by Gage Lee
She recoiled from my words as if they were a slap. Her cheeks reddened and her lips trembled. “Don’t make me do this,” she said. “It’s not fair. They’re coming for you, Jace. You need our help.”
Eric stepped forward and locked eyes with Clem. “There’s no more they, Clem. We’re part of the clans coming for Jace. It’s not safe for us to be anywhere near him.”
A dark shadow of realization passed over Clem’s features. “You’re not afraid for Jace. You’re worried about your career. I can’t believe you’d be so selfish.”
Dark fire rippled around Eric’s eyes. An aura of flickering jinsei sprang to life around him as his temper frayed and his control slipped. “Selfish? I don’t want to lose my shot at the title, but that’s not what scares me.”
“Please, everyone calm down,” Abi said from his chair. “If we fight each other, Xaophis wins.”
“What I’m afraid of is a lot worse than that,” Eric continued, his words dripping with anger. “I’m the only other student artist here at the School. What if my clan tells me to fight Jace?”
Clem waved her hand dismissively, her anger rising to match Eric’s. “He’ll refuse your challenge.”
Eric chuckled and shook his head. “I didn’t say duel. What if they want me to kill Jace?”
Pure horror washed over Clem’s face. “They wouldn’t do that.”
“There’s no telling what they will or won’t do anymore,” I said. “Xaophis’s influence is spreading, quickly. The quorum speaks with the voice of the elders. If it gets to one of them, anything is possible.”
Clem’s face twisted into a tortured mask. Her entire world was crumbling around her. All I wanted to do was pull her into my arms and hold her until this madness ended. But that was impossible.
I had to send her away before it was too late.
“They can’t just assassinate you,” she insisted. “There are still laws, you guys.”
Abi wheeled up to us and took Clem’s hand. “You’re right, Clem. But Jace doesn’t have time to see how the legal system will see his actions. Xaophis is out there, now, and it has to be stopped. Jace is the only one who can do that, but only if you let him go.”
Clem tore her hand out of Abi’s grip and threw herself at me. She wrapped her arms around my neck and clung to me, sobs wracking her body. “I hate this,” she whispered, “but I love you enough to let you go. Don’t make me regret it.”
She stepped back from me before I could respond and turned away. “Let’s go,” she choked out. “Finish this, Jace.”
A lump in my throat made it impossible for me to speak. All I could do was nod mutely and watch the most important person in my life walk away. I vowed to make it up to Clem when this was over, though I had no idea how that would be possible. This decision had hurt her deeply, and only time would tell if that wound would heal cleanly or leave a nasty scar.
“You’re going nowhere,” Theodosia Reyes declared. She and the rest of her quorum approached from the passage ahead of me. “The elders have sent word for you, Eric.”
My friend and I both tensed. This was exactly what we’d feared. If Eric and I had to fight to the death, there was no way to know who’d win. He was a better fighter than me, but my techniques evened the playing field. It would come down to which of us was most willing to kill the other.
Abi’s fusion blade appeared in his hand before Theodosia could speak another word. The heavy weapon hummed and crackled with jinsei, and he thrust it up from his wheelchair.
Right at Eric’s face.
“I challenge you to a duel, Eric,” he said with solemn conviction. “You have offended my honor, and only a trial by combat will satisfy me.”
Abi’s move startled me, but that shock was followed a moment later by a burst of pride. He’d anticipated Theodosia’s gambit and shut it down.
“You can have your duel after I deliver the elders’ edict,” Theodosia snapped. “Eric—”
“One moment,” he replied to her. “Abi’s accusation is of grave concern to me. If I have somehow given offense to his honor, it is only right that I address the issue immediately.”
“Good luck,” I said to Eric and Abi. “I’ll see you both on the other side of this mess.”
“You’re going nowhere, Warin!” Theodosia shouted. “The elders of the Resplendent Sun clan demand satisfaction. Their champion has been given orders to challenge you to a duel.”
“And he will,” I said as I backed away from the quorum and my friends. “Just as soon as he finishes the pressing matter before him.”
Theodosia fumed, her eyes burning with black jinsei. Her jaw clenched in frustration, and her whole body shook with anger.
“Get us out of here, Hazel,” I whispered to my clan mate. “Back to the Stacks. Now.”
Eric and Abi continued their discussion on how to settle the duel while Theodosia glared daggers at my back. My friends’ gambit was on shaky ground, because technically the elders’ duel should have taken precedence, but Abi’s challenge gave them deniability. If this went before the tribunal, the worst Eric would get was a slap on the wrist. He’d behaved honorably, and the Suns wouldn’t punish that too harshly.
“I’m coming for you, Warin,” Theodosia shouted.
“Elder Warin,” I shot back.
Then my clan and I left the quorum behind, our blindfolded captives in tow.
One way or another, I was close to the end of this quest.
The Fortress
WITH THEODOSIA AND her cronies tied up by my friends, my clan made a mad dash for the Stacks. Hazel led us around duels, through abandoned stretches of the School, and finally to the area of the campus the New Moon clan had once controlled.
We were almost to the Stacks, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that my enemies were hot on the trail. Theodosia’s quorum, rival clans, and the Golden Wardens were all eager to find me. It no longer seemed a matter of if someone would find me, but who would get the honor of being first.
The smart money was on the Wardens. With the power and resources of the Triad Consul behind them, they could hire enough seers to track me down. The fact that my thread was disconnected from the Grand Design would slow the scryers down, but it wouldn’t stop them forever.
“If you’ve got any tricks up your sleeve, now would be a good time to use them,” I muttered to the Flame’s power still slumbering within me.
A vague sensation of movement in my core, like a napping cat rolling over in the sun, was my only answer.
Fantastic.
Hazel tore the door to the Stacks open with one jinsei-strengthened arm, and we poured in behind her.
“Barricade that door,” I barked to my clan mates. “Use books, tables, cots, whatever we have. I need time to protect us, and I need you to give it to me.”
The past few hours had been hard on my clan members, but the experience had also stiffened their spines. They snapped to attention at my order, and shouted in unison, “Yes, Elder!”
I’d be a liar if I said that didn’t feel good. When pushed to the brink of annihilation, my clan members hadn’t backed down. They’d tightened their ranks and pulled together.
That gave me hope they’d survive this, even if I didn’t.
Byron took the lead as I headed to the rear of the Stacks to meditate. His first order of business was to isolate the members we’d added through duels. Hazel and Ferundo moved the still-blindfolded students to the west side of the library. After that, he organized groups of smaller kids to create a barrier of books, and the stronger students to drag the tables from the study area up to the door.
While I tended to Michelle’s wounds and checked in on the Disciples we’d recruited at sword point, my clan mates tore down the home they’d built for themselves. The Stacks were no longer a training area or a study hall.
It was the fortress of the Shadow Phoenix clan.
A fortress I had to protect if my people were to survive. I settled into a corner of the chamber and cycled my
breathing. I wasn’t sure what I needed to do next, but there was no doubt more jinsei would only help.
The deepest levels of meditation brought me before the Grand Design. Its luminous surface stretched out beneath me as far as I could see in every direction. The sweeping lines and blazing paths described every mortal’s fate and every inanimate object’s destiny.
It boggled my mind that the most powerful mortals of the current age had thought they knew better than the creator of this elaborate, all-encompassing pattern. The fools had abandoned the path of the Flame, lied to the rest of us about what their seers told them, and turned the world into a madhouse.
And now it was up to me to fix everything.
“We’ll do better this time,” I promised the power within me.
Though I’d rested and eaten since my battle with Xaophis, I hadn’t recovered from the effort of that titanic struggle. My muscles and channels ached from the enormous amounts of jinsei I’d forced through them. I needed rest, soon.
There’d be plenty of time to sleep after I secured the Stacks.
While my clan mates did their best to barricade the door, we’d need more than piles of books and overturned tables to protect us from our enemies. My small clan didn’t have the resources available to our rivals, much less the Golden Wardens. Trying to fight the overwhelming strength our foes could bring to bear was an exercise in futility.
We needed to hide.
The problem with that plan was that I had no idea how to pull off a disappearing act for myself, much less my clan members. While I was harder to find since I’d disconnected myself from the Grand Design, enough seers with enough power behind them could track me down. And the Golden Wardens had proven they had the tools to do just that when they snatched me out of her parents’ vacation house.
But those seers didn’t know about the Stacks, and that might let me hide from them until I’d recovered my strength and, hopefully, the Flame was ready to transfer into the core and finish this quest. That, I prayed, would abolish Xaophis and let people come back to their senses.
My plan was to cut the Stacks free of the Grand Design. In theory, that would add another layer of insulation and camouflage between my clan and its enemies. It wasn’t a foolproof way to hide, but it would give us more time, and that was the best I could hope for.
I expanded my spiritual senses to trace the outlines of our hideout. The Stacks loomed large in my mind’s eye, an enormous chamber layered with scrivenings that had long since decayed to uselessness. There were other powers there, too, tied to the hidden room beneath the floor, but they were far beyond my comprehension. The dizzying array of sorcery and mechanisms made it difficult to see how the chamber was connected to the Design.
Focusing my thoughts didn’t help much, either, and I soon saw why. Mortals were connected to the Grand Design by a single thread of fate that defined everything about their past, present, and future. While every mortal was unique, the thousands and thousands of aspects that made up their bodies, minds, and souls were all encompassed by that single thread.
But as I studied the Stacks, I realized inanimate objects were very different from mortals. They had simple destinies easily changed by mortal interference. If I picked up a rock and carried it across the world, my actions both severed and rewove its thread of fate with little effort on my part.
But the essence of the rock didn’t change when a mortal moved it from one position to another. Hundreds, maybe thousands, of smaller threads defined its presence in reality and bound it to the Grand Design. Each of those tiny cords, many so fine I couldn’t see them even with my enhanced senses, represented one of the rock’s physical attributes. Its height, volume, mass, elemental composition, and location in the world were all tied to one or more of these threads.
And that was for a simple rock.
Defining a structure as complex as the Stacks required tens of thousands of separate threads, and that didn’t account for the other bonds that connected it to the structure of the School of Swords and Serpents. This new insight flooded into my thoughts, adding to the pressure building in my core. My comprehension of the world and its mystical structures was growing, and the longer I studied the School that surrounded me, the more of it I understood.
And what I now grasped stunned me.
The School wasn’t a single structure, but a patchwork of supernatural marvels held in place by a flexible web of jinsei. The School didn’t shift around the students who traveled through its maze-like passages. It moved them from one slice of reality to the next, using a complex system of scrivenings that nearly blinded me with their blazing complexity and raw power. The amount of sacred energy required to hold this elaborate puzzle box together was mind-boggling.
I lost myself in the warp and weft of the web surrounding me. The School’s vast network of hallways, classrooms, and living areas didn’t surprise me; I’d always known the place was immense. What shocked my senses was the way the campus stretched around the world, its bits and pieces spread across the Grand Design’s geography like a jigsaw puzzle thrown across the floor by an angry toddler.
There was no there there. The School was simultaneously everywhere and nowhere. It occupied a vast amount of space, but most of it was hidden from the world and its students. It was less a campus and more a world built inside the empty spaces most mortals would never know existed. Every time I thought I’d seen the limits of its enormity, another layer unfolded. The School held enough rooms and dormitories to train tens of thousands of students. Maybe more.
Endless possibilities surrounded me.
And almost all of them were squandered. The School could teach an ocean of students, but it catered to only a few scattered raindrops.
Cruzal’s worries about money to keep the doors open, the harassment Grimaldi had visited on Rachel at the annex, the Hollows project, the whole fiasco with the church and its corrupt inquisitors were all symptoms of the rot that threatened to topple Empyreal society. Some unimaginably powerful, unimaginably wealthy people had throttled the flow of students into the School.
The reason why was obvious.
And enraging.
My mother hadn’t been entirely wrong about the world, just in how she’d chosen to deal with the truth that I’d just discovered. The Flame’s servants had wandered off the path. They used their positions to control the world, not guide it. Instead of creating a world filled with powerful, competent sacred artists, they’d chosen to shackle most mortals to the undercities and labor camps while allowing a comparative handful to live in prosperity.
That’s why there weren’t other powerful schools. That’s why we had so few students. Because the people pulling the strings understood that untrained, uneducated sheep were easier to control than the wolves all sacred artists were destined to become.
The Eclipse Warrior inside me howled with blind anger. It wanted me to become the monster the world feared. The mortals who’d defiled the purpose of the Grand Design didn’t deserve to be saved. Better for me to go out in a blaze of glory and let the Flame sputter out like a candle tossed into a mud puddle.
But as much as I wanted to take the easy way out and let it all burn, the part of me that was still human knew that was foolish. The rot in the world wasn’t at the roots. The blight was at the very top.
And finishing the quest would let me trim that corruption away using the oldest of mankind’s tools.
Purifying flame.
I pushed the anger aside and went back to the problem at hand. Hiding the Stacks was no longer an option. Its connections to the Grand Design were too intricate and numerous for me to sever without causing irreparable damage. It would be easier, and probably safer, to disassemble the School brick by brick and physically move it than to untangle its threads of fate.
Fine. Then I’d reinforce my clan’s new fortress against assault.
I turned my attention to the door my clan members were barricading. Though the scrivenings that once protected this chamber fro
m intruders had decayed in the long years they were left without jinsei, the wood-and-iron structure was still robust. Aspects of strength and durability surrounded it, giving the barrier an imposing presence in both the spirit and physical realms.
The physical barriers of books and tables would bolster that defense, but we’d need more to keep our enemies out. I focused all my attention on the door and covered them with a lattice of sorcery. Jinsei threads spread across the wood like a web, and strands of sacred energy anchored it to the door, floor, and ceiling to keep our enemies from pulling the door open or smashing it down.
My serpents sprang into action as soon as it became obvious what I was doing. They gathered aspects of strength and endurance and fed them into the spell until it covered the barrier in so much energy it would take a battering ram to bust through it.
Unfortunately, my enemies might have access to much more powerful siege engines.
I’d have pumped more aspects into the spell, but the metaphysical weight of the sorcery had taken its toll on the rest of the Stacks. The floor had cracked on this side of the door, and pea-sized chunks of the ceiling had fallen to the floor like hailstones. There was only so much power the structure could contain, and we were very close to that limit.
And my core ached from the effort I’d dumped into the spell. That was a sure sign I was nearing the master level, but also a warning that I was about to knock myself out. I needed to save some energy for the last trick in my arsenal.
I cycled my breathing, refilled my core with jinsei, and examined the truncated stump of my thread of fate. The longer I looked at that black cord, the more I saw the strands it comprised. I narrowed my spiritual vision until I found a glimmering line of power that corresponded to a very special part of me.
A shiver ran through my aura and into my core when I brushed that thread with my thoughts, as if I’d touched a raw nerve. It was exactly what I needed.
One deep breath and a very careful operation later, I’d bound that piece of my thread to the spell I’d woven around the door. Anyone who tried to batter their way into my stronghold was in for a very nasty surprise.