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Noise. Damned, interminable noise. It came from every quarter, every angle, every person from every walk of life. The crowd and its unbearable din were more than thrice that of the summer festival at the foot of the Great Tree -- where even the drunkest and most lowly of elves, I might add, still exhibited more dignity and decorum than this deplorable pack of barbarians.

The aspirants among whose ranks I myself was most shamefully counted each seemed determined to draw more attention than the last, by whatever means and in whatever manner was most available to them. Some challenged one another to practice bouts, determined to elevate themselves by preemptively disgracing their competition. Others satisfied themselves with quietly practicing their strokes against the various dummy targets dotting the opposite end of the field -- though not, I might note, without subtly glancing back to see how many eyes were on them as they did so.

They were like the children at Master Ailin's lectures -- too eager to be noticed, and too stupid to realize that one proves more with silence and consistency than with boasts and showmanship.

Not that they had to make much of an effort to please the crowd in the first place. The townsfolk seemed intent on oohing and aahing over even the most mediocre displays imaginable. While I might not have been an expert in the art of swordplay, as such warlike things were scarcely taught under the peaceful boughs of the Viridian Sea, I nevertheless had at least enough experience to recognize when it was done well, and to notice the flaws when it was performed poorly.

Some among the assembled youths had such a tenuous grasp upon their arms that they seemed more likely to fall upon their own swords than strike their opponents with them. Others overcompensated in the other direction, hammering away with exaggerated strikes that nearly carried them to the ground themselves, and, in one notable case, shattered one of the practice targets like dead branch in a hurricane. I clicked my tongue in disgust at the man's carelessness -- it was disrespectful enough to the ancients to desecrate their corporeal remains for such a disgraceful purpose, but to destroy them so wantonly just to showcase one's own ape-like strength was more disgusting still.

At least one of these vainglorious humans had the presence of mind to restrain herself, turning her strikes away from the dummy of her choosing rather than engaging in any self-aggrandizing displays of pointless savagery. The speed and dexterity with which she applied her twin blades was neither exaggerated, nor did it seem anything more than effortless. Routine steps, repeated faster and faster, the preparation for each blow warding her body while the one before it struck home. It was graceless, but the art of killing did not require grace. More importantly, it was efficient, and it was controlled. I would have applauded her discipline, had she been able to maintain it for longer than a few moments before immediately lapsing into some form of frolicsome celebration.

...Wait, that red hair -- the same as from before. Perhaps rather than "celebration," "appetite" would be a more accurate descriptor of her motivations. Either way, her flippant demeanor concerned me none. She was perhaps of passing skill -- moreso than I could ascribe to any of the other candidates I had seen thus far -- but that was all.

At least she made no pretensions of being any more than what she was, unlike [i]some[/i] people. The most disgusting display of all was not, it would seem, the brute, nor the airhead, but rather a certain foppish man draped in robes more gaudy and ostentatious than even my own entirely ceremonial armor. The gilded engravings upon his bow brought no honor to the legacy of the wood with which it was carved, nor did the manner in which he bore it. His every action reeked of excess -- the flourish with which he produced the arrow from his quiver, the grandiloquent tone in which he proclaimed his intent, the almost ceremonial reverence with which he raised the weapon above his head before he oh-so-slowly lowered it and drew back the string, and, most damning of all, the long stillness with which he contemplated his target before firing. His hands were not shaking, nor were his arms that held the bowstring. Had he so brazenly announced himself only to have no faith in the surety of his aim? Or was this, too, meant to be nothing more than a display of strength?

Pointless extravagance. Puerile self-infatuation. A "true archer," as he so naively styled himself, would have struck him dead before he had even finished withdrawing an arrow from his gaudy quiver. If this was what passed for the art of archery among the Menfolk, then even I, lacking any training in the art, would surely seem a prodigy.

But I had no more time to admire this man's monumental ignorance. It would seem the crowd ahead of me had thinned out, and my own turn to approach the stage of this grand farce had finally come. I took a deep breath, clearing my mind of the acerbic spite that had begun to take hold of my thoughts, and making an effort to curtail my knowledge of my own superiority for this one moment alone. It would not do to look down upon my peers for their ego only to allow the same haughtiness and lust for acclaim creep into my own swordplay.

I stepped forward, making no attempt to decipher the whispers of those behind me, no matter what their expectations of an elf might have been. I sized up the target -- little more than a bag of straw mounted around a crude wooden cross, bearing only the vaguest semblance of a mortal's shape. That, I would strike. The frame suspending it, I would leave unscathed -- it had already been desecrated more than enough by those who had come before me.

I withdrew from my sash the as-yet unfamiliar weight of my precious Manablade. I felt within the crystallized sap the still-beating pulse of the world, heard within it the echo of the chiming bells of my homeland, far away. The selfsame wind that rocked those bows spread to this place also, fluttering the gaudy pennants of the practice ground and rocking the sparse branches of the trees that made up this so-called Glade. It was fainter here, to be sure -- but that mattered little. The dust of the earth would answer my call all the same. The light of the sun would answer. And the wind, that noble wind, would answer. My lips moved, my voice came forth in a whisper barely audible even to my own ears, as I recalled the days of my youth, so familiar yet so distant, spent in contemplation of Master Ailin's instruction. What emerged from my own mouth, from the whirling eddies of thought and memory, were the opening words of an old poem, half-remembered yet unforgotten.

[i][color=#399cf2]"Boughs that embrace the heavens, sway and ring."[/color][/i]

The same wind that sounded the bell my mother's hands had hung lifetimes ago in a land half a world away now rested in the palm of my hand. I, too, was a proof of her existence, just as the blade I held would serve as proof of my own. I needed no announcement nor celebration -- my sword would speak for me all that was required of myself.

I raised it upright before myself in a fencer's stance, my feet shifting beneath me as though to begin one of the artful dances to which I was accustomed. But it was not an honorable spectacle which I wished to perform -- rather, a simple, decisive motion. With a flick of my wrist, I brought the shimmering, phantasmal sword down, carving its tip from the top of the straw target to its bottom. My grip was languid, my arm loose as I drew it gently back, the blade flowing accordingly like water, carving out the target's bottom and wrapping around it like the coiling of a serpent. Then, like the cresting of a wave, I raised it again, spiraling inward like a whirlwind upon all sides of the target, and sending a shower of straw and dust cascading into the air. With one final motion, I brought the weapon out and swept it horizontally before my body, its blade drawing back as I shook it free from the detritus it had accumulated along its course.

Its threads meticulously severed by almost a dozen near-simultaneous cuts, the straw bag that made up the target's form rapidly deflated, its contents spilling onto the ground, leaving a ragged and pathetic patchwork of mangled and empty sackcloth hanging from the still-pristine wooden framework like a funeral shroud.

In the same instant, the blade in my hand dissipated back into the dust from which it had been formed, and I calmly returned it to its holster by my side, and moved to return to my place on the far edge of the crowd in silence. If these menfolk wanted to gawk at my performance, they were free to do so -- but I would neither demand such fawning nor expect it. Either way, now that I had reminded myself of the sensations needed to activate the Manablade, I was confident in my ability to dexterously employ it when the time came for a [i]real[/i] test. This pointless display, then, had at least sufficed as a warm-up.