by Will Wight
Eithan's eyes were wide and his mouth slightly open. After a moment, his smile came back, but this time it was soft. “Honored grandmother, I will take your words to heart. I'm sorry for worrying you.” Then he pressed his fists together into a salute and bowed low.
Gesha cleared her throat and reddened slightly. “Well. So long as you know.”
Before Lindon could gather his thoughts, she'd already scooped up her chest and scurried out the door.
Eithan stared after her, chin in his hands. “You know,” he said, “I don't believe I've paid enough attention to her.”
“I apologize for her,” Lindon said, dipping his head slightly. “I have no complaints about my work over the past year. I know it was done for my benefit.”
“Not entirely for your benefit,” Eithan said. “I was initially hoping that Jai Long would serve as a motivation for you, of course, but the situation evolved as soon as Jai Daishou inserted himself. I was hoping to reap some benefits for the Arelius family, and though I didn't get everything I wanted, I still made some measurable progress. I'll chalk this whole thing up to a win, though we may have indirectly led to the destruction of the entire Empire.”
Lindon was meant to ask about the destruction part of that sentence, he knew. It was bait, set by Eithan, trying to capture Lindon's interest and attention. Normally, it would have worked.
This time, Lindon shrugged his right shoulder, drawing attention to his missing arm. “You could have finished off Jai Daishou immediately.”
Eithan's smile faded. “I could have, yes.”
“You drew it out. You were trying to get him to bring out that crystal ball.”
“The Archstone. It's a—”
Lindon cut him off. “He took my arm.”
Eithan clasped his hands behind his back and studied his disciple. Instead of deflecting or pointing out that technically Jai Long was the one who had removed the arm, which would be typical Eithan tactics, the Underlord simply nodded. “He did. If he hadn't given the order, Jai Long would have left you alone. If I hadn't put him under such pressure, he wouldn't have given the order.”
The admission both made Lindon feel better and much, much worse. It tore open the bandage he'd wrapped around his anger, and he could feel tears welling up in the corners of his eyes.
“Why?” he said. “Why did you have to push him? I just...want to know it was worth it.”
Eithan looked to the ceiling for a moment, considering, then looked back down to Lindon. “What do you know about the Dreadgods?”
“Nothing,” Lindon said. “I don't know that I've ever heard the word. Are they like dreadbeasts?”
“Yes. Yes, they are.” Eithan chewed on his words for a second, as though trying to gather his thoughts. Or trying to decide how much to tell Lindon. “They are...disasters. Four monsters, big enough to blot out the sky, hungry for destruction, and so powerful that the most advanced sacred artists in the world have to join forces to drive them off. Drive them off, you understand. None of the Dreadgods have ever been killed.”
“They're sacred beasts?”
“Corrupted ones. Like the dreadbeasts of the Desolate Wilds, they were warped and twisted by their own powers.”
“Where do they come from?” Lindon asked, caught up in the legend. He briefly wondered if this was another tactic to distract him...but if it was, it was working.
“They're scattered all over the world. They burrow into a secure location and wait for decades...but when they wake up, they're hungry. Fortunately for humanity, no two have woken at the same time in centuries.
“But the last time they did, they destroyed the original Blackflame Empire.”
From Orthos and Eithan, Lindon had heard of the fall of the Blackflame family. But from what he could piece together, even that family had taken over the remains of another, more powerful Empire.
And even that ancient nation had fallen to these Dreadgods.
“The original Empire was ruled by dragons, not men,” Eithan said, with a tone that suggested dragons building an empire was nothing unusual. “As they advanced as a culture, they began to study civilizations even older than theirs. And they stumbled on a...vast, underground complex. It was abandoned even then, and it was so massive and so dangerous that not even the greatest of the dragons could map it fully.”
That reminded Lindon of something, but before he could voice it, Eithan nodded to him. “You've seen one of the shallowest corners of this massive labyrinth in the Desolate Wilds. What they called the Transcendent Ruins was, in reality, just a corner of this huge maze that stretches all over the Empire. There are entrances all over, but to have seen one is your good fortune.”
“Two,” Lindon said. “There was one in my homeland.”
He remembered the ancestor's tomb in the Heaven's Glory sect, and a stone door marked with four beasts.
Now, that carving carried an eerie significance.
“Is that so?” Eithan asked, surprised. “Well, you're lucky indeed. And even luckier that you didn't explore too far inside. The dragons of the first Blackflame Empire found that out firsthand when they plundered weapons from the depths of the labyrinth. At first, they only took Highgold or Truegold devices, wanting to study them, but they became greedy for more when they learned that the weapons had such miraculous effects.”
“The Ancestor's Spear,” Lindon said.
“One of the weakest objects in the maze. The spear wasn’t even unique, you know, though it is enough to dazzle the eyes of anyone below Truegold.” Eithan stared longingly into the distance. “The labyrinth is a true treasure trove, but there's a reason we've left it undisturbed for so long, only nibbling at the corners every once in a while in places like the Desolate Wilds. Because when the dragons delved deeper, withdrawing Lord treasures like the Archstone...”
He paused, picking up from a different point. “You should understand that the dragons left the doors open for years as they explored the labyrinth, making war on one another and settling petty grudges with their new weaponry. They didn't realize that something in that place drew the Dreadgods like wolves to fresh meat.
“Records of that disaster are very spotty, as you might expect. But the warnings they left are clear. Most of this continent was reduced to a blasted wasteland, from which it has not entirely recovered even to this day. Billions of people and sacred beasts died, and the former Blackflame Empire was nothing more than a Remnant haunt for generations.”
Eithan slowly shook his head. “We can't know how many dragons survived, but it wasn't more than a handful. The survivors returned all their weapons to the labyrinth, leaving dire warnings to future generations. To delve past the shallows of this maze is to invite death. They destroyed as many of the entrances as they could, and sealed up the rest.”
“And Jai Daishou opened one?” Lindon asked.
“Desperate men cannot see beyond their own desperation,” Eithan said, with the air of a man quoting. “There was an entrance to the labyrinth in his territory. He would have kept the door open for less than a day. A minor risk, he must have thought, though a risk to the entire Empire. When he brought out the Archstone, Naru Gwei and I knew what he had done. We knew that he had risked bringing the Dreadgods down on us once again.”
A wisp of Lindon's anger rose up again. “You pushed him to it.”
Eithan held up a finger. “I closed off his options to push him to do something foolish. Otherwise, I'd have been leaving my reputation entirely on the outcome of a single fight. I don't prefer to gamble without an overwhelming advantage.”
“But you knew exactly what he had. You knew it was a hidden weapon, you weren't guessing.”
“Yes, well, I was watching when he opened the door. I was shocked he would go so far as to risk the wrath of the Dreadgods, but there it is. That was my plan: to get him to incriminate himself in front of the Skysworn. Even if he had survived, with Jai Long victorious, his reputation—and that of the Jai clan—would never recover. They are the low
est-ranked of the great clans, and the Arelius are ranked number one among the major families. They will lose their spot in the Empire, and we will take it.”
He grimaced, looking uncertain for just a moment. “I am...sorry that you lost what you did. Only know that you were a part of something greater. The Arelius family will rise because of you, and you can only benefit from that.”
Lindon nodded, but his gut was still a little twisted. He shouldn't be complaining about a lost arm. Back in Sacred Valley, if Eithan had offered to raise him to Gold in exchange for a lost arm, he would have handed the man a saw himself.
But this didn't feel like he'd sacrificed something for a greater goal. It felt like he had been a pawn in the plans of the powerful.
“The Dreadgods,” Lindon said at last, trying to change the subject. “Are they coming for us?”
“Most likely not,” Eithan said. “But just in case, the Emperor is gathering his Underlords to him.”
“Will you fight them?”
Eithan let out a bark of a laugh. “As an Underlord? No, they could evaporate my blood from a hundred miles away. We'll be working to keep the populace under control in a state of emergency, should we see signs of a Dreadgod's approach. And we'll be messengers to the people that might actually help.”
Before Lindon could ask who, Eithan explained.
“The Monarchs. They're the most powerful individuals in our world, though the best they could hope for would be a stalemate. None could win a fight against a Dreadgod alone. Not Seshethkunaaz, not Akura Malice, not the Eight-Man Empire or the entire Ninecloud Court.”
Lindon's breath caught. He remembered two of those names, but he had never expected to hear them from Eithan.
How much did Eithan know about them? Monarchs, he'd said. Lindon had never heard the term applied to sacred arts. It sounded like there was a whole group of people at that stage, not just the three examples Suriel had shown him.
He took the thought to its natural conclusion, and a fist seemed to squeeze his lungs. Suriel had given him the names of three people with the power to save Sacred Valley: Sha Miara the Queen of the Ninecloud Court, Northstrider the dragon-eater, and the Eight-Man Empire.
If those were the most powerful people in the world, that meant whatever was approaching Sacred Valley was even more horrifying than he had imagined.
It might not be one of these Dreadgods, but it would be something equally destructive. He couldn't even imagine it.
“I've heard of them before,” Lindon said.
“I would imagine so. They're very famous.”
“No, in a vision. Suriel showed me. She said...they were the ones that could save my homeland.”
Eithan nodded slowly. Over the months, he had scraped most of the details of Suriel's visit from Lindon. All without giving up the details of his own vision. But Lindon had never been specific enough to name the individuals Suriel had shown him.
But that brought up another point, and Lindon could sense an opportunity. He seized it.
“Speaking of visions...” he began, and Eithan's back straightened.
“Later,” Eithan promised.
“I lost an arm for your plans,” Lindon said, the heat of Blackflame leaking into his voice. “I have earned your trust.”
It was perhaps the most firmly Lindon had ever spoken to Eithan, and a trembling part of Lindon's mind—the part that still remembered being Unsouled—begged him to apologize. But Lindon kept staring into Eithan's blue eyes.
“I owe you a full explanation,” Eithan said. “And I will give you one. The more you grow, the more I can share with you. For now, I beg you to trust me.”
That was an irritating non-answer, but Eithan spoke more earnestly and openly than he almost ever did.
Reluctantly, Lindon nodded.
“That's good,” Eithan said, and his grin returned. “Cassias will be here in Sky's Mercy to retrieve you any day now. Rest. Fisher Gesha was right; you've trained like a madman for a year, but that's no way to live forever. There will be plenty of time to advance when I return.”
“When will that be?” Lindon asked. The idea of staying in bed for months horrified him. What if he fell behind his advancement?
“That depends,” Eithan said, “on whether or not there's a Dreadgod coming to kill us all.”
Chapter 8
Sky's Mercy was a cloudship maintained by the Arelius family: a large blue cloud with a house in the center, flying through the air. Yerin had seen stranger things before—stranger cloudships, too—but there was something about a floating house that especially knocked her off-kilter.
There used to be a second building on the cloud, and Yerin missed the barn. She had more room. Instead, she and Cassias were inside a single bedroom-sized cultivation room, surrounded by wooden walls that had been reinforced by scripts so they didn't fall apart with every flying Striker technique.
He was showing her what it took to be the second-ranked Highgold in the Empire.
She kicked off from the wall, slashing the air in a Rippling Sword technique: a wave of silver madra that sliced through the air like an extension of her sword.
Cassias stood before her, back straight, one hand on his thin saber. He looked like Eithan's more serious younger brother: his golden hair was curly and short, his blue eyes calm, and he wore no smile.
He sidestepped her technique, raising his weapon to return a strike. But she had counted on that. She'd gathered enough aura around her sword, and she struck that aura with her madra as hard as she could.
Her sword rang like a bell.
A ripple ran through the sword aura in the room, exciting it, causing invisible cuts to appear on her robes...and then the wave of aura reached Cassias.
When it hit his sword, the weapon should have burst into a wave of slicing sword-energy that cut him to pieces, but instead he gathered aura himself as he pulled his saber back. The aura she'd affected with the Endless Sword was drawn in like straw into a cyclone, and it swirled around his sword in a silver cloud visible to her Copper sight.
Then he stabbed forward, carrying all that aura with it.
The thrust stabbed across the room in an instant, piercing the air and passing an inch over Yerin's shoulder. A few strands of her hair fell away, and she shivered as she felt the air disturbed by her ear. His technique landed on the wall, where a script shone and dispersed the aura, leaving only a slight scratch on the paneling.
Cassias sheathed his saber and frowned. “If you haven't recovered from last time, I'd be happy to wait.”
Yerin's ankle was still sore, but nothing that would slow her down in a real fight. “You never woke up with a dull edge? Happens to everyone, sometimes.” Cassias had defeated her in no more than three moves each time today, and normally she could hold him off for six or seven. She was a Highgold now, technically his equal, but he had experience and skill that she couldn't match. Yet.
Cassias nodded, expression softening as though he understood. “Don't worry. Eithan has taken too much interest in Lindon to let him die so easily. And in you too.”
Yerin snorted in disbelief, but she turned her head so as not to meet his eyes. What did he know? Sacred artists risked their lives every day. That wasn't enough to worry her.
Even though people died all the time where they weren't meant to. Her master had died in Sacred Valley, maybe the safest place in the world. It wasn't the trap you saw that killed you.
Without her around, Lindon wouldn't know what to watch for. Would Eithan look out for him?
Cassias pulled an intricately carved wooden device out of his outer robe and checked it, tucking it back inside after a glance. “It's almost time. Before we go, Yerin, would you mind if I asked you a personal question?”
“How personal?”
“No one pushes as hard as you do without a goal. Pardon me if I’m overstepping my bounds, but I’d like to know what destination you have in mind.”
She'd started wondering that herself recently.
> “To become a Sage,” she said.
His eyebrows lifted. “I wouldn't have thought you were so ambitious.”
“Most Sages don't take disciples. Not real ones, anyway. They don't want to pass on their Path. My master trusted me, and now he's gone.” She ran her hand over the hilt of her master's sword. “I'm not letting his Path go to waste.”
Cassias moved to the door, gesturing for her to follow. “That's a noble goal, and an impressive one. I met a Sage as a child, back in my family's homeland. It was a humbling experience. But it took him centuries to reach that height. Most people can't handle the pressure of training at that level, day after day, year after year, with no guarantee that they'll ever make it.”
They passed through the door on the second floor of the house, moving to the stairs. Through the tall arched windows, she caught a glimpse of the deep blue Thousand-Mile Cloud that was their foundation, as well as the islands of white that surrounded them.
“Never understood that myself,” Yerin said, vaulting over the railing and landing on the first floor instead of taking the stairs. Cassias took them carefully, one at a time. “Don't know what I'd do if I wasn't practicing the sword. You think I'd rather put down roots, or what?”
“That's not what I meant to imply,” Cassias said, unbuckling his belt and tossing it and his sheathed saber onto a nearby rack designed for the purpose. “Only that it often helps in a fight if you have something to fight for.”
Preserving her own life had always been enough to push Yerin along in fights. Should be enough for anybody.
But that wasn’t always the truth, was it? She wanted more than that.
The Sword Sage had always said the pursuit of perfection in the sacred arts was a lonely pursuit, and anything else was a distraction. She’d come to think that advancing alone wasn't just boring, it was painful.
Which had made it such a stab to the gut when Eithan told her she couldn't come to watch Lindon fight. Especially when he'd taken Fisher Gesha, of all people.