Grandpa and three of the other guards who don't smell very good take him to the big training room.

He takes a deep breath in, lets the energy burn and congeal inside of him, and slowly breathes out. Oily black smoke comes out of his mouth and nostrils. Using his flow, he pushes it into a roughly humanoid shape beside him.

He is tasked with moving the puppet around to dodge the flow blades and strikes of the guards. He manages to prevent his puppet from being touched by any of them. He's seen enough of the other guards' styles to know how they usually operate, and he can feel their flow with his own. It's not too difficult. Regardless, Grandpa smiles. It pleases him that he is pleased.

They return him to the cell, and he does his set of bodyweight exercises, eats again, uses the chamber pot, washes, and goes to sleep.

Pekksjempar Damjen kepsa Bajeste is the fourth and last child of his mother, Ksjempar, of the clan Bajeste. Their family is descended from the aforementioned Bajeste, one of the people who worked against the Cannibal Kings in the revolution. Most of their clan are strong eye mage doctors.

Given that the status of being a mage is passed down matrilineally, his family keeps rigorous genealogical records. Though the mother is the main source of variance in whether or not children become mages (a nonmage father with a mage mother has a fifty-fifty chance for each child, whereas the reverse pairing producing mage children is almost unheard of), talents can be passed down through both lines.

In terms of strength, Damjen's gift is the weakest of his siblings — it's thoroughly mediocre. But his aptitude for mind reading was evident even from when he was a toddler, and eye mage talents are often pretty strongly heritable.

So it was that his parents entered into negotiations with another good eye mage family and arranged a marriage for him at the ripe old age of five years old.

His family paid a steep bride price to bring the girl into their clan in the hopes that his talent could be passed down to their children, whether memetically or hereditarily.

It was not a very pleasant thing to be told that as a twelve year old. He started to refuse to do any of his anatomy and physiology studies and would hide from his parents and the servants and the instructors. Spiritual sight can pass through solid matter and is only blocked by spiritual energy contained by living things, and their urban townhouse, while having lots of greenery on the outside, did not have as much on the inside. He would take vines out of trellises and cover himself in moss to disguise himself, reading the minds of the servants from a distance to know where they would be planning on going and what they would be doing.

His parents got fed up with this behavior and sent him away to their inland rural estate, away from the distractions of the city. Now that he was sixteen, they were also concerned that there was a real possibility that he could elope, and that would be a disaster. Better to avoid that possibility until the marriage is done.

It's impolite for eye mages to stare at people's faces, since spiritual sight is involuntary. Not even closing one's eyes can block it, since an eye mage's own eyelids are transparent to their sight. Still, he would choose to just do it anyway to know what the servants were planning and what they were ordered to do. 

The servants and the instructors were given hats to wear coated with moss and leaves and flowers to prevent their minds from being read.

He learned how to read body language and facial expressions with mundane sight.

The move to the rural estate did not go as well as his parents had hoped. It was true that he decided to care more about learning, but he became even more unruly. He was big enough now that the servants could not just scoop him up, and the estate being in the middle of nowhere meant that, if he wanted to go for a very long walk, he could do so and not be interrupted or caught by the city guard and sent back. So he did.

The climate inland was more continental and less wet than on the coast. Colder. The differences in flora and fauna were interesting, and he would often spend time just observing them for long stretches. He realized that all this observation was inadvertently contributing to his knowledge of biology, but he was internally insistent that this was just for the sheer pleasure of beholding nature.

These walks would get very long indeed, but he always made sure to get back before nightfall. This was rural and inland, and there was a small but real chance that he could be accosted by a magical beast. His spiritual sight would let him spot it regardless of mundane light, but many of them have eye magic too, so spotting it means it probably spotted him too.

The dry season finally began, and with it, the days started getting longer.

Hedges and trellises are common sights in Narmjesa, not just for beauty, but to stifle spying by eye mages. The issue is that, while they might conceal what's going on inside, they don't conceal that something is being concealed. When he finds an old, dilapidated castle during one of his walks, he notices the suspiciously thorough and unlikely cover of vines on the stones.

He doesn't remember being told there was an old castle here. How old was it? Maybe it dated back to the era of the Cannibal Kings. He doesn't know enough about architecture to tell.

He circles the castle, trying to find an angle to peek inside. Some privacy installations operate too much with the assumption of right angle or horizontal viewing lines that they leave gaps in the coverage. He climbs a tree – easier as an eye mage since one can tell which branches will support one's weight. Not as easy as a flow mage though. They can just fly.

Damn. No luck. Whoever arranged the plants was good. Professional.

Well, he's not actually going to go inside unless he knows what's in it. There's a limit to his reckless and self-destructive behavior.

He writes a letter.

Honored Mother and Father,

I did not know that we had hired a new groundskeeper for the northern castle. Or is it being restored? I would like to meet them if it's the former, or watch the restoration process if it's the latter.

Your son,
Damjen

There are different people in the room. They seem important. The way the other guards and Grandpa move and talk around them makes him think so. He can hear it in their steps and in the tone of their voices.

They're going to be bringing him outside. It's been a long while since he was last outside. He is happy.

They will be flying to the destination. It's to the northwest. Grandpa goes first. He's supposed to follow him. He can see how the other guards are wearing harnesses with netted struts, on which the Important People sit on. They wait for him to go first.

He rotates in place, gathering his flow around him until it develops enough mass, then, in a single fluid movement, crouches and jumps at an angle. He rockets off, leaving behind a hole and a plume of dust behind him. He has enough acceleration to overtake Grandpa, but he puts his arms in front of him to slow himself down to match.

They fly-glide for half an hour, landing and jumping again at regular intervals every few minutes. It's much more efficient than fully flying.

There's a bunch of buildings with dirt roads between them. They stop about a kilometer away from the center of the village.

They brought food! They have five tins of canned meat. They say they want him to eat all of them. That's more than he's ever gotten at once. So he does. He is very happy.

They say that his mission is to destroy the village, as in, all of the buildings. He should try to do it as quickly as possible, and using as little spiritual energy and stamina as possible, but that he otherwise has no other restrictions on how he ought to go about it.

It sounds easy enough.

He decides to draw out half of his current spiritual energy out into smoke. It's taking longer than usual, which isn't surprising since he's trying to draw out more than he's ever done at once before. Can he make it go faster?

He typically times his soul burning to match with his exhalations so smoke doesn't pool in his lungs. If he burns too fast, then it accumulates and feels awful. He tries drawing it out with his flow, in the same way one could move air. He already knows how to shape his smoke using his flow, so it ought to work. He tries it.

It works! He's pleased. Despite his happiness, he can hear the alarm from the others. He doesn't understand why. But they don't tell him off from doing it. When he turns to look at them, the flow mages of the bunch — he can tell the Important People aren't mages of any sort — conceal their sounds with their own flow, and he can't hear them anymore.

Alright. Don't get distracted. Having drawn out smoke, he shapes four puppets and arranges them into a wedge formation, putting himself at the front.

He typically prefers to work with Grandpa's slow style, based around building masses of flow to create unstoppable blunt force. There isn't any sort of wall or barrier to be overcome though, and here, he was told to work as quickly as possible. So using the shredding style seems like it would be better.

He draws out some more smoke and gives each of his puppets, including himself, a smoke greatsword. He shapes the greatswords and imbues them with qualities of cutting and sharpness.

He hears the Important People make thinking noises. He can hear them writing things. Unlike the flow mages earlier, they sound pleased.

Initially, he thought to just go through in this formation and cut down all the buildings. There might be a smarter way to go about all this, though.

Despite trying to save his smoke in the beginning, he draws almost all the rest of it out and puts it into his puppets. Can he imbue the puppets with the quality of having flow magic?

He can!

Flow mages can braid their flows together to achieve effects greater than the sum of their parts. He's only ever practiced it with the slow blunt style, but conceivably, he could also try it with the shredding style.

He does a simple braid with himself and his puppets spinning around, with their steps tracing out a circle. It's actually easier than working with others, since he can intuitively feel his smoke creations and how their flow interacts with his, without need of music or singing or clapping or stomping to keep time and synchronize everybody.

He lets this continue for half a minute, then has everybody jump up so they all float in the air. They transition to a flying posture, holding the greatswords out in front of them. He probably ought to shaped a weapon better designed for this purpose, but transforming already formed smoke is lossy, and he already drew out almost all of his smoke.

The five of them adjust their flying postures rhythmically to push the circle towards one direction. It takes a while to get it right, and at some points the circle threatens to destabilize and send them all flying in different directions, but he manages to keep it together. He approaches the village.

Their blades slice through the buildings like butter. In half an hour, no building stands intact.