The piebald bruised outcast trembled at the center of the training circle after having forced open her ether core and allowing torrents of foreign magic to pour out of her fragile body. Fear wasn’t the right word for it. Terror fit better, like the sensation of the ground collapsing from underfoot, or a runaway carriage careening downhill. Khazmine belted a wordless cry in abject terror as an uncontrollable ether storm raged around them, gathering force exponentially.

This magic... It isn’t mine… Khazmine gasped deeply as another ether spike shot out from her body. The unstable storm that continued to spiral wasn’t part of Khazmine’s core. It was almost certainly borrowed from Major Barshaw and Lieutenant Mevralls. Khazmine had never once held so much ether in her scrawny body and didn’t know what to do or how to control the powerful magic that seeped out. An acidic taste of panic filled the outcast's dried mouth as she screamed again without making a sound.

“Khazmine, you have to stop!” Lieutenant Mevralls’s fingers dug into Khazmine’s shoulders until the fierce sting of storming ether forced him to let go. “It’s going out of control! Focus, Khazmine!”

The rings of the training circle flashed their bright orange warning lights, indicating an unstable ether storm within. Lieutenant Mevralls spotted the flashes and braced himself for an explosion, and Major Barshaw reinforced the training circle’s containment grid with her own ether to shield from any blasts. Charged ether shocks coursed through the arena, as Khazmine silently screamed herself hoarse in agony.

Khazmine pleaded to any Ancients that could hear her. If her storm backfired now, she could easily kill the lieutenant, and the thought terrified her on the spot. Storm clouds filled the containment grid and Khazmine tried her best to concentrate on not shocking the major and lieutenant. She wanted nothing more than for every scrap of ether in the training circle to disappear.

Not seeing any alternatives, Major Barshaw spotted the agonized outcast and pulled a last-ditch maneuver to avoid disaster. Using her superior skill with storm wrangling, Major Barshaw thrust her right hand into the containment grid and siphoned off the unstable ether, channeling it to the ground below, charring it to a cinder. Her skin seared and bones cracked from the effort, and every second endured caused the major’s stony veneer to crackle, showing the untapped depths of suffering she could tolerate.

A vivid shock of blue lightning filled the dome of the training circle, followed by a blast of thunder that rattled the camp’s battlements. Once the reverberating ceased, the orange rings of the training circle faded, leaving a dust cloud and a single crouched figure in the circle’s center.

Sensing that the worst of the ether storm had passed, Lieutenant Mevralls reclaimed his footing and stood up to see… nothing. Specifically, his student was missing from the arena, having vanished without a trace. A maelstrom of horrific thoughts filled his head and fueled long-buried anxieties that bubbled to the surface. Mevralls sent out several ether spikes in all directions to find any trace of Khazmine, but to no avail.

A single ping returned, sending a soul-image of the major back to Lieutenant Mevralls, who blanched once the ping dissipated. Despite tugging a sleeve over her battered limb, Mevralls could sense that Major Barshaw had suffered tremendous storm damage to her right arm.

“Major, are you all right?” Mevralls bellowed, eliciting a pained nod from his commanding officer. He was about to approach her to provide basic first aid when one of the heavy outer doors dropped by the southern entrance, startling everyone. “Who goes there?”

“It’s me, Rida,” the healer emerged from the doorway, bearing a heavy black bag and a large roll of what looked like thick ribbon. His scrawny body bustled through his ill-fitting blue healer’s cloak as he rushed towards the circle. “I saw the warning lights on my way through Cheapside. Is anyone hurt?”

“The major is injured,” Mevralls observed as he returned to his other pressing concern, “and Khazmine is missing.”

“Missing? How did you manage that?” Rida asked as he entreated the major to pull back her sleeve, revealing a charred mass of fractured flesh underneath. “Gods old and new, Major! What did you do?”

“There was a… It was an ether storm…” Mevralls stammered as he continued to search through the lingering dust cloud for signs of life. Repeated ether pings came back with nothing, and the lieutenant began fearing the worst. “It was, that is, p-poor Khazmine…”

“Slow down, Jaycen. I don’t understand. Take a deep breath and explain,” Rida sighed impatiently as he wrangled Major Barshaw’s titanic arm in his tiny hands. “And you, hold still, ma’am. I’ve gotta get this on right. It’ll hurt way worse if I have to pull it back and reset it.”

Rida tugged and tore strips of the thick ribbon from his roll and covered the major’s arm in luminescent wrappings that glowed slightly on contact with what was left of her skin. “You really did a number on it this time, ma’am... Gah, I should have brought more tape…”

While Rida continued applying healing bandages and injecting strange liquids into the major, Lieutenant Mevralls had scoured the perimeter of the dusty training circle and found nothing. He was so singularly focused on finding the missing outcast that even the distracted Rida could hear the desperation in the lieutenant’s ragged breaths.

“Calm down, Jaycen,” Rida soothed as he finished wrapping Major Barshaw’s damaged arm. “Give me a minute here to test the strips, and I’ll help you look—”

“Do I LOOK like I can CALM DOWN!?” Mevralls snapped back, much to the healer’s surprise. A rush of painful memories stung the soldier’s consciousness and raked their pernicious poison into the deep wounds in Mevralls’s spirit. Visions of the war, filled with wretched fields of the dead and dying, resurfaced to unravel the lieutenant’s sanity, thread by thread. “I can’t, Rida. I just—”

Lieutenant Mevralls never got to finish his statement, having lately tripped over nothing and toppled to the ground unexpectedly. Instead of landing entirely on the hard, dusty ground, something softer managed to catch his shins and knees on the way down.

“Are you okay over there?” Rida called out to the lieutenant, who had sent another cloud of dust into the air when he fell. The scrawny healer gave Major Barshaw a friendly pat on her undamaged shoulder to indicate he was leaving her side and for her to wait there, only to spot a tangle of limbs and armor splayed out on the ground. Underneath the lieutenant, a strange, rippling void materialized as the outcast’s camouflage failed. “Oh my gods… Jaycen, you never said she was a Deceiver…”

Ignoring Rida’s curious expression, Lieutenant Mevralls propped himself up and repositioned to observe Khazmine’s condition. Rida was already ahead of him, checking the outcast over for new injuries. Both men held their respective breaths until Rida let out a long sigh of relief before wiping his brow with a long blue sleeve.

“It’s all right now. She’s just passed out,” Rida explained. “Looks like she suffered a massive ether drain, brought on by incompatible mingling magic. Based on the ether trails hanging around here, I’d say that Major Barshaw was ‘overly generous’ with her infusions over the last few days.”

“Then what about Khazmine? Will she be okay?”

“I think so. Now that it’s out of her system, she should be fine,” Rida said as he smiled enough to crinkle his golden eyes. “I must say, I haven’t seen a full-body camouflage in person before. And to think, we still have a Deceiver, here in Old Sarzonn…”

“You can’t tell anyone about this, I mean it,” Mevralls insisted while staring intently into Rida’s eyes. “The holy house would flay her alive if they heard we were harboring a Deceiver. We can’t protect her if it becomes widely known.”

“I’m sure there’s no need to inform them of this,” Rida shrugged. “You know I’m not their biggest supporter to begin with. And besides, how can I keep an eye on her if she’s rotting away in the Grand Cathedral?” The healer cradled Khazmine in his arms and rocked her gently to wake the outcast. “There we go… She’s coming out of it now.”

The bruised and battered outcast stirred in Rida’s arms, allowed her pupils to narrow, and regained focus on the world around her. Khazmine startled upon seeing Lieutenant Mevralls hovering over her and tugged on Rida’s coat for reassurance.

“It’s all right, miss,” the healer comforted her. “You’ve had a scare, but are otherwise intact, yeah? You’re fine, Jaycen’s fine, and the major is, well, resilient. I must say, I’m impressed by your—”

“Thank you, <Dorian>, for your sterling care,” Mevralls interrupted. The lieutenant stood slowly and helped Khazmine to her feet. A tremor in the outcast’s body faintly shook his hands as Khazmine spotted Major Barshaw in the distance, reprogramming the training circle with her uninjured hand. “I’d say that’s enough training for one day, don’t you think?”

Khazmine managed to nod back at Lieutenant Mevralls before casting her gaze back down to the ground again. In her ignorance, the outcast had wasted precious ether donated by her new superiors. And the fact that she'd failed to assimilate their powerful ether was another shameful reminder that she was inadequate to join their ranks anytime soon. “I’m sorry, sir… Major.”

“It’s quite all right, Khazmine. Happens all the time,” Mevralls exaggerated, if only to ease the outcast’s obvious guilt. “Why don’t you head home and rest? We’ll tidy up here.”

The lieutenant's gaze followed Khazmine as she trudged away with a defeated air. His lingering stare caught Rida’s attention, and the healer saw fit to comment on it.

“See something in her, do you?” Rida asked with a raised brow.

“What?”

“You were staring,” Rida pressed. “But not how I thought you would. The way you carry on, it’s as if you look at miss Khazmine as if she’s someone special.”

“You’re imagining things,” Mevralls deflected as he dusted off his uniform. “It’s not like that at all. She just… reminds me of someone, that’s all.”

“If you say so…” Rida shrugged and collected his leftover medical supplies. He ambled with the remains of his heavy black bag over to the southern gate and turned back for a parting word with the officers before toddling off. “I’ll be sure to send the bill to the camp for your care, Major. The outcast’s is on me.”

Finally alone, Major Barshaw approached Lieutenant Mevralls and lowered her gaze to meet his eyes. It pained them both that today hadn’t gone as planned, but the major seemed to take it harder than her subordinate. Their experiment had failed and now they had no leads to speak of.

“Cheer up, Major,” Mevralls forced through an unconvincing grin. “So what if the outcast isn’t the one? The odds were low to begin with and at least now we know for sure.”

Still, I had hoped, Major Barshaw frowned. This etherling was incapable of containing the major’s storm or Mevralls’s ether spikes and was therefore not one of the Chosen. It was a setback, indeed, but the Solanai couldn’t afford to dwell on failures. War could break out again at any moment, and they needed all the support they could muster.

“Major… I’d like to reiterate my support of miss Khazmine,” Mevralls said as he swallowed hard to anticipate Barshaw’s response. When no rebuttal came, he continued. “Chosen or not, I see a future for the Deceiver here. All she needs is a good teacher. What do you say, shall we give her a chance?”

---

Shambling through the cobblestone streets of Old Sarzonn, Khazmine balanced a heavy sack of freshly baked bread and a parcel of folded clothing as she limped away to the Forbidden Ruins.

Harriet had taken pity on the poor girl and loaded her up at the bread peddler’s bakery with “healthful sweets” and pastries filled with dried fruits and nuts for a speedy recovery. Khazmine hadn’t meant to take advantage of the kind woman’s generosity, but she’d already strayed into Merchant’s Quarter on another errand and was immediately recognized by ol’ Tatty.

Now laden with a bounty of aromatic delights, Khazmine aimed to share them with the only other people she knew who would appreciate such treasure.

The outcast’s ears pricked up at the familiar, distressing sound of a young boy’s painful cough in the distance. It was a siren’s song leading her to the place where she knew she would be welcome, and Khazmine stepped forth in hopes that her latest windfall would at least brighten their day.