Grey Skill 22

She gave me a weak, sad smile. “So someone recovered my creation after all. In truth, I expected its shrine to sit undisturbed until the end of time—wait. You’ve heard these words before. You’ve…seen me before.” The smile turned down into a distrustful frown. “Who are you?”

“You already know. And I think you also know what I’ve come for. There is no need to worry about the test you’ve been tasked with. Instead, I want to learn what only you can teach me.”

Her brows slowly rose. “I can see it in your mind. You have the strength to fight back, to strike and spill the blood of our enemies. You are exactly who I have been waiting for, and I will train you to wield aether not only as a tool of creation, but as a true weapon of destruction.”

A long, thin, curved aether blade appeared in her left hand, then a second in her right. She crossed them in front of her, sparks flying through the air where they touched. “I will train you.”

I summoned my own sword of aether, holding it in both hands. Then a second manifested to my right at shoulder height, and a third to my left beside my hip.

The djinn regarded me with surprise and delight. She took a step back, and several more swords appeared around her. “Yes, you are who I have been waiting for.”

It is difficult to say how long we trained. Time became an aetheric blur, space shrank to that single small chamber. Her words came back to me as we fought: Only after you understand aether as itself can you begin to understand Fate. I recited it like a mantra, pushing myself to understand every aspect of my abilities as I fought her. When she began to slow, no longer capable of pushing herself to the full depth of her abilities due to the failing mechanics of her housing, I pulled the thread back to the beginning and did it all over again.

My companions were not left to watch. Although they didn’t fight beside me, the djinn projection kept up a steady lecture on the aevum and vivum arts. It turned out that she knew quite a lot about the nature of Destruction, and I could feel Regis’s insight deepening as he absorbed her teachings.

By the third repetition, however, I knew there was a limit to what this single djinn remnant could teach us. I needed to push myself further, harder—we all did. And so, we moved on.

The three of us passed from zone to zone, finding and conquering challenge after challenge. Instead of passing through each zone, or chapter as the djinn called them, we examined the foundations of the spaces and the tests they provided us. After all, that was the purpose of the Relictombs: to house the djinn’s aetheric knowledge, with each chapter providing a real, physical example of said aether arts.