by Gage Lee
There was no energy left inside me for a witty comeback. The Flame had left us. That was an undeniable truth. But no matter what Xaophis said, this quest was important. A new Design gave all mortals a chance at peace, a way out of the chaos my mother’s schemes had unleashed.
My thread had consumed half the aspects. It wouldn’t be long now.
But if Xaophis attacked me, I wouldn’t have the strength to fight it off.
The shifting presence circled me slowly, a shark hunting a swimmer. “Stop, or I’ll kill them all.”
The cracking, jittering voice clawed at my thoughts. It filled my head with visions of my clan members, their bodies tattered, hideous wounds opened across their torsos, faces obliterated by the horrible scars of battle.
“You can’t beat me,” I said, throwing the weight of my core behind the words.
The creature’s presence scattered like a school of minnows from a stone tossed into their pool. Bits and pieces of it flickered through the surrounding air only to reassemble, screaming like a thousand birds.
“You think you’re powerful,” it screamed, “but you know nothing of true power. I am the guardian of this world, and I will not let you unmake it.”
Xaophis came at me from a dozen different angles, its power slamming into my aura in a rattling barrage. My serpents had to stop their weaving to protect me. Their thrusts and sweeping parries deflected some of the creature’s blows and drove it back.
But only for the moment. It circled me, looking for an opening.
“I won’t give up,” I said gravely. “No matter what you threaten, no matter how you try to stop me, you’ll fail. This is my quest, and I will not give it up.”
I’d come too far, done too much, to back down now. The loss of Christina, whatever was going on with Byron, Abi’s legs. The price had been high, but I’d paid it to save the world. Giving up now would throw all that away.
“You’re trying to save a world that hates you,” Xaophis hissed. “They’ll gladly see you dead rather than lift a hand to help you. Or themselves.”
The creature slashed and hacked at me to distract me long enough for me to lose control of the elemental aspects. Its words stung more than the blows, though, because my serpents couldn’t protect me from the truth.
My clan members were losing faith, and the other clans had not only turned on me, but on each other. Their pointless battle had given Xaophis a route into the School, and now it was out of control. Left to their own devices, mortals would tear themselves apart.
But that changed nothing.
Because the Flame had given me the tools to pull us back from the brink. With a new Flame, a new Design, humans could reach new heights. We could be our better selves.
We just needed the chance.
“Sometimes people don’t know they need to be saved,” I said. “And sometimes they don’t know what’s best for them.”
“You’re a fool,” Xaophis raged. “This Design was perfection. Mortals defiled it because of their lust for power. They turned away from the path the Flame laid out for them. And now you will destroy the master’s work to let them do the same again. I’ll kill you before I let that happen.”
With a thought, I pulled my serpents in around me. They formed a cage to shield me from the barbed, constricting coils of the spirit’s body. While it tried to crush me, I finished the work my serpents had started.
I sealed my thread around the aspects with loops of sacred energy. The aspects moaned in protest as I bent them to my will, forcing pure copper and gold to become something new, something strange and powerful.
The last of the jinsei in my core lashed around the end of my thread, sealing the gold and copper within my aura, binding them to me for all time. I was exhausted, my spiritual reserves completely empty.
But the spirit had exhausted itself, too. The struggle to batter through my serpents left it pale and translucent, its jinsei so low it barely held Xaophis together. Already it was drifting away, retreating to replenish its power.
“Remember you had a chance,” Xaophis sneered through the narrow gaps between my serpents. “And you chose the path of blood. Their deaths are on your hands. I will tear apart everything you know. All hands will be raised against you.”
The creature vanished without a sound. I was so weak I could barely think straight, but there was still so much work to do. At least I had a little more room to breathe without a hostile spirit trying to kill me.
It was time to finish this.
I poured my freshly cycled jinsei through my serpents and guided them through the final stage of the process. They stretched threads of sacred energy into a frame and wrapped arcs of power around it. Strand by strand, the shell I envisioned took shape. The effort pushed my core harder than I’d ever experienced before.
A perfect sphere, exactly one meter across, hovered in the void in front of me. My mind’s eye told me it perfectly matched the dimensions that Maps had insisted on. One yard wide, one inch thick. Only one small hole in its surface was clear of jinsei.
I stitched my thread of fate to that opening by hand. Every stich required the utmost care and precision to ensure there were no gaps between my thread and the sphere of jinsei.
And then I unleashed the aspects.
As they passed through the thread, I willed them to bond together. Those motes of light were no longer separated from me. They were a part of my aura, bound to my destiny as surely as my serpents or my arms.
They couldn’t resist me.
The world shifted around me, time and space bleeding away in a meaningless rush. All that mattered was the raw power of creation and the strength of my will. Heat built up around me as the waste products shed away from the newly formed orichalcum, and I bled it away through my Thief’s Shield until a glowing corona surrounded me.
There were still some aspects of gold and copper left in me after I’d filled the shell. That was all right. I tied off my thread of fate. I could use up the rest of it later. It would pay off Ishigara and Krieger for their help, and it would make a fine gift for someone else who needed it.
For the moment, though, I was finished. When I opened my eyes, the fruit of my labor was on the floor at my feet.
It was a perfect orichalcum shell, its surface covered in intricate patterns and strange designs. I had no idea how those delicate scrivenings had found their way onto the core. I certainly hadn’t put them there. I doubted even Ishigara could craft such complex, powerful designs.
So, who had?
The question was still in my thoughts when I felt a faint stirring within me.
The Flame was awakening.
Oh.
The Warning
IT TOOK ME MORE THAN an hour to restore my jinsei and replenish the strength I’d lost in my battle with Xaophis. The energy I’d gathered from the Umbral Forge was depleted, too, which did nothing to take the edge off my exhaustion. But I knew that Xaophis was beat as well, and wouldn’t want a rematch just yet. My best chance to finish this was to push ahead, through the weariness.
It took me an hour to use up the last of the elemental aspects trapped in my thread of fate. That produced three more ingots of orichalcum, each weighing in at roughly a pound. Probably a little more, but what can I say? I’m a generous guy.
Best of all, the gamble of pushing ahead when I was on the verge of sleepwalking had paid off. Xaophis had not shown up to eat my face. He was probably enjoying a nice relaxing nap somewhere.
“That is a lot of loot,” Niddhogg said with wide, hungry eyes. “Maybe I could just take sleep down here...”
“You’re a funny guy,” I said. My voice was startlingly weak. I’d sleep like a baby tonight.
“You look tired,” Hahen said. “Perhaps if you had learned the Sleepless technique...”
Hahen had not appreciated the shortcut provided by the Flame’s energy I’d taken from the Umbral Forge. It had let me go without food or sleep, which made the rat spirit’s favorite thing to needle me abo
ut obsolete.
Now that the fires of that power had burned low, I was back to being a very lazy and hungry sacred artist.
At least that’s what Hahen would surely lecture me about.
I grumbled and jerked a thumb toward the ladder to the surface. “Move along, friends,” I said. “I need to get back topside before I pass out.”
The Stacks were as far as I made it. The effort to seal the New Moon hiding place drained the last of my energy, and it was all I could do to retreat to the cots in the far corner. It was lights out for me the second my head hit the pillow.
Hahen woke me the next morning with a pointy finger jabbing into my ribs. “Enough sleeping,” he said. “You missed all your classes and your friends are worried about you. There’s still time for dinner. Go speak with them.”
Dinner. For the first time since the Umbral Forge, I felt hungry.
“Let’s go.” I dragged myself out of the cot and headed for the dining hall with the rat spirit beside me.
Hahen was uncharacteristically quiet as we wound our way through the School’s shifting architecture. It wasn’t until we’d almost reached our destination that he spoke up.
“Tru is with Clem and the others,” he whispered. “And she knows you did something... impressive last night.”
“How?” I asked.
While I hadn’t technically broken my promise to Tru by creating the shell, even I had to admit that came awfully close to crossing the line. The young dragon wouldn’t be pleased. But I was much more concerned by the fact that she knew what I’d done than by her potential anger.
I’d performed that ritual deep underground in a place only a handful of people knew existed. Hahen was with me, so I sincerely doubted he’d spilled the beans. Had Niddhogg decided his alliance with the dragons was more important than his loyalty to me?
“I don’t know,” the rat spirit said. “You should ask her.”
It felt like every eye in the dining hall turned in my direction as I entered the heavy double doors and made my way to the food line. Abi and Clem both waved to me, but Eric averted his eyes, and Tru didn’t turn in her seat to look toward me.
That was not a good sign.
The hunger in my belly went to war with the anxiety in my head over what to load onto my plate. I settled on a thick ham sandwich complete with a few slices of smoky provolone cheese, a tall, frosty glass of water, and a pair of nectarines so ripe they were nearly purple. By the time I’d reached my friends’ usual table, the attention on my shoulders was an uncomfortable weight. Every eye might not be on me, but most of the people in the dining hall were at least thinking about me.
Something was about to happen.
“Well, if it isn’t the walking dead,” Clem said with a grin. “Busy night?”
“Of course it was,” Tru said with a biting tone. “Somebody was up to no good.”
I put my tray down on the table and took a seat next to Clem. “It was a busy night. And how do you know what I was up to?”
Tru gave me a withering glare. “We don’t know specifics, but whatever you did alarmed our seers. You may as well have fired a flare into a dark sky.”
I used a bite from my sandwich to hide my concern. I’d put a lot of jinsei into the orichalcum, and other sacred artists nearby could detect power of that magnitude. The stronger the energy source, the further away it could be felt. But to detect my power in Shambala would require an amount of energy far vaster than I could have managed without burning myself to a cinder.
Unless...
“That wasn’t me,” I said honestly. Well, mostly honestly. I’d been involved, but if my suspicions were correct, the power they’d seen in Shambala had been the Empyrean Flame’s.
“Sure,” Tru said with a smirk. “It was someone else operating under orders from the—”
My steely glare, backed by the power of my artist-level core, silenced Tru as sharply as a slap. I hadn’t wanted to insult the young dragon like that, but she’d left me little choice. “Let’s not discuss that where so many could eavesdrop.”
Tru’s draconic nature did not react well to my command. Dragons were powerful creatures used to calling the shots. When faced with a challenge, their first instinct was to either burn it to the ground with fiery breath or claw its head off. The look in Tru’s eyes told me she was still considering which of those options was best for this situation.
“Enough,” Abi said. “We are not enemies.”
Tru slowly turned her head toward him.
“Tell him that,” the young dragon growled. Faint wisps of smoke escaped her nostrils, and her eyes shone with a violent green light. “He’s the one who set the minds of half the seers in the world on fire last night.”
The combination of my jinsei-amplified voice and Tru’s obvious agitation had attracted a lot of attention. I showed a fake smile to Theodosia, then chomped down on my sandwich and chewed noisily in her direction until she decided there were better things to stare at.
After I washed that big bite down with a drink of water from a glass so cold it wept beads of condensation, I leaned in a little closer and stage-whispered, “Keep your voice down. The entire world doesn’t need to know our business.”
Tru ripped off a hefty bite from a bloody slab of steak and licked the red juices from her lower lip. She chewed deliberately, grinding her teeth through the meat with obvious pleasure. It was her turn to take a drink. When she put her glass down on the table, she gave me a smile as cold as the water. “If you wanted to keep things quiet, you wouldn’t have pulled that stunt last night.”
“I told you it wasn’t me,” I said. “You’re convinced that I’m lying. What do we do now?”
Hahen and Niddhogg, seated at the ends of the table, watched my friends watching Tru. Clem and Eric had convinced me that playing straight with the dragons was the best policy. I’d done my part, even if I’d gotten close to breaking my word a few times. But if Tru didn’t see it that way and went to the dragons to stop me, I was doomed. I could fight a lot of things, but the First Scepter of the Scaled Council was beyond even my considerable abilities.
“I don’t know what to believe,” Tru said at last. “If that... display... wasn’t you finishing the second leg of your quest, what was it?”
I nibbled on my sandwich to buy myself a little time. Finally, I dropped the food on my plate and spread my hands as if to show Tru I wasn’t hiding anything up my sleeves. “I am preparing to wrap up this part of the quest. That required some legwork that got a little out of hand. But you know I’m not powerful enough to light up Shambala, Tru. Think about it.”
The young dragon studied me over the rim of her glass as she took a long drink that I hoped would cool her anger. “It doesn’t really matter whether you’re that powerful. The seers for the Scaled Council say something set off the flare. A lot of people, and not just dragons, put two and two together and decided it was likely that the strongest sacred artist at the School was responsible.”
That was a problem I hadn’t expected. The other clans trusted me far less than the dragons did. If they thought I’d pulled a big power move here last night, there’d be trouble.
Which would explain the eyeballs turned my way as I’d entered the dining hall. If the clans had decided it was time to take me down, there was no time to act on that impulse like the present. And it wouldn’t be me they’d come after.
“Where are my clan mates?” I asked Hahen, sudden panic tightening my voice.
“Safe,” Niddhogg said, pointedly refraining from spilling any more of the beans. “I can take you to them whenever you’re ready.”
That was good, at least. Niddhogg might be a dragon, but he wouldn’t turn on me.
At least I didn’t think he would. Maybe that was naïve on my part.
“When are they making their move?” I asked the young dragon.
“The clans are holding their cards close to the vest,” Tru said. “But I have it on good authority that most of the elders want
you out of the picture, more or less immediately. And the dragons are leaning that way.”
The pain in Tru’s voice was an even match for the anger she’d shown earlier. She and Eric were close, and she and I were nearly friends. Or had been before last night. The young dragon was hurt because she believed I’d lied to her and broken my oath not to finish the second leg of my quest without giving her time to talk to her superiors on the Scaled Council.
Things were spinning out of control. If the other clans had decided the gloves were off, my clan was in danger. I’d need all the allies I could get. That included the dragons.
“Okay,” I said. “Let me finish this sandwich, and then you and I need to take a walk, Tru.”
Eric and Clem stared at me, both looking anxious about what a “walk” might entail. I couldn’t blame them. It wasn’t like I hadn’t killed my mother when she threatened me. Offing Tru wouldn’t be that much out of character for me.
“Relax,” the young dragon said, nudging Eric in the ribs. “Jace and I are both mostly adults. We won’t kill each other.”
“Probably,” I said with a grin.
Clem pushed her plate back, a mound of fresh fruit and a salad still mostly untouched in its center. “Don’t. Even. Joke.”
She sounded not just upset, but afraid. As if she worried that I might fly off the handle and try to murder my way out of this mess. Or that Tru might take draconic justice into her own hands. While I doubted the young dragon could beat me, a serious fight between us would be a public relations disaster for my clan. The dragons would take it as an insult, they’d join the dueling party, and...
I didn’t even want to think about it.
“I’m sorry,” I said with sincere remorse. Irritating Tru and scaring my friends was not behavior becoming an elder. “I just want to have a quiet conversation with the representative from Shambala. I’d also like to present her with a gift as a way of showing my appreciation for her patience.”
Tru quirked a scaled brow and shrugged. “You can’t bribe me, but I’ve never turned down an honest gift.”
We finished our meals in relative peace and left the table in what I hoped looked like casual conversation. In truth, what we had to say to each other was far from small talk.