We walked for two hours in complete silence. The thick pine forests south of Ashford gradually gave way to a rocky, uneven landscape of steep ravines and dry creek beds.
Silas led the way, his tattered canvas coat flapping around his calves. He didn't walk like a man trying to stay hidden. He strolled. He occasionally swiped at low-hanging branches with a silver-topped walking stick he had pulled from somewhere inside his coat, humming a completely off-key tavern song under his breath.
"So," Silas said, breaking the silence without turning around. "Ever wonder why the Academy takes ten years to teach a kid how to light a candle?"
"Control," I assumed.
"Nah." He waved his stick dismissively. "Well, yeah, partly. But mostly? Because they're terrible at it. Ten years of reading dusty books just so some duke's kid doesn't blow his own face off. It's embarrassing, really. The whole thing is embarrassing."
He stopped, turned, and pointed his walking stick at me like a rapier.
"The body already knows how to use mana. Every living thing does. Trees do it. Wolves do it. Bugs do it. But the Academy says no, no, first you need to understand it. Sit down, read this thousand-page book, memorize these words in a dead language, and maybe in a decade, we'll let you throw a spark." He snorted. "It's like teaching a fish to swim by reading it a lecture on fluid dynamics."
"And you skip the lecture," I said.
"I skip the nonsense." Silas grinned, his gold tooth catching the light. "I found a shortcut. Straight to the muscle, straight to the nerve. No books, no chanting, no ten years of sitting in a stone library smelling like old cheese."
He resumed walking, tapping his stick against rocks as he went.
"You'd be surprised how many rich folks want what I'm selling. Merchants, nobles, even a few Guild dropouts. They show up with bags of gold and say, 'Make me special.' And I do. It's a living." He shrugged theatrically. "But you, Marshal... you I'm doing for free. Call it curiosity."
"Generous," I said flatly.
"Isn't it?" He beamed. "I'm practically a saint."
We walked in silence for another stretch. The terrain grew steeper, the trees thinner. Exposed rock faces jutted from the hillside like broken teeth.
I pulled the smooth black stone from my pocket, rolling it between my fingers. It still absorbed the warmth from my skin, always staying cold.
"What is this thing, really?" I asked.
Silas glanced back. "Ah, you kept it. Good." He slowed his pace, falling in beside me. "It's a sponge. A battery. Whatever you want to call it."
"A battery."
"It drinks mana," Silas explained, tapping his own chest. "Slowly, constantly, just from the air around it. It's always hungry. That's why it's cold — it's eating the ambient energy near your skin."
I held it up. It looked like a polished river stone, but the surface seemed to swallow light rather than reflect it.
"What can you do with a full one?" I asked.
"Lots of things." Silas grinned, resting his hands on the top of his walking stick. "But mostly slow things. It's a sponge, not a shield. Try to catch a fireball with it and you'll just lose a hand." He tapped his temple. "But... put it next to an animated corpse? Give it a month, maybe two, and the stone will suck the magic right out of it until it drops dead again. It creates a quiet, slow dead zone. Unless you find a stone the size of a tavern, then sure, the effect is stronger."
He wiggled his fingers playfully. "And more importantly... you can leave a full one somewhere, walk away, and pull the stored mana out of it from a distance. Like having a second lunch stashed in a very safe pocket for when you're starving."
"A slow drain and remote storage," I summarized.
"See? You're smarter than you look." Silas winked. "Just don't lose it. They're not easy to find."
I slipped the stone back into my pouch.
* * *
The ravine narrowed. High walls of grey stone rose on either side, cutting off the wind and trapping the air into a damp, still pocket. The sky above was reduced to a thin strip of pale blue.
Then I smelled it. Smoke. Cooking meat.
Silas walked ahead, utterly relaxed. We rounded a bend and the ravine opened into a wider clearing. A large, jagged hole in the rock face formed a natural cave entrance.
And standing directly in front of it were two armed goblins.
My body reacted instantly. The hammer was in my hands before I finished my next breath, pulled up into a killing grip, weight shifting to my back foot for the opening swing.
"Easy, easy!" Silas said, stepping smoothly between me and the goblins, both hands raised. "Down, boy. Those are mine."
I didn't lower the weapon. My eyes were locked on the creatures. They weren't like the feral scavengers I had fought near Riverside. These two stood unnaturally straight. They wore crude but well-maintained leather armor with metal studs. One held a rusted but sharpened infantry sword; the other gripped a heavy iron mace with a wrapped leather grip.
Then they saw Silas.
Both goblins dropped to one knee instantly. Their long, crooked noses nearly touched the dirt. Their entire bodies were trembling. From raw, animal terror, the kind that goes beyond fear and into the territory of a mouse staring at a snake.
"My students," Silas announced cheerfully, gesturing at the kneeling monsters like a man showing off prize livestock at a county fair. "Best ones I ever had, actually. Never talk back. Never ask stupid questions. And..." He paused for dramatic effect. "They can do magic."
I stared at him. "Goblins."
"I know!" Silas clapped his hands together, genuinely delighted. "Brilliant, right? Everyone said it was impossible. 'Goblins don't have mana channels, Silas.' 'You're wasting your time, Silas.' Well, look at them now."
He didn't speak to the goblins. He didn't even glance at them. But as he walked past, both creatures jerked their heads up simultaneously. Their yellow eyes snapped to me with sudden, coordinated aggression. They rose to their feet in perfect unison, gripping their weapons.
"Since you've already got the hammer out," Silas said, hopping up onto a large flat boulder near the cave entrance and sitting down cross-legged, "let's do something useful with it."
He pulled a wooden pipe and a tobacco pouch from inside his coat.
"These two are your sparring partners. Try not to kill each other. Good help is hard to replace."
He waved his pipe lazily at them.
The goblins fanned out. One drifted to my left, one to my right. A textbook flanking maneuver.
Cold adrenaline flooded my veins. I adjusted my grip, choking up on the haft like I had practiced that morning. Left hand free. Eyes tracking both targets.
The goblin on the left — the one with the mace — lunged first. I pivoted, ready to parry and counter-strike.
But as the goblin stepped forward, the air around his feet violently distorted. A blast of compressed wind erupted from beneath him — silent, invisible, devastating. It propelled the goblin forward, turning his stumpy, standard lunge into an impossibly fast dash that completely bypassed my guard.
His shoulder slammed into my ribs before my hammer finished its arc. My lungs emptied. I staggered sideways, boots scraping across loose stone.
Wind magic. A goblin just used wind magic.
Before I could recover my footing, the second goblin was already there. The one with the sword. He brought it down in an overhead chop, fast and surprisingly precise.
I brought my hammer up horizontally, iron haft catching the blade in a solid block.
Clack.
I dug in, preparing to shove him back and create distance. I had the weight advantage. I had the leverage.
Then something deeply wrong happened.
The goblin's yellow eyes locked onto mine. I felt a sudden, heavy surge of mana from the metal of his sword.
He channeled Earth magic directly through the blade at the exact point of contact with my hammer. The rusted steel didn't cut — it warped. For a fraction of a heartbeat, tendrils of stone-gray energy fused his sword to my iron hammer, welding them together into a single, rigid object.
I couldn't pull free.
The goblin jerked his sword downward with his entire body weight. My hammer — and my arms, and my center of gravity — went with it. My torso pitched forward, my guard shattered wide open.
The wind-goblin was already there, low to the ground, his mace sweeping up. I twisted desperately, taking the blow on my shoulder instead of my temple. It cracked against the leather pad with enough force to drop me to one knee, stars exploding across my vision, my ears ringing with a high, thin whine.
"And that's enough!" Silas called out, his voice sharp and clear.
The connection between sword and hammer dissolved instantly. The blade popped free. Both goblins took exactly three steps backward and stood motionless, weapons lowered.
I stayed on one knee, breathing hard, staring at my hammer. The surface where the sword had fused to it was slightly discolored, a faint grey residue like frost on a cold morning.
He pushed magic through the metal. Through his weapon.
My mind was racing. If I could do that with
Ignis
— push fire through the hammerhead at the exact moment of impact — the strike wouldn't just be kinetic. It would be thermal detonation delivered directly into the target. No time to dodge. No shield to block. Just contact, and obliteration.
"Well?" Silas asked, puffing a thick cloud of white smoke. "What did you see?"
"He put magic into his sword," I said.
"Aha." Silas pointed his pipe at me. "No chanting. No thinking. Just doing. That's the whole trick, Marshal. That's what the Academy spends ten years failing to teach."
"How long did it take you to train them?" I asked, nodding toward the motionless goblins.
"These two? About six months. But they had a head start." He tapped his temple. "I can push patterns directly into them. Humans take a bit longer. More resistance. More... personality, I suppose."
I stood up slowly. My ribs ached. My shoulder was going to bruise badly. But the excitement burning in my chest overshadowed the pain. The goblin had shown me a weapon technique that no dueling instructor in any city on this continent could legally teach.
* * *
The interior of the cave was larger than I expected. The jagged entrance narrowed into a short passage before opening into a wide, dry cavern, maybe thirty paces across. Blue-white crystals were embedded high in the walls, casting a pale, cold glow that made everything look like it was carved from ice.
A small fire pit sat in the center, ringed with flat stones. Around it: stacked wooden crates, a portable alchemist's workbench cluttered with brass instruments and glass vials, a bedroll, a waterskin, and several burlap sacks of dried food. It looked like someone had been living here for weeks.
"Home sweet home," Silas said, spreading his arms. "Not much to look at, but the rent is free and the neighbors don't complain."
He tossed me a strip of dried meat from one of the sacks. I caught it and ate without hesitation. I hadn't realized how hungry the walk and the fight had made me.
"You live here?" I asked between bites.
"When I need to. I have a few spots." He poked the fire pit embers with his walking stick, coaxing a flame back to life. "You're welcome to use this one when you need it. If the city gets too hot."
He bent down, opening a crate, and pulled out a thick wool blanket, tossing it onto a pile of dry pine needles near the cave wall.
"There. Guest quarters."
I looked inside.
"Thank you," I said. It felt like an unusual word in my mouth.
"Don't thank me yet," Silas said, and his voice shifted. The playful, bouncy energy bled away, replaced by something focused and surgical. "We're not done."
He pulled off his leather gloves and tossed them onto a crate. His bare hands were covered in faded tattoos — fine, branching lines that ran from his wrists to his fingertips, like the roots of a tree drawn in dark blue ink.
"Sit by the fire," he said. "What I do — the awakening, the shortcut — it starts with reading the body. I need to map what's inside you before I can change anything. It's... unpleasant. Don't move."
I sat on a flat stone near the fire. Silas knelt in front of me, lifting his right hand and pressing it firmly against the center of my chest, just over my sternum.
"Breathe," he ordered. "And hold still."
I felt a sudden, sharp coldness radiate from his palm. It felt like a frozen draft blowing through my veins, pushing past muscle and bone, sinking into my chest cavity. My stomach lurched; the sensation was invasive, intimate, deeply uncomfortable.
Silas closed his eyes. His brow furrowed. The tattoos on his hand pulsed faintly, the dark blue lines flickering with a dim internal light.
Ten seconds passed.
Twenty seconds. Silas's breathing slowed.
Thirty seconds. His eyes snapped open.
He pulled his hand away from my chest. He took a full step backward.
He stared at me. Then he looked down at his own shaking hand.
"Well," he said quietly. "That's... interesting."
"What?" I asked. The cold knot in my stomach was tightening.
Silas rubbed his jaw with his tattooed hand, pacing in a tight circle around the fire. He muttered something under his breath that I couldn't catch.
"Silas?" I said, harder.
He stopped pacing and faced me.
"I was going to rewire you," he said slowly, choosing each word. "Open your channels. Burn the pathways into your nerves so your body accepts raw mana the way your lungs accept air." He paused. "But someone already did it."
The fire popped. A log shifted, sending a shower of orange sparks toward the ceiling.
"Not just did it," Silas continued, his voice dropping further. "They perfected it. Every channel I would have opened is already wide open. The pathways are clean, precise, burned in with a level of skill that..." He trailed off, genuinely at a loss for words for the first time since I had met him.
"Whoever did this to you, Marshal... they were so much better at it than I am. And I don't say that about anyone."
I sat perfectly still. The cold in my chest had nothing to do with Silas's diagnostic spell anymore.
Someone made me into this. Deliberately. Precisely. And then I woke up in a forest with no memory of who I was or why.
"Can you tell when it was done?" I asked. My voice was calm. My hands were not.
Silas tilted his head, studying me the way a jeweler studies a diamond he didn't cut.
"Years ago," he said. "Maybe longer. The scarring on the channels is old, fully healed. This wasn't done last month. This was done to you a long time ago, by someone who knew exactly what they were building."
He picked up his pipe from the boulder, packing it slowly with fresh tobacco.
"Which raises a very fun question," Silas said, and a tiny flicker of his old grin crept back onto his face. "Who builds a weapon this good... and then throws it in a forest?"