Two weeks after his slaughter of the slavers, Kir was depressed.
The Black Sheep, and Amarena, had set out from Darlbridge as soon as they were ready, with barely a few hours rest.
Noir had thought it prudent to leave before the town or Cadence changed their minds, and Kir had agreed.
Amarena had been the only unwilling point but eventually agreed, even helping Kir climb into the cart behind the strider, where he fell into a deep sleep.
Today was the first day since they left when they encountered a town, and they were out of food.
"Look at them, they don’t even have walls. We could just take or fight for what we need," Amarena said. She still hadn’t quite forgiven Kir for taking all of the "good kills."
"No, Rena, that’s not how we do things," Kir argued. Noir, Sam, and Stella had taken the cart into town to negotiate for food. Stella had insisted on going, arguing that she could just tug people’s emotions into getting them everything they needed, but Kir had insisted she use that only as a last resort.
From the tree Kir was sharing with Amarena, they could both see Stella in her "goat mom" form standing next to the others as Noir spoke with a dwarvish woman before they were shown into her building.
Once they were out of sight, Kir sat back against the tree.
He wasn’t hurting for food, and neither was Stella after a bit of transfer between them.
A small chunk of the soulstone skull had lost its integrity after being used, and Kir had eaten the crystal while rather futilely trying not to think about the fossilized bone that tasted like ashes in his mouth and gave him no mana at all.
The entire ti he’d chewed, Amarena had stared at him like a freak.
"You get used to weird shit all the ti with this one," Stella had said, patting her on the shoulder, before taking her "daily al" with a kiss.
The soulstone had tasted like a blue hurricane martini, and even diminished had given Kir a slightly heady feeling of power. One he quickly ca down from, as his depression proved stronger.
As he leaned forward, wrapping his tail around the branch he was straddling for purchase, Amarena remained standing as she asked, "What did Noir an, telling us not to kill each other?"
"He said ’Try not to,’" Kir answered, his voice almost as flat as Noir’s usually was. "I assud the aning was pretty clear."
"You are a warrior. A strange one, but one that is worth keeping alive. Why would I want to kill you?" she asked.
Kir shrugged. "Maybe it’s because you’ve asked to duel every night?"
"You slew every worthy fighter before I could arrive to battle. I want to see if you have improved," she answered. "Besides, I know now why you lost control in your warform. You have the mana for it, but there is not enough of yourself in it. That is why your instincts take over."
Kir’s horns bumped the tree well before his head could. So much bodily magic had to do with concepts of self... things he was very mixed-up over, seeing as he didn’t know who he had been in his past life, though he carried most of that man’s knowledge. "Is this where you start teaching how to control it?" he asked.
"Since you don’t seem to learn from example, yes," she said.
"I wasn’t aware I was supposed to observe you," Kir shot back.
"You an you did not leer at my body, seeing my mana under the skin?" she smirked. "I have see you up close and naked. The mana inside is thickly coiled... Enough that when we first t I thought you might be an enhancer like myself, perhaps even a master."
Kir blushed a bit, wondering when exactly she’d seen him naked. Kir kept clean, so there might have been so ti at streams or-
"The way you let that strangeling conquer you told otherwise though."
After thinking back far enough to realize what she ant, Kir facepald so hard he felt his horns dig into the tree a little.
"I’m stuck with a fucking voyeur," he complained, sitting up and unknowingly taking so bark with his horns.
"I ant it when I said you were strange for a warrior. I’m glad I finally found sothing to provoke you out of this shaful regret you’ve been walking with."
"I don’t regret fulfilling my oath," Kir said. "Most of those n deserved to die-"
"Then what is it you regret? Losing control? Those villagers looking at you like a monster? Everyone becos a monster when the alternative is death. That is what it ans to war! To have a war form!"
Kir bit back from saying anything. He did regret being seen as a monster. But more than that he regretted losing control. The feeling of retreating into himself... it resonated with so hidden mory of his past life that he was afraid to investigate.
"So you’ll let win with words but not a proper fight?" Amarena sneered. "You’ll never learn to control your form this way, Heresy-Son."
Kir ground his teeth, snapping a branch above his head as he pushed himself to stand. "You want a fight? Fine. Let’s find a place."
-
Hours later, for what felt like the hundredth ti, Amarena threw Kir into a tree.
"Quit fighting yourself and fight , Heresy-Son!" she challenged him for what felt like the fiftieth ti.
He’d tried integrating his martial arts, but his body was too large and ungainly for any but the most basic moves.
He’d tried using the trees as weapons, sure after the first lucky hit he’d gotten that she could take it.
He’d tried a dozen different thing but the result had always been the sa.
Kir rose up and charged her - across a large clearing that had once been a much smaller one. "Ghraagh!"
This ti he feinted to a stop before actually connecting, bringing his fist up in an uppercut that should have knocked her on her back, only at the last mont she bent her body backward and spun into a sidekick that sent him staggering.
Red started entering his eyes...
"There it is," she laughed. "You’ve been holding it back... but it’s still there."
"Is this what you wanted?!" Kir half-growled, his voice deepening with the challenge.
"I wanted to put you on the blade’s edge, Heresy-Son. Your challenge now is to hold yourself there. To figure out why you are the way you are, and put it into your form." She started pacing a circle around him, still wary. "You showed your wrath on the day you killed forty four people without ... And yet you have hated yourself for it. For letting the cold fire grow hot."
Kir felt the red start to retreat, but then Amarena stomped on his tail, making him roar in anger. "Hold yourself there, Heresy-Son. Hold your wrath."
"You’re certainly making it fucking easy," Kir snarled, his eyes feeling like they were throbbing as red pulsed in and out of his vision’s edges.
"Wrath is hatred given power, Heresy-Son. What you hate must be eating you alive, for you to have invested in such a massive form... Give your wrath a place, Heresy-Son, and it will beco your tool, not the other way around."
His arms twitched with the desire to attack her again, and this ti as he held back he rode the thought... into a place he hated. A place within himself that hated what he knew was happening, that sensed that now, as in his past, he was fighting the sa fight... That hated-
"What do you hate, Heresy-Son?" Amarena asked.
"Right now I hate you," Kir snarled at the interruption.
From behind her back, Amarena produced a rock and threw it between his eyes, striking his horn.
The red returned to his vision.
"I know you are smart, Heresy-Son. A genius, according to the strangeling, Stella. So don’t be stupid now. This is a test. One my mother conducted for . One that every demon who reaches a form of power must figure out."
"Just tell what I’m supposed to figure out!" Kir demanded.
"What do you hate, Heresy-Son?"
Kir snarled. "I hate... I hate slavery. The people who do it. Who enforce it. I hate that everyone in the world seems to hate demons in so way when we’re just... just people! I hate that there’s half of I have to hide because I will be killed for what I am! That my friends may die for it too!"
Amarena watched his eyes. "I believe you... but those things aren’t the source of your wrath."
"Then what is?!" Kir shouted.
She suddenly leaped up, drop-kicking him so that his landed with his back against a tree. The spikes on his spine stabbed into it, locking him in place.
Before he could recover enough to watch for her, she landed on his stomach.
"Your source, Heresy-Son, will be sothing you feel in your body." She punched him in the gut, winding him. "Sothing you think about yourself that is impossible to fight. Impossible to defeat. Impossible to lose..."
She stood taller, casting her shadow over him.
"Sothing you can only make a place for."
As his vision swam in and out of red, Kir for a mont felt that he was back in the Adventurer’s Guild, back in Norneau...
That it was Demon Breaker Halie looming above him, asking, "You’re weak... why are you so weak?"
Kir wanted to reject it... to deny it with every fiber of his being...
To fight until no one could say that, ever again...
But he couldn’t...
Not now.
Not now that he knew.
"I’m... weak..." Kir rasped, as soon as he had breath enough to.
"Why are you weak, Kir?" Halie asked him, sliding one of the spears from its quiver. A crystal spear with one of his mother’s feathers in it.
"Because..." he knew the answer. The thing he wanted but had spent almost twenty years ignoring, avoiding, or putting off except when he was forced to confront it...
Every ti he almost died.
"Because I don’t know myself..."
Suddenly Halie was gone. He was back in the field, with Amarena pinning him by the chest as she stared into his eyes.
His war form was gone, and though his body felt like lead, confessing the source of his wrath had left him with an odd feeling of... lightness.
"Now you know your wrath, Kir," Amarena said. "The next part will be far easier." She reached up, brushing his tears away with her thumb. "You must rge your wrath with your strength."
"How can you be sure of that?" Kir asked.
"Perhaps it won’t be. But maybe now you can see why achieving war form is uncommon, even in my mother’s domain, where wrath is life."
Standing off of him, she offered him a hand, which he took.
"Still, I believe you will learn it. Because the source of your wrath... is the sa as mine."
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