The Golden Man

The paved square of the town is small. Anya is no more than twenty paces from the boy, who had obviously been stewing on her arrival for some time despite the early morning hour. But the multi-storey apartments, with their gabled, thatched , added a colosseum like atmosphere and gave the square a larger sense of itself. The clouds of the overnight rain are beginning to disperse, the sun turning the remaining puddles to piles of blinding crystals.

The boy had dressed in his best, polished boots and a new waistcoat with the gold chain of a watch joining pocket to shining black buttons. Anya wonders why. Was it to impress her, or was this how the boy thought these kinds of standoffs were meant to look? She smiles sadly. A church bell chimes, sending crows in to all corners of the world, and everything was coming together to form a nice little cliché of the duels of old. The ancient gunslingers would be proud, if utterly baffled and awed by what was coming next.

But that is where the similarities end. The boy does not seek to intimidate her, twitchy trigger fingers crawling towards their first summonings. As soon as Anya plants her feet across from him, he begins. Thick tendrils of power, red and fluid as blood, snake from the mage’s outstretched fingers. They weave together, knitting from the ground up the solid form of the Avatar the mage has decided to open with. Sharp hooves build into strong fetlocks, then the barrel chest and thick neck of a stallion. It snorts, and a spray of red steam issues from its nostrils, the Avatar all the more powerful for the detail.

But it was a weak willed creature, undoubtedly groomed for the spoiled rich youth before he came into his powers. Easily dominated in life, so too was it a simple matter for the mage to acquire its aura for use as an Avatar. There was no consciousness to wrestle with, nor any subtleties inherent in the mind of an instinctual animal. Its form was easily understood both through riding and, later, an autopsy. It was a solid opening, well-crafted due to the mage’s familiarity. But it poses little threat to Anya. She has her own early memories, and they are a far more complicated match for this beast.

She clenches her fists, feeling the golden threads of power solidifying there as real as the threads of fishing twine she had held in much smaller hands as a child. Even as the stallion charges her, sharp hooves on the cobblestones clattering in the suppressed, fearful animal part of her brain, she calmly folds, loops and tie the squares of the net as her father had taught her. The movements familiar, she is able to focus on adding tiny details, the miniscule coarseness of the threads she had to concentrate to feel between her fingers.

More, she imbues the Avatar with memory, every catch it had ever made, whether fish or seaweed. She added emotion, that of the thread as it thrilled in the catch or sparked at snaring something more unexpected, as well as her own, the patience and pride of her father as he taught, her own frustration and, later, joy as the fiddly task gets easier.

She casts her Avatar up before the horse not a moment too soon. As it strikes the web, it slows immediately, as if trying to push through a vat of glue. With a small flick of her wrist, the net starts to move forward like a sail catching a fair wind. The threads dice the horse’s flesh into clean, regular chunks, which turn to smoke and evaporate as Anya’s enemy’s power loses focus.

Too late he realises the net isn’t stopping as it clears the horse’s hindquarters, and hastily tries to summon a new Avatar to protect himself. Wisely he chooses a sword over a shield, working with enough precision under pressure to be able to draw it from a scabbard before holding the point before himself. He slices through the net with a tall, overwrought swipe, not without some effort to snap each and every hair width thread before him.

Anya allows herself a small smile at his panting, sweating form.

“We don’t have to do this,” she says.

“You know we do!” shouts the mage, unfolding from his waist an Avatar in the form of a thick leather belt, with a large and cornered buckle. From the lines on his face, Anya can easily imagine all the pain and hate he has channelled into this Avatar. It is a stronger effort by far than his first. He grows it overhead until it is as wide and tall as a tree, and sends it crashing down on her.

Nonplussed, she starts to draw a house around her. It is a miniature realisation of her old home, just enough to encompass her, the roof peaking just over her head. But size is not necessarily related to power when it comes to a battle of Avatars. The walls spring up from hazy foundations, the best she could realise, but the details aren’t as important to this particular rendition. This manifestation relies more heavily on the insubstantial – the smells of her mother’s cooking, and the sound of her humming a tune her mother had taught her. The particular feeling of comfort and safety she feels here, specific to her, and, being a memory, incredibly difficult to replicate, but incredibly powerful because of that challenge.

The belt strikes the roof, but there is no shattering explosion of tiles and plaster. Once again, the mage’s power evaporates as the belt melts against Anya’s withstanding Avatar, oozing down the sides of the golden construct and leaving her untouched beneath.

Growling in rage, the boy begins fashioning something new, as Anya stands calmly before him. But suddenly, he draws his arm back and slings something at her. It rockets across the field between them, striking her hard in the hip and spinning her twice. She doesn’t fall, splaying her injured leg wide to rebalance and quickly throw up a rudimentary wall, just to survive the next assault and give her time to recover from the deep wound.

But nothing comes. The boy smirks, enjoying his first victory in what he assumes will be many.

“I, too, have happy memories of childhood.”

Anya coughs, wiping a trickle of blood from her mouth with the back of her hand. She can taste the remnants of the attack in it, the almost orgasmic sensation of pebbles perfectly skipping across a lake, the mesmerising ripples issuing from each contact with the water’s surface, the laugher of young boys with nowhere and nothing better to spend their time, and of course the sting of an errantly flung rock, magnified a thousand times by the power pumped into the Avatar.

Perhaps she is being too lax. The boy clearly is no slack at this game. But she was hoping to intimidate him out of it, with a serene, untouchable approach. Things would have to change.

“Good, yes!” cries the boy, narrowing his eyes in a mirror of hers. “Let’s have at it, properly now!”

So they do, for long enough that the puddles evaporate and the shadows begin to stretch over the paving stones. More Avatars are summoned and spent than either mage can keep track of, plenty large and blunt in their force, more deceptions like the rock trick, or Avatars which snuck up behind the mages, or hidden within other Avatars, disguising the true threats. They overlapped or came together, mobbing each mage’s defences. There were plenty of breaks in between assaults as well, the combatants mutually allowing themselves time to gather their breath and thoughts, and decide which tact to take next.

Each time Anya took the battle to a higher level of skill and power, the boy managed to rise with her, sometimes straining, but always just making it. Someone was coaching him, she decided, feeding him power and ideas. There was no way he could be this experienced, this powerful, no matter the depth of the hateful vendetta he seemed to carry against her.

She does not have the same assistance, and her tiring state is forcing her towards a concluding move. She resists for as long as she dares, the Avatar she has in mind being equally dangerous to them both and therefore guaranteeing some sort of end to this, but she cannot allow the boy to seize on the confidence of matching it with her for so long. So she begins the summoning.

The Avatar is an ordinary looking man, on the short side, and lean. She can hear the boy huff from across the square. He has not yet learnt that these are the dangerous men, hard an toughened, so much more dangerous than the pretty, display-muscle bound thugs with glass jaws that the boy both idolises and despises for their bullying in a conflicting mess.

Its golden face bears no resemblance to the man she knew. This is only an aspect of him after all, and in this form he wears a mask of rage, a portal into that overwhelming emotion. Anya makes herself small, shying away from her own Avatar, trying to appear already defeated. The boy laughs cruelly at her, but she does not mind his derision as the Avatar turns away from her in disgust.

It begins marching on the boy. He tries to turn it away, but it shrugs off his every defence, growing stronger and more enraged with each attempt to turn him. The boy does not know the counters against this kind of hate, and neither does his mentor, evidently. Therein lies its power, because this is a special kind of madness, able to be fuelled and quelled only by her.

Fear comes too late to the boy, and as he tries to turn, the Avatar lunges to grab him by the neck. The momentum carries him forward until the back of the boy’s skull cracks painfully against a wall, his legs dangling tempting inches from the ground. The Avatar draws back a fist and punches him in the gut. Tears flood to the mage’s eyes, matched by Anya in the past and present. She is still connected to this, feeling the pain and humiliation.

If the boy had been with child, well, he wouldn’t be any longer. As it is, the blow only shatters his pocket watch and a few ribs. The Avatar drops him pitifully to the ground, stomping on his chest once more for good measure. The mage cries out, broken more than physically, and that is enough to take all the power out of the Avatar. It evaporates as Anya rushes through it to crouch at the boy’s side.

Perhaps it was too much, she thinks, seeing the grief in his eyes as he tries to comprehend all he has experienced. It certainly was for her.