he indicated it, and then launched it into the air, to land smoothly across the clearing.
And that was [Locomotion].
Thank you all for sticking with me this far.
Exposition in Dalliance Rather