The Ashavan: The Secret History of the Multiverse by James Parrish

Author:James Parrish [Parrish, James & Parrish, James]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2023-04-21T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 31.

Beginner’s Luck

There are no hard rules around what weapons Dragon Guard may use. The only thing important is that it be something the guard can fight with. With that said, most tend to use swords. They’re more versatile and wieldy. As for the Empress, her affection for the spear didn’t come about until the fall of Magisterium.

~ Captain Vita Yellowdragon

Cannons roared out in the distance. Mike was developing a unique ear for them and could tell at least two broadsides were fired almost simultaneously. Looks like one ship was over-eager, he thought. He couldn’t blame them. If a fire-breathing dragon was charging the ship he was on, he would gladly have fired away too. Better than allowing diffusion of responsibility to settle in and have neither ship fire. Regardless, he quickly went back to work hauling crates.

He was tired. Most of the previous night, he lay in bed trying to piece together the different sides of his life. Everyone wanted something different from him. He was a friend to Strazalia, a disciple and Ashavan to Yuna, a student to Captain Zuberi and Magister Grati, and a potential lover to Lily.

That was the hardest piece to reconcile, and perhaps the most valuable to him. Lily had selflessly sacrificed her hand in marriage to speed along the liberation effort in Mazu. Mike knew she deserved better than she got, but both her behavior and his own feelings screamed of codependence, and he was never one to fully trust in his emotions. They had known each other for such a short time. He carefully attempted to tease out how much he truly cared for her and how much of his feelings were likely driven by the fact that she was one of the only people he knew that could speak his language or relate to him in any capacity. Lily effectively asked to have an affair with him. In the end, Mike concluded it was just a drunken conversation made by two people who were desperate and out of their element, though there were parts of him that still wanted it to be serious.

After a week of refining his fidem magic, he’d gotten to a point where he could pull any card he wanted from the deck so long as he allowed himself to draw the card at random. It was as if the cards shuffled themselves without actually having to move. The phenomena reminded him of a thought experiment a famous quantum physicist had come up with: Schrödinger’s cat. The scientist put a cat in a box, with the box set to release poison if a certain quantum condition is met, but since quantum mechanics are affected by outside observers, a person can never truly know if the cat is alive or dead until the box is inspected. Supposedly, both quantum states exist until an observation is made. It was merely an interesting talking point, he knew, but maybe not entirely. Perhaps the world was just a dream, as he had mused not so long ago.

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