Vigor Mortis

Chapter 112: Parallels

“Welcome to your first day of combat class, trainees. Each and every one of you knows how to fight, but here you will learn how to fight like a Templar.”

As planned I ended my torpor this morning an hour before first light, waking my grumbling roommate despite her displeasure and ensuring the both of us get to the courtyard well before the designated meeting time. Gina was frustrated with me for waking her, but our instructor was already present when we arrived and I think showing up first made a good first impression. As soon as the island above stopped blocking the light, all the trainees were sent to run laps, and every single one of them that arrived even a second late was pushed far harder than the rest of us. Gina mellowed out after seeing that, but I’m still just confused. Does the instructor think that the people who are bad at waking up need more training or something? I’m not sure I see how that’s related. Maybe it’s a human thing.

We ran for an hour before finally being told to stop, Xavier and Melik huffing and puffing with exhaustion after being given the instructor’s extra-intense training. Bently was also late, but he seemed unphased by the added work. Now, with everyone standing at attention in front of our instructor in various states of exhaustion, he finally addresses us with something other than a barked order.

“Templars fight, but we are not just fighters. Templars wage war, but we are not just warriors. Templars protect, but we are not just protectors. The Templars are not just the blades of the church, we are the face. We are exemplars, paragons, the absolute best of the best, not merely because we must be the best to conquer the challenges the Watcher has given us but because we are the people the rest of our country looks up to. When we fight, we win, regardless of the enemy and regardless of the situation. That is your expectation and your duty, and when I am done with you you will be capable of nothing short of total domination compared to any lesser organization. Which is all of them. It will be the job of your other instructors to teach you when to actually exert this power.”

I frown under my helmet, holding in a shudder. The last thing I want is more power.

“Some of you think you are hot shit, that you are strong enough to represent our god already. I will disabuse you of this notion, but first it’s time to see where you all stack up. Enhancers, line up to my left. Mages, line up to my right.”

Harvey (the former soldier) and Melik (the young kid who declined to say much when we introduced ourselves) head over to the mage side, Gina (my roommate) and Bently (the tasty gu— I mean the former hunter!) walk to the enhancer side, whereas Xavier (the talkative, chipper guy) and I (the monster) stay where we are.

“You have too much wax in your ears, trainees?” the instructor asks Xavier and I.

“M… my talent… can let me function as either, sir,” Xavier explains, breathing hard.

“Then why are you huffing and puffing like an asthmatic dragon?” the instructor demands.

“You… told me not to… use my talent during the warm-up, sir.”

“So it should be pretty fucking obvious where you stand, shouldn’t it?” the instructor snaps. “Mage side. Trainee Lark, why the fuck are you standing around?”

I flinch, failing to suppress the pounding anxiety of embarrassment.

“I… I’m sorry sir, I don’t know where I stand,” I admit. “What is an enhancer?”

“Do you fight by empowering your body or attacking with magic?” the instructor barks.

I don’t know if I ’empower’ my body, per se, my body just kind of does whatever it feels like, but if those are the two options I suppose my choice is obvious.

“I fight with my body, sir,” I tell him.

“Enhancer side.”

In some ways, I think the worst part of blushing is the fact that only I will ever know when I’m doing it. The heat and the pressure in my cheeks seems as though it is laughing at me, mocking both my stupidity and the false humanity that causes my body to react so pointlessly. It’s just monstrous blood pulsing behind a monstrous face, incapable of actually making my skin any darker.

“Now that this simple fucking sorting exercise is taken care of, I’m going to pair you up and you are going to spar with each other. Lark and Gina. Xavier and Harvey. Melik and Bently. This is your opportunity to demonstrate what you do and do not need to be taught. Try not to break each other.”

Next thing I know my roommate and I are standing across from each other. We don’t have any weapons, but we still have our armor on. Gina takes a low stance, her hands curled into fists as she prepares herself for battle. I, meanwhile, stand straight ramrod still, having absolutely no idea how to ‘spar’ but unable to bring myself to ask. I sort of know the word. A mock combat, I think? Like a game?

“A fistfight in plate mail, eh? I promise I’ll go easy on you,” Gina comments. “You going to get ready?”

“I suppose I’m as ready as I’m going to get?” I hedge.

She snorts derisively, then leaps my way, fists lashing out. I intuit that I’m probably not supposed to stand there and get punched, so I hop backwards, avoiding her blows and trying to divine the purpose of this exercise. Even if she hits me, which she won’t, it’s not like I’m going to be hurt by an attack like that. Is that the point? Are we supposed to punch each other because it’s kind of like fighting but doesn’t hurt? I don’t really know how to punch, though. If not for these gauntlets I would stab myself in the palm just for trying to form fists in the first place. How much force is appropriate? Am I allowed to do other things? I suppose I could try to grab her, but then what? It’s not like I can bite her throat out or snap her neck.

I’ve been avoiding her while I think, and the more I do it the more it all feels like a game of tag. A pleasant nostalgia washes over me as I have that thought, as well as a realization. Of course! Tag! That speed-training game kids play! This is just like that! Heh, maybe I should stop using my legs and jump around on my hands? Well, I suppose Gina is a lot faster than a child, so I’ll give her a bit longer to try and hit me normally before I handicap myself.

I slow down a bit, giving her more time to punch as I dance around her blows. In a game of tag, it’s important to not completely overwhelm the other kids or else they stop having fun. Gina is much faster than any other human I’ve met except for Alan, and I suppose Vita if you count her. This is not a high bar, especially considering how much stronger I’ve gotten since then, but I still enjoy testing myself by keeping as close as possible without ever getting touched.

“Are you not going to fucking hit me?” Gina growls, the fury in her voice startling me.

Wait, she doesn’t sound like she’s having fun at all! Oh no, did I do something wrong? I can’t see her face with the helmet on, so I must’ve missed all the emotional cues… ah! Wait, I’ve been so rude!

“Sorry! Do you want to switch?” I ask her. “I’ll be ‘it’ if you want.”

“Oh, fuck you!” she snaps back, her attacks getting all the more furious… and thereby all the easier to predict. “Fight back, you bitch!”

“Language! Also, I don’t know how!”

“Just hit me!”

I… guess she has a point. This is like tag, but I kind of forgot that this isn’t actually supposed to be tag. This is the next step or something. But how do I hit her back? The instructor insisted that we not break each other. I duck under a wild fist and tap her chest with the tips of my gauntleted fingers, hard enough to elicit a satisfying ‘clack’ from the collision of chitin on chitin, but not hard enough to actually hurt her. Is that right? It’s enough to establish that I could have killed her, but not enough to actually cause any harm. That should do the trick.

After a few more repetitions of this I start to enjoy it quite a bit. It’s pretty much the same as tag, but with an extra element added that forces me to stay as close to the other player as possible, because if I just jump away I can’t touch them back. Rather than simply avoiding every blow, I have to try to position myself around them to enable counterattacks, which is only possible when I bait Gina into leaving herself vulnerable or manage to outmaneuver her. It’s enough of an extra challenge to be interesting, so I’m a bit disappointed when the instructor finally calls off the fights. Gina also seems disappointed, immediately protesting the early end to our game, but the instructor just yells at her and makes us stop anyway. From there, we are all given a critical deconstruction of how we performed in the spar, and I start getting the feeling that I have been doing it wrong the entire time. Sure enough, our instructor’s words for me are less than glowing.

“That was juvenile,” he chides. “We are not here to play games, trainee. If you just want to show off then I suggest you leave.”

Oh, shit. Uh, so it’s not a game? Then what is it? Spars are like make-believe fights, aren’t they? I swallow, heart hammering in my chest more now than it ever did against Gina.

“I… I’m sorry, sir. I’ve never sparred with anyone before.”

He pauses at that.

“You’ve never received any formal combat training before?” he asks.

“No, sir,” I confirm. “I’m sorry. I don’t know any of the rules, and I didn’t want to hurt Trainee Gina by accident. I’ve never tried to fight without killing.”

Not strictly true, but I use my webs to capture prey alive and I obviously can’t use those here. It’s unfortunate that I may never use them again. I do like my webs. They have always been my favorite adaptation.

“I’m not that fucking weak, Lark,” Gina hisses.

But she is, though? Even with how restricted and restrained I am in this snare humans call ‘armor,’ I could kill her quite easily. I admit, she’s strong for a human. But there’s a reason humans need to travel in teams to fight monsters.

“Trainee Gina, you need to control your emotions,” the combat instructor snaps at her. “You might have been able to actually land a hit if you fought smart.”

A sharp exhalation of breath is the only response I hear from her. …I guess she’s mad at me.

“Sorry,” I whisper, but that doesn’t seem to help.

Our next class is one on Valkan law. It’s a much smaller room, with chairs to sit on and desks in front of them. On each desk is a collection of papers, holes punched in one margin and bound together with twine, scribed with the things we will need to learn. I don’t anticipate having any difficulty remembering all the laws, of course, but I do get embarrassed once again when I have to explain to the instructor that I don’t know how to read.

“Your preacher should not have recommended you unless you were literate,” my instructor grumbles.

Unlike the combat course, where everyone was in armor, I’m now the only person in armor. Our instructor is a graying old woman, scowling down her hooked nose at me in response to my admission.

“I… apologies. Should I leave?” I ask.

“No,” she grunts. “I will set up the remedial courses. This happens. I will be penning a stern complaint to your sponsoring Templar, however. Who brought you here?”

“Um,” I stutter. “High Templar Galdra Karthala, ma’am.”

She opens her mouth, and then closes it.

“Ah,” is all she says.

About fifteen minutes into the lesson—which just involves everyone else reading while I sit around and wait—the instructor walks over with some more papers and starts teaching me the alphabet. It would be interesting if not for the fact that the whole thing is done at a frustratingly slow pace. She keeps stopping to make me repeat things that she said, quizzing me on information that I would rather just get all in sequence. Reading does not seem at all complicated: there’s just a bunch of rules and information I have to memorize, and I memorize everything automatically. If she could just tell me how every letter works all at once, we would be done. I don’t really have the courage to ask her to hurry things along, though, especially not when she’s taking her time to teach me personally.

There are many more things to learn. I both love and hate the ethics course, because it is simultaneously interesting, enlightening, and painful. The magic course is okay, but it’s mostly just everyone except Melik learning cancel commands. Melik apparently has a metamancy license. It’s thoroughly boring, because while everyone else spends most of the class being corrected over and over again on the right sequence for the somatic cancel command, the first time I get it right I know exactly how to get it right every time in the future. From there I just have to practice doing it more and more quickly, which is neither difficult nor interesting. The memory of the necessary movements does not fade, and can be sent to my limbs as many times as I desire.

Throughout the day, Gina refuses to meet my gaze with any expression other than a scowl, and I don’t understand why. On our way back to our room, I feel her approaching me at a brisk walk so I turn to apologize again and am immediately surprised when she places both hands on my helmet and yanks.

Instantly, one of my own hands reaches up to clamp down on the chitinous head-bucket and I leap away, hissing furiously at her as I land in a low crouch on three limbs. Only a supreme act of will stops me from extending my spines and ripping my armor open from the inside. Empty-handed, Gina blinks in surprise at my animalistic display.

Embarrassment attacks me once again. I can’t believe I hissed at her! I kept the helmet on, sure, but I know humans don’t hiss at people like that. I’m not even sure they can! Did I seriously fuck this up already?

“S-sorry!” I squeak out, but I’m too stressed and frozen stiff to actually stand up like a normal person.

“Okay, seriously, what the fuck is wrong with you?” Gina grumbles. “You’re so goddamn fishy!”

“I… what?” I sputter back.

I’ve only eaten fish a few times, and I’m very thankful to have never grown any trait from a fish! Gina just lets out an irritated hiss of breath and steps past me before I manage to calm myself enough to get back on two feet. Dazed and surprised, I follow her back to our room.

“If I catch you staring at me while I sleep again, I swear to fuck I will find a way to hurt you for it,” she snaps at me.

I nod silently and face the wall before descending into torpor.

“…I’m sorry, I don’t normally ask or talk about stuff like this,” I ask Lady Vesuvius a few days later, “but do you have any idea what I should do?”

Gina’s treatment of me has not gotten any more copacetic since our first day of classes, and it has been bothering me enough that I feel the need to ask for advice about it. She even keeps trying to sneakily remove my helmet! Penelope just chuckles softly, shaking her head at me while she grips one of my wrists like a vice.

“You are adorably inept at social situations,” she answers, not unkindly. “It makes me rather nostalgic. Ready?”

“Ready ma’am,” I confirm, and then I wince as she chops my pinky finger off with a meat cleaver.

As previously instructed, I grab one of the unconscious mice nearby and swallow it, letting Penelope watch my rapid regeneration in action. Mice are exceptionally weak, so the first one merely stops the bleeding while it takes another two to actually regenerate the finger. A gleefully enraptured expression lights up Penelope’s face as she watches my body repair itself. This is the third time we’ve done this today, and immediately afterwards I expect we will start the fourth.

“Your roommate is obviously insecure, and your actions have made her feel her ineptitude,” Penelope explains. “It’s a common problem among talentless individuals, colloquially or otherwise. Even odds on whether she has a chronic issue with self-esteem or if your demonstration of complete physical dominance combined with the fact that you admitted to being a criminal is making her feel unsafe, but either way her mental state requires her to establish superiority in as many areas as she is able. I’m going to take the whole hand this time. Ready?”

The whole hand!? Oh Watcher, I’m not ready for that but I lie and tell her I am anyway. I hope August forgives me for the falsehood. I bite down a snarl as she cleaves it off and drops it in the bucket with the rest of my dismembered body parts. I quickly swallow more food, shuddering with every unconscious rodent that falls down my throat.

“I’m not entirely sure I understand what you mean,” I admit. “The fact that I’m good at stuff makes her feel bad? That’s called envy, right?”

“Well, yes, I suppose,” Penelope allows. “But whatever you want to call it, she’s just a weak person.”

“Okay, but what do I do about that? How do I stop her from constantly being mad at me about stuff? Do I just have to… perform worse? That should make her feel better, right?”

Penelope gives me a mildly disgusted look.

“Watcher’s eyes, no. You could, and it would appease her temporarily, but ultimately you would just be opening yourself up for more abuse. It’s not like the problems that caused her to treat you poorly would randomly disappear. You would be lowering yourself down to her level for nothing. No, no, I would recommend the opposite. Establish your dominance so thoroughly that no hope in her heart remains towards the prospect of besting you. Crush her completely, and thereby replace that disdain with fear.”

I blink in surprise.

“That… I don’t think I can do that, ma’am. I just… I don’t really want to ‘dominate’ anybody? That’s pretty much the opposite of what I would be comfortable with.”

Penelope busts out laughing for some reason, but at this point I’m getting used to her finding amusement in things I don’t understand.

“Then just take off your helmet and show her your teeth,” she says after catching her breath. “I can’t imagine a former hunter trying to bully you after that.”

“I—Lady Vesuvius! You know I’m not allowed to do that!”

My biomancer shrugs, walking over to the door and ringing a bell to summon a slave and ordering him to fetch us more rodents.

“I know that you have been instructed not to, but what you have been told to do and what you will be allowed to do are two different things.”

I look at her blankly, eyebrows furrowed.

“I don’t understand,” I tell her.

Penelope allows herself a smug grin, raising a single finger as she prepares to lecture me.

“Think for a moment. To keep this secret you are required to spend all day and all night, every day and every night, in that armor. You can’t even bathe, which is a problem that will continue to compound, and I imagine it’s a hassle to find good times and places to eat. Everything about your situation is explicitly suspicious to everyone around you, most of whom are inquisitive youths, and to top it all off you spend the majority of the day entirely without supervision, in situations wherein it would be simple to admit your true nature without it ever reaching your superiors. You are, obviously, being tested.”

“Every promise is a test,” I tell her. “You fail by breaking it.”

She waves dismissively at me.

“Perhaps, but the important test here is not about whether you fail. It is a test about what happens when you fail. It is inconceivable that the Templars genuinely believe you have a chance of keeping this secret. Your situation makes far more sense if they just want the justification to lock down the information after you make it known, in case the act of doing so blows up in everyone’s face.”

“You think there’s a chance people will resort to explosives?” I ask, aghast.

“What? No, Lark, that’s a metaphor. No one is going to literally explode if you take your helmet off in front of your roommate. And again, you absolutely should do that.”

“I don’t know,” I hedge. “Doesn’t it seem kind of overcomplicated and counterproductive if the Templars gave me orders they expect me to fail at?”

Penelope sneers.

“Trust me, it happens. Lark, I assure you either the Templars expect you to fail or they are so thoroughly incompetent at enabling your success you may as well quit now. Besides, I bet half of this whole fiasco is just Galdra laughing at the idea of you having to sleep in full plate.”

“I don’t sleep,” I point out. “And anyway, whether or not I’m supposed to, I don’t like the idea of revealing myself! I don’t want people to know I’m a man-eating monster!”

Penelope sighs, returning to casting spells on my recently-regrown hand. I sulk silently as she works, annoyed by her advice. I was so happy when Galdra told me that I could be a Templar instead of a vrothizo. A person instead of a monster. I can’t believe anyone would suggest I return to the opposite.

“Someone once taught me, albeit accidentally, that the most damaging thing you can do to yourself is pretend to be someone you aren’t,” Penelope says suddenly. “It’s a lesson I wish I’d learned sooner. You are walking to the right destination, Lark, but you are taking the wrong road.”

“That’s… another metaphor,” I intuit. “Do you mind explaining?”

“Ugh, you’re far too much like her. What I mean is that you’re obsessed with this idea of being a good human, and it’s not going to do anything but cause you pain. Cast that idea out of your mind and just focus on being a good person. A good vrothizo! Your body is the value you add to this world which no one else can. Embrace your nature.”

I can barely believe what I’m hearing.

“Embrace my nature!?” I repeat, aghast. “My nature is… I hurt so many—”

“Lark, may I be blunt with you?” she asks, cutting me off with a tone like a snake coiling to strike.

“I… yes ma’am?” I answer carefully.

“If you don’t stop whining about the measly ten people you hurt, I’m going to grow you a large intestine so I can give you hemorrhoids.”

“M-ma’am!?”

She stops casting on me, her glare intensifying.

“I’m serious. Get over it. Guilt exists to remind you of the lessons you need to internalize. Beyond that threshold, it is pointless, and you clearly learned your lesson ages ago. If you want to amount to anything you need to stop beating yourself up about it, because the first step to making a positive difference in the world is believing that you can.“

I don’t have a response to that, so I fall into silence again. Believing I can, huh? It’s not really that I don’t believe I can do good so much as I don’t think I know how. With the Templars, my hope is that I don’t need to trust myself. I can just do what good people tell me to do and make a difference that way. And if I ever stop doing the right thing, the good people can stop me.

I glance back at Penelope to find she’s still staring at me, a calculating expression on her face. I wonder what it would be like to have her unflappable conviction.

“I think to do the most good, one must always embrace their nature,” she says softly. “I realize our natures are not inherently good, Lark. They can be horrible temptresses, yes, but denying one’s nature does not make it go away. It merely makes it quieter, more insidious, and in many ways more powerful. You cannot destroy your nature, nor can you lock it up.”

The words are chilling, an exact reflection of my greatest fears.

“Then what am I supposed to do?” I ask helplessly.

“You embrace it,” she repeats. “You master it, guide it, but also you find ways to revel in it. Our natures are not good, but neither are they evil. If your nature is to harm, you can still bring harm to the deserving. If your nature is to protect, you can still protect the corrupt. And if your nature is cruelty, you can find ways to love that part of yourself while doing the least amount of damage. You need not listen to your base desires all the time, or even most of the time, but if you do not find ways to satisfy them they will consume you from the inside out.”

Hugging myself, I look away, but she steps forward and grabs my chin to force me to meet her eyes.

“It is okay to be who you are, Lark,” she promises me. “Do it openly and with vigor. Some people may hate you for that, but ultimately being a vrothizo is the very thing that gives you the most power to help.”

“Vrothizo eat people,” I whisper.

“Some of them do,” Penelope agrees. “You don’t have to.”

“I already did!”

She grins at me like she’s remembering an old joke.

“Huh,” she says. “Well, quit doing that then.”

“I… I mean I did that too! Obviously.”

“Then we’re square,” she answers, shrugging.

I glower at her as she chuckles to herself, the only one to understand whatever reference she’s making.

“It’s really not that simple, ma’am,” I grumble.

“I think you’ll find that it is exactly that simple,” Penelope disagrees. “The problem is the fact that being simple does not at all make something easy. At least for most people.”

I sigh through my nose, still annoyed.

“…No offense, ma’am, but what if you’re wrong? What if, the moment I stop hating myself for what I’ve done, I find an excuse to do it again?”

She considers that for a moment, tapping her chin. Eventually, she sighs, letting an expression of begrudged disappointment briefly pass over her face before saying her next words.

“If I may answer your question with a question,” she says, “why would the Mistwatcher have made you a vrothizo if that was not what he wished for you to bring to his service?”

Oh. Oh, shit. My eyes widen as I realize this is the suicide thing all over again. Preacher Gregory had to push that lesson Galdra taught me into my thick skull. I was given life because I’m supposed to live. Wishing for death is tantamount to wishing away the Mistwatcher’s purpose for me. So by the same token, wishing away my body…

“Looks like that got through to you, at least,” Penelope says, a dim frown on her face.

“I… maybe,” I admit. “I still don’t know how exactly to ’embrace myself,’ but…”

“You’ll figure it out,” Penelope dismisses. “You are exceptional, Lark. Do not let your lessers drag you down to their level. And if you make a few mistakes on your path to self-acceptance, well…”

She kneels down, rummaging around inside the bucket of my amputated body parts before pulling out a finger. Standing up, she dangles it high in the air, smirking as she stares at my black, clawed digit.

“… Eating a finger or two isn’t so bad.”

She opens her mouth and drops it down her throat.