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II

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"Evanee, remove your Twilight Zone guild mark."

Lashes fluttered against her porcelain features, stunned. Befuddled. Remove her mark..? That would mean leaving her home... Her family... She couldn't find words, nor could she even bring her body to move.

"Well?" Kiron instigated impatiently. She had said it herself that there was no time to be wasted, yet here she was, stalling on her lessons. She needs this worse than I thought, the elder suggested to himself. "If you're not going to adhere to my rules, I won't bother taking you in again. This is a favor. You are not my responsibility."

Moments of silence passed between the two. They held no significance to Kiron, but to Evanee, seconds felt like hours - hours of contemplation. Was she really ready to fully leave Twilight Zone? She never thought she would need to make such a decision.

But the fact that this decision existed meant something.

She was choosing between emotion and strength.

Evanee did not come this far to turn right back around and go back to being what she thought of as useless. Without her power, what was she? Nothing but a shell of a girl. This is why she needed Kiron. This is why she needed to be taught again. To be trained to such an extent that the possibility of falling back into her current ways was nonexistent.

It cleared up to her immediately. Determination saturated her expression and she issued her teacher a stern nod as her Nymph Magic began to encase her right hand - Underworld Nymph Magic, specifically. She then lifted her thistle colored shirt enough to reveal her mark on her lower right back and placed the palm of her hand over the imprint. It glowed beneath her touch, radiating a golden light that could directly be linked back to Caelestis, and eventually lifted from her skin, fading into nothing. Evanee removed her hand and recovered her lower abdomen.

She was free of her responsibilities to the Twilight Zone guild. She was an independent mage with nothing holding her back.

"There," she stated, "it's gone."

"Very good. Now, this session will go as I say it will. Forget what you thought you were in store for, because it is going to be very different than it was eight years ago. Are we clear, Evanee?"

"Yes, Kiron-san. I'm ready for whatever you have for me."

"That's what I like to hear!" In a sardonic form of excitement, Kiron clapped his hands together. "You can start by cleaning around this cabin! I haven't gotten to it in ages." The elder man cracked a smug grin as he took a quick glance around the familiar area, scanning the hoarded mess that it had come to be.

Even though there was still an overwhelming sense of darkness, broken only by the small gleams of false stars, Evanee could see the curl of his lips, and it irked her - enough so that a scowl took residence upon her features. Clean his house? It sounded so utterly ridiculous - she didn't even clean the guild. Unfortunately for her, she already gave Kiron her word. She agreed to do whatever he had in store for her, and she had to keep up with it. Because she wanted her reputation back. She wanted to feel like Evanee Carlisle again, not whoever this person was living in her shell. The path she chose was strength, not kindness. Both mentor and student planned to put her back on such a path, and neither would stop until she was there once again.

And if that meant starting with cleaning a shack, then so be it.

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Several hours had passed when Evanee finally finished spit-shining the inside of the house. Her vexed visage was stained with soot and dirt from the farthest corners of each room and her arms actually ached from the sheer amount of physical labor.

That was certainly something new. Never had she experienced pain from anything other than her training or the obvious battle.

A sigh exuded her pursed lips as she then returned to the main living space of her mentor's home, presenting herself before him once more. "I'm finished," was all that she stated - in an exceptionally stale tone, at that.

He'd hardly been paying attention to his surroundings. Kiron buried his pale face and dull eyes within the pages of an aging book. Its binding was worn and the cover littered with lacerations, making its title unreadable. He had been so entranced by the piece of literature that Evanee's first announcement went directly over his head - and that seemed to bother her. Rather than repeating herself or attempting to make herself heard again, she merely reached her hand out for the book, gripping it by its upper half and pulling it away from her mentor's face, replacing the sight of words on yellowing paper for her souring expression. "I said I'm finished."

He quirked his brow, taking a moment to fully absorb his student's audacity. It was then his turn to sigh, and as he did, he closed the book and placed it in his lap, a stern visage overtaking him.

"You're actually no where near done," he began sternly, "but if it's going to help you sleep at night, give yourself a pat on the back."

"Whatever. At least tell me what I'm doing next, and maybe a head's up if it's going to be as useless as cleaning your damn house."

"Let me ask you something, Evanee. As you were cleaning, did you feel any particular emotion standing out to you?"

The nymph mage froze in a bout of confusion; his question had caught her quite off guard, shaking her conscience to a point of discomfort, but it stuck. She thought. An emotion that stood out...

"Disdain," she retorted, "abhorrence."

"Why?"

There it was again. Why? Why? It should have been obvious, because...

"It was completely irrelevant to my goals, of course. It served of no use to me."

Bingo.

"Exactly, Evanee. Cleaning my house was in no way related to your desires. It bothered you because it was in your way. Do you believe it's fair to say that you wanted to dispose of your task - to remove it completely from your path?"

"Of course!" Evanee snapped - "What kind of stupid question is that!?" - and then realized exactly where Kiron was going with the pre-lesson of his.

"You've lost your spark because you allow things to get in the way of what you truly want without a fight. You were easily distracted, causing you to lose sight of your ambition - your quest for absolute power. Don't let anything stand in your way. If anything comes before you, you tear it down; you destroy it; abolish it; remove it from the fabric of existence, because it serves no use to you."

As much as she wanted to scoff, she knew exactly how right he was. Everything that she came into contact with as a member of the Twilight Zone guild was detrimental to her one and only goal. The realization itself hit her like a brick, and afterwards she wanted to physically do the same. How could she have been so blind? It was all right under her nose, and she didn't pay an ounce of fucking attention to it. She was so lost in all the extraneous matters that she lost sight of what mattered, and without that, what was she even fucking aiming for? Friendship? Lasting relationships? No, never. None of that matters. Evanee lived for herself, and herself only.

She was at a loss for words - surprisingly, with all the thoughts that rushed through her head, she just couldn't put together a coherent sentence. All she could do was clench her fists under folded arms and avert her eyes from her mentor, unable to even bear eye contact with him.

Luckily enough, Kiron had none of those problems. He was only there to help Evanee clear her vision. The things she didn't know, he did, and he had the words for it.

"Keep the disdain and abhorrence in the back of your conscience always, they will help you recognize when something is disturbing your way. Let nothing deter you from the path you chose."

Following suit of her fists, Evanee's jaw clenched. Shortly after, she nodded.

Her pathway had been cleared.

Now she could grow.