by Will Wight
She was doing it.
Lindon’s mother wrote furiously on her notepad. “Do you gain in size as you advance? Or can you control your growth?”
“Sacred beasts can get bigger than a pregnant mountain,” Yerin answered quickly. “People don’t, at least not any I’ve clapped eyes on.” She nodded to Malice. “That one’s not much bigger than me. Shorter than you. It’s the armor that grows, it’s like a shell.”
Yerin was standing stiffly, her back straight, deliberately looking in another direction to appear casual but flicking her gaze to Seisha with every word.
Lindon’s mother brightened, her writing picking up speed. “Really. And you’ve met her?”
“Not to polish myself up, but I fought under her banner in the Uncr—uh, a tournament for the whole world.” Yerin’s Broken Crown bloomed over her head, a wide black halo. “Came in first, as it happens. Not that trophies matter.”
Lindon had tried to leave his family behind as they had set down in the Desolate Wilds. He had been thoroughly outvoted.
Seisha made an appropriate sound of awe, and even Jaran grunted approvingly. Kelsa leaned forward. “Pardon if this is too much to ask, but can I see the trophy?”
Lindon thought Yerin was about to start sweating. “No, well, I was just talking out the side of my mouth. Didn’t get a trophy. But I would have, if they…had one.”
Without taking his attention from the controls, or the battle happening in the sky, Lindon gestured to the Broken Crown. “That’s the trophy. It’s a unique treasure that only the top eight of each tournament earn.”
Kelsa reached out her hands as though to touch it, but pulled back before she did. Seisha’s pen moved so that Lindon was sure she was sketching the Crown.
“Were you watching the tournament?” Jaran asked.
While Lindon was trying to think of the best way to dodge the question, Yerin popped in. “He fought himself. Top sixteen. There are recordings of his fights, or you can get a memory from the audience. Now I think of it, Dross could…”
She trailed off and looked at Lindon hopefully.
[I could give them Lindon’s memories, but they might be too…ah, what’s the word…heavy for them. The recordings released by the Ninecloud Court are appropriate for all advancement levels. I could try reproducing them myself, but it might be better to get one from the Court.]
Jaran grunted. “Sixteen. Out of how many?”
“It doesn’t matter,” Lindon said. “Yerin won, and the woman fighting up there is queen over most of the continent. She came here as a personal favor to Yerin.”
Yerin’s cheeks tinged red, but she glanced at Lindon’s parents, clearly eager to see how they would take the news.
Lindon was hoping to keep the topic of conversation away from himself. He couldn’t explain anything he’d done in simple enough terms to get his parents to understand it without looking like he was desperately bragging.
[Maybe I could do a better job than the Court,] Dross mused to no one in particular. [I could add my own special flair to it.]
“You brought her here?” Kelsa asked in awe. She could have watched the battle through the projection construct, but instead she was craning her neck to watch Malice out the windows with her own eyes.
Seisha dipped her head to Yerin. “This one thanks you for going to such lengths for our home.”
Jaran inclined his head too, though he was looking slightly in the wrong direction. “Yes, we are honored to have you go so far for your student.”
The console flared a little too brightly as Lindon’s madra became disordered.
Yerin’s mouth dropped open. “Yeah, student, not…I mean to say, uh, bleed me. Lindon, did you tell them—”
“No!” Lindon steadied his breathing. “I haven’t spoken with them much at all. There’s been no time. There isn’t much time now, in fact. We should be arriving soon.”
The colossal sounds of battle had grown distant, though the occasional flare of madra suggested that Malice was still fighting the Titan on the other side of the mountains.
Jaran frowned, but Kelsa and Seisha had caught the scent of blood.
Orthos chuckled and opened his mouth wide to take a bite out of a nearby chair, but he reluctantly closed his jaws again. “You don’t have a snack, do you?”
Lindon quickly opened his void key, pulled out a bundle of firewood, and tossed it to the turtle, who snapped it out of the air.
Little Blue peeped up in agreement, and Lindon flipped her a scale of pure madra.
“So she’s not your teacher,” Kelsa went on. Her back was to the window now, and she settled into the chair that Orthos had been about to eat.
Lindon’s mother smiled kindly. “Yerin, wasn’t it? Why don’t you come here so I can get a better look at you?”
Yerin breathed like she was facing down an executioner, but turned stiffly on her heel. Her six Goldsigns quivered behind her.
“Well, Lindon.” Jaran’s mood had markedly improved. “You must have grown into yourself since you left. Tall, strong, good shoulders. I bet you have my jawline, too. How’s his chin?”
“We could be in for a rough landing,” Lindon said anxiously. “We’ll have to be ready to move quickly. Now would be a good time to get prepared.”
Dross piped up. [Oh, right, you haven’t seen him! Here, I can show you. Consider this a sample of what I can do with the memories of the tournament.]
A moment later, Jaran’s eyebrows lifted. “Makes sense now. Advancement does the body good.”
“She’s a powerful sacred artist,” Kelsa said. “She doesn’t care about his jawline.”
Seisha shrugged. “I’m sure it didn’t hurt. So, Yerin, you must know Lindon well.”
“Yes.” Yerin’s Goldsigns were trying to tie themselves in knots.
“We haven’t gotten to know the new Lindon much ourselves. I’d be very grateful if you could fill us in on what we missed.”
It was his mother’s way of asking “What do you see in him?” without sounding rude, and Lindon was honestly relieved. Yerin wouldn’t answer that question.
Either she would hear an implied insult to Lindon, in which case she would strike back, or she would be embarrassed by the question and dodge it.
[Oooohhh you should have asked me for a simulation on that one,] Dross said.
What do you mean?
[That’s what Yerin would have done. Before.]
Lindon didn’t figure out what Dross meant before Yerin responded. “Might be you know this already, but he doesn’t give up. If you cut off two legs and an arm, he’d fight you with one hand and his teeth. If there’s a way to win, he’ll hunt it down or he’ll die on the trail.”
Lindon was too stunned to be flattered.
Yerin went on smoothly. “Haven’t spent long in your valley, but everybody I met tripped all over each other to see who could stab me in the back first. Guess you taught him right, because he’d twist himself inside out before he turned on me. If my core popped tomorrow and I was no better than a Copper, he wouldn’t leave me alone until he found a way to put me back together.”
The room was very quiet except for Orthos munching on firewood.
“He could have set himself up like a king in some corner of the world. Could have scooped you three up, set fire to Heaven’s Glory, and left. But he stuck around for people who treated him like their least-favorite whipping boy. Don’t know who he was before, but that’s who he is now.”
Her Goldsigns twisted again, and she coughed. “That’s what I contend, anyway. In my view. Might be I’ve polished him up too much.”
Lindon finally understood what Dross meant. Not long ago, Yerin would have been too embarrassed to say any of that.
But Ruby wouldn’t be.
Red eyes moved to his, and she gave him a shaky smile.
He couldn’t return it. He stared into her, thinking about how she saw him. He wasn’t as great as she described.
But he wanted to be.
&
nbsp; She saw through him, and her smile became more genuine.
“Heavens above,” Kelsa muttered. “I should have left too.”
When they landed and left the cloud fortress, there were even more people flooding out of Sacred Valley. With the Akura cloudships gone, the number of people seeking refuge seemed endless.
Many of them had given up on the cloudships and now ran out into the world themselves, crossing the mountains and foothills east of Mount Samara on foot or in whatever vehicles they had brought with them.
Lindon wished them luck. There was no way he could go after them himself; he was going to have enough trouble with the people waiting for rides.
Hopefully, none of this would end up being necessary. Malice would drive off the Wandering Titan, and there would be no further damage to Sacred Valley or the other mountains.
If the only problem Lindon had to deal with in the aftermath of a Dreadgod attack was locating everyone who ran and bringing them home to rebuild, he would thank the heavens.
As their fortress began to fill up, he received another piece of good news: Mercy flew in unharmed, bobbing on her staff and waving eagerly to him.
When she reached him, she began to speak before she finished drifting to a halt. “So…who called my mother?”
“Don’t know why I needed to,” Yerin said. “I’d take it personal if a Dreadgod stomped around my back yard.”
“At least she came! But don’t be too grateful. She wouldn’t have shown up here if there wasn’t something in it for the family.”
Mercy leaned against the base of their cloud fortress, which she sank into like a giant pillow. As she did, she surreptitiously pushed something into the ground with the heel of her foot.
Without Dross, Lindon might not have noticed. The object she’d buried wasn’t easy to sense; it felt entirely mundane, with only lingering traces of spiritual power, so it was probably some scripted tool.
But around it, the world felt…thin. Like the invisible indentation Lindon had pressed on to create a portal.
“What was—” he began, but Mercy cut him off.
“The Li clan wasn’t as bad as you said they’d be,” she reported. “They wouldn’t listen to me at first, but once I impressed them a little, they did whatever I said.”
Dross materialized onto Lindon’s shoulder, frowning at Mercy’s foot. [You’ll have to do better than that to hide something from me. If you’re hiding something. If you’re not, stop acting like you are.]
Lindon sent his thoughts silently to the spirit. I don’t think we’re the ones she’s hiding from. Stop drawing attention.
Mercy gave him a wide-eyed plea, and Lindon nodded. He understood. Yerin looked between them, glanced at the ground, and then stretched out her arms. “Sounds like we’ve got more people to load. No time to stand around flapping our lips.”
Dross was still staring obviously at the spot under Mercy’s foot. His one eye couldn’t be open any wider, and he was slowly drifting closer to the ground.
“Dross,” Lindon said aloud.
[Yes?]
“We need to get back to work.”
[Okay, yes, of course, let’s go.]
He didn’t hide his staring at all.
With his Remnant arm, Lindon seized the spirit and spun him to face another direction. Dross’ eye swiveled to stay where it was.
You’ve got to stop.
[To stifle my intellectual curiosity would be to deny who I am.]
I suspect we both know what it is.
[That’s why I’m so curious! Are we right? Are you wrong? We must confirm.]
Get back in my head.
In a huff, Dross vanished.
Mercy was acting as casually as she could while kicking dirt over the spot where she’d just been standing. “Looks like you’ve got a full load here. I can stay here, keep the peace.”
“I’d feel steadier if you rode with us,” Yerin said. “If we have to bolt, we want to stay together.”
That brought up something Lindon had wondered about for a while. “Speaking of which, have you seen Ziel?”
Mercy sighed and shook her head. “If anyone’s heard from him, I thought it would be you and Dross. I could stay back and wait for him! It might be…inconvenient…having me aboard. Under these circumstances.”
From the other side of Sacred Valley, a tongue of shadow madra leaped into the air like a burst of flame from a bonfire.
Lindon had wondered why Malice hadn’t taken Mercy back already. Maybe she hadn’t noticed her daughter’s presence in Sacred Valley…or maybe she had been waiting for Mercy to leave on her own.
“We’re more than happy to have you aboard,” Lindon said, hopping onto the cloud himself. “I would feel better if you were with us too.”
Mercy scratched her nose, glanced around as though looking for another opinion, then sighed and joined them.
They lifted off for the second time, Samara’s ring now bright. The golden sky had dulled to bronze, and the Titan’s influence had thinned so that stars even peeked through here and there.
As they drifted higher, past the curving light of Samara’s ring, they caught sight of the Monarch’s fight once again.
Malice stood almost as tall as the Dreadgod now, though the Titan still loomed over her. Its back was to Sacred Valley, and thus to Lindon, and its tail flattened trees as it lashed back and forth.
The Monarch looked like a tamer working with a dangerous creature. She leaned close, provoking the Dreadgod to swipe at her, and then stepped backwards to loose an arrow of Forged blue madra.
Weakened by the field around Sacred Valley, the arrow only splashed against the Wandering Titan’s rocky skin, but it still enraged the Dreadgod.
The creature roared, bringing its hands together. Loose stones rose from the earth for miles, gathering in the air between its palms. Golden light formed a ball around them, until the Titan held a sphere of deadly madra, aura, and actual physical stones in its hands.
Lindon had seen Abyssal Palace priests use a similar technique, though of course never on this scale. And the Titan was still within Sacred Valley’s restrictions. How could it use sacred arts of that level with its advancement suppressed?
The technique blasted out, but Malice simply let it crash onto her breastplate. The amethyst armor stood firm, rocks and chunks of yellow madra spraying out over the landscape for miles behind her.
The Dreadgod gave one more frustrated roar, throwing its head back to scream into the sky…
…then it marched out of Sacred Valley.
Its black, serpentine tail carved a canyon in the soil as it followed Malice, furious. Lindon could feel its power recovering with every breath, and so of course could Malice; she created space by leaping backwards, readying an arrow on her bow.
She needed to keep the Titan on the hook, so she couldn’t move too far away, lest it turn back again. At the same time, she didn’t want to fully engage and risk starting a full-scale fight here.
Malice still needed to tease the enemy away, but as far as Lindon was concerned, she’d won. She had pulled the Dreadgod away from Sacred Valley.
Granted, the Valley wasn’t in pristine shape anymore, but it was mostly intact. He could see Elder Whisper’s tall tower from here, and the purple slopes of Yoma Mountain. They could rebuild.
Yerin gripped Lindon’s forearm. “Lindon.”
He leaned toward her, giving her some of his attention, but didn’t take his eyes from the battle.
“Lindon.”
His bones were starting to hurt under her grip. He looked up to her…and her red eyes were shining. Literally. They lit up like scripts, and he could feel blood aura slowly strengthening all around her.
But not just around her.
Outside the windows, the burnished bronze of the sky began to swirl with another, brighter color. The moon, a dim secondary light to Samara’s ring, slowly melted from a cool and soothing blue to a bright pink-tinged red.
[Uh, Lindon…]
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No, Lindon prayed. Please no.
He held Suriel’s marble in a tight fist. Maybe his wishes could reach Suriel, and she could turn back time or rewrite the truth. Anything to undo what he felt now.
One of the refugees in the room began to scream. She wore a stained bandage around one arm, and the blood had begun to writhe under the wrappings.
From beneath the red moon, there came the searing cry of a great phoenix.
16
Northstrider drove his boot down on a skull bigger than he was. With the slightest flex of blood and force aura, the power carried throughout the creature’s body.
Every bone in the dreadbeast shattered at once. Its heart burst.
The twisted, corrupted lizard—the size of a large house—had only been a Lord-level beast. But you never knew what abominations would crawl out of a Dreadgod’s wake. It was always best to wipe pests out when you had the chance.
The important thing was that he stay where he was.
He stood in the center of a wide swath of devastation that the Wandering Titan had cut across the landscape as it marched eastward from Sky’s Edge. It had ruined many of the squat towers that Abyssal Palace had left for it, but the cult wouldn’t mind. The towers were meant to be destroyed.
The towers would collect the Dreadgod’s power and store it in scripts in the foundation, waiting to be harvested by Abyssal Palace members later. It was one of the many ways in which the cultists benefited from the destruction the Dreadgod brought.
At least, they would benefit from it. If Northstrider weren’t standing in their way.
Ordinarily, he wouldn’t be able to block an entire Dreadgod cult like this. Abyssal Palace had enough experts, and enough high-grade weapons made from the Titan’s madra, that they could be a threat even to him.
But the floating pyramid that was their headquarters, rolling on a cloud of hovering boulders, now listed to one side. A jagged hole had been torn into the Palace itself, and their Herald was recovering within.
They might have been able to push Northstrider aside…except they had just spent their resources on another Monarch. Akura Fury had cost the cults more than they ever expected to spend.