First Lesson: Help!!!! My trainer is a Mad Man

This is the story of how I began my training arc.
And it started with arson.

Thomlin woke me at dawn.
Not with a polite knock. Not even with a shouted curse.

He lit my blanket on fire.

“Training starts now,” he said, as if this was normal behavior.

After I stomped out my smoking blanket, I found him waiting outside, sitting, his legs crossed like some smug monk.

“You know,” I said, rubbing the sleep from my eyes, “most sane people start lessons with a lecture. Maybe a demonstration.”

“Most sane people aren’t trying to teach you to fuse runes without killing yourself.” He tossed me a stick of chalk. “Outside. Now.”

“WE ARE OUTSIDE…”

I didn’t have time to argue because he became crazy and started hurling fireballs at me.

“Get to the mountain!” he yelled.

FFFWWBOOOM!!

This wasn’t training. This was a war crime.

I sprinted throughout the Bronze Ring, dodging startled civilians. By the time we reached Mount Kazarra, my lungs were about to file for divorce. They just couldn’t take it anymore.

I faceplanted onto the black volcanic sand, some of it got onto my nose, still warm and gritty. I briefly considered just dying there and letting the mountain claim me.

Then Thomlin’s shadow fell over me. His breathing was calm, fireballs floating lazily around him like tiny moons in orbit. He turned me over, a huge grin on his face.

“Get up,” he said. “We’re running back.”

“What?!” I croaked. “You’re joking, right?”

He sat, literally his butt was on my stomach and his forehead touching mine, pinning me with his glare. “I’m giving you the count of NOW…if you don’t move, I start shooting.”

Why can’t I just die in my sleep?

We ran back. And forth. SIXTEEN more times.

By the end I was more corpse than person. Laying on the warm sand, dreaming of a peaceful world, far from this hell.

But Thomlin, didn’t stop. Oh no he didn’t. He dragged me by my legs like a sack of meat back to the barracks. At one point, I think a bird pooped in my mouth. I choose to believe it was just white rain.

He propped me up against a tree behind the barracks where the morning frost had hardened into brittle slabs. Then he drove his staff into the dirt with a thunk.

“Rune-weaving,” he said, his breath fogging in the air, “is like becoming a bridge between two worlds. One wrong step and the bridge collapses on your head. We’ll start simple.”

He drew a line in the air with his staff. A glowing strip of fire bloomed in midair, thin as a thread, then stripped itself bare until it looked like the skeleton of a word. Then he drew another line of pure, rippling water, curving until it met the first. Where they touched, they didn’t fight. They didn’t explode. They stopped, locked, and formed a perfect circle — half flame, half liquid light.

“Your turn.”

“What? I don’t have any runes on my body, I can’t do that.”

“You still have the chalk I gave you?”

I nodded.

He tossed me another chalk, a red one, then pointed at a half-broken black board to my left, don’t know where he go that piece of crap.

“Use both. Do what I just did.”

“But…”

“I didn’t stutter.”

Arguing with this mad man was pointless. I crouched, my hands shaking and began to draw. The first line wasn’t so hard, just a half a circle. The second was the problem, it was crooked and wrong but it wasn’t my fault, my arm just wouldn’t stay up.

“Too weak,” Thomlin snapped. “Spacing and control matters. Again.”

This was rigged.

I wiped the lines and tried again. And again. And again.

By the tenth attempt, I threw the chalk at him.

“This is impossible.”

“It’s survival,” he said flatly. “You want to keep playing the sarcastic fool, fine. But if you want to stop the summonings, you’d better start learning. No one else is going to do this for you.”

He flicked his staff, summoning another perfect circle that hovered between us like a glowing coin.

“That,” Thomlin said, tapping the circle, “is balance. Runes aren’t just fancy tattoos on your skin or etchings on a chain. As a weaver you become s bridge…pulling Magna from the elemental plane and converting it into usable force. At the same time, you must release bits of Magna back, otherwise you’ll burnout.”

I staggered to my feet, wiping sweat off my face. “I get that. But what does that have to do with drawing perfect circles Why not just put the rune on me right now and skip the homework?”

“Ungrateful bastard,” he muttered under his breath, but I heard it.

Then he sighed. “ Fine. There are two ways to get a rune. One, inherit it naturally either from bloodline or from the elemental plane itself. I doubt you’ve got a secret rune-bloodline waiting to awaken, so that leaves option two: artificial inscription or grafting. Natural runes are powerful and far more stable but artificial runes have more versatility, especially where fusion is concerned….”

“….You said Ryder explained anchoring to you?”

“Yeah. And Activation.”

“Great. Then you know weak anchors drain Magna like a leaking jug. If you want to fuse runes, you’ll need strong anchors to keep the flows steady.” He twirled the staff lazily. “Hmmm, what else, yeah…anchoring isn’t limited to skin or weapons. Under the right conditions, you can anchor a rune to a place, a battlefield, a building or even a rule of nature itself.”

That made my pulse jump. “So, you’re saying with a strong anchor I can fuse fire and water like you?”

"I'm not saying that at all." His face darkened. “That fusion only worked because I spent years studying their flows and synchronizing them. If you force a fusion without balance, you’ll detonate yourself.”

“But what if it’s necessary?” I pressed. “What if I meet someone stronger who can fuse everything?”

He hesitated the looked at me before yawning. “You’d need to synchronize every element’s flow perfectly. It’s not impossible, but dangerous. As far as I know, the only element that doesn’t clash with any other is Shadow.”

Shadow. Just like the Orchestrator.

“And being stronger doesn’t mean you’ll automatically win,” Thomlin said standing. “Discipline is the bridge between goals and achievement. Don’t forget that.”

I yawned. “You’re really milking that bridge metaphor, you know.”

“Cheeky bastard,” he said. “Just for that, you’re running sixteen more laps!”

Damn it. Me and my big mouth.