"How many times do I have to tell you, Seth, it's a spear not a sword. The riposte is different."
Seth ducked another jab from his brother's spear, his human speed barely keeping up as Jonathan's words went in one ear and spilled out the other.
Of course the riposte was different. He moved his spear to his side in defense and caught his brother's blow. His defense was acceptable but the force sent him staggering with so much vehemence it was a surprise he didn't fall.
His arms throbbed as he caught himself, stopped himself from tripping over his own feet. With a frown, he repositioned himself and retook his stance, the tip of his spear forward and pointed down. Air left him panting like a child who'd run a marathon and not a thirteen-year-old boy who'd just defended himself with the spear for the last three, maybe four minutes.
He really hoped it was at least five minutes.
"It's hard, isn't it?" Derek smirked.
Seth's scowl touched more than just his lips. It reached so far that he scowled with his entire face as he looked at his brother.
"Don't goad him, Derek," Jonathan warned from where he stood watching from the sidelines. "That's not the lesson we're trying to teach him today."
"And what's the lesson I'm supposed to be learning today?" Seth snapped at his older brothers, "How to survive against a Silver mage? I'm only human, for crying out loud."
"A weak human at that," Derek laughed. "Weak and faulty."
Seth's frown deepened until he could feel his facial muscles growing as sore as his entire body. As a child of House Darnesh, it was his duty to learn how to use a spear. It was the family's official weapon, and their use of it was meant to be unparalleled in the entire territory. This was a rule he had no grievance with, despite his lacking talent with the spear. However, as a third child, five years younger than Derek who in turn was two years younger than Jonathan, first born and heir to their father's lordship, he was sparring far above his weight class.
At eighteen, Derek was already a soul mage. And at his level, he was gravely more than capable of killing Seth with a casual swipe of his hand. So training with him, regardless of how much he held back, was simply a punishment.
"You," Jonathan said, in his smooth and regal baritone, "are supposed to learn how to stop swinging a spear like an overgrown bat."
Under his oldest brother's gaze, Seth's frown withered.
Derek might was stronger than him, but Jonathan was more so. And what Derek could do to Seth with a simple slap, Jonathan could do to Derek with a bit more seriousness in his slap. So Seth reminded himself that not all grievances were meant to be voiced.
They were in the family training hall, in a basement built deep and wide under the family home. It was vast and the ground was covered in enough sand to swallow Seth's feet. The place was boxed in by four walls and was wide enough to contain an entire cavalcade if they numbered no more than fifty men on their armored horses.
Despite being built under a house, the place wasn't dark. From orbs embedded in the walls with fireflies that glowed a bright orange and yellow, the place looked as if it had been built out in the open with the light of the sun gracing it in all its luminescence.
Jonathan stepped into the arena, giving Seth the smallest reprieve from his training with Derek, and Seth felt his muscles sag in relief. His oldest brother was a tall man almost twenty years of age. But while he was tall, his height wasn't anything special for a soul mage. Most soul mages—males to be specific—averaged around his brother's six feet of height. The females, from the few Seth had seen, usually stood about two to three inches shorter. At thirteen years and five feet one inch, Seth had to tilt his head back to see pretty much anyone. Even his younger brother, Jeremy, was tall enough to face him at eye level, and the boy was just ten.
Jonathan's height wasn't the only regal thing about him, though. His blonde hair was always cut to an acceptable medium length, short on both sides so that it was styled elegantly at the top. His odd royal amber eyes gave him a superior stare that he somehow managed to make look benevolent at the same time. Having him look at someone felt like having a benevolent king's attention.
In summary, it was a sharp contrast to Seth's brown hair and brown eyes.
As Jonathan approached him, Seth spared Derek a quiet glance and found his brother smirking. Like Jonathan, Derek had a presence. His eyes were a deep morning blue where Jonathan's were amber, and he kept his dark blonde hair long and held back in a horse tail. He was just as tall as their brother, but where Jonathan resembled a benevolent king, Derek was an arrogant prince. He was the kind of prince who knew he looked good, knew he was powerful, and flaunted it like a skilled ballerina flaunts her twirls and pirouette. How he continued to attain fame and love with such arrogance was beyond Seth's understanding.
"What you're supposed to learn today," Jonathan continued, a few steps away from Seth. "Is that the spear is an extension of yourself and—"
"Can't I get a break?" Seth interrupted him, then pointed the tip of his spear at Derek. "I know you think he's holding back, and he probably is, but he's still silver. There's only so much I can do. And he keeps saying annoying things about Natalie."
"An enemy won't be nice to you just because he's stronger."
"And the unsouled third son of House Darnesh won't be foolish enough to be caught fighting a soul mage, not to talk of one of silver authority."
"You know his problem?" Derek chimed in. "It's that—"
"No one cares, D," Seth cut him off.
"—He's too eloquent," Derek finished without missing a beat. "He talks more when he should think more. How do you get riled up when someone insults some girl?"
"That girl is my best friend," Seth shot back, his anger rising again. "And you stay away from her. I see the way you look at her. You're eighteen, and she just turned thirteen, this isn't one of Jonathan's old world medieval novels. In our time you make a move on her and it's called child abuse."
"And who'll arrest me?" Derek smirked.
His words were enough to grab Jonathan's attention, and the oldest son of Lord Darnesh turned to him with a raised brow. "Who'll arrest you?" he asked, stupefied.
"I didn't mean it like that," Derek sputtered.
"You didn't?" Jonathan forgot Seth for a moment to attend their brother. "Regale me then, D. How did you mean it?"
"I didn't mean it any way." Derek stepped back as Jonathan took a step towards him, and Seth fought to conceal his smile when a slow thrum of headache began growing at the back of his head.
Not this again, he panicked. Can't it just wait until I'm in my room.
His joy at watching Derek squirm under greater power was short-lived. Now, his attention was in the resistance of the building pain in his slowly aching head. And as he fought it, resisted until it chose to be done with him, his brothers continued their exchange, oblivious, as always, to his pain.
He'd had this pain for as long as he could remember. It was a steady hum at the back of his head, like a muffled bee, buzzing and darting around behind an almost sound proof box. Sometimes it was bearable, but there were times, like now, when the bee found a way out of its box to buzz right inside his head. When it did, pain was always an accompaniment.
He bit back his pain through clenched teeth as it rose to a crescendo. Gripping the side of his head in his right hand, he staggered back but refused to fall, holding on like a child for his dear life. Experience had taught him it would last a few minutes then leave him, but it didn't make those minutes any better.
Slowly, his jaw worked itself open in a voiceless cry. It was always the same; always painful; always refusing him the reprieve of crying out his pain. Silence, he'd learned vastly too young for any person, was the worst way for any pain to be taken. It trapped the pain inside and embraced it to the point of madness. To cry out was to release some of it to the world beyond. But pain knew this and trapped itself within him, soundless and dominant in the breaking of his mind and the swallowing of his sense of self. His pain was his, and no one else's.
It would not be shared, and it would not be ignored.
When his spear clattered on the sand filled ground, his brothers turned to him. He couldn't see their expressions but knew Jonathan would be worried while Derek would be exhausted.
In record time, Jonathan was at his side, silent as the dead and rubbing gentle strokes along the length of his back. He was a brother from time to time, and a benevolent one at that.
The training room waited in silence for the length of over five minutes, playing witness to Seth's silent suffering. Watching with the helplessness of winter's chill in autumn's reign. Eventually, the aegis of pain lifted, and Seth found his mind his once more.
When it was, he lowered himself to sit in the sand and sobbed the tears his pain hadn't given him leave to shed in its presence. Jonathan, being the understanding brother that he was, allowed it for two minutes before speaking.
"How's the hand?"
Seth didn't need to think about it. Jonathan asked of his weak hand, his left hand, and the answer was clear. He turned to look at the spear, laying in the sand where it had once been in his grasp. Beside him, the hand in question, his left hand, lay inert.
It had abandoned him as it most often did, gone from his control, numb and lifeless.
According to their parents, it was the result of a tragic incident that had happened to him as a child, a side effect to the headaches that now plagued him.
"Can't you just try to hold it in," Derek said suddenly, tired. "I mean, it's a headache. And every time you make it look like I'm beating your head in."
For whatever reason, his brother's opinion prevented him from noticing the look on Jonathan's face as he left Seth to give him his undivided attention.
"It was understandable when you were small," he went on as Jonathan approached him, "but it's just pathetic now. You should have a handle on it by now. Its been what, eight years now? The least you can do is not be so dramatic about it. I know it hurts but learn to not make a scene about it. It's why Natalie's your only friend. No one likes a drama—"
Jonathan drove his foot into Derek's chest and he shot across the hall and crashed into a wall. He made a hole in it, wedging himself into the crack in a rubble of broken concrete.
"For someone not as eloquent as his younger brother, you talk too much," Jonathan said.
Soul mages were a different breed of humans. In a world plagued by beasts and monsters for the last forty years, they were humans who'd harnessed the power of these alien creatures to reach a realm beyond what had once been termed as natural, and the more they strengthened this power, the higher their authority in it rose. This state of harnessed power was what it meant to be a soul mage.
It was what it meant to be souled.
At Derek's authority, Jonathan's kick probably hurt Derek far more than the wall he'd broken.
Derek didn't hesitate to pull himself out of the broken wall with a frown. He stepped down, placing his feet on the floor so lightly it was a testament to his control. When he was out of its embrace, he looked at Jonathan angrily then picked up the spear that had fallen from his hold when he'd hit the now broken wall. Something about the way he watched his older brother rubbed Seth the wrong way.
"Careful, brother," Jonathan warned. "You activate a skill here, and I can't promise your safety."
Derek's knuckle whitened around the haft of his spear and he stared daggers at their brother. A tension built between both brothers and Seth scuttled back, increasing the distance between him and them.
His father and mother had rules regarding their two older sons. For whatever reason they were to come to blows, they were not allowed to use the beautiful gift of skills being souled granted them. Unfortunately, down here, none of them were around to enforce this rule.
Seth only prayed he wouldn't be a casualty to their chaos.
When it began, it was to a more than pathetic war cry from Derek. He hefted his spear in both hands, standing against Jonathan's casual unarmed stance, and roared: "Fuck You!"
Then he activated a skill.
[Ice Guard].
Seth watched the air around his brother tremble. It was a strange phenomenon that continued to awe him each time he witnessed it. In truth, it wasn't the air that trembled, it was more like watching the world move to his will, like he called out his skill and the world somehow answered. A conclave of ice gathered to his free arm and where there had once been nothing, a shield of pale blue ice as tall as three feet and as wide as two gathered at his hand.
It was an inverted rectangle that gleamed under the day colored lights of the hall. Its glossy exterior made it look as fancy as it was sturdy. The ice climbed up Derek's arm until it ended at his elbow and he held his spear like a jousting lance.
Jonathan watched his brother, unbothered, and sighed. "It's still not too late, D."
Derek turned to the side and spat. His spittle hit the sand, bloodied. "You'll never take me serious until I've wiped your face with the floor."
"And you never listen."
Derek's anger tightened and he activated another skill.
[Ice King].
His second skill filled the air with lances of ice like stalactites in freezing winter. Each one gathered in the air behind him, forged from nothing, and he prepared himself. All twelve stalactites aimed at their brother and Jonathan shook his head.
"Very well." Jonathan turned to Seth and shooed him further back with a gentle hand. "Do endeavor to learn something from this," he said.
Seth nodded, scooting further back and abandoning his spear.
When the first ice spear shot from its place above Derek, Seth didn't see it. All he saw was one less spear of ice and Jonathan shattering it in his grasp before taking a step forward.
He took a deep, resigned sigh and said, "My turn."
[Hearth of Fire].
When Jonathan's skill came alive, the air burned, a crack appeared in Derek's shield, and Seth fainted.
In the nothingness of the unconscious, something whispered without words.
[You Have Been Stunned].