24. Breakable

“You’re here early, Fulgora,” Castalia greets me. “Or… Minerva?”

I shrug, glancing uncomfortably around the open field. It’s the sort of flat, brown grassland pervasive to the areas outside of town, where human engineering hasn’t bothered to transform the natural environment into something lush and green for the sake of aesthetics. No one is around for as far as I see, which is pretty far in clear weather like this. I feel like this is probably somebody’s property, but I have no idea what kind of person owns all the unused spaces like this.

“I don’t know,” I answer, craning my neck up to where she’s hovering overhead. “Whichever. Whoever. I don’t want to think about it. Just call me Eliza.”

It’s a familiar name, if perhaps not a perfectly accurate one.

“Oh,” Castalia says. “You’re going to have to think about it, though.”

I flinch.

“Um, why?” I ask.

“Because that’s how you’re going to be training,” Castalia answers matter-of-factly. “You are still forbidden from assuming your incarnate forms for another week, outside of an immediate threat to your life, so the start of your training will be mental, not practical.”

“I’m fine,” I insist with a scowl, rolling my recently-shot shoulder to show how easily I can ignore the pain. “I can transform whenever.”

“That is good to know,” Castalia says. “Don’t.”

I want to argue with her, but I hold my tongue. This is Castalia, after all. All of this would be kind of pointless if I didn’t trust her to know what she’s doing.

“I won’t, but transforming is the easiest way to figure out whether I’m Fulgora or Minerva,” I tell her.

“Okay. Why do you think that is?” Castalia asks.

“Um. Because the spell makes me shout my name at the end?” I blink.

“No. Well yes, but no. Your incarnate form is you. It is your true self. You have two, you are two. But Minerva does not stop existing when you are Fulgora, and Fulgora does not stop existing when you are Minerva. Right?”

“Yeah, I mean, I guess that’s right,” I begrudgingly admit.

“And that is why your stone is brown,” Castalia says. “If both of you are there, both of you can use it. Simultaneously.”

“Okay… but if I’m not supposed to cast, what are we doing today to ‘work together?’ Just talk things out?” I ask. “That… I dunno, I can do that on my own time.”

But will we, though?

“The heights of magical power come from great madness or great clarity,” Castalia answers cryptically. “I would prefer to steer you towards clarity over madness.”

A little late then, aren’t you?

“What is this, some kung-fu purity of mind stuff?” I ask.

“Yes,” Castalia answers bluntly. “Well, maybe. I do not know kung-fu. But I would not be surprised if it utilizes similar concepts.”

I sigh. I know she’s right, I don’t know why I’m being so petulant about this. I suppose I’m just frustrated. I guess that’s a good sign that I’m probably Fulgora.

It’s not like I can’t get mad and you can’t get scared.

Okay so I’m definitely Fulgora then. Hi, Minerva.

Oh, yeah. Uh. Hi.

“If it assists you with conceptualization, I do not mind if you speak out loud,” Castalia offers.

“It would not help,” I insist, gritting my teeth. I can’t imagine anything more embarrassing than straight-up talking out loud to myself in front of my mentor. I may be crazy, but I don’t want to look crazy.

Let’s at least try to do what she says, okay? It seems like the basic idea here is that we should be copiloting, right? Working together to supply emotions and use the body.

I don’t want you using ‘my body.’ And I imagine you don’t want me using yours.

I mean, not really, but I see why we should. Our spells have different specializations. You fight up close, I fight at range. You’re aggressive, I’m defensive. You can’t deny that combining our styles and fluidly swapping as necessary would be an effective combat strategy. Plus, you know, if you hate it when I take control you can just get mad about it.

And you can be scared that I’m not going to give you control back.

Uh. Oh no! I guess I can! Is that a thing that can happen!?

“How’s it going?” Castalia asks.

“Fine,” I snap at her.

She blinks.

“Are you angry at me because you want to be, or are you just angry?” she asks.

I wince. She’s taking time out of her day to help and I’m just being a bitch about it. Why am I so prickly today!?

“Sorry,” I say. “I’ll do better.”

“That doesn’t answer my question,” Castalia says. I stare up at her, not entirely sure where she’s going with this.

Well, answer her!

“I guess I’m just angry,” I admit. “You haven’t done anything wrong. Interacting with Minerva just pisses me off. Which I guess is a good thing?”

“No,” Castalia says firmly. “It is not.”

I blink. Why… not?

“But… I’m a red mage. Or a red-and-green mage, at least. More sources of anger means more I can draw on.”

Castalia frowns.

“…Maybe I should teach more people,” she mutters to herself, returning to normal volume afterwards. “I would suggest moving yourself away from that line of thinking. It is a fragile, unreliable strategy. Not necessarily a weak one, but are you truly strong if you lack governance over that strength?”

“Lack… governance?” I frown. “Like, lacking control? It’s not like I go mad with rage during fights. I’m not lashing out wildly, and Minerva isn’t even retreating pointlessly most of the time. What governance are we lacking?”

Castalia hesitates, bobbing side to side a bit in the air as she thinks about how to answer my question.

“…By their very nature, human emotions control human thinking,” she says, answering slowly. “And by our very nature, identifying flaws in our thinking is often impossible while our thinking is still flawed. All emotions risk this trap in some form or another. Sadness leads to sloth. Rage leads to aggression. Fear leads to paranoia. Happiness leads to complacency. And if you lose yourself in these extremes, you will be powerful, but you will no longer be yourself. If your answer to needing more anger is to be angry at everything you can manage, then you will be nothing but reactionary fury. A tool to that anger, rather than a woman using anger as her tool.”

I chew on that for a bit, more than a little irritated that the strategy I’ve been running with for most of my life is apparently considered to be stupid.

Isn’t that exactly what she’s talking about? Now you’re angry about being too angry.

And you’re afraid of being too afraid.

Yeah, and that means she has a point.

I scoff, but I can’t argue that, really.

“So what’s the alternative, then?” I ask. “I need to be angry to use anger. There’s no workaround for that.”

Castalia nods.

“You train yourself to be selective,” she says. “Discerning. Do not maintain a constant rage. You ask yourself, with your mind before your heart, should I be angry about this? Should I fuel this rage burning inside of me? And you do not let yourself say yes without the greatest of reasons.”

“Isn’t that just having less emotion, though?” I ask.

“No. Your soul can only hold so much anger, Fulgora. So instead of being angry about everything, find the things you should be angry about and focus your rage into a honed blade. Find the things you cannot tolerate, that you cannot fathom living with the knowledge of their existence without fury in your heart, and train yourself to ignite or cool the flame as necessary. This directed anger will guide your spells with a singular purpose, granting a reliable direction to your magic that you currently lack. It will be your strength in a way that raw power cannot.”

“…I see,” I admit. “I’m not sure I have anything like that, though. I get angry easily, but I don’t have some kind of crusade that I want to go on, or something. I just have a temper.”

“That is okay,” Castalia shrugs. “This is a long-term goal. It will be very difficult for you to learn, because you have already spent your life interacting with emotions in a different way. How to think and feel is a very difficult thing to relearn. It is something to keep in mind while we do your other training, but there is other training to start with. And it is ensuring the two halves of you may work as a whole.”

“I’m not really sure how to do that either,” I admit. “I mean, we can talk to each other, but I’m not really… good at that. I don’t have any… er, I mean, I guess I only really have one friend.”

Because Chloe is a very good friend, even if I feel like I’m not a good one in return. But I don’t want to tell Chloe about the whole ‘two of me’ thing. It’s weird. Freaky. If she doesn’t take it well, I… I don’t know. One friend is a lot better than zero.

“Well, it probably starts with not being embarrassed about each other’s existence,” Castalia says, unfortunately reading my emotions exactly. I’ve never been great at that either, probably due to that general lack of friends and other forms of social interaction.

We’re not very good at a lot of things. But we can get better! We’re good at hard work, if nothing else.

I guess.

“How am I not supposed to be embarrassed?” I ask. “I don’t want people to know I’m crazy. It freaks me out every single time it’s brought up. I don’t want to imagine what everybody else thinks.”

Castalia tilts her head.

“You… aren’t crazy, though?” she says like it’s the most obvious thing in the world. Which… what?

“I literally have an imaginary person in my head who keeps talking to me,” I remind her.

Rude.

“Minerva is not imaginary,” Castalia says. “Neither is Fulgora. I have spoken with both of you.”

“You know what I mean.”

“No, I do not,” she insists. “To be ‘crazy’ is to insist on a reality which demonstrably does not exist. It is to lack some fundamental capacity of logical thought in such a manner that nonsensical conclusions are drawn from reasonable evidence. You do not exhibit any of these traits. On the contrary, it would, in fact, be a minor act of insanity for a person to fail to recognize that the nature of your mind is different in a manner that does no harm to anyone, and that therefore there is no problem to be solved or madness to be addressed. The presence of two kind people working their hardest to protect others is undoubtedly better than one.”

By the time she’s done speaking I’m churning with half a dozen different emotions that I’m struggling to identify, which I suppose is all the more evidence that I need all this new training. Emotional awareness is the bare basics, for fuck’s sake. But still, what do I say to that? How do I respond to something so… absurd?

“But are we two people though?” I ask. “Can we really, actually be two people if we only get one body at a time? If there’s only one individual physically walking around, doing things, talking to people? We share a head, we share memories, we’re not that different at the end of the day. Isn’t the mere fact that we consider ourselves to be two different people a failure to recognize reality?”

Castalia stares at me.

“I don’t know,” she says. “Does it matter?”

“Wh… yes!” I insist.

“Okay,” she shrugs with the one shoulder capable of it. “Then define ‘person.'”

“Wha—I don’t… I don’t know!”

“Then that is the source of your confusion,” Castalia answers. “If you choose to include the stipulation that a singular person requires an independent body, then no you would not be different people, but there is nothing that requires such a definition in the first place. Personhood is not an objective concept, but a societal one that is open to interpretation. I think you are correct that many individuals will disagree with your definition, but that does not make them better at observing reality than you. In many cases, I believe it would make them worse at it.”

I have to say, it is really funny watching you flounder around in this conversation with her. I wonder what she’s majoring in in college. Psychology? Anthropology?

How should I know?

Ask her!

What? No!

Ask her, darn it!

“…What are you majoring in college?” I ask begrudgingly. Castalia responds with a blank stare.

“Why did you ask me that?” she questions.

“I didn’t want to! Minerva kept bugging me about it.”

“Oh. Good. Good job,” Castalia nods approvingly. “I have not decided on a major yet. I am taking lots of different classes and trying to find the ones I like the best. It is difficult because I did not go to high school.”

The training continues, and it remains the weirdest training I have ever done until Castalia and I leave and set a new time for tomorrow. The rest of the week is full of meditative exercises that don’t feel helpful, plus awkward conversations with the person I most respect and some weirdo in my head. It’s not that bad, though. Castalia is… a very focused individual, and her teaching mostly boils down to telling me stuff and hoping I figure it out, but it’s not like I think she’s wasting my time.

“Your incarnate form is still off-limits,” Castalia tells me as we near the end of the week, “but I believe it is time that we move onto practical casting.”

“Like, as a human?” I ask, frowning. “I mean, I don’t really have much magical power like this, but I can try.”

Castalia scrunches her eyebrows together.

“…Why would you think that?” she asks. “Your emotions are the same, and your soul is the same, in all your forms. The raw power you possess is not altered, only the method of use. The transformation stone is a tool to make casting easier, more thoughtless.”

I… huh. I mean yeah, I guess I knew that, I just never really thought about it. Objectively, there’s no difference in the sheer amount of magical power I have access to, I just… I dunno. It feels like sucking a thick milkshake up through a thin straw.

“How does that… work, exactly?” I ask.

Castalia hums.

“Exactly? I do not know. I believe it calculates and creates spells for us. Casting without a spell to help is difficult. Inefficient. But it can be made more efficient, with practice.”

“Huh. Is there a point? Beyond just being able to cast spells outside of incarnate forms better, I mean.”

“It will help you understand magic better, I think?” Castalia says hesitantly. “It helped me. And when you understand better, you can use it better.”

“Hmm. Well, if you say so.”

The week passes before I know it. I feel… better. A lot better. I hate to admit it, but maybe I did need some rest.

I’m glad we at least had something to do during our rest.

Yeah. Waiting is the bad part. The restlessness and having nothing to do… I can’t stand it. Castalia gave me a lot of training exercises that I could do on my own, a lot of it stuff that I already knew about and just… hadn’t been doing. But some of it was new.

And we talked some!

Yeah. We talked a little. Probably not as much as we should have.

Well, there’s not a whole lot to talk about. It’s not like we can keep secrets from each other. It’s really more like… cooperative introspection.

Which we probably need to do more of.

Oh yeah, for sure. Introspection kinda stinks, though.

It’s the worst.

Oh, we’re almost there. I guess… I should probably take point for this?

They’re your team, not mine.

If you insist, then sure.

I make it to the entrance to Guardian headquarters and head through the wall, finding myself in the usual teleporter room. There’s no sign here of the damage from before, but construction is still ongoing throughout most of the base. They just prioritized the entry area and the living spaces so Veritas and Amaterasu would have somewhere to stay. Although apparently Amaterasu is still staying with Aurora’s family? I’ve never really met them before, but apparently they’re quite nice.

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…I should meet them.

What? No! Bad idea!

We need to meet them! We’re responsible for the safety of their daughter, it’s weird that we haven’t met them, isn’t it?

What the hell are we going to say to them? Hey, sorry, I know I let my last team die, but your kid is definitely safe this time around, trust me!

I mean, we don’t… have to get into that. It’s just the right thing to do, isn’t it? It might help them feel better to have a face to associate with the name.

Only if we successfully reassure them, and I don’t know about you but I don’t think we have a very reassuring presence. Everyone around us just seems to be worried about us all the time.

That’s… a fair point, I guess. But we can become more reassuring, and then meet them! I’m sure Aurora would like it, too.

Speaking of…

Ah, there she is!

“Aurora!” I wave at her, seeing her chatting with Uma’tama down the hall. “Hey!”

She turns around, spots me, and brightens up.

“Minerva! Hey!” she greets me. “Hehe! It feels like it’s been so long!”

“Two weeks is a long time!” I answer.

It’s not THAT long.

Oh, shoosh.

“I guess so!” Aurora agrees. “A lot happened!”

“Welcome back, Minerva!” Uma’tama waves at me, bobbing closer. “Er, is Minerva right? You don’t often walk in here outside of your incarnate form.”

“Yeah, Minerva is right,” I confirm. “Heh, I guess I’ve been so used to ignoring the urge to shift that I did it today, too. It feels kind of weird towering over you like this.”

“Then shrink back down, dummy!” Aurora laughs.

“Yeah,” I agree. “I guess I should.”

I take a deep breath. I can’t remember the last time it’s been so long since I got to be me.

“Oɴᴄᴇ Aɢᴀɪɴ, I Fɪɢʜᴛ.”

I’m so used to the sensation of transforming that I tend to not pay too much attention to it. As the light falls over my body and pulls me away, my sensations pour from my weak, uncomfortable flesh into my true form. My human self curls up in the back of my mind, sleeping inside my soul as I drop into my correct size and shape. My outfit manifests around me, snug and soft against my skin barring the skirt that I love but Fulgora would never wear.

“Bʀᴀᴠᴇ Pʀɪɴᴄᴇss Dᴜᴛɪғᴜʟ Mɪɴᴇʀᴠᴀ.”

I open my eyes, and my teammate smiles at me from eye level, my equal despite our differences in experience. As it should be.

“It’s great to see you again!” Aurora says, radiating warmth like always. “Veritas has really missed you, you know. She’ll try not to show it, but… well, that’s how she is.”

“I still owe her a proper apology,” I admit. “Though I’m not entirely sure what for.”

“For being an idiot!” Veritas snaps from behind me, and I jolt in surprise to see her walking out of a nearby room. “And apparently for talking about me when I’m not around!”

“Hehe, whoops!” Aurora giggles unrepentantly.

“…You totally knew she was there,” I accuse.

“I assumed you could sense her!” she lies. “Anyway, you were saying?”

I sigh, turning around to face my other teammate. The one I thought was the bigger troublemaker.

“Veritas, I am sorry for… being an idiot. And talking about you when I thought you weren’t around,” I tell her as honestly as I can manage. She squirms a bit.

“…Just promise not to say stuff like you did before,” she mutters.