III. Adax

Adax’s head was swimming from going over a translation of an ancient text on power reserve manipulation. He slumped on the chair in his austere dorm room in the Pillar, and rubbed the bridge of his nose with his ink-smudged fingers. Great. Now his nose was smeared too. After a full month of studies, he was starting to wonder if he would ever even meet a Vector. In a way, he contemplated, the Pillar was still a great improvement compared to the settlement. Long before he was old enough to understand what the words refugee settlement meant, he had yearned to find out why he found himself in one. Lyra was lucky in the way that people living in the settlement could be lucky. She had her family, her sense of origin. Adax had neither. His unmarried mother died shortly after he was born due to a wasting illness. Thus, leaving Adax at the settlement’s orphanage. The refugees that left the Isles during the war all those centuries ago, were allowed to establish some rudimentary settlements, but they were never allowed to assimilate with Erethia’s population. Isolated, they stayed there, and their offspring stayed there, never allowed to earn more than the small stipend and the rations that Erethia supplied. Children that manifested could leave and go to the Citadel; Concipios were important enough that even ones whose ancestry traced back to enemy refugees were still received quite well. The same could not be said about Vectors from the settlement. Adax remembered the day he manifested. He was sitting on the river’s bank, and a herd of small-sized deer carefully trotted next to him, to drink water from the stream. Little Deer. Not even a palm in height, branches laden with colourful leaves instead of antlers, sprouting from their heads. Their little bodies opalescent in the sunlight, a tapestry of forest colours mirrored on them. Descendants of the Fawn, they were the last of the magical denizens of the forest. They were rare and preferred to keep to their own. A sighting of one was the talk of the town for months. As he was scratching the deer’s head, he was able to see their power, a golden light nested within them. A Concipio. He still remembered being more shocked at seeing them, than at himself for being one. Several years later, he had studied enough to know the creatures allowed him to see them, he had done nothing to detect their power. He smiled when he remembered Lyra’s reaction after he shared that with her. She had him take her to the exact spot on the stream, climbed on a branch above and waited for the Deer to come back, until she fell asleep and almost fell into the river. That was Lyra; she had quite literally fallen into his life, when he was reading a book near the stream, and some boys came to bully him. Lyra jumped down from the branches of the tree, and hissed at them like a feral cat until they ran away. Her siblings were famous Vectors —as much as Vectors could be— so Lyra was respected as well, even if a bit begrudgingly. That changed when word got around about Adax being a Concipio; All of a sudden, the boys that used to harass him showed him an unnerving level of subservience. Lyra was dethroned, her only saving grace —until she manifested herself— was being his friend. Something he had thought would last their entire lives, but it seemed that despite new Concipios not being discouraged from mingling with new Vectors, they were certainly given enough work to not have time to mingle with anyone. Adax sighed. Time to join another lecture.