- - The Bad Lands - -
The training began not with ceremony, but with a grim, shared understanding. The secluded field lay on the village's southern outskirts, a forgotten scratch of land in the opposite direction from the forest and Shout End Hill. To the villagers, it was "the bad land"—a place where the soil was a thin skin over a shelf of stubborn shale, useless for the plow, incapable of supporting even goats. Thistles and wiry, gray-green grass were its only crop, and a single, wind-twisted hawthorn stood as a testament to its inhospitable nature. To Kaelen, it wasn't good or bad; it was just empty, and that made it perfect. The air here was still and heavy, smelling of hot stone and dust, a stark contrast to the damp, leafy scent of the northern woods where his nightmare had happened.
Phenex hung in the air, a hand's breadth above the ground, perfectly still. It had positioned itself to observe Kaelen from the same angle a veteran drill sergeant would use—side-on, able to see every flaw. The light within its runes pulsed in a slow, rhythmic pattern.
Kaelen stood in the center of the field, trembling. He held a basic combat stance: right foot forward, knees bent, body lowered. His remaining hand was held up near his cheek in a guarding position. It was a posture Phenex had pulled from the muscle-memory of a hundred infantry echoes. To the spear, it was elementary. To Kaelen, it was a form of torture that had lasted three hours.
Kaelen's jaw clenched. Sweat traced an itchy path down his neck. His thighs burned. The phantom ache in his missing left arm was a constant distraction, making his balance feel perpetually off-kilter. "Easy for you to say," he grunted, forcing his knees down another painful inch. "You're just floating. You don't have to do it."
The spear's response was a wave of cold clarity.
The words were a psychic punch. Kaelen's breath hitched. The image was vivid and horrifying. A hot surge of pain lanced through his chest. He wanted to scream, but the terrible truth stole his voice. He remained silent, face flushing with shame and anger, focusing on not collapsing.
When the sun reached its zenith, Phenex relented.
Kaelen collapsed onto the dry grass. He drank greedily from his waterskin, then ate his bread and cheese in sullen silence, refusing to look at the spear.
The silent treatment was transparent. Phenex, connected to the boy's emotions, felt the storm: resentment, embarrassment, wounded pride. It processed this with a resigned sadness, sifting through echoes of young recruits. *Better he rages now and quits this pace,* it reasoned, *than I coddle him into false confidence. A slow foundation is better than a swift, brittle tower.* It decided to weather the silence.
The afternoon brought footwork.
Phenex had used the break to create a course. A line of stones to hop, a thorny bush to circle, a patch of loose scree, and the hawthorn's roots to weave between. The goal was agility and unthinking reaction.
The voice became a relentless drumbeat. Kaelen launched himself. He hopped the stones. He stumbled sidestepping the bush. He regained his footing, pushed toward the scree, slipped, and went down hard, skinning his palm.
He pushed up, wiped blood on his trousers. He ran, hopped, sidestepped. He crossed the scree with careful, mincing steps—too slow.
For three hours, the cycle repeated. Run, stumble, fall. Each failure was punctuated by Phenex's dispassionate critique.
The sun beat down. Kaelen's tunic was plastered to his skin. Every muscle ached. The raw skin on his palm stung. The phantom limb pulsed. Each fall chipped away at his resolve.
Finally, after a graceless sprawl into the dust, he snapped. He lay there, chest heaving, then pushed up onto his knees. "This is bullshit!" he yelled, his voice raw. "I'm done! I'm out!"
A spike of alarm shot through their bond. Phenex lifted sharply from the grass.
"Yeah? REALLY?" Kaelen shot back, scrambling to his feet. He used his own voice now, loud and cracking. "As far as I remember, YOU made this a mission! I just wanted to finish it! You decided I need to become a soldier!"
Kaelen flinched, but anger rallied into bravado. "Hah! You think a wounded beast could kill me? That thing's probably dead! A five-year-old could kill a boar missing an eye!"
The spear sent a single, crystalline image: the sight of his own left shoulder, the puckered scar, the undeniable absence.
The dam broke. "YOU!" Kaelen screamed, tears of fury springing to his eyes. He stumbled forward, pointing a trembling finger. "Don't you DARE bring my left hand into this! Don't you EVER use that against me!"
Kaelen saw not cruelty, but an unbearable, smothering certainty. A future of relentless training where he would never measure up, where his loss was always a weapon.
"Really?" he hissed, voice venomous. "Then try and stop me. I'm going. Right now. I don't need you to protect me. I never asked for it!"
He turned and ran. Not toward the village, but south, toward the sparse scrubland that eventually gave way to the rocky foothills—a direction devoid of his goal, but away from Phenex. It was a run of pure, directionless defiance.
Phenex did not follow immediately. It hung, its glow flickering erratically. It felt Kaelen's heart—not just anger, but a cold, steel-hard resolution. The boy was serious. He would find a way to the boar, logic be damned.
A torrent of memory-fragments assaulted the spear: prideful charges, foolish solo missions, countless moments of youthful folly ending badly. It felt a terror deeper than any battle—the terror of foresight.
It had miscalculated. It had sought to forge a weapon but had driven the raw metal toward disaster. Confusion, fear, and guilt washed over it.
Suddenly, a new, sharper pang echoed through the bond. Not just emotional pain, but acute, physical panic. Kaelen had stopped running. The spear's senses snapped outward, focusing down the tether. It perceived it immediately: Kaelen, in his blind sprint, had not watched his footing. The "bad land" had lived up to its name. He'd stepped into a hidden animal burrow or a crack in the shale. There was a wrenching twist, a spike of pain—an ankle, likely sprained, maybe worse.
The boy's resolution curdled into shocked, breathless agony. He was down again, but this time not from a training fall. He was hurt, alone, and miles from help in a direction no one would think to look.
Phenex was moving before the full wave of pain finished echoing. It shot forward, a blur of wood and muted light, covering the distance between them in seconds. It found Kaelen curled on the ground, clutching his right ankle, his face pale, tears of pain and frustration mixing with the dusty streaks on his cheeks.
"Go away," Kaelen choked out, not looking at it. "I don't need your help. This... this is your fault too."
Kaelen was silent, breathing heavily through the pain. The adrenaline of his rage was fading, leaving the cold, hard reality of his situation. He was trapped. By his injury, by the distance, by his own stubbornness.
Phenex offered, its tone hesitant.
"It'll take hours," Kaelen muttered, despair creeping in. "And it'll be dark before we're halfway. Ma will... she'll be terrified." The thought of his mother's worry, fresh after the trauma of his coma, was a new weight on his conscience.
Phenex considered this. The logistical problem was clear: slow, painful progress with high risk of further injury versus immediate extraction. Its recent self-training had been in moving itself. The principle of lifting an external object was similar, but the application was direct, physical. It would not be an energy cradle. It would be a simple, brutal test of strength and balance. It would require Kaelen to hold on.
Kaelen looked up, confused and wary. "Hold onto you? And you'll... what, fly? With me hanging off?"
The idea was terrifying. To dangle from a flying spear over the hard, rocky ground. Yet, the throbbing in his ankle decided for him. He gave a single, tight nod. "Okay. Don't... don't go too high."
Phenex began to rise. It was not a smooth elevator, but a powerful, steady ascent that immediately strained Kaelen's grip. His feet left the ground, and he let out a yelp, squeezing the shaft with all his strength. The spear angled forward, and they were moving, picking up speed as it pushed against the air. The wind rushed past Kaelen's ears, a roaring river of sound. He squeezed his eyes shut, burying his face against the wood, feeling every minor adjustment Phenex made as a sway or a dip. It was nothing like the peaceful floating he'd imagined. It was a wild, bucking ride, a battle against gravity and the elements. He could feel the immense strain in the bond—not just physical, but a deep, focused expenditure of will from Phenex.
But it was fast. The bad land streaked away beneath them, the hawthorn tree vanishing in a heartbeat. They cleared the southern ridge, and the familiar, scattered lights of the village huts appeared in the gathering dusk. Phenex began a slow, careful descent, its speed bleeding off as it aimed for the clearing before Kaelen's home.
- - The Village - -
Elara was in the vegetable patch beside the hut, her back to them, harvesting the last of the autumn carrots. She straightened, rubbing the small of her back, and turned—just in time to see her son dropping from the darkening sky, clinging for dear life to a loudly humming, glowing spear.
They landed with a soft thump and a stumble. Kaelen's legs gave way, and he collapsed onto the soft earth of the garden path, his arms screaming from the effort of holding on. Phenex thudded to the ground beside him, its glow guttering like a spent candle, the runes on its shaft dim and dark. The flight had drained it utterly.
For a second, Elara simply stared, her mind refusing to process the sight. Then, reality crashed in. "Kaelen!" she shrieked, dropping her basket. She ran forward, her eyes wide with horror, taking in his dusty, tear-streaked face, his trembling limbs, and the clearly swollen, discolored ankle. "By the stones, what happened? What is this?"
Before Kaelen could form a word, Phenex made its attempt. Focusing its last dregs of energy, it tried to project a thought, an explanation, a calming assurance toward the terrified woman.
Nothing happened.
The connection, the golden chain of the soul-bond, existed only with Kaelen. To Elara, Phenex was an object. Silent. Inanimate. Its consciousness slammed against a wall of biological separation it could not cross. The frustration was a sharp, silent scream in its own mind.
Elara's attention was solely on her son. The spear was just the thing he'd foolishly brought with him. Her hands flew to his face, his shoulders. "What did you do? Where were you? I thought you were at the old mill! I thought you were with Jax!" Her voice was low, shaking. Her hands, which had been gentle a moment before, gripped his shoulders tightly. "You lied to me? After everything? After I sat by your bed for a week thinking you were going to die?" A sob broke through her anger. "You lied?"
"Ma, I was just training, I—" Kaelen tried, his voice small.
"Training? TRAINING?" She looked from his ankle to the dull, lifeless spear on the ground. "With that? That thing you won't let out of your sight? The thing you had when you..." She couldn't say it. "Is this what it does? It makes you think you can jump off cliffs and fly?"
"He didn't make me! And he saved me!" Kaelen burst out, the words tumbling forth in a desperate, clumsy defense. "My ankle got hurt in the bad lands, and I couldn't walk, and it was getting dark, and he... he brought me home! He flew me! He's not bad, Ma, he's my friend! He's been helping me!"
The declaration, sincere and childlike, only made it worse in Elara's eyes. Her face crumpled. She wasn't just angry now; she was heartbroken. The tears came freely. "It's a spear, Kaelen! A piece of wood and metal! It's not a friend! Friends don't get you almost killed and then... then make you believe they can fly!" She wiped her face with a rough hand, her shoulders slumping under an invisible weight. "Don't you understand? First your father to the winter fever, then you to that monster. I am alone. You are all I have left in this world. Every time you walk out that door, my heart stops. And now you're talking to weapons and getting hurt chasing... what? Revenge? With a magical stick?"
She glared at the spear on the ground. "That thing was there when you were broken. Now I see it in your eyes—this hardness, this need to go back and fight. I won't let it fill your head with stories and get you killed. I won't lose you." Her voice dropped to a whisper. "I can't."
Kaelen looked at his crying mother. He saw how scared she was, and his own anger faded. "It's not stories, Ma," he said, his voice shaky. "It's just a spear. But it's a good one. It helped me. My ankle got hurt, and I held on, and it moved. It brought me home. It's just trying to help."
He explained like a child, mixing truth and belief, making the impossible seem simple.
Elara stared at him, then at the silent spear. Her son was defending it like it was a person. He believed in it completely. That scared her more than the flying.
With a tired sigh, she turned back to his ankle. The argument could wait. He was hurt.
"Come on," she said, her voice rough. She helped him up, letting him lean on her. "Inside. We need to wrap this." She glanced at Phenex on the path. Her look was tired and annoyed. "Bring your spear. It can sit by the fire. But no more talk of flying. No more training in the bad lands. Understand?"
It wasn't agreement. It was a tired truce. She was letting him keep his strange toy to get him inside. As Kaelen hobbled, leaning on her, he grabbed Phenex's shaft. The wood felt cold and dead.
- - Kaelen's Hut - -
The door closed behind them. Inside, by the firelight, Elara cleaned his scrapes and wrapped his ankle, working in heavy silence. Kaelen sat quietly, holding the silent spear.
Phenex, lying still in his hand, felt it all. It felt the mother's fear in the tense air. It felt the boy's shame and loyalty. And it felt its own loneliness. It had done everything to bring him home, but to her, it was just a thing. A thing that gave her son dangerous ideas. Its bond was real, but its voice ended with Kaelen. The quiet in the hut taught it a hard lesson about being a weapon, even a living one.