Page 48 of Monsters in the Museum

They remained in the courtyard for a while longer, Antony once again feeding Pags the peacock. Now though, Nora was not quite as overwhelmed by the threat she knew waited for her beyond the walls of the Sanctuary.

When Nora showed up for her training with Ezra on Monday, the sight that greeted her made her want to skip over to the big man and give him a giant hug. She contained herself, however, and settled for a brisk walk over to where he was standing with a spear clutched in each meaty hand.

“Today’s the day?” she asked by way of greeting, inclining her head toward the weapons in his hands: two long wooden spears.

Ezra nodded. “Don’t get ahead of yourself. Normally, you would train in pankration for a full year before you even got to hold a weapon, but considering the circumstances, I have been persuaded to make an exception. Knowing how to use a weapon sooner rather than later might prove to be… beneficial for you.”

Nora reached to snatch the weapon from Ezra’s hand, but he yanked it out of her reach.

“Don’t think you get out of your warm-up exercises just because of these. Show me your forms before I change my mind about letting you use this.”

Nora huffed but settled into her stance without further complaint. She progressed through her punches, moving on to her kicks, which she managed to complete without overbalancing even once. By the time she was done, and Ezra approached her with the practice spear in hand, she was bouncing on the balls of her feet in poorly contained anticipation.

“Calm yourself, young firecracker. It’s a weapon, not a piece of candy,” Ezra grunted, but Nora could still sense his pleasure at her excitement. It must have been many years since he had gotten the chance to train anybody.

He handed her the weapon, and when the smooth wood touched her palms, she smiled. This felt real. This felt like she could make a difference.

Nora blinked, and her hour of training was over. As Ezra instructed her to begin her cool-down exercises, she griped.

“We just covered the basic stances and grips,” she argued as she flopped down in the dirt.

“And that is a quick progression for the first day with a spear. You had barely learned the basics and now you have to adjust to accommodate three meters of wood. If we go much further, you’ll hurt yourself,” Ezra pointed out.

She began stretching her arms and hissed to find out that he was right. She may have gotten used to exertion, but her muscles seemed permanently knotted from the added weight of the weapon. As she moved to stretch her other arm, she silently thanked Ezra for starting her with a wooden training spear instead of the bronze ones traditionally used in combat by the Eteria.

Still, as she took stock of her aches and pains, she was pleased to find that she had accumulated fewer bruises today than she had in prior weeks. It seemed that training with a spear involved far less of her getting dumped on her backside. She mentally added another tally in favor of the weapon.

Over the next week, Nora continued to train with the spear. Her suspicions that this would go much better than her initial training were confirmed. She found that she was granted a surprising amount of confidence with its length in her hands, almost as if it were an extension of herself that she didn’t know she had been missing until now. The stories from her favorite childhood fantasy novels about heroes who slept with their weapons started to make a bit more sense to her. She only trained with her battered practice spear a few hours a day, and she had already grown attached to it. It did not seem that far-fetched to think that she would never want to be too far from her weapon if she had trained with it her entire life. With more practice, perhaps she could prevent herself from acquiring more injuries that would necessitate a trip to the emergency room. The scar on her thigh did have a roguish appeal, but she had no desire to repeat the experience.

More often than not, Nora found herself too invigorated from her training to consider going home immediately after. On those nights, she would wander to the library and pull tomes off the shelf, absorbing knowledge on every bit of history and combat she could get her hands on.

One evening, she found herself sprawled on the ground across the bronze symbol embossed on the floor, having given up on the hard stools and opted for a more comfortable, if slightly less dignified, posture. She was thumbing through a book she had found, bound in plain brown leather with no title on either the spine or cover. Curious, she peered at pages that were not neatly printed as if by a professional scribe, but instead hastily scrawled in a looping cursive. She blinked in confusion for a second before realizing that it was, in fact, a diary of sorts.

Reading on, she found that it was mostly a personal record of battle strategies from a commander, but she could not help but be drawn in by the small personal details she found in the accounts. The commander mentioned a fellow Warrior a few times, whom he seemed to disagree with while still respecting. He also mentioned his wife, who would sometimes accompany them on assignments as a battlefield healer.

Nora flipped through the pages rapidly, the battles becoming darker and more desperate. In later entries, the man began describing a council of leaders, meeting to discuss the future of the Eteria in the face of the growing Shadow. In the end, the decision of how to handle the conflict came down to a vote, which the man and his wife lost by a close margin of five to four.

Nora felt the last line in the entry describing the vote like a punch in the gut.

While I abide by the decision of the Eteria and will fight the Shadows to the last, I only pray that Seraphina and our unborn child will survive this confrontation and live to see days of peace once more.

With shaking hands, Nora flipped the page to find out what happened next. Nothing. There were no more entries.

Feeling a lump in her throat, Nora snapped the journal shut. She rose and stalked back to the shelf, intent on shoving it back where she had found it. She had learned enough of the tragic history of the Eteria for one night.

She stalked out of the library, meandering through the hallways pointlessly to burn off her sudden restlessness. She didn’t bother to remember where she was going, feeling as though getting lost would be a suitable distraction from her current melancholy. Improbably, she found herself in a set of corridors she did not recognize. How could she still find new places after the amount of time she had spent wandering? Maybe she was just skilled at getting lost.

Nora stopped, as one of the paintings on the wall caught her eye. It depicted a Warrior, dressed in full battle armor, like the set that Nora had stumbled across in the armory, and a bronze spear held aloft in their hand. The Warrior appeared to be glowing, the light emanating from them pressing against the edge of a sea of darkness. Leaning in closer, Nora saw a small plaque under the painting engraved with the title of the work: The Last Stand.

Something about the painting was hauntingly beautiful, and Nora stared at it for a long time before eventually wrenching herself from it to go home and get some much-needed sleep.

Although she did take a few days off, Nora did not let her harrowing discoveries about the history of the Eteria keep her from continuing her research. Having read a good deal on theories of combat and wanting to take a break from the discoveries about the Shadow that would give her nightmares, she decided to look for books that detailed how exactly the members of the Eteria used the Light. Adam had been rather vague when describing how their power worked, and Nora was not content with vague explanations. She wanted to take things apart and see how they worked.

Nora was quickly disappointed, however, as she found that many of the books referring to the Light only described it in the most abstract terms. They were far from instructional and spent most of the time waxing on about the nature of the Light and the Shadow instead of describing what exactly one could do with it.

The next day, after training, she lay on her back in the courtyard and stared up at the cloudless sky. They had started sparring today and facing up against Ezra had made her remarkably more sore than normal. It was a blow to her pride to know that Ezra was not even breaking a sweat when teaching her the basics of live combat.

Ezra was now on his usual perch on the edge of the fountain, looking down at her expectantly as he awaited her daily barrage of questions. She debated exactly how to convey what she wanted to know, and settled for asking, “So, what exactly does the Light do?”

“What does it do?” he repeated back to her quizzically.

She rolled over onto her stomach to prop her chin up on her hands and look at him, dropping all pretense of stretching by this point. “Yeah. I mean, Adam alluded to the fact that you can use this awesome power to do all sorts of crazy things, but he never really explained it to me. What exactly can you do with it?”

Ezra cocked his head at her, “I guess what one can do with it is only limited by their ability to control it. It’s more like an… endless reservoir of power that you draw on and shape into whatever it is you need. Different people have an easier time drawing on it for different things. Healers tend to be naturally gifted at using the Light to repair the body, while Warriors find it easiest to shape it into weaponized blasts.”

“If it can do anything you wanted it to, what kept you guys from, I don’t know… ending world hunger?” Nora asked.

“While the reservoir is endless, a person’s ability to channel it is not,” Ezra explained. “For one, learning to control it and not have it explode in your face requires a large amount of concentration. And second, being a conduit for that amount of power is exhausting. Everybody is born with a different amount they can tolerate before the Light flowing through them starts to take a toll on their body. As you can see from the size of the Eteria, very few people are born with the ability to channel any Light at all, and none at all have been born since the Defeat. Even the most powerful among us have their limits and overdoing it has been known to be fatal.”

Nora frowned at the thought before pressing on, “So what about now? What makes it so you can’t use the Light now?”

Ezra’s sigh was heavy. “Nobody really knows exactly how it happened, just that when the Shadow was defeated, it was suddenly virtually impossible to channel the Light. Now when you reach for it, it feels as if the reservoir is at the bottom of a deep ocean. It’s still there, but it takes an immense amount of effort to call even a small amount up from that depth.”

“That’s too bad,” Nora responded, “I would have enjoyed a demonstration of the weaponized blasts.”

“And I would give no such demonstration to a student who doesn’t even properly perform their stretches at the end of their training.”

Nora rolled her eyes at him, but only after she had rolled back over and continued stretching, so he would not be able to see.