A Guardian's Ascension (Chapter 20)

“You’ve been busy,” the Guardian replied with cooing benevolence that let him know there was nothing to apologize for or to forgive. “I’ve seen the smoke rising from the forge for longer hours of each day than when I was still there to offer help. I just hope you give yourself rest when you need it.”

“I get enough,” Allian said. He didn’t hang his head, but might as well have. “Father needs to see that I can take over when the time comes. That I won’t disappoint him.”

“There’s no risk of that, I promise you,” Sophia said, not shocked by her sibling’s excessive work ethic, but regretful that he evidently didn’t see his prior efforts as sufficient to impress their parent and teacher. Her thumb rose instinctively, wanting to pat Allian on the arm if not give him the closest approximation of a hug that she could, but held back. “Even if it wasn’t tradition for the firstborn to inherit the family craft, you’ve given so many hours and years to honing your skills, and the quality of your work couldn’t possibly leave room for doubt.”

“That’s not true.”

“Stop that. I know you’ve never been one for bragging, but I won’t listen to you demean yourself for no reason. You’ve earned this.”

“But I haven’t. You have.”

“What… does that mean?”

“It means Father was going to give the forge to you,” Allian said, just as quietly bucolic, but as Sophia had been able to hear the lighter-hearted jesting in his tranquil greeting before, so too could she detect the pain now. This was an outburst, by her brother’s standards, and considering how unexpected the information was, the giantess understood why, even if she didn’t believe it.

“That… cannot be true. I was always destined to be your subordinate in the forge. You’re just assuming-”

“He told me himself. About a year before the attack, when you first picked up a blade on behalf of our people. When you were chosen for something much greater than Father could ever have planned for you. You were to inherit the forge, and I was to… support you. Likewise, you’ve never been a bragger yourself, Soph, but you know your skill was improving rapidly. More rapidly than mine ever had. And even if you had the courtesy to tell me that I was still your better in the forge – and, to be generous to myself, at the absolute best, I was still your equal in one or two respects – you had already surpassed me in nearly every way. Time would have only made the difference more drastic, I wager. It was… the correct decision.”

Speechless, Sophia did everything in her power to keep her feelings of disbelieving shock and then begrudging recognition from projecting too obviously on her face. But as she was holding Allian so close to her enormous countenance, the odds of keeping these gut reactions concealed from him were low. And as well as he knew Sophia, he likely would’ve been able to read her emotional response out of the stoniest features anyway. Her brother might have been one to talk his own accomplishments down, but he certainly had no reason to make up such a story. And once the truth was spoken aloud, of course it made a painful kind of sense to her. Indeed Sophia was aware during her final year of apprenticeship that she’d begun, objectively, to match her brother’s skill in the forge and at times came out with a more-polished product.

Yet even while she was aware of this shift, she’d never thought less of Allian’s work, always crediting any of her own dexterous blade-crafting gifts exclusively to the tutorship of her father and brother, and had no doubts until this precise instant that anyone but him would inherit the family’s enterprise and accompanying reputation. But their father, much as he loved his children, was also harshly practical, as was required for survival on the frontier, and the giantess had to silently accept that, yes, it probably did make the most “logical” sense for her to someday take over the forge. Or at least it did, until fate had other ideas. Suddenly the burdened timbre of her miniscule sibling’s heavy voice from the palm of her hand took on new meaning; it made Sophia’s stomach turn and her throat clamp shut. The full-body affliction she experienced now wasn’t nearly so severe as it was when Torv declared that their soul partnership was concluded, but it nevertheless sickened the Guardian to her core and made her feel indescribably helpless. What was she supposed to say?

Even before Allian opened his mouth again, Sophia could already foresee exactly what her brother’s greatest wound must have been. And no amount of medicinal salve or inspirational sword-flailing on her part could correctly heal it. But she also couldn’t remain silent. It wasn’t her way and never had been.

“He… never said anything to me. I had no idea,” Sophia vowed, though she was cautious not to let pity infect her voice, as Allian would perceive it from a mile away, and then he would just feel worse. As would she, in turn. “If… I had only known-”

“It would have changed nothing,” Allian interrupted, without any trace of resentment, but still hurt nonetheless. “And you know that, Soph. Yes, you would have been embarrassed at first. You would have minimized your own talent. You would have refused to accept the forge if I had fought against Father’s decision. But I would not have done that, because doing the right thing is more important than my pride, or your humility, and so you would have still taken responsibility. You would have made an incredible master smith, too. After enough years, you surely would have been the greatest of anyone in our village who ever put steel to flame, living or dead. Instead, you are, and always will be, the greatest among us. In every way. Without condition.”

Again, Sophia couldn’t argue with Allian’s foresight of their family drama that was now never to be. If not for that attack which had placed her in the Guardians’ sightlines, her reluctant claiming of the forge would have been inevitable. Of course her sibling was right. As well, a ghostly hint of that previous discomfort Sophia used to feel in the face of such glorified superhuman extolling now rose back into her throat for a moment when he cast this final supreme assessment upon her. Yet the giantess had become well-practiced by now not only at tolerating such words, but accepting them. This was Allian talking, too: a person who never unduly flattered or said anything except exactly what was in his heart, bluntly if necessary, and so she could definitively trust that her brother saw her now just as all the rest of them did. He wasn’t misguided, delusional, or denigrating himself. He simply believed in her as something more than she ever was before. And that was all right. If Allian was troubled by anything, and he indeed seemed to be, it was certainly not his sister’s comparative godhood.

“I’m sorry,” the giantess sighed, not even certain what she was apologizing for yet, but felt that one was necessary anyway. “I truly-”

“You don’t need to worry yourself, Soph,” her brother urgently reassured, and seemed to mean it. “You have enough concerns to deal with already, wondering when the next plague of monsters might arrive to eat all of us. Even if I had come here to be… upset with you, which I never would or could, or to selfishly place blame on you for the faults of my own ego, you would be right to think it was… ridiculous of me. I don’t want or need an apology from someone who has done nothing wrong. Who has done nothing in her whole life that was not done on behalf of others alone.”

“What can I do for you?” Sophia nigh-pleaded in whisper, while compelled to place her fingertip on her brother’s shoulder as a compromise for the embrace she still wished to give him. “If… there is anything.”

“There is.”

“Just name it.”

“Don’t make the same mistake I did. Please.”

Sophia pursed her lips, quietly taken aback again. She wasn’t sure what she was expecting Allian to request, but it wasn’t this. What mistake could he possibly have made? As far as she was concerned, he was the wronged party here, having worked hard for years and done everything their father ever asked of him without complaint, only to be stranded with the unfairness forever of knowing that the forge would never have been his, if his little sister hadn’t grown into a five-hundred-twenty-seven-foot-tall warrior titaness.

“And… what was that?”

In lieu of the straightforward answer he normally gave, Allian sighed, contemplatively hung his head, and began to aimlessly pace in a tight circle upon Sophia’s palm. His tiny footsteps gently depressed the soft flesh of her hand: maybe not quite yet at-home with the reality of being held this way by someone he probably would always regard somewhat as a child, but at least tangibly less nervous than some of the villagers were when mounting their champion’s feet for the first time on their excitedly-voluntary cleaning detail. Still Allian didn’t speak. Sophia trusted that he wasn’t purposefully withholding, however, but was genuinely struggling to put his feelings into words, which might’ve been a first for the well-meaning but curtly candid blacksmith.

“I missed my chance.”

“For what?”

“To be something else. Something… other than what I always thought I had to be.” Allian stopped meandering in the peachy center of his sister’s hand now, and stared up directly into the painfully inquisitive pools of her eyes. “Like you, I was raised to think I couldn’t choose what to make of myself, or how. That the needs of the people important to me, the needs of survival, meant my entire life’s path, every step of it, was already laid out. I never regretted that belief, though. At least not when I was younger. It made sense. So I followed Father’s directions, and kept on following them. Then suddenly years had passed, and… now I will inherit the forge, in a position I was never meant to hold. I must live with knowing that I am… a consolation. I’m not saying I would ever have abandoned our family. I’m not even saying I would have sought work outside the forge. But I could have taken a hand in on my own fate. Taught myself something new. Thought for myself. Tried to improve myself outside the shadow of what everyone always told me I must do. And I may have missed my chance. You, though. You might still avoid putting yourself through that same… labor as I did. Yes, you are a Guardian now. You are powerful and wise and beyond anything any of us down here could ever hope to be, but that isn’t all you are. It shouldn’t be. I’ve watched you, from a distance, and I can see. The hesitation, and limiting yourself only to what you’ve been told you have to be. It’s hurting you. And I don’t want that for you, Soph.”

“What are you saying?” the giantess delicately questioned: not because she was actually lost, but because she was beginning to see where Allian was probably headed with this, and was already preparing the gentlest-possible dismissal of his appeal. Her heart ached harder now to hear the continued raw honesty in her brother’s voice, maybe providing the deepest perspective into himself that Sophia had ever heard him speak aloud, considering the young smith tended to use only in exactly as many words as were required for basic communication. And then just as emotionally cutting was the slow dawning of precisely the so-called mistake her tiny sibling was hoping to save her from now.

“You don’t need me to say it,” Allian replied, evidently knowing his sister just as well as she knew him. “Your life will always be… different now. Not that you needed someone to tell you. And the things you once wanted or were certain you would have… might now seem outside your reach. Ironic, really, for someone so tall. But you can still be fulfilled, Soph. You can still be happy. The way there is just to rethink your old possibilities, not abandon them entirely. Not like I did. You’ve got to make your own choices. And it might make me a hypocrite to tell you this, when what I want for you is to stop listening to what you’re told you “must” do, but if you’re going to deny yourself contentment just because you think you have a responsibility to do so, please hear me when I say that’s not the way it has to be. You deserve more. You always have.”

Again Sophia was confronted with the kind of talk that might have flummoxed her down to the level of her soul only a few weeks prior. She would have kindly rejected almost everything Allian had said, remembering and possibly misinterpreting all the lessons imparted by the Guardians to help ease her into the position of perceived godhood over her village of miniscule dependents. She would have heard his sincere encouragement to make some new meaning from the shambles of her relationship with Torv, his belief that she could still have her previous desires in some altered form, and then she would have promptly disregarded this idea as anything but white lies told out of fraternal love. But Sophia, indeed having grown wiser in the line of duty commensurately with the gargantuan power she’d been given months before, only absorbed Allian’s message now. And it took. She nodded, bit her tongue, and finally let out a windy exhale that blew back her brother’s hair.

“Thank you,” Sophia whispered, and might have meant these words more than ever before, even if her mind was still reeling from what exactly she was actually meant to do next for herself, her happiness, and her ever-tessellating future. But above all she understood that had to be her decision, whatever it was, just as Allian insisted. Her fingertips curled protectively upward behind where her puny brother stood upon the cushioned centerpoint of her palm lines. “Might I make my own suggestion for you, now?”

“Of course.”

“Don’t wait so long next time to come see me. Because I have missed you so. In fact, consider that an order, not a suggestion. And… when the time comes for you to return home, maybe you can deliver a message for me, as well.”

“Just speak it, Soph. And it’ll be done.”