Azura was pacing back and forth in his room. He had already received word that his father was coming to congratulate him for his entry into the academy. Given that it had only been 2 days since the last trial, and standard mail would have taken a week to get to the academy he assumed his father had sent it before he had even technically been enrolled. Unfortunately he knew his father wouldnât be far behind, his father would come to do the ceremony to bond him to a dragon spirit. He was excited and nervous at the same time, that was the center-point on which heâd earn his freedom. There would be no room for error.
His father no doubt knew heâd try something, but he hoped that this would be well outside of his expectations. After all, something like this was well outside of what a nobleâs pride would allow of them, so hopefully it wouldnât even occur to his father until it was too late. His biggest concern was his sister, he had met the family she was currently with, and they were⦠well similar in mind to his father. He had been ecstatic for her when he found out she would be studying healing magic with a noble family specializing in it. Unfortunately healers always being kind people was in fact a myth.
Instead of her finding her freedom the only thing that actually changed was their ability to easily talk to each other. When he renounced his name, she would become heir Silver, a weight he knew she wouldnât be able to bear at this point. Father wouldnât want his heir to be a âmereâ healer, but she didnât have enough combat training to meet their fatherâs absurdly high expectations. He could only hope that the Falkreaths didnât back out of the deal they had made with him.
A knock on the door pulled him from his thoughts. âCome in.â It was too early for his father to be here, so he didnât bother to stop pacing as the door opened.
âYikes, your fatherâs imminent arrival really has you stressed doesnât it?â He hadnât expected Lily to be the one on the other side of the door. Not that he didnât get along with her, she just wasnât usually the type to seek out others without a purpose. Still it was a little odd to see her in the official school uniform after getting used to her normal wear. The uniform was black with gold patterns lining it. The girls uniform had the option between plain black trousers like the boys, or a skirt with the same gold pattern as the tunic around the edges.
âWell his arrival brings with it, a moment that will decide the course the rest of my life takes, so I donât think it unusual to be a little⦠well stressed yes, but also excited, and admittedly a little afraid. There is a lot riding on this, and no room for error.â He felt oddly light being able to share some of his thoughts with someone.
âIâm sure youâre just overthinking it, seems to be a habit of yours. Making a mistake isnât the end of the world, and even if it was, youâd make more of them worrying like you are than you would if you relaxed a little.â She wasnât wrong, he knew that much, but knowing and doing were not the same thing unfortunately. Still she was right, he had run through this hundreds of times in his head. If that wasnât overthinking he didnât know what was.
âWell clearly I need a distraction, what are the others up to?â He had a pretty good guess already, but he would latch on to just about any topic of conversation that didnât involve his father at this point.
âTraining with their familiars, your little rant about how important it is to be in sync with your partner when Reign started spouting his fire breath left and right during your trainingâ Ugh as if he needed a reminder. His familiar was extremely powerful, but the dragonâs arrogance and short fuse left him as a very subpar team mate. Still if he could just get the dragon to work with him they would be a force to be reckoned with.
âHopefully their familiars are a bit more receptive than mine. How about you? Pretty confident in your teamwork with your familiar?â Well she had a bit of an advantage, since her familiar was oath bound. Say what you will about demons, but they took oaths more seriously than any other race.
âIf it came down to it, Iâm the one who needs to improve my teamwork, and I figured I could do that with anyone. Summoning my familiar here would probably make a lot of people extremely uncomfortable.â
âSince when have you cared about making people uncomfortable?â He technically hadnât known her for very long, but they had been in a pretty wide variety of situations together. At least enough that he was pretty confident in saying that the feelings of others definitely wouldnât stop her if she wanted to do something.
She gasped and put a hand over her chest. âAre you implying that I am insensitive to the feelings of the people around me?!â Heâd give her that she was impressively good at keeping a straight face.
âNo⦠I'm outright stating it. Although I will grant that at least that general mindset doesnât seem to apply to your friends.â He stopped pacing, brushing off his own uniform, and went to get his equipment from under his bed.
âHaha, very funny. Letâs just get to training so I can fight with somebody without accidentally burning them.â He winced, between training with Lily and Reign he had taken quite a bit of friendly fire. Literally unfortunately. It had taken him hours to perfect the fire resistant enchantment for his new uniform. He still felt the heat so it wasnât a very effective defense, but it stopped him from having to buy a new uniform all the time. Turns out the self repairing enchantment didnât work if the material was burned.
âYeah, yeah Iâm coming. Did you find 2 more poor suckers to spar against, or are we just running through team attacks and strategies?â He put on his vambraces, and his cloak. He kind of liked how the white and silver of his cloak clashed with the black and gold of the school uniform, the blue scarf he had taken to wearing complimented them both well. At least in his opinion.
âNobody wanted to spar with me for some reason, but we donât have to just run through strategies or team attacks on unmoving targets. Your copies can be our opponents.â He shivered. He sparred himself all the time, that wasnât an issue. Fighting with Lily on his team usually left him with a few burns, he didnât imagine his copies would be very pleased with their roles if he agreed. He knew he wouldnât be, heâd still be stuck with the most likely horrifying memories, but at least he wouldnât get any lasting injuries. Well physical ones anyway.
âWhat? No one wanted to spar against you? I wonder why. Youâve only left 4 people recuperating from severe burns in the med bay.â Lily as usual ignored his sarcasm, and continued to drag him towards the training facility. âAside from that I already have my max number of copies deployed.So weâll have to settle for more basic practice.â They were all close enough for him to order them to dispel, but he didnât particularly need the memory of being burned alive to be his nightmares for the next week.
âBoooo. Canât you like call them back or something?â Hmmm he wasnât in the practice of lying, but twisting the truth to benefit him was fair play. He made his copies dispel.
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âIâm afraid not, If I tried to call them here they wouldnât hear me.â He may have saved himself some suffering, but he would have to find a place where he could resummon them without Lily seeing him. They were doing important stuff after all. Not that Lily would have accepted that as an excuse.
âUgh fine, but donât think you can weasel your way out of this all the time. I know for a fact you usually use your copies around the school, and your range at least hits the school limits.â He chuckled. She had him there. He supposed he was going to have to work extra hard to get other people to spar with them, at least she somewhat held back against other people. He got the feeling his copies wouldnât get the same courtesy.
âWouldnât dream of it.â He followed along to the training rooms. His moment to make his copies would be right before the door to the training room closed. It would be a pretty tight window, but he was confident he could make the timing. âHonestly maybe I should have Reign practice with us next time, heâs as close to immune as it gets to fire. Heâd be a pretty good opponent for you to practice against.â
âOh yeah! Thatâs a great idea, where is he? We can grab him now.â He sighed. He got a rough idea of Reignâs location through their familiar bond, but getting Reign to do anything was like pulling teeth. He was barely even able to get the little dragon to agree to sync training with him, getting Reign to agree to training with Lily was going to be nearly impossible.
âNo point, unless you want to delay training for a long while. Reign doesnât agree to things easily, it would take quite a bit of convincing to get him to help with something like this.â He had without a doubt ended up with the most troublesome familiar. Not that it was much of a contest. The rest of them listened well to their partners, well technically Lunaâs partner was still an egg. She was only escaping helping Lily out with her team training by virtue of being able to communicate telepathically with her familiar even while Stella has yet to hatch.
Although it was clear Cynthia and her familiar were already in sync. Cynthia had a lot more practice then the rest of them at mental communication, so it was his theory that her familiarâs bond was much stronger than anyone else's at the moment. That and Argentâs fierce loyalty led to rather impressive teamwork. Frankly once Cynthia got a bit better at defensive magic he would probably suggest her and Lily train together. Argent would be almost as good an opponent for Lily as Reign would, and without all the sass.
âFair enough. Youâre still struggling to get your familiar under control?â He didnât love the wording, made it sound like Reign was a slave or something, but he knew Lily didnât mean it like that. Most people werenât trained from birth to choose their words very carefully. Oddly despite her creepy fire magic, she wasnât really a malicious person. Violent? Absolutely, but not malicious.
âI donât need him to be under control per se, I just need him to work with me. It would be fine if he corrected my strategy, or was trying to be helpful, but most of the time he lazes about, and tries to order me around. Frankly Iâm just about ready to try and knock him down a peg.â Honestly he couldnât believe he had gone through Garrionâs trial just to get the silver menace.
âTo try? Not confident you could win? Heâs barely up to your waist, surely you could confidently take a hatchling class dragon.â He laughed. She was absolutely right, if he was a hatchling class dragon he would have every confidence in his victory.
âHeâs a silver dragon, his body is formed almost entirely out of magical energy, adjusting his size and mass is almost as easy as breathing for him. Donât let his current size fool you, if I win it would be because heâs arrogant and underestimating me, not because Iâm stronger.â Not to say he couldnât win without Reign doing something stupid, but the odds definitely wouldnât be in his favor.
âReally? I didnât know that. I thought only spirits could shape change like that?â He furrowed his brows. Lily wasnât shy in admitting that she was more focused on the combat aspect of magic and monsters, but shape changing was a pretty dangerous ability. It should definitely have been something she looked into more.
âThatâs a pretty common misconception among people who donât deal with monsters often, but there are plenty of shape shifting ones. Though the ones that can get really big are pretty rare. Since the maximum size is decided by how much mana they have to spare to make their form.â He was actually pretty sure all of their familiars were capable of it. Save technically Gaia, but that was only a technicality. Gaia could grow by fusing with plants around her. Also he wasnât actually sure about Lilyâs. Demons very rarely appeared on this plane.
âHuh, thatâs pretty cool. I bet that will come in handy if you can ever get Reign to work with you.â He rolled his eyes. If Reign wasnât the offspring of an ancient dragon he definitely wouldnât have made the dragon his familiar. Lily opened the doors to the training room. He summoned his copies right as the door closed.
***
Katy had made some great progress with Phantasma. She had really lucked out, the umbral cat was just about as close to a perfect familiar for her as she could get. Between her and Phantasma, their opponents wouldnât even be able to tell up from down. She was pretty excited to start doing some actual sparring. Her classmates wouldnât know what hit them. She wondered if Phantasmaâs illusions would work on Reign. She hoped so, because she was really looking forward to winning in a sparring match against Azura for once.
She was currently sitting on a bench in the training room with her familiar curled up in her lap. They had been training nonstop the last few days, same as the rest of the newly bonded pairs. Well except Lily, and Azura, both of their partners were tough to work with though for very different reasons. She couldnât help but laugh every time she saw how Reign interacted with people.
She couldnât imagine a worse personality for Azura to be partnered with if she tried. Reign had so many of the qualities Azura had specifically grown to disdain. Honestly she was surprised he was taking it as well as he was. She furrowed her brow. Azura had been different since his return. He seemed lighter somehow, but also unsure in a way she hadnât seen in a long time. She wasnât dumb, she knew he had left out a lot of details in his story.
Whatever happened on that mountain had affected him deeply. He had even gone out of his way to hang out with them in person more. Instead of just telling them it was a copy they were hanging out with. She hated that he had been right about knowing it was a copy not making things any better. His explanation about the oath he took being broken, giving him some breathing room accounted for some of it, but she knew there was more.
Not to say she thought whatever happened was bad per se. It had definitely opened up an old wound for him, but she was starting to think it might be for the best. He appeared to be healing properly this time. Still she couldnât help but think that whatever happened came at a bad time. He was a little distracted lately, and she didnât know how well heâd be able to execute his plan against his father in his current state.
No, she couldnât think like that. Azura had put way too much work into this to mess it up now, she knew him better than that. No matter what was going on around him when it really counted heâd be able to pull through, that much she knew for sure. Especially now, when his sister was the one in the line of fire. Selena wasnât weak by any means, but she definitely wouldnât be able to deal with Tiamat. Selena was the nicest person Katy had ever met, and it was obvious that Azuraâs father had taken a much less active role in raising her than he did with Azura and his brother.
Selena was quick to help others, and always happy to meet new people. Azura had always been amazed of how forgiving his sister was, and though she didnât know exactly why, she knew Azura seemed to feel some kind of debt with Selena, and his sister was the only other person she had ever seen Azura really let down his guard around.
She gave her familiar one more gentle scratch before she lifted the cat off her lap and set her down softly on the bench. She needed to burn off her extra energy. It was the only way sheâd be able to stop from acting out when Azura started his plan. She didnât have much of a part to play, and her interrupting would only hinder Azuraâs plan.