Cradle: Foundation (Cradle Collected Book 1)

by Will Wight

  Cassias ran webs of Arelius power over the whole place, astonished. It seemed that this was connected to the Blackflame Trials below, but while the heads of the family had always known about the Trials, Cassias had never even heard rumors of something like this temple.

  How could there be secrets on Arelius grounds?

  Eithan landed the dark blue cloud at the top of the stairs, hopping out and strolling inside without a word. After taking another few seconds to scan the premises, Cassias followed.

  The room inside the temple was small and almost empty. Light streamed in from the far wall, which was made of glass—it angled slightly downward, which meant it wouldn’t gleam and reveal its presence to Lindon and Yerin. A massive script-circle was etched into the glass, taking up most of the window, and a broad table of gold and ivory spread out beneath it. Dozens of smaller scripts covered the table, which told Cassias it must be a control array of some kind. A cheap wicker chair—obviously a recent addition—gave the person manning the table a place to sit.

  “What is this, Eithan?” Cassias asked wearily.

  Eithan turned to face him; Cassias knew it was no accident that he was standing in the very center of the room. “Familiarize yourself with this room, because it will be your sole responsibility for the next…well, quite a while.”

  Cassias ran strands of detection over the controls, as well as his spiritual perception. “This course operates independently. It doesn’t need controls.”

  “While that is indeed what we have always told the imperial clan when they used this course to train their students, it is not strictly true.” He looked so pleased with himself that Cassias already missed the uncertain, vulnerable Eithan from the mountain below.

  “This—” Eithan spread his hands to indicate the whole room. “—is the control center for the Blackflame Trials. The courses will run themselves, but they will not carry out detailed or advanced maneuvers. With supervision and direction, the Blackflame elders could truly test their juniors far below.”

  “I am to have authority over their training?” Cassias asked. If it were up to him, neither of the children would be here: the course was too advanced for Yerin alone, and Lindon’s presence would only hinder her, if anything.

  “If you would like the authority to decide between making the course slightly more difficult than usual or truly sadistic, then yes. That is entirely within your power.”

  Cassias continued scanning the control circles. “And if I wanted to deactivate portions of the Trials?”

  “That, happily, does not fall inside your purview. You can choose when and how to lend your power to certain constructs, or you can choose to do nothing, at which point the Trials will operate at their standard level of difficulty.

  Eithan gestured, releasing some madra, and the script-circle in the glass flared. Suddenly, the view at the window showed Lindon reaching for the activation crystal with Yerin standing beside him. As though they were only feet outside.

  Fascinated, Cassias ran a strand of his bloodline power through the glass. Scripts only manipulated madra; they wouldn’t be able to change the magnification of glass. Unless…

  He found it only a breath after he started looking for it. A light-aspect binding intended to allow vision of faraway objects. The script merely activated it and applied its effects to the window.

  That was still an incredible feat of Soulsmithing and scripting, though. How had Eithan managed to restore it? Surely a setup like this one, centuries old, would have decayed by now.

  Eithan looked fondly through the glass. “It will rest upon you to test the children. Push them. Hold them in the fire and hammer them, that they might be forged.”

  Cassias straightened himself, waiting for the Underlord to turn around and meet his eyes. “I will not be part of breaking members of our own family. If you adopted them only to abuse them, I will report to the branch heads and have them removed from Serpent’s Grave.”

  Eithan didn’t respond, so Cassias continued.

  “Besides, the Arelius cannot spare my absence. Not in times like these. The Jai clan will have free reign of our lands.”

  Eithan rested a comforting hand on Cassias’ shoulder. “I go to deal with the Jai clan myself.”

  That really was comforting, though Cassias didn’t say so out loud.

  “In the meantime, I will make you a deal. If you manage to push Lindon and Yerin so hard that either of them gives up, I will release them from the Trials. And Lindon from his obligation to Jai Long. In that case, you will also be allowed back to your normal duties in the shortest time possible.”

  Eithan beamed at him. “So you see, the most prudent and merciful course of action is really to come at them with everything you have.”

  A fist clenched Cassias’ gut, but he couldn’t argue. There was a fine line between preparing the young for a harsh world and abusing them, but it shouldn’t be too hard to get them to surrender quickly. Lindon, at least. Once they did, Eithan would honor his word.

  The Underlord patted the ivory table. “Now, it seems we’re in luck. They are trying the course for the first time. Let me show you how this works.”

  Chapter 13

  Lindon hefted the crystal ball in his palm, Blackflame madra swirling around his body, and the crystal flared with a dark, bloody light. He faced the thick forest of stone pillars as scripts ignited all through the ground.

  Dark gray shapes started condensing in the shadows, like gravel pulled together by an unseen force to slowly build a larger figure. They gained definition as they formed, until they looked like statues of ancient soldiers: bulky, clad in layered armor, and carrying thick shields and swords or spears.

  Three of them were almost finished forming, but there were other half-assembled shapes in the darkness behind them.

  Yerin raised her sword.

  Lindon bolted for the pillars.

  Whether these were constructs or impossibly solid Remnants, his task remained the same. He had to keep the Burning Cloak up in order to keep the crystal active, and his Blackflame core was already on the verge of emptying itself again.

  But these soldiers were taking their time to form, so what would happen if he just…skipped them?

  He leaped over the first rank of soldiers, pain lancing through his ankles and calves, and the power of his jump almost carried him face-first into a pillar. He stumbled to an awkward landing but kept running, ducking around columns whenever he would run into a half-formed soldier.

  It was working. The soldiers at the front formed faster than the ones behind, so he could outrun the Trial.

  Even with the enhancement of the Burning Cloak, it took him five or six slow breaths to reach the end of the columns. When he did get past them, they vanished abruptly, leaving him standing in the sunlight again.

  Another arch stood before him. It was a twin to the original entrance, with two exceptions.

  First, the air between wasn’t clear. It was opaque and smoky, so he couldn’t see what waited beyond. Second, the paint on the support said, ‘Trial Two’ instead of ‘Trial One.’

  A sense of warning shook his soul as he considered that gray area in the center of the arch, which he took as an alarm from his new Jade senses. He slowed, examining the smoke more closely. It was dense aura that sent a shiver through his rib cage.

  He didn’t know what aspect of aura that was, but he could be sure of one thing: he wasn’t touching it.

  Lindon scooped up a handful of gritty dirt and tossed it at the barrier between the arch. The dirt sizzled and disappeared.

  He turned back to hear Yerin’s shout, the sounds of metal clashing against stone, and a roar like rocky plates grating against one another.

  Forged gray madra started to gather itself in front of the arch. If the cores of the others had been pebbles, this one was a boulder, and in seconds it had formed into a towering stone giant with a horned helmet and a pair of tridents, one in each hand.

  It planted its feet firmly on the gro
und, and behind it, the aura barrier in the arch flickered and disappeared.

  Lindon had a fingernail-thin grip on his remaining madra, and the crystal in his hand was starting to dim. Nonetheless, when the giant struck at him with its trident, he had to do something.

  Roots of Blackflame madra slid through his channels, then they all exploded, igniting a shot of blazing hot power. The Burning Cloak flared higher, the air around his body crackling black and red, and he slapped the trident away with the back of his fist.

  The repelled trident dug a ten-foot groove in the ground, sending black dirt spraying everywhere, but he barely felt the impact—the strain on his elbow and wrist from moving his arm so quickly was far more painful than the little slap of the weapon.

  Lindon was in love. This was it—a power so great it required his Iron body to withstand. His elbow blazed with pain as though he’d torn it, but it was already healing.

  But he couldn’t exult in his power—he had a test to pass. The barrier had opened, which meant he could finish the Trial.

  Then he kicked the ground to move forward, and his Blackflame core guttered out.

  The crystal ball in his hand went dark. The aura barrier flared to life again in the arch. His legs collapsed, but he switched to drawing madra from his pure core before he buckled to the ground.

  And the giant soldier dissolved. Gray madra faded to essence and blew away, half-visible sparks on the wind.

  A brassy gong sounded from somewhere, its sound echoing through the canyon, and Lindon had to assume it meant defeat.

  Lindon spent a moment regretting that he hadn’t passed on the first try, but the promise of Blackflame was like a sun that burned all disappointment away. He turned back to the columns, whistling and tossing the crystal ball in one hand.

  He’d already started cataloguing everything he needed to improve the Burning Cloak. It was good for explosive bursts of movement—punching, jumping, kicking—anything where a sudden burst of force would help. But for steady strength, for lifting or carrying or running long distances, he would need a different technique.

  To optimize the Burning Cloak, he wanted pills to refine his Blackflame madra base so that he could activate the technique more easily, practice keeping it active longer, and training to answer specific questions: how fast could he move? How much strain could his body withstand? Could he channel the technique through only a single part of his body at a time?

  This could be exactly the tool he’d needed to keep up with Yerin. He just needed to master it.

  As soon as he had the thought, he realized that he could still hear a battle: shouts, stone on metal, and heavy crashes.

  Lindon picked up the pace, jogging through the columns. The back ranks of stone soldiers had started to dissolve, and ignored him, but the ones closer to Yerin weren’t banished yet. She was still fighting.

  Then he saw her.

  He hadn’t even reached Copper when he’d watched her fight the Remnant of her master back in Sacred Valley. He had lacked the senses to truly appreciate the fight.

  Now, he lost track of his surroundings as he watched in awe.

  She fought an army. Two soldiers whipped their swords at her with blurring speed, one fell toward her at the end of a leaping strike, and two pushed at her with shields in one hand and spears in the other. Javelins rained down at her from soldiers in the distance. Stone hands reached up from the ground beneath her, snatching at her ankles.

  All at the same time.

  Yerin turned them all.

  Invisible blades shredded the hands at her feet, churning the earth. Her Goldsign met one of the swords, her free hand the other, and her sword skewered the falling soldier and slammed him down like a hammer on the head of his comrade. He hadn’t seen her use her Striker technique at all, but silver slashes of sword-light struck the javelins from the air, and a pair of kicks caught two enemies on their shields and launched them through the air to shatter on pillars.

  How long would it be before he could fight like that?

  An attack he hadn’t seen slammed into his skull in a burst of pain and white light. His Bloodforged Iron body drained power, and he rolled to his feet in an instant, pulling the halfsilver dagger from his pocket.

  He could feel the presence of the gray soldier even as it dipped behind a nearby column. He would feel its attack coming, but whether his reflexes could keep up was another matter.

  And what he felt of the construct was even more interesting. In a way he couldn’t entirely articulate, the soldier felt…mindless. He sensed no life within it. It was simply a mass of madra, acting according to direction.

  But not even the most complex construct ever designed could fight as a living creature without someone controlling it. At least, not as he understood constructs.

  The soldier ducked out, avoided his slash with the halfsilver dagger, and struck him a heavy blow on the shoulder with the butt of its sword. His madra drained again to his Iron body, until even his pure core darkened.

  The spiritual exhaustion was like a gaping hole inside him, leaving him limp and twitching on the floor. He wanted to squeeze his eyes shut, but instead he kept them wide, watching for the next blow that would land on his helpless body.

  Instead, the soldier withdrew. It joined the others in attacking Yerin.

  He couldn’t see the fight except for an occasional flash of black or silver, but after a few minutes Yerin let out a pained shout and hit the ground with an audible thud.

  The soldiers retreated, ignoring them both, and dissolved in the shadows of the stone forest. The script beneath them powered down.

  Lindon spoke into the dirt. He didn’t have the strength to move, and he knew Yerin would hear him. “At least they didn’t kill us.”

  Yerin groaned.

  ***

  “In that case,” Eithan said, “I didn’t have to do much. I could have directed more of the soldiers to stop Lindon, but there was no need.”

  “Maybe you should have sent more against Yerin,” Cassias said, wishing he had a dream tablet handy to record the memory while it was fresh. As a sword artist himself, he was left in awe at the level of skill and control she’d already displayed at the Lowgold stage. He bitterly regretted that he couldn’t meet her master.

  “She could reach Highgold any day now, if she could let go of that death-grip she’s got on her Remnant,” Eithan said with a sigh. “She might out-rank you fairly soon.”

  Cassias watched the girl in the tattered robe as she sprawled out on the dirt, each breath rough and heavy. “Considering what it’s costing us to run these Trials, I’d be disappointed if she didn’t at least take my place in the rankings.”

  Eithan gently pushed him into the chair in front of the control array. “The course only runs while the sun is up. Tonight, you can go back to your family. If you’d like to retire early, then by all means…push them until they break.”

  Cassias gave him a wry look, but his spiritual perception was already moving over the console. If he was going to run these Trials, he needed to know the controls like his own sword.

  ***

  The crab meat tasted like ash and scorched oil. Yerin almost spat it out, but she’d choked down worse food out of necessity. She separated herself from the taste to chew and swallow out of pure discipline.

  Lindon did spit it out, making a retching noise. “That…that cannot be food,” he said.

  “It’s the fire that’s rotten,” Yerin said, ripping off another piece of vile meat with her teeth.

  It had taken Lindon until well into the night to start the tiny campfire that now smoldered outside their caves. He’d used Blackflame madra to ignite the tinder, and now that power lingered; the aura wasn’t the healthy red-and-orange of a natural blaze, but was tinted with bloody scarlet and corrosive black. The flames gave off too little light, too much smoke, and a taste like burnt death.

  But Yerin had experienced the consequences of eating raw meat in the wild. Even a corrupted flame like this o
ne was better than nothing—there was no telling what sort of diseases or parasites these wild creatures carried.

  Lindon popped another one of those red-veined black berries into his mouth, wincing as he chewed. Yerin had found them even less tolerable than the meat. They burned her tongue, leaving it unable to taste anything…although that might be an advantage, considering the crab.

  She was sure the berries must be low-grade spirit-fruits that would burn away impurities in madra, but she didn’t have the energy to put up with a burned tongue on top of everything else.

  Lindon set aside his cracked crab claw, staring into the flames. “I’m sure we weren’t meant to succeed on our first try,” he said.

  Yerin’s grip tightened around her own segment of crab. The shell cracked. “You’d contend so, huh? You think a real enemy would be soft enough to give you a second shot?”

  His eyes widened at her tone, but she wasn’t feeling charitable enough to apologize. It wasn’t fair to him, likely—he may not have grown up on the battlefield, but he’d faced plenty of real enemies just in the few months they’d known each other.

  “We’d have some information about a real enemy,” he said reasonably. “That’s all we were doing—gathering information. We have to know how that construct works if we want to defeat it.”

  She shoved another strip of revolting crab meat into her mouth, tossing the empty shell in the fire. “Not a construct,” she said, around the mouthful of food.

  He leaned forward, interested. “A Remnant, then? Compelled by the script?”

  “You’re Jade now. Did that feel like a Remnant to you?”

  “That that exhausts the possibilities I’m aware of, though my experience pales next to yours. If it’s not a Remnant, and it’s not a construct…”

  Yerin gulped water from a hollowed-out crab shell she’d filled at the waterfall earlier, trying to rinse the taste out of her mouth. She spat to one side of the fire. “It’s a Forger technique.”