Blood Bond

In the dream, Father was guiding me down the temple corridors. One large hand was resting gently upon my tiny shoulder. The other gestured to the mural stretching overhead like the sky.

"That is Galador, the first of our line, the first Chosen, a Divine Knight. He had to face and vanquish the demon horde alone, then…"

His words trailed off as his bushy eyebrows furrowed. His eyes and face grew contemplative as he tilted his head back.

Up above, instead of the young, gallant hero with his fabled sword standing before the line of monstrous demons, there was just me standing before a long trail of blood.

At the end of the trail was a stretch of evenly-mowed lawn. Maya was kneeling before a flat, square gravestone embedded in the grass. Mom was behind her, her body bent, her hands upon Maya's shoulders for support. My friends were standing further back around the stone, and Naomi was one more step further, her hands covering her face.

Everyone was wearing black.

Maya turned and pointed an accusatory finger at me.

I didn't need to see the gravestone to know whose name was engraved on it. What Annie had said wasn't that she saw the roots in me. No, she said that I was the roots.

When I was buried under the rubble, when all my other senses were gone, I was connected with my blood as it flowed all throughout my body. I had found no malformed blood cells within me, no structure of throbbing, root-like dendrites.

Maybe, like Annie said, those roots were the extension of me. When I was confronted by the bloody heart of the Wardstone, had I reached out across worlds and taken, me, him, with my blood?

Am I the cancer?

Perhaps Julia was wrong, maybe once the roots are destroyed, then me as Leo would collapse with its strings cut off like all the other puppets I had taken.

Was there another, more selfish, more insidious reason, that I didn't want them to examine Maya? Maybe the reason I had such a visceral reaction to Maya being tested was that I know if they test our blood for DNA, they'd find: we do not match. They would then know:

I killed Leo!

My body lurched upward. I covered my lips, biting back the bitter, acidic bile rising up from the back of my throat.

I am Leo. I have to be. These memories that I have. The emotions that I feel. They can't be stolen. They must not be.

A hot tear rolled down my cheek and dripped onto my sheets.

"Your highness… are you in pain?" Anya's voice reached tenderly out to me.

"I…"

​​My fingers clenched, and the sheets beneath them, fabric that should flow like liquid silk, crinkled and cracked like dried-up paper. A pool of dried, dark blood had spilled away from my body. And in my nostrils were a coppery, metallic, all-too-familiar scent. It seemed my past wounds had bled again during the night, and I had been grievously wounded, everywhere. My nightgown which had been cream color when I got into bed was now dyed a deep red. "I really should have worn red."

Moisture was welling in Anya's eyes and I hurried to reassure her that I was fine.

Meris arrived and two of them helped me off the bed. I turned back and the wreckage left in my wake looked more like a butcher table than a bed. "I'm sorry. I didn't expect it to be this bad."

"Don't concern yourself with that. We'll have a bath ready for you soon." Anya hurried me out of the room, shielding my view as if she feared the bloody carnage might take me back.

Meris's eyes burned with fury as she looked behind us. "We will continue your lesson after your bath. You learn fast and it's best to train in the morning when your body will retain knowledge best." Her grimace deepened when she gazed down at my now red gown. "I was wrong before, it doesn't matter if you're meant for it or not, violence will come for you."

—

"Ha!"

I struck my open palm at Meris's chest, but she was no longer there. Instead her body had instantly shifted a step to the side. She grabbed my wrist.

SLAM!

My world inverted as I was thrown over her shoulder and hit the hardwood floor with a resounding crack that echoed in the cavernous training room. The impact slammed the air from my lungs, and for a moment, all I could smell was the sharp scent of oak and lemon from the polished wood inches from my face.

Pain radiated from my shoulder and hip as I watched a blurry Kael wince through watering eyes. He didn't move from his spot by the wall though.

"Oww… that's not fair you used a rune ability didn't you?" I groaned as I rolled onto my chest and slowly pushed myself back up.

"Your enemies won't hesitate to use whatever they have at their disposal. The pain will teach you not to leave yourself open, even when attacking. Come, your body heals quickly. You can take more, and there's more to learn." She yanked me on to my feet and then a hand knifed toward my face.

On second thought, maybe asking Meris is a bad idea. A really painfully bad idea!

This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

A few more rounds back and forth and while I was still getting thrown around like a rag doll, I was starting to anticipate her movements and managed to even break my fall a few times. One thing I noticed was that when her movements sped up and blurred, it reminded me of a skill that I had taken from the mind of the Air Assassin elf.

I rubbed at the top of my head where Meris had struck as I looked up at her. "Meris, did you use the Fluidity skill there?"

Meris frowned. "How do you know that skill? I did make use of that ability, but it's an innate one. I did not have to focus or channel it, instead it's more like moving a muscle. I push myself to move faster and it does."

"So there are innate abilities where you can just swing a sword harder or run faster? How does the Soul Seed know when to activate it?"

"With enough training, your Soul Seed will be in tune with your body. It will know."

I thought back to the memories I dug out of the elven puppet's minds. Quite a few of the ones related to skills were repetitive training of the same movements over and over again, such as striking a sand bag, putting a palm over flames, or making a sudden jerky motion of one's body.

I repeated one of the motions I saw in those memories, a quick snap of the arm forward, starting with the leading leg, then hip, then a thrust of the hand out, shooting forward like a bolt.

Meris backed away. "Where did you learn that form from? Fluidity is an assassin type rune ability, you won't be able to use it unless you have a Soul Seed with that type of rune."

I snapped forward one more time, repeating the process. "I might have stolen it."

Meris shook her head at me, looking exasperated. I could tell that she was about to tell me to stop wasting my time, but I snapped my arm forward one more time. There was whoosh as the air rushed past my ear, my hand blurred and then appeared instantly right beside her face. Meris' eyes were wide and Kael so shocked he stepped toward us.

"You can steal abilities?" Meris breathed, looking shell-shocked as she turned from my hand to me.

"I'm not sure, but that doesn't feel quite right either." Now that I think more on it, the truth might be even more shocking than that. I mean I didn't take those abilities through my Soul Seed. All I did was use my blood to take the memories of those abilities from their minds. If all I took were the memories, and my Soul Seed responded to those memories, didn't that mean my Soul Seed already possessed those abilities?

"Meris, if you try to activate an ability that your Soul Seed doesn't have then nothing would happen right? Like nothing at all?"

"Yes, trying to activate an ability outside of your rune class and elemental affinity should have no effect."

I thought of when I had tried to use Shroud Step and Flame Bomb, they were failures but they both had an effect.

"Shroud Step is another assassin type ability? And Flame Bomb, is fire based?" I asked.

Meris nodded toward me. "Yes, Flame Bomb is a fire-affinity rogue type spell."

I stepped over toward a mirror by the wall. In my reflection, my hand was cradling my deep red orb of a Soul Seed, blood red to me, and dull to everyone else. I had thought like everyone else that it was useless because it has no rune, but now there was a completely new possibility. Perhaps instead of one rune, there were many. The smooth surface of the orb might be an illusion—maybe if you zoomed in it'd be like one of those pixel pictures, where instead of pixels there would thousands, maybe millions of runes.

Was the molecular view one of those runes?

"Meris, do you know of an ability that lets you see the world in…" I stumbled about in my mind, searching for the right term. There didn't seem to be a word for 'molecule' or 'atom' in this world. "Its most basic form?"

Meris shook her head and glanced over to Anya who was standing at the entryway on the other side of Kael. "There is elemental sight, which lets you see elements within things."

That didn't feel right. The molecular felt more basic and raw than all the other powers that I had experienced. It might actually be the underlying way Runes themselves affect the world.

Had I just hijacked that mechanism with my blood?

I remember how draining it was to do simple things through the molecular view. Perhaps what I was doing when reached out and pushed against the molecules was just a cruder form of what the Soul Seed did in a more streamlined and efficient manner.

The Soul Seeds were running programs while I was executing simple, strung-together steps.

Titus's comment about my spell took hold of my mind. He said it was sloppy. Did I make it sloppy by overthinking things? Was my experience with the molecular view and the simulations I had run on plasma reactions interfering with my Soul Seed just simply casting the spell?

Another question popped out of the multitude that swarmed my mind. If I do have so many runes, how do I know what abilities I have access to?

"Meris, how do you know what abilities or spells you can use? Is there another lexicon?"

"Teachers can guide you, and there are written works. But mostly, once your mind and body is ready the right rune words will appear in your mind."

I thought about Shroud Step. I had taken the skill from the memory of Air-affinity Assassin, but it failed because the muscles of my body weren't ready for it.

A near giddy wave of excitement rushed over me. I nearly jumped on Meris. "Wait, do you know Shroud Step? Can you train me in it?! I think it's just my body that's lacking!"

"Easy, your highness! That's a high level ability. There are many other techniques you must master before getting there. Now, we dawdle long enough. You learn fast, but there's still much to instill in you." Meris's voice snapped me back to attention. A sharp glint appeared in her eyes and I braced myself, my muscles tensing in anticipation of the pain to come.

I'm definitely gonna get it now.

—

SSHHHH!

The air hissed as my hand blurred, carving a path through it. Meris's leg blurred at the same time, but my body was already fully in Fluidity, and I had sped past her attempt at sweeping my legs out from beneath me. Her head spun just as my open palm reached her throat, and I stopped just short of hitting the spot just beneath her chin. If my palm-fang burst out now, I'd impale her brain.

Meris's dark green eyes met mine. "Good, one thing you must keep in mind though. If you were to make a strike like this for real. Always finish it off." She pointed her chin downwards and I looked down to find the point of her training dagger up against my chest.

"A break, your highness?" Anya appeared beside us with a tray of food and drink in her arms. "You've been practicing all morning. It's almost time for lunch."

I glanced out the window where the noontime sun was glaring hard outside. Then I remembered what I had to do. Training is good and all, but one of me was still nothing against an army.

"Oh, that reminds me. Please help me get ready as soon as possible. I need to go to see Prince Saleic." Then I looked up higher to the clear blue sky, where ships might fly. Might as well get that out of the way too. "Also if you can, please locate Prince Cassian as well."