The Wrong Kind of Immortality

Orestis had spent most of the previous afternoon thinking about how to approach Eirene’s training, and the answer had been irritatingly simple: start with the basics. His basics—not those of the Consortium, or the various academies of this age.

That morning, instead of leaving for their usual training, they remained in Eirene’s room for the moment. She sat at the desk nursing a cup of tea, waiting for him to speak.

“First thing,” he said, without preamble. “You need a proper shield; the regular ones won’t do.”

She set down the cup. “What’s wrong with them?”

“They are too rigid. Once the force exceeds its tolerance, it doesn’t degrade—it collapses. All at once.” He drew mana into the air between them and constructed a sigil framework—the modifications she would need to apply to the standard shield formation. “This version distributes force instead of resisting it. Redirects what it can, absorbs what it must, and fails gradually instead of catastrophically.”

He rotated the construct so she could see the layered structure from multiple angles. “It will only start showing its real strength at the Fourth Circle—the elastic properties of higher-density mana are what make it exceptional. Until then, the benefit is marginal and the cost disproportionate. So you’ll need divine energy for now.”

Eirene studied the sigil framework, already deconstructing the logic. She nodded and began practising.

While she worked through the construction—her first two attempts collapsing during the layering phase, her third holding but leaking at the junctions, her fourth stabilising cleanly—Orestis leaned back and said, “Let’s make sure we’re both on the same page.”

She glanced up, maintaining the shield.

“Your goal is to overwhelm your opponents. So completely that their life and death become your decision.”

“Yes.”

“To do that, you need four things: power, speed, control, and initiative.” He gestured at her shield. “Fortunately, you already have the first one.”

“You’re talking about divine power.”

“Not just that you have access to it—that you have access to unlimited amounts of it. The normal method grants power based on conditions. Piety, devotion, alignment with the god’s principles—the more boxes you tick, the more power you can draw. It’s metered. Regulated.” He paused. “You don’t use that system. You’re using my cheat method to draw freely.”

“I suppose it’s fortunate Eleuthera is content to let me do that,” Eirene said.

“It’s not as if you’re limited to her reservoir.”

Eirene paused, her head tilted slightly. It was a familiar gesture by now. Orestis wondered, not for the first time, whether she realised she did that every time Eleuthera talked to her.

“Eleuthera says,” Eirene reported, “that as her Chosen, she would be offended if I drew from any reservoir but hers. She also says that drawing at any meaningful quantity from another god would alert them regardless.”

“What she’s calling ‘meaningful quantities’ starts at the level of destroying cities,” he replied wryly. “But yes, she has a point. Although there are ways around that.”

“What ways?”

Orestis shook his head. “Doesn’t matter. The method can’t be used with a mortal body.”

He paused.

Or can it? I never tested it on anyone other than myself before. Something to think about.

He waved a hand. “We’re going off on a tangent. Power is handled. That leaves speed, control, and initiative.”

Eirene dismissed the shield—her fifth attempt had held cleanly—and gave him her full attention.

“Speed is not just about movement,” he said. “It’s decision speed and casting speed. A correct decision made too late is just a complicated mistake. Initiative means acting before your opponent does—dictating the terms of the fight instead of reacting to theirs. That one requires experience; you can’t learn it from theory.”

“And control?”

“Precision and restraint. The ability to use overwhelming force at exactly the level you intend—no more, no less.” He looked at her. “I plan to focus on speed today. Initiative will come with practice. Control requires precision, and that will take—”

“I’ve been working on my precision,” Eirene said.

She raised her hand. Mana gathered at her fingertips in an unstructured spell, similar to what he had taught her months ago. Similar, but not the same. Instead of hand-shaped constructs, the mana resolved into threads. Thin, precise, individual strands of mana extending from each finger.

She wrapped one around a small figurine on the desk, lifted it, rotated it, set it down. The control was exact. The threads moved independently.

“I’ve been practising a variation of the unstructured manipulation you showed me,” she said. “Your version used hands. I started with that, then made them thinner as my control improved. Eventually I reached this.”

She extended the threads further, demonstrating what she could do—splitting them, braiding two together, guiding a single strand to trace precise lines across the surface of the desk.

Orestis watched without speaking. She had iterated the technique independently. Hands to shapes, shapes to threads. That progression might be obvious, but it was not easy to implement. It required understanding why the technique worked, not just how.

“How fine can you make them?” he asked.

She concentrated. One thread thinned until it was barely visible—a filament of mana so narrow that maintaining its coherence required continuous, precise attention.

That level of control was exceptional. She was operating at a precision tier that even most Fourth Circle mages never reached. And she was doing it at the Third.

This was impressive, even by his standards. Orestis found himself smiling.

“Good,” he said. “That saves time.”

She looked at him. “For what?”

“There’s a spell that’s perfect for your goal of disabling without killing. A modified gravity spell. It requires sustained pressure control at a level that would be dangerous without fine precision. I was planning on waiting until your control was up to par before teaching you.” He paused. “Which it is.”

“A gravity spell.” She turned that over. “Those require Fourth Circle, minimum.”

“This one requires Fifth for comfortable sustained use.” He waved a hand. “We’ll go over it properly later. The sigil structure is complex—learning it will take time. For now, speed and initiative.”

“Which involves?”

Orestis grinned. “Sparring. But not here—and not in the usual forest clearing. It’s too close to Orthessa. The kind of sparring I have in mind would draw attention and ruin the surroundings.”

Eirene raised an eyebrow, more curious than surprised.

He opened a gate to the training ground he had chosen the day before. Beyond the aperture was open ground bordered by distant hills and sparse vegetation. A wilderness.

“After you,” he said, gesturing dramatically.

***

Eirene felt the monitoring spell settle over her. It was the same one Orestis used during aura exercises. She guessed that he wanted to monitor her vitals during this training as well.

It would have been reasonable—if she wasn’t going to be under a shield for the duration. As if compelled by her thoughts, Orestis said, “Shield up.”

She drew on Eleuthera’s power and constructed the new shield. It enclosed her in a close-fitting sphere. It felt different from a regular shield. Less like a wall. More like armour.

The cost of maintaining it was also much higher. But then again, she could afford the expenditure even if she’d been using her personal mana.

“Ready,” she said.

He raised his hands and spread them slightly to either side, elbows relaxed, palms angled downward at waist height. The posture looked almost casual, as if he were simply holding space open beside him.

Two gates opened, one before each hand. He cast through them, the spell complex enough that she couldn’t follow the full structure.

A moment later, the sky darkened.

It was not gradual; the light simply went away, swallowed by clouds that had no business forming that fast. They boiled into existence overhead—heavy, black, alive with something that made the hair on her arms stand up. Thunder cracked. The air tasted of metal and violence.

Lightning fell. Dozens of bolts at once—a continuous barrage hammering the ground in every direction. The noise was deafening, a rolling wall of sound that turned the world white and chaotic.

Several bolts struck her shield. The impact was significant, but the force was scattered across the surface without overwhelming it. The shield was holding.

At that moment, she heard Orestis’s voice, magically amplified to carried over the thunder. “Don’t just stand there. Dodge the lightning.”

Through the storm, she saw Orestis standing exactly where he had been—arms relaxed, expression calm, smiling as if none of it concerned him.

Another lightning bolt hit her shield—strong enough to force her back a step. She moved.

Even as she began weaving around the arcs, she noticed that none of the lightning was striking him. Bolts struck the ground to his left, his right, behind him, in front of him. Not one made contact. They curved past him as if he were a stone in a river, the current parting around an obstacle it could not move.

“Good. Anticipate the trajectories. Your task is to avoid them along with my spells.”

Right after he said that, twelve spell circles materialised around him—arranged randomly, each one with a different structure. Twelve different spells, prepared and waiting. The sheer variety was the first thing that struck her. The speed with which they appeared was the second.

The first circle flashed, and a bolt of fire streaked toward her.

She dodged. The fireball passed through the space she had occupied and detonated against the ground.

A second circle discharged—a lance of compressed air that shrieked as it crossed the distance, the sound sharp enough to carry over even the noise of thunder.

Eirene was still off-balance from dodging the first spell and was forced to take the hit. The force dispersed across the sphere. It was manageable.

Then a third spell was released. Ice. It came low, skimming the ground, and she jumped over it while another lightning bolt hammered her shield from above. The impact staggered her.

She regained her balance and moved. The lightning was continuous—she couldn’t predict individual bolts, only react. The spells from his circles came at irregular intervals. Fire, force, wind blades, earth spikes erupting from the ground. Each one different. Each one demanding a different response.

She began casting deflection shields on top of her existing one. She blocked a wind blade and sidestepped an earth spike in the same motion. A bolt of lightning hit the ground where she had been standing a heartbeat before. She cast a barrier against a force bolt, absorbed the impact, and threw herself sideways as something cold and sharp whistled past her ear.

Orestis wasn’t giving her time to think. But that was likely the point.

She stopped trying to predict and started reacting. Shield adjustments became instinctive—angle, brace, redirect. Movement became continuous—never standing still, never in one place long enough for the spells to converge.

A bolt of fire forced her left. An earth spike rose where she landed. She vaulted it, took a lightning strike on the shield—stronger than before, enough to make her grit her teeth—and cast a counterspell at a column of ice bearing down on her from the right.

The lightning was getting stronger.

The realisation landed between one dodge and the next. The early bolts had been firm but manageable. These were harder. The shield was still working, but the strain was growing. The force was increasing.

Eirene realised that he had been adjusting the power the entire time. He was still adjusting it.

She had not noticed earlier because the increases had been gradual. The lightning she was dodging now would have overwhelmed a normal shield in seconds. No wonder he’d had her learn this new version. It was the only reason she was still standing.

Another volley. Three spells in rapid succession—fire, force, ice—followed by a cluster of lightning strikes concentrated in a tight area around her. She shielded, dodged, cast a deflection at the fire bolt, and took the ice strike near her shoulder. The shield absorbed it but the cold seeped through—a reminder that the protection was not absolute.

New spells constantly bloomed around Orestis. He still hadn’t moved from his original position. He still had not taken a step. His hands rested at his sides, his weight on one foot, an easy smile on his face—as if maintaining a lightning storm and several spell formations at the same time required no more effort than breathing.

She cast an offensive spell—a concentrated mana bolt aimed at his chest. It crossed the distance in an instant.

His smile widened.

A thread of mana, thin as a hair, flicked out from his hand and cut through the bolt. The spell formation collapsed, dispersing the mana bolt before it reached him.

Eirene recognised the spell as the same one she’d shown him earlier. She’d only been using it to practice her shaping skills. Now she was inspired to apply it differently.

She also understood the lesson: economy of motion. She had been wasting too much mana and effort with casting different types of shields and counterspells. Wasting her concentration.

Now, she let her main shield serve as protection as she created several strands of mana to deflect or cut through his spells.

“You’re adapting,” Orestis’s voice said, as calm as if he were commenting on the weather. “Good.”

Time passed. More lightning. More spells. She adapted—started using the terrain, keeping barriers between herself and the worst angles, timing her movements to the rhythm of the storm even though the rhythm kept changing. Because he kept changing it.

A bolt struck her shield hard enough to drive her to one knee. Two spells converged from opposite angles—a wind blade and an earth spike. She deflected the blade, rolled under the spike, and came up casting.

The storm intensified. The spells came faster. Lightning hammered the ground in sheets.

She didn’t know how long it lasted. Time compressed into a series of reactions—dodge, shield, move, cast, shield, dodge. Her body burned with exertion. The divine power sustaining the shield was inexhaustible, but her concentration was not.

Eventually, it ended.

Eirene bent forward with her hands on her knees, panting from exertion. This was the first time since activating her aura that she had been winded.

The storm was gone. The sky above them was clear—unmarked and still, as if nothing had happened. The ground around her was scorched and cratered, torn by lightning and spell impacts.

Orestis walked over, looking no different than he had before the first bolt fell. She, by contrast, was drenched in sweat, breathing like she had sprinted a mile.

“You did well,” he said.

She straightened slowly. “One of these days, you should tell me where you learned all of that.”

It came out before she could stop it. Fatigue had a way of lowering the filters she usually kept in place—the ones that told her to wait and let him share on his own terms.

“I will,” he replied.

That made her pause.

The answer was almost shocking. That was how unexpected it was. There had been no deflection, no dry redirection, no subject change disguised as a joke. And most importantly—

“That’s the first time you’ve clearly said you would tell me.”

He looked at her. Something in his expression shifted—not dramatically, but enough that she noticed.

Orestis shrugged and said simply: “You deserve to know.”

A small, unexpected warmth spread through her chest. The choice of words mattered. He wasn’t just promising to tell her eventually—he was acknowledging that she had the right to know.

Then he made a face. “But not now. For some annoying reason, discussing it is… uncomfortable—which is irritating. I’ll just mention things as things come up naturally.”

Eirene felt a flicker of amusement as she watched Orestis frowning into the distance, as though the source of his irritation might be found somewhere on the horizon. The expression looked almost accusatory, as if the emotion itself had offended him.

Beneath the amusement was something quieter. Satisfaction, perhaps.

Orestis had always kept his feelings carefully contained—hidden behind calm detachment and the occasional dry remark. Moments where that control slipped were rare enough that she found herself quietly pleased when they did.

Then she heard Eleuthera’s voice through their link: Tell him I want to join the next sparring session!

The words carried with them a feeling of genuine excitement.

Smiling because she had a very good idea about how he’d react, Eirene said, “Eleuthera says she’d like to join the next sparring session.”

Orestis’s response was immediate. “Absolutely not.”

Eleuthera responded, and Eirene passed on the message: “She says she promises to hold back.”

“Her words make it abundantly clear that her intention is to bother me, and not to help you train. The answer is still no.”

A pause. “She says you’re no fun.”

“She’s correct. And the answer is still no.”