Author's Note:
These next few chapters are going to have a lot of my headcanons for the Temples themselves and the Spirits. I've been trying to have fun with how different or alike they would all be.
I've graduated with my AA in Fine Arts. Now I'm taking a semester off to put my portfolio together and apply to Bachelor's programs for Animation and/or Illustration since I think concept art might be more my thing that actual animating. Still, it's a good skill to learn.
I wanted you to see what real courage is, instead of getting the idea that courage is a man with a gun in his hand. It's when you know you're licked before you begin, but you begin anyway and you see it all the way through, no matter what. You rarely win, but sometimes, you do.
-Harper Lee (To Kill a Mockingbird)
Shadow's warrior monks, renowned in legend for never having been defeated in battle, were largely dwarves.
"Everyone's always surprised," Malik laughed. He was the first person they'd met here; he was jovial and energetic, with an intricately braided beard, and beads of silver and bronze glinting in his hair.
"Well, it makes sense when you think about it," Martel said, the first to recover from the surprise. "I mean, the Temple is entirely underground."
"Not too many half-elves out here, huh?" Yuan asked.
"There are some, but you lot tend to not like spending much time underground. Too much elf-blood in ya."
Shadow's Temple was in the heart of a mountain, full of archways and open ceilings. Braziers were kept lit everywhere, and many of the walls were decorated with gemstones which reflected and refracted the light from the fires.
"So—this might be a rude question—" Yuan began, and Malik just waved at him to continue. "I'd heard the Shadow monks were all bald."
Malik smiled. "Only the masters. They tattoo their vows on their bodies, as well as the traditional prayers and incantations."
"All of them?" Kratos asked.
"Yes."
"You don't have them in a book or—"
"We have many of our prayers bound in books, yes, but there are spells on out masters' skin that are not to be public knowledge. They are too powerful."
The idea of having spells that had been hidden by such measures was a little terrifying, but then Kratos remembered Alstan's story about Bowten, and the Meteor Storm, and he thought that yes, some things were too powerful to be public knowledge.
Kratos enjoyed watching the monks train. They were incredibly flexible, and they moved with a grace and certainty that he couldn't ever hope to mimic.
One of them waved him over, inviting him to join them. "I—that might be difficult. I can't do what you guys do."
"We don't expect you to. Just try."
So he did. He watched them, and clumsily attempted to follow them through slow stances and deep stretching, but he couldn't get anywhere close to their level.
"You're stiff," they told him.
"Did you have an injury recently?" the one who'd invited him asked.
Kratos thought of his back, which had healed so well, he'd thought. "It's healed. It shouldn't be a problem."
"Your range of motion takes a lot of damage when you're injured. Was it your back?"
Kratos nodded.
"I thought it might be. Come, we'll work on that then."
The stretches burned and hurt somewhere deep in his muscles, but the next morning, even though he was sore, Kratos found himself looser and more limber and he hadn't realized that his back was still tight, that he'd been so afraid of reinjuring it that he'd been holding back.
"That is common with injuries," Chaila, as he'd learned her name to be, said when he told her about it. "But the longer you shy away from it, the harder it is to ever do the things that started it all."
"You sound like you're speaking from experience."
She stretched out her leg and tugged up her pant. There was a deep scar running up her leg, faded now, but the gravity was still evident. "An accident in the forge. It took me three months to take a step again. And I was terrified of ever setting foot in the forge again. My wife helped me find the courage to go back in."
Kratos thought of facing down his father, remembered the slight weight of Mithos on his back. "…There is a human saying that says that courage is not the absence of fear, but rather the realization that there is something more important than fear."
She smiled. "Humans have their own wisdom, I suppose."
"Do you hate them?" Dwarves had been largely removed from much of the war, but they'd been affected nonetheless.
"I try not to. Most of the world that believes in Spirits believe that Shadow is a malicious being. I've learned that that isn't true, and it's taught me that everyone has their own side to things. It is a difficult thing to remember when the bombs fall and we count our dead, but I have to. Elsewise, we slip backwards, not forwards."
Kratos smiled at her. "Dwarves have their wisdom as well."
Mithos learned the rituals here as well: the correct order to light the candles, which stones to use on which spell circle. The language was difficult, a mix of dwarven and elven.
"I'm afraid I can't help you with this one," Kratos told him, looking at the carefully written notes that Mithos had taken. "I don't know dwarven, and I can barely stumble through elven thanks to you and Martel. If it was verbal, I could probably help you, but—yeah."
The monks were particularly fond of sparring with Martel. They were superior in terms of physical fighting, but they found Martel's light magic a challenge to work with, and vice versa.
Kratos chuckled when he felt Martel drop her head on his thigh. "How was sparring?"
"Dark magic sucks," Martel grumbled.
He rubbed her back sympathetically, feeling her lean into his touch. "Gravity Wells again?"
"They're hard to get around and they mess with my aim." Her voice was a little muffled by his thigh, but he managed to understand her. She turned a bit so her voice came clearer. "It's good training, but it's annoying." Kratos snorted, and she playfully poked his ribs. "Your sympathy is overwhelming."
He just grinned at her, unapologetic.
Martel craned her neck a little to see the notebook in his lap. "Read me something?"
He smoothed some hair from her face. This was a habit they'd been settling into, him reading the stories he'd collected over their travels. Just like Martel had taken to playing the pipes that the blacksmith had given her. Calming things, things they hadn't had time for back in the capital.
"Sure. My pick?"
"I trust your taste."
Kratos told her the story of Shadow's love for Aska, forever destined to be impossible because of Aska and Luna's love, and so Shadow chose to retreat to give Aska his space, and that was the reason for day and night. It was a story he'd learned here, and he found it a very different point of view compared to how most half-elves seemed to think of Shadow, as a more menacing Spirit, used to scare their children into coming home at sunset.
Martel listened, half-dozing to the relaxing cadence of Kratos' voice, and his hand scratching lightly at her back. Kratos had a very pleasant voice, she thought, deep and measured, but highlighted with his laughter, which didn't boom as most people with deep voices did, but it slipped out, almost surprised, every time.
"Falling asleep on me?" Kratos asked, amused. "I didn't think I was that boring."
Martel thought about responding, but decided instead on snuggling closer. He just let out a huff of a laugh and continued reading, well past when she actually fell asleep.
"Electricity creates light, yes?" Yuan asked Simone, a dwarf with a handsome beard of her own, streaked with gray, and she kept her hair hidden beneath a scarf.
"It can generate the power to create light," Simone corrected.
Yuan had grown up with the humans, and their electrical devices. They tended to run on some kind of false mana, with the magitechnology, but dwarven technology used it too. He'd seen it in some of their lamps in the libraries. No fire was allowed in the libraries. "Can you teach me?"
"You're a stubborn one." Simone eyed him, her eyes bright and a very pale blue to look almost silver. "But you're willing to learn. It's not easy, I'll grant you, but aye, I'll teach you."
In truth, Simone—as well as several other dwarves who helped her teach—were thrilled to have Yuan as a student, teaching him the sigils and runes necessary for their art. They'd tried teaching half-elves before, but Yuan was having more success than they'd had.
"Which isn't saying much," Yuan said dryly over lunch. "'Cause I'm not exactly having a whole lot of success either."
Dwarven magic was based around the idea that everything could be connected to something else. The fewer steps between connections—like sand to glass—the stronger the magic. Something like wood to metal needed a great deal of strength to do, and very few mages could generate the mana necessary for it.
Their runes represented things or connections and, when carved into a material, they maintained that connection. It was how they created their ever-burning lamps, or their dull-resistant swords.
"It's very different from elven magic," Yuan told Kratos. "In the spells we grew up learning, the mana we put into the spell is channeled through the circle gathering energy through what is essentially momentum and then we shoot it. But this stuff? It's like making a permanent connection between the mana and the circle, so the spell never shoots, but it is constantly maintaining its own energy."
"I've never heard of a dwarven mage on a battlefield," Kratos said. "Perhaps that's why. It sounds like it would take an incredible amount of concentration and speed to do it effectively."
When they asked Malik about it, his eyes gleamed. "Very astute of you. Yer right; we don't have battle-mages like you lot. If our mages go to battle, they stay in the back."
"Like snipers."
"Precisely. They're too much of a liability in the thick of battle. It's why we learned to forge our weapons and armor as well as we did in the first place. To keep up."
Mithos was studying his own spells—Spirits above, no wonder dark magic was rare. The language itself was difficult enough to learn, and once you figured that out, getting the spells to work properly was tricky—when he heard pops and curses, followed by the smell of something burning.
He dropped the book on his bed, and followed the smell, summoning a ball of witchlight to guide him. The Temple was fairly well-lit, but dwarves had better night-vision than other races, and Mithos was tired of straining his eyes all the time.
"Everything okay?" he asked as Yuan stamped out the little pile of burning…something…on the ground.
"Yeah. Just…a miscalculation."
Mithos looked at the table where a small roll of tools were and a book. He'd heard that Yuan was learning dwarven technology, but he hadn't known really what went into it. "What were you trying to do?"
"Create a light. It's supposed to be a basic thing, y'know?" Yuan glared at the tools like they'd offended him. "Apparently not."
"Want some help?" Mithos smiled wryly. "I could use some time away from spell circles."
"You're an angel." Yuan tugged the book over so he could show Mithos what he was working on. He and Mithos had been working together, trying to translate dwarven magic into something they could do, not just understand. They both understood the concept perfectly well; but actually getting their runes to do anything was proving to be the real challenge.
They puzzled through it—it was simple enough in theory. Running an electric current through a piece of metal and convert that into light—but Yuan was having trouble with output and he'd almost blinded himself once before he figured out that particular problem, but the extra light had converted to heat and that was when he'd set the thing on fire.
"Like you always do," Mithos said, and wasn't surprised when his head got shoved playfully.
Kratos groaned when he heard two familiar voices whooping. "I hate them," he muttered darkly, and he heard Martel's grumbled agreement from the other bed.
Neither of them were shocked when Mithos and Yuan burst back into their shared room. "Check this out!"
Martel's bright eyes peered dangerously out of her blanket nest. It had been a long day, and she'd only gone to bed two hours before. Kratos just rolled over a little, too lazy to actually sit up, and they both immediately regretted their decisions when Yuan tapped something in his hand and it lit up like a beacon in the dark room.
"Turn it off!" Martel told him, burying her face in her pillow, purple and yellow spots dancing in her vision.
"Sorry," Yuan said hurriedly, tapping the metal again.
"The hell was that?" Kratos asked, eyes still burning a little, and keeping his palms pressed against his eyes.
"A light. Mithos helped me figure it out."
"Lampshades are a thing, Yuan. Can you learn to make one of those?"
Yuan grinned a little before planting a kiss on top of Kratos' head. "Sure thing, sunshine. Next on the list." He gave Martel an apologetic nuzzle before wishing her a good night, that he and Mithos still had stuff to work on.
"Like lampshades," Martel said.
Mithos laughed, bright as Yuan's light. "Yeah, like lampshades."
Mithos had a panic attack in the middle of the fight against Shadow. Martel had been knocked out—Yuan was slipping over to revive her, but there was no light down here. The candles he'd lit at the beginning as per tradition had gone out, and Yuan's lightning wasn't doing anything right now. Kratos was having issues even fighting Shadow—how do you hit a shadow? How do you strike it with a sword?—but Mithos was frozen, his lungs paralyzed in his chest.
(He remembers another underground Temple, remembers the terror of fighting a Spirit all on his own. He remembers winning, barely, and lying on the ground in front of the altar, bruised and feeling something broken, and how had he not even said anything to the others? Even written a note? He couldn't stand, it hurt to move. He's going to die down there, in a dark cavern, all alone)
Kratos sent a burst of air to push Mithos out of Shadow's line of fire. "Focus, Mithos! We can beat him!"
And there was Martel, climbing to her feet, a brilliantly white spell circle under her as Yuan leapt back into the fray with Kratos.
Mithos sucked in a breath.
He wasn't alone.
His family was here.
He grinned, and lit up the room with a Ray.