by Ivan Kal
From her position Ashara could see his skin take on a grayed-out color, and she knew that he had activated one of his defensive techniques. Then she was there as well, and she felt something take over her. Memories were flashing through her head at a quick rate, preventing her from even comprehending them, and her body moved on its own. She jumped over the Arashan, her spear held in one hand. Wind ki flew through her body and she could feel the air around her surge as a small wind picked her up, sending her forward beyond Lei. She fell on the head of an Úlfriir warrior, her legs on his shoulders as she stabbed down. Lightning ki surged out from her and into the spear before she heard a crack, bolts of lightning exploding out of the Úlfriir she had stabbed to hit those near him. All of them fell to the ground, their fur singed and even burning in places.
There was little room for her to move, and in her mind she knew that it would be hard to use a spear in such a situation. But her body knew what to do—she held her spear in both hands and stabbed at the Úlfriir in front of her. Faster than they could react, she stabbed three through their throats, their bodily fluids gushing out in a shower of blood.
It hit her face and she froze, her spear extended in front of her. She could see the looks on her opponents’ faces, could see their horror and fear. The blood rolled down her face and she almost felt sick. It was warm, and it felt wrong on her. She had killed them, and it hadn’t even been hard. She remembered all those times when she had been in danger, when her life could’ve ended, and she knew that she had been like these people before her now—helpless. She had survived only because she was lucky.
Now, it was her with power, her who was the one doing the killing. She could feel the power thrumming through her blood, waiting to be used—wanting to be used. These people were nothing to her now. She could kill them all with ease.
This is what it feels like to be powerful, she thought to herself. This is what Vin and Kyarra feel all the time. Ashara felt like she had gained a new understanding. She could see just how different she had been to the two of them. She had been an ant pretending to belong with giants. It was no surprise that they hadn’t wanted her around, that she had been abandoned—how could a giant care about an ant?
She was so lost in her own thoughts that she missed an Úlfriir warrior stabbing with his weapons toward her head. Her body reacted when she realized that the attack was coming, but it was too late.
But then Lei was there, his palm shielding her face. The pike hit his palm and shattered against it. Lei jumped forward and punched the Úlfriir in the stomach, sending him flying up in the air. Those around him attacked, but Lei was an unmovable force. He would move his body just enough for their attacks to miss, and then counterattack. He struck at the Úlfriir, shattering their bones with single blows.
Ashara shook her head and focused. She was in a battle, and she had to learn how to keep her attention solely on the fight. She jumped forward to stand next to Lei. The two of them slowly moved forward, killing the Úlfriir and pushing them back. Behind them, the Arashan troops followed, waiting for them to get through the pass.
Then the Úlfriir broke and started running back, even trampling their own in the process. Ashara and Lei walked out of the narrow pass and into a larger clearing, a small valley inside the mountains. She could see the Úlfriir camp, their troops forming a line and waiting for their enemy.
Ashara and Lei surged forward. Lei fell down on the front line, his fist hitting the ground and sending cracks in all directions. Ashara focused on the Thundering Spear, the blessed arm that used to belong to Vin. She pushed her ki inside of it, seeing it glow with power. Then, once it was full, she followed Lei’s instructions on how to use it. She pointed at the Úlfriir line on the other side from Lei and triggered the Engravings. A bolt of pure white lightning shot out of the tip of the spear, hitting the Úlfriir in the first line before then spreading behind him in a wider and wider area as the lightning split from the initial contact, sending two bolts flying out of the back of the first hit, then increasing by two for each following strike. She couldn’t even imagine how many people she had just killed as she saw a large portion of their army collapse in front of her, smoke rising from their bodies. For their part, the Arashan were entering the valley now, getting ready to attack themselves.
Lei was in the middle of the Úlfriir army, fighting them and killing them quickly. Ashara jumped forward to join him, landing among the dead. Those around her turned on her immediately, and she saw some Úlfriir holding staffs—and she realized they were mages only just as they finished casting their spells. A ball of light surged at her, and before she could react it hit her in the chest, sending her flying back and hitting the ground. She rolled until she finally came to a stop. For a moment she wasn’t sure what had happened. She sat up and looked at her chest. The Engravings on the armor she wore were glowing, and there was no pain. She had known that Vin’s armor was powerful, but it was more than that. Her body itself was stronger, and she had barely felt the strike. When she hit the ground, it hadn’t even hurt.
She looked up at the Úlfriir, saw them look at her in surprise. She allowed herself to smile. She was strong; she was finally powerful. She would never again feel like she had on the slaver ship. Her grin spread as she stood up and charged the Úlfriir lines.
Quickly, Lei, Ashara, and the Arashan annihilated the Úlfriir troops, taking the valley. The battle had lasted barely an hour.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
VIN
Present
Vin walked through his house, a sprawling mansion that he had little use for. He had spent the last few days taking care of the issues surrounding his estate resulting from his long absence. It was tiring and annoying, but he understood that there were benefits to the gift that Kyarra had given him for helping her take back the city.
Teressa and Jirross were somewhere in the house, following the caretaker to their new rooms. Vin had managed to convince them to join with him on a more permanent basis, but there had been some…uncomfortable conversation between him and Teressa. Vin had overheard what she and her brother said when they were in the palace. Learning that she had been interested in him had come as a shock. He had never been good at social interactions, but in retrospective he could see her giving him hints. Thankfully, there didn’t seem to be any ill will from her, and Vin had checked with her brother—privately—in case that he had again missed something. There was some teasing about him being with the Eternal Soul, but that was all.
And that was an issue all to itself. He had no idea what he and Kyarra were. Things between them were complicated, messy. Their initial reunion had been great, had been everything he had hoped for. But afterward, when reality returned and they were forced to address things they both had said and done, they had again disagreed on how to face the Arashan threat, Kyarra not really believing that they were the threat of the level Vin claimed they were.
A part of him understood that, as he knew that for people on this world his word alone was not enough. They had to see things, to experience on their own. Vin had wanted to spare them that, had wanted to stop the Arashan before they even had a chance to step foot on this world, but he had grown tired. He spent five years hunting them down only to realize that he was unable to stop them by himself. After speaking with Kyarra, he realized that he would never be able to change her mind. She just couldn’t comprehend the things he was telling her, even though she knew that her first life believed in it as well. But then, Vin had seen people of this world lie to themselves often. It was easier for them than it was to accept the truth. She would need to see things for herself, as Vin couldn’t help this world alone. He only hope that by the time they realized the danger, it wasn’t too late, like it had been for his world.
Walking through the old house was a strange feeling for him. He had never spent much time here; it wasn’t really a home to him, but rather simply something that belonged to him that he didn’t really need. But it had been useful, Vin reflected as he reached h
is destination: a small hut on the other side of the large courtyard. It was made out of stone with small windows placed high enough that no one could look in. The doors were chained and locked and Vin pulled out the key his servant had given him and unlocked it.
He entered the hut and looked around. It was dusty, and in the same state as he’d left it. In the days before he left Tourran, he had been working on a project: a way to help Ashara create a core. He had done much to try and figure out how it could be done, but the only path that he could see was to try and create an elixir which would do the work. That had been a large issue in itself, and a great part of the reason why it had taken him so long to figure it out. The problem was that he knew nothing of the ingredients available on this world. There were no plants he was familiar with from his own home, nothing even remotely similar. He hadn’t told Ashara anything because he hadn’t wanted to get her hopes up, but perhaps that had been a mistake. He had wondered if she wouldn’t have left if he had told her that he was working on what she asked of him.
He had spent weeks in Kyarra’s library going over her former lives’ books on alchemy, trying to figure out if there was anything similar to the way it worked on his world. In many ways it had been; in others, not so much. Every plant on this world was filled with aura, a thing that that was not the case on his. It had been a hard process to just imbue ki into ingredients or to find those who already had such properties. He had never been the greatest of alchemists—but he had managed to find a solution.
Vin walked over to a small shelf on the far wall and looked at four small bottles filled with yellowish liquid. He had succeeded in his task after Ashara had left, but without her there wasn’t any point in testing the elixirs. In theory, one dose should force a person’s anima to compress and harden, forming a core.
If he had just done it sooner, perhaps Ashara would still be here. He missed her presence, her advice. He had never been good with people, but he blamed himself for not seeing that she was seeking something. He had missed her struggle. He hadn’t recognized it, because he hadn’t ever known anything like it. From the moment he was old enough to understand the world around him, he wanted only one thing: to be the greatest spirit artist in the world. And every action he took had been toward furthering that goal.
He never knew anything else. He couldn’t imagine what it was like to live without an aim, to be at the mercy of others, to be so powerless that you couldn’t even defend yourself. It was a completely foreign idea for him. Even when he had been stripped of his body, when he had lost all of his power, he had known that he would regain it all. There had been no other possible outcome.
Which was also why he was so frustrated. No matter what he did, he couldn’t make that final step to reaching his former power. He had attached his soul to six of the seven ki gates, but the last one eluded him. He just couldn’t create the connection, and he feared that it had something to do with the fact that he was in a body that was not his own. But he hoped that it was just something else, something internal that he was not seeing. He was changed now compared to who he used to be. He had joined his soul with that of a beast. He had done much over the years in order to bring his two halves together—the Hunter’s voice was now mostly absent—but Vin felt like there were still things that he could do in order to bring the two halves of himself closer. He just didn’t know what they were.
The Hunter had once told him that he needed to accept himself, and Vin had believed that he had done that. His drive had always been to become stronger and walk the Path. He had left Tourran in part because he believed that staying here was harming his balance. He hadn’t been meant for sitting in meetings and talking endlessly. He was a man that always walked forward, never sitting in a single place.
He walked out of the small hut and made his way to the garden. There, he found a small secluded spot and settled into a meditation pose. He immediately began cycling his ki and drawing in more from his surroundings. The ocean of ki inside his outer core moved in a circle, grinding the newly added aura against his inner core, breaking it apart, refining it so that it could more easily adopt the affinity of his core’s ki.
As he let the strain of moving so much ki inside of his core wash over his body and mind, he pulled a small part of himself aside and turned his attention to his ki gates. Six of them shone faintly in his mind, the connection with his soul apparent to his inner sight. But there were no signs of anything else, nor would there be until he made the last connection. The last gate stood out in its dimness. He fought not to have his concentration broken as once again he tried to attach his soul to it.
He willed his entire being to the task, imagining a small tether stretching from his soul to touch the gate. He could feel the strain happening, he always did, but his soul didn’t move. It was as if he was trying to move the heavens themselves—there just wasn’t any way for him to do it.
Finally he released a sharp breath, his concentration breaking as he stopped his cycling and opened his eyes. He saw no reason why he couldn’t achieve what he already had once before. He knew who he was, and what his goal was. He was the last true spirit artist left alive, a man whose purpose was to climb the Path and defeat the Arashan, to take revenge for what they had done to his world. There was nothing else that mattered to him. But if he couldn’t take the next step, then he would never become strong enough to fight against the Arashan alone.
Frustrated, he stood up and paced around the small garden. He felt suffocated here in this city, in this world. There was so much aura all around him that it made him feel like every moment that he spent without cultivating his ki was a waste. There were so many people here that he couldn’t even see them, all blending into formless husks walking around. The sky was larger, boundless, the entire world threatening to collapse down on him. Vin felt that his failure to convince Kyarra to attack the Arashan and their allies was because he himself was lacking; Ashara’s leaving felt the same. So many failures—ever since the Arashan first arrived on his world, he had been doing nothing but failing. For all of his power, he hadn’t been able to do anything that truly mattered. He was a failure. Perhaps deep down in his soul he knew that, and perhaps that was why he couldn’t take the seventh step. Maybe he was unworthy.
It wasn’t in his nature to allow obstacles to stay in his path for long, yet now, for the first time ever, he didn’t know what to do—and that made him feel lost and alone. He wished that Ashara was here, that he could talk to her and ask her what she thought. But she wasn’t. She had left because she felt like she didn’t have a place next to Kyarra and him.
Finally, he decided that there was no point in him dwelling on things he couldn’t change. Seeing as he had made no progress in taking the next step, he decided to train his techniques. There were always ways for people to grow stronger, they just had to be willing to put their entire being into a single path.
And Vin was, if nothing else, willing to do exactly that.
CHAPTER TWENTY
ASHARA
Four Years Ago
Ashara sat with her legs crossed inside a small tent, focusing inside on her core and her ki. It remained a strange sensation even now, when she had been in this body for quite a while. She could feel so much power inside of herself, contained and ready to come out at a mere thought. She wondered if this was anything like what a mage would feel.
She had spoken at length with both Lei and other Arashan mages, and they had explained to her the differences between a mage and a spirit artist. A mage used their own anima to control the ambient anima around them and trigger their spells; they utilized a set of patterns that forced the anima around them to obey their will, making the process easier by using hand gestures and chants in concordance with their will. A spirit artist, on the other hand, used whatever energy they were born with and added to it, refining it into their ki and increasing their reserves. They used it to shape their body, to make it stronger and faster, upgrading it beyond what an ordinary person could attain.
For their techniques, they used only their will and their ki.
Slowly, she used a cultivation technique that Lei had taught her, as for some reason couldn’t quite grasp the one that Vin had used. She remembered it sometimes, but she couldn’t hold it for long. It was too painful, and neither Lei nor Ashara knew if that was because she was doing something wrong or not. Lei’s technique consisted of pushing the ki inside of her core down on itself, compressing it and strengthening it. He told her that it wasn’t a technique quite suited to her affinities, but that it would suffice until they got the chance to visit Lei’s homeworld and find another technique among the ruins. Still, the technique was easier to do than what she remembered Vin doing. The principal downside was that Lei’s technique wasn’t as suited to increasing the capacity she could hold, but he told her that Vin could hold a more than sufficient amount of ki inside of his core for her to use all of the techniques Vin had been capable off. She had seen many of his memories now, remembered them as if she remembered a dream. They were always about spirit arts, about training and fighting in the duels. It took her a while to realize that it wasn’t that she wasn’t seeing his other memories, but that that was all that there was. Vin’s entire life had been about the spirit arts to the exclusion of everything else.
It made her realize just how focused he was. He had told her that he had always been alone, that he had never had anything other than his spirit arts, but she hadn’t realized just what that had meant. She never felt any of his emotions, but just seeing it made her angry. She remembered him weaving tales, taking about how important she was to him, but she knew now that that was all lies. He had never needed anyone; he didn’t know how to be with anyone. How could a man who had never known anything but his own power care for others? She understood why he had abandoned her—she had always been a burden to him, someone who was taking up his precious time, time that he could better spend regaining his strength.