"Siya… You've been asleep for long enough…"
As I opened my eyes, they stung, my skin inflamed from tears, that must have gone on for some time as a soft soothing voice put my mind at ease… Despite his words, the sound of his voice made me want to do anything but get out of bed… 'Where… No, if it's his voice then…' "Agis?" I asked, raising a hand to my face and covering my eyes.
"It's been awhile."
I slowly sat up, my hair falling past my face, thick enough to almost block the sunlight. "Why am I here… Send me back…"
"Send you back?"
I slowly took my hand away from my face and looked up at him. He wasn't casually sitting or playfully leaning on one of the pillars of the gazebo. Rather, he was standing firm, arms crossed… As if taking on the look of a father about to scold a child.
"You do realise you've been asleep for two days already… Of your own accord, by the way… The only reason you're not still asleep is because I yanked your soul out of that little shell you made…"
I looked around, finding myself in a very lovely bed with soft cotton sheets covering most of where the usual marble benches and table would have been in the past. "What? Who's leading the army?"
"You are."
"Uh… I thought I was asleep though…"
"On the contrary, after you left Kasesh, you got into a few fistfights with some hell hounds and wrestled a bear. You were also mauled by a wyvern… But you tore its wings off and burned its head to ashes before they could even get the ballista ready… After that, your roar scared the rest away. Or maybe it would be more accurate to say your dragon friend did all that… While you stayed tucked away deep inside, hiding from the world… Either way, it was your body, though… Well… Although…" He uncrossed his arms and grabbed a handful of his own hair, looking down as if confusing himself.
I couldn't help but chuckle softly, finally seeing someone else struggling to understand just how ridiculous the situation was. "I'd act surprised… But that sounds like him…" I looked down at my hands. They were hard and calloused, my hair orange, and my skin hairless and thickened by harsh conditions. 'I wonder if it left a scar… Mauled is a pretty strong word…'
"You've accepted your new body as your true self… But now… In part because of that… You are finally experiencing this world as if it is your own… Your unable to turn off your emotions anymore… And sense the callous over your heart had grown quite thick, when it softened it became all too easy to tear…"
The bed vanished out from under me and I fell on my butt, hitting the hard marble floor like rock. "Ow…" I whined.
"You've been pulling your weight for years… I think it's time I finally do my part…"
'It's not just my body, but my clothes have changed too. I'm in my pajamas…' I slowly stood up, brushing myself off. "Sweet, so what kind of power am I going to get? Dark magic, draconic… Holly magic? Will I be able to call down a giant sword of light from the sky?"
He threw me a wooden sword. "First, change your clothes. Then I'll teach you how to properly use a sword."
I caught the sword, looking at it more closely… But nope, ordinary wood… Not even special magic wood… "A… big magic sky sword, right?"
He rolled his eyes, snapping his fingers to draw a curtain between us.
"Right?" My voice cracked before I looked back at the sword again. 'I already kinda know how to use a sword though…' Closing my eyes, I focused and switched to my armor in the blink of an eye before lifting the curtain and ducking under it. "Will this really be that helpful? I'm pretty good at it already…"
He just smirked. "You don't know the first thing about using a sword."
I pushed my hair out of my face and tied it back with a leather strap before grabbing the sword handle again. "Alright…" Enhancing my strength with magic, I felt my body flood with power before he snapped his fingers again, and all of it vanished, as if my manna had evaporated. 'What the…'
"I said I was going to teach you how to use a sword… Not magic…"
"That is so not fair… How is this helping anyway? Are you going to teach me some ultimate technique that will let me defeat Rokai in single combat?"
"No, nothing like that, but at least by the end, you'll be able to regain enough mental stability to take control of your body again."
"So Rafi gives me demon slaying magic that can cut through anything, and you give me back something I only lost in the first place because of you… Seems fair…"
He grinned. "Come on, that's not true. I gave you a wooden sword just now."
"I hate you…" A literal crack suddenly stretched through a small part of reality. "I-I take it back. I didn't mean it I'm sorry."
The crack slowly vanished, the sky healing itself. "I guess I win this round."
'Can I… take it back, that I took it back?'
"Come on, let's begin."
'Scary… Can we not begin when you look so angry? Maybe it's just in my head that he looks angry… He looks pretty normal…'
Moments later, I found myself sitting at the edge of the mountain and meditating without explanation or reason… For the next 5 hours… If I tried to move… He hit my wrist with a wooden sword…
"Agis…"
"Refer to me as a master."
"What is that, like your new kink?" He took a step back, turning bright red. 'Somehow I don't think he's really winning anything…' "Ok master… What am I supposed to be doing?"
"That is entirely up to you."
"But master…" I whined.
He cleared his throat. "I changed my mind; just call me by my name…"
'Yeah, I thought so…' "Can you at least try to explain? Your… Kind of reminding me of someone I'd rather forget. And I'm not actually getting anywhere…"
He sighed, waking up and sitting next to me, suddenly wearing full armor like mine, but war-torn, faded, but still brilliant, as if I could feel its divine power. "Before you can begin to wield a sword properly, you must first conquer the battle inside yourself… I don't mean your soul, or anything deep or literall by that though…"
He took a deep breath, and the faint divine force of his armor drifted into the air like wind, forming the shape of two bear cubs playing with each other. Then they suddenly turned red, and a spear jabbed through one of them. In an instant, they vanished, and two new ones formed, much older and filled with scars; one had turned black. They fought, and in the end, both simply walked away.
"What was the point of all that…"
He chuckled. "I suppose there wasn't one… Siya, when you are alone and your thoughts are left to wonder without worry of time, what do you think about? When your mind needs rest but keeps itself busy for fear of the quiet, what is it that leaps out at you? For me, it was stories. Each one different than the last, and similar in only one aspect, they all shared an end that I wish could have been reality. For my master, it was a battlefield, not of soldiers, but of graves, a peaceful, daunting place filled only with swords sticking out of the ground… For me, I had to come to terms with the fact that I could only change the future, and not the past, and for him, he had to accept that he didn't die when maybe he should have… Once we did that, our mind was finally able to find quiet, enough that we could sit still for hours, even days, and barely notice it… That's the first step. You have to be able to achieve the long quiet."
"So… You're saying I think too much…"
His armor vanished into golden sand and drifted away with the wind. "There's no such thing as thinking too much… Especially not for someone that's bright. I'm saying that when you want your mind to be quiet, you should be able to make it quiet… If you can do that, then maybe we will start to work on making it loud again."
I sighed, leaning over and laying at the edge of the cliff, letting my arm drift lazily off… "So the empty your mind thing? I did that when I was learning magic though. Shouldn't that have been good enough?"
He raised an eyebrow, standing up. "Having an empty mind because it's physically incapable of thought isn't control… It's artificial, and it comes with plenty of side effects, remember… Not least of which were your tear ducts rupturing from turning to ice."
'I guess… That's fair…' I groaned. I had more questions… But I knew that the only reason for asking them would be to stall for time… And if I had already been gone for days, I didn't have much to spare.
"Now!" He lightly tapped my shoulder with the wooden sword, his voice alone making me straighten my posture. "Keep trying."
I let out a deep breath of air, and before I knew it, several more hours had passed. His explanation seemed useless… No matter what I did, one stray thought or another would always show up, and if I tried to keep my mind empty intentionally, that only made it worse. There was no consistency to any of my thoughts either, not like he said. There was no linking characteristic, at least not that I could tell.
'I have Mr Dragon, so I can take my time… But that doesn't make this any less frustrating… I have no idea what's going on in the outside world…'