Hulking through a manmade forest of spears, a young adult of twenty something odd years arrived right under the open sky of the shattered roof of a vault beyond the castle walls.
He had followed a hint by a madman blazing his swords on the castle guards in the maze of the vaults below.
The hint itself was simple, "There is a vault with a broken roof. Find it and your freedom is within eyesight."
The madman had brown or black hair, singular in the way each hair strand interlocked. Shaking himself back to reality, "Uh, still can't remember that madman." The young adult put down the one he'd carried all this way.
"Everyone!" He turned around exclaiming to get the attention. "We are here! Let's go back home!"
The one he had settled down asked in a murmur. "Are you sure Castroph? Is there even a home left for us?"
Even that murmur scaled with the vault's size, ever becoming a scream of truth from a whisper of worry.
Castroph chose that moment to hone in on his magic, to keep the people together. Thus, he proclaimed.
"I, Knight Castroph of Cleaving, take the oath that all of you will reach your home! If anything stands in our way, will be met by me," as he raised his arms stairs began forming made of fake sky effect of the action of sky.
"Witness the power I took from the Monarch and watch as we triumph over catastrophes that have come to take our world from us!" Continuing his words, each of the fake sky patches rising one after the other gained a block of earth above them.
The patches of fake sky and the blocks of earth together formed a flight of stairs that reached to the top of the roof from the bottom behind Castroph. He had done it.
He had become a Knight through and through.
Castroph never knew whether gaining their freedom would be true but his and everyone's freedom was within eyesight. And away from the honey-laden words of the Monarch Gweren.
Meanwhile, Monarch Gweren was letting his mind unravel the mystery of how Cheal managed to avoid his will revelation through starlight.
Cheal had thrown several daggers at Gweren in the last three minutes since their fight began. None ever came closer than a finger's length away from their intended target on Gweren's body.
"Come on, it is only going to sting!" Cheal rasped as he stabbed where Gweren's eye was a moment ago.
"Mmm, hmm," Gweren nodded affirming his new location to be behind Cheal's back.
Cheal quick to the response thrust back with his sword from above. Gweren dodged it without ever changing his position.
He hadn't gone on the offensive. "So, how did to you create a stolen action?" Analysing Cheal's daggers gave him this conclusion. His will revelation showed glimpses of certain situations the daggers had gone through.
"Why aren't you using actions?!" Cheal's frustration bubbled. He was running out of daggers to throw, four of his daggers caught in four different fake skies and two slid handle deep into the walls of the throne hall.
Gweren walked around walking right through his own fake skies he had placed in the throne hall. Whenever he did, his body became brighter and more colorful, then he walked out through the fake sky patch and landed on the other side blinding the room in a flash for a split second.
His choice to travel through his fake skies was to become the sky's only thing that pierces it, the starlight. Thus, an effect of his bestowed action.
"Are you not aware of whose subset the actions magic is?" Gweren sat back down on his throne. He hadn't taken a gaze out of the keep, for he wanted to learn of Cheal's secret. "It looks like you wish to not use any of your actual secrets, boy. Be gone then, I have an empire to worry of."
Gweren's hand backhanded the air in front of him. Imitating his will, the air and light suffusing the throne hall violently ruptured in a cacophony.
The main keep of the castle lost its top above the throne hall. The sky above became the new roof for that hall.
Still Cheal stood there, defiantly. He had drawn five daggers from his armour stabbing them into chinks of it while crashing against that violent rupture.
"That…huh, that...huh. What was that!" His voice felt sharpened even to his own damaged ears.
Cheal's presence in the newly furbished hall spoke of his tenacity. Gweren did not mean to let the boy survive, yet here he was.
"That's a clever way to survive an attack. No major or minor damages to your body, except for paper cuts." Gweren's gaze revealed details to him and him alone, but none told of the secrets that the boy had used when his vision wasn't on him.
"Impressive." He applauded the boy.
However Cheal's eyes weren't searching for where Gweren was, he knew it from the voice. What he searched glinted in the rubble all around.
His daggers were free.
Scrambling to get them, he rushed in the same zigzag manner as he did when the wanderer in the brown overcoat had told him to run during their travel to Cleaving.
Gweren saw the glinting daggers too. He stood up to pick one up by hand.
He did not want his magic to touch the daggers anymore before he had assessed them better physically.
Gweren's slow walk among the rubble gave Cheal time to pick the rest from the rubble, and he had a thread in his other hand. What were his intentions? What could he create using simple thread and daggers? Gweren's will revelation had told him that the thread was ordinary, but the same revelation had marked the very boy scrambling around for daggers as one too early.
The same could be said of the wanderer who massacred all the guards in the inner castle. His brown overcoat trailed behind him as he ascended the flight to the keep's tower from the inner castle.
His brown overcoat matched the dark shadows or did the shadows choose to match the ashen marks of the wanderer's coat? The overcoat might know if it could have talked.
Every step he took he saw another knight slain by someone with praiseworthy swordsmanship. He studied the cuts, thrusts and parries that each sword and its owner might have received in the hours since the fight began.
This boy wanted to know how good was his first partner and whether that partner was worth being one.
Corpses did not speak; they showed the stories of their battle. Each ending within the maximum of ten exchanges.
Hefting any good longswords and spears on the way was the second task the boy began. He needed a few new weapons.
But he never stopped putting some random coins in some weird places. Sometimes in a knight's armour plate, other times in between a joint.
Some coins lay very openly as if inviting people to pick it up. A trail of Beret coins.
Each coin's value was different but the boy drew them out of his brown overcoat. How did these many lay within it and not drag the boy down hadn't occurred in his mind for last couple of days.
Before that? 'Hmm, I guess after this few hours those thoughts will return. Maybe the first one will be of 'what gives people direction?'' A suppressed thought crawled in front of him.
He had chosen a spear of wooden make and a longsword with a gem on its handle.
"Too much of a hassle. Why put a gem?" He did not understand the use of it. Trying to remove it via hammering on it with another weapon did not help.
"Maybe it is to use some other mystery of the world." Forgoing his earlier irritation on the gem, the boy went forward up towards the keep's top.
He drew out another Beret coin and jammed it behind the spearhead. It did not hold well.
For his final phases of the plan he began on from that first town of the kingdom, he needed the coin to fit.
The boy cut off the spearhead from the spear, and made another slight cut in its wood with the longsword. He placed the coin in it.
His steps echoed as he heard clashes of swords from above. "That may be Cheal….and the Monarch Gweren?" Tilting his head he presumed so based on the rhythmic cacophony.
The battle below was a dull murmur in the keep. Maybe the hooligans and ragtag army had lost, or the castle guards were dead. "Whomsoever had caused a silence to start spreading below must be strong." The boy's words echoed.
A laugh reached his ears. He thought he recognized it to be of Cheal.
"So the next to add is the vial. Where to make its place?" He scratched his hair with the pommel of the longsword.
Using it precisely to make a small cut in the side in the same plane as the cut that's holding the coin, he put a small vial with a cork in it. The liquid inside shimmered wanting to get out.
"You will, you will." Taking the last step the boy reached the open new roof of the keep.
A spectacle awaited him.
He began one of his own, spinning a rock in the sling with the same hand that held the spear.
Cheal dueling the Monarch Gweren inside of a thread and dagger made circle. He expected the Monarch to be more terrifying.
Letting his disappointment simmer away, he whispered, "It is time to end it all."