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Alexandra did not know what to make of things. She was here on her mother’s home world and most of all she was with her father. The training that he was putting her through was almost impossible to get through. Jentus’ training routines were nothing compared to these. First the training was instructional and informational. Alexandra wracked her brains on trigonometry and geometry.
It was all about the angles and the spacial economics of magic. Hours and hours of mathematical computations her dad made her go through until it was second nature to her. Logical constructs were gone over as well as symbolic logic and geological constants within planets and the universe. Alexandra found it rather complicated, but her father said that it was necessary.
He instructed her in this stuff until her brain felt fried and then kept going. Alexandra’s head hurt from all of the information that her father was giving her to put in her head. Information overload is what she felt and a few years of this gave her nose bleeds. It could have been longer than a few years as it was hard to tell sometimes how long it actually was taking when you are deep into the studying of things you don’t notice the time going by.
She was throwing-up most of the first three years and her head felt like it was going to explode for the first seventy two years, but she continued to train and be trained. Her father had said that this training should have been done quite a long time ago. If done then, it would have been easier on her and progress would have been smoother. As it was they barely had any progress at all for the first one hundred and fifty years and not much more in these last one hundred and fifty years.
Her father was very frustrated and wanted to help her in her transition to coming into her inheritance, but she knew that his patience was growing thin. She was not the daughter that he had wished her to be. Genshen gave her nice gifts on each of her birthdays in the last three hundred years, but Alexandra knew that he did so reluctantly. This day was the second day after her six hundred and seventy-ninth birthday and her final test before she was to graduate from her training.
It was like any other day except she was very sick. She knew that this was normal at this time of the month, but she did not want to disappoint her father. Today would be the end of her three hundred years of Dochani training. In the past three hundred years she had learned many things, but she had not mastered any of them. Keeping up with her hand-to-hand combat training and weapons training was hard, but it seemed to be the only things she almost mastered during the last three hundred years.
Genshen seemed to be adept at everything while she, being his daughter, was inept at learning what he wanted to teach her. The only things that seemed to stick when he taught it was teleportation, a simple light, a simple shield and a simple fireball. Everything else that Genshen tried to train Alexandra in seemed to fail or harm herself. Today she was to have a combat simulation against her father. He had hoped that this would bring out the natural ability in her that had been laying dormant for far too long.
She had done nothing yesterday in preparation for today’s combat and most of the day was spent in meditation as per the instructions of her father. Wearing only her apprentice robes that were tied at the waist with a cotton belt wrapped around her tiny waist three times and knotted the same way one ties a belt for most styles of martial arts, she was almost ready.
Her robe had a quilted appearance to it and was made out of a heavy enough material to fend off the average blow from your opponent. Red was the colour of the apprentice robe and it was always too hot to wear anything beneath the robe. Her waist length black, with red highlights overshadowing the black, hair was tied back with a red ribbon making a long braid. The ribbon intertwined with the whole length of her hair and a white kerchief speckled with various geometric shapes of different colours folded in half was wrapped over the top of her head to keep the hair out of her face.
His robe was a pitch-black colour as was customary for a master of the Dochani art and the cloth belt was tied the same way as Alexandra’s except the robe had legs instead of a skirt style even though he was not wearing a sword. His hair was short and cut close to the scalp. They faced each other and the combat commenced. Genshen put up his shield that did not allow things to come in contact with him, but allowed him to send things through it. Alexandra followed his lead, but her shield did not allow her to fire anything upon him.
She saw the flows of energy that he had used to create his own shield, but could not duplicate it. It was not because she did not know how to do it, but because she did not have enough karma as her father had termed it to perform a task such as this. Her shield would have to do even though turning it off and on at the right times could prove to be difficult, if not impossible. A white glow enveloped Genshen’s hands as he raised them above his head.
The glow grew and slowly began to encase his whole body and then suddenly gathered back to his hands to form a sapphire blue sphere that waved back and forth, licking and crackling the air like a bonfire being pummeled by a light wind. Genshen twirled the sphere in his left hand and tossed it in Alexandra’s direction like a discus thrower. Before the ball of blue fire reached its intended target, Genshen was preparing another and another.
Two more blue balls of fire were sent in Alexandra’s direction before the first had time to reach her. All of the training in this world or in any world could not help her at this point and her instincts were her only refuge. She strengthened her shield as much as her karma would allow, even though this could turn out to be a fatal mistake and leave her defenseless against her father’s seemingly limitless karma.
Her father had told her that there were many ways to augment her karma, but it was something that he would not teach her because it would mean that he would be teaching her to rely on the unpredictable. Relying on the unpredictable could mean the end of a life. Alexandra was not sure that her father used any of these unpredictable sources of karma or knew how to use them.
During her training she always felt that her father was about to teach her something and then change his mind. It was like he chose what she should know instead of teaching her everything that he knew. Almost like his training was tainted to one side from too much bias over the years and too much heartache experienced by her father. What happens though is the opposite of what was meant to be achieved. Denial only brings one to want something more, instead of just showing the negatives so that one could learn of what could happen.
It was a major failing of many societies not teaching the young all that they needed to know. Eventually knowledge that is needed won’t be there in the next generation. It was the not knowing about something that could get someone hurt, or killed even. Something that was very unfortunate for her, especially since she had used up all of her available karma. Available karma was deemed as local karma and her father deemed unavailable karma as external karma.
Local karma was predictable and external karma was unpredictable. Alexandra felt the threads of her shield shimmer and then tear apart and her mind reeled with pain as she felt the fabrics of her power being twisted to the breaking point. Her body was seared with fire, her mind was absent of any thought or memory of what might have been or what might be and her power shimmered and dimmed from lack of karma to fuel the hunger.
The sinewy threads of her power almost died and fell apart but had found instinct, her instincts. The instincts of soul can be very powerful and thus, this is the reason that Alexandra will survive and her father’s hopes of her reaching her potential being fulfilled. Threads of power, guided by Alexandra’s instincts, found what was needed like a plant spreads out its roots to find water. She became linked to the earth, water, air and fire at the core of the planet and was fueled by it.
All of these changes took place within a few seconds and the last two balls of blue fire were absorbed into her newly formed shield, which added to her already greatly expanded karma. It was the first time that she had felt alive in all of her life. Somehow she knew that her father knew of her change. The flows of his shield changed and Alexandra knew that he had strengthened it in anticipation of her attack. Alexandra’s body began to glow a dark crimson as she waved her hand in her father’s direction.
Three red fiery balls visualized halfway between her and her father. Her father sent three identical balls of fire, except for their colour, which was blue, to meet hers. She saw a look of surprise on her father’s face as her own red fireballs absorbed his fireballs.