I hit the ground. I got up and took a stance. I hit the ground again. I got up again.

  Such has been my life for the last few months. Well okay maybe that was a slight exaggeration, my days haven’t literally been me getting smacked around at all times, but between attending boring lectures, etiquette and behavioral classes and this “combat training” (Not sure if it should be called such, but whatever) not much free time remained. Or more like basically none at all.

  Every day consisted of me learning the history of our oh-so-glorious kingdom, its governmental structure,its laws, social etiquette and, as mentioned, combat training. Or at least that was what my family called it. I personally would’ve more aptly described it as “bullying”, but then again my second oldest brother wasn’t exactly bullying me, at least not in his mind, but I was getting ahead of myself here.

  As I have mentioned, the one currently “training” me, was my second oldest brother, Geoffrey. We were in the royal training yard where more or less only members of the royal family and those directly invited got to practice. This was where all of my bullying sessions took place.

  This particular one followed a pretty simple pattern, my brother, who was much bigger and stronger than me mind you, would repeatedly attack me with a wooden sword - Thank the gods he is not crazy enough to do this with a real one - while telling me to parry his attacks. Of course, as he was not just physically much bigger and stronger, but to top it off also a much stronger Gifted than me, even if his ability wasn’t directly related to physical strength (well, neither was mine), parrying his attacks without getting thrown about proved difficult.

  Obviously, he held back enough to not seriously injure me and weak as I may be, a Gifted is still a Gifted. We were all more resilient and stronger than the average person, which allowed me to walk away from these without major injuries, desperately clinging to the defensive as best I could. When I inevitably parried a hit wrong, as I wasn’t that talented at the sword to begin with, I took the brunt of it and fell to the ground, my joints aching.

  As for why he was doing this, I didn’t have a clear picture. My family, or more like Gifted overall, were harder to read than normal people, making it more strenuous or sometimes impossible to get a good grasp on their emotions and motivations. He was claiming to do this to “ensure I would progress steadily in my training, so as to not besmirch our name” and truthfully this didn’t seem to be a complete fabrication, as part of the muddled emotions I got from him was a sense of pride and obligation. However, I could not feel the slightest hint of concern or worry for me, as I did from Gert that night, but maybe that was just buried so deep I couldn’t get a read on it….

  Yeah, right. Why am I deluding myself? I thought to myself.

  Be that as it may, I had mentioned before how I didn’t think he would view it as bullying and that was because despite the fact I could not feel or otherwise pick up on body or spoken language indicating any concern for me or my well-being, the strange mixture of faint impressions I got didn’t include animosity towards me either. It was more like he simply didn’t care about me as a person, about my emotions, my thoughts, which, if I wasn’t so numb to it already, would probably have hurt even more than animosity. Instead he cared about himself or the family name, or more precisely how that family name reflected on him. Knowing this, it made sense to me why I could feel some hint of disappointment every time he struck me, yet what made less sense to me was that I got a stronger impression of… happiness? Or perhaps relieve(?) when he struck me too. I tried to get a better understanding of this, straining my concentration on his emotions while observing his face as we fought, but he was simply that much more powerful than me, which made it nearly impossible to get anything more out of him. It vexed me, I was already weak and unfit for the royal family, so at least, I figured, I could take silent pride in what abilities I did have and yet I couldn’t even use them to understand my brother, much less surpass him in anything.

  As that feeling of resignation settled in my mind, so did the “training” session come to an end.

  “Alright, I got more important stuff to do today, so this will be enough for today. Alex, you are making progress in your technique if nothing else, but even that is slow. As for your powers, well, I don’t think you need me to tell you again how useless they are. Too bad you can’t just learn another one.” My brother’s harsh words met an unresponsive face. I was used to this, not that it didn’t hurt me to see my family speak like this about me, but I couldn’t afford to freak out over every time this happened.

  He threw the wooden sword to the actual instructor, who was the person I would normally learn from and practice with, and turned around.

  “Make sure to give it your all, Alex.” If only I didn’t know these words came from a place of disappointment, they would almost sound encouraging.

  My siblings would sometimes do this - randomly barging in on my training when it fits their whims and schedules, smacking me around a bit in the name of practice or testing my progress and then leaving again whenever they had enough - that is. They all had their own reasons for acting the way they did I assume, but I could only assume.

  With Geoffrey finally out of the way, the actual sword instructor, a retired knight captain of the Manier kingdom, named Lubeck, stepped up once more.

  “You did well in that training session young prince, now let us continue where we left off.” He said. I could tell he didn’t really mean that compliment. Normal, powerless human as he may have been, Lubeck was a talented swordsman and my relative lack of talent frustrated him. Of course me being Gifted meant that eventually I would become stronger than him, but that wouldn’t be because of my skill. And right now, while he still had the advantage of being much, much heavier and taller, more so than Geoffrey, he was still stronger than me anyway.

  So then why would he have lied and was continuing to do so? Simple. I was a royal and he was just a regular, retired knight. Of course he must have known about my ability from somewhere if he stayed at the castle for a bit, so lying like that didn’t really serve to hide his true feelings, but even so he’d rather tell me what I want to hear or he assumed I wanted to hear, than tell me the truth. Such were the two extremes of people I would interact with on a daily basis, the ones that would be nice to me even though I could read clearly they don’t mean anything they say, except Grace, versus the ones that would treat me harshly and leave me wondering why, except for George, my oldest brother, who treated me kindly.

  “Yeah, let’s continue.” I put my thoughts to the side for now and continued doing what I was doing before Geoffrey came by, practice swings.

  But as I was absentmindedly swinging my no longer wooden sword, since the wooden sword was only for practice bouts, another thought crept up.

  “Hey Lubeck, do you happen to know what my brother has planned after today?” I was curious what he had planned - he normally spent much more time “training” me and left quite quickly.

  “Haven’t you heard? Apparently some wandering Gifted that serves as an advisor to the royal family arrives today. His identity is kept in strict confidentiality though, so I don’t know much else than that. Oh, and that he is an old man I suppose.”

  A ‘wandering Gifted’ that advises the Manier royal family? That sounds absurd, I can’t imagine father taking the advice of some vagrant. More importantly why didn’t I hear of this, but Lubeck knew? Am I not supposed to know?

  I noticed that Lubeck got agitated at my surprised reaction, reaffirming that I wasn’t supposed to know about this. I decided to ease Lubeck’s agitation first before I continued my thoughts or our conversation on the matter. After all, despite his frustrations with me, he was a good man and cared about my training more than my actual family. Or maybe it’d have been fairer to say that his frustrations betray exactly his expectations of me, something my family had already lost.

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  “Oh right, I had heard something about that, but my days are so monotonous I didn’t even realize it’d be today.” I lied, with so much ease it surprised me. I guess it was a side effect of being exposed to and seeing through the deceptive thoughts and feelings of nobles, servants and, to a lesser degree, my own family alike all my life. I must have picked up how to lie convincingly, not exactly a skill I should be proud of.

  And true enough it worked. Lubeck felt relief.

  “Ah, makes sense. It’d have been weird for me to have caught wind of this, but you to be unaware, your Highness.”

  “That it would, after all despite being the family disappointment I am still part of the royal family.”

  Lubeck laughed awkwardly at that. My self-deprecating remarks made most of the servants and people working at the castle uncomfortable, after all they couldn’t exactly agree with me outright, but didn’t want to outright lie to my face, perhaps because they knew I would be able to tell.

  Instead he tried to hide his conundrum by asking a different question: “Do you have time to continue this practice, your highness? Don’t you have to be present for the meeting?”

  “It’s fine, I am not part of that meeting. Let’s just continue my training.” While technically not a lie, since I had never even heard that meeting would take place, I felt bad about it, so I decided to put my mind off the whole matter by just continuing my training, swinging my sword until my arms were about to fall off.

  ________________________________________________________________________________________

  “You’re training hard I see.” A voice from behind me spoke.

  What? Who? Where?

  I was alone at the training grounds, or was supposed to be alone, as Lubeck had already left, telling me we were done for today, but I stayed behind to train some more since I had nothing better to do anyway. And now a voice behind me spoke up.

  I frantically turned around to the source of the voice, sword in hand aimed at it. I saw an old man, his back leaning against the wall, a smile on his face. He had grey, slightly long hair and a grey beard.

  “Who are you? How did you get in here?” I hadn’t noticed him at all.

  “Relax kiddo, you don’t need that sword. I was just passing by and felt a weak magical energy, so I went to check it out. Sorry for sneaking up on you, I didn’t mean to scare you, I just didn’t want to interrupt your training.”

  ‘Magical energy’? What is he talking about? Also that doesn’t explain what he is doing here to begin with.I

  “That doesn’t answer my question. Who are you and how did you get in here?” I eyed him cautiously. Something about him unnerved me.

  “If by “here”, you mean the castle, I was let in. And as for who I am, my name is Renius. Does that answer your questions?” He smiled, or perhaps grinned.

  “NO! Stop playing around, old man, you know what I mean.” I was getting more and more anxious by the second, something about him seemed unnatural.

  He threw up his hands in a surrender motion.

  “Alright, before you completely lose your cool and impale me on that sword of yours I’ll explain.” He laughed lightly and removed his back from the wall. “I am the great wandering sage Renius and I occasionally serve as an advisor and mentor to the royal family. Telling them of the going-ons around the world and helping them in their usage of their abilities.” He finally explained, putting great emphasis on the “great wandering sage” part, underlining it with a theatrical bow.

  ….What?

  I was confused. I take it that this old man was the “advisor” that Lubeck spoke of? But what was he doing here? And why was he so… weird. There was no way my father would take this man seriously.

  “So you’re the gifted that serves as an advisor that I heard about?” I somewhat lowered my sword.

  “That’s right. And now that that’s cleared up, mind introducing yourself? Though I already have an idea of who you might be.” He asked, weirdly polite.

  I still wasn’t sure about this person and something still unnerved me, for one his mannerisms, posture and speech were all a total mismatch with his appearance, but regardless I couldn’t just very well not answer I felt.

  “I am Alexander Manier, the youngest prince of the Manier Kingdom.” I spoke, trying my best to not show my unease.

  “Mhm, so I thought. Say young man, why weren’t you part of the meeting with the royal family then?”

  “Because I am a disappointment to my family. My abilities are weak and useless and I don’t have the aptitude for being a royal.”

  “Would your ability have something to do with that weak magical pulse I feel coming towards me from you? It doesn’t seem like it’s intending to harm me, what exactly is your ability, son?”

  There it was again, “magical” pulse. I assume he is talking about my ability? But what does he mean “magical energy” and “magical pulse”?

  “My ability lets me understand the emotions and to a certain degree thoughts of others, but it is wholly unsuited for combat and has no outwardly visible effect, so it’s not very good for presentation either, thus my family thinks I am unfit as a prine. Can I ask you a question?” He was dictating the flow of the conversation, or more like just asking away at whatever he wanted to know without concern, but I also had questions piling up.

  “I respectfully disagree with that assessment of your powers, but sure, ask away.” His manner of speech really did not befit an old man.

  “What is this ‘magical’ stuff you are talking about?” I was also curious how he came to be royal advisor or really, just the whole image of the man in front of me made no sense to me, but I didn’t know how to go about figuring out why, so I asked one question at a time.

  “Magic,” He raised both his hands up to his sides, palms facing up. “is something like this.”

  My eyes went wide in shock as I watched. The very space seemed to shake ever so slightly around the old man. Above his left hand the air came to a dead stop, before freezing solid right in front of me, taking the form of an ice sword hovering just above his palm; Above his right hand the air swirled around, moving like a mini storm before igniting into a sword of flame, hovering just above his palm, parallel to his left hand.

  Impossible

  I had never heard of anyone wielding two such drastically opposed abilities, let alone at the same time, with such control. I dropped my sword to the ground with a metallic clang, unable to hide my sheer shock at what I was seeing and sensing. It felt like when I was pushing against the mental barrier of powerful gifted like my family, except that the wall was pushing against me. And suddenly I noticed what felt so off about this person, from the very beginning I couldn’t even get the slightest glimpse of his emotions, not even a single stray feeling like with my family, like I was trying to move the castle with my bare hands. This man was powerful, unimaginably powerful, even more so than my father.

  As if to prove me right the old man spoke up once more.

  “I am not done with the presentation yet, kiddo.”

  He grabbed the two swords, one of ice and one of flame, as if the freezing cold or smoldering flame didn’t even bother him in the slightest and walked over to a thick wooden pell we used for training. Then he swung down his left arm, with a speed and precision uncanny for a greybeard, the blade of ice going straight through the thick wood and yet before the separated piece of wood could fall to the ground, it froze together solid where the blade struck, unable to even fall to the ground despite being cut all the way through.

  Seemingly satisfied with that, he swung down his right arm at the same spot, once again proving skill I could not see from my own brothers, aiming at the exact same spot he just froze solid. The blade of flame went through the ice, instantly melting it and yet before the separated piece could fall, both it and the base went up in flames completely charing before it could hit the ground.

  Unable to avert my eyes for even the slightest moment, I watched and by the time I involuntarily blinked there was little left of the pell aside from some ash.

  The old man, seemingly proud of his work, waved his hands and the two swords disappeared like there never had been anything out of the ordinary. The torrent of heat, cold, wind and that weird pressure disappeared with them as if it all had been an illusion. But the ash on the ground spoke the opposite: This had been real.

  He looked at my dumbfounded face, grinning.

  “That. Is magic.” He finished his ‘presentation’ and eagerly pulled out a pipe, as if to reward himself for a job well done, casually igniting it with the snap of a finger, leaving me rooted to the spot.

  That is… magic?