Chapter 8: The Ugly Thing.

I knelt over the broken pieces.

There were five of them. The largest was no bigger than my palm, the smallest might have been missed entirely, had I not been looking. My fingers found the two largest shards and pressed them together. The edges didn’t match. I turned the second piece, tried again. I found where they did match and held them there. They fell apart the moment I let go.

Mana. If I could fuse them with mana, then it would take. It was such a simple trick, one I had never thought to need. I reached for my power and called the mana to my fingertips and tried to push it into the clay. Even without the [System] I should be able to do this. The mana swirled against the surface and slipped away, the same way it had slipped from every technique I’d tried since arriving in this world. The pieces sat in my hands, still broken.

Why the hell was I doing this? I resisted the urge to punch the ground again, though it was strong.

I tried again. Again, it failed. I tried one more time, and failed one more time. I pocketed the pieces and stood. This was beneath me -wholly, thoroughly beneath me. I had conquered nations. I had broken the spine of the world itself. I was not going to sit in the dirt and mourn a lump of mud.

I walked back toward the village with the pieces in my pocket. I did not know why I had taken them. It was a whim, nothing more.

What mattered was the marks.

I sat at the edge of the village, back against the low wall. From here I could see most of Hamel’s pitiful square. If watching these humans go about their meager lives was what it took to understand their power, then I would watch.

A woman hauled water from the village well. The bucket was full -it should have strained her. It didn’t. I watched closely and saw a large green dot on her forearm pulse beneath her skin as she lifted. This was physical reinforcement of some kind.

The woman set the bucket down and moved to the door of her hut, which had swollen in last night’s rain. She shoved it with both hands. It barely moved until she threw her shoulder into it. The door gave.

Interesting.

The mark strengthened one function, not all. She could lift a weight that should have strained her hard, but she could not open a stuck door. The limitation was rather narrow. Was that her own failing, or the mark’s? Both?

I saw a boy crouched by a cooking pit across the square. He snapped his fingers and a small mark glowed on his wrist, and a flame came from his wrist. He held it to the kindling beneath the pot and waited. This was an elemental power -fire generation. The most obvious of all powers.

But when the smoke rose and curled into his face, the boy coughed and waved his hand. He could create the flame but could not move the air? One element then, perhaps even one tiny aspect of that element. In my time, it was exceedingly rare to not have command of at least two, even for a child. Fire and air always went together with the classes that had them.

Strange, to think of it as ‘my time’.

Still, I knew two categories of these powers already: physical reinforcement and elemental manipulation. Both of them rather limited. I was making progress, and this was productive. This was what mattered.

A girl ran across the square, chasing a dog. It was not Sara. This was a different girl, roughly Sara’s age, and she was laughing. The thought came before I could stop it. Another girl, wilting in front of me -her lower lip was trembling. My focus shattered. I forced it back and returned my attention to the square.

A man stood by a fence at the village’s edge. He pressed his palm flat against a cracked post. A brown dot on his hand glowed and a shimmer of light sealed the split in the wood as something from his hand projected outward.

Mana taking shape outside the body? Light given solid form? That was a rare power, even in my time. One even I hadn’t possessed.

There were three categories then. Physical, elemental, and this…projection? I made these observations, but I did not examine them as deeply as I could and should have.

The pieces were still in my pocket. They felt like they stabbed me through the cloth. I rose and moved to a different spot and tried to focus.

A woman across the way had a mark that let her heat a pot in a different way. The pot boiled even though there was no flame. A child formed tiny, shimmering platforms of silver light beneath his feet as he played, the same one I’d seen before.

It was like slowly filling a map, my generals getting the lay of the land before the marching of the horde. Each of their reports drove back the darkness of ignorance. I should have been fascinated.

These were powers unlike the ones I had spent so long mastering. I should have been fascinated. Curiosity had always been my strongest hunger…it should have swallowed everything else whole.

I still saw a girl’s face in my mind, between every blink. I pressed my back against the wall and closed my eyes, trying to will the image away. It didn’t leave.

I returned to the room.

The bed was made and Ash’s pillow no longer sat by the far wall. The single lantern was out. Light came in through the window. I sat on the edge of the bed and stared at the opposite wall. I had ordered villages burned. Not once, not twice. I had done it dozens of times, across the breadth of many wars. I had watched entire armies die beneath my magic and felt nothing.

The Dwarven capital had fallen in a single afternoon. There had been eighty thousand souls, by the lowest estimate. I had slept well that night. I had killed a God and slept well that night. Killed his sister, and slept well that night too.

One child cried, and I could not concentrate. The child was irrelevant.

The marks were what mattered. Power was what mattered. This world was dangerous, and in ways I did not understand. The corrupted Divine Beast alone was proof of that. I could not afford weakness. I could not afford distraction -none of it worked.

It was not the scale that made it different. I knew that, even as I tried to pretend otherwise. It was simpler than that and far more infuriating. Before, there had been a wall between the act and the feeling. I had always assumed it was mine -a distance between me and petty things like guilt. Why would the Dragon feel guilt over the worm?

The Class. That wall had been the Class, and it was gone now. Strange, that I hardly felt a thing for the orders given a thousand years past.

For the Elven people of Osyrus, whom I’d had cut down to the last man simply for not prostrating themselves before me. For the Dwarven race, who would forge their masterworks no longer. For the land of Ashia, whose Gods I had killed, and which was, I had no doubt, still shrouded in perpetual darkness. Even a thousand years later.

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I pulled the broken pieces from my pocket and laid them out on the bed. I would remake the vase. Not for the girl -that would be absurd. Simply to clear my head, so that I could return to studying the marks without this insipid distraction clawing at me. That was the reason.

I gathered the pieces and went to find mud. The path down to the river was muddy from the rain.

The riverbank was quiet. It was a place not far from the river, the same river from the forest, I was sure, just further downstream. What meandering brought it this close to the village I could not say. The villager I had asked had been only too eager to point me to it.

I laid the broken pieces out in a row on a flat stone, arranged by size. They were a reference. If I was going to make a new one, it should at least resemble the original.

I gathered a fistful of mud from the bank and sat cross-legged on the grass. The mud was cool and thick between my fingers. It had a gritty texture that caught under my nails. I pressed it together, both hands working to form the base. I used too much force. My thumbs punched straight through. I stared at the hole in the lump of clay.

I tried again.

I gathered more mud and tried to press lighter. The shape slumped sideways before I’d even finished the base. It was too wet. I tried again. I took mud from further up the bank, where the ground was drier. This time the clay held its shape for a few moments before cracking apart in my hands -it was too dry.

I tried again.

I mixed the two types of mud, working them together with my palms the way I had seen potters do in my throne room, a lifetime ago. I had been bored, and one of my generals had brought me slaves. I had asked the men for their talents, promising them safety if they could keep my interest, even for an hour. Those potters had made it look effortless. It was not effortless.

This time, the mixture seemed right as I began to shape it. My hands were the problem -they were made for magic, made to swat down griffins, made to wield power that could reshape the world. They did not have the skill for this. Every press was too hard or too soft, every attempt to thin the walls left them uneven.

“Damn it.” I started over as the sun moved overhead. I did not track it.