Chapter 1

Changes

Macalania.

The enchanted crystal forest was renowned for its beauty. Towering trees reached for the sky, growing higher than anywhere else in Spira. The air remained crisp and refreshing all through the year. The forest itself was always cool, and the area surrounding it was, even on the hottest of summer days, only pleasantly warm. It owed to the fact that the lake lying at the heart of the forest never thawed. A kind of supernatural coolness radiated from it, said to be caused by the fayth of Macalania temple. The phenomenon, and the forest itself, were quite remarkable. Numerous pieces of poetry had been written about both.

Baralai should know, because he had read quite a few. His mother, a great lover of poetry, had introduced him to her favourite works. A good many of them had featured the splendour of Macalania.

But that had been years ago, and not all aspects of the forest were so poetic. He was currently climbing over a fallen tree trunk – rather large one – boots threatening to slip on the icy bark. He had been forced to leave the forest road, as it had turned out to have been taken over by a gathering of chimaeras. One he could have handled, although it wouldn't have been an easy battle. Two would have been tough; he would have had to be very careful not to let either one get behind him, and keep his potions supply at hand all the time. And three chimaeras… that was virtually impossible.

Besides, he'd never been too fond of fighting.

Which inevitably led to the question that if this was the case, why was he now returning from Macalania temple, having travelled there for the sole purpose of signing up to train especially for battle?

He recalled the look on the officer's face, and the man's disbelieving tone.

Are you sure you're up to this, kid?

The remark had made his cheeks burn, and it still stung. But the truth was… he didn't know. There was a disturbingly good chance that he wasn't. He wasn't even sure if he really wanted to do this.

But when compared to his other options, it inarguably stood out as the best.

The scuffling and snorting sounds from the direction of the road had turned into thuds and roars, indicating that in lack of human prey, the chimaeras had turned on each other. Although it was unlikely that they'd pay him much mind now, the smart thing would be to avoid the road until he was completely out of their sight.

He slid down the trunk on the other side and landed heavily on the leaf-littered ground, catching his fall with one hand. The other was occupied with a battle staff – which caught on a branch as he dropped, spun around, and twisted his arm painfully in the process. He stood up and fastened the staff into its straps behind his back before flexing the muscles on his arm to assess the damage. Moving his wrist hurt, but fortunately not very much.

Still, he ought to be more careful, he thought as he continued to make his way through the underbrush. Fighting skills were crucial, but he was beginning to realise that there was also a number of other, potentially very harmful things that could happen out in the wilderness. You could twist your arm when your weapon caught on something, or trip on a rock or a tree root and sprain your ankle. You couldn't restock all that often and you might run out of something vital, such as healing supplies – especially since you had to carry all you needed with you. And fiends might sweep in at any time, from any direction.

He had travelled before, but never on his own. When he had been younger, his father had taken him along a couple of times when he'd gone to Guadosalam, and once even as far as to the Djose temple. All those times, though, they'd been part of a larger envoy party that was protected by an escort of warrior monks.

He remembered being very impressed by the way the warrior monks seemed to be calm, ordered, and in control all the time. They seemed to have a power to protect that even the priests could not match. It had been something that he'd striven for ever since.

Though it was by far the one closest to Bevelle, this was the first time Baralai had ever visited the temple in Macalania. The cold had almost caught him by surprise. He'd known to what to expect of snow and ice – in wintertime, it often snowed in Bevelle, too – but was unused to the way it crept through clothing and bit into the bones, chilling him thoroughly during the long walk from the shore of the lake to the temple.

Once he'd reached it, though, Macalania temple had been a splendid sight. It hovered right below the frozen surface of the lake, supported only by the ice that seemed to cradle it like mother's arms cradled an infant. He'd spent a while standing at the beginning of the temple road, simply staring. While the Bevelle temple – which he had seen many times – was quite remarkable in its grandeur, it seemed to shrink when in comparison to the delicate way the temple in Macalania bore itself, in perfect harmony with its surroundings while defying the very laws of nature.

He brought himself back to the present, shaking his head. No time to think about such things now. It was still a long way back home, and he would rather put some distance between himself and those chimaeras.

Granted, he had some battle training, but it had mostly been conducted within the city limits, either with other warrior monk trainees or with stationary targets – "dummies", as they were called. He had been in the forest before – quite often, in fact – but never for this long, and he usually hadn't wandered very far from the city limits.

Macalania Forest was, in some ways, his private place. It was where he went when he needed to have time with his thoughts, or when he just wanted to be alone and still have some open space around him. That was one of the very few things that were truly hard to come by in the city. He was lucky in the sense that his family lived close to the city's edge. He had been quite young when he had first found his own way to the other side of the walls.

Unfortunately, though, these trips outside the city always upset his mother. He'd lost count of all the times she had moaned about the dangerous fiends that lurked in the shadows of the trees and that were something to happen to him, his body might never even be found, robbing his parents of every chance for some kind of a peace of mind. He always found it a little ironic that she loved the poetry about the forest, but dreaded the thing itself.

When things came down to it, Baralai had spent his entire live within the confines of the city of Saint Bevelle. It was inarguably the grandest settlement upon the entire Spira, and the places you could go and the things you could do there seemed endless. Generations could lead their lives within the shelters of its walls, without once setting a foot outside.

Somehow, that wasn't enough.

Lately, he'd felt like the city was suffocating him. Although he could walk around the urbs for several days without seeing the same face twice, he somehow felt like all the people he met were … cast in the same mould. That was the only way he could describe it. Anywhere he went, it was like everyone else seemed to fit in perfectly with their surroundings. And it made him feel like he fit there less and less.

To say it was something that had occurred suddenly would have been untrue. He had been feeling a strange sort of a disquiet for years now. It had built up slowly with the passing of time, until it finally had grown big enough to be almost too much for him to bear. He was growing up, his life was moving forwards faster and faster – his father had even started to talk about how one of these days he would talk with someone about having Baralai promoted from the position of an acolyte, so that he could settle down on his own, establish a position, and start looking for a suitable bride.

He wasn't ready for that – for having his life laid out in front of him, carefully planned by someone else without him once having a say in it. He wasn't ready for any of it.

When he'd heard some his father's colleagues talking about this special squad one of the Maesters was going to establish, Baralai had made his decision. The fact that the training would be conducted somewhere far away from Bevelle may have been the biggest deciding factor.

Resolve hardening, Baralai squared his shoulders and walked faster. The sooner he would reach the city, the sooner he could leave again. It was starting to be the prime time.

The only thing he wasn't looking forward to was telling his parents.