by Will Wight
Jai Chen stepped up on his other side, and her eyes were full of tears. She was a small woman, at least compared to Kelsa and her family, and she looked…soft. In every sense of the word. Eyes, skin, hair, hands, demeanor. Soft.
But she had fought at Kelsa’s side, and soft didn’t always mean weak.
She raised a trembling hand to place on Orthos, but his shell was radiating heat, and she couldn’t touch him.
Her brother spoke softly to Kelsa from within the scripted red bandages that covered his head. “We should head up the mountain to the Fallen Leaf pass. All of us.”
Kelsa grabbed his outer robe and bowed her head. She couldn’t see his face even if she looked up, but she was about to make a shameless request, and she didn’t want to see disgust in his eyes.
“Please, stay and fight. This one begs you.”
Over the last week, she’d seen him in battle. If he and his sister and Orthos chose to fight with her, maybe they could resist even these overwhelming numbers. They could hold a pass, or strike at them and retreat, or…something.
She was already in their debt. They had risked their safety for her, a stranger, and she couldn’t repay them. Now, they weren’t strangers any longer, but she hated to ask for any more.
Jai Long’s voice sounded awkward when it wasn’t cold and distant. “Kelsa, this is…hopeless. Come with us. I promise you, I can get your parents out.”
“…I can’t.”
Kelsa released him and took a deep breath, squaring herself. She looked him evenly in the eyes. “This is my fault.” Behind her, she felt the heat of Heaven’s Glory madra like a wildfire. “I will pay the cost of my choices, but I would be grateful if you would look out for my parents as you leave.”
“Fine.” Jai Long’s icy tone was back. He turned to Orthos. “And you?”
Orthos nudged Jai Chen with his head, sending her stumbling closer to her brother. “Go. They have no dragons fighting for them, so I say they’re outnumbered.” The blood running down his leg turned the dirt to mud.
“Very well, then. Die with honor, turtle.”
“You as well, human.”
They traded nods before Jai Long left, pulling Jai Chen behind him. She mouthed an apology to Orthos, and the pink serpentine dragon-spirit floating over her shoulder gave a long, mournful flute note.
But they both left.
Kelsa didn’t blame them.
They had done more for her than they needed to. They weren’t family. She had been embarrassed to ask for their help in the first place, and they were well within their rights to refuse.
She rose to her feet as gold light speared down from the heavens and incinerated the tree stump her father had used as a table for his game board.
“Okay. How can we do the most damage?” she asked.
Orthos looked at her with his one good eye and started to chuckle. “I don’t need a Jade standing beside me.”
“You’re Jade too, for now,” she pointed out. “And this is my mess. It’s only fair that I clean it up.”
The turtle squared himself on all four feet, including the injured one. Red light and black smoke rose from his shell. “What makes you think there will be any left for you?”
He unveiled his spirit.
And immediately froze.
Kelsa knew something was wrong, but she couldn’t figure out what it was. She cycled her madra and extended her perception, trying to figure out if he was under attack or if he’d seen something else coming.
He began to laugh.
Not the grim chuckle of a moment before, but full-bellied, joyous laughter.
He had gone insane.
“He’s here,” Orthos said.
Kelsa was not following this at all, but Heaven’s Glory had spotted them. Already hands and weapons were launching techniques in their direction, and she had to shelter behind a nearby tree. “Who?” she called.
The turtle didn’t answer her, as chuckles shook his body. “Hold on for a little longer, girl. This battle is almost won.”
No matter how Kelsa turned it in her mind, she didn’t understand his confidence. No matter who came for them, they would be reduced to Jade, just like him.
But she held on to that tiny, flickering hope for all she was worth.
On the slopes of the mountain above them, green light flared. Sacred artists in the uniforms of the Fallen Leaf School shoved at the wave of fleeing people. Trees and vines came to life, pushing them back, trapping them.
At least the school hadn’t started slaughtering the exiles, but it was the next best thing. Fallen Leaf had denied them shelter, leaving them to die.
Despair choked her, but it was nothing compared to the terror she felt when she turned back.
Heaven’s Glory was already upon them.
Four Jades had abandoned their meticulous march, dashing out ahead of their fellows to focus on Orthos.
The man at their vanguard was in his forties, with silver-winged hair and a stern expression. He gestured one arm that had been scarred and mangled, and a scripted sword flew at them with the speed of an arrow.
Orthos breathed black-and-red fire at it, but a pane of golden glass appeared in front of his Striker technique. The Forged Heaven’s Glory madra was destroyed, but it slowed the dragon’s breath enough to allow the sword to follow its course.
Kelsa was ready to launch the Fox Dream, her Ruler technique, when she realized the weapon had changed direction.
It was coming for her.
Her technique scattered, and she dove away, using the tree as cover.
The sword broke the trunk in a spray of splinters. It crashed through and rushed at her, and she raised her hands to try and knock it aside. She knew it would be futile.
Orthos arrived like a dark wind.
Red-and-black light surrounded him in a blaze of fire and destruction, and she had to lean back from the heat even as he intercepted the sword on his shell.
He moved his head to swat it aside, but the sword changed direction again.
It plunged directly into Orthos’ side.
He screamed in pain, letting out a rush of black dragon’s breath.
All his time in Sacred Valley, Orthos had held back from killing as much as possible. She had seen it. He didn’t want to make a habit out of killing the weak, he said. You couldn’t always avoid it in a fight, but when he could spare someone, he did.
This time, his dragon’s breath made a man vanish from the waist up.
Unfortunately, it wasn’t the Elder who controlled the sword. That one gestured with his scarred hand again, and his flying sword pulled back and looped around.
Orthos dodged to one side, but his movements were heavy and his spirit was almost empty. Kelsa knew the feeling. She gathered more madra to work them into a technique, and it was like trying to mold handfuls of soft mud.
She was exhausted.
And then the other two Jades joined the battle.
Golden walls of transparent Forged madra grew around them, and constructs drifted over their heads. A man with a jade Enforcer badge ran in, carrying a two-handed hammer.
It crashed down on Orthos’ shell, but it was only a glancing blow. Orthos’ returning blast of dragon’s breath was thin and insubstantial, and it splashed against a halfsilver-laced shield that the man raised.
Kelsa caught the Forger in a Fox Dream, and he staggered down the hill a few steps, but she couldn’t do anything about the Enforcer or the flying sword.
Orthos bled from even fresher wounds, and he was still moving with more agility than she thought should be possible from a turtle.
He spun, flipping around the sword, and lashed his tail against the hammer-wielding Enforcer in midair.
The instant he landed, Orthos said, “Yield.”
Neither men acknowledged him.
The third Jade, the woman Forger, shook off Kelsa’s Fox Dream and re-focused on her with a look of irritation. She glared up the hill, gathering power.
“We have
reinforcements coming,” Orthos said again. “We will accept your surrender.”
The Elder with the scarred arm gestured, and the flying sword flew back to his hand. It gathered power, then shot toward Orthos with greater power than ever before.
Orthos stood his ground, the last of his Blackflame madra gathering in his jaws.
The sword stopped.
It took Kelsa a moment to realize that someone was holding it.
A stranger had appeared out of nowhere, a blur of motion that Kelsa had barely registered before he arrived, and he held the flying sword by the hilt in the grip of a pale right hand.
She didn’t recognize the huge man with the Remnant arm. He glared with eyes like Orthos’, and he was covered by a translucent blaze of black and red. She sensed fiery destruction from him on a level greater even than the turtle.
He had run up behind the sword. Overtaking it and seizing it in mid-flight.
The sword shivered in his grip, trying to escape, but his fingers might as well have been cast from steel.
The stranger’s red-and-black eyes stopped on Orthos before passing over her, and with the surge she felt from his spirit, she was sure he was about to kill her in rage.
He wore robes of black, white, and purple, and around his neck hung a shadesilk ribbon carrying a badge. Not a hammer, a shield, a scepter, or an arrow. One symbol in the old language was carved into that white metal.
Unsouled.
Suddenly, the image of this stranger congealed with the descriptions Orthos had given her. Even so, she couldn’t bring herself to believe it.
How could this be her little brother?
“Lindon?”
Lindon spun and hurled the sword back at the Heaven’s Glory Elder.
Flying swords were controlled by scripts. When activated by a specific wielder’s madra, their script guided wind aura that allowed the weapon to fly.
You could never use a flying sword against its owner. It was keyed to their spirit. Throwing it back at them would only free up their weapon.
Unless, it seemed, you threw it with overwhelming strength.
The sword blasted straight through the center of the Elder, leaving a bloody hole in his middle and a crater in the earth behind him.
The man looked down at himself. His jade badge was gone.
He collapsed in a heap.
The Enforcer landed a hit, his two-handed hammer crashing into the side of Lindon’s head. It had slightly less effect than a spoon tapping the side of a teacup.
A white hand closed around the neck of the Heaven’s Glory Enforcer.
Gold walls were already going up around the rest of the area, and Kelsa knew from experience that, when broken, those panes of Forged madra burned like live coals.
Lindon gripped the Enforcer by the neck, then looked down the hill at the Forger who was raising her own defense.
He threw the full-grown Jade in his hand at the Forger in an overhand pitch.
The man blasted through three layers of Forged Heaven’s Glory madra, and his clothes were burning with natural fire when he collided with the other Elder.
“Collided” was actually too polite a word. Together, they smashed against the bottom of the hill with a sickening crunch.
White light swelled into a bubble next to Kelsa, and she dodged backwards. She didn’t sense Heaven’s Glory madra from the light, but she knew it had to be an attack of theirs. Kelsa immediately wove her madra into Foxfire. She was draining her spirit dry, but she extended her perception to find the one who had cast the technique.
In the center of the white light, a girl appeared.
Shorter than Kelsa, she was compact, with flowing black hair interrupted by a streak of blood-red. Six arms of metallic crimson metal extended from her back, their ends sharpened and hammered flat like sword blades.
Hurriedly, Kelsa redirected her Foxfire and hurled it into the newcomer.
One of those sword-arms flicked the Striker technique out of the air. The scarlet girl turned, steadily getting her ragged breathing under control.
She didn’t seem to move quickly, but before Kelsa knew what was happening, a hand grasped her by the throat.
Kelsa looked into red eyes and prepared to die.
“Hey, give me your name.”
Kelsa found she had no trouble speaking. The young woman’s grip was loose.
“You first,” Kelsa said.
A faint smile pulled up the corner of the new girl’s mouth. She let Kelsa go and turned to Orthos, taking in a sharp breath. “You look about five miles past dead.”
He rumbled agreement. “Something stranger has happened to you.”
“Can’t argue with that.” She placed a hand on Orthos’ head, though even standing close to him must have been agonizing in the heat. “Wish you’d been with us.”
She was Orthos’ friend?
That meant…she didn’t exactly match the description, but she must be Yerin. The girl who had taken Lindon away from Sacred Valley.
But Kelsa couldn’t think about that now. There was still a battle going on.
Before Kelsa even looked back down the hill, she knew it had gotten worse. The heat had grown stifling, red fire aura rising by the second. The Heaven’s Glory School must be gathering their Ruler techniques…
It took her a few seconds to put the scene together.
Lindon stood in the center of the burning wreckage that had once been the camp. Shattered Heaven’s Glory Forger techniques surrounded him, licking his feet with flames, but even his shoes weren’t burned.
Heaven’s Glory Enforcers crawled away from him. As she watched, he caught one of their Striker techniques. The beam of golden light sank into his Remnant hand, and after only an instant he sent it back. It was tinged slightly darker than before.
But most of the enemies were fleeing. Maybe a hundred, maybe more, including some she recognized as Jades.
They fled because the sky had turned dark.
Hundreds of feet over Lindon’s head, black and red aura swirled so intensely that they had become visible as a dense, spinning cloud of dark fire.
She spent several breaths fumbling with her new Jade senses, trying to unravel how Heaven’s Glory had used such a Ruler technique and how Lindon had gained control of it.
Finally, she came to the inevitable conclusion: he had generated this all by himself.
“You should stop him,” Orthos said. “He’ll regret this.”
Yerin patted him on the head. “You’ve been gone an age and a half. It’s your turn.”
Orthos lifted his wounded leg. “I’m not running anywhere.”
Yerin lifted her hand from him and vanished in an implosion of light. She reappeared at the same instant next to Lindon, panting.
He turned immediately, focusing on her instead of Heaven’s Glory, reaching out to steady her. She didn’t need his help, but rested a hand on his left arm anyway.
Interesting.
They exchanged words, Lindon gesturing angrily to Heaven’s Glory, but Yerin pointed back toward where Orthos stood.
The turtle inclined his head once.
Again, Lindon moved with speed Kelsa couldn’t track, but this time she could at least see a blur like a flying arrow as he ran up the hill and came to a stop next to the turtle.
“Forgiveness,” Lindon said. “I lost my focus.”
When the dark fire and red circles bled from his eyes, leaving them human black, he looked to Kelsa with apology in his eyes.
That was the first time she really recognized her brother.
He gave her a gesture of acknowledgement, but first he turned to Orthos and threw his arms around the turtle’s neck.
The sacred beast closed his good eye and rumbled deep in his chest.
They didn’t say anything, but when Lindon separated, his eyes were wet. Only then did he return to Kelsa.
When he did, he bowed deeply over fists pressed together. “Forgiveness. I left without telling you. I…I had no idea you we
re…I didn’t know things were this bad. My deepest apologies.”
At the moment, Kelsa didn’t understand her own feelings.
She was glad her brother wasn’t the type of person to completely butcher a retreating enemy…but she had wanted him to do it.
He could never have known what Heaven’s Glory had done in his absence…but part of her still blamed him for it.
For years, she had believed that he was dead, and was glad to see him alive…but he frightened her.
Orthos had told her stories about sacred artists outside, and about Lindon in particular, but her imagination had not been enough. She felt like she was within arm’s reach of a wild tiger.
He was still bowing to her, and he would stay that way until she responded.
He had always been like that.
Kelsa’s eyes filled, and she took in a rough breath. “You took too long,” she said in a broken voice.
Lindon straightened, now even taller than she was, and she wrapped him up in a hug before she wept. From the shaking of his chest, she knew he was crying too.
7
Lindon watched Eithan spread his arms wide as if to embrace the crowd before him, his smile gentle. “Brothers and sisters of the Fallen Leaf School, I am humbled and grateful by this overwhelming show of hospitality.”
All thirty-two Jades of the Fallen Leaf School knelt on the ground in front of him, their foreheads pressed to the dirt.
They had seen Lindon face Heaven’s Glory, and that had been enough to stop them from pushing the exiles back. It hadn’t made them open their doors.
That had taken the arrival of the Akura Golds.
If Eithan’s power and skill hadn’t intimidated them, the arrival of over two hundred and fifty new Jades—as the Sacred Valley inhabitants would see them—had certainly done the trick.
Lindon had seen only glimpses of the process. He’d been catching up with Orthos and waiting for Kelsa to find their parents; it was only at his sister’s insistence that he hadn’t gone to find them immediately.
In the few fragments he’d seen of Eithan’s negotiation, the Fallen Leaf School representatives had gone from wary to goggle-eyed to tripping all over themselves to agree as more and more Golds in black and purple descended from the skies.