Engin
Engin spent the following days prioritizing rest. A part of him couldn't wait to just put on his rune gloves and start channeling again, but he'd learned it the hard way just how important recovery was for a younger lobe. This was no time to get over zealous. He was determined to stay disciplined.
Time away from channeling only just meant that he could spend most of his free hours in the archives of the church. The top-most floor was where he'd found his best hide-away, tucked into the comfort of a window seat nestled at the edge of the archive's spired dome. The alcove let in just enough sunlight through the panes and looked out to a beautiful view of the church's marble courtyards. Though it was much quieter on this part of the floor, Engin certainly wasn't alone. On his first day he'd already made a friend, a father robin guarding his nest from a perch as his spouse sat on her vibrant batch of blue eggs.
"It must be scary being a father." Engin rested his head against the window, legs outstretched. "In a world full of monsters like us."
The robin bobbed its head, deliberate, like it was indulging him.
"One minute your foraging for worms, and the next - you're flying away from a couple of giant humans carrying baskets full of food that could feed your offspring for generations."
The robin glared at him, blinking a few times before turning its head away.
"What? Did I offend you?"
"..."
"Oh, please. I don't want to hear it from you. You can fly. There's no bigger freedom in the world than that."
Engin folded his Brief History of Primanetics tome closed and put it to the side. "You probably think I'm crazy trying to have a conversation with you. I would too if I was in your shoes."
Engin sighed, sinking deeper into a tiny cushion he had found in the lounge area downstairs. He ran a slow finger along the pane of the window, tracing nothing in particular.
The robin noticed this and moved closer. Its big orange chest puffed out in quiet vigilance.
"Don't look at me like that." Engin smirked. "I've talked to a human-sized rat with the lancing skills of an entitled noble-boy. I'm definitely not crazy."
By day two of his archive excursions, Engin had already made himself a checklist of topics he wanted to start looking into by the end of the week.
A list that I will certainly follow through on because I am a disciplined boy... young man even.
- Flux Motes
- Hex Motes
- How to effectively channel them?
- Engram abilities and how to start using them
- Engram Trees; Unchained Dreamer (?), historical research
- Stormrunner basics, tempest science
- Giant talking rats, do they exist?
The first half of his list was admittedly a lot easier to get through than the second. There was a ton of literature available to read on mote channeling, being that it was the oldest and most innate form of magic across human history. Engin learned a lot more about motes in those few sittings than he had all throughout seminary school. Maybe it was because it felt a lot more personal this time. For all these years he felt so disconnected, like he wasn't meant to be a part of that world. Even though eventually he could channel and train just the same as everyone else, he never felt like he belonged. Especially after the events of that night... nothing ever did feel the same. It was like a part of him had been ripped away. He'd lost his joy for learning. He'd lost his joy for anything at all.
"All of us lost everything that night, Engin." Merabella would remind him. "It's no excuse not to study."
Maybe she had been right. Everyone else had held up just fine when it came to their 7th year appraisals. So why had he given up so easily? Why had he chosen to fail rather than giving it a good shot?
Engin never wanted to get into a habit of excusing his own bad choices, but he'd hated himself for so long because of it, maybe it was time to forgive himself. Why shouldn't he be allowed to feel different... grieve differently than the others did?
So what if he took a little while longer. So what if he was a step or two behind.
Engin did not think he was ever going to be able to stop grieving the events of that day... but that did not mean he was not ready to turn all of that grief into some form of redemption for himself.
He'd find his purpose. He was sure of it now.
"Good luck ever being able to channel them." Merabella said, plopping a dusty green hardcover into Engin's lap. She took a seat in the window seat across from him, pushing his feet away from her own. Her hair was frizzing, waving into long curls as she pushed it out of her own eyes.
"Genosama's Eccentric Dance with Skyflayers." Engin read the title of the tome. "What in primahells does this have to do with Flux Mote Channeling?"
"Don't judge a tome by it's cover." Merabella frowned. "Those one hundred and thirty-two pages of pure unadulterated adventure were a godsend for me when I was first learning how to channel."
Engin raised his brow, not buying it.
Merabella tugged at the straps of her overalls. "Just give it a chance alright? Pages sixty to ninety are going to have exactly what you need, if I still remember it correctly. But I recommend reading it all the way through. It's worth it."
"I still don't see how this is going to help me. Who is Genosama and why is he dancing with Skyflayers?"
Merabella rolled her eyes. "It's just a title. Genosama is one of the greatest channeler's of our era. I didn't want to spoil it for you, but since you've got the patience of a nymph, Ill just tell you that he's mastered seven different mote channels all on his own and the way he learned how to do it is a lot more simple than a lot of what our maegens have taught us."
Engin skimmed through some of the pages. It read more like a diary or a manuscript than it did an informational tome.
"Don't start reading it right now." Merabella kicked him. "I'm only here for an hour. And I have a lot of questions."
"I wasn't going to." Engin scowled, putting the book down.
"Can't believe you passed out for three straight days. I leave the city for a week and you decide to finally get commenced and then fall into a coma like a big wimp? Come on, Engy. You could've at least given me a heads up, I would have come back early just to see all of that happen."
“For the record, I wasn’t out for three days. I was awake by the first night. They just wouldn’t let me leave until I was fully recovered.”
"Same difference." Merabella shrugged, pulling a bundle of grapes out of her bag and stuffing her face with at least four at once. "Mmm...shyu want shom? I gaut them fwesh from the market."
Engin stared at her in disgust. But he'd be an idiot to refuse the offer, that to from someone as greedy as Bella was.
Stolen novel; please report.
"How was your trip?" He asked, accepting a smaller vine of grapes.
"Fine. Lady Tryllis can be a sore in the ass at times, but she's a tree of knowledge that I will climb and pick all of the apples off of before she wilts and dies."
"That's dark."
"It's life, my dear Engy." Merabella smiled, fluttering her eyelids rapidly. "The old ones will die off and the beautiful new blooms like me will take over. But we're not here to talk about my meteoric rise to ladydom, we're here to —"
Merabella's gaze fell on something near Engin's feet.
"What?" He asked her.
She was staring at the multiple rolls of parchment sticking out of a tome called All about Tempests.
"Why are you reading about tempests? No. Scratch that. Better question — why are you taking down a compendium's worth of notes on tempests?"
"There's no particular reason." Engin shrugged as nonchalantly as he could. "I just found it interesting."
He wasn't ready to tell her. He wasn't ready to tell anyone in the family. After his time in the chamber and after his encounter with the rat, it had become more than obvious to Engin that he had been undermining a major part of being a stormrunner — facing the actual tempests themselves. Even if he did pass the physicals and was selected during the trials, he needed to be ready for the next phase; which was training to become an actual stormrunner. And that meant having a strong understanding of what Tempests were like, and how they formed.
He'd been going strictly off of the little knowledge that he had gathered from following storm-chasing magazines over the years. But opening up an actual compendium resource on tempests, he'd realized how in depth the actual science went. From forecasters to stormseers, to surveyors; there were countless roles in place at a bastion for civil tempest defense. A stormrunner was just one of those roles. A front-line soldier, to put it best. Soldiers who risked their own lives while civilians sheltered — fighting off harbingers amidst the storm.
Engin knew what a job like that entailed. It was dangerous, and it wasn't desired by most people. Educated and well-off children didn't apply to become a stormrunner. Especially here in the east. Stormrunning was seen as a poor man's job. An occupation only those with no other options on their table applied for. But for Engin, it was his way out. His ticket out of the city. He knew that if he told Merabella or any of the others about his aspirations— they would snitch to Madame Song. And Madame Song, would never let him take part in the trials.
"You're crazy, you know that?"
"What?"
"I know what you're going to do, Engy. You're not a very good liar. I can see it all over your face."
Engin straightened his face. "If you're going to accuse me of something, at least tell me what it is."
"I saw the flyer in your room today! Of the stormrunner trials! You're going to enter yourself!"
Ugh — when the hell did she become so perceptive.
"If you tell anyone Bella, I swear on Tiol I will make your life a living hell!"
"Like you don't do that already! Are you seriously that desperate? All you have to do is wait six months to retake your 7th standard appraisals again. Just study hard, and you're golden, Engy."
"And then what?"
"And then — what do you mean and then what? And then you apply for an apprenticeship, or a course at the academy or here in the Church. That's what normal people do Engin. Normal and sane people who don't want to sell their soul to the Ministry just to play as living bait for Harbingers whenever a Tempest comes around somewhere in the sovereignty. Hell — go sign up for trooper like Krip did , but this, this is mental..."
"You're making it sound worse than it actually is. The statistical likelihood of a stormrunner dying during a tempest event is far far overstated in public opinion."
Merabella stared at him dumbfounded, like she had just seen a ghost. "You're quoting that straight out of a Ministry recruiting campaign. Who the hell are you and what have you done with Engy?"
"I want to leave, Bella." Engin met her gaze, serious this time. "I want to get out of Sorens Peak."
Merabella broke their eye contact, looking away. "Why..."
"Because I feel trapped here, Bella. And its not because of you, or Madame Song or any of the others. I just... spend every night thinking about them. About Perry, and Neina, and Henrietto, and Jona, and Mabe and... hell even Boog. I can't get them out of my head. No matter where I go here, there's always something that reminds me of them. Training for these trials, for the first time in a long time makes me feel like I'm working towards something, working towards getting out and bringing some change into my life. You always told me to dream big, or don't dream at all. That's what I'm doing now."
Silence. Long enough for him to hear the distant clang of the cathedral bells echoing off stone.
Merabella kept staring out the window. Her jaw was clenched, her fingers twitching against the fabric of her knees, and her eyes shimmering green. When she finally spoke, her voice was small.
"Gods, you really are crazy."
Engin smiled, stretching his hand out to her.
She looked down at it, shook her head and then gave him a slap on the palm.
"I can't believe I'm even considering keeping this a secret for you. That flyer says placing first place in the trials earns you six hundred gold ones. You owe me half of that if you win, Engy. Don't get greedy on me."
Engin was staring at a slate of engrams revolving around each other like weightless stars in his vision.
[Initialization Engram - 0 units]
[Unchained Mind - 1 unit]
[Dreamwalker - 1 unit]
It was a quiet night. The terra star lantern on his bedside table was glowing a dim orange from under a shader, and the midnight breeze was whistling soft puffs of air through the open window. He could hear the sounds of a faint drizzle pattering against the rooves of the dormitories outside.
Puddle of dreams... your every step leaves in its wake a puddle of dreams...
He found himself revisiting that inscription over and over again, as if reading it a fourth time or a fifth might finally make sense of what it meant.
His historical research had produced no results. There was no mention of an Engram Tree called the Unchained Dreamer in any tome he had looked into so far. Of course, he hadn't really expected much going into the process anyways. Not only was his resource base quite limited (having no access to the Ministry's Machine Archives), but the Certificate he had received after his commencement showed no signs of the machine itself detecting an Engram Tree either. Just a comprehensive biopsy page which also was not entirely accurate to Engin's current status.
The certificate only showed the results of Engin's biopsy before the Engram Tree had kicked in. Therefore, any parameter that had been enhanced by the tree was already outdated.
Engin harkened back to the final words he had heard from the rat. How it would be wise for him not to tell anyone about his Tree.
He always figured the Ministry had its own ways of finding out. All Aya Machine Commencements produced a subset of data that was then sent off to the Ministry Archives, where teams of archivers would do their best to translate any transient and unknown sources of language that the machine had produced.
Even if it was a secret now. They would find out eventually. That was how the process worked. That was how the science evolved.
But for now, as far as the Ministry knew, Engin had no tree, and no engrams. And maybe it really was best to keep it that way. If someone from the Haastarian branch of the Ministry, really did have an objection to Engin's commencement, then a revelation like this, certainly wasn't going to make things any better for his case.
Engin reached into his bag and slipped on his rune gloves, the blue tips of the palm lines were runed with intricate engram material, allowing any channeler the ability to focus their lobes. It'd been a few days since he'd put them on. The surge of connection to his lobe was immediate and sharp, kicking in like bitter coffee did in the early morning.
He pushed off his covers, finding the wooden flooring under his bed with his bare feet.
He closed his eyes, entering a deep state of meditation. A good channeler, could feel the Aya leave their lobe, a strong channeler could let it brim from every corner of their body.
If Unchained Mind increases my resolve and expands my perception... I should be able to feel the difference.
He set his feet closer together, uncurling his toes. The Aya escaped from his gloves, a faster and powerful flow, different from what it was before his commencement.
He set his mind on the streaky, green engram that had marked the inscriptions of [Unchained Mind].
It wanted to be read. It wanted to be used. Like it was asking for permission.
Engin allowed the stone to embed itself into his Aya. Its inscriptions attached to his flow, conjoining with every pulse.
Instantly, as if his mind had been awakened by some higher power, a myriad of different cognitions began to demand for his attention.
Whispers and footsteps pounding outside his door. The change in direction of the wind's whistle rattling against the wire mesh of his window. The temperature of the ground — changing the more he shifted his feet. So much sensory information, heightened and piled, one after another, clouding his brain with bursts of new color.
It was hard to control. His heart beat raised by at least a dozen tempos before his breath started hitching in an attempt to catch up.
Engin ripped off his gloves, throwing them onto the bed beside him. He inhaled a deep breath, his eyes growing wide from the sudden burst of panic.
"Hunh hyuh hunnnh hyuh." He wheezed out.
He dug his hands into his hair, and then wiped the sweat off his forehead.
Primahells! NEVER AGAIN! NEVER... BLOODY... AGAIN!
When he'd calmed himself down, he was lying on his back near the open window, letting the night air cool his warm forehead.
The second Engram was now circling his vision. Violet in hue, a dreamy amethyst adjacent slate of crystal.
[Dreamwalker], it spoke to him.
It was enticing. He couldn't deny it. The lure of its power. The curiosity behind its strength.
But was he really that reckless?
I'm not playing into your games. He told it. I'm not putting those gloves back on.
The inscriptions flared brighter, as if to raise its own allure.
Engin shut his eyes, and then pushed the Machine deep down into the caverns of his conscious mind.
Not today dreamer... not today.