by Gage Lee
Clem leaned against me and curled her fingers into mine. “Okay, so what do you know about our enemy? Maybe there’s something you overlooked.”
That seemed unlikely, given how many sleepless nights I’d spent puzzling over this problem. If any of them held Xaophis in their cores, telling them what I knew for certain might tip my hand to my enemy. On the other hand, seeding a few little lies might help me tilt the odds back in my favor if the vile creature was listening in on this conversation.
“Okay,” I said, deciding to start with the truth. “The two times I’ve seen it infect someone, it happened during a duel.”
“That makes sense,” Abi said. “Close contact with emotions running high would make an ideal vector for it to pass from one person to another.”
Time for a little white lie. “It seemed to happen during physical contact.”
“It must need the emotion and the touch,” Clem said. “If physical contact was the only requirement, the entire school would be suspect.”
She blushed as she finished the sentence. “Oh, now I see why you were so worried.”
“Yes,” I said with a sigh. “It isn’t because I don’t trust you. It’s because we can’t trust anyone. If any of you come up with an idea for how we can defeat this thing, I’m all ears. But, until then, there are things I just can’t tell anyone else.”
“Should we stop coming to the Stacks?” Abi asked.
“No,” I responded instantly. “The clan still needs your help, for as long as you can give it. It’s a risk, but one that we can manage together. With all of us here, it’ll be harder for Xaophis to remain undetected. And if it tries anything—”
“We’ll kick its butt,” Eric said. “But we could do the same during one of your rituals. So why can’t we help there?”
“Because the margin for error is so slim,” I said. “Byron disrupted a powerful ritual by himself. If one of you five turned against me, there’d be no way to stop it. It’s safer this way.”
“I don’t like it,” Hahen said, “but I understand.”
“What should I tell Tru?” Eric asked. “You promised to let her know if you moved on to the next phase of the quest.”
“Tell her the truth,” I said with a shrug. “I’m still in the preparation phase. She’ll know before I try to complete this quest.”
“That’s the truth?” Eric asked. “Because if you’re trying to pull a fast one, the dragons will lose their minds.”
“It’s the truth,” I said. “I swear. Let’s finish up the training for tonight. I need some meditation time to restore my energy.”
That was a lie, but the Inquisition had taught me how to do that with no one being the wiser. I washed any dishonest aspects out of my aura before even the most perceptive of sacred artists would notice.
My friends gave me cautious nods, then left to complete the day’s work with my clan members. Niddhogg went with Eric, while Hahen followed Abi. Clem stayed behind, her fingers still entwined with mine.
Pain flickered through her eyes as she looked up at me. “I understand why you have to do it this way. But if there’s anything, anything at all, you need from me, let me know.”
“I will,” I promised.
There was no dishonesty there. I was positive I wouldn’t have any work for Clem. It was all for me.
“Good,” she said, leaning up to give me a kiss on the cheek. “I’d better check on the students before one of them blows up a scrivening.”
I chuckled and waved her on. For the next couple of hours, I meditated. When I woke, my friends and clan mates had left the Stacks.
Perfect. I was alone, save for my co-conspirators.
“Come out, come out, wherever you are,” I called. “It’s time to get to work.”
Hahen and Niddhogg skulked into the distillation laboratory, their eyes downcast. They both looked miserable.
“Knock it off,” I grumbled. “You can’t guilt me into changing my mind, no matter how hard you try.”
“This feels wrong,” Niddhogg said. “They’re our friends, too.”
“Which is why we aren’t telling them about this one thing,” I said. “To protect them.”
“You’re right,” Hahen said, his voice barely above a whisper. “But I don’t have to like it.”
“I know,” I said. “I hate it, too.”
Before I could change my mind, I reached out with my serpents to the black dots hidden around the Stacks. A jolt of jinsei unlocked the hidden room beneath the floor that the New Moon clan had used to conceal the manual of their history. I’d briefly held onto that book, but it had disappeared from my room at some point, and I’d never been able to track down who was responsible. I wondered if I’d ever see it again.
I somehow doubted it.
The ladder leading down into the chamber’s depths was cool beneath my hands as I descended, Niddhogg fluttering just above me, Hahen on my shoulder. The door sealed over my head with a heavy metallic clunk when I was halfway down the ladder. Jinsei lanterns sprang to life, guiding me to the secret room.
It held a pair of heavy aspect containment vessels. I’d filled them to the brim with copper and gold over the past couple of weeks, working myself ragged in the process. The ritual that Ishigara had shown me was safer than what I had in mind, but I couldn’t trust her or my clan to carry it out.
I’d puzzled out something that might work. It was far more dangerous, but it only involved one person.
Me.
I folded my legs and sat down between the containers. Niddhogg and Hahen sat across from me, their eyes wide and gleaming with light reflected from the aspects within the containers.
“Time to make the orichalcum,” I said.
I really hoped it wouldn’t kill me.
The Core
“YOU’RE SURE THIS WILL work?” Niddhogg asked. He shifted uncomfortably, trying to find room for his tail, legs, and wings. All three things looked bigger than I remembered.
“Are you growing?” I asked the dragon.
My two allies glanced at one another. Hahen shrugged, as if he didn’t care what Niddhogg said.
“I am,” Niddhogg said carefully. “Hahen and I figured out a way around the curse.”
“Wow.” I scratched my chin. “You’ll grow up to be a full-size dragon?”
“That’s the idea,” Niddhogg said. “I don’t know if it’ll work. I grow some. Then it slows down.”
“Tru mentioned that she’d need a hoard to reach her next maturation phase,” I said. “Maybe you need an enormous pile of treasure to lie on.”
The little dragon’s eyes grew wide with excitement. “Of course. That makes sense. Now where could I find a bunch of precious metals...”
“Keep me from getting killed,” I said, “and I’ll see what I can do. You’re both clear on what I need you to do?”
“You want me to watch your back,” Niddhogg said, brandishing his claws. “I’ve got that covered.”
“And I’ll watch the spirit realm for you,” Hahen said.
“And if either of you see anything, what will you do?” I asked.
“Make a lot of noise,” Niddhogg said. “I might even breathe some fire to get your attention faster.”
“Good,” I said.
“Are you sure we’re the best choice for this job?” Hahen asked. It was the first time I could remember my mentor ever being uncertain.
“Yes,” I said. “I can’t be sure that dragons and spirits are immune to Xaophis, but you’re both a far cry from the humans I’ve seen it infect.”
“Gee, thanks,” Niddhogg said, snorting out a puff of smoke.
“You know what I mean.” I straightened my spine and rolled my neck on my shoulders to loosen my muscles. “Ready?”
“As we’ll ever be,” Hahen said. “Please be careful.”
The rat spirit’s concern was touching. And well-placed.
My new plan was dangerous, not only because I didn’t know if it would work, but because my last
attempt to make orichalcum had drawn the dark spirit’s attention. He’d gotten to me even through the defenses raised by my clan and Ishigara. I was much more exposed this time, and this method was also untested. It relied on my unique skills and jinsei sorcery in a combination that had proven extraordinarily dangerous in the past. I’d grown since then, though.
I hoped that would be enough.
Before my nerves got the best of me, I folded myself into a lotus position, legs crossed, hands resting on my knees with the palms face up. The jug on my right contained the gold aspects, while the vessel on my left held copper. As I settled into cycling meditation, I reached out and touched each container with one of my serpents.
Despite my jitters, it didn’t take long for me to reach the deepest level of meditation. The world receded from my awareness and the gleaming web of the Grand Design filled my thoughts. I hoped that I’d be invisible to Xaophis here. The only other creatures I’d seen at this level of reality were the warped and their loathsome, tentacled master. I hoped that would hold true as I started my work.
The ritual I’d performed with Krieger and Ishigara had shown me the essential steps to create orichalcum. Combining the copper and gold aspects using scrivenings and jinsei sorcery provided a relatively safe path.
But I’d long ago learned that there was more than one way to manipulate aspects. I’d dreamed this up after long conversations with Hahen. In theory, it would work.
In practice?
We were about to find out.
For my first trick, I wove a funnel of jinsei strands over the mouth of the copper aspect containment vessel to keep any precious aspects from escaping. The narrow tip of the magical cone would keep too many aspects from rushing out of the swarm at once.
In theory.
I repeated the process on the containment vessel holding the gold aspects. Satisfied I wouldn’t have to deal with runaway aspects, I cycled my breathing to calm my nerves. The work had taken a lot more out of me than I’d expected, and the hard part was still to come. I gulped jinsei into my lungs like a drowning man desperate for oxygen. When my core was full to the brim and my channels were bursting with sacred energy, I pushed ahead.
The narrow tips of my serpents carefully slipped through the funnels’ openings and pierced the vent seals on top of the containment vessels. The aspects within the jugs reacted immediately. They jostled with one another, eager to escape the confines of their prisons and flee back into the wild where I’d never be able to recover them. With no physical form to anchor the elements, they tended toward chaos.
Before precious elemental motes could run wild, though, the funnel of jinsei forced them to flow in an orderly line up along the blades of my serpents, where my supernatural appendages could corral them.
The serpents were excellent assistants. They were eager to gather the aspects for my experiment and didn’t need my guidance to keep the elements under control. All I had to do was make sure they didn’t get overzealous and pull too much gold and copper into my aura at once.
Ishigara’s ritual had used scrivenings to purify and bind the elements. This time, I’d do it all the hard way.
When my aura became crowded with aspects, I commanded my serpents to plug the vent and wait for my orders. They resisted at first, but I crushed the waves of feedback and demanded they obey. My core ached with the effort required to bring the serpents under control, but that was good. Stretching myself would lead to advancement, and I sorely needed that. Rising from the artist level to master might be enough to shift my inevitable battle against Xaophis in my favor.
There was no doubt in my mind that a fight was on the horizon. Even if Xaophis tried to slink back to wherever it had come from, there was no way I’d let it survive to trouble me another day. When I’d finished the quest, if not before, the monster and I would finish things once and for all.
The dark pulses of anger in my aura disturbed the elements. I took a deep breath, cycled my breathing, and let go of emotion. This was a time for stoic peace. When only copper and gold remained in my aura, I set to work on the last phase of my project.
“Here’s where it gets tricky,” I said to Hahen and Niddhogg. “This is when the monster made its move last time.”
While I was no master of jinsei sorcery, I had gotten talented at weaving threads of fate. Mortals had complex weaves that required intense concentration and the utmost care, but inanimate objects had much simpler threads. A rock’s fate wasn’t very complicated.
And neither were the destinies of the gold and copper aspects floating in my aura.
One by one, I found the thread of a copper aspect, snipped it free of the Grand Design, and then repeated the process with a gold aspect. The next step was to loop jinsei around those threads to keep them from escaping, while still leaving enough space between them so they wouldn’t touch.
Xaophis hadn’t shown up during my last experiment until I’d started creating orichalcum. I hoped that meant he couldn’t see me until I started making a lot of mystical noise. With any luck, I could get all the grunt work out of the way before he realized the jig was up.
Unfortunately, I’d underestimated how hard it was to tamper with fate, even that of inanimate objects.
Sweat broke out across my brow. My body shook with the strain of tying copper and gold threads together while still keeping them slightly separated. It wasn’t just the aspects that resisted me, but something deeper, more primal. The ritual I’d performed before violated laws of nature. It combined energy to create a new form of matter, and that was the very highest form of magic. It had been difficult to create orichalcum even with the protection offered by Ishigara’s proven scrivenings. Doing the same thing unaided was like moving heaven and earth with only my mind.
Fortunately, I’d never been one to let reality stand in the way of my ambition.
Before I’d finished tying all the gold and copper elemental aspects together, my head rang like a hammered gong and my heart thudded along with the ponderous rhythm of a drunken elephant’s footsteps. The Grand Design still burned beneath me, but its elegant curves were distorted and blurred.
Gulping more jinsei into my core helped recover some of my strength, but the process wasn’t sustainable. I had to wrap it up soon or risk passing out from exhaustion and losing all the aspects.
Again.
The strings of aspects hovered, filling my aura with corkscrew patterns of glowing, amorphous beads, each separated from its neighbors by a hair-fine gap. Closing those spaces would bind the metals together and create orichalcum.
When I’d refilled my core with jinsei, I dove back into the grueling process. Three of my supernatural, mechanical appendages attached to the first golden aspect, and the other serpents grabbed hold of the first copper aspect. All that remained was to move each less than a millimeter. Easy as pie.
But as I bore down on the aspects, reality pushed back. The tortured squeal of metal grinding against metal filled the small room. My nostrils filled with the stench of burning hair and sulfur. My serpents groaned with the effort of moving the aspects together, and their stress made its way into my body. I needed more jinsei, but wasn’t sure I could cycle enough of the sacred energy before exhaustion caught up to me.
“Jace,” Niddhogg said, his voice worried. “I feel something. Like a wave of static just crashed over me.”
“So do I,” Hahen confirmed. “A spirit is approaching.”
“Let me know when it gets close,” I said through gritted teeth. “It won’t be long now.”
“You’ve been at it for eight hours,” Niddhogg grumbled. “I don’t think you’re the best judge of how long you have left.”
That seemed impossible. I thought I’d been out of it for minutes, not hours. Frustrated, I pushed on. I had to finish this. I’d deal with whatever was coming when it arrived.
But I was still stuck on the first pair of aspects. I might as well have been pushing against the earth itself for all they’d moved.
&
nbsp; What was I missing?
And then it hit me. Krieger had told me anyone who created orichalcum was bound to it. That was the key to the entire process. Ishigara’s ritual had distanced me from that simple truth. Dealing with the raw aspects, with nothing to guide me but my mind, showed me the truth.
I gave up on forcing the aspects together. That wasn’t the way. Instead, I wove a jinsei extension to my thread of fate and formed a pair of loops along its length, then wrapped each of those around one end of the gold and copper strand.
The jinsei in my core instantly rushed out of me and flowed down the length of braided aspects. It gleamed like a blinding solar flare.
“Stop,” a strange voice called. The syllables sounded like the clashing of metal on metal and the faint screech of distant hunting birds. “You do not understand what you’re doing.”
I activated the Vision of the Design to see my enemy’s most likely angle of attack. But the technique misfired again, filling my head with a burst of crackling noise and flashing lights that was confusing, not enlightening. With an aggravated snarl, I dismissed the technique.
Just in time to see danger approaching.
An alien, serpent-like creature swam into the edge of the light I’d created above the Grand Design. Its form shifted and changed, dancing like a wisp of wind-blown smoke. Black strands drifted down from its body to distant points on the Design, binding the creature to the pattern of creation. The spirit didn’t seem to have any eyes, just a smooth, featureless bullet of a head, but the weight of its attention landed on my core like a lead apron.
“I won’t stop,” I said.
My serpents wove more jinsei around the cord of elemental aspects. The silver threads encased the glowing metal natures, not tying them to me, but making them part of my destiny.
“You’re grinding yourself down to nothing,” the voice continued. “All for an entity who left your kind to die. Stop your struggles. There’s nothing to gain by tampering with the Design.”