Mortal Magic: Broken (Book 1)

23. Discipline

The rest of the days were much quieter than that first one. I wasn't so worked up about Atreus and he seemed to not give mind to what happened between us. On the contrary he was purposefully avoiding the subject and focused on my training which turned from physical to one fit to train the mind and my powers. He claimed that I had issues I needed to deal with before my magic let me access its full potential and I knew exactly what he was referring to.

He thought that the issue was my anger towards him, but in truth that wasn't the case at all. I had gotten over my anger for him and his past actions. I had not forgiven him since he could never be redeemed for his past, but I didn't hold it against him either. I accepted that it was the way things unfolded and quite frankly had no right to make him a villain because he did something he thought would protect his children. I couldn't understand why he chose to give us away instead of fighting, but he did it because he thought it was the right thing to do.

We still used the same hall for the training although we didn't fight in it. He was making me understand my magic. How it worked and what it wanted from me. The way it was affected by my emotions and how they affected my state of mind once I was overcome by anger like all these times before. In two long days I learned that whenever I was furious or in too much pain my magic took over and in the first case suppressed all rational thought and let my anger run its course. However when I was in pain, mostly emotional since physical I could handle pretty well, my magic was isolating me from everything, keeping everyone around me far away using the same mana waves I emitted four times already. It was protecting me from everything but what I truly wanted, my pain, which I had to deal with myself.

That however I learnt myself. The rest only knew about my anger since the only time I was in that much pain was years ago. And I never even saw what my magic did the first time I realized I had killed someone. When I had returned to my cell that day I couldn't feel the waves in that small space and people thought of them as nothing more than a breeze. Years later the realization hit me when I connected the dots from the anger.

I learned to control the flow of my mana as it run through my body to strengthen myself without using magic and keeping myself healthier. I learned how to channel magic to the rest of the world faster when I needed to unload the excess mana that was making me sick and also how to create more, faster and keep more mana inside me without getting weak or sick.

After these two days I came to the conclusion that my magic was more a part of me than I thought. It was tied to my emotions and it was more like breathing than a means to an end unlike Yuto's magic. However I was still unable to make myself use the master arte, even though I had managed to stop my body from degenerating fast. My hair hadn't turned whiter since the night I spent with Maia like I did every night since then. She moved to my room for as long I was here and no one said anything, in fact I suspected they wanted this to happen and that was irritating, but I wasn't about to complain about it now.

In fact even if I wanted to do so I couldn't because I was supposed to be concentrating here. My task for today was to focus my mind to see the mana around, feel it and recognize the way it moves. I wasn't sure if this skill was essential to me but Atreus had reassured me that I needed to understand mana as well as my powers to be a master magus. To tell the truth it wasn't that hard to feel mana, I did it for a long time. And neither was to understand it, its purpose to give life and maintain it no matter the cost. What was hard was my task to see through it instead of my eyesight.

But I was nowhere near that goal since my mind kept returning to Maia who today was so cheerful that it was strange to me. I woke up to find her getting dressed and running off after she told me that Atreus had decided to train me in something new. "Focus Archer. To see through mana you need a clear and set mind". The annoying part was that he knew every time my mind drifted away from my task and he had given me and was quick to lecture me about it.