Born From A Divine Gamble

Everyone else got to the training field long before him and everyone wore appropriate clothes for the occasion. They had all been warned beforehand to bring out all the equipment they possessed for the combat cla.s.s, both armors and weapons.

Most of them wore light armor, some had no armor at all like Cyril and a rare few wore expensive looking armors, like Frits who wore the bulky and th.o.r.n.y armor a.s.sociated with his family name and Norval who wore a dazzling suit of small rune-engraved steel plates.

On this rare occasion, Rica wasn"t hiding in Frits arms since all the pointy bits of his armor where preventing her from doing so. Instead, she was hanging out shyly with most of the girls who stood in the gra.s.s. Aside from Brenia, most of them didn"t have armors. Gytha had a leather suit lined with thick fur and Heida had a s.h.i.+rt of jeweled scale armor but that was it. The rest came in appropriate clothing and had their servants carry their fencing swords and bows for them.

Since Emp was wearing his own armor, his face was hidden behind his helmet but the rest easily recognized him because of Celtine on his shoulders. When he got close to the group the rest welcomed him like usual.

"Hey, Emp! So the old miss Blackbull finally let you go? I was wondering if you would show up for this cla.s.s." Said Kenneth with a smile.

He was wearing a simple breastplate and arm-guards like most of the other.

"I did not have the time to eat dinner though." Answered Emp, a bit disappointed.

"You forgot your weapon too." Said Ivar. "You"re going to get yourself in trouble again."

"I did not forget my weapons, I just keep them in the bag."

"Yeah, what"s up with that ugly thing, you always carry it around."

"It"s a bottomless bag."

"Oh, how unexpected of you to posses such a tool!" Odilon b.u.t.ted in.

While they were talking about the bag, the group of girls started a discussion of their own, prompted by the innocent question of Nessa.

"I wonder how strong everyone is. Who do you think is strongest in our group? Brenia?"

"Maybe." Said Aglaya. "She is a renowned hunter after all but I believe some of the older boys may be stronger, they were here for five years already."

"I think Oran is a sure bet." Said Josseline, as if to justify her actions of that morning.

"I"d go with Frits instead, that guy has Rica as a fiance, that means he got a kill already right? He seems confident in his armor." (1) a.n.a.lysed Juniper, with Rica nodding her ascent with both her hands held together close to her heart.

Gytha had a different opinion as well.

"I would say sir Longhorn. He doesn"t seem that strong at first but every other boys seems to follow him readily, he must have some hidden strength."

"But being the apparent center of a group doesn"t mean he controls it, maybe Ivar just has a talent to keep people together. Who do you think is strongest Mable?" Asked Aglaya as she brought her friend into her embrace once more.

Mable struggled a bit to free herself and tried to put up a dignified front for the others before she answered.

"I don"t know for the strength of the rest but I would say Emp has a pretty good chance himself."

"That"s true, he doesn"t talk that much but he does have a blessing and at least one kill under his belt." Nodded Aglaya.

"But his armor is a bit... barbaric. If I didn"t know who was under, I would think he was a beast instead." Frowned Nessa.

"A beast that carries a beast, how fitting." Sneered Gervaise, joining in from the side.

"He told us his kill was entirely because he was lucky as well, did he not? His armor may be scary but its got nothing to do with his power. He only needs money for that and believe me, a woodland horror is worth a lot." Observed Juniper.

"I won"t change my mind." Said Mable while crossing her arms.

"Sure, I think he may have a chance but why are you so certain?" Inquired her friend.

"I saw something amazing the other day, those two were there too." She said, pointing at her two servants standing behind her.

They both nodded energetically while she followed her sentence.

"I don"t know if he is the best warrior or not, but in terms of strength alone, I believe he can squish everyone else here."

"Squish?" Aglaya repeated before laughing out loud.

Mable laughed in a good mood as well. The girls continued to talk merrily about who they thought would be the strongest but they weren"t the only ones to wonder about that. The current group C could be divided in three, those who genuinely wanted to train, Emp was in that group, those who didn"t want to be there, Penny, George and Rica were among those, and finally, those who wanted to know how strong their fellow students were already, either to compare with themselves or just by curiosity. The third group was the most numerous.

"Do you guys know how the cla.s.s will go? I can"t wait to show you all how amazing I am." Asked Odilon.

"The trainer is called Winfred." Answered Ivar, ignoring his boastful remark. "Last time, he started by evaluating the physical abilities of everyone, I guess he will do the same again."

"How does it work?" Asked Brenia, suddenly in the middle of the group of boys. Emp hadn"t noticed yet but apparently, she came armed with a large axe. "Will he have us all fight against each other?"

"No, not for now at least. He will start by-"

"Hi people, I am Winfred the master of arms here, everyone pay attention!"

A large muscled guy showed up and clasped his hands loudly to gather the attention of everyone, cutting short Ivar"s explanation. Emp wondered why every teacher had to show up by interrupting something. They were so good at it too, they had to be doing it on purpose.

He wore an armor that obviously belonged to a knight but not the helmet that usually went with it. Instead, he wore around his head a band of green cloth to keep sweat out of his eyes. He had a large s.h.i.+n, a similarly wide mouth and a loud booming voice to go with it.

"Let"s go straight to the point, my job is to make sure that all of you are physically healthy, that all of you get stronger and to teach you how to survive in a combat situation, either against a beast or a human.

I can already see that some of you are way more enthusiastic about this than others. I know many of you girls will say this cla.s.s is pointless, especially for n.o.ble daughters, there are always knights and soldiers protecting them, what is the point of learning to fight for themselves? I often hear them ask. The answer is obvious, sometimes, things don"t go your way. You may find yourself alone in a dangerous situation at some point in your life and at that moment, you will be glad I was there to force you to improve yourselves."

Winfred talked fast but clearly, he was obviously eager to get to the meat of things. He didn"t even leave them some time to understand what he had said before he clapped powerfully again.

"Alright then, today, I want you all to show me what you"re made of. I will have you all do some exercises one by one to test your limits, show me your best and from it, I will prepare a suitable training for each one of you. Oran, you first since I already know you, show them how it"s done."

After that, he had them all do a long series of different exercises to test their speed, agility and strength. He had brought many weights with him, fully used the long training field to have them run around, had them stretch and test their flexibility, had them show him their weapons and armors, the techniques they knew and anything else that would help him understand their strengths and weaknesses. Throughout the whole afternoon, he made a lot of comment to everybody.

"Small girl, you run fast and you are super flexible but you have no stamina at all, we"ll work on that." He said to Mable

"You, I get that you are here for magic and aren"t interested in my cla.s.s but how do you expect to carry all those weird spell materials around if you can"t even lift those small weights?" He told Penny

"You are a complete mess, you have no leg muscles, no stamina, and can"t even bend forward properly." He complained to Odilon.

"Frits, you are as slow as ever, I told you this many times already but wearing that bulky armor doesn"t make it alright to run at the pace of a slug, what are you going to do if you come across something your armor can"t defend against? Even plate armors don"t slow people down significantly, what is that thing even made of?" (2)

"You, young miss, you are amazing, one can tell you trained a lot already, what is your name?"

"Brenia." She answered him casually.

"Brenia, you seem well rounded and your strength is higher than the rest of the girls. If you were any of those n.o.ble girls, I would give you a pa.s.s but I can tell you are aiming for more. It"s still lacking if you want to be a true warrior. Your technique is also poor, in fact, you have none, and your coordination isn"t the greatest, we will work on those."

She wasn"t angry to hear that at all, instead, she was eager to start.

Then came the turn of Emp, of course, he had a lot to say about him.

"You, where is your weapon and by the ancestors, why are you carrying your servant on your shoulders?"

"Well, I always carry her like that. For the weapon, I didn"t know which one to bring so I brought them all." Emp started to get every weapon out of the bag as he named them, dropping them on the ground in front of him one by one.

"I have that spear, a bow, those swords, a bunch of s.h.i.+elds, this magic long sword, this magic rapier, Flame and Ray and the thunder-chew hammer."

The hammer made a loud thud as it crushed the gra.s.s underneath it.

"What in the sands? You"re like a walking armory!" Exclaimed Juniper.

"Hey hey Emp, my friend, I see you got four magic swords, would you like to share one with me?"

Odilon started to move forward but Kenneth stopped him with a choke hold. Mable laughed at the confused reaction the rest of the girls showed. She herself didn"t know Emp had all those weapons on him but since she had declared he would be the strongest, this worked in her favor. There was still something she wondered though.

"Didn"t you have a big black one too?"

"Yeah, I do but it"s too heavy, I can"t use it as a weapon." Answered Emp honestly as he got the Great overburdening hammer out of his bag.

The large black and red hammer fell downward the moment it appeared out of the bag and sank in the dirt below the gra.s.s, displacing the ground to accommodate it"s ridiculous weight. Rica made a step backward in front of its weight while almost everyone else looked at it in amazement. Mable laughed loudly and pointed at it.

"See? I"m sure that thing can squish anyone."

"By the green sea and it"s ancestors, what kind of weapon is that?" Asked Cyril in an impressed voice.

"It"s the one I used to kill the woodland horror."

"It doesn"t matter. If you can"t use it, it"s pointless to get it out." Said the teacher before asking him to store it away.

He then asked further about Celtine and ended up telling him to keep her on his shoulder for the tests.

"She is always up there right? In that case, if you were to take a walk in the woods, it is likely she would be there as well if you fell in an ambush. Fights often starts when you don"t expect them and I doubt you would have the time to get her down if you were in danger. Unless you are willing to sacrifice her at the first sign of trouble, I suggest training with her there. It will get you both used to it."

Emp agreed, if he didn"t practice with her and he was stuck again in a fight with her on his shoulders, it would hinder the movements of his arms and his head. Maybe the teacher would have some counsels to offer him and even if not, he was bound to find some tricks of his own with enough practice.

Winfred proceeded to check how Emp wielded each of the weapons using a dummy and came to the conclusion Chinui had predicted long before.

"You know the basic imperial swords stance, that"s good, you are also well versed in the basic movements but don"t know any of the advanced. You don"t have the best form but you are far from the worst of the new students."

Emp was truly eager to learn some new moves. This was a thing he understood easily, unlike how the other people thought, the movements were easy to comprehend and replicate. He wondered if the teacher had a hammer technique to teach. He probably should, he was a master of arms after all, he should have mastered the use of all arms no?

While the teacher was examining the techniques of some other students, Brenia came to him and his mountain of weapons. Celtine recoiled like often when Brenia got close but she didn"t mind it and examined his hammer from closer.

"So this came from a thunder-chew? It"s really big. Because of the tooth it"s way larger than a normal war hammer."

"It is really heavy as well."

She extended her hand towards the handle and looked towards him.

"Can I?"

"Sure."

Emp didn"t see how it could ever bother him so he let her try to wield it.

"Ohhh, It really is heavy." She commented as she lifted it from the ground with great difficulty. "You"re stronger than I thought, I would never be able to use that in a fight. Can you imagine the jaw strength of the thunder-chew itself, raising a hundred of those to open its mouth?"

"That"s true, I didn"t think of that before." Their strength must have been ridiculous. "I wonder what they look like, how does one fight that kind of beast?" Emp pondered out loud.

"I didn"t see any either but I heard one once. Back in the village I grew up in, we heard one smack its teeth together once. The sound was so loud every baby started to cry and part of the nearby hill broke apart and rolled down into the forest."

The sound alone broke part of a hill? Emp had heard before that the sound was powerful but he didn"t expect it to be that strong.

"I wonder how they killed one in the first place. If it can break down a hill just by closing its mouth, how does one get close enough to attack it?"

"I have no idea." She answered while giving him back the hammer. "But I hope that I get to learn something here and become strong enough to defeat one, that would be great."

She seemed to have big hopes for her future. Emp wondered why she wanted to become strong so much.

"They use magic to silence it." Penny chimed in. "There is no way anyone would survive that otherwise. Your eardrums would burst and your internal organs would liquefy from the sound blast alone. it must have been some mage that used a spell to silence it from a safer distance before they fought."

Penny couldn"t be any more uninterested by the combat cla.s.s but she seemed to like the current subject of conversation.

"A true warrior wouldn"t need any fancy magic to triumph." Denied Brenia.

"If you want to die than yes, you don"t need someone who wields real powers."

"Real power? How about my axe into their heads for a real power?"

"I believe you are both wrong." Tried to mediate Emp before either of the girls could go any further. "I have not seen that many fights but I did see guardsmen take on an entire sizzle of blood-spitters. They had a mage to protect them from the acid, without him, they would have all died but the mage alone would not have survived either. I believe you need to use everything you have at your disposal to win, you need to be flexible in your tactics."

Chinui told him something like that once so he believed it would help out. The two girls both glared at him. Was it not a great advice?

"I refuse to believe a true mage could have died to the likes of a blood-spitter nor that there is something that magic couldn"t do."

"I also think you"re talking out of your a.s.s, if those soldiers had been properly trained, they would have dispatched those cats easily, there was no need for the likes of a mage to intervene."

Since he did not understand why they were both angry, he just gave up.

"Since neither of you are going to change your mind, I feel like it would be pointless to talk about this further. I will go prepare for the next test instead."

The other two surprisingly agreed to disagree and the cla.s.s continued.

Following that, Emp outperformed everyone else in the speed test. Because of the blessing he had, he could move great distance without making any real efforts. His true movement speed was not the greatest but when it came to evaluate the time it took him to move from a point to another, he was faster than anyone. Even the teacher was at a loss and said that at this point, he was moving faster than a horse ever could.

Heida complained it was cheating but the teacher denied it saying a blessing wasn"t technically magic and couldn"t be turned off. From what he described, very few were able to subdue their own blessings and not use them because it became so deeply ingrained in them that they couldn"t comprehend what was normal for the rest of the world.

Emp could easily understand that, even knowing it was because of what s.p.a.ce gave him, he had a hard time understanding why it took so much time for everyone to move those small distances. They all made runs of a hundred steps even though it was clearly a gap of a mere few steps. Even by walking he could reach the other end of the field before those running.

What was even more confusing to him was Celtine"s perception of his movements. She described it as flying at full speed but without the wind slamming against her face. He felt like he was moving normally whilst she felt like they were going really fast.

As for the raw strength, Emp was far from the strongest. Everyone in the older group knew a strength reinforcement self-magic and thus, managed to lift a lot more than him. The only exception was Frits who couldn"t exert that much strength because the armor he wore was already ridiculously heavy and combined with heavy weights, stopped him from doing anything.

After all the older boys, Emp was strongest by being just a bit weaker than them, followed by Brenia who didn"t use any magic and than the ten years old Norval who knew some self-magic like the older boys. The weakest were Mable who was too small, Penny who was just weak and then Zoran Glowstorm who was even smaller than Mable but somewhat stronger.

While doing the strength tests, Emp learned something new. Apparently, he knew some self-magic too. The teacher said that, with the thickness of his arms, the self-magic Emp used must have been quite powerful. He answered that he wasn"t using any and after talking a bit with Winfred, he managed to understand what was happening.

As he had learned from Chinui, self-magic was a type of magic that used the strength of the caster himself as energy to fuel the magic. With it, you could become a lot stronger or faster for a while but afterwards, you would have to pay the price. The exact effects and compensations varied greatly depending on the technique and the one using it but it was always the same principle.

Here, in the school, Winfred taught all of his students official Steelwood imperial self-magics on strength, speed, visual acuity and voice amplification. If the students knew one or more of their own, they were free to practice in their use as well, many n.o.bles came in knowing a magic pa.s.sed down in their family like Norval.

In the case of the magic Winfred taught, the strength of the user would be increased by half their original strength at the cost of burning twice as much energy for as long as it was in use. It wasn"t the best technique there was but it was much better than nothing for those who didn"t know any strength related self-magic. The mouse for example, would certainly have won his fight against him if he had known that basic self-magic.

As for what Emp understood, his overburdening hammer was apparently a form of very advanced self-magic. At every use, the hammer would raise his strength by a bit permanently at the cost of depleting his energy completely, causing hunger and tiring the body. The hammer was doing all the work but it was still a form of self-magic since the price was still paid by himself. This meant that the strength he always used wasn"t his real strength at all but an augmented one instead and that if he truly trained his muscles, the effects may be many times stronger.

He wished Strength had told him this from the beginning but thinking about it, a man like him was probably training all day long anyway. He may have felt it was natural to train as well as use the hammer and it didn"t cross his mind to tell him. Maybe his other treasures had their own secrets as well.

Of course, even after he understood all this, he kept it all to himself. If he was to tell everyone he knew a powerful strength self-magic that required no training in its use at all, everyone would turn blue from envy. Maybe nothing would happen and he worried over nothing but he felt it wouldn"t be kind of him to tell everyone such an easy way existed if he was the only one that could use it.

As for the tests, he had to explain to Winfred that he couldn"t turn it off as it was a permanent effect making him by default the strongest in the group if no one used magic. This also made Mable partially right because he was indeed, in a way, the strongest in the cla.s.s. The rest wouldn"t accept this as her victory though.

It took almost the whole afternoon for Winfred to test everyone in every possible way. In the end, since no one was made to fight against the others or the teacher, it was really hard for the interested students to determine who was the best. Many had the question hanging from their lips as they listened to the last things the teacher had to say.

"Next time, we"ll all start training for good. I will better your bodies and have you all shaped up like statues. I"ll have a training plan for each of you and I will organize spars between you all and sometimes myself in order to train your battle senses. Someone needs to remind me to tell you all what is the best way to win a fight next time."

"Can"t you just tell us now?" Asked Brenia, a bit confused.

"No, I feel like it will start a debate and I"m done with you all for today." He said flatly.

"But teacher! Who"s/"

"Call me Winfred."

"Uh... Winfred, who"s the strongest of us all? We"re all curious." Asked Odilon.

"Not you, that"s for sure. let"s see, the strongest... In theory it would be Frits I think."

Rica made a beaming smile hearing the teacher but he went back on his words immediately.

"It"d be him but with that armor he refuses to take off, he would die in any situation in which he would need to retreat. Not only that but he can"t dodge, if someone throw out a spell like a ball of fire at him, he"s going to cook inside unable to escape, the smoke alone can probably kill him."

Rica made a sad face and the teacher followed.

"If we are referring to the survival rate of a fight instead of the raw ability, than Ivar has a better chance, but he knows my first lesson so well, I feel like his chances would diminish greatly without a proper path to retreat. It"s definitely not Oran either, he has the highest physical strength of you all but he can"t read the flow of a battle properly, he"d die in a surprise attack before the fight even began or even to a stray arrow.

I believe with what I saw today that Nicolas Bluepeak is the better out of you all. He might not win a duel against any of the other three but on a battlefield, he would be well rounded enough to survive the others. I"d take ten Nicolas over a hundred Frits or a thousand Ivar."

Nicolas seemed happy to hear that but Heida couldn"t help but bring him back down.

"Don"t smile like that, he"s saying you"re average and that"s why you win. Winning because the others have huge flaws doesn"t make you best, it just makes you not worse."

Emp did not know the qualities of Heida yet but if one things was sure it"s that she had a real talent to make Nicolas miserable, if anyone could call that a talent.

"But what about Emp then?" Asked Mable, intent on winning her meaningless wager.

"As he is now, he is carrying unnecessary burdens and he doesn"t have true techniques. His speed would probably let him survive almost any fight as long as he knows when to retreat but I don"t know him enough to be sure. As for a battlefield, the girl on his shoulder just makes him a giant target, I"d hope he would drop her before a planned battle but like before, I do not know him. I believe he could win against many untrained people at once but in a fight on equal terms with any of the other four, he would lose. Well, maybe not against Ivar, it might be pretty even."

Mable made a disappointed pout and someone whispered in the back.

"Did anyone vote for Nicolas? Who won the cake then?"

Had they really bet a cake on who was strongest? No one seemed to have voted for the poor Nicolas and so the cake remained un-won and uneaten.

Afterwards, Winfred wished them all goodnight and everyone went back to their rooms. The morning had been pretty tiring for him but the afternoon just flew by as if nothing happened at all. Emp sat at his table and ate the meal prepared by Harriett while he thought of the next day. The next cla.s.s was to be an introduction to magic, Emp wondered what it would be like. Up until now, he knew what to expect but magic he had no idea what it would be like.

He wasn"t nervous though, this was just another thing he needed to learn. It supposedly was much harder than the rest to learn but since he had to do it, it was pointless to worry about if he could or could not do it. However difficult it would be, he would still do his best and eventually learn it all like Sage had asked of him.

***

On Self-magic,

many things are important to know in order to understand both its value and its problems. First of all, it is true that humanity would benefit greatly if everyone knew how to use self-magic. It is already the most widespread form of magic in the world and many efforts have been deployed in the past to bring it to as many people as possible.

The reason as to why not every citizen of the empire knows how to use it is simply the lack of time and talent. Like any skills and disciplines, self-magic is honed with time and require a lot of training and efforts to simply be able to cast its simplest of forms.

In order to use descent self-magic, a person needs to devote a long time to it and that is often impossible with those living in villages or stuck doing laborious works to earn a living.

The other detrimental point of self-magic is that just like any other form of magic, its misuse could result in deadly consequences for the user. Most of those who would not need such magic on a day to day basis choose to ignore its benefits for the fear of said consequences.

To understand how its misuse could be so tragic, one needs to understand its workings.

Like any other form of magic, self-magic isn"t free, it comes at a cost. Where traditional magicians sacrifice components and ingredients to make a spell work, self-magic requires the sacrifice of a part of the caster or his energy. The spells most spread across the Steelwood empire barely require the user to spend more energy than they would have but some are far more costly and even those smaller tricks can end up deadly if one does not understand the price they have to pay clearly.

Before delving into complex self-magic, let"s take a deeper look into the simple and often overlooked price to pay for the simple imperial strength augmenting self-magic or SISA.

A good user who knows how to pace himself and regulate the magic properly will have to spend twice the energy they would for as long as the spell is active. Lifting a rock would tax your body as if you had lifted two in succession. In exchange, the maximum power you can output would be one and half time as big as you would be able to normally. This seems like a fair deal at first glance, one would think that eating a bigger supper afterwards would make up for the energy lost but would it really?

The human body works on a very fragile balance that have left scholars across the world perplexed for centuries. Messing with this balance is far more dangerous than one would think.

In our case, many things you do unconsciously takes up small amounts of energy. Walking, breathing, even your beating heart must take its energy somewhere and as long as the spell is in effect, all of those are using twice as much as well. Using such power for a small amount of time is fine but using it for hours on end could very well kill you.

Supposing that one would be using the spell because they actually need it for something, we can a.s.sume they are doing some form of hard work, or even battling, the situation can quickly worsen. The human body uses the food you eat to fuel you but after a while of consuming it at double the rate, it starts to consume itself to sustain the effort. It will first melt the fat and when all of it is gone, it will melt your very flesh to turn it into power. The worst part is that the user won"t feel any more tired than they normally would. By the time they feel their muscles burning, it is often too late to escape long lasting damage.

Yes, such a thing would normally take days of starvation to occur but ten hours of battling under the effect of the spell will take its toll whether you notice it or not.

Rarely does one die from such a thing but there are many ways to kill oneself using self-magic. There were more than one account of someone who crushed himself to death with an object far too heavy for them because they lost the focus required to hold the spell up at a critical moment.

More often than the last two, a fool tries to combine multiple self-magic at once because he has the focus and talent to hold them all up at once. If spending double the energy is already taxing, spending the double of that is very ill advised and holding a third one for a total of eight times the consumption of energy will deal tremendous damage to yourself unless you are as fat as a bear.

As for the less common self-magic spells, there are as many as there are trees in the forest with effects ranging from extending one"s lifespan to hardening their skins to resist the claws of smaller beasts or withstand the heat of a steel furnace. The costs to pay too vary wildly from almost forgettable things to outrageous, some being outright banned across the empire.

If the cost of hardening the skin is the loss of a few layers of it and extending your lifespan requires the sacrifice of a limb in exchange of a few years, some things are far worse than apparent physical losses.

As prime example, there was once a spell that would let you live through death blows for a small time in exchange for a part of your soul. Very few ever used it to survive a fatal blow. Either you did to take down as many foes with you as possible or to seek a healer in that small window of grace but as you would expect, afterwards, they were never the same again.

The way to cast such a spell was erased from any and all books on the matter after the emperor Peublier Grandbois lost the love he had for his first wife and three sons as the price of surviving the jaws of a great-fanged mudbeast.

A soul cannot be mended, if part of it is lost, it is gone for good. Who knows what effect a broken soul will have on your current life, or the next?

Some debated that even if the price is so high, the choice of using it or not should have been left to the individuals but in the face of the possibility of crippling the forest and its people forever, the emperor made the decision.

"The citizens may have the right to destroy themselves if they wish but I now know from experience. Every future versions of me, be it if I am reborn as a protector, a puny rabbit or a proud warrior, will despair and loath the current me for what I did because I can feel, I know! Part of me is missing, for now and for the rest of eternity. You do not seem to truly understand the extent of what I lost. I know I did love them once but I now fail to see why. I understand that I should be loving them but I can"t. It is not merely my love for them that was lost but rather the part of me that made it so I loved them, don"t you understand? Moments or even years more spent in this life will never be worth the sacrifice made and if one thing only can be retained from my rule it should be this, never cede your soul for anything, never give away what makes yourself you. I would rather destroy all mentions of this spell than running the risk of someone making the same mistake as I ever again."

---Magics of the empire, on the dangers of Self-magic.

***

(1) Fiance. Did you know that the word is the exact same in French? It means the same as well, the only difference is that it takes an accent: "fiancé". I"m pretty sure it"s just a French word you all decided to use, more so since half of you all write it with the accent. The p.r.o.nunciation is almost the same as well. In English, I believe, it sounds like fi-han-cé with an emphasis on the N. In French, it"s fian-cé with no emphasis on the N. Does it matter? Not at all, I just felt like talking a bit.

(2) By that, Winfred and me just mean to say that someone wearing armor shouldn"t be slowed down by it or have his movement limited in any significant way by it or no one would ever wear them for war. If the armor is more annoying and clunky than helpful, it"s not worth it.