By The Sword - Homepage

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The silence was the worst of it.

I shifted, flicking my gaze across the room to keep from frying as the Ranger’s leader stared at me. As I looked around, all I saw was the same elegant office draped in the same dim yellow light. After Lorah had called me out, she’d escorted me through to the back of the lodge. Down hallways I’d never been in and past doors I’d never seen before. She and the two rangers flanking her had led me into what I could only assume was her office.

And what an office it was. At the head of the room, where I was still standing and waiting for her to speak, sat a large wooden door. Similarly to the door that acted as the entrance to the entire lodge, her door was lined in dark, polished wood and adorned with the Rangers’ symbol. A crescent-shaped arrow. Except, like Lorah’s robes, the symbol was inlaid in silver instead of gold.

After the door though, the room only became more magnificent. As far as I was concerned, it was the largest room in the entire lodge, and it acted more as a living space than specifically an office. Obviously the room’s main purpose was work—the papers scattered across the polished wooden desk Lorah was standing behind now told me that—but it also seemed to be used for more. On the far side, a myriad of exquisitely designed pieces of furniture sat, even culminating in a bed resting on a raised platform in the back.

All in all, the room reminded me of the chambers given to royal scholars back in Credon. But no matter how familiar it felt or how comfortable it was, I couldn’t help my own shallow breaths. Since the moment we’d entered, she hadn’t said a word. All she’d done was stare. And despite the fact that it hadn’t even been half a minute, the frozen quiet of it all was grating on me.

I shook my head. Just because she didn’t want to talk didn’t mean I had to stay silent. She’d called me in here, and I wanted to know why.

So, I cleared my throat, opened my mouth, and—

“What makes you special?” she asked.

I froze, my lips twitching with words that had been ready to spew out only a moment before. Now though, they seemed redundant. Rendered useless by the strangeness of the question echoing in my ears.

Snapping my lips shut, I blinked in disbelief. Lorah didn’t budge, imperceptibly raising an eyebrow instead. Her question still stood. And as it circled in my head, I could only get more confused. Ideas and theories spun with my thoughts, but with a dry swallow, I didn’t let any of them out.

“Excuse me?” I asked, tilting my head forward and arching my eyebrows. The idea was to make Lorah warm up to me.

She smiled. Nothing more than that. “What makes you special?” she repeated.

I blinked. “I’m not sure I understand the—“

“You have to be aware of why I called you in here,” she said and steamrolled past my words. I bit down, curling my lips. Dealing with bluntness and disrespect was something I was getting used to all too slowly.

“I have an idea,” I finally said. “But I don’t understand your earlier question.”

Lorah’s smile wavered. After another second of silence, she sighed. “It didn’t stare at anyone else, you know.” Her smile shot right back up after that and so did the burn on my skin. “I could feel it. But it didn’t come for me. No, it stared at you.” She pointed at me with the same intensity as before.

My expression broke. In her eyes, I could see warmth; I could see care and respect. But toward me, it seemed masked. Covered in the layer of doubt I was getting tired of seeing. As if I was shrouded in all too much mystery for me to have earned my place.

“The bird,” I said dryly. Lorah brushed the hood off her head as she nodded. “I don’t know why it stared at me.” Movement pushed in the back of my mind. I gritted my teeth and tried to shrug the feeling off. “I’ve seen it once before, but I—“

Light flashed in the room, stealing words from my mouth. I squinted, taking a step back as the torches on the walls all flared brightly at once. I blinked as the air around me lightened.

Lorah relaxed her fingers and tilted her head. “You’ve seen the Aspexus before? Where?”

“Yes. I saw it on my way to Sarin…” I trailed off, something about her previous question sticking out to me like a sore thumb. “The Aspexus?”

Lorah dropped her eyebrows before shaking her head and mumbling something under her breath that I couldn’t hear. “The bird. That is its proper name.” I nodded slowly at that, my eyes narrowing with each passing second. “Now what do you mean you saw it on your way here?”

I raised an eyebrow. “I mean exactly that. On my way to Sarin, I saw the”—I waved my hand as if to summon the correct term to my lips—“Aspexus during a rest.”

The Ranger’s leader opened her mouth but bit words off before they could come out. Instead, she just squinted at me and rubbed her chin. It looked like she was trying to work through confusion as much as I was. But as her eyes bored into me, each one inspecting my very soul, I knew she had more tools than I did. The presence in the back of my mind retracted as though trying to hide from her queries.

Again, I shook my head. “Look, I’m not sure what—“

“Describe your meeting with it before,” Lorah said, cutting me off. This time I didn’t even bother sparing a reaction.

“After walking all morning, I stopped to rest on a rock.” I had to stop myself from growling as I exaggerated the extent of my physical labor. My body had truly only let me walk on for less than two hours before giving out. “When I did, that bird came. And actually, it did the exact same thing as this time. It stared at me for less than a minute before flying off.”

Lorah clicked her tongue. “Interesting. There was nothing else to the encounter? No reason why it came to you in particular?”

I shrugged. “Not that I can think of… But I was the only person for hundreds of paces around.” Lorah nodded at that; it was obvious that she wasn’t satisfied. And, in truth, I could think of a reason that the bird came to me. But I decided to hold my tongue.

“The Aspexus needs more of a reason than that,” Lorah said. “It doesn’t take interest in the mundane.”

I narrowed my eyes. “Do two brief encounters count as interest?”

Lorah looked up and widened her eyes. “The observer stared at you. More than once, in fact. It does not take these actions lightly.” Then, watching the doubt I was making sure to display on my face, she continued. “You must understand the Aspexus’ power. It’s not just a regular bird of prey.”

“I know that it isn’t,” I said, stepping forward. Honestly, I didn’t know much about the bird at all, but I did know that I wasn’t too keen on getting dragged because of something I’d never learned about. “I simply don’t understand why brief glances seem to matter so much.”

“For the world’s sake,” Lorah said, throwing her hands up. “The last time I saw the Aspexus was when I recruited Tahir.” I opened my mouth, but Lorah already had her finger raised. “A former ranger and prodigious mage.” My lips pressed shut in short time. “Servants visiting our lodge happens once per decade if they’re generous. And yet, the Aspexus showed up today. For you.”

I arched my brows. “Servants? What are you—“ I stopped myself, stabilizing and trying not to sound like a blundering idiot. “I’m not familiar with the term.”

“Servants of the Soul,” Lorah said as if that cleared it all up. “Sentient extensions of the World Soul’s will. Entities such as Fidet, Temat, or Death.”

My eyes widened; I had to fight to keep them from becoming dinner plates. The new terms registered against my ears, but I didn't focus on them at all. One word Lorah had said stuck out like lightning.

"Death?" I asked, my lips going dry. The Ranger's leader froze, eyeing me.

Then she nodded. "Yes." The single word sent my thoughts into a spiral. Lessons and stories from my youth rushed back with the mention of the World Soul. It was at the center of every creation myth; it was the progenitor of all the world and the source of all magical energy. I could accept that it had servants—forces of nature used to keep its balance. But Death?

The reaper's true name made my blood run cold. Yet as my thoughts started spinning and my lips pressed shut, Lorah glared. She furrowed her brow and started tapping her foot as is trying to bring me out of my daydream. Blinking, I tried to put the curiosity aside. All of the questions that I now had and the understandings about the world I didn't want to accept.

It was easier said than done. So instead, I took a breath and focused my curiosity on a question I could ask.

“The Aspexus is a Servant?” I asked with the straightest face I could manage.

Lorah grinned. “Yes. And that is why this matters so much. The Aspexus is the eternal observer, the world’s eyes and ears. It does not interest itself in human affairs unless they are important to the world itself.”

I tilted my head. Slowly, my eyebrows dropped. “You think the Aspexus is interested in me?”

“That is why I called you out in the first place,” Lorah grumbled. Then, she shook her head and raised her voice again. “There are no such things as ‘brief glances’ with the Aspexus. It observes all equally. Yet, it came to stare at you.”

A brush of movement against the back of my skull. “What does that mean for me?” I asked. Thoughts swirled in my head, mixing information with the unknown and summoning ideas from the void. Out of the nearly infinite answers to my question, though, I just hoped the correct one had nothing to do with the beast.

“I was hoping you would tell me that,” Lorah said as she scrunched her nose. “With Tahir, it was interested because of his magical potential.” Lorah raised her hand; the light level in the room raised with it. “There was something about his soul… something special.”

Another twitch from the back of my mind. “Do you think this makes my soul special somehow?”

After a few seconds of silence, Lorah sighed. “I don’t know, which is why I was hoping you did.” She turned to me and squared her gaze with mine again. “I can feel some magical presence in you, but it’s distant. Disconnected. Almost like some sort of phantom limb.” My lips slipped apart as I took another step forward. Lorah continued before I could get a single word out. “But it’s there. It has to be. The Aspexus doesn’t interest itself in the mundane.”

I furrowed my brows. Mundane? The image of myself rose up—my faded blonde hair being kissed by the wind as I stood on the ramparts of my king’s palace. My lips curled into a smile. Even if I wasn’t a mage, I was anything but mundane.

A brown strand of hair fell in front of my eyes.

I raised my eyebrows in surprise, staggered for a moment before the realization hit me. Right, I thought as I brushed the hair away and curled my fingers to a fist. Things were different now.

“Could it be a mistake?” I asked. In my new body, frail and inexperienced as it was, there was no way the world had taken true interest in me.

Lorah cocked an eyebrow. “What are you saying?”

“I’m not a mage,” I said bluntly. “This body of mine”—I gestured to myself, still draped in what amounted to little more than rags—“has never done anything great.” Inwardly, some part of me recoiled at the very statement, but I continued on. “I came to Sarin because I had nowhere else to go. Even if I have seen the bird before, there’s no way it’s interested in me. I may have been somebody in the past, but here I’m simply mundane.” My lips curled. “A nobody.”

My words cut through the air like a knife through butter. Lorah’s eyes widened and I let out a large breath, trying not to let on how painfully true my statement was.

“No one is nobody in my lodge,” Lorah finally said. She leaned forward on her desk and tried to meet my eyes.

I didn’t particularly want to see that layer of doubt again. “Right. Like you even know my name.”

“Agil,” she said. I froze, flicking my eyes to her. Where I’d expected to see doubt, I didn’t. Instead, the warmth, care, and respect that I’d seen before was all that shined through.

My brows knitted. “How did you—“

“Kye,” Lorah started, “reported to me about her assignment. And seeing as you were the reason she was able to escape when she did, your name naturally came up.”

I blinked, the formality in her tone not connecting to the warmth in her eyes. But as she smiled again, the interrogating leader she’d been for the entirety of our exchange melted away. And as I realized myself, that meant more to me than I’d thought.

“Oh,” was all I got out. It was strange feeling speechless after a life of giving formal and calculated reports.

Lorah tore her eyes away from me, instead inspecting the pile of work on her desk. “I don’t allow people to live in my lodge without knowing who they are,” she said without lifting a finger. “Additionally, your picking up of the slack, so to speak, regarding undesirable assignments has not gone unnoticed.”

I nodded. Truthfully, I hadn’t expected her to not notice me. I hadn’t expected to be some sort of ghost living in the lodge without anyone knowing. I’d come to Sarin because I’d needed to get to a town. And I’d stayed with the Rangers because it was the best chance I was going to get if I wanted to improve. If I wanted to train—to still become the best.

“I’m still getting acquainted with Sarin,” I said. “And Ruia as a whole, I suppose.”

Lorah cocked an eyebrow at me without looking up. “The world seems to be getting acquainted with you as well.” She scowled down at her desk. “As do my rangers, it seems.”

An amused breath fell from my lips. “Some of them have, yes. Taking assignments that they—“

“Look,” Lorah said, cutting me off once more. I snapped my lips shut and tried to move past the interruption as best I could. “Are you sure you don’t know why the Aspexus is interested in you? Something you’re not telling me?”

A foreign feeling of anxiety washed up from the back of my mind. A shiver raced up my spine, but I didn’t let it on. Instead, my lips tweaked upward into a tiny smile. “I honestly don’t think it even is interested in me.”

Lorah scrunched her nose at that, still scowling at the papers on her desk. “Fine. Unfortunately, I don’t have all the time in the world to question you about it. So I’ll have to trust you on that.” The smile on my face grew another inch. “But, if you were wondering, you don’t have to vacate the room you’ve been living in. That was Tahir’s old room, anyway. You can… you can stay in it.”

My smile warmed even more. “Thank you.”

Lorah nodded shallowly, the ghost of a smile breaking through her scowl before she waved me off. “You’re dismissed, then.”

I nodded. There was no point in pressing further. No point in testing whether or not she’d been telling the truth about my stay. Because no matter how I felt about Ruia and its unorganized chaos, I needed a bed. I needed a place where I could be of use, where I could become someone that could achieve my goals.

And so I kept my mouth shut, only sparing one last wave at the woman now scribbling something on the paper in front of her before slipping out into the hallway.

The polished wooden door clicked shut, pitching me back into silence. Except this time, the silence wasn’t anxious. It wasn’t filled with unanswered questions or a stubborn gaze. It didn’t grate on me.

Because for the first time in my entire new life, I felt a little bit at home.