Pushed Away Again?

The Guild Hall of Daruma stood like a fortress of stone and old magic, carved deep into the city's heart. The scent of ink, parchment, and metal hung heavy in the air. Within its upper floors, behind heavy oak doors and enchanted silence wards, the Guildmaster and a small council sat with furrowed brows.

"He was surrounded by mana," Cerin said, voice low. "Not leaking it. Clinging to him like a second skin."

Grun folded his thick arms. "More than anything I've ever felt. And I've faced drakeblood beasts."

Elira added softly, "It didn't feel human. But he tried to save us."

The Guildmaster, an older man with a thick grey beard and sharper eyes than age would suggest, stared at the candle in the center of the table. Said nothing for a moment.

Then: "You know what this reminds me of."

No one responded. Tension rose without anyone moving.

"Twenty years ago," he continued, "a man arrived in the southern provinces with a similar aura. Powerful, aimless, kind at first. People trusted him. Some revered him."

The silence deepened. Only the flame cracked.

"Until the day he lost control. He turned a town into ash."

"But Yuu isn't..." Elira tried.

"I know what you're going to say." The Guildmaster raised a hand. "And I don't disagree. I saw his report. He fought beside you. He saved lives. But the mana pressure around him would overwhelm lesser mages. Civilians can't stand to be near him."

He rose and walked to the window. Outside, citizens moved through the market square, many still whispering about the strange boy with eyes like a storm and the silence that followed in his steps.

"I want him gone," said one of the junior council members.

"No." Voice firm. "We're not exiling a boy who just saved our own."

"Then what do you suggest?"

The Guildmaster turned back. "We send him out. Officially it's a quest. Long-range reconnaissance. Something that gives him space and gives the city peace. Unofficially" His eyes narrowed. "We watch him. Closely."

***

I sat in a plain room downstairs, still in my worn sweatpants and the thin shirt, boots muddy from the road. A cloak had been offered when we arrived. I hadn't accepted it yet.

I could feel the weight of eyes from the hallway. Whispers. Children turning away. A merchant who had dropped his goods. The guards outside flinching when they looked at me.

I stared at my hands.

I'm not doing anything. Why does this keep happening?

A knock.

Elira.

"Yuu," she said, gently. "The Guildmaster wants to see you."

I rose slowly. Still sore. I followed.

Inside the study the room was dim, lined with scrolls and old artifacts. The Guildmaster motioned for me to sit, then walked to a side cabinet and opened it. Neatly folded garments inside.

"These are for you. A traveler's shirt, trousers, and a cloak."

I touched the cloak first. Long, charcoal gray, deep hood, silver embroidery along the seams. I brushed my fingers along the fabric.

"Why?" I asked.

"Because I think you'll need them where you're going."

I looked up.

"You're being sent out. A solitary quest. We need information about the borders beyond the Broken Pines. You'll be compensated. Food, shelter, and direction will be provided. But you'll be traveling alone."

I said nothing.

The Guildmaster leaned forward. "I need to know something, Yuu. If you were pushed hard enough, could you still hold back?"

A beat passed.

"I don't know," I said.

He nodded once. "Then take this quest. Learn who you are before someone else decides it for you."

Later that evening Elira, Grun, and Cerin came to the outfitting room. I had changed by then. The cloak fell past my calves. The shirt was muted black with a reinforced collar. I felt less like a vagrant.

Or at least someone who might survive.

Cerin handed me a folded parchment. "Map and directions. Don't get lost."

Grun grumbled, "Don't get killed either."

Elira gave me a small pouch of herbs. "For burns and bruises. You're not invincible, okay?"

I looked at them.

"You're not alone," Elira added.

I opened my mouth, then closed it. I nodded.

That night I lay in the quiet guild lodging and didn't sleep.

They're sending me away.

I'd saved them. Fought beside them. Bled for it.

Even when I try to be useful. Even when I save people.

My breath caught.

Is this just how it always is?

I closed my eyes.

Then why did she say she wanted to know me better? Why did they save me if they were going to push me out anyway?

No answer. Just the wind tapping the window. The dark sitting there with me.

I would leave at dawn.

But something inside me, some part that had been soft and waiting, had already started to go hard.

I would find out who I really was.

Before anyone else decided it for me.

Flashback — Fifteen Years Ago

The Valley Fortress, Eastern Line. Winter Eclipse.

Smoke filled the air, heavy and black, carrying the stench of scorched earth and burning flesh.

Halran, then just a rising A-rank adventurer and still lean before age and rank thickened him, stood among the fractured remains of the fortress wall. His greatsword was chipped, hands raw and shaking from swinging it far too long. His left side burned where something had cracked two ribs against the rampart stone. He'd been coughing blood for the last ten minutes and trying not to think about what that meant.

They had barely held the enemy line, an army of mercenaries corrupted by dark mana, but it wasn't the enemy that worried him now.

It was what stood in the courtyard.

A boy.

No more than sixteen.

Barefoot. Covered in soot and blood that wasn't all his. Surrounded by a vortex of mana that made the air around him bend and shiver.

Pale blue flames coiled from his fingertips. His eyes glowed faintly, unfocused. His cloak, the kind only the Guard's most decorated wore, was ash and rags, hanging off one shoulder where the strap had burned through. And around him lay the remains of their allies.

Not fallen. Not dead.

Remains.

Mages. Warriors. Healers. Melted weapons fused to melted hands. Pulverized armor collapsed inward around whatever had been inside it. Blood so thick in the cracks between stones it had stopped running and sat there black and congealing in the cold. Halran had been in bad fights. He had walked through real carnage before and kept his stomach.

He had to look away from the courtyard.

He hadn't just fought.

He had slaughtered.

"Retreat!" someone had screamed behind him. "That thing isn't human!"

But no one had escaped. Halran had watched it happen, all of it, from the wall where the impact had pinned him for the first terrible minutes. The boy moved through smoke and fire trailing flickers of elemental energy, each spell coming out of him in waves that didn't seem chosen so much as inevitable, like weather. Fire, wind, lightning, all of it, none of it controlled, none of it aimed with any real thought behind it. Just pouring out.

He watched a ranked party from Westvale try to stop him. One of the best in their generation. The archer loosed three arrows in under two seconds. They incinerated in the air before they reached him. The shield-bearer raised a bulwark that should have held against a siege weapon. It shattered with a single shockwave that cracked the stones twenty feet behind it. The spellcaster threw up a barrier and the boy walked through it without slowing, without looking at them.

None of them got back up.

Halran got off the wall.

He didn't know why. His legs moved and he let them. He crossed the courtyard with his sword raised and his ribs grinding with every step and he roared the only thing he could think of.

"Stop! You're killing your own!"

The boy turned toward him.

Slowly. The way someone turned when surfacing from somewhere very deep.

His crimson red eyes found Halran's face and for one moment, one single heartbeat, something was there behind them. Grief. Real grief, raw and terrible. Terror underneath it. And something else Halran had no name for, the look of a person watching their own hands do something they cannot stop.

"I didn't ask," he said, voice hollow and flat, "to be made into a weapon."

Halran opened his mouth.

The ground came apart under his feet.

He doesn't remember the flight. He remembers stone and fire and the specific sound of his own ribs giving on the other side, both sides now, and then the wall at his back and his sword somewhere on the ground behind him and blood in his mouth, hot and copper, and the ringing in his ears so loud it ate everything else.

He couldn't stand. He got to one knee and that was as far as he got and he stayed there, heaving blood onto the stone, watching through blurring vision.

The boy hadn't moved from where he stood.

He was still on the ground. Still standing in the middle of everything he'd done. The pale blue fire had spread up both arms now, past the elbows, past the shoulders, moving across his chest, and his face was turned upward toward the sky. The mana pouring off him had changed. It wasn't lashing outward anymore. It was pulling inward, gathering, concentrating, and beneath Halran's one good knee the stone was vibrating faintly, steadily, the way stone vibrated before something structural gave way.

The boy's mouth was moving.

Halran couldn't hear the words over the ringing. He watched the lips.

Why did you make me fight.

A pause. The fire burned brighter, colder.

Why did you give me this and then call me a monster.

The ground cracked outward from where the boy stood. Not explosion. Just fracture, spreading in lines across the courtyard stone, deep and widening, and the blue fire dropped downward along those lines like it was following them, filling the cracks with cold light.

Then came the final spell.

Halran still can't fully describe it. What he saw was the mana in the boy collapse inward all at once, everything he'd been pouring out suddenly reversing direction, and what came out of that reversal hit the fortress wall to the north and the section of mountainside above it simultaneously. The wall came apart in chunks. The mountainside cracked along its face and a section peeled away, not in pieces but in one mass, and the sound it made coming down swallowed everything else.

The shockwave knocked Halran flat.

He lay in the rubble for a long time. Dust so thick he couldn't breathe properly. Ribs on both sides now, something wrong in his left leg, the ringing in his ears absolute.

When he finally pulled himself up the fortress was half gone. The mountain above it had a raw clean wound across its face where the rock had separated, the exposed stone too smooth, too sharp edged, wrong in the specific way that things were wrong when forces had acted on them that had no business acting on rock.

The Scar of Veyren, people would call it later.

The boy was gone.

No footsteps in the ash. No trail. No body.

Just silence and blood and the smell of burned stone and the particular stillness of a place where something had broken that wasn't going to be fixed.

Halran stood there for a while, breathing badly, not moving. He didn't have anywhere to go. There was nobody left to regroup with.

Eventually he sat down in the rubble and waited for his legs to work again.

They never found the body. Some said he vanished. Others said he died with the ones he killed. Halran never joined those conversations. He'd watched it happen and the thing that stayed with him, the thing he couldn't bury no matter how hard he tried, wasn't the scale of it.

It was the boy's face before the ground came apart.

The grief on it.

The way his lips had moved asking a question nobody answered.

Back to the present.

The crackling fire brought Halran back.

"Elira," he said, without turning. "His eyes. They were the same."

She didn't respond right away.

Then, "He's not like him."

Halran let out a breath that sounded more like a prayer.

"Let's hope you're right."