After the End: Serenity

The next day started with Sillon throwing a roll at Serenity for “letting his eyes show again”. Serenity noticed the effect was harder to dismiss than it had been previously, but he wasn’t sure why.

“So, have you talked to Kerr yet? She was looking for you, yesterday.” Sillon was munching on another roll while he watched Serenity - now with normal eyes - get his breakfast.

Well, his first breakfast. Serenity still hadn’t fully recovered from the fight two days before, and was debating heading to the students’ dining hall for a second breakfast. He really ought to check in with his friends, too.

“No, not yet. She was looking for me? Yesterday was Trials all day.”

“Yeah, something about Entherys. Heh. Doubt you heard - the Voice actually suspended him as an instructor. That’s part of why yesterday was so long, we would’ve been down one if you hadn’t been there.” Sillon sipped his zeht. “Never seen anything like it before. Never seen an instructor ambush a student - or another instructor - before either though. A fight, sure. Happens. But not like that.”

“So - what’s next? If you’ve never seen it before - “

Sillon spoke over Serenity. “You know the rule. You’re the injured party - well, you and Echo. But mostly you. So you’ll get to decide what happens, within reasonable limits. They attacked to kill, you can kill them. Or cripple. Whatever. Won’t matter to the instructors, Entherys was pretty unpopular. Thought we were all low-class garbage stuck at a low Tier, and made no secret of it. Students? You’d know better than I would.”

Serenity actually wasn’t sure what the students thought of Entherys. Echo would know. And the other attackers - wait. “Did the others survive? And the other archer?”

Sillon snorted. “Don’t know. Don’t care. Well, I know we didn’t catch the archer. She got away clean.”

“She?”

“Yeah, that student of yours, the one that got Entherys’s ankle? He saw the group, says the archer’s female. Didn’t know her though, so it doesn’t help that much.”

Serenity just looked at Sillon. Maybe it helped more than Sillon thought. Yes, there were a lot of female instructors - but Serenity didn’t know that many. He’d only taught three or four so far. He didn’t know how he could have offended one that badly, but - maybe that was something to follow up on if Entherys wouldn’t say who the other archer was.

Second breakfast wasn’t as good as first breakfast. Serenity hadn’t really noticed the quality change, since he’d mostly switched to eating in the breakroom, but now that food was only what people could gather both the quantity and the quality were suffering. He wasn’t sure there was enough for everyone to have breakfast, and he had already eaten. Beverages were still provided, though, so he settled on something that tasted a lot like hot cocoa.

Doyle was already eating when Serenity arrived. “Hey. You don’t happen to know an instructor … female, bit under six foot tall, curly red hair, fond of putting holes in your hide?”

Kerr had short black hair, while Ekari was a brunette. The only redhead he could think of was … “Not unless it’s Margrethe. And I can’t think of any reason she’d want to kill me.”

Doyle nodded. “That’s pretty much what Instructor Ekari said. Well, that and there are several redheads and she couldn’t ask them to do anything if I didn’t even know who it was. Almost like she was trying to get you to handle it yourself.”

Well … that wasn’t entirely unusual. It wasn’t what he’d have expected from the tutorial, but - “She did say she couldn’t help me earlier. Got the impression she wasn’t allowed to.”

“Yep!” Oh, so it was Echo who was standing there. He hadn’t noticed who it was. “She can’t. Not sure why. The other instructors - well, Kerr, at least - are willing. Did she catch up with you?” Echo dumped her tray on the table, and sat down - with the chair backwards, of course. She was going all in on being silly.

Serenity chuckled. “You’re the second person to ask me that this morning. No, she didn’t. Do you know what she wants?”

“Yeah. She wants to talk to you about Entherys. She’s got him locked up somewhere in the Armory. Not that he’d be going anywhere soon anyway. He can’t really walk, Doyle got him good and Blaze refused to heal him more than was needed to keep him alive.”

Serenity remembered Blaze. Serenity had been grumpy about being monitored after the attack at the Trial grounds, but they’d actually managed to talk a bit in between Trials. “He did?”

“Yep. Something about assholes who want to make his life harder not needing healing. I get the impression he doesn’t like Entherys.”

“Huh.”

“Blaze is good people. He saved my life when I first got here. We talked a bit while he was healing me.” Echo kept her gaze on her food while she was talking. “He’s here because - well, his world went through integration a few decades ago, he was apparently in a Tutorial then. He feels like he needs to pay the favor forward.”

The hot cocoa was pretty good. “Idealistic.” Serenity wasn’t sure if that was a good thing or not. It was good for Serenity now, but - was it good for Blaze?

Blaze wasn’t who Serenity wanted to think about. His mind drifted back to the previous morning.

They ate in silence for a few minutes.

Serenity worked up his courage and turned to look at Echo. “So - there was a note yesterday morning - “

Echo put down her silverware when Serenity stopped. “Yeah. It’s time. Not sure how it’ll work out, but - it’s time.”

“Why now of all times?”

“Serenity …” Echo shook her head. “That’s a lot of why. For Rissa, at least, she’s starting to wonder if she’ll ever have the chance to make up with you. For you - two reasons. First, she might be willing to give you a chance. Second, well, there isn’t a party number limit on that Great Dungeon thing, and we’re going to want a healer, aren’t we?”

Serenity stared at Echo.

“Are you always this devious?”

Echo wrinkled her nose at him. “Yep!”

When Serenity got to the graveyard, a couple students were already waiting for him. One of them seemed disappointed and asked “Why aren’t your eyes glowing?”

Serenity didn’t have a good answer, so he said the first thing he thought of. “Because I’d rather they didn’t, it upsets people.”

Class that day was a smaller group of the better students - not always the highest affinity, but the ones that actually seemed to care about Death affinity (plus one very determined rune mage). That made it a good day to go into the theory of magic - a good grounding could be useful. He was very careful to make it clear that magic was based on intent, not hard and fast rules.

“I’m pretty sure one of the other teachers said to never combine Healing into a higher Affinity, but you just used that as an example!”

“For a pure Healer, that can be true. The problem is that simple rules aren't always true for magic. I can’t show you a good healing example since healing isn't one of my Affinities, so let's try something else. Remember how I told you I have a Vapor Affinity, and it’s more or less Wind magic?”

The class nodded.

Serenity tugged on his Vapor Affinity. It created a light breeze.

“Everyone feel that? That’s about the best breeze I can manage with Vapor. My affinity is honestly kind of terrible.”

Serenity then tugged on his Void affinity, completely removing a fairly small volume of air a little ways away from the class. A much stronger wind swept over the class.

“THAT was Void Affinity. I removed air where I wanted the wind to go, and the lower pressure did the work for me. Something similar can be done with Space, though mine is bad enough you wouldn’t notice the breeze. Time affinity can do weird things too - in fact, some healers are actually Time affinity experts, with a focus on using it to restore a body to an earlier state. There’s no one way to achieve an effect - and anyone who tells you that there is only one way isn’t creative enough. That’s true for healing as well - if what you want to do forever is exactly what your Affinity does, don’t combine it, but it’s not as simple as an absolute rule makes it sound.”

The rest of the class was students coming up with increasingly bizarre ways of accomplishing things. It wasn’t what he’d had in mind for the class, but it was if anything more useful for the students’ futures.