CRADLE: FOUNDATION (Cradle Collected–Book One)

Copyright © 2017 Hidden Gnome Publishing

All rights reserved.

Book and cover designs by Patrick Foster Design

Foundation cover painting by Ashley MacKenzie

Blackflame cover illustration by Kevin Mazutinec

* * *

This book collects volumes 1–3 of the CRADLE series, previously published as individual editions.

UNSOULED

Copyright © 2016 by Hidden Gnome Publishing

All rights reserved.

SOULSMITH

Copyright © 2017 by Hidden Gnome Publishing

BLACKFLAME

Copyright © 2017 by Hidden Gnome Publishing

No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

This is a collection of Cradle books one through three. If you already own those books separately, then what are you doing reading this?

Contents

Unsouled

Soulsmith

Blackflame

About the Author

Also by Will Wight

Unsouled

Cradle Volume One

Contents

Dedication

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Epilogue

To Devin, who reads as many web novels as I do.

1

Information requested: the Spiritual Origin test of Sacred Valley.

Beginning report…

Twice a year, the clans of Sacred Valley test the spirits of their children. Boys and girls of six, seven, even eight summers line up before their clan’s elders. They wear clothes too formal for them: layered robes of muted color for the boys, intricate shadesilk wraps for the girls. Parents line the walls nearby, anxious to hear the nature of their children laid bare.

One by one, the children step before their clan’s First Elder. He holds a shallow bowl, twice as wide as a dinner plate, that contains nothing more than still water. But it is not water, the parents know. It is madra, raw power of spirit, purified and distilled. The material from which souls are made.

The first girl in line dips her hand into the bowl, shocked at the cold. A trickle of something runs out of her core, something she’s never felt before, and the liquid changes.

For her, the madra sticks to her hand, surrounding her fingers like a tight glove. The First Elder smiles, gives her a wooden badge marked with a shield, and declares the nature of her spirit. She has the soul of an Enforcer, a guardian, and will use her great strength to protect the clan. The madra returns to the bowl as the girl returns to her parents. She carries the badge with her.

The water flees from the next boy’s hand, as though his presence pushes it away. He looks to the First Elder, horrified that he has somehow failed this test, but there can be no failure here. He is given a wooden badge marked with an arrow.

Each child in line sees one of four responses: the water clings, or it retreats, or it rises, or it freezes. They receive badges accordingly. Shields for Enforcers, who protect the clan from its enemies with strength of arms. Arrows for Strikers, who attack their rivals from a distance. Scepters for Rulers, who bend the powers of heaven and earth. And hammers for Forgers, whose techniques create weapons and wealth for the clan. All things in Sacred Valley can be divided in four.

And Lindon, of the Wei clan and the family Shi, knows which of the four he wants.

Hammer, he begs the heavens as he steps up for his turn at the bowl. More than anything, he wants to follow his mother as a Soulsmith, creating wondrous and magical items from madra. Molding the stuff of spirits and Remnants. Please, give me a hammer.

He’s done his research, and he knows he needs the water to freeze. It’s traditionally considered bad luck to tell children what to expect on the day of their test, but his mother considers ignorance a greater threat than misfortune.

“Wei Shi Lindon,” the First Elder intones, as Lindon moves forward. The elder stands thin and straight, like a polished walking stick, with a wispy beard that stretches down to the floor. “Stretch forth your hand, and let your spirit be known.”

Lindon’s mother tenses behind him, but he doesn’t look at her. He focuses on the bowl of madra.

Chanting freeze, freeze, freeze in his head, Lindon places his fingers into the bowl. It’s colder than he expected, which excites him at first, because the water must already be freezing.

But the liquid doesn’t grow cold, it doesn’t solidify. It sits there, placid and undisturbed.

The elder’s white eyebrows draw together into one solid line. He leans over the bowl, his own badge—of polished green jade, bearing the same hammer that Lindon hopes to earn—dangling over the bowl. Impatiently, he seizes Lindon’s wrist and lifts it free. Natural water would have clung to Lindon’s skin, but this madra only imitates water. Nothing sticks. His hand emerges clean and dry.

As though dunking laundry in a tub, the elder moves Lindon’s hand in and out. A sick feeling bubbles up in Lindon’s stomach as he realizes something has gone wrong.

Over to the side, his mother holds a whispered conversation with another elder. The adults are whispering now, and that never means anything good.

“There is no affinity to his spirit,” the First Elder says at last. “He is empty. Unsouled.”

Lindon glances to his mother, who has gone utterly pale. He’s never heard this word before, Unsouled, but it doesn’t sound like anything good. At seven, he’s old enough to piece the core of the truth together. He won’t get a badge.

But they’re right there.

“Which badge do I get, honored elder?” he asks politely, as though he doesn’t understand.

The First Elder glares at the boy. “You don’t deserve these badges, Shi Lindon.” No clan name. He must be angry, but Lindon knows that if you pretend to ignore an adult’s anger, it often goes away.

“If you don’t have one for me, I could just…” Lindon reaches out for the hammer-marked badge of a Forger, but the First Elder smacks his hand down.

“These are not for you!”

“Can’t I pick one?” It makes perfect sense to Lindon. The bowl tells them which badge to pick, and the bowl hadn’t said anything. So Lindon might as well choose.

If he had a badge, maybe his mother wouldn’t look so scared. He doesn’t know what it meant to go without a badge. Everybody has one.

The First Elder signals to one of his subordinates. “We will have a badge made for you, Shi Lindon. To show the world what you are.”

What you are. Not who.

“Wei Shi Seisha, I suggest you take your son to the next testing. Perhaps the heavens will choose to have mercy on him then.” Seisha, Lindon’s mother, draws him to her waist protectively as the elder continues. “Until such time as they do, he will be Unsouled.”

Lindon’s mother sweeps him out of the hall, riding on a wave of whispered comments from relatives in the clan. She hides him with her body until they escape.

“Why didn’t I get a badge?” he asked, when they were free.

“Because the heavens wish to shame us.” Her voice is grim, and here Lindon learns his spirit is something shameful. Until he earns a badge, he will continue bringing shame to his clan.

So he needs a badge.

Six months later, at the next test, he smears a drop of his mother’s blood on his palm. The lingering madra there makes the water stir, just for a second, before it returns to its placid stillness.

He is tested again at eight years old, and this time he comes prepared. He sneaks into the hall through the shadows, scratching a crude circle of runes on the bottom of the table in the hall. He copies it carefully out of one of his mother’s books. The next morning, when his turn for the test comes, he runs a trickle of madra—the bare amount he can control, as an untrained eight-year-old—into the script.

The water in the bowl shakes, which should earn him a scepter badge. Not the hammer he hopes for, but he couldn’t think of a way to freeze the water. Any badge will be fine; any soul is better than none.

In the end, it is not only the water that shakes. The bowl shakes as well, and the table with it. It takes the First Elder only a moment to glance under the tablecloth and discover the sabotage.

The elder expected this, and has brought a badge for Lindon.

It has a symbol in the middle, but not a hammer.

The badge looks the same as all the others, smooth six-sided medallions of soft wood, but there’s no picture at the center. No arrow, no scepter, no shield, no hammer. Just a symbol that Lindon recognizes from his mother’s lessons, a word in the old language. It means ‘empty.’

Empty like Lindon is inside, the elder tells him.

As the other children grow, they leave behind their wooden badges. Their mastery over madra, their skill in the sacred arts, increases day by day. The earliest among them reaches the Copper stage at nine, upgrading his badge accordingly. The latest is thirteen.

At fifteen, Wei Shi Lindon is the only one who still has his original badge. Still wooden, still empty.

Every half a year, when the children have finished their test, Lindon slips in and judges his own spirit again. Every time, he hopes the heavens will finally have mercy on him, as his mother once said. He’s tried seventeen times now.

The water has yet to move.

Suggested topic: clan culture of Sacred Valley. Continue?

Denied, report complete.

2

Lindon looked up into the purple leaves of the orus tree. This one felt right—he was calmer somehow, standing in the shade of this particular tree, as though it exuded an aura of peace. Wizened white fruit waited among the leaves, far out of reach, and he sensed an ancient eternity behind the gnarled bark of the trunk.

Or maybe that was his imagination.

He raised his hammer and chisel, carving away the outer layer of bark. Then, with utmost care, he chiseled a simple rune into the soft wood.

When he finished, he compared the symbol he'd left in the tree to the tablet his mother had given him. He wasn't much of a scriptor, but he could at least copy simple scripts, and this particular circle should glow if carved into an ancestral tree. So long as he copied the runes perfectly.

There were seven runes in this script, and he carefully began chipping away at the second. This was the twenty-fifth tree he'd found and tested over the last three days, ever since his mother had found out there was a tree somewhere in the forest that was about to advance. The Fallen Leaf School kept a monopoly on most trees with any possibility to produce a spirit-fruit, but Lindon had a chance to beat them to this one. As long as he worked quickly.

Plants had to live much longer to advance than animals did. If a fox or a turtle survived their first century, they would absorb enough vital aura from the world around them to ascend into sacred beasts. These animals cycled madra, advanced in power, and left Remnants just as humans did. The oldest of them could even speak, and legends said some could take human forms.

Plants did the same, but it took several times as long. Some trees had to stay undisturbed for five hundred years or more before they absorbed enough vital aura to develop a rudimentary spirit, and they would never learn to speak. The orus tree he was looking for had lived at least three centuries, and was on the cusp of ascension.

Centuries of vital aura concentrated in the wood would nurture its fruit, giving it a potent spiritual power. Even sacred artists at the Iron or Jade stage would pay a small fortune for such an advantage. For Lindon...he only dared to imagine it. This spirit-fruit might strengthen him enough to make up for whatever his soul lacked at birth.

Before he knew it, he'd finished the script circle. With wary hope he watched his handiwork, rough symbols in pale wood.

Several breaths later, the runes remained dull and lifeless. This was always the worst part. Had the script failed because there was no madra in the wood to fuel it, or because he'd made some mistake?

With a sigh, he looped the hammer and chisel back onto his belt, picking up the bottle that was his day's supply of water. A few out-of-season orus fruits had been his only meals, but he couldn't take the time to travel all the way back to the Wei clan for more food. He'd be fine for a few days.

As he took his first step away from the tree, a flash caught his eye. Lindon scanned the depths of the forest first, looking to see where the light had come from. It might be the sun reflecting off a piece of metal, maybe a forgotten tool or coin.

The script flickered again, sending out a spark, and this time Lindon saw it clearly. The light was dim, and it guttered like a candle in the wind, but there was no mistake: his circle had worked. He'd found an ancestral tree.

Among the tree’s purple leaves, a lone speck of white dangled from the highest branch: a single fruit. A normal orus fruit was like a pure white peach, and grew only in Sacred Valley. Lindon had grown up eating them in everything from pies to juice, but it seemed the outside world considered them delicacies. They had no special properties, only a unique flavor.

Fruit from an ancestral orus tree looked no different, but a bite would deliver him years' worth of purified vital aura that he could process into madra. He wanted to claw his way up the bark, but the nearest branch was far too high to reach. He should come back with his sister, or at least a ladder. If only he could find his way back here before the Fallen Leaf disciples did.

Lindon was still staring up into the tree when something shook the underbrush to his left. Seconds later, a snowfox darted out of the bush and froze, examining him.

With pure white fur and three tails waving in the air, the snowfox was as unique to Sacred Valley as the orus tree. The symbol of Lindon's Wei clan was the White Fox, in honor of this valley's snowfoxes. Or rather, one snowfox in particular.

Like Lindon, this fox was miles north of his home. It gazed at him for another breath before something larger crunched closer, and it darted off.

A young man emerged from the woods, hair mussed and skin covered in scratches. A copper badge hung pinned to the right side of his chest, and he wore a jacket lined with white fox-fur.

Lindon knew him. Wei Mon Teris, a member of his clan a year younger than Lindon. He was a threat.

“Cousin Teris,” Lindon greeted him, bowing formally with two fists pressed together. “This one is honored to see you here.”

“Out of the way!” Teris shouted, bowling past Lindon. Behind him, another young man and a young woman followed. Both of them were fourteen- or fifteen-year-old members of the Wei clan, and both of them Coppers.

Lindon's wooden badge hung heavy on his chest, but to hide it would be to accept his shame. He stayed bowed over his fists as they ran past him.

Deliberately casual, he backed up against the tree. If they saw the script shining, they would ask him what it was for. His only chance to take the fruit was to keep them occupied with something else.

He cursed the fate that had led three members of his clan here, so far from home. At least they had ignored him, continuing their hunt for the fox.

Which was, strictly speaking, illegal.

Just when he thought they’d left for good, he heard footsteps approaching once again.

Lindon grabbed his pack, stuffing his few belongings inside, and started running. He had hoped they would leave him alone, overlooking them according to their usual habit, but he wasn't even lucky enough for that.

Nor was he lucky enough to make it three steps before Teris caught him.

Upon reaching the Copper stage of the sacred arts, one's spirit opened. Teris could harvest the vital aura of the world, processing it into his own madra. He could use that power to fuel his body, so when he grabbed onto Lindon's elbow, there was no possibility of resistance.

Lindon came up short like a dog on the end of its leash, but he kept a smile on his face. “Cousin Teris, how can this one serve you?”

Teris wasn’t tall enough to look Lindon in the eye, so he spat at his feet. “We've hunted that three-tailed snowfox for a day and a night. Thanks to you, we might lose it.”

“Excuse my ignorance, Cousin, but has Elder Whisper blessed this hunt?”

Teris' ugly look was the only confirmation Lindon needed. Elder Whisper did occasionally allow the hunting of snowfoxes, but only under carefully controlled conditions. He most certainly would not tolerate three young Coppers running down a snowfox at the foot of Yoma Mountain.

Whisper was the reason the symbol of the Wei clan was a white fox.

But even his eyes couldn't see everything. Myth said the meat of a snowfox would strengthen the madra of those following the Path of the White Fox, as virtually everyone in the Wei clan did.

There was no logical reason it should be true, as far as Lindon knew, but many believed it. So Elder Whisper had therefore banned all hunting of snowfoxes without his explicit permission.

Teris formed a fist, and the air around it rippled as he gathered his power. “Are you being disrespectful, Unsouled? I don’t like that look.”

Lindon's heart tightened. Teris was only Copper, but the shield on his badge showed he was an Enforcer: born to focus his madra into physical strength. He could kill Lindon with a blow, even if he probably wouldn’t. Murdering someone below your level was an unspeakable shame. If Teris killed him, and the news made it back to the clan, Teris would remain a dishonored pariah for the rest of his days.

But there was something uniquely terrifying about facing down someone capable of caving in his ribs with a punch. No one was close enough to save him.

Lindon bowed again, and spoke even more humbly. “This one begs your pardon, Copper Cousin. Please, this one has gathered a few chips together, and it would be an honor if you would take them.”

He glanced up to gauge if Teris would take the bribe, but the Copper boy was looking past Lindon. Something had grabbed his attention.

And unless the snowfox had returned, there was only one thing back there. The ancestral tree.

Though it was a cool spring day, sweat gathered ran down Lindon’s back.

“What is this script, Unsouled?”

“This one is practicing his scripting, Copper Cousin. At the request of this one’s mother.”

Hopefully invoking his mother would grant him some mercy; unlike Lindon, Wei Shi Seisha provided a valuable function to the clan. She was widely respected among all the families.

Though her reputation wasn’t the only thing she’d left him.

Lindon’s parents were…statuesque. They had both once been famous fighters, and he had the misfortune of inheriting their physique with none of their actual strength. He was an inch taller than anyone else his age, slightly broader across the shoulders, and some young men took that as a challenge.

Teris took a step closer, back straight as he strained for height. “Get your eyes off me. Look at the ground.”

Lindon bowed even more deeply, hoping Teris would see it as a cowardly show of fear. Which it was.

Teris turned from him in disgust, which counted as a success, but unfortunately he returned his attention to the tree. “You've ruined my hunt, Unsouled. That should cost you.”

Lindon took his eyes from the forest floor to see Teris drawing his fist back. “Stop!” Lindon shouted, but it wasn't soon enough.

Teris had not yet reached Iron, so his body wasn’t actually any stronger than Lindon’s. But Enforcers bolstered their strength with madra. When Teris drew on his Copper madra, he would be stronger than other sacred artists of his stage, tougher, and faster. His punch landed on the ancient fruit tree, shattering the bark and leaving the imprint of his fist in the wood. The impact echoed through the forest, smashing Lindon's script.

Teris stepped away. Behind him, the tree bent in the middle. Deceptively slowly, it splintered and fell apart.

Icy cold shivered through Lindon's body, and it had nothing to do with the loss of the fruit. His odds of survival had just plummeted sharply.

“You idiot,” Lindon half-whispered. Teris froze.

“What did you say?”

Lindon dropped to his knees, hurriedly scratching symbols into the dirt. His tablet didn’t cover this script, so he only hoped he remembered correctly. “You've killed us both. That was an ancestral tree.”

Teris frowned at him, then looked at the broken trunk. Precious seconds passed as he digested the news.

Lindon had almost finished the circle, scratching frantically at the dirt with his finger. “Get behind the circle!” he shouted.

Then the Remnant rose from the tree’s corpse.

It was made from lines of vivid purple, like color sketched on the world by a celestial painter. The Remnant was thin and free of details like bark or leaves, as though it were the purple skeleton of the tree that once had been.

In reality, it was more like a ghost. A spirit without a vessel.

Remnants were constructions of pure madra, freed from their physical bodies. Whenever a sacred artist of enough power died, he left his soul behind him as a living force.

If Lindon died, his madra would dissipate into the vital aura in the atmosphere. The same would go for ordinary animals, or even Copper-level sacred artists. But sacred beasts and ancestral trees were on another level altogether. It would take an Iron- or Jade-stage practitioner to face one of these spirits in combat.

And before Teris could react to what he was seeing, the purple tree-Remnant clenched a branch like a massive fist and slammed it into the boy's midsection. The young Copper flipped through the air before landing facedown on the forest floor.

Wei Mon Teris’ clothes were torn where the tree-Remnant had struck him, but he was on his feet and stumbling away within seconds. Even in a possibly lethal situation like this one, Lindon had time for a brief flash of jealousy. A blow like that would have killed or crippled him, but Teris must have been drawing on his madra. He scurried off like a roach.

The Copper ran deeper in the woods without a glance back, rushing in the direction his friends had gone. Lindon fought the urge to hurry, finishing the last rune in the circle, knowing that precision was his defense rather than speed.

It was impossible to calmly take his time as the Remnant lumbered over to him, a skeletal ghost of purple madra in the shape of a leafless tree. Its branches swayed as it lurched forward in a pathetic parody of a man’s walk.

Lindon put his thumb to the final rune and closed his eyes.

He visualized his madra as a blue-white light, moving along lines like veins all through his body. He sped the flow of the energy, cycling it according to the Foundation technique he’d learned as a child. This technique was supposed to eventually become the basis for an entire Path, but Lindon had never progressed further. Any child in the Wei clan could do as much with their madra as Lindon.

But he could activate scripts.

The circle flared to life at the touch of his power, each rune burning with the same blue-white energy he’d seen in his mind.

When the Remnant loomed over the script, reaching out a long branch like a grasping hand, it passed through the light easily. No barrier stopped its movement. Lindon hopped backwards, out of the circle, and the Remnant stepped forward to follow him.

Lindon’s limitations were many, but he knew them well. He could never empower a script to block the Remnant of an ancestral tree directly, at least not with a script as crude as this one. But he could draw the Remnant in. Once inside, the spirit’s own madra would power the circle.

And the Remnant was much stronger than he was.

The script’s light turned from blue to purple, and the tree’s branches bristled into spikes. It tried to step away from the circle, to reach for Lindon, but it was forced to stop short.

Sweat soaked Lindon’s clothes, and he flopped to the ground well out of the Remnant’s reach. He caught his breath, shivering at the close call. If he’d been a moment slower…

Then something caught his eye that drove all thoughts of danger from his head. On the highest of the Remnant’s purple branches, a single spot of white. A spirit-fruit.

As the Remnant raged, it was not silent. Its fury sounded like snapping twigs, like the crunch of splintered logs. It was at least three times Lindon’s height, crowned by that single spot of white.

The fruit hung from the same place on the Remnant as it had on the tree’s body. Now the fruit was forged of flawless white madra, glowing on the spirit like a crown. The physical reality was still nestled among the branches on the forest floor, shriveled and pathetic.

Still thinking, Lindon walked over to the withered material fruit and plucked it, slipping it into the cumbersome pack he carried on his back. He was no longer wary of the Remnant; if it were powerful enough to break his script, it already would have. Now he had something else to worry about.

If he could retrieve the Remnant version of this fruit, his mother could bind it back to its physical vessel. She was a Forger and a Soulsmith, a specialist in manipulating madra as a physical material. She could turn this lifeless vegetation back into a powerful spirit-fruit, good as new.

If he wanted that to work, he’d need to bring the Remnant fruit back with him. And it was attached to the head of a crazed spirit monster.

He wished he had a better plan.

With reluctance, he reached into the shadesilk pockets of his pack and withdrew a glimmering gemstone the size of his smallest fingernail. It was hollow on the inside, like a stoppered flask carved for a doll, though this one was filled with a few drops of blue light that danced through the crystal’s facets.

When there’s only one road forward, take it with a smile. It had taken him weeks to fill up this crystal flask, which was capable of storing and purifying madra. He hated to waste weeks of his time here, but if he could restore the orus fruit, it would be worth more than a year of cycling. If he failed, though…

He slowed his breathing, cycling his spirit in a rhythm with his steady, even breath. Lindon placed the tiny flask, glowing blue-white, at the very edge of the Remnant’s reach.

The purple tree turned to him as though it could smell the energy, silence falling over the woods. Lindon hurried to the side, but the Remnant’s attention was all on the miniature crystal.

This was the main way his family used crystal flasks. The crystals had other uses, but for a Soulsmith, baiting a Remnant was by far the most practical purpose. All Remnants hungered for pure human madra, which could become virtually anything. On such a diet, a Remnant could slowly gain consciousness.

As the tree lunged, so did Lindon. He ran for the circle, leaping as soon as the tree bent down.

He might not have the strength of a true sacred artist, but Lindon still trained his body the same as the rest of his clan. He landed on the back of the Remnant, clutching its branches.

It felt more like clinging to slick, oily bone than wood, but he didn’t waste time examining the sensation. He reached out, grasping for the glowing white fruit, hanging like a full moon.

A branch slammed into his arm with the force of a kicking horse, and he heard something crack.

The impact knocked him off the Remnant’s back, and he had the presence of mind to roll away from the script as he fell. If he kicked one of the runes, the circle would break, and he would likely die.

But the Remnant didn’t seem to have noticed him. It tossed the empty crystal flask to the ground, having finished its brief meal, and then stilled. The wind was the only sound now, and the spirit looked like nothing more than a thin purple tree planted in the earth.

Lindon saw all this through tears of pain. He clenched his jaw to keep from screaming and potentially drawing the Remnant’s attention back to him. His forearm was broken, his hand dangling loosely, and it felt as though the weight of his own flesh would tear the arm apart. The pain kept him on his knees, drawing huge breaths in his lungs.

He forced a smile through his agony. In his uninjured fist, he gripped a shining white fruit.

It didn’t feel like a natural orus fruit any more than its source had felt like a natural tree. Rather, it squished in his hand like jelly, but as soon as he stopped applying force it snapped back into form. He wasn’t sure what aspect this madra held, or even how powerful it would be, once his mother restored it.

But he’d made it.

He tucked the Forged fruit into his pack next to its physical counterpart, plucking the transparent crystal flask and tossing it in next. Now he was only faced with the task of traveling a dozen miles through the wilderness, on foot, with a broken arm and a bulky pack.

Triumph made the journey easy.

* * *

Almost a million people called Sacred Valley home, and the Wei clan alone accounted for over a hundred thousand of those. Even so, the one resource no one lacked was space.

Each family received a generous portion of land, with a small house added on to the main complex for each member. Typically, children received their own house along with their wooden badge, as a mark of independence. Even Lindon, who could contribute nothing back to the clan, received a housing allotment inferior to no one’s.

His house was made of tight-fitting orus wood, pale and smooth, roofed in purple tiles. His bed lay against the wall opposite of the hearth, in which a fire burned merrily to ward off the spring chill. He lay in his bed, broken arm splinted and tied, with a scripted ribbon wrapped around his bicep. The script twisted his madra into a basic Enforcer technique that cut off his sense of pain, but the power running through the script-circle would eventually tear the silk of the ribbon. At that point, his mother would replace it with another one.

For now, Lindon was as physically comfortable as he had ever been. He couldn’t feel his arm, the fire was warm, and his bed was so soft it felt like lying on a cloud. He was used to that; his mother had packed his mattress with Forged cloud-aspect madra she’d purchased from one of her contacts. Even the Wei clan’s Patriarch didn’t have a better bed.

But Lindon couldn’t enjoy any of it. His family was here.

The fruit now shone with the bright color of a Remnant, but it held all the wrinkles and imperfections that showed it to be real. His mother had restored it to full power in minutes. It sat on the center of Lindon’s table, and the other three members of his family surrounded it like wolves circling a wounded deer.

“If I had found this years ago, I would take it,” Lindon’s father said. “But it’s too late for me now. Kelsa will fight for us in the Seven-Year Festival, so she needs it the most.”

Wei Shi Jaran had participated in the Festival before last, which had left him with a lip scarred into an eternal smirk, and a limp that required a cane. He hadn’t fought since.

“It wouldn’t have helped you,” Lindon’s mother responded. She was one of the more eye-catching figures in the Wei clan, with her long brown hair. Everyone else, including her children, had black. “This spirit-fruit only purifies energy, it won’t heal you. It does nothing that months or years of regular cycling wouldn’t do.” Seisha scratched away at a portable slate as she spoke, her chalk pausing only rarely. Scripts wouldn’t check themselves.

Her drudge hovered over her shoulder, like a rusty brown mechanical fish drifting on invisible tides. It was a Soulsmith construct, madra Forged according to a particular pattern, and it served her as a box of tools served a carpenter.

“I’m only saying, Seisha, that if I had gotten this early enough…who knows?”

“I do. That’s not how it works.”

“You know everything about the soul? All the mysteries of the sacred arts? I could have changed my Path, studied with the Fallen Leaf School, and their life techniques could have restored me. Your body is renewed when you advance to Jade.”

“You’re hardly more likely to advance by starting over on a different Path, even with a hypothetical elixir.” She rubbed out some chalk with the heel of her hand, never looking away from her notes. Jaran’s scar-enforced smirk creased into a sneer.

Lindon’s sister Kelsa took over the conversation before it could devolve further, as he had known she would. “I can’t do well enough for the Patriarch to notice us if I’m still a Copper. How will I fight Wei Jin Amon or Li Ten Jana without Iron strength?”

Their father snorted, crossing his arms. “That’s right. There will be at least half a dozen sixteen-year-olds with iron badges already, and Kelsa should be among them. With her Path, she can give them all a surprise. I did, and I was even younger.”

Kelsa nodded to her father, mostly to stop him from drawing the story out any longer. “I’m sure I can, if fate is kind. But we still have two months, and I am already close to condensing my Iron body. It’s possible I’ll advance on my own before the Festival opens.”

She rolled the white fruit toward herself, pulling a knife from her belt. “There’s no reason I should keep it all to myself. If one of you reaches Jade, it will do more for our family than anything I can show on the Festival stage. We should split it in three.”

Finally, Seisha looked up from her tablet. Her drudge whistled inquisitively, ready to be used, but she met her husband’s eyes. His scowl lightened, and he nodded, eager to take part of this treasure for himself. Kelsa’s blade met the skin of the fruit.

Lindon leaned forward until his bed frame creaked under him. His family turned, surprised to remember he was still there. In his own house.

“Would it be so hard to cut another piece?”

3

As Lindon sat on his bed with his numb arm in a sling, he watched his family. Around the table, they each exchanged glances.

Kelsa held up the white orus, the spirit-fruit Lindon had hunted and bled for. “Mother, can we divide it in four?”

Seisha glanced up at her drudge, but the brown shape only croaked in response. It currently looked like a toy fish floating over her shoulder, but Lindon had seen it unfold into many other forms. “We were already taking a risk with three,” she said at last. “There’s a limit beyond which any elixir cannot be stretched, or it is wasted.”

Frustration had returned to Jaran’s face. “We can’t take the chance. Who knows when we’ll find something like this again? Give it to Kelsa.”

“No,” his daughter said, cutting into the fruit. “We’ll divide it as planned. It’s not fair to you, Lindon, but I’ll make it up to you. I’ll give you my clan stipend for the next half a year, how would you like that?”

Jaran spread his hands as though presenting her idea, and Seisha returned to her slate. To them, clearly, the matter had been settled.

In fairness to his sister, Lindon had to admit that her offer was fair. Six months of the clan’s allowance to her would be a small fortune in chips for him, enough to buy lesser elixirs of his own. Maybe even a partial Path manual, so he could further his study of the sacred arts without the clan’s blessing.

But those items weren’t unusual. They weren’t going anywhere. He could save up his own chips and buy them, if not so quickly.

This fruit was special. He was so far behind everyone else that he needed something out of the ordinary to catch up.

If he relied on normal means, he’d stay behind his entire life.

He nodded to her. “Gratitude. But with respect, I hunted for that on my own for three days.”

“On my instruction,” his mother pointed out.

“For which I am grateful. But nonetheless, the work was mine. The time was mine. I found the tree, I plucked the fruit, I fought a Remnant for it.” He gestured to his sling. “I’ll have battle scars for it! Me!”

Kelsa looked down at the fruit with her knife in hand, as though unsure where to cut. “I can give you eight months of chips, but any more than that, and I’m not sure I can afford to keep my garden through the winter.”

“I don’t want more money. I want half.”

The scar at the corner of Jaran’s lip made his scowl sinister instead of stern. “Think beyond yourself. She represents our family in the Festival. Our clan. The Patriarch is negotiating trade rights with the Kazan. The stronger we show ourselves, the better his position. This should be a concern for every Wei.”

“But that is exactly my concern.” Lindon leaned forward on the edge of his bed, radiating sincerity. “I’ll be fighting among the eight-year-olds. Can you imagine the scorn if I don’t take first place? Anything Kelsa accomplishes against the Irons will be overshadowed by that shame.”

His father was quiet.

“Don’t fight,” Seisha said, reaching up and sliding her chalk into her drudge. The floating fish absorbed it without a ripple. “The Foundation stage exhibition is a formality anyway, it’s training for the real fights.”

Lindon had expected this, and had prepared a counter. “And everyone will know why. I will forever be the Wei clan coward who ran from opponents half his age.”

Jaran’s frustration had become too much to hold in, and he picked up his cane, spinning it between his palms. “It doesn’t matter! If I break through to Jade, or your mother does, or your sister reaches Iron, then that will wash away anything that happens in the children’s fights.” He slammed the cane down as though the matter were settled.

Gently, Kelsa shook her head. “It’s a poor gamble. We’re betting on possible honor against certain shame.”

Those words, certain shame, pricked at him, but he didn’t let the pain touch him. He never did. “Father, Mother, if you tell me it’s likely that you will advance to the Jade stage before the Seven-Year Festival, I’ll give up my claim. I don’t argue that Kelsa needs to be Iron, but she’s so close she doesn’t need the entire thing. I have so little. To a beggar, even scraps become a feast.”

His mother gave him a wry look, and Jaran’s face had reddened, but neither said anything. They weren’t close to Jade, as he suspected.

It was Kelsa who finally made the decision. With one clean stroke, she segmented the orus fruit in half, splitting it around the pit. “There’s no honor in denying a man what he’s earned. If you’d like it, Father, I’ll give you my half.”

Predictably, Jaran grumbled a bit but let her keep it. She walked over to hand her brother his half of the spirit-fruit.

Kelsa had gotten everything Lindon wanted in his life: the natural gifts, the favor of the clan, and the opportunity to train in sacred arts. And while she was as tall as he was, she didn’t look like she was trying to intimidate anyone. Daily martial training left her lithe and graceful.

If she wasn’t so absolutely fair about everything, Lindon might have hated her.

She handed his half of the fruit to him without malice, and even nodded to him in respect. He’d won the argument, and the Wei clan respected honorable victory.

He allowed the thrill of his prize to run through him as he took the fruit. This could be the first step of his path up. More importantly, he’d won.

He relished the feeling as he relished the fruit, which tingled on his tongue like a peach charged with lightning. It was gone too soon, and the shock on Kelsa’s face mirrored what he was sure he showed on his own. Even in his stomach, it seemed to give off the occasional shock, sending tingling waves through his body.

“Could you describe the sensation?” their mother asked, poised to take notes.

“It definitely feels like it’s working,” Kelsa said.

Lindon put his hands to his stomach. He imagined he could feel excess energy in his fingertips. “It’s like I’ve swallowed a thunderbolt.”

Seisha had retrieved a brush and an ink jar to replace her chalk and slate, and painted notes on a scroll as fast as she could move. “Would you describe the feeling as hot or cold?”

Lindon exchanged looks with his sister. “Hot?” he said, at the same time she said, “Cold?”

“Alternating hot and cold,” their mother muttered, never pausing in her writing. “Examine your core. Any changes?”

Lindon closed his eyes, visualizing his core. It sat just beneath the navel, and was where all the lines of madra connected. This was the physical location of the soul, some said, and Lindon always pictured it as a rolling ball of blue-white light.

He evened out his breathing, inhaling and exhaling in tune with the tides of his spirit. The energy flowed through his body according to his Foundation technique, the one and only sacred art he’d been allowed to learn. It allowed him to focus and purify what little madra he had, to build a foundation for…nothing at all.

He wasn’t allowed to learn a Path, to harvest vital aura, so he would never advance. If he was lucky, in his later years, his innate spirit would be refined to the point that he would naturally advance to Copper. The state most people reached by age thirteen. Copper spirits were open to the vital aura of the natural world, so they could draw power from the heavens and earth to make themselves stronger. It was the true first step for any sacred arts.

“No change,” he reported, the review of his lackluster destiny having dampened his excitement.

“I don’t feel anything either,” Kelsa confirmed. “But there’s something…”

A shout came from the door. “Wei Shi Lindon, the First Elder requests your presence.” It was a voice Lindon knew, but hadn’t expected to hear again so soon.

He rose to his feet to answer the door, careful of his numbed arm, but Kelsa moved first. She strode over and pulled the door open.

Wei Mon Teris stood looking up at her, gawking at her presence. He was still wearing his snowfox skin, scuffed though it was, but otherwise he looked completely unharmed by his encounter with the tree-Remnant only hours before. “Cousin Kelsa, excuse my interruption. Is your brother nearby?”

By this time, Lindon had slipped into a pair of shoes and made it to his sister’s side. “Cousin Teris, I see you made it back safely.”

Teris’ jaw clenched. “Wei Shi Lindon. The First Elder requires your presence to review the events of the day. I’m to bring you there immediately.”

“Carry our family’s regrets to the First Elder,” Kelsa said, “but Lindon is injured. He needs our care and attention tonight, but he would be honored to attend the First Elder at first light tomorrow.”

Cradling his sling, Lindon ducked under Kelsa’s arm. “How could I make the First Elder wait? My injury is nothing to be concerned over, just a small wound incurred in my battle against the Remnant.”

Teris glared at the pointed reminder that he hadn’t stayed and fought the monster, as honor dictated he should. In fact, as the strongest party present, Teris should have protected Lindon with his life.

Not that Lindon had ever expected as much. In his observation, honor often fled before self-preservation.

“Lead on, Cousin,” Lindon said. Teris started off without another word.

The First Elder waited for them in the Clan Hall, the same place where young Wei souls were tested. Lindon had rarely seen the elder outside of it, and he seemed to have grown to fit there; his long beard matched the White Foxes on the banners, his robes jade and gold to match the pillars and tiles.

He stood in the hall as they entered, back straight, his hand on the head of a stone fox and his eyes on the golden statue of the first Wei Patriarch. He did not turn as the young men approached and dropped to their knees, bowing almost to the ground.

“Tell me what happened today, in the forest beneath Yoma.”

Teris began immediately, reciting the events of the day as though he’d practiced. To Lindon’s surprise, Teris stuck to an accurate retelling of events, even admitting that he and two friends had tracked a snowfox into the woods. They never actually caught the fox, as he hurried to clarify, and then he went on to tell how Lindon’s presence spooked their game. Lindon’s response angered him, and in his anger, he broke a nearby tree. He had no way of knowing the tree was sacred, and would release a Remnant.

“With my body, I took a blow that would have struck the Unsouled,” Teris went on, in the furthest departure from truth so far. “When I recovered, I saw that he was defenseless, and I ran to warn my friends rather than die together with him. I do not know how he survived.”

Silence fell on the Clan Hall, and still the First Elder did not turn. He stroked the fox statue’s head as he thought.

“What are the words of the Wei clan?” he asked at last.

“Honor by any means,” the boys recited at once. The Path of the Wei clan used madra of light and dreams to deceive their enemies…but according to the first Wei Patriarch, even deception could be used to serve honor. It was the contradiction around which the Wei clan was founded.

“There is a time when running to preserve your own life is not cowardice,” the elder went on. “When the threat is so great that your death would mean nothing, then flight is no shame.”

Teris let out a deep breath.

“But this was not such a threat,” the First Elder said, turning around at last. His face was carved from stone harder than the statues around him. “If this Remnant failed to defeat an Unsouled at the Foundation stage, then surely a Copper sacred artist could have stood against it. Your stipend will be withheld this month, you will spend a night in isolated meditation, and at the end you will be whipped three times in front of the clan. Cowards have no place in the Valley.”

Teris bowed so low that his forehead stuck to the floor, so Lindon couldn’t see his face, but his whispered voice was choked. “You are wise and…merciful, First Elder.”

The First Elder snorted. “Report to your father, tell him what I have said, and that I allow him to add a punishment of his own if he wishes. But if I do not see you through the window of a locked room tonight, then I will make your sentence three times worse. Go now.”

Teris bowed again and fled without a word.

Lindon braced himself. Part of him felt a measure of shameful glee at Teris’ sentence, but he couldn’t enjoy it. He knew his clan, he knew his own standing within it, and if the elder had punished an otherwise honorable Copper in front of him, it meant that there was something worse coming.

The First Elder stood over Lindon, silently judging. Weighing. Perhaps deciding which of several sentences to mete out.

If Lindon struck first, he might be able to mitigate the damage.

“This one is shamed to be here before you, Great Elder,” Lindon said into the floor. “This one had no intention of interfering with the Coppers, or their hunt.” Best to bring up the hunt as much as possible, to remind him that Teris and the others had been breaking Elder Whisper’s rules. “This one was in search of an ancestral fruit, on behalf of his mother.”

With one sharp gesture of his hand, the First Elder motioned for Lindon to get up. He scrambled gratefully to his feet.

“Did you find it?”

“Yes, First Elder.”

The aura around the elder darkened, almost imperceptibly. “Did you waste it on yourself, Unsouled? I know you were tempted.”

Lindon’s stomach was still buzzing with trapped lightning. It was all he could do not to swallow, afraid the First Elder would take that as a sign of guilt. “It went to my older sister. I mean…this one’s older sister.”

The intimidating aura dispersed like clouds before the sun, and the First Elder waved irritably. “Speak freely, Shi Lindon. I’ve seen you in here often enough.”

Lindon fought back a smile. “Yes, First Elder, but I have little to add. Cousin Teris told the story accurately.”

The First Elder had the longest eyebrows of anyone Lindon had ever seen, and they shot halfway up his forehead at this. “You know what you’ve done wrong, then?”

That was a trap if Lindon had ever heard one. Sweat trickled down his back, and the lightning in his stomach boiled up. It would be worse luck than he deserved if the fruit made itself known now.

“I…was…too far from clan territory, First Elder. I know it now. In the future, I will travel in the company of my sister. Thank you for instructing me.”

The elder sighed, rubbing at his eyes with two fingers. “You found yourself in the way of three Coppers, Lindon. That was your sin.”

Lindon hesitated. “I am sorry for it, Elder. But I could not have known they would run past this one tree in the forest. Can I predict where lightning will strike in a storm?”

The First Elder slapped his hand down on the statue of the white fox, sending a sharp crack through the air and leaving a fissure in the fox’s skull. In a blinding flash of madra, he repaired it instantly. “You could not have known? If a party of Kazan dogs had stumbled on you instead, or the honorable disciples of the Fallen Leaf, they could have killed you as easily as Teris broke that tree. Only honor might restrain them, and honor is a poor hook on which to hang a man’s life. And if they did choose to kill you, our clan would have to apologize. For inconveniencing them.”

Lindon started to respond, but he had nothing to say. Shame blotted out his thoughts, shame that burned worse than the fruit’s lightning, shame that crawled along every inch of his bones and ate him from the inside like a colony of ants.

The First Elder’s tone softened, but his words didn’t. “If a sacred artist with an iron badge burned down your home with you inside, at most I could give him a punishment like I gave Teris. For the dishonor of picking on the weak. He could not be executed, or maimed, or even fined, because in taking your life he cost the clan nothing.”

Lindon squeezed his eyes shut and bowed, hoping that would cover the tears he fought down. Weeping like a child would only shame him. He shifted his injured arm in its sling, pretending his wince came from sudden pain.

“I do not say this to wound you further, Lindon. The heavens can show great cruelty in a man’s birth. But the foundation of any Path is learning to accept the world as it is, not as you wish or even observe it to be. Every slight, every insult, every injustice in your future will be your fault. Your fate is not fair, but it is true. What should you have done today?”

“I should have returned home as soon as I saw Wei Mon Teris,” Lindon whispered.

“Wrong! You should never have left.” The First Elder stabbed a finger at him, and it skewered him as thoroughly as a sword. “You have a place in the clan archives. Let that be your turtle’s shell. Help your mother with her work, or stay in the archives, and fade into the background. Humility and anonymity are your protection.” The elder sighed, his shoulders slumping. “They are the only armor I can give you.”

Tucked away in the corner, on a stand designed for the purpose, waited the testing bowl. Seventeen times, he’d placed his hand in that bowl. Seventeen failures, in a test no one failed.

He returned his gaze to the floor.

“Yes, First Elder.”

The elder sighed again. His slippers moved as he paced back and forth, in a greater display of emotion than Lindon had seen from him before. “I won’t punish you. Your fate, and the injury to your arm, are punishment enough. But if I am seen to do nothing, the Mon family will hold you responsible for Teris. As such, I would like you to feed Elder Whisper tonight.”

Lindon looked up sharply, a strange hope filling him along with the storm in his belly. “Gratitude, First Elder.”

The First Elder shook his head. “Maybe he can give you the help that I cannot.”

* * *

Most buildings in the Wei clan were purple and white, reflecting the purple leaves of the orus tree and the white fur of the snowfox. From a distance, the clan was a collage of those two colors. Only one tower stood out: a needle of white, so tall that it seemed thin, rising above the purple-roofed sea like the mast of a great ship. It had been made of white stone in the age of the clan’s founders, and it was one of the most prominent landmarks in all of Sacred Valley.

It was filled with stairs.

There were only two rooms in Whisper’s tower: one at the bottom, and one at the top. In between was nothing more than a spiraling staircase, thousands of steps that represented a monotonous journey to the clan’s oldest ally.

Lindon took a deep breath as he faced the first step. The founders had obviously designed this tower with sacred artists in mind. And why shouldn’t they? Everyone practiced sacred arts, so everyone had a madra-reinforced constitution greater than their bodies would normally allow.

Except for Lindon, who had to face this staircase with little more than the strength in his legs. He could cycle his madra to prevent exhaustion, to restore some stamina when his feet began to flag, but he would run out halfway through if he didn’t ration his spiritual strength. A Copper would have the madra to climb these stairs in half the time and arrive in perfect condition.

Without further hesitation, Lindon began the long march up the stairs. He carried a bucket filled with jade-scaled river carp: Elder Whisper’s twice-daily meal.

Normally Lindon would never have been chosen for this task. It was easier to ask any Copper-stage artist, and they would finish faster with less effort. Today, Lindon’s eagerness carried him through the hour it took him to reach the top. The First Elder’s words had left him feeling trapped, doomed, cursed to a lifetime of insignificance and weakness.

If anyone could tell him how to break free, Whisper could.

Elder Whisper had joined the clan founders to create the Wei clan, dominating the native Remnants to carve out a section of wilderness in Sacred Valley. He had created the Path of the White Fox, the most common Path in the entire clan, and used its powers to control and assimilate several lesser clans. Not even the current Wei Patriarch was as honored as Elder Whisper.

So when Lindon finally reached the door at the top of the stairs, he set his heavy bucket down and took a moment to catch his breath. He couldn’t appear before Elder Whisper panting like a dog.

To open the lock, he had to brace it in the crook of his sling-wrapped arm and twist with his free hand. Both the lock and the key were heavy bronze, each bigger than his head. Why they had to use such giant devices to secure Whisper’s door, he couldn’t imagine. They didn’t appear scripted, only heavy. Surely a normal lock and key would work just as well.

Once he finally wrestled the lock open, he had to lean his shoulder against the slab of a door, forcing a way inside with his whole strength.

He pulled the bucket inside and let the door slam shut once again. The inside of the door was covered by a scripted mirror—part of a spirit-trap, designed to keep Remnants and sacred beasts imprisoned by their own madra. While the door was open, the circle was incomplete, and Whisper could sneak out.

If he did, he would find himself stuck on the stairs, unable to cross the closed circle at the tower’s base. As far as Lindon knew, Whisper had never even tried to escape. He enjoyed a respected position, intervened in clan affairs as much as he wanted, and the elders released him from the tower on formal occasions. As a boy, Lindon had wondered why Whisper was trapped in the first place, but it was simply one more part of the way things were.

Lindon had heard several myths about Whisper’s imprisonment, but never one he believed. The truth was likely beyond his comprehension.

Elder Whisper sat on his haunches, watching the clan below through an open floor-to-ceiling archway. A line of script engraved in the floor prevented him from simply leaping out and running down the side of the tower.

Cold wind, crisp with the scents of a spring night, ruffled his white fur. Five bushy tails lashed behind him, tracing arcane patterns in the air that reminded Lindon of a script.

“You have eaten of a wonderful fruit,” said the sacred fox. “Tell me the story.”

Lindon dropped to his knees next to the bucket of fish, bowing respectfully. He was more conscious than ever of the flickering lightning in his core. “This one found an ancestral orus tree, Elder. This one was fortunate enough to obtain its fruit after it was destroyed.”

Whisper turned slightly, fixing Lindon with one jet-black eye. “There is more.”

4

Naturally, Lindon concealed nothing before Elder Whisper. “This one engaged in a small conflict with a Copper practitioner from the clan. In the battle, the tree was broken, and a Remnant released. This one was able to protect himself.”

The Wei clan’s signature Path of the White Fox had been created by—and named for—the very sacred beast that stood before him now. They produced madra that deceived the senses, that created illusions, that twisted light and sound. And Elder Whisper was the Path’s original master.

A second five-tailed snowfox stepped out from the first, like an image walking away from a mirror. This second body dipped its muzzle into the bucket of fish even as the first continued speaking. “The Foundation stage defends himself from a Remnant, and leaves with its prize. Commendable.”

Lindon bowed deeply. “This one is unworthy of such praise.”

Neither Whisper responded. One continued devouring the fish, while the other examined Lindon with eyes of opaque darkness. On any other day, Lindon would take his leave now.

But the First Elder had thought that Whisper might be able to help him. “This one humbly begs a question of you, Elder.”

A fuzzy snout slid over his shoulder, cold lips brushing past his cheek. He focused his entire body on remaining still, on not trembling, as a third Elder Whisper rested his head on Lindon’s shoulder.

“Speak,” the third sacred beast said quietly.

“This one is not allowed to follow a Path of the sacred arts.”

“Why should the Wei clan water a tree that will never bear fruit?” Elder Whisper asked, simultaneously watching Lindon from three directions.

“An Unsouled may never have a family of his own, for fear of passing on his deformity to a new generation.” Lindon couldn’t keep bitterness from his voice. “He cannot practice sacred arts, and so cannot travel or engage in battle. This one cannot rise if he does not bring honor to the clan, but he is not permitted to do so.”

Elder Whisper and his two reflections began to pace around him, three five-tailed snowfoxes each bigger than a man. Lindon shivered as the fox’s head slid back away from his shoulder, but kept himself in place out of discipline. The elder was still an ancient sacred beast, mysterious and feral, and if he devoured Lindon no one in the clan would make a sound of protest.

“What are the sacred arts?” the elder asked, his murmur coming from three directions at once.

“The path of refining a spirit and pursuing connection to all of creation,” Lindon recited. There were many correct answers to Elder Whisper’s question, and any child of Sacred Valley could recount them on command.

“When does that path reach its end?”

This answer was more vague, but Lindon answered as best he could. “When an artist’s spirit is as pure as gold.” Gold was the final stage of any sacred artist’s Path.

A tail whipped the back of Lindon’s skull, leaving a sharp sting. “Is a Gold practitioner one with heaven and earth? Does he control everything in creation? Can he create worlds and break them at will?”

The obvious answer was ‘no,’ but Elder Whisper would not be satisfied by the obvious. In humility, Lindon fell to his knees and pressed his face to the floor, despite the groan of pain from his broken arm. “This one is unworthy to even guess at such profound answers, Elder.”

The fox’s chuckle softly filled the room as his three bodies continued to circle. “There is no profound answer here, young human. The answer is ‘no.’”

Hesitantly, Lindon raised his head. “Pardon this one’s ignorance, but…does the Path not end with Gold?”

“The spirit has no limit, nor does the sky. How could a true Path have an ending? If you studied until the end of the universe, you would still have not touched true comprehension. The Path of the White Fox is but one among countless others, and none reach the end.”

“This one thanks you for the enlightenment, Elder Whisper,” Lindon said, though he still didn’t fully understand what the sacred beast meant to teach him.

All three foxes paused, side by side, regarding Lindon. “When a traveler cannot find a path, sometimes he must make his own.”

Understanding washed over Lindon, and he bowed again out of gratitude. The shame that had been exposed by the First Elder’s words ignited like tinder until determination blazed alongside the lightning in his belly.

One of the Whispers blinked out of reality, leaving one staring Lindon in the eye and one feasting on fish. “Remember. Cutting a road through a forest is always harder than following one already cut.”

Lindon straightened. “If all it takes is work, Elder Whisper, this one will not fail you.”

“Fate is not fair, but it is just. Hard work is never in vain…even when it does not achieve what you wished.” With those words, the five-tailed fox faded away, leaving only the real Elder Whisper enjoying his meal.

Though the elder had clearly dismissed him, Lindon had to show his respect before leaving. He bowed deeply three times to Elder Whisper’s back, taking the empty bucket from the elder’s last feeding and returning down the stairs.

The trip down was no easier on Lindon’s legs than the trip up, and his broken arm had begun to ache even through his mother’s script, but he spent the time in contemplation. The First Elder had spoken of Lindon’s situation as though he should give up and accept his fate, but Whisper had given him the opposite advice.

Lindon knew which he preferred. The First Elder would have him wait at home, safe and relatively content, but he would die having accomplished nothing. The fruit’s power tingled in his core, begging him to process it, urging him to take the first step on a Path of his own devising.

When he returned home, his family was gone. He sat cross-legged in the center of his house, focused entirely inward, cycling his madra with a greater intensity than ever before.

He felt as though he should make some breakthrough tonight, as though Elder Whisper’s words should trigger some understanding that would take him to a higher level and allow him to comprehend some deep truth. Or perhaps the spirit-fruit would show more of an effect than it had so far, allowing him to unexpectedly advance to Copper.

Nothing happened beyond the ordinary. The storm in his core subsided somewhat as he continued digesting the fruit’s pure madra, and his legs eased somewhat as they received fresh power after their exertion earlier. Even his broken arm felt better, though he could just as easily attribute that to the fresh pain-suppressing script his mother had left for him.

He quickly bathed and slept.

* * *

The mirrored door to Elder Whisper’s chamber swung shut, leaving the ancient fox staring at a reflection of himself. He tilted his muzzled back, snapping up a fish and letting it slide down his throat.

He had spent most of the past five decades in this room, where every day was much like another. Compared to the excitement of his younger days, this was a perfectly satisfying way to spend a few years.

But now the Unsouled had visited of his own volition. That was interesting.

He left the remainder of his meal, pacing circles around his chamber. In the mirror, his sleek white reflection followed him.

Whisper harvested both light and dreams into his core, blending them so that he could blind any eyes, stifle any ears. The humans understood light to some limited degree, but they had great difficulty with dreams. Whisper, however, had spent a hundred years meditating on the nature of dreams.

For the most part, a dream was nothing more than a mind deceiving itself. Only rarely did dreams tap into greater forces…but when they did, they could reveal pieces of fate.

Over the years, Elder Whisper had developed a sense for that fate. It was distant, imperfect, but he could dimly see the shapes of impending events.

“The Unsouled is connected,” his reflection said.

“He could be,” Whisper corrected himself.

The reflected snowfox whipped its five tails in irritation. “A drowning man will seize any branch, no matter how thin.”

For centuries, the shape looming in his dreams has been dark and impossibly vast. It would crush them all beneath its ponderous weight, and there was no stopping it. Sacred Valley’s past was coming back and bringing death with it. But there was something strange about his premonition this time.

Somehow, he felt as though the titanic threat were years distant and months close at the same time. One and then the other, like fate had yet to decide.

Now, he saw the familiar shape of fate’s touch on the Unsouled: the resolve in his eyes, the agony of a difficult decision in the set of his shoulders, the timing of his appearance in the tower. The boy’s future was in flux.

However it turned out, Whisper had done what he could. Now he would wait…and watch.

* * *

Every morning, the entire Wei clan turned out to meditate and cycle. The more distant families followed this tradition in their homes, but the core members of the clan all gathered together. It became the time where clan business was conducted, and a center for gossip and competition.

Ordinarily, Lindon arrived in the central courtyard outside the Hall of Elders to find fifty or sixty people already in conversation. The number would grow as the sun approached, and by daybreak the two hundred or so most honored members of the Wei clan would be united in cycling their madra. Even Lindon, an Unsouled, was no exception.

Today, the courtyard buzzed with excitement. Under the gray light before dawn, over two hundred people gathered in the courtyard of the Elder’s Hall, and none were meditating. News of Wei Mon Teris’ punishment had spread, and they were here to witness the penalty for cowardice.

Public punishments weren’t unheard of, but the most recent one was over a year past. They were always an occasion for the families of the Wei clan to snipe at one another, to witness a rival falling down a step on the endless ladder of position. The Patriarch hadn’t shown himself, but the First Elder stood atop the steps of the hall, his long eyebrows hanging down to his white beard.

Wei Mon Teris knelt before him, no ropes binding him. Honor would keep him in place. The rest of the Mon family stood behind him, his immediate family in the front, with aunts and uncles and cousins behind.

Teris’ father, Wei Mon Keth, stood like a mountain over his son. With his arms crossed, his face set, and a sword on his back, he looked like the statue of an ancient guardian.

As dawn broke, the First Elder addressed the crowd. “Yesterday, the young Copper Enforcer called Wei Mon Teris failed our clan. Faced with a Remnant on the slopes of Mount Yoma, he fled for his life, abandoning a child of the Foundation stage to danger. For this punishment, I will deliver three lashes from my own hand. Let this serve as a warning to cowards.” From his belt, the First Elder produced a thin stick of supple orus wood.

More than pain, these lashes were meant to deliver humiliation. The clan didn’t want to injure a sacred artist with a future, but they had to curb any potential embarrassments. A public lashing would show the Mon family as weak, and would undermine their position in the Wei clan.

If they fell low enough, eager relatives would seize their assets, leaving them weakened in truth. Weakness and the appearance of weakness were the same, and only strength had a place in Sacred Valley.

For his part, Lindon would take no pleasure in watching Teris beaten. He had never expected the Copper to defend him in the first place, and this whole process was a grim reminder of what could happen to him at any time. He was reliant on the honor and goodwill of others to protect him, and those were thin walls.

But if he could walk his own Path…then strength would be his defense.

As the First Elder raised his hand for the initial blow, Wei Mon Keth stepped forward. Teris’ father was also the head of the Mon family, and it was expected that he should defend his son. But the glance he sent toward the Shi family, toward Lindon, carried an impending threat.

“One moment, Elder,” Keth said, stepping in front of his son. “There is one matter we must resolve first.”

The First Elder’s switch blurred through the air, halting to point at Keth’s face with the threatening air of a sword. “It is not your place to guard your son from punishment.”

Teris’ father scowled even deeper. “I beat Teris myself when he came home a coward. But he was not the only one to run.” Keth turned to Lindon. “Let the Unsouled be punished with him.”

Lindon froze when the crowd turned its attention to him. Keth was only trying to save face by pulling the Shi family down together; it was a common enough tactic in scenes like this, and the elders would see through it. Lindon was patiently waiting for the First Elder to rebuff Keth when he caught sight of someone pushing his way through the gathering.

Wei Shi Jaran had to lean on a cane, but he still shouldered other families aside. His scarred face turned from Lindon to the Mon family, but in the end, he addressed the First Elder. “First Elder, why do you allow this dog to bark?”

Lindon’s stomach dropped, and he could see his sister over the crowd. She paled when she heard her father’s words.

Mon Keth loomed over Shi Jaran, glaring down at the cripple. “Men do not fight with words alone. Will you face me on the stage?”

Jaran acted as though he hadn’t heard the challenge, keeping his attention fixed on the First Elder. “By what right does Wei Mon Keth accuse my son? Surely it is not lack of courage that keeps a Foundation child from defending a Copper fighter.”

“Of course your son could not have protected mine,” Keth responded, before the elder could open his mouth. “But he is a coward nonetheless. What bravery has he shown before the clan? What courage? Surely he should work twice as hard to prove his worth, but what has he brought to the clan?”

Jaran’s scarred lips twisted further into a sneer. “Once, you would not have said such things to my face. If not for these injuries, I would teach you a lesson here.”

“First prove that you have taught your own son his lessons.” Keth looked around and found his daughter, a ten-year-old girl with an arrow on her wooden badge. She ran to him eagerly, and he placed his hands on her shoulders. “Your son is at the Foundation stage. If he is not a coward, he will accept a fight from someone his own level.”

The little girl looked Lindon straight in the eyes. “I, Wei Mon Eri, challenge Wei Shi Lindon to a duel of honor before the entire clan.”

The words echoed in the courtyard, accompanied by shocked silence.

They planned this, Lindon realized, hearing the girl’s recited challenge. They needed to distract the other families from their dishonor.

Perhaps the First Elder would have prevented Wei Mon Keth from speaking further, had he been given a chance. He’d surely seen more complex gambits from subtle opponents. But Lindon’s father had opened his mouth, and thereby opened a crack in his son’s armor. Now, Lindon was feeling the sting of the blade.

When a child first passed their test of spirit and received a Foundation-level badge, they were taught a rudimentary Foundation technique. This technique was the same for everyone in the clan, and was designed to acclimate children to feeling and cycling their own madra. When the child was ready, they would learn a more advanced cycling technique, one suited for their future Path. Unless the child was Unsouled.

Lindon would never learn a Path, so there was no point in preparing his soul for one. Even eight years after reaching Foundation, Lindon practiced the same basic cycling technique. Asking him to fight was like asking a soldier to step onto a battlefield armed only with a training sword.

Even the ten-year-old daughter of the Mon family would be better off than he was. She was a Striker on the Path of the White Fox, and surely her family would have taught her a better Foundation technique. Lindon had the advantage of size and weight, but she had the advantage of superior madra control.

He had no certainty in being able to defeat a girl five years his junior. He should have been used to shame by now, but that realization still hurt.

“Well?” Mon Eri demanded, when Lindon hadn’t responded to her challenge. The entire courtyard, packed with the heart of the Wei clan, stood waiting for his response. “Do you accept or not?”

“He has no reason to fight,” Jaran said, with a glance back at his son. “Only the Mon family has something to prove. Besides, you can see his injury for yourself.”

Wei Mon Keth crossed his arms and gave a harsh laugh. “If he is not a coward, he will answer.”

Hundreds of the Wei clan were gathered, including the First Elder. The weight of the combined attention pressed into him on every side, like a tightening fist.

The pressure seemed to push his shame deeper, rubbing it in like salt into a wound. He was useless, he was crippled, and now everyone was staring at him. The pain that leaked through his sling-bound arm was nothing compared to this. Lindon looked up to Whisper’s tower, imagining he could feel eyes on him even from the room at the top.

“When a traveler cannot find a path, sometimes he must make his own.”

Eri stepped forward when Lindon didn’t answer immediately, rubbing her fist like she couldn’t wait to drive it into Lindon’s face. Her father held her back, looking somewhat surprised.

When Lindon’s voice finally came out, even he was somewhat surprised. “In the Wei clan, there is only one family that produces cowards,” he said to Keth, the head of the Mon family.

Laughter and whispers traveled quietly around the gathered families, and Keth’s face turned red with anger. He forced out a few words: “Then you accept?”

It was up to the challenged party to set the terms, so he did. “Seven dawns from now,” Lindon said. “To surrender.”

For Lindon, there was no winning this fight. Either he defeated Eri, in which case he had beaten a ten-year-old girl, or he wouldn’t. No matter the outcome, he would lose face for his family.

He could only salvage a little by putting up a brave front, bowing to Wei Mon Eri with his fists pressed together. After a moment in which she looked like she would attack him, she returned the salute.

“If this distraction is over, I will get on with the business at hand,” the First Elder said. He flourished his smooth orus branch, looking down on Teris.

As the first strike cracked across Teris’ back, leading to a cry of pain, his family paid no heed. They were still watching Lindon.

* * *

When he wasn’t carrying out a special task for his Soulsmith mother, Lindon spent the second half of every day in the clan archive. The building was scarcely more noticeable than any ordinary house, with faded white walls and a wide purple-tiled roof. If Lindon had never seen it before, he might have mistaken it for the home of one of the Wei clan’s smaller families.

As the sun passed noon, he arrived in the archive. He first retrieved a broom to sweep the front step, which took twice as long as normal since he was forced to work one-handed, then re-organized the Path manuals that a few young Coppers had disturbed the previous evening. His fingers itched when he worked on this shelf, and he had to fight the temptation to sneak a glimpse, though the minimum penalty for an Unsouled studying sacred arts was a private beating. He’d survived such punishments before, and he would again. If he had to discover his own Path, he would eventually need an example.

For now, he’d settle for a shortcut.

The Eighth Elder was supposed to monitor the archive, but Lindon could never tell when the man was doing his job properly or not. As a Forger on the Path of the White Fox, the man was a master of the Fox Mirror technique; he could craft illusions as precise as a mirror’s reflection. More than once, Lindon had dared to sneak a glimpse into a simple Path manual, and the elder had appeared out of nowhere to punish him. Other times, Lindon had left the archives to spot the elder passed out on the roof.

For his purposes, so long as he didn’t open a Path, he had the archive to himself. Once he’d finished his chores, which took him only an hour or two, he began to gather the scrolls, folders, tablets, and books he needed for research.

Following a Path of the sacred arts was often likened to a journey, and he would never embark on a journey without a plan.

Shortcuts of advancement were common legends in Sacred Valley, and while many were proven to be effective—like the fruit of an ancestral orus tree—most were too rare, expensive, or dangerous for ordinary sacred artists. Lindon needed to hunt for a loophole, which meant poring over every option one by one.

Fortunately, the archive was not the clan’s most popular building. He had plenty of time to himself.

One scroll contained a personal letter from an explorer who had visited the four peaks of Sacred Valley in search of exotic madra aspects. She wrote of Greatfather’s tears, a spring that bubbled at the top of the mountain known as the Greatfather.

“One handful of water restored my aching body and flagging spirit. Two sent me into a cycling trance from which I would not emerge for three nights and days, having imparted to my spirit a density and potency that I had never before known. As I had not bathed in all that time, I dipped myself briefly into the spring, only to find the water anything but gentle. It scoured my arm like a frozen blade, and when I removed my hand, I found my skin more youthful and supple than ever before, in great contrast to the rest of my body. I advise any artist of the Jade to visit Greatfather’s peak as soon as they are able, provided they can withstand the storms and the pain of the pool itself.”

Lindon held down the scroll with his broken arm and copied the passage with his own brush, though the spring was not a possibility for him. Not yet. The Holy Wind School, which claimed the Greatfather as their territory, would never allow anyone less prestigious than a clan elder to visit their spring. And then only if they brought generous gifts.

The next possibility came in the form of a recipe pressed onto a wax tablet:

Bloodmaker Pill

Four feathers of a downy shrike

The spring branch of a marauder root, shaved clean

Three small leaves from any life-aspected herb

Blood essence from one Remnant of at least the fire aspect

Blood essence from one Remnant of at least the water aspect

Refine all ingredients in a refinery of twelfth grade or higher, arranging them according to the Six-Pointed Star method. Combine into a state of balance, then weigh and blend. Shape into pill form, and allow to stabilize for three days. A successful pill should have the sheen of polished gold and the color of new blood.

Carries the blood aspect, but improves the basic spiritual foundation. Most effective when taken before Copper.

Lindon copied it down, and a quick perusal of the clan’s herb stores—located in the back of the archive—suggested that they should have all the necessary ingredients in storage. His excitement grew until he realized that the only refiner with enough skill to prepare such a pill was gone, on a pilgrimage to the Heaven’s Glory School. Lindon couldn’t even begin to understand what the “Six-Pointed Star method” was, much less imitate it himself. And he had no idea where he would get a refinery of any grade.

The disappointment was a blow, but not enough to stop him. He had a time limit now, and if he couldn’t figure out a solution before his duel with Eri, he might as well not show up. His next possibility came from an offhand mention in a funeral document, chronicling the possessions of a traveler who had died in Wei clan territory. “He carried with him a parasite ring, of braided halfsilver etched with intricate script, which went into the keeping of the Patriarch to award to a promising practitioner of the Sacred Arts.”

That one bore investigation for later. A parasite ring would slow the cycling process, making it more difficult but also more rewarding. He’d heard it likened to weight training for the soul. He would keep watch for a way to earn or steal this ring from the Patriarch, or possibly earn one for himself if he could find a craftsman from the Golden Sword School. The only drawback was time; it would take time to acquire such a ring, and longer for it to show any effect. He marked his notes on the parasite ring, indicating that he should consider it once the duel was over.

Other books held fanciful legends for young sacred artists, their imaginations full of the wonders and powers out there in the world. It spoke of ancestral orus trees and their fruits—a story that was true, per Lindon’s experience, but exaggerated—and the Jester Twins, who would alternately hand out miraculous gifts or crippling curses. It told of the heavenly guardian within Mount Samara, and how enterprising disciples of the Heaven’s Glory School might earn a mark of its favor, and of the mythical “true badges” that amplified the power of human madra. Of the Oblivion Wine, which the Fallen Leaf elders always sold a year after the opening of the Nethergate. And it spoke of the Torchyard, an apocryphal location that Elder Whisper was said to have visited in his youth.

The Torchyard was supposedly a field of condensed fiery energy where, if you survived, you could harvest enough vital aura to fuel your advancement even to the legendary Gold stage. According to clan rumors, though, even Elder Whisper hadn’t managed to bear the torments of the Torchyard that long.

The story of the sacred fruit lent credibility to the other tales, but none of them were real possibilities. One could only meet the Jester Twins by chance, and their gifts were as likely to harm as help. He wasn’t a disciple of Heaven’s Glory, the true badges were no more than stories, and the Torchyard was far beyond his power. Even if he could endure the trip and make it back in less than a week, he didn’t know how to harvest natural fire aura, so he would simply burn to death.

His notes became shorter and shorter, his brush-strokes weighted by disappointment. He had combed through piles of likely manuscripts all day, and while he hadn’t exactly expected to stumble across a miracle, he had at least hoped for a possible lead. He’d only started with six full days between him and his deadline, and now the first was gone.

The sun had completely set, and he stood to light a candle. Once it burned down to the next mark, the archive would be closed, and he could leave. He would use this last hour to clean up, returning his texts to their places.

As he did, the Path manuals caught his eye once again. There were eight copies of The Path of the White Fox, two for each specialized technique. If he could borrow the one for Strikers, he could at least familiarize himself with the Foundation Mon Eri would use. Maybe he could find some weakness, something to exploit.

But he would never be able to read the manual long enough, and besides, Paths were meant to be studied for years. The White Fox was not the only Path on the shelf, though. There were two scrolls and a thick tome as well, all of them bearing Paths that the Wei clan had acquired from outside. No one practiced them, as far as Lindon knew, because they required madra of different aspects than the Wei clan cultivated. Those called to Lindon, but ultimately he turned from those as well. They may allow him to win the duel, but the First Elder would recognize what he had done and punish him afterwards.

He reached down and shelved a tablet, and in doing so, caught a glimpse of another shelf he hadn’t considered. Technique manuals described skills that could be cultivated in addition to a primary Path, and they were much shorter than Path manuals, often a single plaque or a finger-thin scroll.

Lindon knelt for a closer look. The section for technique manuals took up two shelves, divided according to the aspect the techniques required. Strips of white jade labeled the sections: here the character for fire, there the symbol for purification. His gaze skipped from section to section, from cloud to lightning to light to dreams. The last two had by far the largest selection, dealing as they did with madra of the White Fox.

But there was a section at the end of the bottom shelf with only one entry. An old book, it was little more than a sheaf of yellowed papers, bound together by string on one side. The jade strip declaring its requirements said, simply, “None.”

Carefully, Lindon withdrew the book, examining the name of this technique: Heart of Twin Stars.

5

While it violated clan decree for Lindon to follow a Path, it was technically allowed for him to study technique manuals. After all, he couldn’t actually use the techniques without madra of a compatible aspect, which he couldn’t harvest. Learning a technique outside of a Path was like tearing a branch off a tree and expecting it to bear fruit.

But this one didn’t need any particular aspect, nor did it require him to be of Copper level. He turned the first yellowing page, expectation transforming into a hopeful excitement.

I leave this manual out of obligation. Any technique deserves to be studied and remembered, in the hope that it may someday spark greater inspiration. Even such a dim spark as this one may one day strike a great flame.

The impetus for this technique comes from a longtime rival of mine, a deceitful and cowardly man whose name I will not honor by repeating it here. I bear the great shame of sharing a clan with this man, and thus we have challenged each other many times since our youth. They say that a good rival sharpens a warrior as a stone sharpens iron, but not my deficient opponent. I defeated him handily each time, and had no reason to grow in strength or skill. He was a pathetic match.

But some scrap of talent must have remained in him, for he developed an underhanded technique that he christened the “Empty Palm.” I will not lower myself to attempt the technique on my own, but as I understand the theory, he focuses neutral madra into a simple palm thrust. How he cancels out the aspects of his spirit, I have not yet deduced, but the result is undeniable.

When his Empty Palm makes contact with my core, his madra disrupts my own. For a few seconds, I am as powerless as a wretched Unsouled. Even more so, perhaps, as I can hardly muster the energy to control my own limbs.

I tried a series of techniques to defeat him, but each time he managed to land a single Empty Palm upon my core. Even such as he, with his lack of talent, can lean upon a technique as a crutch.

It is thus in desperation that I have developed this defense, and at last rightfully triumphed over him. Should he pass down this Empty Palm, I can rest at ease, knowing that my future disciples reading this manual may oppose his legacy.

Heart of Twin Stars is utterly simple in its concept: you must divide your core in two. Thus, even when one core is disabled through some device such as my rival’s, you have a second to rely upon.

The observant reader will notice that this does not increase the power available to you. Splitting one’s core is a painful process prone to many risks, though it is mercifully quick. If attacks such as the Empty Palm ever become commonplace, I wish to leave behind this defense.

Here at last, I leave a record of my journey to split my core, in exacting detail. Be sure to follow my path to the very step, lest you suffer a crippling injury from which you cannot recover.

Useless. Heart of Twin Stars was an utterly useless technique, which doubtless explained why no one practiced it. Even if he wanted to split his core in two, Wei Mon Eri wouldn’t have any techniques like this Empty Palm. He would be just as defenseless as before.

The book did include a cycling technique, which would at least work better than his own pathetic Foundation method, but he wouldn’t see any benefit before the duel. Besides, the cycling technique was designed to prepare him to split his core, which he never intended to do. The Heart of Twin Stars wouldn’t even make up for his broken arm, which—even with his mother’s scripts—could never heal before he had to fight.

His enthusiasm had dimmed, but not died entirely. The technique manual had given him a few other ideas he could try, and maybe a new search tomorrow would reveal more promising results. After locking up the archive—leaving the Eighth Elder drunk on the roof again, perfectly visible—he returned home, cycling his madra according to his new technique. His nerves kept him at it until dawn, and he would have continued except for a brutal hammering on his door.

“Get ready,” Kelsa told him, dressed in the orange shadesilk training clothes of a Copper Ruler. Her copper badge, marked with a scepter, hung proudly in the center of her chest. “You’re training with me today.”

* * *

Lindon brought his pack to the Shi family gardens, surrounded by blue mountain roses and tiny clusters of cloudbell, and knelt across from his sister. They faced each other over a stretch of grass.

Ordinarily, they would have joined the rest of their family in the main courtyard for daily cycling, but Kelsa seemed to have something else on her mind. She started off studying him, her hair pulled back and face severe.

“You seem tired,” she said at last. “You didn’t sleep well, which will slow your arm’s recovery. What were you doing?”

Over the years, he’d found that the fastest way to deal with his sister was to respond immediately and honestly. “Cycling. I was trying to process the rest of the fruit.”

“And have you?”

“Not fully.” The foreign madra still crackled like lightning in his core, but less than it had the day before. He couldn’t tell how much less, or if digesting it had made any difference at all. This was not the effect he’d ever imagined from a legendary natural treasure.

Kelsa cupped her chin in her hand, pondering for a moment. “We’ll come back to that. For the moment, we should discuss our strategy in getting you through the duel.”

Only five days left. “Can we?” he asked.

Her answering glare was as firm as a strike to the chest. “This is our family’s honor. If I can’t get you to acquit yourself well, I don’t deserve my badge.”

Lindon straightened his spine, adjusting for the increased pressure on his shoulders. “Then where do we begin?”

“Obviously, there’s no good outcome if you fight the girl. You’re shamed if you win, and shamed if you lose.”

He didn’t need a reminder of that, but he remained quiet, waiting for her to continue.

“Your only honorable option is to challenge someone of greater standing in the Mon family, like perhaps Wei Mon Teris. This has the disadvantage of getting you killed.”

That was a slight exaggeration; the Mon family wasn’t likely to kill a relative in front of the whole clan. But they could. And honor would require them to injure Lindon severely, which was another consequence he’d prefer to avoid.

“I suggest you fight the girl for a while and then concede. You could say that an Unsouled is not worthy to fight someone of the Mon family, which gives them face. They’ll accept, you’ll be embarrassed for a while, but in the end your reputation will improve. You will have handled the duel with grace and accepted defeat with dignity.”

“At the price of telling the Mon family that I’m worth less than they are.”

She nodded once. “Yes.” Kelsa never shied away from the truth.

Lindon didn’t think of himself as overly prideful, but he burned at the thought of humbling himself in front of all the other Wei families. For one thing, his Shi family would be seen as vulnerable if he publicly demonstrated his weakness. Their rivals would push them, seeking to exploit a perceived opening.

After watching his expression for a few seconds, Kelsa folded both hands on her knees. “But I’m sure you didn’t waste the day yesterday. What’s your plan?”

Sheepishly, Lindon reached into his sling, where he’d tucked the technique manual. “I found this technique in the archives. It’s not directly useful, but it might have given me an idea.”

She snatched the manual from his hand and glanced over the first page. “You want to split your core?” Her tone made it clear exactly what she thought of that idea.

“No, of course not.” While cycling according to the method described in the Heart of Twin Stars manual, he’d spent the night thinking. He suspected there were other uses for a split core rather than just defending against one specific technique, but they were too risky or difficult to test. “There’s a second technique in there.”

Kelsa looked back down at the book. “The Empty Palm.”

“It would be easier if I was Copper, I know, but in theory it’s just injecting your madra into a certain spot. It could be enough.”

She flipped through each page in the thin manual, paying special attention to the back. “It doesn’t describe the timing, or the energy flow, or the Foundation you’d need to pull it off. Only how to defend against it.” Kelsa snapped the pages shut. “But ultimately yes, I think there’s enough information here that we could develop a version of the Empty Palm. It’s simple enough anyway.”

Lindon leaned forward, eager. “Can you teach me?”

In the Wei clan, most sacred artists reached the Iron stage in their twenty-first or twenty-second year. For Kelsa to have reached the barrier between Copper and Iron at the age of sixteen meant that she was more than merely talented; she had the discipline and skill to match.

Abruptly, Kelsa rose to her feet. “That’s up to you. I have some ideas, but I need a living target with a functioning core if I want to try them out. That means you.”

“You can disable my spirit, but it won’t do much. I can hardly defend myself to begin with.”

Kelsa stretched first one arm, then the other. “That’s not what I mean. The manual mentions that he had to achieve purity for the technique to work. We don’t have time for that, so I’ll be pushing my madra into your core until I get a feel for the technique.”

As a sacred artist on the Path of the White Fox, Kelsa cultivated aspects of dreams and light, bent toward the purposes of deceiving enemies. Accepting it directly into his core meant…

“I have another idea,” Lindon said, with a half-step back. “I could try on you first, and we could work from there.”

“I need to understand the theory myself,” Kelsa said, dropping into a balanced stance on the balls of her feet. Her left hand was extended, her right held back, her whole body angled sideways. “First trial.”

Lindon tried to protest again, but Kelsa unfolded in a deceptively quick movement that left the heel of her palm against his core, just below the navel. She’d used hardly any force, and the strike came with no pain; it felt like a light slap, if anything.

But the world went mad.

The soft blue cloudbell flowers at his feet took flight, flapping around his eyes. Shadows in the bushes flickered and giggled, while the clouds zoomed around like zealous fish in the ocean of the sky. Grass tickled his feet through his shoes, and he tiptoed around to avoid it. The ground must not have liked that, because it finally had enough and slapped him in the back of the head.

He came to in a wrench of returning sensation, lying flat on his back in the garden and staring up into the sky. His arm had begun to ache again.

Over him, Kelsa was flexing her palm. “Too slow. The motion has to carry the madra, you can’t rely on transmission through contact. Stand up, I need to try again.”

Lindon crawled to his feet, still dizzy. “Wait. I think it’s worse on me, because I can’t—”

She hit him again.

After the garden stopped partying without him, he spoke from the ground. “I’m not standing up again. I’m not.”

Kelsa was moving at half-speed, stepping forward into a slow palm thrust. She repeated the first step a few times, working something out in her head. “Then you’ll be worthless for the rest of your life,” she said casually, but the words were like a spear to the ribs. “You don’t want to shame the family? Stand up.” She didn’t so much as glance at him, as though she didn’t care whether he stood or not. “I’ve almost worked it out…it has to transmit all at once. Not like a stream, but a gust of wind.”

Lindon stood up again. And again.

Eleven more times.

By the end, the earth never stopped spinning, even when the effects wore off. He tried to rise again, but up and sideways seemed to have swapped places, and he stumbled into the cloudbells. Their stalks were sharper than they looked.

Kelsa reached in and hauled him out with ease, steadying him with a grip on his shoulder. Ten breaths passed before he could take a step without swaying.

“Rally yourself,” she said. “Step forward and shove in one motion, focusing madra in your palm. Release it in one breath like a gust of wind, being sure to exhale and cycle to the rest of your body for stability. Understood?”

Lindon was trying to determine if his senses were back under control. Was that flickering shadow a sign of lingering madness, or a leaf blowing in the wind? “Please, I need…I need a moment.”

Kelsa rarely had the patience to wait around, and though she allowed him his rest, she did so reluctantly. She paced in the garden, studying Heart of Twin Stars as she did. “Let’s return to an earlier subject,” she said, without looking up from the book. “The fruit. Have you finished cycling it?”

“Almost all,” he said, sensing the tingling sparks that lingered in his core. “I haven’t noticed much of a change.”

She squinted at the page. “I can’t see clearly. Bring out your light.”

Lindon looked around at the bright morning light. “Do you need me to find a healer?”

She used the manual to point at his robes. “You’re my disciple for the day. Pull out your light.”

To his sister, Lindon would have protested. To his master, Lindon would have obeyed without a word. He spent a few seconds deciding which she was, and eventually reached into his pack to produce a palm-sized board.

The board was covered with an intricate three-layered script circle, and when he fed his madra into it, it burst into white light. The runelight was much stronger than from an ordinary script, and remarkably steady. That was this script’s only purpose: to produce light on command. It would last as long as the user’s spirit did.

Lindon held the board over the book with the shining script down, though it made no discernible difference among the bright sunlight.

Kelsa didn’t thank him, but spoke as she read. “I finished processing the orus last night. It was quite the experience. Did it feel as though you’d swallowed a thunderbolt? Mine did. But as I continued cycling, I didn’t feel much else. It was as though the fruit vanished. I wondered if Mother was mistaken, and this wasn’t the miraculous spirit-fruit she thought.”

She looked at him but kept her book open, so he didn’t remove the light. “It wasn’t until early this morning that I noticed the changes. Tell me, does your light seem brighter than usual to you?”

Lindon flipped the light over and examined it himself. It was almost impossible to tell how bright it was, especially compared to a memory. “Perhaps a little?”

“Keep watching until you can see a difference.”

Lindon knew his sister was headed somewhere with this, and he would exhaust himself eventually. He kept the light ignited, staring into it, looking for the slightest difference in illumination. He noticed nothing.

Finally, she told him he could stop. “How do you feel?” she asked him.

“Absolutely ordinary.”

“Yet you burned the light for fifty-two seconds, and you could have kept going. How long could you do it before?”

Unlike the brightness question, he could answer this one. “Thirty seconds, at most.” He had used this board to light his way while diving in the river, so he knew exactly how long he could keep it lit. But he must be wrong. When he sensed his core, he didn’t feel any stronger. “Are you sure you counted properly?”

She snapped the technique manual closed, wearing a pleased look. “The fruit’s madra integrates so smoothly with our own that we don’t notice. Yesterday I was Copper, and today I’m on the verge of condensing Iron, but I don’t feel any different. And yesterday, you wouldn’t be able to use the Empty Palm more than once without passing out.”

Lindon’s breaths were coming more quickly, and the flowers in the garden suddenly smelled almost painfully sweet. “What about now?”

She adopted a low stance, balanced and firmly planted, prepared to be hit. “How should I know? Now, disciple, Empty Palm!”

This time, Lindon snapped into action as he would for a real sacred arts master. He stepped forward and pivoted at the hips, launching a palm strike at his sister’s stomach. Synced with his madra, it should have driven energy through her core like a steel spike, but it splashed like a cup of water instead.

“One gust, not a breeze!” Kelsa barked. “Again!”

His head was already light and his limbs weak, but he tried until he passed out. When he woke, he tried again.

* * *

Four days later, the most prominent families of the Wei clan gathered once more before the Hall of Elders at the break of dawn. A few industrious sacred artists sat cross-legged in the courtyard, cycling in the first light of dawn. Everyone else stood, eager to watch the show. If something went wrong, an honored family might fall from grace today.

The Mon family waited on one side of a cleared space, Eri in front. She hopped in place, practicing attacks on an invisible opponent. Her scowl said she was looking to kill. Keth stood over his daughter, arms folded, scanning the crowd for the Shi family. Which was why Lindon had shown up together with his family. Kelsa and his father walked beside him, while his mother kept up as best she could while taking notes.

The First Elder stood on the stairs of the Hall, as he had before, but this time his brow was furrowed in a frown that seemed carved into his wrinkled face. “This is a duel for honor, and so it may continue. But any wounds to the young are wounds to our clan, so I must ask if there is any other way for the offended parties to resolve this.”

Eri executed a series of punches that veered ominously low. “No other way!” she declared.

Before his training with Kelsa, Lindon would have agreed with her. He’d seen no other way out. But while practicing the Empty Palm, he’d been struck by an idea.

A terrible idea.

He bowed toward the Mon family, bending over his wounded arm. “Honorable head of the Mon family, this one has a request.”

Keth straightened his back, responding to Lindon’s humble speech. “I will not release you from the duel.”

Lindon could probably appeal to the First Elder on the basis of his injury, and at least ensure a little more time. But there was an opportunity here, and if he let his own crippling weakness get in the way of opportunity, he’d never achieve anything. “This one would dare not ask so much. Instead, this one wishes to challenge another member of your family.”

Eri’s mouth dropped open in a comic show of disappointment, and she turned to her father as though to ask if he could possibly allow this. Keth, for his part, worked his jaw as though chewing the idea over. His eyes roamed to his fur-clad son, Teris, who still sat gingerly after his whipping. “Which would you challenge?” Keth finally asked.

Lindon met the eyes of this grown man more than twice his age, this fighter legendary for his unflinching courage in combat. “I challenge Wei Mon Keth.”

He had somewhat expected gasps from the surrounding families, or at least derisive laughter, but the crowd reacted with utter silence. A Foundation artist challenging an Iron wasn’t interesting gossip, it was like an infant trying to bite a tiger.

Copper souls could process vital aura, giving them a supply of madra that was both more expansive and more effective. But a quick or clever Foundation child could overcome that disadvantage. An Iron body was a qualitative difference; compared to Copper or below, Irons were superhuman.

Wei Mon Keth looked as though he’d lost what little respect he might once have had for Lindon, but he didn’t dismiss the idea out of hand. “Explain.”

“This one must prove his courage, as must your son, Teris.” A dark cloud passed across Teris’ face at even the indirect mention of his cowardice, but Lindon plowed ahead. “However, the opponent Teris faced was many levels higher than he. It seems only fair that this one should face an adversary as exalted.”

This time, a quiet murmur did ripple through the crowd. Lindon and his sister had spent two days making sure their argument was sensible enough that those gathered would have no choice but to take it seriously.

Within his sleeves, Lindon clenched his fists. He was close to the outcome he wanted, but he needed Keth to agree.

The head of the Mon family rubbed his short beard with two fingers. “This is a better way to demonstrate courage. What terms would you accept?”

Traditionally, the challenged would set the terms, which meant Keth would have been within his rights to set a fight with no restrictions and then knock Lindon onto the peak of the nearest mountain. But the other families would have looked down on him for abusing his power against a junior, so he took the honorable course and allowed Lindon to define the fight.

Which was Lindon’s only hope.

“One strike each, if it pleases you. First, you take one strike from this one without defense or resistance. Then you strike me in turn. The first to lose his footing is defeated.”

Keth’s brow furrowed. “You would be wise to set different terms.”

There was precedent for a duel like this, if not one so hilariously out of balance. Jade elders had once exchanged pointers one blow at a time, with the more confident party agreeing to take the first hit.

But this was supposed to look like Lindon was throwing himself on Keth’s mercy, and he had to hope that the Mon family head would see that. “This one hopes you might hold back when you strike, but at least this one may show that he is not afraid to take a blow.”

At last, Keth’s face lightened as he understood. Lindon was giving him a chance to administer a punishment equal to Teris’, humiliate Lindon publicly, and remind people of his own strength in one blow. As long as he didn’t kill Lindon, he would be seen as both strong and merciful, and he would only gain in reputation.

“You’re clever,” Keth said with a nod. “You show courage. I agree.”

That was it. The rules of the game were set, all his cards played. He almost couldn’t believe that it had gone so easily. He moved away from his family as though he drifted forward in a dream, opposing Wei Mon Keth across the open space in the center of the courtyard. He kept expecting someone from the Mon family to object, but none made a sound.

As the First Elder ordered them to face one another, Lindon’s heart pounded on the inside of his ribs. This was his chance. His first real chance since he was seven years old. It had been a long time coming.

So why did it feel too soon?

“If none object…” the elder said, almost hopefully. No one did, and the dawn air froze. The First Elder straightened his back, sweeping his hand to present the challengers. “Then may this duel begin!”

Lindon faced Wei Mon Keth, who stood taller even than he was, and twice as wide. The man seemed to take up more of the horizon than Yoma Mountain, looming over Lindon and blotting out the rising sun.

The older man’s arms fell to his sides, leaving his slate-gray robes completely undefended. “The first blow is yours,” he said. He didn’t even brace himself, as Kelsa had done. And why should he? With all of Lindon’s strength, he wouldn’t be able to tip over an Iron balanced on one foot.

Lindon stepped in, preparing his attack, cycling energy through his limbs to keep them under his control. He felt as though they would shake away from his body.

He cocked his upper body, drawing back for a palm strike. As he did, he focused his madra at the base of his palm, as he’d practiced. One pulse, like a gust of wind, but focused like an iron spike.

At the Copper level, this part of the process would be quick and simpler than breathing. His madra would have been dense and powerful. As it was, Lindon had to focus his entire strength on his palm for three breaths of time as he prepared. It was slow, it was clumsy, and it would never work against a prepared opponent.

But he wasn’t facing a prepared opponent.

The Empty Palm landed accurately, just below Keth’s navel, along with an invisible thorn that he drove like a hammer driving a nail. Lindon felt his own madra snapping into the man’s core, sensed the shiver of feedback that ran through the spiritual lines that crossed his body like veins.

Keth trembled and looked at Lindon in shock, but he didn’t stagger backwards as Lindon had hoped. He hadn’t taken a single step.

Panic shook Lindon even more than the Empty Palm shook Keth. His Empty Palm had been perfect…but if Keth didn’t lose his footing, it wouldn’t matter. Lindon would have to take a blow from an Iron Striker who knew that he’d been tricked. If Wei Mon Keth caved in Lindon’s rib cage with a fist, he would face no more than a fine.

“What have you—” Keth began, but Lindon followed up with a second attack driven by all the raw-nerved terrified desperation in his soul. This one wasn’t guided by any technique or sacred art; it was nothing more than an ordinary punch to the gut. Every observer in the crowd would know how useless it was. He would have a better chance punching an iron plate than an Iron practitioner.

Pain echoed up Lindon’s knuckles and reached his shoulder as though he really had punched a metal plate, but Keth’s breath whooshed out of his lungs. He clutched his stomach and took two steps backward, his legs shaking as he tried to stop himself from going to his knees.

Except for Kelsa and Lindon, every single other person present drew in a sharp gasp. It sounded like a ghost passing over the crowd.

Before anyone could speak, Lindon bowed to his still-staggering opponent.

“This one thanks you for your instruction,” he rushed out. “You are the victor.”

Then he scurried back to his family.

He didn’t need to win, after all. He only needed to save face. And while he may have been able to endure an attack from an Iron sacred artist who adhered to the honorable rules of a duel, he would never survive a blow from an enraged Iron with blood in his heart.

“Stand where you are, Unsouled!” Keth roared, and the shout was driven with all the force of his madra and fury. He straightened, which meant he’d recovered his spirit from the disruption of the Empty Palm. During Lindon’s tests with Kelsa, it only took her four or five breaths to recover, so it wasn’t surprising that someone at the Iron stage would be even faster.

Power gathered around Keth’s fist until it was visible, warping the air in a haze that reminded Lindon of the attack Teris had used to fell the ancestral tree. “I owe you a strike.”

His imagination provided him with an image of his body cracking in half as easily as that tree had, his bones snapping like dry branches. He was relying on someone to intervene on his behalf. His life was in the hands of the crowd, and for a long second, they were all silent. Even his father, Jaran, stared at him in confusion, still too shocked by the events of the duel to do anything to help.

To Lindon’s relief, the First Elder stepped between him and the Mon family head, his long eyebrows and wispy beard flowing in the morning wind. “Wei Shi Lindon has surrendered. The duel is over, and you are the victor. Congratulations.”

Lindon let out a heavy breath, and the sudden rush of relief stole his strength. He half-expected to collapse onto the stone at that instant.

Even the First Elder’s harshest critic could not have found a trace of mockery in his words, but Keth turned to him in a fury. “He cheated! He violated the terms of the duel by striking twice, in a deliberate attempt to humiliate me!”

“For which he deserved to lose,” the elder reminded him. “As he admitted his loss.”

Keth drew up in absolute rage, swelling to seemingly twice his size. “He conspired to ruin my dignity as an Iron!”

Jaran’s laughter was high and scornful as he hobbled his way forward, leaning on his cane. He’d finally overcome his confusion to side with his son…or at least against an old rival. “Whatever trick a mouse uses, it cannot defeat a lion. If Lindon decided to charge you with a spear, what is that to you? His strength should never have been able to harm you, no matter how he cheated. A true warrior of the Iron stage would not be shaken by a child’s punch.”

Lindon winced and pushed back further into the crowd. He had more or less expected Keth’s reaction, but he hadn’t anticipated his father making everything worse.

His sister caught him by the shoulder as he tried to sneak by. “Well done,” she whispered. She moved in front of him, ready to defend him at need.

The madra around Keth’s fist condensed into spinning balls of purple-edged white fire. Foxfire was only an illusion of flame; it produced no actual heat, but if it touched flesh, it would burn with the agony of real fire.

“I see how the Shi family addresses members of the same clan,” Keth shouted, trying to drum up support from the audience. “With shame and dishonor! Grant me a contest against Shi Jaran, the one responsible for the Unsouled, or I will find my own satisfaction here.”

The First Elder raised a hand. “Keth, Jaran, I have seen enough. Return to your families. This duel has concluded, and the Mon family is victorious.”

A few laughs from the surrounding gallery. No one present believed that the Mon family had won, least of all Mon Keth. By afternoon, there would be a new Mon family myth: the Unsouled who had struck down an Iron.

Lindon couldn’t deny his pride at the thought.

When the First Elder turned his head, thinking the matter settled, Keth flowed forward. He must have used some movement technique, because one step brought him before Jaran, his fist cocked back to deliver a blow that shone purple with foxfire. Lindon’s father raised his hands to defend, but even Lindon could tell he’d been caught off guard. His cane fell to the ground as he lifted both hands, his scarred face tightening into a grimace.

The scene flickered.

Jaran and the First Elder had switched places, and now Mon’s flame-wreathed fist was crashing down on the elder, not the head of the Shi family. Jaran’s hands were still raised to defend himself from nothing. For an instant, Lindon’s mind refused to accept what he was seeing. Had the First Elder switched places with his father in that breath?

In a move that seemed slow and clear—but must have taken half a second at most—the elder held up two fingers. He placed them to the side of Keth’s wrist, gently guiding the strike down and to the side. Foxfire swished through the air as illusory purple-white fireballs struck the stone, dealing absolutely no damage whatsoever.

Jaran lowered his hands, stunned.

The First Elder continued his movement, moving his two fingers to Mon Keth’s shoulder and pushing down. He didn’t appear to exert any effort, but the much bigger man collapsed to his knees, his hands behind his back. The elder flicked his sleeve, and intricate stone manacles appeared around his wrists.

Keth shouted, trying to force his way to his feet, but the First Elder had already placed a hand on the man’s hair. A ripple of force disturbed the air as it passed through Mon Keth’s body, flattening his clothes and sending a pulse of dirt blasting out.

His knees slammed back into the ground, and he resisted no further.

“Wei Mon Keth will be in isolation training for the next month,” the First Elder mentioned. “No doubt he wishes to meditate and learn from today’s events. During this time, the Mon family will be responsible for him. You are all dismissed.”

Lindon froze, replaying the scene in his mind.

The First Elder was a Forger on the Path of the White Fox. He couldn’t switch bodies, he could only Forge deceptions: copies of reality made of dreams and light with no real substance. White Fox illusions had no structure and could not resist the weakest attack; they relied entirely on crafting a perfect appearance. Forgers had to craft their pictures detail by detail. Even the First Elder could never have created an illusion so layered, so complex, as the scene Lindon had just witnessed.

Could he?

Suddenly Lindon found himself unable to tear his gaze away from the First Elder, the man who had directed the entire scene and maintained absolute control the entire time. Even now, as he instructed the Mon family to carry Keth away, he looked no more concerned than a man ordering his breakfast.

This was what a real sacred artist looked like. This was the sort of power Lindon wanted.

The power he would gain on his Path.

6

Jaran slammed his clay mug down on the table, sending orus wine sloshing over his wrist. “That was stupid. A warrior fights with his mind first. With strategy! You don’t risk your life on a fool’s plan that will leave you even weaker than you already are! When I was younger, I would never have…”

Lindon’s father went on, talking about the glorious days when he’d been one of the most promising sacred artists in the entire clan. They were alone in Lindon’s house, with no one to listen in, so Lindon nodded along and kept the mug filled. He already knew he’d been foolish.

He should have told his father and mother first. He was only blessed that they had been too confused to intervene, or they could have ruined everything in trying to save him.

How fortunate that they had left him alone.

“…don’t know what you were thinking,” Jaran continued, raising the mug to his lips. “So stupid.” With one hand, he roughly reached out and grabbed his son around the shoulders, pulling him into a one-armed hug. Lindon almost knocked over the bottle of wine.

“But it’s the best kind of stupid,” Jaran said, staring into his mug. “Only an idiot accepts a battle he’s sure to lose, but bravery and idiocy share a border. The son of a cripple might be a cripple, but the son of tigers won’t be a dog.”

Jaran coughed out a laugh, raising his wine as though for a toast. “They’ll soon see what a couple of cripples can do, son! A three-legged tiger’s still got a bite!” He downed the rest of his wine.

A golden rush filled Lindon from his core to his fingertips, like a pulse of fresh madra. His father approved of him. He hadn’t heard open praise from his father since he’d learned to walk. Certainly not since he’d first received his Unsouled badge.

Before Lindon could think of an appropriate response, Jaran upended his cup on the table, leaving it upside-down. That was even more of a shock; there was still half a bottle left. But his father leaned forward on the table, his expression turning as grave as his scarred lips would allow.

“You and your sister did well with the plan today, but I can’t be left out again. What do you intend for the Festival?”

Lindon had been more concerned about surviving the week with his honor intact, but he had given the upcoming Seven-Year Festival some thought. “The children at my stage will have better foundation techniques, but the Empty Palm gives me an edge in combat. I should be able to take first.”

“Empty Palm…” Jaran muttered. “Is that what you call it? Disrupts the enemy’s spirit with an injection into the core?”

He should have known his parents would see through it immediately. “Yes, Father.”

“You’re lucky. If you had cultivated any aspects at all, it wouldn’t have worked so well.”

Lindon rubbed his temple, memories of dream-like visions swimming in his head. “Kelsa put me on the ground with the same technique every time. I couldn’t trust my own eyes.”

“Of course she did. She’s a Copper, and you’re Unsouled. You can’t defend against her any more than an ant can stop a boot. If she had tried the same thing you did on Wei Mon Keth today, he wouldn’t have even noticed.”

That violated everything Lindon knew about the sacred arts, but his father wouldn’t be mistaken about something like this. “Surely when Mon Keth left himself undefended, Kelsa’s Empty Palm would have done far more damage than mine.”

Jaran’s fists tightened on the table. “Son, if that’s what you think, you came close to a harsh lesson today. A weapon held in ignorance only wounds its bearer.”

Lindon sat up straighter, a chill running down his spine. He thought he’d prepared for the morning’s duel as well as he could, but if he’d made a mistake…he really could have died.

“If it worked as you imagine, why doesn’t every sacred artist in the Wei clan use this Empty Palm? We could disable any opponent with one strike!”

“Because it’s difficult to strike the core,” Lindon said, knowing he was playing the fool. “The enemy would be on guard against it. I know it only worked against Mon Keth because he didn’t defend himself, and who would do that in battle?”

“You're missing the most fundamental reason. It's because your madra is pure.” He raised his hand, palm-up, where a hazy purple-white impression danced on his palm. His own power. “Our White Fox is formed from aura of light and dreams, and it will act according to its nature. Even unformed, you see.”

Lindon peered closer. As the energy danced in his father's palm, it gathered in the shape of a running rabbit, of a flag snapping in the breeze, of his mother's face. He thought he heard sounds, impossibly distant: the cry of a wolf, the panting of a man running for his life, the steady drip of water. The White Fox, unrestrained, tricked the senses by its very nature.

Jaran closed his fist, and the images vanished. “Untrained madra, that of a child or an Unsouled, is still pure. It has no form, and so it affects only the spirit...but it does so more naturally than anything else. There's very little defense against it. A strike from me would not have affected Mon Keth's core; if anything, it would have confused him for a moment before his own spirit rejected my influence. But yours influences the core directly.”

Lindon remembered a line from the Heart of Twin Stars manual, a note he hadn't given much thought: “How he cancels out the aspects of his madra, I have not yet deduced, but the result is undeniable.” The developer of the Empty Palm had come up with a way to purify himself in spite of his previous training.

Only a moment ago, he had worried that his ignorance may have taken him too close to death, but now he couldn't deny a measure of excitement. Of all the sacred artists in the Wei clan, only he had yet to absorb any vital aura. That meant he had capabilities no one else did.

His father saw his thoughts, and held up a hand. “Unfortunately, pure madra has only two uses. It can activate scripts, just as anyone can, and it shakes the spirit. That's all. For anything else, you may as well have no power at all. It's also incredibly difficult to strengthen your spirit without harvesting aspects from the world, and it typically requires elixirs or natural treasures. Like the fruit you found.

“If you cultivate aspects that exist in heaven and earth, you can soak vital aura from the environment as you cycle. That's how I do it, that's how your mother does it, that's how everyone does it. To keep yourself pure, you'd have to give up the easiest and most reliable way of getting stronger. Worse, you'd sacrifice your most dependable means of self-defense. A fire artist could burn arrows out of the air mid-flight, and a sword artist could strike them out of the air. An artist of pure madra would be helpless to affect the flight of an arrow. He would die as helpless as a bird.”

Lindon nodded seriously along with Jaran's words, but his enthusiasm didn't dim. It wasn't as though he meant to cultivate pure madra forever; he would start on a Path as soon as he was allowed. But this was an advantage he had now, an advantage that had gone to waste. Even an Unsouled wasn't entirely useless after all.

Having firmly driven his point home, Jaran drummed his knuckles on the table. “Your sister knew all this, so you were safe this time. But carelessness is a short path to death in the sacred arts, remember that. It's why a good plan is so important. Which brings me back to the Festival.”

Lindon thought for a moment before speaking, choosing his words carefully. “I plan to use the Empty Palm on my opponents. At the Foundation stage, they should have no defense, and I'll take first place easily.”

Jaran leaned forward, rapping him on the top of the head. It hurt more than he'd expected. “You said that before, but I was hoping you'd think this time. Acting without thinking is bad, but it's worse to think like a coward.”

Jibes and backhanded insults from his father were far more familiar than compliments. “Excuse my foolishness, Father, but I don't see the error in my words.”

“After the first strike, you always follow up with a second.” He laughed suddenly. “Like Mon Keth this morning, right? First hit lands, in comes your second one. You landed a hit today with your plan, with your sister's help and heaven's own luck. People see you as the Unsouled who beat an Iron. That's an advantage to you, which means you've got to strike again now. What can you get out of this?”

Lindon's body thrummed with hunger. The same appetite that Elder Whisper had woken by speaking of a new Path rose up in him now, a yawning void that demanded to be filled. This was his chance to snatch another piece for himself, to climb another step closer to everything he ever wanted.

He'd forgotten about his father, his mind racing from option to option. Could he leverage this notoriety into a request for training materials? He could borrow the parasite ring from the Patriarch, with the excuse that he needed it to prepare for the Festival.

No, he would have to appeal to the Patriarch directly, who wouldn't be able to show him favoritism. Lindon had fought with another member of the Wei clan, and thus not brought any honor to the clan as a whole, so the Patriarch wouldn't be able to reward him.

Maybe he could go to the Eighth Elder in the archive, and request a few minutes with the Path manuals. Not to take one, just to study and learn. But given the Eighth Elder's personality, he wouldn't be swayed by anything Lindon had done.

So it came down to one question: who had enough power in the clan to give him a gift and the motivation to do so?

A figure appeared in his mind, and he abruptly stood up. He froze when he remembered his father; even though this was Lindon's home, Jaran was both father and guest. If Lindon left, it would be disrespectful.

Jaran saw his dilemma and laughed again, flipping his cup over. “Go, wherever you're going. That's not the face of a coward, so my work is done here. And I have your wine to keep me company.”

Grateful, Lindon bowed his way out.

* * *

Lindon used the morning’s duel as an excuse to enter the First Elder’s home, which was readily accepted by the elder’s niece. She congratulated him on the way in. As soon as he passed through the door, he understood why the First Elder of the Wei clan would live here. It was the perfect place to cultivate White Fox madra.

Inside the hallway, mirrors shone to his left and right, reflecting his image in an endless chain stretching off to eternity. Foxfire flickered in the lamps, purple and white, casting phantom images on one mirror that weren’t reflected in the other. The effect, even one step inside the doorway, was like swimming in a sea of dreams.

The hall was perfectly straight, but Lindon still slid forward one careful step at a time, not daring to trust his senses. Since he’d trained the Empty Palm with Kelsa, he had gained a new appreciation for just how disorienting the Path of the White Fox could be.

As he moved deeper in the house, he passed more oddities intended to focus dream aura. One painting of abstract shapes reminded him of a stern face one second and a tight flock of crows the next. A snowfox statue seemed to follow him with its eyes as he passed. Clusters of chimes on the ceiling were interspersed with ribbons of paper, trailing his entry with soft whispers and fragile music. As sticks of incense burned, they produced conflicting scents; sweet like mint, acrid as charred paper, savory like a haunch of roasting meat.

The senses bent and warped in the house, and Lindon’s head ached after only a minute or two inside. He couldn’t imagine living under these conditions, but then again, he didn’t follow the Path of the White Fox. Maybe the First Elder was more comfortable here.

“Lisha?” the First Elder called from the other room. “What are you doing out there?”

A human voice gave Lindon something to anchor to, and he stumbled in that direction, running his good hand over the wall searching for a door. He found one, sliding it open.

The elder was inside, kneeling beside a low table, brush poised over a scroll. “I didn’t expect to see you again today, Shi Lindon,” he said, without looking up.

Lindon bowed over his broken arm. “This one begs your indulgence, honored elder.”

The First Elder waved his hand irritably. “Wait there quietly. I must reply to one of the esteemed Schools, who insist that we honor them by intervening in a problem that does not concern us.”

He had been ordered to silence, but Lindon took a risk. “A problem, First Elder?”

The elder rubbed a spot on his temple, glaring at the scroll as though it contained a death threat. “The honorable Heaven’s Glory School has lost no less than four disciples to abduction, it seems. Apparently an outsider is torturing and killing them for the secrets of their sacred arts.”

Despite the grim news, Lindon was somewhat excited. Torturing a rival disciple for secret arts only happened in legends. “Do they suspect the Wei clan?”

“No, no, don’t worry. This has nothing to do with us, and this certainly isn’t the full story, but they still want ‘assurances of our immediate and absolute compliance.’ The clans have enough to deal with without taking on the burdens of the Schools as well.”

“We’ll show the other clans our power at the Seven-Year Festival,” Lindon said, angling the conversation around to his point.

“As the Li and Kazan clans will seek to show us,” the First Elder pointed out. “The Kazan in particular are maneuvering aggressively for one of our farms by the river. They either know something about that farm, or they have some secret that allows them to act arrogantly. But the roaring tiger loses its prey to the tiger hidden in the brush. The Li clan has made no motion to improve its strength before the Festival, and that worries me most of all.”

The elder placed his brush down and straightened. “I forgot myself. These are not matters for an Unsouled. What brings you here, Shi Lindon?”

“This one has a request, honored elder,” Lindon said, bowing again. Then he dropped the humble speech and met the First Elder’s eye. “Today, I’ve shown that my ability reaches beyond my level of advancement.”

“You’ve shown that you can use tricks to embarrass a man more skilled and powerful than you are.”

“Honor by any means,” Lindon said, and the First Elder conceded the point with a nod. “I have every confidence in my ability to sweep the Foundation stage competition at the Festival.”

“As you should,” the elder pointed out. “You’ll be the oldest one competing by at least two years. That will win us no honor among the other clans.”

This was the very point Lindon had come to address. “The elder speaks truly. But this one wonders if the First Elder has considered the exhibition match.”

The victor of each stage won the right to challenge one competitor of higher advancement to an exhibition round. The Foundation winner could challenge a Copper, the Copper winner could challenge an Iron, and so on. It wasn’t a true contest, but rather a display of skill. Against a more advanced opponent, one could display one’s true ability.

The elder ran fingers through his long white beard as he thought. “It would improve our standing…if the Foundation champion from our clan could fight evenly with a Copper from another clan. If you could pull a trick like you did today, embarrassing another clan, then you would have earned a reward. What is your request?”

“A Path,” Lindon said simply.

“Out of the question,” the First Elder responded without hesitation. “Do you understand why we forbid Unsouled to practice the sacred arts? It’s for your own protection. You’re as likely to maim your own soul as to advance to Copper. Elixirs and training would be wasted on you. You would forever be the weakest one on the Path.”

Lindon was prepared to negotiate for a lower prize, but he sensed an opening here. As long as the elder was using reason to convince rather than making absolute statements, that left room for discussion. “The resources of the clan should obviously go to more promising disciples than I, but if I have defeated a Copper from another clan, then surely I’ve proven that I have as much ability as they do. If that’s true, then why should I be forbidden from practicing a path?”

Foxfire flickered in the corner of his eyes, showing him phantom motion that was as much in his mind, tempting him to turn his head. But he watched the First Elder as the old man thought. Hope grew with every second of the elder’s silence, and finally he opened his mouth to say, “You’ll be entirely on your own, you know.”

“If I may say so, being on my own has never stopped me before.”

The First Elder considered a moment longer, and then slowly nodded. “You’ll have access to the Path of the White Fox. I’ll have a copy made for you, so you don’t take resources away from other students. But, Shi Lindon, heed me: you must win.”

* * *

Iteration 110: Cradle

Suriel lurched from the Way into reality in a flash of blue light, floating at the high edge of atmosphere. A planet spread out beneath her like a childhood blanket, blue and green and familiar.

[Successfully arrived in Iteration One-one-zero,] said the ghostly Presence on her shoulder. It had come with the job, because no lone mind could control all the powers at Suriel’s disposal. [Local time is +5.2 deviations from standard.] She would lose time here, and communication with Sanctum would be delayed, so her journey would take longer.

But then, that was the point.

[What is the purpose of your visit?] the Presence inquired. It was an innocent question, as the Presence was innocent, but Suriel wondered at the answer herself.

[Recovery?] the Presence asked, and all over the planet, displays lit up in Suriel’s vision with diagrams and glowing ribbons of text. They marked artifacts of the Abidan, lost over the millennia, matching them to last known locations and possible uses. With a thought, Suriel declined.

[Education?] Places of historical and cultural significance lit like beacons, from the Arches of Dairan to the Twelve Rivers.

[Entertainment?] Sky dancers, spinning on clouds of wind madra, trailed Remnants like glowing streamers. An arrow pointed to a performance in progress on the other side of the planet. A play moved through the audience, actors in painted masks carrying prop daggers, sneaking around as though the viewers didn’t exist. A duel between two experts; one riding a stag with lightning for antlers, another carrying a spear of solid flame. The life and death of a nation rode on this contest, but she could watch from safety like an interdimensional voyeur.

[Business?] the Presence asked, and though it was equally innocent, Suriel imagined an accusatory tinge to the construct’s voice. Before she could stop it, details of Ozriel’s life spooled out on the spectral display, locations of interest blinking into being all over the planet.

The mountain under which he had been born in a dark chamber of stone.

The ruins of the library where he had once developed his own Path.

The pillars where he debated the ten greatest scholars of the day, leading three to commit suicide soon after.

The City of Anvils, sealed now, where he’d forged his first weapon.

The labyrinth where he died and returned to life.

The country home, buried beneath a meadow now, where his fury had first touched the Way.

Suriel wiped the display with a thought. She’d been a fool to come here in the first place. She was the Phoenix, not the Hound. The healer, not the detective. She didn’t need to find Ozriel—she needed to find his aftermath. The billions of people affected by his refusal to do his job.

Someone had to bring them back to life.

But here she was, shirking her duties in the safest world of all creation. Even Sanctum was more likely to fall to corruption than this place.

Cradle was the birthplace of the Abidan, and theoretically Ozriel could cripple their organization for millennia by destroying it, but crippling them was never his goal. Makiel didn’t understand that, though Suriel did. He would never return here, and he would not allow it to fall through his inaction. Of all the worlds she oversaw, this was the most secure.

[Then why are you here?] the Presence asked, sensing that Suriel needed another voice. From anyone else, the question would have been damning. She was a healer, the greatest in existence, and she was dallying on the way to a war zone. Thousands died in every second that passed here. If they remained dead long enough, even she couldn’t bring them back.

But he might be right.

Ozriel had done unconscionable things in the service of the Abidan Court. They were all in the name of order among the worlds, but anyone else would have been indicted for war crimes. Though she understood his rationale, she had never felt comfortable with Ozriel on the job.

Then he quit. Ozriel, the celestial executioner, had refused to demolish condemned worlds. The Reaper had hung up his scythe. The other Judges were out for blood, and they expected the same of her. But how could she blame him for not murdering billions?

[The corruption spread from his inactivity will affect trillions,] her Presence said, responding to her unspoken question. [If it is not curtailed, then it will soon spread to tens of trillions, until the Court is forced to implement quarantine procedures.]

That was why Suriel delayed. Not because she didn’t want to heal the dead and dying, but because the other six Judges would have gathered together. They would want her to vote on a world-spanning quarantine that would leave dozens of worlds without the protection of the Abidan.

It was the exact attitude that had driven Ozriel to leave.

She needed a moment to think, here in a world outside of it all. A world that, though it was torn in an eternal thousand-sided war, existed in isolation. For her, that meant peace. Time to consider. Maybe she could solve some small problems, as a break from the cares of an entire universe.

[Problems,] her Presence acknowledged, and constellations of dots and lines spread all over the planet. Spooling text and images showed Suriel all the wounds she could heal, all the small problems she could fix while ignoring the larger troubles that overwhelmed her.

Here, a monstrous eel undulated through the ocean, spreading clouds of poison over an underwater city. Ten thousand kilometers away, a plague devastated a spire full of white-clad pacifists. On another hemisphere, a kilometers-long azure dragon flew on a violent storm, moving like a hurricane toward a small kingdom.

The text showed her ten million people she could save: from rape, murder, genocide, slavery, starvation, ignorance, disease. Ozriel would try to save them all, and would fail, but the world would be better for his efforts. Makiel would leave those problems to mortals and focus on the bigger picture.

As Suriel stared at the web of information spread out over the planet, trying to decide, another star flared to life. It was red rather than blue, representing a crime that was fated to happen. She focused on it.

[Imminent spatial violation,] her Presence reported. [Domination of local inhabitants by an outside power is predetermined to follow.]

Someone who had grown beyond this world was trying to return to Cradle, using outside power to set up their own fiefdom in this relatively simple plane of existence. That was a grade three violation, something that the local Sector Control Abidan would address, but they’d take their time about it. This level of crime was far beneath her notice, but both Ozriel and Makiel would have agreed it was worth stopping.

It was perfect.

She took a quick stock of her appearance, to make sure that she wouldn’t start any myths by descending. Transparent gray ghostlines ran from the back of her head, twisting down her right arm to terminate in her fingers. Those would be strange, but not alarming. The Mantle of Suriel ran behind her like she’d tied a river of burning light around her neck, and she made that vanish. Her white uniform was seamless, a layer of inch-thick liquid armor that coated her from her neck down to her toes. It would be obviously unnatural, but shouldn’t alarm anyone. They would assume it was Forged madra, which was close enough to the truth. She left it.

She couldn’t bring her weapon, though it pained her. The meter-long shaft of blue steel hung at her hip, innocuous enough, but she couldn’t take the one-in-a-billion chance that she might somehow leave it in Cradle. With an effort of will, she banished it back to Sanctum.

Her long hair drifted around her, luminescent green and shining against the darkness of space. She toned it down to a deep shade of jade barely distinguishable from black, then focused on her eyes. Her irises had expanded to take up most of the sclera, marked with a ring of symbols that a few people on the planet below might recognize as script. They were tools to help her see the flow of fate, but they might advance the development of Cradle scripting beyond acceptable limits. Her eyes burned as though she’d pressed them against red-hot iron, but she endured, altering them to a roughly natural shape in a matter of seconds. They were still large and purple, but they looked human enough.

Suriel’s will flickered to the Presence, which acknowledged her command. [Plotting course to the fated violation. Destination: the Sacred Valley. Distance: one hundred sixty-two thousand kilometers. Engaging route].

In a streak of blue, Suriel took off.

7

Once the sling came off Lindon’s broken arm, he redoubled his training. The Seven-Year Festival raced closer, looming over him, and he resented every minute of rest that might cost him his chance to read a Path manual.

He still intended to find his own way in the sacred arts, as Elder Whisper had told him, but he didn’t know enough yet. He needed to research the Path of the White Fox, and once he did…well, maybe he would find that it fit him. Maybe he wouldn’t need to explore a new Path at all.

He spent the mornings in the Shi family courtyard with Kelsa, where her beating him counted as training. Afternoons belonged to the archive, and he spent that time studying the other technique manuals to which he was allowed access. He never found anything else as perfectly suited for him as the Empty Palm, but he studied the theories. In the evening, he cycled.

The cycling technique in the Heart manual was intended to prepare him for splitting his core, which he never expected to need. Still, it was also a technique meant to improve pure madra manipulation, and thus a better match for him than the Wei clan’s Foundation technique. So he continued to use it.

The orus fruit treasure had long vanished, its power incorporated into his own, and he no longer felt the tingling lightning in his core. He felt no stronger, but his results spoke for themselves: he could practice with Kelsa for hours, using the Empty Palm ten or twelve times, before he gave in to fatigue. And that was due to his sister’s relentless beatings more than spiritual exhaustion.

Three days before the Festival, only a few hours before noon, Lindon spotted an opening in his sister’s stance. He took it, driving an Empty Palm at her belly.

She knocked his wrist wide, stepping in to put a fist into his side…and froze, her elbow cocked back, loose strands of hair drifting in front of her face. Her eyes were fixed on something behind him, beyond him, and he knew at once something was wrong.

“Kelsa?” he asked, taking a careful step back. She didn’t respond, and if he couldn’t hear her breaths, he wouldn’t have known whether she was still alive. In fact, she was still breathing in rhythm according to her Foundation technique.

Her eyes still glazed over, she folded up and sat on the grass. Her hands rested on her lap, her breathing deepened, and tiny balls of foxfire began to dance in the air around her.

When Lindon realized what was happening, he ran for his parents.

He found them together, outside their house, his father cleaning a boar as his mother did something similar to a Remnant. A bucket of bloody guts sat next to a scripted basin containing loops of light and color. Claws of Forged madra slowly fizzed into nonexistence next to slabs of meat leaking blood.

Lindon skidded to a halt in the yard. “Kelsa’s advancing to Iron,” he announced, then he ran back the other direction.

His mother overtook him in seconds and his father wasn’t far behind her, hobbling on his cane faster than Lindon could run. They both reached Kelsa before he did.

Sweat already soaked her training robes, plastering her hair to her neck. Her breath came in labored gasps, and each exhale was tinged with White Fox madra. Phantom images danced in the vital aura around her, complete with sounds; half-formed, unrecognizable ghosts that screamed, laughed, growled, and muttered as they were born of dreams and light.

White Fox madra swirled around her in a cyclone of illusion and color. Purple and white predominated, but every color flickered through, like bright-scaled fish flitting in and out of the light. Purple sparks twisted in the air, cast off Kelsa as though from a bonfire.

Nearby, the underbrush rustled, and a snowfox peeked its snout out to watch. It was young—only one tail trailed behind it in the bushes—but it was still drawn to the madra it sensed was so similar to its own. According to legend, the first Wei Patriarch’s ascension to Jade had drawn snowfoxes from all over Sacred Valley in a pilgrimage that lasted three days.

Kelsa’s eyes drifted closed and then snapped open, blazing with purple-edged light. All around her, vague dreams bloomed from the earth like squirming flowers.

“Second stage,” his mother noted, scribbling as she watched.

“She might be as fast as I was,” Jaran said, a proud smile on his twisted lips. “Copper to Iron in less than an hour, and no worse for it.”

“Then we should prepare for the third stage,” Seisha said.

“Prepare?”

“Not us,” she said, with a significant glance at Lindon. “You should leave, son.”

Lindon rarely defied his parents, but this was an exceptional chance. He’d never seen anyone advance to Iron before, and this was his sister. “I’d learn more if I stayed to the end.”

“Too dangerous,” Jaran said, hobbling over to take him by the arm.

Then a ripple of purple-white madra pulsed out from Kelsa, and Lindon learned what his father meant.

White Fox Forgers used the Fox Mirror technique to create illusionary copies of exact appearance but no real substance; some built false walls, or hid in fake trees, or adopted the clothes of their enemies. Legend said the Patriarch could create a twin of himself as indistinguishable as his own reflection.

Enforcers kept their madra close, even inside, and White Fox Enforcers deceived their opponents by hiding their steps or subtle movements in a skill called the Foxtail. Their punches looked slightly longer than they were, their steps shorter, their motions faster, their reactions slower. In battle, where victory or defeat could ride on the accuracy of split-second judgments, Enforcers of the Wei clan could be the most frustrating enemies.

Strikers cast their madra out to use on others, and White Fox Strikers learned to manipulate foxfire. They could make a target feel like he was burning to death, or illuminate a target with a spark only they could see, or cloud an enemy’s vision with phantom lights. The Striker technique was considered the weakest in the Path of the White Fox, but nonetheless it had certain advantages. Foxfire did no real damage, but it did inflict pain, and its purple-and-white flames could not be extinguished.

Rulers worked differently. Rather than manipulating their own madra, they used their madra as a catalyst to control vital aura. As for Rulers on the Path of the White Fox, they directed aura of light and dreams to trap their enemies in a Fox Dream.

As Kelsa’s power flew out of control, Lindon’s vision fuzzed as though every surface crawled with ants. One of the nearby bushes seized the ground with one branch and hauled itself out of the earth, its exposed roots trailing dirt. It scooted toward him, pale blue cloudbells bobbing. Shadows giggled and whispered, flinching away when his gaze moved to them. They scuttled away in shy groups to spy on him from another angle.

One of the clouds dipped down from the sky to look him in the eye, until his vision was filled with cottony white. Once it was pleased with whatever it saw in him, the cloud left on its merry journey.

He recoiled after a single glance at his parents’ faces. The scar at the side of his father’s lip expanded until the man’s face was only one giant mass of tissue, pale and puckered. His mother’s eyes glowed, and every word dropped from her lips with the weight of heaven’s decree. The earth shook as she spoke, and Lindon clapped his hands over his ears.

When the earth righted itself, he found that he was curled up fifty feet away from where he’d started, and his hands weren’t over his ears at all. They were contorted into claws, and his wrists were firmly pinned against his chest by his father.

“You won’t tear your eyes out now, will you?” Jaran asked.

Lindon shook his head, too afraid to say anything. He had hated the times when Kelsa injected her madra into him, but she hadn’t ignited any vital aura then. His delusions had been much more detailed this time, like an utterly convincing dream. Last time, shapes and colors had lurched around until he couldn’t tell where anything was, but this time…he had seen a plant uproot itself in full color, and now the cloudbell bush sat planted as solidly as ever.

“Even you can develop a defense against this sort of thing,” Seisha said, though most of her attention was on her daughter. “Your spirit has supreme control inside your own body.”

Lindon was very interested in learning more about that, but for now, one thing mattered more. “How is she?”

It wasn’t common, but there was always the possibility of disaster during advancement. When someone was interrupted while advancing, or tried to advance during a fight, or used elixirs to force an advancement early, they could end up facing a backlash. Their madra could turn against them, killing them or removing their ability to practice the sacred arts.

In that case, Kelsa might be no better than an Unsouled.

Seisha leaned over her daughter, brown hair falling into the girl’s face, and cast a clinical eye over her body. Kelsa was now lying in a heap on the grass, sweat-soaked but breathing evenly. She was streaked with grit like black mud, which gave off a stench that burned Lindon’s nose from yards away. Advancing to Iron refined the body, expelling impurities. Seisha pressed two fingers to the girl’s throat, and then to her core.

Kelsa groaned, stirring.

“Did you do it?” Jaran asked, leaning over her.

In response, Kelsa reached out and gripped a young sapling with one hand. In one simple movement of her thumb, she snapped it in half.

“Call the elders and break out the wine,” Seisha said. “The Wei clan has a new Iron.”

The same night, the clan turned out for a celebration in honor of Wei Shi Kelsa. Even some guests from the other two clans and four Schools were in attendance, having arrived early for the Festival. The Patriarch presented her with her new badge in front of all the gathered families, and the First Elder gave her a polished case containing a trio of valuable elixirs. They represented a significant expense for the clan, but the wise gambler bet on the fastest horse. Resources went to strengthen those who were already strong, not to bring up the weak.

It was the way life worked, and Lindon had no cause to complain. He might as well complain that the heavens hadn’t given him a stronger soul. Instead, he looked forward. His sister was ready for the Seven-Year Festival, and now it was his turn.

* * *

That night, Lindon stuffed a shovel into his pack and prepared to cheat.

The Wei hosted the Festival this year, an honor and a responsibility that increased the pressure on their families to perform well. As a result, the clan’s Enforcers had been working for over a year to construct a brand-new arena in which to display the contests.

The arena was circular and made almost entirely of orus wood, with one huge script etched around the inside to prevent power from spilling over into the audience. The seats were tiered in layers and separated by clan colors—purple and white for the Wei clan, green and gray for the Li clan, and brown and red for the Kazan. One higher box would contain guests from the four Schools, separating them from the common rabble outside.

The stage itself was a square of pure white stone a hundred yards to a side, divided in eight sections by lines in the floor. The Foundation children would use all the sections at once, with eight fights simultaneously until the number of participants was reduced. The Coppers would use a quarter of the stage each, the Irons half, and any pair of Jades who decided to settle a grudge or demonstrate their skill for the younger generation would have the whole stage to themselves.

Outside the arena were four polished wooden columns, each ringed in script and topped by Forged snowfoxes. These five-tailed white foxes, each an almost exact copy of Elder Whisper, paced on their columns or yawned or licked their paws just as live sacred beasts would have. They would be indistinguishable from life to every sense except touch, which explained why they were elevated so far above the ground.

If not quite famous in the Wei clan, Lindon was at least known, and the guards allowed him inside on the pretext that he was checking a script for his mother. She had led the work on the four foxes, for which she was expecting a reward from the Patriarch.

Under the protection of his mother’s name, Lindon had a thorough look around, inspecting the stage, the columns, the seats, and especially the ground inside the arena.

Then he walked into the woods.

He carried a spirit-map with him—his mother’s analysis of the local Remnants—and there were a few around here that might cooperate. When he reached a likely spot, he knelt down and scratched a script circle in the dirt around him. His skill as a scriptor had improved since he was a child, but only to the point where he wouldn’t embarrass his mother by laying a simple layer of protection. At least, not while he was copying it from a book.

Mount Samara loomed over the Wei clan to the east, lit by the massive halo of white light that they called Samara’s ring. It glowed brighter than the moon, casting all of Sacred Valley in white, but the depths of the forest were still bathed in shadow. He had expected to use Samara’s ring for enough light to read, but he had come prepared nonetheless, pulling a candle and a striker out of his pack.

Seconds later, he squinted at his mother’s scripting guide by candlelight. He could have used the scripted light in his pack, but he wanted his madra fresh to deal with the Remnant. He smoothed out one symbol, correcting another, brushing pebbles and twigs aside to keep each rune as close to the guide as possible. After satisfying himself that the circle was at least as secure as he could make it, he sat cross-legged at the center, book on one side and candle on the other.

Then he threw a rock at the hornet’s nest.

Hornets buzzed out an instant later, furious and seeking vengeance…but not living hornets. Remnants. They were made of bright emerald color, as though some artist had dipped her brush in a jar of green ink and painted them onto the world. But not in full detail. Rather than accurate depictions of the hornets they’d been in life, these Remnants were mere sketches. Outlines, swirls of lines and shape that somehow suggested hornets.

The swarm flitted around Lindon’s circle, stingers at the ready. Script wasn’t some magic language of the heavens, as old mythology suggested. Each rune was a shape that guided vital aura in the air, reshaping it to a new purpose. This particular circle was the reverse of the one he’d used on the Remnant of the ancestral tree; it would catch and eject any madra that attempted to cross the line.

And Remnants, while strange and powerful, were made entirely of madra.

The hornets could fly high enough that the script circle would lose its effect, but they didn’t. They stayed, either unaware that they could fly over, or intrigued enough to hear what the human had to say.

Lindon hoped it was the latter. For one thing, that suggested that these Remnants were intelligent enough to hear him out. Which meant they’d be less likely to flock through and sting him to death as soon as the circle dropped.

The only way to judge a Remnant’s intelligence was through experience. The tree-Remnant, the newborn spirit of a plant, had displayed little intelligence at all. If this swarm was smart enough to wait on him, he could take a little risk.

Lindon held up the other object he’d brought inside the circle with him: a clay jar with a wide mouth and a tight-fitting lid. He opened the lid, showing the hornet Remnants the shining blue crystal—barely the size of a child’s fingernail—that lay within.

At the sight of the crystal flask, the hornets buzzing increased to a frantic pace.

“Honored sacred beasts, this one comes to you in humility,” Lindon began. They weren’t sacred beasts any longer, but more respect was always better than less when it came to Remnants. Or people, he supposed. “In exchange for this offering of spirit, this one begs you to wait inside this vessel for only three days’ time.”

Sacred artists typically filled flasks this size by the handful, but this one had taken him almost a week. It was the best he could do, considering how little strength he started with, and how exhausted his spirit was after a day of training with Kelsa.

The bright hornets buzzed frantically, pushing as close to the circle as they dared, hungering for the bare human power they sensed within. A few of the green-sketched shapes got a little too close, and their own energy activated the script. Runes shone weakly, and an invisible force pushed them backwards.

This circle could be overwhelmed, and would do precisely nothing against Remnants with bodies bigger or more solid than these insects, but tonight it held.

Can they understand me? Lindon wondered. He cleared his throat and tried again.

“Honorable…cousins of the hive, this one wonders if you would agree to rest inside this jar. In return, this one gives you an offering of his spirit. In only three days—”

A buzzing interrupted him, forming a voice, harsh and monotone. “WHY?”

Lindon’s breath caught. He had hoped they were intelligent enough to accept a crude barter. It had never occurred to him that they might speak.

He bowed forward so deeply that his forehead pressed against dirt, just shy of the script. He almost shivered, knowing that their emerald stingers were only inches from his scalp, but it would be disrespectful to show fear in front of this strange Remnant. Not to mention unwise.

“This one wishes to call upon your might before the sun sets three days hence. This one will break the jar, whereupon you will attack another human of my direction. Not this one, if it pleases you. One other.”

The buzzing dipped and rose, as though the hive were trying to find the right pitch for the words. “WE…TAKE. SPIRIT. ROCK.”

The flask. “Of course, sacred ones! Take it. Drain it dry. It is yours.”

The hornets spun around in a dance, conferring with one another. Human madra was more than mere food and water to Remnants; they could advance with it. Evolve. Gain in wisdom, power, and concentration.

He didn’t care if they ascended to the heavens, so long as they helped him.

“AGREE,” the hive responded.

Lindon hastily scuffed the nearest symbol with the heel of his foot, but fear punched him in the gut as soon as he did. In his eagerness to close, he hadn’t specified anything about his current safety. They had agreed not to attack him once he released them, but nothing stopped them from plunging their stingers into him tonight.

Abandoning dignity, he curled up into a ball as they swarmed past him and into the jar. He held arms over his face for a full minute or two, sweating, before he realized that the buzzing had quieted.

He glanced into the jar. A cluster of hornet Remnants, like sketches of green paint, climbed all over each other at the bottom. The tiny flask was only visible as a faint twinkling of light, and as he watched, that light dimmed. A few of the closest Remnants brightened visibly, gaining new details: here a new joint on a leg, there a segment of carapace, as though they somehow grew more real before his eyes.

He bowed once more to the open jar before carefully placing the lid on. As soon as they couldn’t see him, he wiped sweat from his brow and sagged down in relief.

Remnants weren’t likely to kill him, not as long as he dealt with them in good faith, but they could very well have taught him a painful lesson. This had been a gamble—not a huge one, but one with a potentially uncomfortable downside.

The wise gambler bets on the fastest horse. The Wei clan had taught him well. Eagerly, he wrapped a line of weighted shadesilk around the jar. When tied, this held the lid, ensuring that an awkward misstep on his part wouldn’t spill hornets everywhere.

The Remnants could fly straight through the jar, if they wished. A ring of script around the sides discouraged that, but it was even weaker than the circle he’d used to protect himself earlier. They could push through as easily as a man pushing through a screen. What really held them was their word.

It wasn’t as though Remnants couldn’t lie, but rather that they acted exactly according to their nature. For most, they simply wouldn’t accept an unfavorable deal. It would never occur to them to accept and then break it.

Lindon erased all evidence of the night’s work in minutes, packing his gear up in his worn brown pack. The jar of Remnants went in last of all, carefully secured.

It was most of two hour’s hike back to the clan, but he hardly noticed the time. His chances had just doubled.

He walked past the street that led to his rooms, instead heading back to the arena. The guards allowed him back in without further questions, leaving no one to watch him. They were his family, if only distantly; they knew him. So no one saw as Lindon took a shovel to the soft earth, digging straight down until he bared the sides of the stone blocks that made up the stage floor.

When he got beneath them, he adjusted his angle, hollowing out a space under the block. A space just big enough for a sealed clay jar.

He was sliding the jar into the opened earth when his mother’s voice sounded from behind him.

“Still practicing?”

8

Lindon turned to face his mother, hiding the hole and the sealed jar behind him. “Your son is honored to see you here, Mother. But why...I mean, if I may ask why you...”

Seisha saved him the effort of explaining by walking forward and leaning over the hole he'd dug. Her drudge gurgled as it floated over her shoulder, no doubt detecting the Remnant sealed within.

“While the arena is under construction, the staff answer to me,” Seisha said, kneeling to run a finger along his scripted jar. “I asked them to report anyone entering tonight, but I never thought it would be you.”

Lindon was afraid to move, lest it somehow push his mother over the edge from calm to furious. “I'm sorry to have disturbed you, then.”

Seisha stood, flipping brown hair over one shoulder. “You can think of nothing else you've done that might warrant an apology?”

Despite the cool of the night, he broke out in a sudden sweat. He had thought of cover stories depending on who caught him, but none of them would pass his mother.

She looked into the hole with brown eyes, lighter than anyone else in the clan. “Back home, we had a saying. 'The disciple follows the master, but the genius blazes their own trail.' You should cover this up before someone else sees it.”

Lindon wasted a second on astonishment before grabbing his shovel and setting to work. He piled the dirt back in hastily, hoping she wouldn't change her mind. “Mother, are you calling me a genius?”

“Obviously not. It's just a saying.” He couldn't deny a moment of disappointment before his mother continued. “Nonetheless, I’m proud of you.”

The shovel felt light in his hands as his mother's words danced through his mind, so it wasn't until he'd worked in silence for minutes more that he thought to ask a question. “Who were you expecting?”

She gave him a wry glance. Because he knew her, he knew what it meant: she had hoped he wouldn't ask that question. But Wei Shi Seisha would answer it anyway, because she believed that curiosity should always be rewarded. “Have you heard any rumors about the Li clan recently?”

The First Elder had said they were too quiet, suspiciously so, but Lindon suspected he wasn't supposed to have that information. He shook his head.

“Three months ago, they purchased an unusual item from an auction. A fragment of a stone tablet dating back thousands of years, supposedly found at the base of the Nethergate. It was covered in runes that may have had some...unique properties. But no one could ever prove it.”

“What sort of properties?” Lindon asked, leaning on his shovel.

“It looked like half of a script intended for direct spatial transportation. The stuff of myths. Walk into one circle and emerge in another one a world away, stories like that. I examined the tablet myself, before the Li clan bought it, and I could not confirm it.”

Still, Lindon's imagination burned with the possibilities. That really was the stuff of legends.

“Since they bought the tablet, we haven't heard much from them at all, but we've started to receive reports that they've been hunting specific Remnants. A rabbit that crosses yards in the blink of an eye. A bat that can vanish into nothing. A mole that burrows through thin air. We believe they're trying to condense spatial madra.”

Spatial madra. It sounded ridiculous. “Apologies, Mother, but how could that be? How could madra take on the form of space?”

She pointed at him, and he knew he'd struck the heart of the matter. “It can't. Madra can imitate anything from fire to dreams, and we call those forms ‘aspects.’ Obviously, to speak of space having a form is absurd. They are actually seeking to pierce and control space using madra, which should be impossible.”

But there had to be more to the story, or his mother wouldn't be so uneasy. “Then the Li clan is wasting their time. And their money.”

“I've worked with some of the Li Soulsmiths, who would be leading any project involving Remnants. They're underhanded and some of their theories are suspect, but they wouldn't commit clan resources to a project unless they had reason to believe it could succeed. That is what scares me. Everything I've heard leads me to believe that they're investing everything into a fool's dream, so they've either gone insane...or they know something we don't.”

Lindon shivered even as he finished filling in the hole he'd dug beneath the stage, patting the soil down so that it fell flush with the stone block. If the Li clan did try something during the Festival, it reassured him that he at least had one hidden weapon.

Seisha held a glowing blue stick of Forged madra up for her drudge's inspection, and it ran segmented legs over the stick before whistling in response. She noted something down on her notepad. After only a few minutes, she'd already moved on to her next project. “If you've finished, we should leave the arena. It won't be long before someone asks what we've been doing here, and the shovel will be hard to explain.”

On their way out, Lindon asked a question that had unnerved him as soon as he'd thought of it. “Will the Li clan try something during the Festival?”

“Undoubtedly they will,” she said, deep in her notebook. When he responded with uneasy silence, she elaborated. “The clans always try something during the Seven-Year Festival, because it's the best time to strive against one another. They'll propose 'sure' bets, or try to rig trading agreements. Nothing unusual. As for our earlier discussion—” They were walking past a guard, who nodded to them as they left. “—I suspect it will take them years before they have anything functional. Real research takes generations to perfect.”

“Then why were you expecting them tonight?”

She gave him a wry smile. “Because I try to expect the worst.”

* * *

Information requested: the Seven-Year Festival.

Beginning report…

Every seven years, the clans of Sacred Valley hold a festival.

While the original purpose of this gathering was to promote unity, it has become the primary stage on which they compete. The children of the clan are taught to identify the others by their clothes—armor and a red sash for the Kazan, with their banners bearing three stone dogs; a white fox with five tails for the Wei, who always match white with purple; and the Li, who wear too much jewelry and carry banners bearing the Snake and the Tree.

These are your enemies, the children are told. One day, our clan will be strong, and we will crush the other two under our heels.

It has been this way for a hundred generations.

The Wei clan hosts the Festival this year, so outside craftsmen have inhabited clan grounds for months. They build booths of orus wood, dig trenches, paint houses, smooth roads, and generally prepare the clan for an influx of rivals. The Wei are never so clean, organized, and well-presented as in the days leading up to the Seven-Year Festival.

The outsider craftsmen are confined to temporary housing around their projects, and are kept to a strict curfew. Most don't mind. Beyond clan territory, Sacred Valley is still wild, and they are accustomed to the ravages of weather and wild Remnants. Living in the security of a community is a luxury most cannot afford for long.

When the booths are arranged, the White Fox banners flying from the tallest homes, and the arena prepared, the clan is ready. The outsiders are paid and sent away as the other clans begin to arrive.

The Kazan announce their arrival with a host of trumpets when they are still miles away, and the ground rumbles under the impact of their advancing army. When banners flying the Stone Dogs are visible in the distance, streams of red flowing in the wind, the least dignified of the Wei gather to catch a glimpse of their visiting enemies. Most only see a Kazan clansman every seven years.

Every man, woman, and child of the Kazan wears armor, even where it could not possibly grant any protection. Women wear shadesilk dresses with a sleeve of delicately wrought mail, or plates sewn into the bodice. Men wear helmets over red robes, or wrap themselves in loose-fitting cloth with thick belts of iron and leather. Children carry shields, or run around in tiny breastplates.

All of the Kazan wear badges, of course, but these are seemingly crafted with perfection in mind as well; they are four or five times bigger than those of the Wei clan, so that the adults wear plates of copper or iron over their entire chests.

Even the mounts they ride, for those rich or important enough to afford mounts, are armored. They are stone dogs the size of horses, Forged constructs created by Soulsmiths, and every step of every paw strikes the earth like a drumstick. The bulkiest of these craghounds, as they are called, drag wagons behind them—wagons laden with the goods of Mount Venture. Halfsilver ingots, sky-iron statuettes, and goldsteel blades flash in the sun, delighting the eyes of the Wei children.

The families of the White Fox mock the incoming Kazan for their blunt ways, for their lack of subtlety, for their obvious stupidity. The Wei clan will rule their lands soon, as it once was, and as it is meant to be again.

The Li clan is too sophisticated for trumpets. They unleash Remnants to fly around their heads as they approach, swift jade hawks and shining silver butterflies and twin-headed crimson eagles, all trailing lines of vivid color behind them in the sky. The display is a delicate tapestry woven among the clouds, accompanied by music from the most accomplished Li performers. Flutes and stringed instruments drift in sweet tones around the Remnants' dance, leading some Wei children to laugh in delight. They will be reprimanded by their parents later.

There are no wagons visible among the Li at first, as their mounts and cargo will be taking up the rear. They will present nothing unsightly to their enemies. Those of the Jade stage march in the first rank, their badges displayed proudly among necklaces of gold and silver. Those most honored in the Li clan are also the most bedecked in jewels, with Jade elders wearing five rings in each ear and two on each finger.

The ranks of Iron and Copper follow Jade, though only the best of each stage are represented here. Those who have stagnated at their level for too long are miles behind, with the pack animals and the children, to arrive with no fanfare and no apparent connection to those who have gone before.

Each Copper carries a tall wooden branch, unpolished and uncarved. At the height of this branch is a green banner. When the Coppers raise their branches together, it is as though they march in the center of a forest, with leaves blowing over their heads. A few of the most outstanding Coppers have snakes carved into their branches, as the Tree and the Serpent are the symbols of the Li clan.

Mothers and fathers of the Wei families lean over their children, pointing out the ostentatious jewelry, which flash in the gleaming Remnant rainbow overhead. This is vanity, pride, and arrogance. Only the truly strong deserve to be arrogant, and the Li clansmen think too much of themselves. With such displays, they will someday provoke a power much greater than their own, and that will be their downfall.

At the same time and in the same voices, the Li and the Kazan mock the Wei in their own ways, and for their own reasons. Such is as it has been for a hundred generations.

For all its talk of humility, the Wei clan will not lose to its guests. And masters of illusion are, after all, masters of presentation.

The gates of the Wei clan—newly constructed for the occasion, and carved with purple flowers and white foxes—peel open under the strength of invisible chains. The Li display is put to shame when the sky explodes in sound and color, foxfire popping in purple flares and raining down among the visitors in a million harmless sparks. A legion of phantom snowfoxes wait on their haunches, lined up along the street of the clan as the Li and the Kazan enter. The eyes of the foxes follow each stranger, even as illusionary cheers fill the atmosphere. Flower petals of pink and white and purple spin on the wind, and sweet scents fall from the sky as though the air itself has been perfumed.

The Wei swell with pride as they watch this coordinated masterpiece of White Fox madra, and the elders—their conductors—nod to each other in satisfaction. They have outdone their rivals in hospitality, welcoming them in a fashion appropriate for receiving an imperial procession.

In their minds, this is more than their enemies deserve.

Suggested topic: the fate of the current Seven-Year Festival. Continue?

Denied, report complete.

9

All the important events of the Seven-Year Festival were to take place later, once the esteemed guests had settled in. It would take several days for everyone to arrive from all over Sacred Valley, and the Wei clan wanted as broad an audience as possible.

But the Foundation fights were scheduled for the first day.

Lindon understood why. These were children, after all; while each clan would still try to make sure its children were the best trained in the sacred arts, there was nothing at stake beyond pride. When a clan revealed a new talent at the Iron level, then they were displaying a new military power. Likewise, Coppers were the future of the clan. Showing weakness before rivals could be a clan's death sentence.

As for the Foundation stage, unless a boy or girl revealed a truly extraordinary genius talent, these fights existed only to give the children experience. A victory would gain face for the clan, but nothing remarkable.

Lindon reminded himself of this to keep from vomiting all over his white training robes. His wooden badge seemed to burn on his chest as he waited on the bench with the other Foundation-level Wei fighters. The seats that he'd seen empty a few nights before now roared with life as sacred artists from all over the Valley gathered.

Besides him, the oldest person on the bench was a twelve-year-old girl from the Chen family. Three years younger than he was, and already on the verge of breaking through to Copper.

The arena spread before him, a huge square of pale stone, but now it looked as vast as a field of snow. If he failed, everyone would see it. Not just those in the Wei clan, who already knew about their Unsouled, but the Li and the Kazan as well. They would see what a shame the Wei had produced.

He looked up to the corner of the arena, where a five-tailed snowfox curled up on a pillar. It opened its eyes as though sensing his attention, staring at him with a gaze of absolute black.

Elder Whisper and his mother had both told him to move forward. He couldn't be a coward now.

Even if he felt like one.

A powerfully built man in elaborate purple-and-gold shadesilk glided past the bench, his thick beard blending in with his wild hair until he looked like a silver lion. He winked at the children, ignoring Lindon, his jade scepter badge hanging over the White Fox emblem on his chest.

Wei Jin Sairus, the Wei Patriarch, rarely involved himself in the day-to-day workings of the clan. The elders handled such mundane matters. He was the idol for the younger generations to follow, the sacred artist fixated entirely on his Path, seeking power to the exclusion of all else. When he did emerge from seclusion, it was usually to battle a powerful Remnant, seek out rumors of a newfound treasure, or directly threaten a rival clan. He personally represented a significant fraction of the Wei clan's strength.

Wei Jin Amon, the Patriarch's blood grandson, followed at a respectful distance behind. He was dressed in white, an iron badge hanging from his neck though he was only seventeen, and he carried a spear wrapped in shimmering green shadesilk. His hair was long and thick, tied back until it flowed behind him like a black river, and some of the less flattering rumors said he spent as much time caring for his hair as he did practicing his sacred arts. His gaze did land on Lindon, cold and calculating, but passed by in a breath.

The hammering of Lindon's heart redoubled. The Foundation fights weren't important, but now the Patriarch and his grandson—a future disciple of the vaunted Heaven’s Glory School—were both here to witness. What was happening? Surely they had something more important to be doing besides watching Lindon try to beat up ten-year-olds.

Seconds later, he had his answer, but it was no comfort. Rather than joining the Wei section and sitting among their family, Sairus and Amon greeted some of the elders and moved on. They walked over to the stairway leading up to the box reserved for visitors from the four Schools.

And Lindon realized there were people up there. Actual School disciples, the elites of Sacred Valley, there to see him fail.

Now that he was watching, he could pick them out. A young woman with purple robes and a crown of ivy represented the Fallen Leaf. The boy wrapped in white and gold, seemingly even younger than Lindon, would be there for the Heaven's Glory School. The man for the Golden Sword wore plates of iron sewn onto his clothes, and his goldsteel sheath gleamed. That left the old woman in gray to represent the Holy Wind, and as far as Lindon could tell, she was absolutely ordinary.

He turned around and heaved, spewing his breakfast all over the ground behind the bench.

The three clans didn't account for the entire population of Sacred Valley—far from it—but they ruled by virtue of superiority in the sacred arts. Those who followed the Path of the White Fox were stronger and better-trained than those wild practitioners without the support of a large family, and the Wei could afford to produce elixirs that the most powerful sacred artists needed to advance.

The four Schools were on another level entirely.

They focused completely on the sacred arts, to the exclusion of all else, and their disciples were selected from among the best of the clans. Wei, Li, or Kazan...it didn't matter, so long as the disciple was promising enough, and wasn't so old that they couldn't still switch Paths. It was said that any Jade expert from the Schools was on par with the Patriarch of a clan, and each School had enough Jades to tear every Wei to pieces.

A School disciple would be well within his rights to strike an ordinary clansman down with no explanation. If Lindon's fight offended the senses of the honored guests overhead, they could kill him from where they sat. The Patriarch would more than likely apologize for wasting their time.

A hand rested on his shoulder, and Lindon turned to see his father, face twisted in disgust. “Wipe your mouth,” he said. “We can't have the Kazan seeing you like this.”

Lindon hurriedly swiped at his lips with the back of his sleeve. “Apologies, Father. I did not realize the esteemed guests from the Schools would be in attendance today.”

“Ah, well, best not to shame us then. Though there are worse things than a clean death.”

Seisha pushed him aside, drudge still floating over her shoulder. “Keep your eyes open. Learn what you can. However it turns out today, it's not the end of your path.”

Behind her mother, Kelsa nodded. “Don't push yourself too hard. If they shame you too badly, I'll pay them back in the Iron trials.”

Lindon looked at his family. Each of them had shown up for a word before the matches, which was more than he expected or deserved. He was warmed by the mere fact that they had tried, and he dipped his head to show his gratitude.

But the warmth was balanced by cold knowledge: none of them expected him to succeed. Even his mother, who knew he planned to cheat. Even his sister, who had helped him train. Even his father, who led him to speak with the First Elder and leverage an additional reward. None of them actually believed he could do it.

In the end, he could only rely on himself.

There was an elaborate welcome ceremony involving the booming voice of the Patriarch, the blessing of each of the four Schools, and a parade of illusory snowfoxes from the Wei clan elders on the sidelines. Lindon watched none of it. His attention was inside, following the blue-white energy of his madra as it traveled through the complex network of lines inside his body. He guided it, matching it to his breathing, purifying the energy. Cycling it.

When the other children on his bench stood, he was ready.

There were hundreds of Foundation children participating, and he was fortunate—or unfortunate—enough to be in the first batch. He and fifteen others walked onto the stone stage, as directed by an elder of the Wei clan. He walked into a square, an eighth of the stage, against a boy with the jewelry of the Li clan. The boy looked no more than ten, and his eyes were wide as he took in the size of his opponent.

A few laughs drifted Lindon's way from the Li and Kazan sections, and he imagined them noticing the fifteen-year-old with the wooden badge. It didn't hurt as much as he'd expected.

He and the boy bowed to one another even as the other seven pairs did the same. A purple star flared in the air above them, created by a White Fox technique, and the elder's voice filled the arena. “Begin!”

Lindon stepped forward, bending to get low enough, and drove an Empty Palm into the boy's stomach.

The boy fell to his knees, his spirit failing him, and cupped both hands to his gut with a look of astonishment. Lindon shoved him over the lines marking the boundary of his square.

“Winner!” the elder announced, powerful Iron lungs carrying his voice into the distance. A second after the match had started, Lindon walked away. Bands loosened on his lungs, and he felt as though he could breathe again for the first time that morning.

He wasn't doomed after all. His trump card had worked. It had worked.

When the jeers sprouted up among the audience, even among the Wei, he only smiled.

“Cheater!” someone shouted.

“Coward!”

“Trash!”

His smile became a laugh, and he walked back to the bench chuckling. Their insults couldn’t touch his sheer delight. Words were nothing, less than nothing, compared to the facts: he had used the sacred arts to overthrow another sacred artist in battle. He was winning like a Copper.

Not like an Unsouled.

He tripped a girl after an Empty Palm, and she stumbled to her hands and knees. When she started to cry, the crowd's shouting redoubled. He grinned all the way back to his seat.

In the weeks leading up to the Seven-Year Festival, he’d trained every day to deal with possible threats. What if an opponent could resist the Empty Palm? What if they had a technique they could land on him first? What if his madra was exhausted before the later rounds?

But as the sun crept past noon and Lindon defeated his fifth opponent, he realized there was one scenario he’d never prepared for: easy victory. None of these children had a countermeasure for the Empty Palm, and once their sacred arts were disabled, superior size and strength made their loss trivial.

His hidden weapon, sealed in a jar and buried beneath the stage, would stay hidden.

He hoisted a Kazan boy by the red sash, tossing him out of bounds. The Kazan section rose up in a furious sea of red and gray, but he just waved at them as he walked away from the stage.

Joy burned in his chest like a torch.

* * *

Wei Shi Seisha stopped watching the exhibition matches as soon as it was clear her son would win. She had expected he would; he was older than all of his opponents, and had finally found a technique he could use in spite of his deficiency. She had every confidence that he would grow into a productive member of the clan now, though once she had doubted.

She began to pace the arena, checking scripts on the conductive pillars that held the illusory images of Elder Whisper. Sometimes visitors would deface scripts like this, but the mere presence of an inspector would reduce such occurrences significantly. She had almost an hour before Lindon would have to fight an opponent at the Copper level, which was plenty of time to make at least one lap around the arena.

The first anomaly appeared when she was passing the Li clan entrance. She happened to glance between the seating sections and noticed a Li clan elder—his jewelry all gold and jade, befitting his status as a Jade-stage practitioner—slipping out the door. She paused, curious, and another Li elder followed a moment later.

Seisha reached up and tapped the side of her drudge, carrying a drop from her spirit. The construct whistled an affirmative.

Drudges were all the tools a Soulsmith required rolled into one. They could measure madra output, determine its aspects, analyze the parts of a Remnant, and even help separate that Remnant into its components with minimal loss. Soulsmithing primarily revolved around deconstructing and reconstructing Remnants to take advantage of their unique properties, and without a drudge, it was almost impossible to do so accurately. Like a surgeon operating with her hands taped together and one eye shut.

In this case, Seisha had anticipated trouble from the Li clan, and so had gone to great lengths to acquire samples from Remnants similar to the ones they'd recently captured: the teleporting rabbit, vanishing bat, and space-warping mole. Her drudge could track a Remnant based on a sample like a hound taking a scent, and while trying to track three 'scents' at once would be complex, it was worth attempting.

With a specific pattern of madra pulses, she activated the drudge's tracking feature. It complied with a burble, unfolding tiny antennae as it executed the search. Those antennae were always the first thing to decay on any drudge, so she tried to use them sparingly, as they were expensive to replace. But this was a worthy cause. If the Li clan was attempting some kind of coup on the first day of the Seven-Year Festival, she had to clip this bud before it flowered.

Her drudge honked only seconds after the search had begun, startling her. The range on such detection was incredibly limited, and even more so when she'd packed three samples at once. There was always the chance of a false positive, but with such a quick response...

The Remnants, or something that reminded her construct of their power, was here. Possibly inside the arena.

She signaled the two closest of her assistants, young men with iron hammers on their badges. She had trained them for years, even if neither of them made promising Soulsmiths, and they had volunteered to help her secure the arena. Both came running.

“Li clan elders are slipping away,” she said. “One of you report to the First Elder, and the other can follow me.” She turned toward the Li entrance, leaving it to them to decide which would take on which task.

The arena had been constructed on the edge of Wei land, so it was enveloped on three sides by a forest: a sea of green dotted with the occasional purple island as an orus tree was mixed in with its more mundane counterparts. Aside from the gravel path leading away from the exit and back toward the main property, she saw nothing.

But her quarry was more advanced in the sacred arts, and she had to respect that. With a whisper of White Fox madra and an effort of focused will, she Forged a disguise.

The Wei clan Forgers trained in the Fox Mirror technique for years, learning to create illusionary copies with a dizzying degree of detail. Her peers specialized in creating copied faces, full-body duplicates, or even camouflaged walls that would render the user invisible. There were imperfections in each of these techniques, specifics that violated reality in ways that could be noticed.

She specialized in clothing. Layered robes of white and purple turned to green in an instant, jewelry glinting on each finger and both ears. Illusory necklaces hung down to her chest, and even her iron badge dangled from a gold chain. Her face would remain the same, but it wasn't as though the Li clan knew her on sight. Her hair could be a slight problem—brown hair was more common in the Kazan clan, but not the Li. She would have to risk it. In the shadow of the trees, her hair looked more black than brown anyway.

As her escort Forged his own disguise, a clumsy green cloak that he threw over himself, she followed the direction of her drudge into the forest. It clicked or whistled to her occasionally, changing her direction, but the chase took much less time than she'd expected.

Less than five minutes after leaving the arena, she spotted a flash of pink light through the trees, along with a man's raised voice. She silenced her drudge, cradling it in her arms like an infant, and signaled her guard to quiet. Carefully, she crept forward.

The Li clan disguise would stop them from attacking her outright, but it wouldn't save her from a thorough questioning...which she would prefer to avoid. Ideally, she wouldn't be caught at all.

Her skin tingled as she slid quietly closer, heart pounding, her well-practiced breathing technique strained by excitement. She hadn't worked against other clans since she reached Iron in her twenty-second year, but she'd missed it. She felt a rare pang of empathy for Jaran; he'd fought far more than she had, in his youth, and the lack of that thrill must add to his bitterness.

Seisha stopped when she was close enough to see the Li. They weren't all Jade, but a mix of Jades and Irons. The youngest was older than she was. Nine in total, though she was staring through a flowering cloudbell bush, so she could have missed one or two in the back. They were gathered around a circle in the forest floor, a circle made of tiles. A script.

They'd brought tiles the size of an open hand, each etched with a rune or sigil. When connected properly, they would function as well as a full-size script circle. It was a technique she’d seen before, mostly in cases where the circle might have to be redesigned quickly.

The three Remnants had been caged and placed at three distinct points around the circle. The blue rabbit chewed frantically at its prison, clutching at the bars with hands that looked almost human A pink series of swirls that might generously be called a bat flapped in place, fading in and out of existence but still unable to shift through the scripted cage. Finally, a brown-and-black mass with huge silver shovels for claws sat motionless, watching its captors with beady eyes.

All of the Remnants here, and all whole. No wonder her drudge had located their signatures so quickly; she hadn't expected them intact and so close.

The Jade man at the head of their party continued speaking, dictating to them as though repeating a lesson taught many times before. “...first the anchor, and then the call. If he doesn't answer, we have to be fresh enough to try again as soon as the next window opens. Shao, have you confirmed our location?”

Seisha didn't know the speaker, but she knew Shao, one of the Li clan's most accomplished Forgers. He was bald and tiny, with an appearance closer to a fresh disciple than an expert at tracking and locating Remnants.

His own drudge, like a gleaming steel sword too fat and dull to be of any use to anyone, sprouted antennae like a pincushion. He listened to its whistles, checked something on a scroll, made a note with chalk and slate, and then consulted a map. Finally, he nodded. “We are, honored elder. He should emerge at exactly this spot, if we time the doorway correctly.”

“If we fail again, he will punish all of us,” the highest-ranking elder said, voice grim. A palpable shudder moved through Shao, as well as a few of the others. “Let us see that doesn’t happen. Are we ready to begin?”

Shao checked a few more notes, his bald head bobbing up and down, before he shot up abruptly. “It's now!” he screamed. “Ignite the script now, now, now!”

The Li elders scrambled for their tiles on the ground, injecting madra into them with a novice's haste. The script glowed white, irregularly at first, but within seconds it had settled into a smooth pulse.

The three Remnants, inside the circle, obviously sensed something was wrong. One and all, they began to screech in the peculiar way of their kind—the mole sounded like an avalanche, the bat like wind whistling through high peaks, the rabbit like the swift beat of a heart.

This is it, Seisha thought, but she hadn't been prepared. From her discovery to the activation of the script had only taken a minute, maybe two. Should she disrupt the script and face the consequences, or run back and tell the First Elder? The Li elders technically hadn't done anything yet. But if she watched, it would soon be too late.

Ultimately, the decision was taken out of her hands.

Only a breath after the script's first light, the Remnants popped and bubbled, as though the ink that painted them on the world had begun to boil. Their complaints grew louder and louder until their bodies fizzed away into motes of light.

That in itself was not so unusual. As they expended power, Remnants dissolved back into the madra that formed them. But she'd never seen it happen so fast, and never to such an effect.

The spots of color, pink and blue and dark brown, swirled around inside the script like snakes in water. They spun closer and closer, getting tighter and tighter, before gathering into a single form that looked like nothing so much as a muddy inkblot.

Only a blink after the process had begun, it was finished. A tiny blue spark flared to life in the center of the ink-stain, glowing brighter every second.

“It worked,” Shao breathed, before the light shot into a single line the height of a man. It looked like the edge of light down one side of a doorway, and as she watched, that doorway slid open.

She never saw anything but a rectangle of deep, textured blue light before the whole construction collapsed, the energy of the Remnants dispersing, the power that had animated the script fizzling out. For a breath she believed they had failed, that whatever summoning they were attempting had fizzled and died. Then the light cleared.

A man stood in the center of the circle.

His clothes were an oddity for Sacred Valley: he dressed in fine black furs, with a broad belt holding various tools. A sword hung from that belt, straight-bladed and unsheathed. Diamonds glistened in each ear, silver chains held diamonds on his chest, and yet more silver and diamonds on his fingers, as though he'd chosen to bedeck himself in imitations of ice. He wore his black hair short, but streaks of white ran through it like a tiger's stripes.

Those were his ordinary features, though, the facts about him that her panicked mind couldn't help but catalogue. They were not what she noticed first.

When he appeared in the circle, he stretched his wings.

They unfolded at least thirty feet from tip to tip, and the structure of bones and tendons were coal-black. But the skin that stretched between them was pale and colorless, as though he'd stripped the wings from some giant arctic bat.

He grinned, flashing fangs. “There is nothing so grand as a second chance.”

The Li clansmen all but collapsed to their knees, grinding foreheads against the dirt. Seisha was tempted to do the same.

“This one is humbled by your mercy, Grand Patriarch.” The elder who had spoken earlier still spoke for the group, even when he was too terrified to raise his face. “Thank you for allowing this modest group the chance to atone for our failure to serve you the first time.”

Grand Patriarch. Sickness rolled through her gut. He was a previous-generation Patriarch of the Li clan, but she'd never heard of one surviving. Which left only one terrifying possibility: an ancient immortal had come home.

The Grand Patriarch grunted, rolling his shoulder in its socket. “I have not returned to this realm in some time. Tell me, have the Four Beasts come home?”

The elder hesitated, but the Grand Patriarch laughed in response to his own question. “No need to answer. You still live, so they remain abroad. I should like to test myself against them, once the Valley is united.”

“Yes, Grand Patriarch. Ah, forgive this one your lowly servant, but this one has prepared something for you.” Without raising his head, the elder lifted an object in both his hands.

It was something as mythical as the wings on a human being; something Seisha had never expected to see.

A gold badge, etched with a scepter.

The Grand Patriarch took it, chuckling. “I had forgotten this custom. Are there any other sacred artists of the Gold stage currently in Sacred Valley?”

“Not to this one's poor knowledge, Grand Patriarch.”

“Then it will do.” The Grand Patriarch slipped the shadesilk ribbon over his own neck, then lifted the badge so he could examine it. “If there were, I would have had you craft something more valuable. Gold is entirely deficient to describe the current state of my advancement.”

Judging by the gasps and whispers that traveled through the gathered Li experts, they found that statement as shocking as she did.

The Gold folded his wings, ran a hand through his black-and-white hair, and started off through the woods without another word. The Li hurried after him, clearly startled.

Fortunately for Seisha and her guard, the Li party passed far enough by her that they remained undetected. Unfortunately, the Gold was headed straight for the arena.

As they marched through the woods, the elder hesitantly spoke up. “Forgiveness, Grand Patriarch, but the Festival has only recently begun. The children of the Foundation stage are fighting. Were you to appear now, it would only be an insult to your grand status. This one had planned an event to display your glory, wherein those from other clans could approach—”

The Gold waved him to silence. “In the face of absolute power, of what use is respect? This task is not worthy of more than one day of my time. I am here today, and so they will bow today.”

The Li clan finally left, taking their Grand Patriarch with them, but leaving Seisha in a cold sweat.

“What do we do?” her guard finally asked, whispering even though minutes had passed since their enemies disappeared into the woods.

“We can't risk running into them here,” she said, matching his volume. “We should go around. We might not make it in time to warn the Patriarch, but at least there's a chance.”

The sun darkened overhead, a gust of wind blasted down on her, and when the Grand Patriarch of the Li clan settled down to the forest floor next to her, she knew there was no chance.

She closed her eyes and accepted death.

10

The final round of the Foundation stage tournament should have been a nervous affair for Lindon, with his family's reputation and his own future at stake. The stage seemed broad as the entire valley with no one but his opponent to share it, and the crowd's dull noise wavered between supportive cheers and mockery.

But this round ended as all the others had. Lindon drove his Empty Palm into the core of the girl across from him, folding her in half. She was almost as old as he was, and therefore only inches away from advancing to Copper, but no one in all the clans trained to fight without their madra. Despite having witnessed his previous matches, she still froze in horror after feeling her power abandon her. After tasting, for the length of one breath, the life of an Unsouled.

Lindon pushed her off the stage and walked away before the elder could announce the results of the match. He was prepared for the jeers of those watching, the dark humor rising up in him again, but this time there was no scorn. There wasn't much applause either—a handful from the Wei clan, clapping slowly or voicing a few halfhearted words of praise—but the artists of Sacred Valley acknowledged victory above all else. Even when it tasted sour, even when they suspected him of cheating in some way, they still respected success.

He glanced at the side of the stage, to the square beneath which his jar was buried. He hadn't been forced to really cheat. The reality slowly set in, like water seeping into soil. He'd won a tournament, even a small one, using actual sacred arts. He was a sacred artist, and all of Sacred Valley knew it.

Lindon almost walked straight into a barrel-chested man wearing robes of purple-and-gold shadesilk. The Patriarch of the Wei clan smiled at Lindon through his silver mane. “You have the congratulations of our clan, Wei Shi Lindon. There is honor in overcoming a deficiency to achieve victory.”

Resisting the urge to drop to his knees, Lindon bowed at the waist, his fists pressed together in respect. “This one does not deserve such kind words, Patriarch.” It was the first time the head of the Wei clan had ever addressed him directly.

Sairus rested a broad hand on Lindon's shoulder. “A sacred artist should never be so humble as to refuse what he has earned. You have earned victory today. Let that be enough, and return to your family with honor.”

Lindon hadn't spoken with the Patriarch before, and had only rumors to judge the man's character. But he could hear the unspoken message in Sairus' words, and his joy dampened. Even the lingering cheers of the crowd faded in his ears.

“Your pardon, but this one is meant to exchange pointers with a senior disciple at the Copper level.”

Though Lindon did not move his eyes from Wei Jin Sairus' feet, he could feel the man's frown. “Some of our guests from the Schools were uncomfortable with your performance. It would ease them greatly if we could conclude our events today and begin anew with the Copper fights tomorrow.”

He meant that the elders from the Schools had been offended by the sight of a fifteen-year-old Unsouled claiming victory. His bet with the First Elder would go unfulfilled, his test incomplete. Lindon glanced up at the stands, to try and catch a glimpse of the First Elder’s face, but the old man’s seat was empty. No help there. The chance of real training was slipping from Lindon's grasp, but he clawed desperately to keep it.

“Our honored guests from the four Schools have yet to witness a true demonstration of our clan's sacred arts, Patriarch. When this one can compete with the Copper from another clan, they will see the strength of the Wei clan. If they are then dissatisfied with this one's performance, this one will of course fully atone.”

An unsettling pressure settled on the back of Lindon's neck, like a snake sliding between his shoulder blades. The effect of Sairus' irritation, nothing more, but it still pushed him toward the ground.

“I would not wager the honor of my clan on an Unsouled.” Painful words, but Lindon reminded himself they were fair. “Give me some face, disciple, and renounce this exhibition. I do not forget my debts.”

Thoughts of the parasite ring, still in the keeping of the Patriarch, flashed through Lindon's head. He could take his cycling to the next level with such an artifact, perhaps enough to catch up with his peers. If he could leverage the Patriarch's debt to even borrow the ring, he could leave his current weakness behind. But he had no promise from the Patriarch. From the First Elder, he did.

Lindon weighed his own future against the honor of the Wei clan. He found the clan wanting.

In one motion, Lindon dropped to his knees and pressed his forehead against the ground. “Your pardon, Patriarch, but this one must prepare for his exhibition match.”

He squeezed his eyes shut, anticipating a wave of pain. As a Ruler on the Path of the White Fox, Sairus could make him suffer hours of agony in seconds. He could force Lindon to bow to his will, or even kill him outright.

Instead, he walked away.

At the sound of footsteps, Lindon raised his head hopefully, squeezing a glimpse out of the corner of his eye. The Patriarch was already signaling to the elder in charge of the tournament, waving him to continue.

Lindon shivered with the released pressure and let out a long, heavy breath. He wasn't sure where he had found the courage to defy his own clan's Patriarch directly.

But the First Elder had promised him more. To travel his own Path, Lindon had to reach higher and farther than anyone else. Only then would he be able to hold himself with pride in Sacred Valley. Only when he was strong.

“Due to a request from our honored ally of the Heaven's Glory School, there has been a slight change in the Foundation stage exhibition,” the Wei elder announced, his voice carrying to every corner of the arena. The four illusory snowfoxes turned toward him at once, as though he'd caught their attention.

He'd certainly caught Lindon's.

“The champion of the Foundation tournament, Wei Shi Lindon, will immediately exchange pointers with a senior disciple. This will be an invaluable learning opportunity for both children, and will allow the Foundation champion to test the limits of his potential.”

Lindon's spirit was strained and weak, after almost a full day of exertion, and he doubted his ability to use the Empty Palm too many times in a row before he would have to rest. But all things considered, he was in good enough shape to fight. The Patriarch wouldn't get him to surrender this easily.

“And the champion's Patriarch, Wei Jin Sairus, has volunteered none other than his own grandson for this duty. Honorable sacred artists of all Schools and clans, the Wei clan presents to you Wei Jin Amon!”

Suddenly, surrender sounded like a much more appealing option.

Black hair tied back and spear propped over his shoulder, Amon leaped from the box at the top of the arena all the way down to the stage. He landed with barely a flex of his knees, iron badge swinging against his chest. “Wei Shi Lindon,” he announced, his voice full and rich. “I invite you onto the stage that we might learn from one another.”

The hornets. They were his only chance of making it off that stage. Having to fight against an Unsouled was an insult to Amon, and he would take it out on Lindon personally. If Lindon could make it back to his seat with only a pair of limbs broken, he would count himself lucky.

He scarcely dared to hope that the Remnants he'd hidden might be enough to save him. But if they were... If, by cheating and trickery, he managed to fight Amon to a draw...

The Wei clan would practically have to support him. He would have proven himself the match of their star disciple in front of the entire Sacred Valley, and if they denied him training then, they would look like fools.

He straightened his back, focusing on the hope of victory rather than the bleak chasm of probable defeat, and started to walk toward the stage.

His sister grabbed him by the elbow, hauling him back. “Let me take your place,” she whispered urgently. “Say you aren't worthy of the honor, and you need a family member to replace you. They will allow it. Amon will push for it. And if I can beat him, no one will disrespect you like this again.”

Lindon gently extracted himself from Kelsa's grip. “This is for me.”

The doubt was so plain on her face it might as well have been painted across her forehead. “What are you saying? Fighting children does not prepare you to face Wei Jin Amon.” Then something occurred to her, and she jerked away from him. “Wait. No. This is one of your...Lindon, what have you done? What are you doing?”

He jogged away from her, onto the stage, in order to avoid having to answer. When he hopped up onto the blocks of white stone, the audience cheered. Looking forward to seeing him torn apart, he judged.

He could only hope they would be disappointed.

Lindon pressed his fists together and bowed. “Wei Shi Lindon is honored to accept your instruction, cousin Amon.”

Without returning the greeting, Wei Jin Amon spun his spear down, flipping it in a circle so that the shadesilk wrapping slid off and drifted to the ground. He ended in a ready stance, half-turned and crouched with his spear angled forward and down. “You have one last chance, Unsouled,” Amon said, his voice too low to carry.

His grandfather walked onstage between the two of them, his arms raised to quiet the crowd. “Courage can be cultivated by the weak and strong alike, and Wei Shi Lindon has already demonstrated his courage today. Our clan honors courage, and when it is warranted, we also value humility. Young Lindon, there is no dishonor if you remove yourself from the stage. Rather, we would respect your wisdom in deferring to your betters.”

In Lindon's place, no sacred artist would be able to refuse. He would lose too much face by contradicting his Patriarch's words in public. This was a perfect strategy on Sairus' part, cornering him between a physical threat and the looming reality of humiliation. He had left Lindon only one honorable way out.

He'd forgotten that Unsouled had no honor to lose.

“The Patriarch’s words are a privilege to hear,” Lindon said with another bow, “but the opportunity to learn from a disciple as skilled as Wei Jin Amon does not come often. This one would be a fool to pass it up.”

Sairus scowled even as the sky behind him darkened. “Very well,” he said, nodding to Amon. A shadow passed over the sun even as purple foxfire flickered around the head of Amon's spear.

Clouds gathered over the arena, slowly blackening as the Patriarch spoke. “Assembled experts of Sacred Valley, I hope this exhibition proves pleasing to...your...” His words trailed off as he looked into the sky.

Lindon had assumed that the Patriarch had used his mastery of illusion to make the sky seem dark, perhaps in an attempt to intimidate Lindon. He'd barely given it a thought. But Sairus stared at the black clouds as though a gate to the Netherworld had opened overhead.

“Amon,” Sairus began, but he was cut off by a voice that boomed through the arena, tearing the air apart with its sheer volume.

“Are you the Patriarch of the Wei clan?”

The crowd shook under the voice, a few people screaming. Lindon glimpsed one woman sprinting for the exit. That, more than anything else, convinced him that something was profoundly wrong.

A man descended from the dark clouds like an angry messenger of the heavens. His whole being was defined by shades of black and white, from his black-veined white wings to his black-and-white striped hair. He wore black furs, and diamonds glistened everywhere he could fasten jewelry.

His right hand rested on the hilt of a silver-chased sword, and his left hand clutched a rough sack. Dark stains spread slowly over the bottom of the sack, giving Lindon a gruesome guess at its contents.

But his most startling feature, even considering the enormous wings that spread from his back, was the badge that rested against his furs. It was made of solid gold.

Lindon found himself unable to take a breath, and only part of it could be attributed to the man's oppressive atmosphere. Here, descending from the sky, was a Gold. A real Gold, in the flesh, someone who had mastered the secrets of madra beyond mortal dreams.

The arena filled with a sound like muffled drums as everyone, from every School and clan, fell to their knees. Even Sairus dropped to one knee, as was appropriate in the presence of a Gold, but the sight of him kneeling struck Lindon as wrong. Like an eternal mountain suddenly swaying with the wind.

“This one's humble name is Wei Jin Sairus, and he indeed has the honor to lead the Wei clan,” Sairus said. “May this one know the honored elder's name?”

The man of black-and-white landed before Sairus, his wings extending to fifteen feet on either side of the Patriarch. The shadow of his wings fell across Lindon's face, and though Lindon shivered, he didn't avert his eyes. Sudden though it was, this event was going to redefine the history of the Sacred Valley, and he couldn't miss it. No matter how the sight of a Gold turned his guts to water.

For a few seconds, the stranger stood over Sairus, his golden badge the only color on his person. He finally spoke in a casual tone, though wind aura carried his voice to every ear in the arena. “I am Li Markuth, Grand Patriarch of the Li Clan.”

Sairus' silver-maned head snapped up in shock. One breath later, Markuth's hand blurred, and a spray of blood slapped Lindon in the face.

He fell backwards, heart hammering, scraping warm and sticky blood away from his eyes. While he was blind, he couldn't fight the panic—he had to see, to know if the white-winged horror from the Li Clan was coming for him next.

The first sight to greet his eyes was the Patriarch's headless corpse collapsing to the stone, staining it red. Markuth had struck his head entirely off.

“The sins of the father pass to his sons, as the sins of the mother pass to her daughters,” Li Markuth intoned, wiping blood from his fingers on his dark furs. “To pay for the evil of your clan's founder, every beating heart from every living Wei descendant would not be enough. So I will settle for two.”

The Grand Patriarch spun around, thrusting his clawed hand into empty space.

Slowly, Wei Jin Sairus' body dissolved into foxfire. Even the blood on Lindon's face flared with heat before dissipating, revealing itself as a Forged dream.

Light lurched, and the Patriarch appeared out of nowhere. His head was attached, but now his chest was impaled on the Grand Patriarch's fist.

Sairus tried to speak, but Li Markuth tore his hand back, clutching what must have been the other man's heart. Blood dripped from the Grand Patriarch's gore-soaked fist.

Out of tricks, the Wei Patriarch fell to the stage and died.

Markuth opened his fist, and a heart dropped on top of the corpse with a splat. “One heart. I will collect the other in time.”

Black-and-white wings folded up behind the Grand Patriarch, trailing him like a leather cloak. A white-and-purple Remnant began to peel itself from the Patriarch’s corpse, but Markuth crushed it beneath his heel and the madra dispersed.

He looked straight at the box containing the elders from the clans and the guests from the four Schools. “I believe in solving my problems directly. Let it be known that I intend to claim the whole of Sacred Valley as my personal territory. If there are any challengers, step forward now. All at once, if you please. I will not waste my entire night fighting every Jade in the valley one at a time.”

Markuth lifted the bag that had been in his left hand since he'd descended, upending it over the stage. A pair of heads fell out, leaving a trail of blood as they rolled on the pale stone. He tossed the empty sack aside, but Lindon's gaze was fixed.

One of the heads belonged to a man he'd never seen before. He didn’t care about that. He was focused on the other head, the second head, the one whose features were veiled in long hair. Long brown hair.

His body shivered uncontrollably, madra racing through his veins in a pattern unrestrained by any cycling technique.

He knew who that head belonged to. He didn't need to see the face. He knew.

The world took on a feeling of unreality, as though he'd been struck by Kelsa's Empty Palm. It was too absurd. Just this morning he'd been preparing to fight a bunch of children and now...now Golds were descending from the sky? His mother was dead?

It was stupid, that was what it was. Idiotic and ridiculous. The world didn't work like this; the world made sense. Only dreams operated without rules or reason, and even his insane dreams of singing flowers and dancing clouds held more logic than this.

Jades began to gather at one end of the stage, old men and women from Kazan and Wei gathering together, mingling under both banners. They argued fiercely, none daring to walk up onstage, but they did gather. In ones and twos they hurried together, banding together to fight and die with pride.

Not all the Jades joined them. Some stayed in the stands, on their knees.

Markuth laughed, shaking droplets of blood from his fingers. “Is this it, then? Don't hold back, come up. I won't begin until you are ready.”

Hatred boiled up in Lindon, and he found himself wishing he could join the Jade elders. Even a Gold wasn't immortal. In fact...

The idea illuminated his soul like a sunrise. Li Markuth might be even more dependent on his madra than an ordinary person. If the legends were true, Gold bodies were partially made of madra, like a Remnant's.

What would an Empty Palm do against such a being?

Lindon would die landing that blow, but that wasn't worth consideration. He'd grown up with stories of mythical heroes who were killed trading strikes with a blood rival. If he succeeded here, he would live on forever in the myths of the Wei clan. It would be a good death. An honorable death. The death of a sacred artist.

If even the Empty Palm wasn't enough, Lindon had one more card to play. The hornet Remnants were still sealed in their jar beneath the stage, waiting for him to release them. If they could distract the Gold for even a breath, even the fragment of an instant, Lindon's life would be well spent.

The sense of unreality crashed in on Lindon once again, shattering his beautiful delusion. What was he thinking? Here he was, Wei Shi Lindon the Unsouled, considering throwing his life away in a battle against a Gold. It was a bad joke, or the fanciful poem of someone with too much ego. He couldn’t do anything. He would only die, with no plan or purpose whatsoever.

He stared at the Li Clan monster, and his hopeful idea died. The truth settled on him like the fall of night: there was nothing he could do. No reason to try. He was too weak.

Li Markuth spread his arms and his wings, and the sky darkened even further, until night fell over Sacred Valley. The whole arena shook as he called on the vital aura of the world, the four White Fox pillars crumbling to rubble. Only Markuth shone in the darkness, his body outlined by white power. “The world is wide outside your narrow Paths,” he said, even as the crowd of Jades prepared their techniques. “Let me guide you.”

The Jade elders of the Wei and Kazan clans walked onstage in a solemn procession, summoning foxfire or Forging bright red blades. They spread out in front of Markuth, some forty or fifty of them, and from their faces Lindon knew they were each prepared to die.

And in that moment, Lindon decided to die with them.

Maybe he was too weak, and his death would accomplish nothing. But it was better to bet on the tiny chance that he was wrong than to wait for death without even trying.

When Lindon stood up, Markuth didn't so much as move his eyes. It was as though anyone less than Jade didn't even exist to him. When the first ranks of Wei elders moved toward him with madra readied, the Grand Patriarch condensed wind and shadow around each of his fists.

Lindon crept in front of him, still unnoticed. He didn't even glance down, paying Lindon no more attention than he did the stones beneath his feet. The sky overhead flashed white.

And Lindon, ignored by the Grand Patriarch, landed an Empty Palm on Markuth's core.

It was as though he’d splashed water on a boulder.

Even legends never suggested that a Foundation-stage child could harm a Gold. It was like a fly attacking a tiger…no, attacking a mountain. If everyone at the Foundation stage in all of Sacred Valley joined hands and pooled their madra, they couldn’t do so much as ruffle the clothes of the Grand Patriarch of the Li Clan. Lindon should have known better.

He should have remembered his place.

His force vanished uselessly, and Markuth backhanded him in the midsection. Even in the end, he didn’t give Lindon a single glance.

The casual slap of a Gold struck hard enough to knock him backwards off the stage, but somehow it didn’t hurt. He landed in the dirt, but the air had already vanished from his lungs. His mouth flapped open, trying to grab a breath, but it was as though the air had disappeared.

He tried to sit up, but nothing happened. He remained on his back, his head shaking from side to side. Lindon strained his eyes, looking down, to see how bad his injuries were.

I’m still dreaming, he realized, when he didn’t see his legs. That was the only explanation. He’d been a fool to consider any of it real. Golds didn’t descend from the sky, the Patriarch couldn’t bow, his mother didn’t die for no reason, and his legs were supposed to be at the end of his body.

It was comforting to know that he was dreaming. Soon he would wake up, and then everything would make sense again. In fact, he could feel exhaustion pressing down on him like a blanket. Maybe that was what waking up felt like, in a dream.

His head flopped to the left, and he caught a glimpse of his father and sister. Kneeling, like the rest. Kelsa’s eyes were fixed on his, glistening with tears, her face pale. Why was she so sad? This was just a dream, she shouldn’t worry so much.

Jaran wasn’t looking at him at all, but was fixed on the battle between Markuth and the Jades. He had to admit that hurt, even if it wasn’t real.

He let his eyes slide shut to hide the sight of his kneeling father. When he woke up, everything would be all right again.

That was Lindon’s last thought before he died.

11

With the assistance of her Presence, Suriel watched her target location from a thousand kilometers away. The fated arrival point was an empty stretch of forest in the territory of a local clan, one marked by images of a white five-tailed fox. [The Wei clan,] her Presence informed her, spooling out lines of explanatory text in her vision. She willed the explanations away, scanning the area.

There was some sort of festival nearby, where children from various clans engaged in combat games. She watched the matches idly for a while, waiting for the spatial violation destined to occur nearby.

One boy in particular caught her attention—tall, broad-shouldered, with a wooden badge and a rough face. He was the oldest of the group, and he won as easily as someone of his size should defeat younger children. The crowd treated him with disdain, but he seemed to carry himself with pride, as though pushing nine-year-olds out of bounds was an achievement.

She looked a little deeper, examining his soul.

She spotted his flaw immediately. He'd been born with a madra deficiency; that could be corrected, given time, but primitive clans like these often ostracized or marginalized the weak. Only the strong could contribute to the greater good.

She ordered her Presence to pull up the boy’s story, digesting it in an instant. It was as she’d expected. He was born with nothing, less than nothing, and others increased his burden because of it. Yet today, he still fought. She could admire that.

His fate unspooled in front of her, a series of images stringing from one to another. She would have seen clearer images, even branching paths, had she left her eyes functional, but in her current disguised state this was the best she could do.

The boy fights against a relative of his, a young man with long black hair and an iron badge. The boy cheats, releases emerald hornets, ekes out a technical victory.

With a bulky brown pack on his back, he bends his head over a scroll, studying a Path by candlelight in someone else’s home.

The same boy, years later, weeping as he earns his copper badge.

As a man with gray in his hair, he and his wife and their children gather around before a ceremony that sees him promoted to Iron.

He dies in a Dreadgod attack that claims a quarter of the valley, decades hence.

Suriel willed the fate away, wiping aside the pathetic collection of images. These would be his dominant fate, the most likely path for the boy's life, and a thousand little things could change it. But left to his own devices, he would overcome his handicap to live a happy and satisfying life, dying a little early.

That was all.

Her interest waned, shifting as the Presence chirped in her mind. [Spatial violation imminent]. The spot in the empty forest flared red, glowing brighter and brighter.

Suriel launched herself from the ledge on which she'd been standing, shattering the air in an explosion as she moved faster than sound. She was late.

Predicting events based on fate was an art more than a science, and not her specialty. She had chosen to stay a few thousand kilometers away for safety, to avoid undue interference. She'd known it was a risk, but now the event was upon her, and she couldn't arrive in time without tearing the atmosphere apart. She could bend space to transport directly in, but her target might sense the distortion and flee to another world. Even so, she wasn't unduly concerned.

Anything this trespasser could do, she could undo.

He descended from a class six spatial rift, little more than a slit in the Way that was repaired immediately. She watched as he gathered some followers around him—he must have been communicating with this world for some time, which would add to his sentence—and decapitate a couple of observers. The spines were severed cleanly, but she would reverse causality rather than attempt a manual reattachment. No sense taking a risk.

As she reduced speed for her arrival, the trespasser fully unveiled his spirit, darkening the sky with storm aura and smashing nearby pillars to frighten the locals. He was going for full dramatic effect.

“Is this it, then?” the black-and-white striped trespasser taunted his enemies. The audio quality had improved now that she was within two dozen kilometers. “Don't hold back, come up. I won't begin until you are ready.”

Suriel prepared to descend when she noticed a detail that the winged man had overlooked. That boy, fifteen and clad in white, was sneaking around to the front of the trespasser. He gathered his meager madra together, terror and resolve and muted self-loathing radiating in a psychic wave.

With the same move he'd used on the children earlier, the boy drove his palm into the Gold practitioner's core.

Suriel winced even before the trespasser tore the boy in half, sending his torso flipping up and out of the arena. The boy had to have known it was useless.

[He knew,] her Presence confirmed.

And he tried anyway, Suriel thought. This was the sort of person the Abidan were created to save: the weak who stood against the strong. The sort of person the Phoenix was meant to save. The sort of person who might, with a little outside help, even reach beyond their fate.

His life guttered out, visible to her eyes, but that meant nothing before Suriel. He was only dead.

She changed her plan. She had meant to freeze time, retrieve the trespasser, revert the damage he'd done, and leave. With a delicate adjustment of memory, the locals would never notice their day had been interrupted.

Now, she had a new goal. Makiel wouldn't be pleased, but this event now fell officially under her purview. She could handle it as she saw fit.

And she saw fit to make the trespasser sweat.

* * *

Death looked surprisingly like the last moments of his life, Lindon found.

His vision had fuzzed away for a second in a haze of gray, but now it returned, and he found that everything looked exactly the same. Markuth had his hands raised above his white-striped hair, madra gathered in balls of force and wings spread. The Jade experts of two clans ran at him with weapons and foxfire ready, resignation in their wrinkled faces. Blood splattered the arena, and his legs lay next to his mother's head.

When Lindon was a child, he had once nudged a table carrying a ceramic vase, an heirloom from previous generations of the Shi family. The table shook, and he looked up to see the vase teetering on the edge. That moment had seemed to stretch, a single image imprinted on time so that it seemed to last forever before the vase at last began to fall.

At first, he thought that was happening now. The world seemed frozen around him, as though time had stretched once again. He noticed it, and waited for the battle to resume.

But it didn't.

A few breaths of time later—though Lindon wasn't breathing, and felt no urge to—the tableau before him remained exactly the same. He wondered if this was what death was, a single instant lasting for eternity. He hoped not. Boredom seemed like a worse fate than otherworldly torment.

Then something changed. The sky, masked by the dark clouds summoned by the Li Clan's Grand Patriarch, began to glow blue. Azure light lit the underside of the clouds as though a blue sun rose, spilling its light over the entire arena.

And in that light, pieces of the world began to move.

Though Li Markuth remained locked in his pose of triumph, the Jade combatants still frozen before him, blood slithered along the floor around his feet. The severed heads tumbled across the arena, gathering blood as they rolled, bouncing off the stone and rolling away toward the forest.

His own legs slid across the stone, as though his blood had become a rope pulling his body together. Panic tightened his chest, and he tried to struggle, but he couldn't even widen his eyes. No part of him responded to his control, and he had to wait and watch as his flesh pulled itself together. It wasn't painful, but he could feel it, an uncomfortable squirming below his ribs as muscle and bone reassembled themselves.

All the while, the sky grew brighter and brighter.

Markuth slowly moved his head on his neck, thawing gradually, first looking around him at the frozen world and then at the brightening sky.

He stumbled backward in shock, flapping his wings like a panicked bird to keep from falling over.

“No!” he screamed, hurling the balls of his madra into the sky. “Wait, please! I belong here! This is my homeland!”

The clouds parted, revealing the source of the blue light. It blazed like a sapphire sun for an instant, sending a painful lance through Lindon's eyes and making him wish he could close them.

The light dimmed somewhat, revealing its source: two sweeps of blue fire, like a pair of wings formed from iridescent flames and big enough to cover a third of the sky. It gave the impression of a blue phoenix, or perhaps a phoenix Remnant, descending from the heavens in glory.

Markuth roared at the phoenix, drawing the sword from his belt. It was shaped like a straight, simple sword, but it fuzzed and flickered, buzzing oddly as though it weren't quite real.

The phoenix faded further as it descended, until its flames no longer hurt Lindon’s eyes. When he could see again, he made out a person at the phoenix’s heart: a woman, drifting down toward them and bearing flaming blue wings.

Beautiful she was, but it wasn't the word that occurred to Lindon first. The first thing he thought was, Perfect. It was as though someone had taken a real person and perfected her, smoothing every blemish in her pale skin, arranging her cloud of dark hair so that nothing was out of place. Neither too short nor too tall, too thick nor too thin, she looked like the template from which every other human being was wrought. She was so flawless that she couldn't be real, reminding Lindon forcibly that he was dead now. Maybe she was a messenger from the heavens, here to usher him into the netherworld. That would explain the burning wings.

Though, aside from her inhuman perfection, she didn't look like he would have imagined. Her body was sheathed in white, liquid armor that moved effortlessly with her. Gray ribbons of hazy smoke started at the fingertips of her right hand, winding up her arm and terminating in her neck. Her hair looked brown at first glance, but upon further reflection, he would call it a deep green. And her eyes, large and human, were undoubtedly purple.

The heavens must be a strange place to produce people like her. But with her here, he found that he could relax. Maybe when she brought him to the next life, he would be more than Unsouled.

Markuth stood with his chest heaving and a sword in his right hand, but he didn't attack. “I have not violated the Pact, nor upset the balance of this world, nor defied the Abidan. I demand a trial before—”

An invisible rope grabbed Li Markuth around one ankle, pulling him off-balance and dragging him to a point just behind the woman. He flapped his wings, kicking up a powerful wind, straining against his unseen bonds, but to no avail.

[Li Markuth,] said an impassive voice in Lindon's mind. [You have been sentenced to trial for spatial violation and attempted domination of local inhabitants. You will be imprisoned until the Court of Seven determine a date and location of your trial.]

A black spot appeared behind the green-haired woman, a point of absolute darkness. It widened so that Lindon could see a few spots of color within, like a distant cloud of rainbow-colored fireflies. Markuth continued being dragged backwards, as though that spot called him inexorably toward it.

As the Gold came closer to the woman, he roared and spread his wings wide, raising his strangely twisting sword. With both hands, he slammed the blade down on her unprotected head, and the force of his madra was such that it pressed against Lindon even across the arena. The stones beneath her cracked, and wind blew away from the impact. The air rang with a sound like steel on stone.

And the woman continued drifting over the ground, undisturbed. Not a single strand of her hair moved out of place, and she never looked in Markuth's direction.

He screamed like a child as the darkness swallowed him, slurping up the tip of his sword last. The black hole in the world closed.

The woman continued toward him, having never acknowledged the Grand Patriarch of the Li Clan for an instant. From the beginning of her descent, her eyes had remained locked on Lindon.

She reached the ground just before she reached him, her smooth white boots tapping down on the stone. The blue-fire wings vanished at the same moment. She regarded him first, then motioned for him to stand.

“Stand,” she said. “Do not be afraid.” The words sounded strange, as though she were trying a different accent with every syllable, but they were completely understandable. He was surprised enough that she'd spoken directly to him, instead of using the dispassionate impersonal voice that had sentenced Li Markuth. Her real voice sounded so different that he wondered if they had even come from the same person. Maybe the words earlier were straight from heaven.

When he realized he hadn't immediately obeyed this celestial messenger, he scrambled to his feet, only an instant later remembering that he should be in agony.

He wasn't. In fact, he felt better than he had before the tournament, his spirit restored to full capacity and his body clean and well-rested.

Lindon considered dropping to his knees, but she had just ordered him to stand, so he bent in half at the waist. “This one thanks you for the attention, honored immortal. Please, how may this one serve you?”

An afterlife in the service of a celestial immortal was infinitely better than his mortal existence. If there was any truth in the myths, he could still practice the sacred arts now that he'd left his physical body behind, so this might be an unimaginable opportunity.

Death could well be the best thing that had ever happened to him.

He couldn't see her face, but she considered for a few seconds before speaking again, her expression as pleasant and unyielding as a mask. “This one would not require so much of you.”

This one? He wondered if she was mocking him, or if he had somehow offended her. “Please, honored immortal, do not speak to this one so humbly.”

“Humbly? Ah.”

She considered a moment longer before clearing her throat. This time, she sounded as though she’d spent her entire life in Sacred Valley. “Raise your head and speak freely. I have no patience for the manners of this world.”

He straightened, taking the chance to look her in the eyes. It was technically rude of him, but she said she didn't mind, and he was willing to take her at her word. Besides, this might be the only time he ever met her, and he was determined to commit her faultless face to memory.

But there was one answer he needed. “May I ask, if you don’t mind…am I dead?”

A smile tugged at one corner of her mouth, a crack in the mask. “Do you not feel alive?”

He thought he did, but then, who could say what death felt like?

“If you've brought me to life, then...” he hesitated, looking around at the frozen world. The Jade elders were stuck rushing forward to oppose an enemy that no longer existed.

Purple eyes surveyed the scene, her face pleasant and impassive once again. She might as well have been looking over a field of flowers. “Li Markuth was not permitted to return to this world. His attack was a deviation from fate, which I have reversed. When I depart, it will be as though your festival continued uninterrupted.”

“What about me?” Lindon asked immediately. “You restored me to life. Will I forget this kindness as well?”

“Yes.” This didn’t appear to disturb her in the least.

“You don’t think you could…leave my memory? So that I could be properly grateful?” He was the only one to receive special treatment from the heavens; he couldn’t allow himself to walk away as though nothing had happened.

She reached over with her left hand, stroking the lines of gray smoke on her right as though tenderly playing an instrument. “Temporal reversion is not memory modification. When I’m done here, nothing Li Markuth did will have happened. Your festival will have continued without cease. To spare you, I would have to temporarily withdraw you from the flow of fate.”

“Thank you for your consideration, honored messenger,” he said, as though her words were a promise. “I am ready.”

Her lips twitched, and he suspected she was using her neutral expression to suppress a smile. “It’s not a complex process for me. I can draw you out of fate with a thought.”

“Fate. So then, if you’re not offended by this one’s humble questions…can you see the future?”

“Fate is not the future. What is destined to occur does not always occur.”

He bowed before her three times. “That is enough for me, thank you. Would you tell me my destiny?”

This time she did laugh, and he was almost surprised that it sounded so human. “I’m pleased to have descended personally, Wei Shi Lindon.” A thrill rolled through him. The celestial messenger knew his name. “I can show you some limited details of your fate, if you are willing to see them.”

“This one would be honored.” He tried to hide the eagerness in his voice. Even the most trivial knowledge of the future could be used to great advantage.

The tips of two white-plated fingers met his forehead, like cool eggshells. “Then see.”

The frozen world was wiped out, replaced with another. He was still standing on the stone of the arena stage, but the clouds Li Markuth summoned had never appeared, and the sun beat down out of a clear sky. Wei Jin Amon faced him, and though he resisted longer than anyone expected, he still lost.

That night, he nursed his wounds alone when the First Elder barged in without knocking. The old man slapped a book down on his table: Path of the White Fox.

Lindon’s eyes shone at this vision. He had succeeded after all. He expected the immortal to return him to reality, but the future flowed on, coming in faster and faster images.

He watched a version of himself, years older, receive a copper badge with tears in his eyes. The First Elder smiled in pride.

His sister led Wei clansmen to fight around a carriage, while armored members of the Kazan fought. She wreathed one man’s face with foxfire, then drove her sword through a second man’s gut and left it there. Kelsa wrenched the door to the carriage open, revealing a finely wrought box. Her expression lifted.

More years passed, and Kelsa was personally awarded a jade badge by Patriarch Sairus himself. She didn’t even look thirty. Lindon and his family cheered for her from the crowd, though his father looked as though he’d bitten something sour.

An unknown time later, Jaran slipped out of his house in the middle of the night while his wife slept. He hobbled on a cane, but he took an overcoat and a sword with him.

Lindon’s stomach dropped.

The three remaining members of the Shi family, wearing white funeral robes, clustered around an iron tablet with Wei Shi Jaran’s name on it. Seisha lit the candle herself.

More years silently slid by, and Lindon saw himself sitting on the edge of a roof under the stars, side-by-side with a girl he’d never met. She had a wide, open smile. He passed her a bottle, and she drank.

Now they stood together in the Hall of Elders, both wearing red, with a white ribbon tying their clasped hands together. The First Elder said something and everyone laughed, but the vision-Lindon gazed only at his new wife.

The Lindon of the present felt his eyes burn and hurriedly wiped them away. He shouldn’t show tears to a heavenly immortal, but…Unsouled weren’t allowed to marry.

Time moved on in the blink of an eye, and he saw himself cycling in a meditative position next to his son. Applauding his daughter as she conjured foxfire for the first time. Pouring tea for his wife.

Fate, it seemed, was good to him. Was this why a messenger had descended from heaven? To show him the rewards for a young life spent suffering? If so, he welcomed it.

He saw himself grow older, his children grow tall.

Then Sacred Valley collapsed.

The image passed so quickly he almost didn’t catch it. A monstrous creature that towered into the clouds waded through the mountains like a man through waves, washing over the valley and burying it in earth. Everything was wiped out in an instant.

And Lindon returned to reality, standing before the white-armored woman. Her green hair drifted behind her, and the ghostly lines leading from her fingertips to her skull flickered with light like swallowed stars. She watched him with that same mask of an expression, though now he saw a tinge of pity in her eyes.

His cheeks were wet with tears, and he felt as though his chest had been hollowed out. “I…my future, I…”

“Not your future,” she said. “Fate is only a direction. That is the direction your life would have gone, like a river flowing downhill, had Li Markuth not intervened. That is how your story is fated to continue, and how it is destined to end.”

“And now, you’ve…undone what he did. Is that still what will happen to me?”

Her smile was sympathetic, and the pity in her eyes deepened. Her compassion scared him almost as much as the visions, because that meant she knew. “It is a good fate. You only die after a full, rich life.”

“When my home is destroyed!” He’d never considered Sacred Valley his home before. Sacred Valley was the entire world.

“Not every thread is cut. A few survive, and they will go on to join greater powers in the world.” She reached over for her lines of gray smoke. “This is why I take the memories, Wei Shi Lindon. Fate is not considerate.”

“How do I fix it?” Lindon asked.

Her fingers froze on the lines.

Taking that as encouragement, Lindon continued. “There has to be some way to fix it. If it’s a direction, then direction can be changed. There has to be some… sacred arts, or some weapon, or…” Lindon still felt the countless tons of cold earth, pressing down on his family. “If I were strong like you are, I could change things. This one begs you. Please.”

Purple eyes watched him, weighed him. Her hand withdrew from the smoky strings, and she paced a half-circle around him as though to consider him from a new angle.

The immortal glanced to her left shoulder. He could glean nothing from her face, which remained somehow pleasant and impassive both. “Suriel requesting clearance for unbound transportation within Iteration One-one-zero. Verbal response, please.”

A woman spun itself into existence on her shoulder, like a doll made of gray smoke. That didn’t surprise him much; Forgers of the White Fox created illusions more solid than this one every day. The ghost spoke with the all-surrounding neutral voice he’d heard earlier. [Acknowledged. Consulting Sector Control.]

Silence reigned as the ghost waited for a response, but Lindon was caught by another detail: the celestial messenger had called herself Suriel. He’d never heard the name before, but he filed it away like a scroll in the clan archives.

[Clearance granted.]

“I would like a tour,” Suriel said, with a glance at Lindon.

[For what purpose?]

“I’m looking for combatants.”

[Acknowledged.]

Suriel reached up to rest an armored hand on top of Lindon’s head. “Steel yourself,” she said. “Do not be afraid.”

She’d told him that already, but before he could ask what he was supposed to be afraid of, they vanished. An intense pattern of blue light washed over him, devouring every other sight. It was like being covered in a blanket woven with millions of threads, and each thread was a distinct shade of blue light. His ears rushed with overwhelming noise…but only for an instant.

Then the blanket fell away, and they stood in the middle of a royal court such as he had never imagined. Lanterns held glowing, golden jewels a hundred yards overhead, and the room stretched so far that it vanished in any direction. Lindon was next to Suriel, the both of them standing in the middle of a vast crowd of old men and women in intricate formal robes. Each of the elders wore a fortune’s worth of jade, gold, and exotic metals that Lindon couldn’t identify. Some had sacred beasts with them—a red serpent coiling around an arm here, a two-headed tiger curled up there. He could feel their wealth and authority hanging in the air; these were people that could have Lindon executed with a gesture.

He dropped to his knees even as the smoky ghost said, [The Ninecloud Court.]

Suriel flicked her fingers, and he found himself gently pulled to his feet though nothing touched him. “They cannot see us unless I allow them to.” She herself stood with hands clasped at her waist, gazing straight ahead as though none of the opulence could attract her interest for a second.

Lindon glanced around, prepared to fall back to his knees at any second. Indeed, none of the crowd so much as glanced at them.

This is the power of an immortal. With even a small piece of that power, he could do anything.

A hatch in the ceiling opened up, and a rainbow-glistening cloud descended. As it drifted down toward the floor, he saw that someone was riding on the cloud: a girl perhaps ten or eleven years old, wrapped entirely in glistening peacock feathers. Her hair was an impossible, fiery red, and she surveyed her elders as though looking down on her subjects.

[Luminous Queen Sha Miara,] the ghost said. [Path of Celestial Radiance.]

The girl reached out a hand and Forged a sword of blinding rainbow light. “Kneel,” she said, and the sea of people knelt. Lindon had to focus to keep standing. The blade radiated power and authority, such that it seemed to affect his soul directly.

Suriel nodded to the girl. “Sha Miara inherited her madra from a noble lineage stretching back to the birth of this world. In three days, she will use that sword to sink a fleet of cloudships, saving her capital city from attack by air. If you had her power, you could save Sacred Valley.”

Lindon stared at the redheaded girl and her rainbow sword. He’d never heard of this “Ninecloud Court,” and of course no one had left Sacred Valley for a hundred generations. It was a desolate landscape beyond the mountains, a nightmare from the lowest hells. All the books said so.

“Where is she?” Lindon asked. He might be able to recruit her, or beg her for help, if he couldn’t learn the secrets of her training.

Suriel gave him a sidelong glance around the curtain of her dark green hair. “If you walked the length of Sacred Valley end-to-end, you’d have to do it more than a hundred times—”

[One hundred and fourteen times,] the ghost said.

“—one hundred and fourteen times to reach the outer border of her country. The Ninecloud Court is in the Ninecloud Country, for which it was named, and that country is four hundred times—”

[Three hundred and ninety-four times,] the ghost said.

“Verbal response not required for calculation corrections. Three hundred and ninety-four times bigger than Sacred Valley. You would never get there. Here, your fate is an absolute certainty. If you tried one million times to go to the Ninecloud Court from where you are at this moment, you would die before you reached her one million times.”

He started to ask for advice when the blue flash came again, and then they were standing in midair over an endless ocean. When Lindon saw the slate-gray waves tossing under his feet, his breath left him. He hurled himself onto Suriel’s armored shoulders before he fell.

She stood with perfect equanimity, every hair in place, as an invisible force peeled him off her shoulders and placed him next to her. His feet were firmly planted on air. On air. He couldn’t trust it. His gut was certain that he would be dropped at any second.

“Do not be afraid,” she reminded him for a third time.

[The Trackless Sea,] the ghost announced.

And then they dropped.

Stomach lurched, and he plummeted into the ocean. He panicked as water closed over him, flailing his arms even as he squeezed his eyes shut, holding his breath. He’d learned to swim in the Dragon River, as any Wei child did, but it rarely ran deeper than his shoulders.

“Breathe,” Suriel commanded, and he realized he was still dry. He cracked his eyes open, but almost shut them again. Aside from a bubble of air surrounding him, the immortal, and her pet ghost, water stretched infinitely in every direction. Light glimmered above them, increasingly distant, but they plunged lower and lower. Into the darkness.

He finally caught his balance, forcing himself to breathe normally and not to cling to the white-armored woman as though to a raft. She seemed to be treating this as nothing out of the ordinary, so he took his queue from her. But he did stand very, very close. Not only was he trusting her to save him, she was the only other person in this world of black water.

As they fell, Lindon saw that they weren’t alone after all. Someone else dropped alongside them, a man sinking through the water like his bones were weighted with lead. The stranger was a mass of muscle, his eyes glowed golden, and he had his arms folded as though impatiently waiting to reach the ocean floor. As they fell into darkness together, the ghost spoke again. [Northstrider. Path of the Hungry Deep.]

The absolute black beneath them shifted, and Lindon slid closer to Suriel. A dragon’s head emerged from the dark, followed by a serpent’s body that coiled endlessly. It must have been miles long, and its jaws gaped open into a pink tunnel lined with teeth.

Northstrider unfolded his arms, revealing hands gloved in pitch-black scales. With one hand he seized a fang longer than he was tall, but the monster’s momentum carried him past Lindon. A wall of scales rushed past him, blocking out everything else.

“Northstrider consumes sacred beasts in the deepest places of the world,” Suriel said. “He takes their power with him to the surface. He could level Sacred Valley on his own…and you could save it, if you had skills and powers like his.”

She’d said that already, but she had withheld the most important part. “Honored immortal, how? I am Unsouled. Where could I possibly learn his skills?” He hoped she would answer him, but feared she would call it impossible.

She smiled at him as though she knew his thoughts, and another blue flash took them away.

Inside an ordinary inn hewn from rough logs, eight people in intricate golden armor laughed and clinked glasses together. A woman tossed a gold shield down, saying something with raised eyebrows. A man pulled his helmet off, revealing a red eye in the center of his forehead.

[Western Chi Ning City. The Eight-Man Empire. Path of the Eightfold Spear.]

“These eight call themselves an empire because they conquer wherever they roam,” Suriel said, striding through the room. She let her hand drift behind her, as though she meant to run white-plated fingers over the local men and women, but she never touched a thing. “So far, they have not been defeated. They could easily save Sacred Valley, as could you, if you earned a place with them. Their armor is a cross between a Remnant and a construct, and when one of them dies, they pass it on to a successor.”

“Are they all Gold?” Lindon asked. He hadn’t seen anyone outside the valley wearing badges, but he supposed the armor might serve a similar purpose.

Suriel stopped with her palm hovering over one member of the Eight-Man Empire, a woman with yellow hair who lay facedown on a table, snoring. “Larian was raised in a noble household. Her father wouldn’t let her play with the other children until she reached the level you know as Gold. When she was six years old, she did. Today, an army of ten thousand Gold-ranked sacred artists couldn’t scratch her armor.”

Larian grunted in her sleep.

The blue blanket fell again, but this time it lingered. He and Suriel drifted in a blinding sapphire void. She stood in the same position as in the inn—arm outstretched as though to deliver a blessing, her visage all the more inhuman for her green hair and seamless white armor. Without turning around, she spoke. “You have twenty, maybe thirty years before disaster strikes.”

[An average of twenty-eight years, seven months, four days,] the ghost put in.

“Verbal response not required.” She turned to face him, arm still raised. “I have showed you some of the most powerful sacred artists in the world, on three very different Paths. What do they have in common?”

“They’re incredibly strong,” he said. He hadn’t seen much from the girl in the court or the eight in the tavern, but the man fighting a sea dragon bare-handed had definitely caught his attention.

Suriel’s expression told him nothing, but she flipped her hand palm-up. “They have nothing in common, save their commitment. They each have different motivations, different goals, different levels of talent, but all of them pursue the sacred arts with absolute dedication.”

Lindon met her gaze with resolve, drawing himself up to his full height. He was taller than she was, he realized, though it made him feel somehow wrong. “I am dedicated.”

“Are you?” Her purple eyes were cold and unflinching, her lips still as a carving. “Each of those sacred artists risked their lives, gave up their pride, endured beatings and public humiliation. They sacrificed comfort for lives of brutality and pain. And none of them built their power from nothing in a mere thirty years.”

“I will do it.”

“Not even I had reached their level in thirty years.”

Now he wasn’t so confident.

“Your first step, if you wish to take it, begins today. You have to abandon your family and leave Sacred Valley as quickly as possible. There is nothing here for you.”

“I can do that,” he said without hesitation. He’d been prepared for that requirement ever since she’d shown him the girl in the Ninecloud Court. It would hurt, but his family would actually encourage him if they knew he was journeying to practice the sacred arts.

“No, you can’t. Not without help.” The blue light vanished, leaving them floating thousands of feet in the air. Four mountains surrounded them: one crowned in light, one robed in purple trees, one made of red stone, and one wreathed in a rushing river.

This was his home, but he had never seen Sacred Valley from this perspective before. It looked so…small.

Suriel surveyed the land like a judge. “By the standards of the outside world, anyone below Gold is considered powerless. Unworthy of being called a sacred artist at all. Your only chance, and it’s a distant chance, is to leave this place where Jade is the greatest height.”

“If I do leave, then can I…” He was afraid to ask the question, afraid the answer would be no. “…can I become a Gold?”

“You’ll have to,” she said, eyes still on the landscape. “That is where you must start.”

Abandoning his home was a sad thought, and he couldn’t deny a rush of fear at the idea. But more than that, his soul lifted. She might as well have told him he could become a celestial immortal and live in the heavens. He was capable of reaching not just Jade, but a level beyond Gold. It was such a bright, tender dream that he almost didn’t dare to touch it.

He wouldn’t even have dared to dream such a bold dream…but Suriel’s words were those of fate itself.

Lindon couldn’t drop to his knees in the air, but he bowed at the waist. “Honored immortal, this one begs one more answer from you. How should I leave the valley?”

Suriel waved a hand, and four green lights shone like beacons in Lindon’s vision. One on each of the holy peaks, burning like emerald bonfires. “There is an exit on each of the peaks, guarded by one of the Schools.” She hesitated a moment as though searching for a specific memory. “But leaving will be very difficult. If there is a way…”

She glanced at the ghost on her shoulder, which responded almost instantly. [Nine-point-eight kilometers northwest.] A smaller point of green light appeared on the slopes of Mount Samara.

The invisible bubble containing them rushed forward, and Lindon’s body shuddered with the instinct to protect itself, but Suriel spoke as though reciting a poem. “There are a million Paths in this world, Lindon, but any sage will tell you they can all be reduced to one. Improve yourself.”

Lindon was still somewhat worried about offending this visitor from another world, but he dared to say, “That doesn’t sound like enough.”

The mountain rushed closer as they descended into its shadow. “It’s been my path for longer than you would believe. Do you think anyone dares to attack my homeland?”

Near the peak of the mountain, where patches of snow still lingered despite the summer heat, and where the enormous halo of light seemed close enough to touch, there was a deep chasm. Without hesitation, Suriel directed them down into the darkness.

At the bottom of the chasm, there stood a girl with the lean, ragged look of a wandering warrior. She was perhaps his age, with the look of Sacred Valley about her: the pale skin, black hair, and dark eyes that characterized virtually every clan.

But the sacred artist’s robes she wore were black, which fit no clan or school he knew, and she carried a sword on her hip…but no badge. Her hair was cut absolutely straight, as though sliced with a razor, and she wore a coil of thick, bright red rope wrapped around her waist like a belt. She had obviously been treated roughly: her robes were torn and stained, her hair frayed and matted, every inch of her skin covered in layer after layer of razor-thin scars. Most of those scars had to be years old, but some were obviously pink and fresh. She stared death down the chasm, sword gripped tightly in both hands.

At first, Lindon thought she was glaring at him. But a glance behind him told him the truth.

She was cornered by her enemies.

The Heaven’s Glory School of Mount Samara wore white and gold, and each of these young men and women had badges of iron around their necks. There were eight of them—two with spears, two with swords, two who carried weighted nets, and two whose hands glowed with light.

[Mount Samara,] the ghost announced. [Yerin, Disciple of the Sword Sage. Path of the Endless Sword.]

Suriel’s boots crunched in the snow as she walked forward, though she left no footprints. “She might not have the skill to save Sacred Valley, but she can help you leave it. With her guidance, you may both leave this valley alive. She, too, has a fate that needs changing.”

The girl stepped forward to fight.

Blue flashed, and an instant later they were standing amid the arena of the Seven-Year Festival, but Lindon fixed the image of the black-clad girl in his mind. Yerin, Disciple of the Sword Sage. She was his path forward. The Heaven’s Glory School would never allow him access to the mountain, which only meant that he had to find another way in.

Suriel lifted into the air again, surveying the frozen sacred artists beneath her with that same pleasant mask of an expression. She spoke to Lindon without looking at him. “If I let you keep these memories, it will change your fate. Your life will be harder, and most likely shorter. You have one last chance. Would you forget, or remember?”

He should spend longer considering such an important decision, but he’d already made up his mind. “I would never choose to forget you, honored immortal,” Lindon said with a bow. “You restored my life.”

She smiled at his words, though she still examined the still tableau beneath her. White-armored fingers strummed the smoky cords on her right hand. “Then watch closely. This is a rare sight.”

Blue flashed, covering everything, and time ran backwards.

The Jade elders who rushed up on the stage now reversed themselves, returning to their seats. The sky overhead cleared up. The pillars crumbled upward, rebuilding themselves from rubble until the illusions of Elder Whisper danced on them once again. Only those she had already repaired were excepted: the Patriarch, his body rebuilt, stood on the side until she pointed to him. As though carried by invisible strings, he drifted up and onto the stage, assuming a pose with his hands in the air. She’d already cleaned up the severed heads, for which Lindon was grateful. If she had returned him to life, surely she had resurrected his mother as well.

Soon, the world was as he’d left it. Before reality had gone mad, and ancient Golds descended from the sky followed by celestial messengers. She had undone everything. Given them a fresh start.

He bowed again, with no other way to express his gratitude. If he lived for a thousand years, he would never be able to repay such a debt. “This one thanks you a hundred times for the guidance, honored immortal. Will this one ever have the chance to return some small measure of your kindness?”

Around him, the day still crawled in reverse as Suriel’s hands danced in accordance with some sacred art. She still spoke to him while regarding her handiwork. “I will give you a token so that I may find you easily, wherever and whoever you are. When the time comes, I will return for you. If you’re lucky, you might be able to ascend to a higher world.”

“Do you mean the heavens?” Lindon asked. “With you?”

Suriel turned to face him, green hair falling to frame her pale face, and finally the world was still again. This time, everything was as it had been only a handful of hours before: the Patriarch of the Wei clan stood in the arena, disapproval on his face. The crowd shouted in the stands. Wei Jin Amon crouched with his spear, ready to do battle. Even the sun had reversed its course, shining golden in the late afternoon. Among it all, the celestial messenger stood out, her purple eyes growing brighter.

“My organization has a name for this world, Wei Shi Lindon. We call it ‘Cradle.’ It’s where we keep the infants.”

She reached out and dropped something into his hand: a glass bead, slightly bigger than his thumbnail, with one blue candle-flame trapped inside. The flame burned evenly as he turned it in his hands.

“This is my token. You cannot use it to contact me, but I can sense it across worlds and beyond time.”

“Apologies, honored immortal, but...what if it breaks?” It was glass, after all.

She favored him with a little laugh. “It can’t break, and it cannot be lost, as it is tied to you with strings of fate. Move forward, stay alive, and I will come retrieve you when you’ve grown.” Behind her, a gateway opened on a layered field of solid blue, as though it opened underneath the surface of a shining sea. “Go with the Way, Lindon.”

In a flash, she vanished.

Sound returned in a rush, and even the crowd’s hushed whispers—they had softened themselves out of respect for the Patriarch—sounded like thunder in his ears.

Wei Jin Sairus lowered his arms, which had been raised to settle the audience. “Young Lindon, there is no dishonor if you remove yourself from the stage. Rather, we would respect your wisdom in deferring to your betters.”

Only recently, Lindon had wondered if he was trapped in a dream.

Now the same sensation returned in full force, as everything his senses told him suggested he had never left. His mother paced the arena, her eyes locked on him. His father glowered from the stands, angered that the Patriarch had put his son in such a position. Kelsa sat next to him, anger plain in the way she perched on the edge of her seat.

Between his fingers, he rolled a warm marble. He looked down to see a ball of glass surrounding a single blue candle-flame.

If this was a dream, it was one sent by the heavens.

He turned from the Patriarch and bowed to the representatives of the four Schools.

12

Information requested: the four holy peaks.

Beginning report…

Sacred Valley is a paradise nestled within a mountain range. It is protected by weather and terrain, by the inhospitable nature of the surrounding regions, by ancient legend, and by a few significant individuals with vested interest in keeping the valley unexplored. Most of the world has forgotten Sacred Valley, overlooking it as nowhere of interest.

But it has a long history, and that history has left its mark.

The four mountains bracketing Sacred Valley are known to the locals as the “holy peaks,” locations of myth and mystery. The four largest schools in the region have each claimed a peak as their home, and the secrets found within have given these organizations strong roots.

To the north, Yoma Mountain is carpeted in purple orus trees for most of the year. The Fallen Leaf School processes the fruits of these trees into products to be sold, as well as secret elixirs to strengthen their own students. They also possess the largest and most obvious entrance into the labyrinth that forms the foundation of the entire Sacred Valley, an entrance they call the Nethergate. The door stands thirty meters high, and is carved with the image of a Dreadgod. Every ten years, it opens, and the Fallen Leaf elders are able to retrieve some treasures from the shallowest levels of the labyrinth within.

To the west, Mount Venture shows off its distinct mineral composition with rust-red cliffs. It is the shortest of the four peaks, and most of the mining in Sacred Valley takes place here. This is the home of the Kazan clan and the territory of the Golden Sword School, and the profits of the mine are split between them. Goldsteel and halfsilver are the primary output of these mines, though a further report can be requested on especially rare or trivially mundane materials.

To the south, the mountain called Greatfather is broken, its peak shattered into a shape resembling the mouth of a bottle. Water pools up there, cascading down the cliffs in a stream known as the Dragon River. Fueled by the water aura at the top of the mountain, storms wrack these slopes year-round, and the Holy Wind School maintains shelters for unlucky travelers caught outside. Favored Holy Wind elders can bathe in the pool known as Greatfather’s Tears, regenerating their vitality of body and spirit.

To the east, Mount Samara rises as the tallest of the four holy peaks. It is blanketed in snow, and crowned in a ring of pale white light that circles the summit. The halo appears at sundown and disappears at sunrise, so that no one in Sacred Valley has ever experienced a dark night. Samara’s halo is a construction of light aura bound into form by an expert centuries past, and it is the reason why so many sacred artists in the valley practice light-aspect arts. The Heaven’s Glory School has claimed this peak, using the power of Samara’s ring to gather light aura even on a moonless night.

Suggested topic: origin of the holy peaks. Continue?

Denied, report complete.

* * *

Without the lungs of an Iron, Lindon couldn’t make his voice heard in every corner of the arena, but he shouted as loud as he could. “Honored representative of the Heaven's Glory School! This one regrets that his display has caused you shame, and he begs one more chance to prove himself.”

In the box above, the boy in white-and-gold stepped forward. His expression was cold and forbidding, as though he wished to have Lindon executed before he said another word. “Why should I give you such a chance?”

“Wei Jin Amon is to become a disciple of your school, is that not so?” Amon, startled, looked from Lindon to the Heaven's Glory agent. “If this one manages to force him out of the ring, or cause him to admit defeat, then this one has surely demonstrated his own value. This one requests a place in your school, under those conditions.”

The boy let out a single, high laugh. “My school only receives those with potential. You have none.”

“This one does not dare to contradict you, honored guest, but if this one can by chance overthrow Amon...then surely, this one has proven his skill. And with the tutelage of the Heaven's Glory School, surely such skill has future potential.”

Wei Jin Sairus had too high of a status to seize Lindon and hurl him bodily from the stage, but it looked as though he wanted to. “You go too far!” he thundered, but the Heaven's Glory elder raised a hand to stop him.

“We've wasted too much time already on this nonsense,” the boy said. “Let him fight. Wei Jin Amon, ensure he has no time to admit defeat.”

The cold words sent a chill up Lindon's spine, but he bowed again. “Does that mean the Heaven's Glory School accepts my words?”

“We do. So long as the Wei clan accepts the consequences of your loss.”

“Certainly,” Sairus declared. “One Unsouled is no loss to my clan. An honorable death in a duel is more than he has earned.”

Lindon glanced up in the stands. Kelsa looked horrified, Jaran was half-standing in fury, and the First Elder shook his head sadly. None of them could intervene.

Only his mother frowned, as though considering something.

“Sacred artists, prepare yourselves!” the Patriarch shouted. His grandson ran a hand along the spear, face as cold as his iron badge. Lindon leaned forward as far as he could, as though he meant to dash into Amon immediately.

“Begin!”

Lindon ran the other way.

A surge of laughter burst from the stands as they watched the Foundation-stage child run from the Iron practitioner. Amon didn't deign to pursue, but straightened up, his spear locked in his fist. “Do you want to shame me into chasing you?” he asked, in a tone too low to carry. “Is that your plan?”

Lindon didn't answer. When he reached the edge of the stage, he turned to face his cousin. “This one patiently awaits your guidance,” he said politely.

When Amon moved, Lindon could barely see it. He seemed to cross a dozen yards in a single step, the foxfire gathered around his spearhead tracing lines in the air like shining serpents.

But he wasn't faster than Lindon's spirit. He sent a pulse of madra down through his heel, into the stage, undoing the seal he'd placed on a jar three days earlier.

Be free, he urged mentally, and the Remnants shattered their prison. They followed the weak thread of his power up and through the stone, passing through like ghosts.

A swarm of green-light hornets spun around Lindon like emeralds, buzzing with fury. His command still bound them: Attack.

As one, the Remnants turned to face Wei Jin Amon.

The Iron fighter pulled himself up short, skidding to a halt on the stone, but he'd been moving too fast. He couldn't stop in time. Not that the Remnants would have allowed him to escape anyway.

They were on him like a school of ravenous fish, stingers flashing as they stung. No one could display the dignity of a sacred artist under such a condition; he screamed like a child, flailing his spear as though he'd never had an hour of weapons training, swatting wildly at the air around him.

For a few seconds, Lindon only watched. When he saw pulses of hazy purple-and-white force emanating from Amon's body, causing hornets to pause or turn spirals in midair, he knew that his cousin had focused his spirit on defense. Now was the chance.

Lindon walked forward, and the Remnants parted before him. Amon was still dangerously strong, his spear sweeping through the air, and Lindon took an instant to judge its path before he reached out and caught it.

The wood smacked painfully into his palm, but not with nearly the force a true attack would have carried. Amon's spirit was in chaos, his madra bent to swiping away hornets, and he had not focused his strength.

With both hands, Lindon wrenched the weapon away. Amon didn't seem to understand what had happened, as he stumbled blindly forward.

While everyone in the clan who reached at least Copper received instruction in a basic weapon, Lindon had never had such an opportunity. He had no idea how to use a spear beyond imitating what he'd seen in others. Fortunately, he didn't need much skill.

He gripped the spear in both hands like a club, and began smacking Wei Jin Amon everywhere he could. The sharp edge of the spear caught him a few times, drawing blood, but Amon was an Iron. He was in far more danger from the Remnants than from Lindon's pathetic attacks.

Lindon couldn't deny a little excitement. He'd dreamed of this moment for years.

Under assault from the hornets and his own weapon, Amon's screams turned to sobs. “I...don't...” he tried to force out, but Lindon didn't lessen his assault. “I...give...” he began, and that was too much.

Lindon walked around to the other side of his cousin, reversing his spear until the butt rested against Amon's chest. Then he gave a shove.

The Iron-ranked fighter tumbled to the ground outside the stage.

The arena was silent except for Amon's sobs and the buzz of the Remnants, who continued their attack until they received another wave of Lindon's madra. When they did, they responded as a swarm: “TASK COMPLETED.” Then they flew off into the sky.

No one stopped them. Someone like the Patriarch could surely have destroyed them had he wanted to, but even he seemed paralyzed. His face grew red as he stared at Lindon, his mouth gaping open as though he couldn't give voice to his fury.

Before he could say anything, Lindon bowed to the foreign guests once more. “Wei Jin Amon has admitted defeat and left the bounds of the competition.”

Another instant of silence, except for the pathetic sounds made by Amon, and then the boy from Heaven's Glory began to laugh.

“Is this the honor and dignity of the Wei clan, then? One child attacks another for a lowly position in my school, fighting over our scraps?”

The air warped around Patriarch Sairus, and Lindon was sheathed in absolute darkness. The Patriarch had blinded him.

Only that morning, Lindon would have panicked and begged forgiveness. But after seeing Suriel's display of power, this one was somewhat lacking.

“Forgive us, Elder Whitehall,” Sairus said. “We will punish the Unsouled.” Elder? That child was a Jade? Lindon hadn't gotten a look at the boy's badge, but that seemed incredible.

“No!” Elder Whitehall barked. “The Heaven's Glory School has given its word, and a child cannot cause us to break it. We will harbor Wei Shi Lindon for as long as he can perform up to the standard of a Heaven's Glory disciple.”

Which wouldn't be long, Lindon was sure, but it didn't have to be. He only had to find Yerin, the Sword Sage's Disciple, and leave the valley.

“But we only came down from Samara for one disciple,” the elder continued. “We have no room for two. Have your grandson meditate on his failures, and perhaps when we again have space for a new disciple, we will consider him once more.”

The darkness over Lindon lifted, and he dropped to his knees to press his forehead against the cold stone. “Disciple Lindon greets Elder Whitehall.”

“Don't buy your own lies,” said the boy in gold and white. “If you last a week on the mountain, I’ll tutor you myself.”

* * *

The rest of the Seven-Year Festival passed without incident, as far as Lindon was concerned. His veiled questions to his family about a Gold from the Li Clan, or the phoenix that descended from the sky, were met with confused looks and careful inquiries. His mother, at least, was worried that someone on the Path of the White Fox had tampered with his perception.

Kelsa ended up as the highest-ranking young Iron in the Wei clan, as Wei Jin Amon was too busy recuperating from his injuries to participate. She ultimately lost to a Kazan girl, but that wasn't enough to tarnish her achievements. The Patriarch himself presented her with a pair of valuable elixirs, announcing that she would “Redeem the shame of the Shi family.”

After receiving her prizes, Kelsa returned to the Shi family compound with Lindon by her side. She spoke about the Festival with great enthusiasm and without interference. He walked in silence.

“…I’ll need one of these elixirs to stabilize my core after reaching Iron, but the second won’t help much. They say it takes twenty of these to get close to Jade, can you imagine? They’re five thousand chips apiece. And that’s with years of cycling in between each one.” She glanced to the side, giving him a wry smile. The box of elixirs was tied in a cloth bag, and that bag dangled carelessly from her hand as she walked.

“I’d share one with you, but I doubt you’ll need it. Heaven’s Glory. You’ll be eating spirit-fruits for every meal and drinking elixirs like water. Instead of sharing with you, I should be asking you to share with me.”

Lindon knew Kelsa. She wasn’t angling for a handout, just making an idle comment. If he actually offered to share any elixirs from Heaven’s Glory with her, she’d refuse unless he tricked her into it.

But the thought gave him a pang of loss and regret. If all went according to plan, he wouldn’t see Kelsa or the rest of his family for more than twenty years. It was an impossible amount of time to him, incomprehensibly vast.

She read his silence and stopped, stretching out an arm in front of his chest. He ran into it as though into a tree branch, her forearm striking his ribs with the strength of a club. He coughed out a breath, and the weight of his pack pushed him forward, straining his neck.

He staggered back, wondering if his chest would bruise. “What was that?”

“You’re too quiet,” she said, folding her arms. The box of elixirs hung down in its blue shadesilk bag. “Something happened.”

He pressed fingers into his sternum, feeling for tenderness. “I’m listening, I’m not meditating on boyhood trauma. Maybe I should do all the talking from now on, and you should take the punches.”

She stared him down. “You can punch me as long as your knuckles hold out, but when you’re done, I need an answer. You’ve won everything you’ve ever wanted. More than I did; there are people who would kill you for a spot as a School disciple. And you’re not proud of it, you haven’t gloated, you haven’t tried to get something extra out of the clan before you leave. You haven’t even redeemed that deal of yours with the First Elder, and he told me he’d expected to see you before sunset on the day of the Foundation tournament. When you didn’t show up, he thought you were dead.”

The deal he’d made with the First Elder, a copy of the White Fox Path in exchange for displaying his abilities in the Seven-Year Festival, felt like it had come from a different life. He’d been dreaming before he met Suriel, and now he was awake.

Not that he could say that to his sister.

“My end of the scales doesn’t balance,” Lindon said. “I was supposed to defeat a Copper from another clan and show them the power of the Wei, but I ended up humiliating our own clan’s best disciple.”

Kelsa placed the elixirs carefully on the ground, then grabbed him by the shoulders. She leaned forward, her face inches away from his, dark eyes heavy with concern. “Are you dead? Because that is nothing my brother would say. My brother would have tried to convince the First Elder that beating Amon was better than beating some Copper from another clan.”

Lindon shrugged, averting his eyes. “I’m going to a School. I won’t need it anymore.”

He wasn’t concerned about keeping Suriel a secret. Spreading rumors about her couldn’t harm her, and receiving a visit from the heavens was a source of pride, not shame. If that had been all, he would have been trying to convince his sister to believe him, not keeping it a secret.

But he’d seen more than just a celestial messenger. He’d seen the end of the world.

There was nothing Kelsa could do to change that, nothing she could do to help him. Even if she completely believed him and was willing to leave Sacred Valley at his side, how could she help? She wasn’t a disciple of Heaven’s Glory, so she couldn’t follow him up the slopes of Samara, and she wasn’t strong enough to survive the terrors outside the valley any more than he was.

If he failed, if he died on the way as he was more than likely to do, he didn’t want her to live helpless under a cloud of doom. She’d be happier if he said nothing.

All that was true, but he still wanted to tell her.

She was still watching him from an inch away, still looking into his eyes with selfless concern. He found himself saying, “Was there….anything you can remember from that day at the Foundation tournament? Anything strange?”

Her eyebrows raised. “I’d say so. You set a swarm of hornets on Wei Jin Amon and beat him with his own spear.”

“Anything else?” Now it was his turn to search her eyes, looking for any sign of recognition, any uneasy recollections. “You didn’t feel like you were somewhere and then somewhere else? You didn’t lose any memories, or forget some time?”

“How would I know if I did?” she asked. Whatever he was looking for in her eyes, he didn’t see it.

He took a step back, and she allowed him to break her grip. “I’m nervous, that’s all it is,” he said. “Heaven’s Glory won’t accept a disciple like me, and they’ll try and force me out as soon as they can.”

Kelsa watched him a moment longer, then plucked her bag of elixirs from the ground. “Likely they will. What does that matter? You’ll take what you can from them, then if it gets too dangerous, you just come back down. Maybe you’ll get an elixir or some treasures from the top of the mountain. This could be exactly what you need to make the clan proud.”

They reached the Shi family complex, a square of tightly packed houses, as night fell. The ring of light around Samara glowed white, illuminating the snowy peak and casting a blanket of light all over the valley.

He took in the sight of his home under Samara’s ring as though for the last time.

In the morning, his mother and father said their goodbyes casually, and they'd all assured him that he would be welcomed back exactly as he was. They didn't understand why he fought back tears as he wished them farewell, because they expected him to return in no more than a week or two.

But in the end, he still had to leave. He'd seen too much to stay home.

* * *

The party from Heaven's Glory was led by Elder Whitehall, who was indeed a head shorter than Lindon. He looked no more than eleven or twelve, despite his intricate white-and-gold robes and the Jade arrow badge on his chest.

He waited with two disciples from his school before a carriage pulled by a pair of Remnants. The carriage itself looked finer than anything the Patriarch would ride, inlaid with golden clouds and dancing sacred beasts, and the Remnants were a pair of transparent oxen. They seemed to be made from heat haze, or perhaps incredibly fine glass, and—like most Remnants—they made sounds totally unlike a living creature. When they stomped their hooves, thunder rolled, and their fractious snorts were like the crack of a whip.

“You've made us wait,” Elder Whitehall said, though it was still an hour until dawn. Samara's halo still shone brighter than the moon, crowning and illuminating their destination. “Stow your belongings before you set us further behind.”

The two disciples glanced at Lindon more out of curiosity than pity, he was sure. Then they climbed into the carriage behind their master.

Lindon had tied his bulky pack to the roof before he noticed what they were missing: a driver.

“Hurry yourself, Unsouled,” the elder called from inside the carriage. “I have business to attend to at the school.”

Without a word of dissent, Lindon clambered up onto the driver's seat behind the oxen. Even this was cushioned, though the only carriages he'd ever ridden in the Wei clan had undressed boards for the driver. He was grateful for the comfort, and for the lack of company.

With an instant of concentration, he sent a drop of madra into the reins. A line of script ran down the inside of the leather straps, carrying his power down and into the ox-Remnants. They bellowed like a couple of thunderstorms, transparent forms rippling with light, and they began to pull.

After that, the trip was easy. At first, Lindon was concerned that he might have to ask Elder Whitehall for directions, but he discovered that the path toward Samara was clear and wide. They rode for hours as the sun rose, the terrain sprouted hills, and the purple-leafed orus trees gave way to foliage of mundane green.

Mount Samara's halo faded and dimmed as they approached, eventually vanishing for the day. The mountain's slopes were sparse, sprinkled with the occasional copse of twisted trees or the spot of color from a flying Remnant. The mountain loomed over them as noon broke, like a wall taking up half the horizon.

The road terminated at the base of the mountain, transforming into a dirt path that twisted upward in a series of hatchbacks. Lindon hesitated as he saw the trail, but the oxen didn't, hauling their way up the mountain with dogged determination.

Within seconds, Elder Whitehall must have sensed the change. “Halt!” he called, and Lindon had no choice but to urge the Remnants to stop their advance on a steep slope. They supported the carriage as though their hooves had been nailed to the side of the mountain.

The childlike elder hopped out of the carriage, his disciples following like chaperones. But when they reached the ground, they bowed to Elder Whitehall, saluting with their fists pressed together.

Lindon left the driver’s seat and did likewise. There was no sense in disrespecting an elder before even arriving at the school.

Whitehall paid them no attention, walking to their right, skirting the edge of the mountain. “The three of you will walk a different path up the mountain. This is the first test of any disciple in the Heaven’s Glory School.”

Lindon was somewhat surprised to learn that the other two were in the same category as he was. They were both older, but only by a year or two, and very little set them apart. One was as tall as Lindon, with brown hair a shade darker than his mother’s, the other shorter with black hair. Otherwise, they were wholly unremarkable.

Unremarkable except for the iron badges on their chests. Every glance they shot at Lindon’s wooden badge poked a needle in his pride.

He only had to bear with it. They would never make it past Jade; they were almost to the end of their Path. His was just beginning.

A number of boulders dotted the landscape where part of the mountain must have slid down years before, and each step of Elder Whitehall’s took him from one boulder to another. The Iron disciples followed him without difficulty, but Lindon strained his body to the limit just to keep up. More than once, he came teetering within an inch of falling off the rock and smashing his head, and he was sure he wouldn’t receive the best of medical care from the Heaven’s Glory School.

They arrived in less than an hour, with the elder and the other two disciples as fresh as if they’d simply stepped outside. Lindon’s clothes were caked with sweat, each breath heaving, his spirit fuzzy and weak from the madra he’d drawn to support his failing limbs.

Whitehall and the other two were looking up the mountain, and though it pained him to even turn his neck, he followed their gazes.

Into the slopes of Mount Samara there was a staircase. Rather than the rough gray-brown stone that surrounded him, these stairs were polished and white. It was so wide that a hundred men could march up side by side, and it appeared to progress up the mountain in a straight line. Beyond a few hundred steps, Lindon could see no further.

After that, the path was obscured by clouds of light. Shapes moved within the light, shadows with twisted antlers and gaping jaws. Even the two Iron disciples eyed the cloud with apprehension.

“Behold the Trial of Glorious Ascension,” Whitehall said proudly. Lindon had to admire whichever ancient leader of the Heaven’s Glory School came up with the name. It was only a staircase with some Remnant formations on it, but they had left such a proud and lofty title.

“Within that cloud are a few of the spirit-aspect and mind-aspect Remnants our school has tamed over the generations,” Whitehall continued. “They will test your resolve, your determination, and the solid foundations of your spirit. With each step you climb, the Trial will become heavier. Past a certain point, retreat is impossible. If you have no confidence, you may give up your title as a Heaven’s Glory disciple and return to your home. I will tell you that one in three disciples who challenges this Trial either dies or has their spirit broken, unable to practice the sacred arts again.”

The boy stared directly at Lindon. “I expect that statistic is especially appropriate today. Would any of you like to withdraw?”

All three of them looked at Lindon, but he maintained an open and honest expression, as though he didn’t realize what they expected of him.

After a minute of silence, the elder dismissed Lindon, turning to the other two. “If you reach the top, you will have passed, and will be considered a disciple of the Heaven’s Glory School. If you reach the top before sundown, however, then we will consider you to have a bright future. In that case, you will be allowed to select one item from the school’s Lesser Treasure Hall for your personal use. There are weapons, training supplements, elixirs, constructs…even some elders cannot choose freely from the hall. Use whatever means you have at your disposal, and do not take this Trial lightly.”

The other two disciples straightened up, and the short one’s eyes lit up. But Lindon’s heart blazed. Even the Wei clan’s treasure hall was enough to stir his imagination and longing, but the Heaven’s Glory hall had to be an unknown number of times greater.

Now he had to reach the top before sunset. Only…

He glanced up at the cloud, where a pair of silhouettes clashed with each other in a silent, distant battle. Shadow-liquid sprayed in the air. That was a test designed for promising young Irons and genius Coppers. There was no way he could survive.

So he had to find a different way.

Elder Whitehall jumped at the staircase, skipping six steps at a time. “When I reach the cloud, you may begin. I’ll see those of you who survive at the peak.”

In seconds, he vanished into the light. The two Iron disciples exchanged a few brief words with each other and then ran after, not sparing Lindon a glance. That suited him, as he had immediately left.

13

Lindon wasn’t insane. No matter how resolved or determined he was, there was no way someone at the Foundation stage of advancement would survive a trip through the Trial of Glorious Ascension. He’d barely been able to withstand the illusions created by his sister’s madra, much less an all-out attack from a mind Remnant. But he still had to make it to the top of the mountain before the sun set, and it was already early afternoon.

It wasn’t pleasant, but he did have one lone idea. Heaving a sigh, he started running back over the boulders.

The trip here had taken an hour. He was able to slow down a little on the way back, at least enough to ensure his safety, but his soul was already exhausted. By the time he arrived back at the carriage, his vision was swimming and his breath came in gulps.

Fortunately, the carriage was still here. If it hadn’t been, Lindon would have cursed himself for rushing.

He untied his pack from the roof, slipping his badge inside it. Then he rolled around in the dirt for a few minutes—painfully, as many of the rocks around here were sharp—until he looked pathetic enough.

When he did, he collapsed facedown.

As soon as Elder Whitehall had abandoned the carriage, Lindon had noticed. The Remnants might be intelligent enough to drag it back up to the Heaven’s Glory School, but they couldn’t necessarily be trusted to do so. Remnants always acted according to their nature, after all, and it was not in the nature of most Remnants to be perfectly obedient.

The carriage required a driver, and Whitehall had climbed up the Trial with his two students. Which could only mean that someone was coming down the mountain to pick up the school’s property. And since Remnants were valuable and prone to madra decay without proper care, that someone would be coming soon.

His only worry had been that he might arrive and find the carriage already gone. Now, he only had to wait for the servant of Heaven’s Glory. He could have driven the carriage up the mountain himself, but then he might face some awkward questions. Better to wait.

As the first hour of waiting stretched to two, Lindon’s confidence in his own theory began to thin. Someone should have been here by now, but he couldn’t lift his head to check too often, or they might see through him.

He finally gave in to the temptation and lifted his head only to see a stick-thin boy, barely Lindon’s age, staring at him from inches away.

They both gave a shout at the same time, scrambling away from one another.

The boy was wearing the uniform of a Heaven’s Glory disciple, white and gold with a red sash. His badge was copper, which explained why he was junior enough to be sent on such a menial assignment, and his eyes were wide.

“Honored stranger, do you need help?” the boy asked hesitantly.

Before he answered, Lindon lifted a hand to his head and winced. He made a show of checking his entire body for wounds, moving tenderly as though his every muscle ached. With his face and white robes matted in sweat and marred with dirt, he should look like someone who had just survived a calamity.

“Are you a disciple of the Heaven’s Glory School?” he asked, injecting his voice with heavy exhaustion.

“Yes, honored stranger.”

Suddenly Lindon propped himself up on his hands and knees, and bowed until his forehead pressed into the dirt. “This one has failed you. This one has failed your esteemed school, and he deserves a thousand lashes for his weakness.”

The disciple clearly didn’t know how to respond, but Lindon raised his head and swept into his story. “This humble one is only a gatherer of herbs, and was on his way to deliver his monthly supply to the magnificent Heaven’s Glory School. But he was set upon by a group of honorless dogs…”

Lindon choked as though unable to go on.

Fortunately, the disciple was intelligent enough to piece it together. “Truly unfortunate. Did they not even leave your badge?”

The boy’s voice was sympathetic, but Lindon had to quell any suspicions immediately. “A copper badge will not fetch them much, but they took even the bread I kept for my meals. I am blessed by the heavens that they overlooked this meager pack, so at least I will have clothes for the return journey.” He held up his pack voluntarily, so he wouldn’t notice it and become suspicious. “I spotted your carriage from afar, and I waited for you to return, but I am afraid weakness overcame me and I fell into sleep. Tell me, what must I do to redeem myself in the eyes of the Heaven’s Glory School?”

The boy hesitated. “I’m just a lesser initiate. You would need to speak to an elder…”

With obvious difficulty, Lindon levered himself to his feet, strapping the pack to his back. “Then I must go acquit myself before an elder. Thank you, honored disciple.” He bowed deeply and hobbled off, as though he meant to climb the trail on foot.

The disciple rushed over and caught him by the arm before he’d even passed the transparent ox-Remnants. “Hold a moment. With your injuries, you’d never survive the mountain.”

Lindon looked him dead in the eyes and tried to imitate his father. He knew he looked stronger than he actually was, so he was hoping to approach the prideful stare of an expert. “My failure is my own, and I must walk my own path.”

He took two steps and sagged, barely catching his balance. This time, the Copper boy sighed and pushed him back toward the carriage.

“I know you have your own pride, but I have mine as well. If I were to let a fellow sacred artist die on the side of the road when I could have helped, how would I show my face among the disciples? What would people think of my Heaven’s Glory School? I must take the carriage up the trail either way, and these Remnants will not mind a little extra weight.”

With a show of reluctance, Lindon allowed himself to be ushered inside.

* * *

Elder Whitehall only looked like a child. As a young man, old age had frightened him more than anything, so he had tested his fledgling refiner’s skills on all the spirit-fruits and sacred herbs he could gather. He’d finally refined an elixir that he was convinced would allow him to extend his youth.

It had almost worked.

An eight-year-old boy’s body was not developed enough to use the full extent of its spirit, no matter how powerful that spirit was. Nor was it strong enough to handle the most powerful sacred arts. He could accept that if it meant an increase in longevity, but for reasons he couldn’t fathom, this state put an increased burden on his internal organs. In only another decade or so, he would die of old age while trapped inside a child’s body.

That he had achieved Jade in spite of his handicaps was a testament to his own genius. Unfettered, he was certain that he could have become the first sacred artist in hundreds of years to reach Gold. The other elders thought his condition added a mystique to the Heaven’s Glory School, as though they’d trained a child to Jade, so they sent him to other factions. He especially resented it now, as a young woman in disciple’s robes told him what he’d missed while he visited the Wei clan.

Having to crane his neck to look this seventeen-year-old girl in the eye didn’t improve his mood.

“Elder Harbek, Elder Nasiri, and Elder Serenity were all confirmed slain in battle,” the girl reported, her voice heavy. “Four Irons are still missing, and thirteen dead.”

“But the Sword Sage was destroyed?” Whitehall was very intent on this point.

“There can be no doubt. His Remnant was the one to kill Elder Serenity, forcing the rest to retreat. The Remnant was sealed in the Grand Patriarch’s tomb.”

“And the corpse?”

She bowed, averting her eyes from his. “Pardon this one’s insufficient knowledge, elder. This one presumes the corpse is still inside with the Remnant.”

Of course it was. If the elders had been able to bypass the Remnant and loot the corpse, they wouldn’t have locked the tomb.

“His disciple is still in hiding,” she added as an afterthought. “The elders say she will be caught soon, and she may provide insight into the Remnant’s powers.”

Whitehall rubbed his chin, wishing for a beard. He hadn’t missed anything too important after all; he was only too late for the danger. The reward may still await him. “That will be all, disciple.”

The disciple bowed again—her hair dangled close to his face—and then ran off. She would be only too happy to leave; no one liked standing here, on the edge of the cliff at the top of the Trial of Glorious Ascension. The stairs were steep here, and covered in a pink-tinged cloud, and occasionally a slashing claw or flickering tail would emerge as the Remnants fought within.

Whitehall had just climbed the stairs himself, so he couldn’t be bothered, but many of the disciples harbored nightmarish memories of their time in the Trial. They didn’t want to spend a second longer near that cloud than they had to.

Nor, at the moment, did Whitehall. His heart itched with impatience, as he longed to go explore the tomb. There was every possibility that he could find a method to disperse the sword-Remnant, and if he did…

The Sword Sage had come from beyond Sacred Valley. Only the most favored of the Heaven’s Glory elders knew that truth, as many believed there were no settlements outside the valley. It was almost true; he’d seen the land beyond from a distance, and it was a barbaric world of slaughter and violence. Better if people stayed here, to meditate on the sacred arts in peace.

But this visitor from outside could be the key to Whitehall’s greatest problem. During his stay in the Heaven’s Glory School, the Sword Sage had demonstrated not only his proficiency with weapons, but his skill as a refiner. He’d brought out herbs and ingredients that Elder Whitehall had never seen before, from an Infant Songroot to the bones of a thousand-year-old sacred beast. With materials of that quality, Whitehall was sure that he could restore his body. He was close already, even with the pathetic sacred herbs he’d been able to scavenge from the clans.

Whitehall had attempted to buy what he wanted from the Sage, as had many of the other Heaven’s Glory elders. The visitor had laughed and insulted them to their faces, saying they did not deserve such treasures.

That was why the elders had collectively decided to kill him and take his wealth for their own. He was a lone expert, after all, not backed by any significant power. Whitehall had only hoped that they would wait for him to return from the Wei clan, but obviously the others had rushed ahead without him and bungled everything. This presented him with a unique opportunity. If he could dispel the Remnant and loot the man’s treasures on his own, then he wouldn’t have to settle for a small cut. Even if he couldn’t undo this curse on his body, his powers as a refiner and as a sacred artist would leap forward. It would be a heaven-sent opportunity either way.

He only lacked time, and now here he was waiting for disciples. What a waste. He’d already stood here for three hours, and if the two children were especially slow, he could be here for three more before the sun set.

As for the third disciple candidate, Whitehall wouldn’t even bother waiting. If the Unsouled hadn’t turned back for his clan, then the boy didn’t know what was good for him. He could die on the steps, and it would be no less than he deserved for embarrassing Whitehall in public.

A more substantial shadow loomed in the clouds, and Whitehall raised an eyebrow. Perhaps he had underestimated the boys. The tall one, Kazan Ma Deret, actually had a bit of talent. If he’d managed to climb the stairs this quickly, Whitehall might even consider taking him on as a personal disciple.

The figure that lurched from the stairs and collapsed, panting, on the cliffs was certainly tall. His hair was too dark for the Kazan boy, and though his robes were white, they were not the Heaven’s Glory robes that Deret had started with. And he was carrying a bulky brown pack that Whitehall didn’t recognize.

He lifted his face, and Whitehall saw that his jaw was clenched with apparent anger, his eyes sharp as spears. From his face, you’d think him rebellious and defiant.

The Unsouled.

Wei Shi Lindon crawled to his knees, kowtowing before him. “This one…greets…honored Elder Whitehall,” Lindon said between breaths. “This one tried his hardest, and hopes he has not shamed the Heaven’s Glory School too much with his tardiness.”

Judging by the sun, they still had at least two hours until sunset. The goal of reaching the top by sundown was not an easy one; only one in five disciples who survived the Trial of Glorious Ascension were allowed to select from the Lesser Treasure Hall. As a boy, Whitehall himself had not made it, and he had used that failure to push himself in the following years.

Had he been outdone by an Unsouled?

The boy’s clothes were shredded and caked with dirt, as though he’d crawled on his belly the whole way up. Scratches covered his knees and hands, and it looked as though part of his face would swell up. He was crusted in layers of sweat, as though he’d wrung every drop of effort from his body for hours. He certainly looked like someone who had passed the Trial.

But he remembered the final demonstration of the Seven-Year Festival, how Lindon had “beaten” his Iron opponent by conjuring Remnants out of nowhere. This wasn’t a proud potential disciple of Heaven’s Glory, but a scheming child whose spirit was trapped in a body that had grown without him. A twisted mirror of Whitehall himself.

Whitehall walked over and kicked Lindon in the shoulder, tossing the boy up and making him shout with pain. “Did you have a winged Remnant carry you up? Hm? Do you have a construct that protected you? Are you a genius scriptor? Because the heavens will crumble and the earth will sink into the sea before I believe you climbed up here on your own strength.”

Wei Shi Lindon looked up at him with hurt in his eyes, but rather than looking pitiable, he looked like he was angry enough to pick a fight. But there was no hint of anger in his words. “Forgiveness, honored elder, but the honored elder himself was very specific that we should climb the steps by any means at our disposal. If the honored elder did not mean it, I would be willing to return to the bottom and climb back up, only I don’t believe there is still time…”

Whitehall slowly glanced over his shoulder. Several disciples, in their red sashes, had gathered to watch this scene. They had paused their end-of-day training to see who’d made it up the Trial of Glorious Ascension.

With no witnesses, he would have tossed Wei Shi Lindon off the side of Mount Samara himself. No one would believe the Unsouled had a chance to make it in the first place, and they would all assume he’d died on the way up.

Besides, the stairs were scripted to prevent anyone who started climbing them from leaving. People could enter the Trial late, but even Whitehall himself couldn’t move off the trail once he’d begun.

Whitehall hurled a small wooden piece at Lindon’s head hard enough that it would probably leave a bruise. The Unsouled flinched and raised a hand to his scalp. The token was polished orus wood, bearing the mark of the Heaven’s Glory School: three crossed swords on top of a blazing sun, with clouds surrounding it all.

“Take that to the Lesser Treasure Hall and give it to the elder there,” Whitehall said, restraining his anger. He had more important things to be about; this Foundation-stage cripple wasn’t worth his time. “Tell him you’re not worth anything too valuable.”

Lindon returned to his knees and kowtowed one more time, pressing his forehead to the ground. “Gratitude, honored elder. This one is grateful for your generosity.”

“Go!” Whitehall shouted, and the Jade madra powering his voice sent pebbles scattering and a flock of birds fleeing from the top of a distant tree.

The boy scrambled away, token in hand, leaving Elder Whitehall to seethe alone.

14

Lindon’s plan had worked better than he expected. He’d ridden the carriage almost all the way up the mountain before dismounting, telling the Copper disciple that he had to walk the final distance for the sake of his pride. As soon as the carriage wound out of sight, he had walked around the slopes to the Trial of Glorious Ascension, which he had only experienced for about a hundred yards.

Certainly, it was a grueling hundred yards. Spirits scoured his mind, tormenting him with doubts and dreams and phantom rage. He stumbled up each step with voices screaming in his head, and when he finally reached the top, he felt as though he’d escaped the cold grasp of death.

If he’d tried to climb the whole thing, he really might not have made it.

He flipped Elder Whitehall’s token in his hand as he asked a nearby disciple where he might find the Lesser Treasure Hall. She was delighted to direct him once she realized he’d passed the Trial before sunset, although his wooden badge gave her a look of clear confusion.

As expected, the Heaven’s Glory School was much more impressive in appearance than the Wei clan. Each building was sculpted from riverstone, a delicate and expensive material that glistened in the light as though drenched. Under the light of the setting sun, every wall sparkled.

The buildings were each large enough to be a family dwelling of the Wei clan, and next to each was a carefully cultivated garden that was dense with life. Disciples, in their white-and-gold robes with red sashes, were often tending the flowers or trimming trees in these little garden patches.

With the mountains in the background, the shimmering buildings and luxuriant plants gave this school the look of a celestial village, torn from the heavens and set down on the side of a peak. As a son of the Wei clan, Lindon could appreciate the dedication that had gone into designing such an image. Impressions were important.

The Lesser Treasure Hall of the Heaven’s Glory School was no larger than any other hall, but a towering sign boasted its name in letters of gold. A script around the edges gathered vital aura into light, so that it could be clearly read even in the night.

Sitting on the porch of the hall, next to a pair of Iron Enforcers, sat an old man that looked as though he would shrivel away to nothing at any second. His hair was white and wispy, his skin so thin and dry that it looked like it might crumble, and his eyes were little more than beady black dots. His heavy jade badge—carved with a hammer—trembled as he climbed to his feet, hobbling over to see Lindon.

“Welcome to the Heaven’s Glory School, new disciple,” the elder said. “Your token, if you please.”

“This humble student greets the elder,” Lindon said, pressing his fists together in a salute. Only then did he hand over the wooden piece.

The elder slipped the token in his pocket and studied Lindon. “You have a wooden badge.”

There was no point in hiding it, even if he could. Lindon didn’t plan on staying at the Heaven’s Glory School very long, and his weakness would cause him trouble even if he tried to deny it. “I am Unsouled, elder.”

“Elder Rahm. For an Unsouled to pass the Trial of Glorious Ascension before sundown is a fine achievement indeed. No matter how you did it.” A bit of wry humor crept into Elder Rahm’s voice before he turned and waved Lindon after him.

Lindon followed, deliberately looking away from the Irons on the side. He already had a good impression of the elder, and he didn’t want to ruin his mood by seeing looks of ridicule or doubt on the faces of the guards.

“I have supervised the Elder Treasure Hall for forty years, and if you need a more detailed explanation of any of the items, you have only to ask. This is the least of the three treasure halls in our school, but do not let that dim your eyes. These are still priceless artifacts that any of the clans would ransom their sons and daughters to afford, and only outstanding disciples are given a chance like this.”

Lindon was hardly listening. The Heaven’s Glory treasure hall looked much like the Wei clan’s archive, but on a grander scale. The building was one huge room, broad and open like a dancing hall, with display cases stretching out in vast rows. Each case only came up to his chest, so he was afforded an almost uninterrupted look at the whole spread.

And the treasures he saw—at least, the ones he recognized—were enough to make any Wei elder sick with envy.

“How do you leave them all in the open like this?” Lindon asked. It was the first thought on his mind, because he imagined any disciple coming up from the clans would be tempted to rob this place clean.

The elder’s wrinkled face stretched into a smile. “The Path of Heaven’s Glory does not require you to set aside evil and selfish desires, but it is to your own benefit that you do so. If you had any ideas of slipping out with something extra in your pack, put them aside now.” The elder pointed one gnarled finger at the frame around the door, through which they had just entered, and Lindon could just make out the delicate etchings of a script.

“That script is a defensive formation that calls battle-constructs out of the ground. Some of them use Heaven’s Glory madra, but not all of them. Only the Grand Elder and I know the full configuration. Their power is enough to destroy even a group of Jades. Besides,” he gestured to the cases, “each case is sealed. If you try opening one without me, the alarms will wake the whole school. And set off the constructs.”

He cackled and slapped Lindon on the shoulder. “So if you want to try and steal something from me, Unsouled, go ahead and try. If you survive, you’ll learn a good lesson.”

Lindon pressed his fists together to salute the elder, glad the man hadn’t taken offense. But in the back of his mind, he still noted that those security measures didn’t seem unbeatable. He’d learned a bit about scripting and a bit more about constructs from his mother, and he was sure he could slither his way through a loophole.

Not that a disciple should ever steal from his school, but Elder Whitehall had made it abundantly clear that he wasn’t a real disciple. So why should he treat the Heaven’s Glory School with extra respect?

But those were matters for another time. He stepped up to the first case, eagerly snatching the attached tablet. This was a fine, slightly-curved sword of polished steel, short enough to wield in one hand, with a delicate spiderweb of script over the flat of its blade.

Flying Sword, the tablet read. When powered by Iron-quality madra, this weapon is capable of levitating through vital aura and striking with the force of a real sword. Used for personal defense, distant attacks, or even transportation for advanced practitioners.

Aspect requirement: none.

Already, Lindon’s heart burned with desire. He’d heard stories of sacred artists standing on flying swords, or controlling clouds of the floating blades to shred armies. Even he could face a stronger opponent by using the sword from behind, fighting as though he had an invisible partner. It didn’t even require a particular aspect, so his pure madra could power the script.

It was only suitable for sacred artists of Iron and above, but Suriel and Elder Whisper had both suggested that he would reach that level eventually. Why not take the treasure now and prepare for when that day came?

Eventually he pried himself away from the first case and moved to the next one. This case contained only a polished wooden box, but the tablet included a picture: the sketch of a hovering, plated ball with what appeared to be a single eye in the center.

Glasswater Sentinel. A transparent construct that is almost invisible, intended for personal protection. Strikes down attacks aimed at its owner. Crafted by Soulsmith Serenity of the Heaven’s Glory School.

Involuntarily, Lindon reached out a hand to hover over the glass case, as though he could sense the construct’s power. This would be even better than the flying sword! He could use it now, as constructs were fueled by vital aura, and it would keep him alive at least until he reached Copper and could somewhat protect himself. He almost picked this one immediately…but there were dozens, perhaps hundreds, of other cases.

Nightflame Spirit-lamp, said the tablet for a shuttered black lantern that gleamed with a cruel edge. Gathers fire-aspect vital aura during the day, sprouting a flame when the sun sets. Allows easy access to fire aura, and provides any practitioner with a source of light.

Spirit-seals sat in their own case, but he brushed by these. They were rectangular sheets of paper about the size of a palm, covered in scripts of daunting complexity, which could be attached to a Remnant in order to weaken them for capture or dissection. Spirit-seals were valuable, but they were almost useless for anyone aside from a Soulsmith. He left that one aside.

One case had a small garden inside, complete with tiny trees, grassy hills the size of a mouse, and a river running around the border that was still flowing. The glass of this case seemed twice as thick as the others, and it took him a minute or two of examination to realize that there was actually a glass box inside the glass case. Inside this garden, a finger-sized Remnant of ocean-blue flame darted around like a playful wraith. It slid inside the river, made a lap of the terrarium, and then frolicked on a hill for a few seconds. When Lindon leaned over the case, it paused, tilting its featureless head up as though to look at him.

After a few seconds, apparently bored, it returned to skimming around on the grass.

Sylvan Riverseed. The seed of a nascent Sylvan with water and other, unidentified aspects. Can be nurtured by a supply of pure madra, but its future growth is not guaranteed.

Aspect requirement: pure.

This case fascinated Lindon, and he stared at it for more than ten minutes. It seemed tailor-made for him, as it required purity, though he had little idea what a Sylvan was. It looked like a Remnant, and Remnants were indeed capable of becoming more powerful, but they didn’t grow from a seed. If this was something like a cross between a Remnant and a sacred beast, it could serve him long after he left Sacred Valley.

But in the end, he moved on to other cases. It had the same drawback as many of the other riches here: it would take too long before he could use it. He needed something useful now. Then again, he didn’t want something that would be useless to him as soon as he hit Copper…

Elder Rahm appeared in front of the Sylvan Riverseed’s display case, smiling gently. “It’s good that you make this decision with patience. The treasure you select here can guide your entire Path, and my soul shudders every time a young disciple comes in here and grabs the first weapon they see. If you tell me what has caught your eye, I might be able to enlighten you.”

If Lindon didn’t walk out of here with at least half a dozen treasures, he would be leaving pieces of his spirit behind. He gave the elder a helpless look. “I could take it all, and it still wouldn’t be enough.”

Rahm gave a hearty laugh, smacking his palm on the flat of a glass case. “Good! Very good! That’s how a young sacred artist should be. If you’re not greedy for more, always more, how could you ever advance?”

Lindon suspected he may have just heard something profound, but the elder was already ushering him forward. “You’re weaker than you should be, yes? Let this old man give you a few suggestions.”

Elder Rahm toured him through the aisles, past a few eye-catching items that made Lindon want to twist around and take a look. Finally, he stopped in front of a velvet cushion displaying a twisted halfsilver ring.

Lindon’s eyes widened even before he read the tablet. The parasite ring would burden his cycling so that it took twice the effort, but it would result in twice the reward as well. Since cycling was one of the only ways to strengthen his spirit without drawing on the vital aura in the atmosphere, the parasite ring would help him build up pure madra.

Elder Rahm gave a brief explanation, but before Lindon could say that this was exactly what he was looking for, the old man moved on. He passed a rack of weapons that weren’t under glass; goldsteel breastplates, mail, and shields, as well as halfsilver knives, daggers, awls, sabers, and spearheads. Halfsilver looked like ordinary silver that had caught sparks from stars, so it glittered; it was more brittle even than its mundane counterpart, but it had disruptive effects on madra. Those properties made it desirable for Soulsmith tools and certain weapons.

Goldsteel looked like polished gold, except whenever it caught the light it reflected pure white. That was an odd sensation for the eye, so that the mind was never sure exactly what color it was. Some in the Wei clan used goldsteel to gather light-aspect vital aura for training the Path of the White Fox, as it reflected light in a deceptive manner. Goldsteel did not disrupt as halfsilver did, but it provided protection against Remnants. It was best suited for trinkets that warded off small spirits or armor to protect against larger Remnants in combat.

Lindon’s fingers itched to examine the weapons and armor more closely, because such pieces had been far too valuable for him back in the Wei clan. But Elder Rahm had him firmly by the elbow, and soon had him in front of another case. This one contained a pinkish-white lotus flower, clenched halfway into a bud, perched delicately in a ceramic cup. It seemed to be made of pure color, like a Remnant, as though it had been painted onto the world with a brush of light.

“The bud of a Starlotus,” Rahm said reverently. “Despite its appearance, it’s classified primarily as a spirit-fruit. Its herbal and medicinal aspects are considered low-grade, but if you eat it directly…well, I normally recommend it to talented Copper disciples who are having trouble advancing to Iron. For you, it might very well allow you to step into the Copper realm immediately.”

Immediately. After Suriel’s visit, Lindon had begun thinking of advancing as something inevitable, but he hadn’t even imagined breaking through instantly. He could catch up to his peers today.

Of course, Copper was only average by the standards of the Wei clan. The Heaven’s Glory School rarely accepted anyone under Iron, and outside Sacred Valley the standards were apparently even higher.

“This is the one I need,” Lindon said, trying to make his voice sound firm. There were still at least five other items he wanted, but he had to be practical. The first step wasn’t as exciting, but it had to come first.

Instead of listening to him, the elder had already gathered him by the elbow again, pulling him away. “Don’t be hasty, now. The school already gives one elixir and one spirit-fruit to each disciple when they join, as well as every half a year. You’ll claim your first batch today, and the mid-year celebration for Sun Day is in only a few weeks. It’s very possible you’ll advance then, using materials much less valuable than the Starlotus.”

“Pardon, honored elder,” Lindon said, even as he tried to extract himself as gently as possible from the man’s grip. “But if I break through, the Starlotus will still be beneficial. It’s intended for Coppers, isn’t it?”

“Certainly it is,” Rahm said, stopping before a cage that softly shone. “But if you can advance with the resources provided you by the school, why would you waste your one chance in the Lesser Treasure Hall? Pick a treasure that will truly serve you even if you one day reach Jade.”

Lindon thought the elder might have overestimated him a bit too much. An Unsouled reach Jade? How?

He firmly stopped that line of thinking. Jade isn’t where I’ll stop. Neither is Gold. When I return to the valley, they won’t be able to measure my power.

Suriel had practically promised him.

Elder Rahm gestured to the case, where a dense, rust-colored cloud filled the box. “This is known as the Thousand-Mile Cloud, but it will let you move even farther than that.” Only with the elder’s explanation did Lindon realize that the cloud itself was a treasure. He’d been trying to peer through it, to see what the red fog was concealing.

“It’s a construct. When you power it, it can carry you through the air for as long as your madra lasts.”

Flight. Who hadn’t dreamed of that? Suddenly advancing to Copper seemed trivial. Any child could reach Copper—any child except him—but what Jade could fly?

As he was picturing the glorious scene of himself returning to the Wei clan on a flying red cloud, the case next to him caught his eye. It was a vertical column of glass, rather than an enclosed podium like the rest, and it contained a stack of purple banners that stood only as high as his knee. One side of the banners were stitched with three intricate script-circles, but on the other side was the image of a five-tailed snowfox.

Without a word to Elder Rahm, he moved over to the tablet next to the case.

White Fox boundary formation. These seven banners, when placed in conjunction with one another, gather light- and dream-aspect vital aura. This can be used for training Paths such as the Path of the White Fox, or for baffling enemies. By holding one of the ward keys (provided), the owner can enter and exit at their discretion.

Aspect requirement: light or dreams.

“This is the one,” Lindon said.

The rest of his ambitions notwithstanding, Lindon had spent every day since he was a child dreaming of being a sacred artist…and more specifically, a sacred artist on the Path of the White Fox. A master of illusion who could strike with the force of a thunderbolt while his foes were still trying to catch a glimpse of his shadow. This boundary formation would allow even him to use power that should be limited to a Ruler of the White Fox.

And the one thing he could do as an Unsouled was power a script.

Elder Rahm drifted over, making a noncommittal sound. “You’re from the Wei clan, I take it. It’s not a bad choice, as formations are restricted only by your flexibility. You can use White Fox madra even without cultivating it yourself, which has its uses. But formation flags have to be placed in a circle, which takes time. It takes planning, it takes foresight. If you’re attacked, these banners won’t save you, and they won’t help you advance either.”

But the more he thought about it, the more convinced Lindon became that this formation was the right choice for him. The banners were only useful with planning and insight, but those had nothing to do with his spirit’s advancement. Only his mind. They would serve him now, last him even when he left the valley, and they would serve as a reminder of his family.

He picked up the tablet, handing it to Elder Rahm with both hands. “Thank you for your guidance, Elder Rahm. This is my choice. Perhaps if I can render some merit to the school, I’ll see you in here again.”

Rahm laughed and took the tablet, which—if the treasure hall worked anything like the Wei clan’s archive—he was supposed to file away. Instead, he tucked it under his arm and waved his free hand over the glass.

The “glass” shimmered and dissolved into motes of white-gold light, and only then did Lindon realize that it wasn’t glass at all, but Forged madra. Of the Heaven’s Glory Path, he assumed.

“Take them, I’ll update my records when you leave. I’ll tell you now, this is likely to be your last visit. Most people don’t serve the school well enough to earn a second trip until they hit Jade, and by that time you’ll be qualified to enter the Greater Treasure Hall. These are toys compared to what you’ll find in there.”

Lindon’s imagination soared, and he’d already started coming up with ways to impress the Heaven’s Glory elders in hopes of receiving another treasure, but he knew he was being foolish. I’m not staying here, he reminded himself. I have a much longer path to follow.

The surge of importance he felt helped, but even with the banners tucked under his arm, he couldn’t resist a last longing look at the Thousand-Mile Cloud.

Elder Rahm pushed him out by the small of his back. “You’re a disciple here now, boy. You can visit me every once in a while and drool over my treasures, though I won’t let you take one. Maybe I’ll let you help out here, from time to time.”

Lindon bowed and thanked him, but before he’d even finished saying his goodbyes, a shout from outside distracted him.

“Bring him out here!” a man’s voice said, with barely restrained fury.

Elder Rahm pushed open the door, revealing a tall young man—about Lindon’s height—with brown hair and a dark gaze. Blood ran down his scalp, he’d lost his red sash, and his white-and-gold training uniform looked like it had been torn apart by a beast’s claws. His iron badge was the size of two spread palms together, which was the detail that made him fit Lindon’s memory.

He was one of the other potential disciples from the Seven-Year Festival, the one from the Kazan clan. And he stared at Lindon with undisguised anger.

15

Night had fallen while Lindon browsed the Lesser Treasure Hall. He could tell why the Kazan disciple was furious; obviously he hadn’t made it to the top in time. He couldn’t swallow the idea that an Unsouled could succeed somewhere he’d failed.

“You’re making a ruckus in my hall,” Elder Rahm said, and the cold in his voice made even Lindon shiver. The Kazan curbed his anger, bowing.

“Apologies, elder. I forgot myself. I am Kazan Ma Deret, and I have had my honor trampled by the trash behind you.”

Deret glared at Lindon, but Lindon was already sliding away down the side of the porch, clutching his bundle of seven white banners. The Kazan disciple turned as though to stop him, but Rahm placed a hand on the boy’s shoulder.

“By ignoring me in favor of your rage, you have dishonored me,” Elder Rahm said. “Explain. How has an Unsouled insulted an Iron?”

Deret looked briefly surprised, as well he might; even in the Wei clan, anyone with an iron badge would have been able to dispose of Lindon as they pleased without question. Lindon’s own grandfather wouldn’t have stood up for him as Elder Rahm had just done.

But he couldn’t rely on others to defend him, especially not from the Heaven’s Glory School. However Rahm felt, the other elders certainly wouldn’t be excited about an Unsouled joining their ranks. That suited him. Once he found the Sword Sage’s disciple, he was gone.

Until then, he needed to defend himself.

Lindon slipped in between the Lesser Treasure Hall and another building, its stone walls slick with the appearance of rainwater. He stood over a flower-bush, in the center of one of those densely packed gardens he’d noticed before. As soon as he was out of sight from the street, he scrambled to untie his bundle.

Seven three-foot poles attached to purple banners spilled over the grass, but they weren’t the only contents of the treasure he’d taken from the hall. A pair of polished wooden placards followed the banners, each the size of Lindon’s hand and banded with script-circles that wrapped around each edge. Ward keys.

He slipped both keys into the sash at his waist and scurried around the edges of the garden, stabbing poles into soft earth. Boundary formations worked on the same principle as smaller script-circles: if they were evenly placed in a ring, they would activate the vital aura in an area to fuel some result. If their placement was too sloppy the boundary wouldn’t trigger at all, and it would only work at peak efficiency if the banners were a precisely equal distance apart.

Lindon didn’t need peak efficiency. He needed whatever he could get.

When the seventh banner was placed, Lindon initiated the script on the back. It flared blue-white…and, a second later, the other two banners visible to him through the undergrowth flashed as well.

The madra rushed out of him all at once, almost exhausting his spirit. He stumbled as he walked away, only holding himself upright with a hand on the wall. In his mind’s eye, the light traveling through his madra channels was dangerously dim.

Before he’d eaten the orus spirit-fruit, he wouldn’t have been able to activate this boundary at all. Even now, though a Copper could likely use it with ease, he had to be careful.

He suppressed the instant longing he felt for all the other treasures inside—the ones that would advance him to Copper, or that he could use without feeling like he might lose control of his body at any moment. He had chosen, and now he would prove his choice useful.

As he left, he glanced back at the boundary. He didn’t feel anything from the boundary, as he carried the ward keys with him, but a faint suggestion of white haze had gathered between the boundaries. He even thought he heard a distant eagle’s cry.

He’d lived among a White Fox aura his entire life, and he could tell when it was gathering.

When he rounded the building again, Kazan Ma Deret was stating the facts of his case. “I saw Shet die. He lost himself, crying and moving in circles, until he finally threw himself at the feet of a Remnant and begged it to kill him. That is what the Trial did to a strong, honorable sacred artist. I ask you now, how could that trash have possibly survived where Shet did not?”

More than ever, Lindon was glad he hadn’t tried to walk up those steps. They sounded brutal.

“It seems he has come to answer for himself,” Elder Rahm said, turning to squint in Lindon’s direction.

Lindon squared his shoulders, drawing himself up to his full height. Deret was a year or two older than he was, but he looked the Kazan straight in the eyes. “Do the Irons of the Kazan Clan have nothing better to do than oppress their juniors?”

Elder Rahm turned toward him slowly, like a tree bending in the wind. Kazan Ma Deret looked like he was about to erupt.

“Very well,” Lindon said. “I’ll give you some pointers. Elder Rahm, will your humble disciple be punished if I injure a peer in the course of a supervised duel?”

Deret’s face turned slowly red, and madra clenched over his shoulders, forming squarish boxes of rippling haze. The hammer on his badge said he was a Forger, and the Kazan walked the Path of the Mountain’s Heart. He would be able to conjure weapons of crushing force. Even half-formed, the constructs floating over his shoulder could smash Lindon’s limbs to pieces.

“Are you sure about this, boy?” Elder Rahm asked.

“I can’t render any merits to the Heaven’s Glory School if I can’t even put down a dog from the Kazan Clan,” Lindon said, bowing over his fists.

Deret choked out his own agreement to the duel, all but incoherent with rage.

For once, Lindon’s appearance worked in his favor. He looked like he was eager to fight, even as his hands shook and cold sweat ran down the back of his neck. He hated provoking people like this, especially people capable of crippling him, but he needed Deret angry enough to follow. And he was confident in his plan. Well, reasonably confident.

His mind spat out a dozen ways this could go wrong, eroding his certainty by the second, but he was committed now. Elder Rahm raised one ancient hand in the air, even as Kazan Deret’s Forged madra began to take on shape and definition. They were definitely bricks, appearing line by line as though sketched in midair, and they would gain heft and weight as soon as he finished Forging them. For now, they remained floating.

“To incapacitation or surrender,” Elder Rahm reminded them. Lindon leaned onto the balls of his feet, shifting his weight as though he meant to dash with all his speed straight toward Deret.

A blinding golden light flashed from the elder’s hand even as he called, “Begin!”

Lindon turned and ran.

Most Forged madra did not float. Soulsmiths had to craft their constructs with special techniques in order to get them to levitate, and Mountain’s Heart bricks were very dense. The Kazan used their Forgers to build walls, constructing intricate scripted arrays to keep the madra from dissipating.

So Deret couldn’t simply will his bricks to blast Lindon from a distance, which was the only reason why Lindon had a chance. But he was an Iron. He could simply throw them.

Without looking behind him, Lindon ducked to one side just as a solid brick smashed into the stones at his feet, blasting into rolling pebbles of Mountain’s Heart. He felt the impact through his feet, and it seemed to rattle the air like thunder. Even the stone it landed on showed a faint crack.

Lindon’s frantic, heavy breaths had very little to do with physical exertion. He had started only a few dozen yards from the edge of the Lesser Treasure Hall, and in the seconds it had taken him to cover that distance, Deret had almost destroyed his legs.

As soon as he crossed the corner, stepping into the dense garden, he snatched the ward key from his belt. Otherwise, he didn’t slow down; the Iron would be only a breath behind him, and he would have another brick ready to hurl.

Lindon dove into the bushes and waited.

Sure enough, Deret followed a second later, one brick raised in his hand, another forming over his shoulder. He stopped when he saw the garden.

Lindon couldn’t allow him to inspect the area for too long, so he rolled away from the bush, intentionally shaking its leaves. A brick blasted the bush to pieces, shredding the branches and tightening the bands of fear around Lindon’s throat. If Deret didn’t approach, if he just stood there at the mouth of the alley and threw bricks…

“I knew a Wei coward wouldn’t fight,” Deret called, a freshly formed brick dropping into his hand. “All you have are your tricks…but do you even know any? Did they teach the Path of the White Fox to an Unsouled?”

Lindon trembled as he stared at the spot where he’d hidden the formation banner. Deret was one step from crossing the boundary. But if Lindon moved again, he’d need the luck of a Gold to avoid getting smashed to pieces by a brick.

The leafy branches of the undergrowth had prevented Deret from finding him so far, along with the barely-perceptible distortion the White Fox aura left in the air, but if he moved, Deret would see him for sure. There was one thing he could try, the same old trick every child tried when playing with their friends in the woods. He could throw a rock.

Lindon reached into one of the smaller pockets in his pack, where he usually kept a few halfsilver chips, and grabbed something small. He lobbed it out from behind his hiding-space.

It was the glass bead that Suriel had given him. Its blue flame shone like a tiny star.

Deret whipped his arm forward like a striking viper, reacting with a speed that made Lindon instantly glad he hadn’t tried to make a break for it, but he stopped before the brick left his hand. He stared at the rolling marble for a second as though trying to figure out what it was. He took a single step forward, his foot landing on grass.

When the boundary activated, the White Fox aura that had gathered in the atmosphere ignited. Lindon saw it as though he looked into someone else’s dream: the blue flame of the bead split again, and again, until seven illusory blue stars spun around Deret’s head. He swung the brick at them, staggering away, but his feet actually took him deeper into the boundary.

He spun around at the cry of a bird, only to see—instead of an alley wall—an endless forest that stretched out for miles.

Lindon observed all this as though it were painted in front of him. He witnessed it all clearly, even as Deret launched his brick at the descending talons of a swooping Remnant. The Forged madra sailed over the rooftops of the Heaven’s Glory School, vanishing in the distance.

Though Lindon could see it, it deceived him no more than a painting would have. The ward key shielded him from the effects of the dream aura, protecting him as long as he carried it.

So as Kazan Ma Deret screamed and battled with creatures in a dream, Lindon slipped away. He had to lean on the rainstone wall to even leave the alley; the last minute had taken more energy from him than the entire trip up the mountain. He slipped around the corner of the Lesser Treasure Hall to avoid any stray bricks, then slumped down against the wall, every muscle in his body trembling out of control. He let his eyes drift shut.

“The Heaven’s Glory School is very strict about preventing its disciples from killing one another,” Elder Rahm said. Lindon pried his eyes open and tried to stand, to show some modicum of respect. The old man didn’t seem to care.

“Otherwise, we mostly leave our students to their own devices. You should be careful now. There is plenty young Deret can do to you short of killing you.”

A tiny object, flashing blue, rolled out of the garden and along the stones of the road. The elder stared at Suriel’s bead even as it came to a stop, its bright blue flame shining steadily.

Lindon leaned over and picked it up. “I apologize, elder. This is merely a toy left to me by my mother.”

“A strange toy,” Rahm said softly. “I would not lower myself to steal from a child, but I would like to examine this bead someday. When you have settled in to the school.”

Lindon attempted a shaky bow. “I owe you at least that much, Elder Rahm. For your advice and for the treasure, which has already saved my life once.”

The elder chuckled as he walked around the alley. “Yours was a very clever choice.” He paused before he was out of sight, catching Lindon’s eye. “But cleverness is an unstable foundation. Wisdom, loyalty, strength…in the sacred arts, only these things are firm.”

Then he ducked into the garden, and a second later, the illusory bird-calls and shrieks from the White Fox boundary faded away. He must have removed one of the banners. Kazan Ma Deret’s labored breathing echoed between the buildings.

“The victor of your contest is Wei Shi Lindon, by virtue of incapacitation. As it was a duel for honor, to seek revenge or recompense would shame you greatly, and by extension my Heaven’s Glory School. I will not allow you to bring shame to my school, do you understand?”

Elder Rahm was clearly speaking for Lindon’s benefit, and he was grateful. With Rahm’s protection, he might actually last long enough among this school to find the Sword Sage’s disciple.

“He did not fight me honorably!” Deret insisted, his voice filled with anger.

“Was it honorable for an Iron to challenge a boy at the Foundation stage?” A snap resounded through the alley, and Deret yelped. “This was foolishness, and I want no more of it.”

Lindon hid himself inside the Lesser Treasure Hall as Deret left the alley. If the Kazan knew that Lindon had overheard that lecture, he would be further shamed, and would have one more reason to pursue his feud. Lindon wouldn’t be able to endure attacks from an Iron forever.

After Deret left, the elder emerged with a bundle of purple banners in his arms. “Take care of these, and don’t leave them lying about. I will confiscate them if I feel you have not valued them properly.”

With further thanks, Lindon took his banners.

Another disciple was helpful enough to guide him to the quarters for initiates, which were nothing in comparison to his home back in the Wei clan. It was only one room, with a thin mattress and hardly enough space to lie flat.

His pack was stuffed with everything he could think to bring, from lights to ink to travel food, but he hadn’t brought a change of clothes. Heaven’s Glory School required its disciples to wear clothes indicating their station, and these were provided. Two identical outfits—white and gold, with a red sash—sat folded on top of his thin bed.

“You receive one spirit-fruit and two Clearblood elixirs when you arrive, and again every half a year,” the disciple reminded him while handing over his room key. “You’ll get yours from the Outer Disciple Hall in the morning, it’s up the mountain at the very center. The road heads straight for it. Eventually you’ll have duties assigned to you, but for now, you’re expected to cycle twice a day and keep practicing your Path.”

Those had the feel of an official declaration, but what he said next sounded much more formal. “Watch out for the more advanced disciples. They’ll take what they can from you, and if you don’t know anyone at the school, they won’t hold back.”

Lindon took the advice to heart.

After the massive ring of light around Mount Samara had begun to dim, but before dawn rose over the peak, Lindon was already waiting in front of the Outer Disciple Hall. He huddled around one corner, letting the building break the icy wind. Even so, he had to cycle his madra to keep from shivering.

An hour or so later, after the sun peeked over the horizon, a man with a short gray beard and some mixed black in his hair came strolling up to the hall, carrying a heavy key. He stopped when he saw Lindon, an amused smile on his lips.

“Wei Shi Lindon?” he asked.

Lindon pressed his fists together and bowed. “This disciple greets you, elder.”

“Only new disciples are so eager. I am Elder Anses, and I will assign you your chores during your stay with us.” As though the cold didn’t touch him, Anses took his time unlocking the door and lighting an oil lamp before ushering Lindon inside. He accepted gladly.

The first room of the Outer Disciple Hall was scarcely bigger than Lindon’s room, and packed with rows of shelves, stacked drawers, and desks covered in paper, tablets, and scrolls. There were other doors in the back, but Anses didn’t head for them; he squeezed by Lindon, sliding open a drawer and removing a shallow wooden box from inside.

He walked over to his desk and made a note before handing the box to Lindon. “Fate was kind to you. The middle of the year is coming soon, so these won’t have to last you long.” He slid open the lid, revealing a pair of round pills colored in swirls of blue and white, next to a fruit like a miniature golden pear.

“These Clearblood pills are refined from a unique blend of herbs grown only here on the mountain,” Anses said, in a tone that suggested he’d given this speech many times. “They will remove impurities from your core and from your blood, increasing the speed of your cycling and preparing you to advance to the next stage. Take one and cycle it for at least three days before taking the second, although you may wish to save the second until you are attempting to advance.”

He pointed to the pear. “The spirit-fruits we give to disciples are different depending on the year’s harvest, but you’re exceptionally lucky this year. One of our elders happened to find a thousand-year dawnfruit tree just on the other side of the mountain. The dawnfruit has absorbed the vital aura of heaven and earth for centuries, and it will nourish your soul directly. I recommend you wait until completely digesting at least one Clearblood pill before eating the fruit.”

After hearing those descriptions, Lindon slid the box out of the elder’s grip before Anses had quite released it. He slid the lid closed, cradling the box like an infant. The only thing he wanted to do was run back to his room and cycle, especially before Deret came hunting for him, but he had one question first. “An elder found this outside the valley? He actually left Sacred Valley?”

Elder Anses grimaced. “I forgot myself. We try not to speak of the outside world to disciples until they’re ready. You’ve heard that the land around Sacred Valley is all wild and untamed?”

Lindon nodded.

“But have you also heard that there are people living outside?”

“I have.” His clan had sold crates of orus fruits to the Fallen Leaf School for generations, and always they were told that the fruit was a delicacy to the people outside the valley. As a child, Lindon had never thought particularly hard about how people living in a forsaken wilderness could afford to buy sweet delicacies.

“Then you’re better informed than most,” Anses said. “Many families don’t tell their children that there’s anything beyond the mountains. And for good reason.” He rolled up his sleeve, revealing an arm that had been absolutely mangled. Huge chunks of flesh were missing from the forearm, so that Lindon could see tendons and bone pressing directly underneath the skin. The upper arm, just under the shoulder, had been shredded by what looked like three claws.

It had clearly happened years ago, as the skin had grown back and the man’s hand was in perfect working condition, but the shock of the sight was a slap in Lindon’s face.

Unperturbed, the elder slowly rolled his sleeve back down. “I’ve been outside Sacred Valley for a total of six hours. I was lucky not to lose an arm. The man who discovered the goldfruit tree disappeared after returning four baskets of fruit to the school. He said he was checking the tree one more time, and he never came back.”

“People live out there?” Lindon asked in a hushed whisper. If it wasn’t safe for a Jade, how could anyone raise children?

“Only nomads,” he said dismissively. “Barbarians. They have tamed some sacred beasts, and they roam around in caravans avoiding the greatest dangers. They’re hardly better than Remnants themselves, acting according to their base instincts with no civilization to speak of. Only savages can live in such a savage land, while culture flourishes here.” He gave Lindon a fatherly smile. “Be grateful for what you have. I expect you to work hard, use those resources well, and advance to Copper before Sun Day.”

As Lindon left the Outer Disciple Hall, his imagination swam with thoughts of barbarian nomads and their tame sacred beasts, living in a land so harsh that the Jade elder of a powerful sacred arts school could only survive for hours. He imagined wilderness stretching on to the end of the world…

That may have been what the Heaven’s Glory School believed, but he knew better. Suriel had shown him palaces the size of the whole valley, vast courts, paved roads and rugged taverns. Civilization had taken root somewhere else, not just here. And he’d be the first person from Sacred Valley to see it.

Yerin and the Sword Sage had come in to the valley from the outside, after all. With her guiding him, why couldn’t he make it?

He pictured a savage beast, all teeth and gleaming claws, leaping out of dark trees and shredding his arm until it looked like Elder Anses’. If he thought about that too long he’d lose his courage, so he focused on the elixirs in his arms instead.

Under the dawn light, he made his way back to his room with dreams of Copper filling his head. These pills were the sort of medicine that the Wei clan had never been able to afford, and the spirit-fruit was beyond anything he’d ever heard of. A thousand years’ worth of vital aura? And they had so many they could afford to give some to disciples? The ancestral orus fruit would be nothing next to this.

He had the box tucked under one arm and one hand on his door when something smashed into the side of his chin.

Pain flowered in his head as though his jaw had cracked, swallowing his vision. The box tumbled open, sending the blue-and-white pills spilling onto the ground. Weakly he reached out a hand for them. They were far too valuable to let them get dirty.

A hand reached down past him, plucking both pills from the ground. It gathered up the box as well, which still contained the goldfruit, and lifted them all out of Lindon’s vision.

Those are mine, Lindon tried to say, but his jaw felt as though someone had stuffed it with live coals. Through watery eyes, he squinted into the dawn-lit sky.

Kazan Ma Deret loomed over him, brown hair hanging down into his eyes, iron badge heavy and black against his chest. Before he spoke a word, Deret lashed out with a foot.

Lindon curled up in instinctive reaction, but the kick still landed, slamming into his ribs and arm like the Iron had driven a spike through his elbow and into his chest. He gasped for breath, but his lungs wouldn’t cooperate.

“If this was Kazan territory, you’d be dead.”

Deret spat, and something warm and wet splattered against Lindon’s cheek. He was in far too much pain to even wipe it away. “On Sun Day, you’ll bring another box to me. If you make me come down here to pick it up myself, I might lose my temper. Do you understand me?”

Lindon nodded with his cheek pressed against dirty stone, even though every tiny motion of his head was agony.

Deret snorted in disgust, tossing the empty box down so that it clattered next to Lindon’s face. He stepped heavily on Lindon’s arm as he walked away, his footsteps retreated into the distance as Lindon was swallowed by pain and shame. It was one thing having everyone know that you were weak, but it was many times worse to be beaten like a stray dog and left in the street. He wished desperately to lose consciousness.

Instead, he heard the murmurs of disciples around him. They whispered to one another, but he still caught snatches of their conversation. It was exactly as he’d expected.

“…both new disciples?”

“…too weak…”

“…Unsouled?”

Finally, hands lifted him up by the shoulders, causing him to groan in pain. It was all he could do to avoid screaming.

“Hold on,” the boy carrying him said, and Lindon recognized his voice. It was the disciple that had delivered him to his room the day before. “I’m taking you to the Medicine Hall.”

Lindon wondered how many halls there were in the Heaven’s Glory School, but idle thoughts didn’t survive long amid the sea of pain. The disciple had lifted him off the ground and was carrying him over one shoulder, which was no doubt easy for someone with Iron strength, but every step sent agony shooting through Lindon’s body.

“I thought something like this might happen,” the disciple went on. “I was going to take you to see Elder Anses myself so no one singled you out, but I didn’t think I’d be too late.”

Lindon tried to say I was stupid, but it came out as “Shtupid.”

The disciple grunted. “They let the disciples compete against each other for everything. The strongest rise to the top, and they only want the strongest. As long as nobody dies, the elders don’t care, but I don’t know why they let an Unsouled in here. Even the Coppers will be eyeing you.”

He ascended some steps, which Lindon’s ribs did not appreciate, and then a pair of doors swung open. The smell that wafted out was equal parts metallic blood, putrid sickness, and a sharp herbal scent that Lindon associated with medicine. The moans and muffled screams within were less than comforting.

“Another casualty?” a man asked.

“No, this one wasn’t her.” Lindon’s benefactor laid him down on a bed gently, but the impact still made him choke back a shout.

“New disciple,” he added.

“Ah. Leave him here, we’ve got limbs to sew back on first.”

The disciple tossed a blanket over Lindon and hesitated before leaving.

Gratitude, Lindon said, but it passed his injured jaw in a garbled mess of syllables. The disciple looked at him as though debating whether to say something or not. Finally he let out a heavy breath and leaned closer. “Listen. They don’t let disciples leave once they’re here, not unless something goes really wrong. But you…I don’t think the elders would chase you down if you just left. You’re from a clan, so go home. You won’t die here…but you might find that you want to.”

He left, leaving Lindon thinking fond thoughts of home. His bed was soft, the air didn’t have this permanent chill, and while no one treated him with any respect, they didn’t beat him in the streets either. And this was only the beginning of his journey. The outside world was a thousand times more dangerous.

Lindon’s bed was not private, crammed as it was between dozens of other beds filled with men and women with injuries at least as bad as his own. As his heart grew heavy and he blinked away tears of self-pity, he couldn’t help overhearing a conversation from the bed only inches away.

“We had her cornered,” the girl said through gritted teeth. “She was—go slower, that burns—backed up against a cave. Fifteen of us, one of her. Then she drew her sword, and we were all cut.”

“Was she that fast?” a woman asked. “Bite down on this, it will sting.”

A minute or so passed with the girl groaning in pain before she finally responded. “Not…fast. She’s not an Enforcer, I think. Probably a Ruler. When she drew her sword, we were all cut. Out of nowhere. She didn’t move.”

“The Sage was an Enforcer. Would he take a disciple with a different spirit?”

“How could I guess the thoughts of the Sword Sage? But she cut fifteen of us to the bone in one move, then she ran away. A few Enforcers followed her, since they held up better than the rest of us.”

Lindon gingerly craned his neck to the side, speaking as clearly as he could. “Forgive my curiosity. Where was this?”

16

A woman of about forty carried a fistful of wild grass in one hand and a knife in the other. She leaned over the girl in the bed, smearing a paste on the girl’s wounds with the flat of her blade. The disciple’s face was red and covered in sweat, but both of them looked over after Lindon’s words.

He shifted position to make sure his badge was hidden beneath the sheet, so the girl would assume he was a fellow Iron. It must have worked, because her tone became defensive immediately. “We almost had her. Our Rulers put down a barrier formation to stop her from escaping, but she’s…if she’s not Jade already, then her sword must be some kind of treasure.”

“She couldn’t have escaped you without some dirty trick,” Lindon said. He’d learned years ago how to flatter a sacred artist’s ego, but the pressure of speaking clearly was burning his jaw. He tried to shorten his sentences as much as possible. “I’m tracking her down. Where did you see her?”

Something of a lisp had crept into his voice by the end, and he had to cut off the last word before pain brought tears back into his eyes. Hearing this, the girl looked at him in sympathy. “Did you run into her after us? Heavens grant you favor, but I’m not going after her again. My pride isn’t worth my life.”

She hissed as the healer applied another dose of the paste. The woman spoke with the tone of one who had great experience, “Pride is more important than you think. The elders haven’t acted against the girl because it lowers their status to treat a disciple as a threat. But now she’s killed six Irons and incapacitated nigh-on forty. At this rate, we won’t have anyone left with a whole body by Sun Day, but which elder would lower their station to fight a disciple? At a certain age, pride is all you have left.”

Lindon tried to speak, but his mouth might as well have been wired shut. The healer noticed and put her herbs down, rinsing her hands in a nearby basin. She moved over to Lindon’s side, cold fingers probing the side of his face.

The injured girl winced as she shifted position. “If you want to go after her, you’ll be going by yourself. I don’t know anyone else who’s willing to risk their lives for it by this point, no matter how much the elders are offering. We saw her in a cave on the north side of the mountain, a few miles up from the Ancestor’s Tomb. Don’t know how she survives the Remnants out there every night. Samara’s ring gathers them like flies to honey.”

The healer poked at his ribs, making him grunt in pain, and then tested his elbow. “Nothing broken,” she announced. “You’re lucky. You’d heal in a few weeks on your own, but we just got a delivery of herbs from down in the valley. Had extra thorngrass, so we made a batch of these. Elder’s orders: anyone who has to fight against the Sword Disciple gets one of these to bring them back to fighting shape.”

She pinched a tiny pill between her thumb and forefinger. It was red and green, and it smelled so sharp he thought his nose would bleed. “This won’t do anything for your spirit, and you won’t like the way it feels, but cycle it for a few days. If you don’t feel fresh as a Copper in three dawns, come back and see me. The problem might be deeper than I thought.”

Lindon gave her the hint of a bow, which was the best he could manage from a seated position with his ribs as tender as they were. She accepted it, bowing back, and handed him the pill.

Taking it was almost worse than the beating. He swallowed it and began cycling, and only seconds later, it felt as though needles were pricking the inside of his skin. He broke into a sweat, cycling faster, focusing his madra on the areas that needed healing. In only two or three breaths’ time, he wanted to quit.

The girl next to him looked on with sympathy. “I had one of those already. All the more reason not to go after her again, because I’m not taking a second one.” She watched longer before adding, “It helps if you cycle it a little at a time. Takes a day or two longer, but it’s not as much of a torture.”

Lindon appreciated the advice, but he couldn’t answer. He forced the pill’s energy through his veins, pushing his spirit to the limit and holding it there through sheer force of will. His earlier melancholy had evaporated.

Before, finding the Sword Sage’s disciple had been a distant thing. Now, it was right in front of his eyes. She could take him away from Sacred Valley, and that was his only hope. As long as he stayed here, there would always be another Kazan Ma Deret. He would never be anything more than Unsouled.

All day and into the night, Lindon cycled. It never stopped prickling him from the inside out, but he let the pain wash through him. If this was all he had to endure to escape his life, he would consider it a small price to pay.

* * *

Whitehall stood before the other elders of the Heaven’s Glory School. It was rare enough that they would all gather at once, even the elders from the various halls, but the Sage’s Disciple was a disaster big enough to warrant their full attention.

The room was humble enough, with reed mats on the floor and unadorned walls of orus wood, and each elder knelt on a flat cushion and sipped tea from a mug. This was meant to be a civilized meeting, held in an atmosphere of peace and equality.

Elder Whitehall stood in the center, having accepted neither cushion nor tea. Peace did not fit his agenda here. “Every Jade left in the Heaven’s Glory School is in this room. We can march on the tomb right now, together! Even if the Sword Sage had been a Gold, his Remnant would be no match for all of us combined.”

Several of the elders exchanged glances, and many others simply sipped their tea in silence. They didn’t take him seriously, he knew. How could they, when he spoke with the squeaky lilt of an eight-year-old throwing a tantrum?

“We would not lightly disturb the Ancestor’s rest,” the Grand Elder said. The Grand Elder served a role in the school not unlike that of a Patriarch or Matriarch of a clan, and the Grand Elder of the Heaven’s Glory School was perhaps the most powerful Jade he’d ever personally seen in action. Even the Sword Sage, that strange wanderer from outside, had expressed admiration for their Grand Elder’s accomplishments.

“Is the Ancestor’s rest not disturbed by the presence of another corpse? Or the wild Remnant accompanying it?” Whitehall countered. “I do not understand why you haven’t cleared the tomb already!”

“You were not here,” Elder Rahm said, sounding as though his voice might crumble to dust. “We acted against the Sage for the good of the school, but he was far more powerful than we expected. I still have not recovered from the injury he left to my spirit, and I was luckier than some of our brothers and sisters.”

Whitehall had not missed that. There were three or four gaps around the room, places where Jades had not survived their ambush of the Sword Sage. And as Whitehall understood it, they had attacked full-force while the man slept. Even so, the Sage had left a number of casualties.

Their tragedy could be Whitehall’s great fortune, if he placed his pieces just right. “I wasn’t there, and that’s why I am all the more eager to do my part. If only a few of you accompany me, or even allow me to bring a group of Irons, I will survey the tomb and return. Together, we can devise a way to retrieve the stranger’s treasures. And his sword.”

Whitehall was far more interested in the rare sacred herbs the Sword Sage always carried on his person, but he knew that many of the other elders coveted the man’s sword. The Sage had performed miracles with that blade, and they believed that an artifact of such power could form the cornerstone of their entire school.

So it baffled Whitehall that they had simply left the weapon where it lay.

Elder Anses rubbed a hand along his short beard, as though to emphasize that Whitehall could no longer grow one. “That’s more complicated than you perhaps think. The Remnant has the sword.”

Whitehall stared at him, searching for any signs of a joke. Remnants did not use weapons. Even the Remnant of such a powerful warrior, made up entirely of sword-aspect madra, would grow its own blade rather than picking one up. Remnants could advance over time, just like humans and sacred beasts, but it was a joke to think that one could advance so far, so fast.

“It’s that stable?” he asked, looking to the Grand Elder for confirmation.

The Grand Elder was at least as old as Elder Rahm, but age had not diminished him. He was a mountain of a man, a huge slab of muscle that took up twice the space of anyone else. “We tried to lay a boundary formation to force it out,” the Grand Elder said. “It used the sword to destroy the first banner. Every time we tried to lay a script, it either broke the script…or broke the one laying it.”

Remnants could speak and reason and make deals, but they were very narrow in scope. They had only fragments of their memories from life, and could understand nothing outside of those memories. They were shadows, nothing more, even if they did gain more detail over time.

But this one had proven itself capable of understanding script, planning action against it, and striking its enemy’s weak points. It was thinking strategically.

“Is it even a Remnant?” Whitehall asked.

“It is,” one of the other elders responded. “Its appearance is very clear, but we had a Soulsmith scan it anyway, in case the Sword Sage had simply used a technique to somehow imitate a Remnant. We’re confident this isn’t the case. It has simply left a Remnant that is far, far beyond anything we’ve ever seen.”

Whitehall’s mind staggered at the thought. To leave such a Remnant…the Sword Sage might actually have reached the Gold stage. His desire for those sacred herbs redoubled. Anything a Gold carried on his person would be a priceless treasure.

“I now understand,” Whitehall said, and he did. A Gold’s Remnant was the stuff of legends and nightmares. The elders would have to tread cautiously, in case the spirit had the ability to destroy their entire school. “You were wise to treat the situation with such care, and I spoke from ignorance.” He bowed to the Grand Elder in apology. “But what about that girl, his disciple? If the Remnant remembers her, we might lure it away from the corpse.”

He had very little impression of the Sword Sage’s disciple. She had always followed him around, but at the time, Whitehall had thought of the Sage as nothing more than a wandering Jade. As such, his disciple wouldn’t be anything special. But if he was a Gold expert, the picture changed.

Another elder, an old woman with a completely shaven head, sighed. “We have sent practically every combat-capable Iron in the school against her for weeks now. She sends them back dead or wounded. We planned on exhausting her spirit, pressuring her until she broke, but our disciples might be the ones to break first. Now that we know how powerful the Sword Sage was, it makes some sense; a Gold’s disciple must be extraordinary.”

Whitehall had just apologized, so it would be unbecoming of his dignity to make a scene, but it was hard to hold himself back when he heard this stupidity. “The Irons failed to capture her, so you…sent more Irons?”

The Grand Elder rumbled deep in his chest. “The enemy is only a disciple, and a young girl. Which elder from the Heaven’s Glory School would throw away their face to deal personally with a child?”

Elder Whitehall very carefully stopped himself from exploding. This was a good thing for him, he reminded himself, and their foolishness was to his advantage. He still felt like strangling every one of them. “This elder does. The Sword Sage’s treasures could make us the strongest power in the valley, or his Remnant could ruin us. This concerns the survival of our school. How could I value my pride over that?”

“It is not our pride that concerns us,” Elder Rahm said, “but the honor of Heaven’s Glory. Without its reputation, a school is nothing. The clans will send their young geniuses to the Fallen Leaf or the Holy Wind, and we will be forced to harvest all our sacred herbs in our own gardens. Even the outsider nomads might not deal with us if they did not trust in our honor.”

Whitehall waved a hand at himself. “Then let a child deal with a child. The pride of the school is untarnished, yes?”

The other elders shifted, uncomfortable, but none of them spoke out. He knew how their minds worked. Elder Whitehall’s condition was not common knowledge outside this room; they allowed all outside parties to assume that he was really a precocious genius that had managed to achieve Jade at a preposterously young age. His plan wasn’t honorable, because it meant propping their reputation up on a misconception. Therefore, none of them wanted to be the first to agree.

But it would work, so none of them tore it down either. They each waited for someone else to give in first.

“You may do as you see fit,” the Grand Elder said, which was the least enthusiastic approval Whitehall had ever received. But it didn’t matter, so long as he was allowed to do as he liked.

“I’ll need Irons that have fought the girl in the past,” he said. “As well as some fresh ones.”

“A group of five will be released from the Hall of Healing tomorrow morning. I’ll have them report to you. As for your fresh fighters, didn’t you bring in a pair yourself only yesterday?”

Whitehall almost hated to admit that Lindon had been one of his, but since the elders already knew, there was no sense in denying it. “Yes, Grand Elder.”

“Take them as well. It will be a good education for them, however it turns out.”

None of them were worried about the safety of the new disciples; there was a Jade along, after all. The matter was practically settled.

Whitehall would work with what he had. Kazan Ma Deret was appreciably strong, and a Forger. He had learned the Path of the Mountain’s Heart, so he would never walk the Path of Heaven’s Glory, but he could still benefit the school. He could build walls, which ought to help back the girl into a corner.

The Sword Sage’s disciple wouldn’t be short of weapons or secret techniques, but now she was out of options.

* * *

It was the middle of the night when Lindon shocked himself out of his cycling trance, and the light from Samara’s ring cast an eerie light over the interior of the Hall of Healing. He’d grown up with the ring overhead every night, but down in the valley, it didn’t actually provide much light. It was only an interesting feature of the skyline. Here, it acted like a full moon…but its light was thin, somehow stretched, giving the surroundings a pale and dreamy quality.

All the other patients had collapsed into an exhausted sleep, and even the healer on duty was slumped against the wall at the far end of the room. She had exhausted her spirit dealing with the wave of wounded.

Lindon wasn’t sure how he had managed to stay awake. His clothes and sheets were drenched in sweat, and while the thorns under his skin had lessened in intensity, his veins still itched. His madra was ebbing low, so that if he did too much more tonight, he’d overdraw his spirit and be trapped in bed for days. Even his head pounded after hours concentrating, stuck cycling.

But he hadn’t given up.

He opened his mouth wide, stretching his jaw. It was still tender, but not nearly as painful as when he’d come in. Even his ribs and his arm felt merely bruised, not shattered as they had at first. If his energy held out, he would be able to walk.

He wanted nothing more than to rest his wounds and his soul…but he knew now was the time. The previous group of Irons to go up against Yerin had come back defeated, and the next batch wouldn’t leave until the morning. He had tonight, and only tonight, to find her.

Lindon staggered onto unsteady legs, using the corner of his bed as a crutch. The air was even colder than he expected, so he snagged an outer robe from another sleeping patient; the disciple wouldn’t miss it.

He hobbled home as fast as he could, gaining strength slowly as he moved. The pale light cast everything in a strange hue, especially the rainstone buildings, which now looked as though they had been dipped in milk. Samara’s ring was as thick as his arm in the sky, stretching from horizon to horizon like a river of light. Being up here, under the ring, surrounded by constructs of gleaming white…he was once again struck by the majesty of the Heaven’s Glory School. It really was like living among a village in the heavens.

I wonder what they do to traitors in the heavens, Lindon thought as he reached his room, quickly ducking inside to grab his pack with the formation banners within. Cast them back down, probably. After a moment’s thought, he brought along his second set of disciple robes as well.

If they had the same punishment here, “casting him down” would likely involve tossing him off the mountain.

The easiest way to avoid that was to avoid getting caught, so Lindon tucked his wooden badge inside his clothes. He couldn’t leave it behind in case he had to prove his identity, but wearing it openly would be as good as painting his name on his clothes. There was only one Unsouled in the school.

With a last, longing glance back at his rigid bed, Lindon set out into the frigid night, hitching his pack up onto his shoulders.

The patches of snow became more frequent as he made his way up the mountain and to the north. The scraggly trees grew closer together, and he even caught glimpses of a few Remnants—a flash of glowing antlers, or a flicker of vivid green scales.

Most of the Remnants up here carried aspects of light, which was why they were attracted to Samara’s ring. His mother had taught him that when he was a child. They drank from it as humans did from a river, but as a result, the Heaven’s Glory territory wasn’t safe at night. Wild Remnants wouldn’t necessarily attack him…but it was impossible to predict what wild Remnants would do. They might shred him to pieces, ignore him, bite him once and run off, shine a light in his eyes, drag him back to a cave and imprison him, or swear eternal loyalty to him on sight. If you didn’t know a Remnant, you had to treat it as though it were capable of anything.

Lindon wished desperately for a drudge. There had been a low-grade drudge in the Lesser Treasure Hall, and he had passed it up only because he wasn’t a Soulsmith. But here, it would have made his entire journey simple. Not only could he have set the drudge to follow sword madra, it would have warned him away from especially dangerous Remnants and given him some options to defend himself if he were attacked.

As it was now, he had to risk it. The possibility kept him dancing on the edge of a knife, scanning every shadow and freezing at the sight of every spirit. If they looked even slightly aggressive, he would have to run for his life, dropping a crystal flask as a distraction.

As the night stretched on, his vigilance scraped his nerves clean, until his eyes felt frozen wide and his ears seemed to tremble at every sound. He didn’t know how many hours he’d spent out here alone in the cold and wind, but it felt like days, and as he staggered forward with every step he lost a little more feeling in his legs.

Finally, on the jagged slope overlooking a natural chasm, he stopped. He’d been wandering around on vague instructions the whole night, every once in a while calling out Yerin’s name and hoping she heard it before a Remnant did. He knew how unlikely it was to work, and had long since resigned himself to as many nights of this as he could physically survive.

But now, new breath filled his lungs as he realized: he recognized this place. This was where he’d seen Yerin in the first place, in Suriel’s vision. The chasm was only about twenty feet deep, with a flat bottom covered in snow. The girl in black and red had been backed up against the end of the chasm, defending herself from Heaven’s Glory disciples.

Looking around, he saw some evidence of the battle—a discarded sword, partially revealed beneath a pile of snow, gleaming where it had fallen. A bloody cloth wrapped around a tree’s branch. A mirror-smooth stretch of rock where a stone had been sliced clean through.

It felt strange to see this in person. He had never really doubted Suriel’s visions, but without confirmation they remained unreal, like particularly vivid dreams. Now he had proof in front of his own eyes.

The sight strengthened his flagging spirit, and he scanned for a way down. It wasn’t easy, unless he meant to backtrack almost a half a mile to check and see if there was a smoother entrance. He certainly wasn’t going to jump twenty feet down onto ground covered in snow; as far as he knew, there were jagged weapons coating the ground down there, and he would land right on a rusty spearhead.

He finally decided to climb down, but before he did, he called as loud as he dared into the chasm. “Yerin.”

No one answered him. There wasn’t any room down there for anyone to hide anyway, not unless she had buried herself in the snow, but he had to look. Maybe he would find…something. Just finding this place had been a major encouragement, so even a piece of her robe would be welcome.

He gripped cold stone in both hands and climbed down slowly and gingerly, favoring his ribs. When he finally reached the bottom, he discovered…nothing. The chasm was even smaller than it had looked from above, and he could see the whole thing in one glance. It did cut the wind nicely, and he spent a moment huddled in his own arms, enjoying the relative warmth.

Yerin clearly wasn’t here, and he had wasted most of the night already. On top of which, he was now faced with a twenty-foot climb back up.

Well, although Suriel had promised him great opportunities outside of Sacred Valley, she had never said they would be easy. A great sacred artist wouldn’t complain about something like this, he reminded himself, and steeled his body for the climb.

A cold point pressed against the underside of his chin, and he dropped his pack onto the snow. “I’d bet my soul against a rat’s tail that I never told you my name,” a girl said.

He’d never heard an accent like hers before, which was further proof that she was really from beyond Sacred Valley. Though he had a sword at his throat, Lindon still felt relief. He’d actually found her. “Yerin?”

“Your elders never asked my name, and I’d contend that you and I never crossed eyes before now. How do you know me?”

Lindon had considered several lies on the way here, but he needed Yerin to guide him voluntarily. He needed her on his side. Which meant he had to rely on the truth, such as it was.

“The heavens showed me,” he said.

The wind whistled over the chasm until the quiet became painful. Finally, she leaned around to get a peek at his face, though he couldn’t see much of an expression through her black hair.

“…you chipped in the head?”

“It sounds like I’m spinning you a story, I understand that. We don’t know each other, you’ve never met me. You don’t trust me, and that’s wise. Why should you?”

He took a risk and started to turn, but stopped when the point stuck deeper into his skin. Lindon swallowed. Nothing like a sword to the neck to keep a man honest. “Let me tell you why you should. How else did I know you? How did I know you were here? If I were trying to kill you, would I come out here shouting your name? A name the school elders don’t even know, so how would I get it? It’s impossible.”

She didn’t say anything and she didn’t kill him, so he took that as encouragement. “An immortal descended from heaven and told me your name, showed me this place. You were backed up against the wall, fighting a group of Heaven’s Glory Irons.”

Yerin’s sword ran lightly down his throat to the silk around his neck. It tugged upwards, drawing his badge out of his clothes. “So you were with the last bunch that tracked me down. That’s a pill I can swallow. They never made it to this place, but there was a group of Strikers in the back that I never…”

The badge emerged, but instead of an iron arrow, it displayed a single character carved in wood.

“Unsouled?”

“See? Not a Striker.” Lindon took a moment to slide away from the sword, which was now pointed at his chest.

“Did you whittle a fake badge just to pull this trick on me?” She didn’t sound convinced, and Lindon took the risk of letting out a small laugh.

“I tried to carve a fake badge once. It’s harder than you think. I cut my thumb so deep they had to stitch it closed.”

The sword moved away from his chest, and Lindon slowly turned around. For the second time that night, he was hit with the cold-water shock of coming face-to-face with something that Suriel had shown him.

Yerin was just as he’d seen her in the vision—a ragged warrior with shredded black robes and blade-straight hair. This close, he could see the hair-thin scars crossing her face, the threads in the blood-red rope tied around her waist like a thick belt. She held a long sword as though she’d forgotten it was in her hand.

All the details were the same, but she looked like a girl on the edge of death. Her eyes were wide and bloodshot, her lips cracked, her cheeks purpled with bruises, her robes caked with dirt. Her sword was steady, but her knuckles were white on the hilt, as though she strained with her entire being to keep from dropping it.

She looked, in short, like a young woman who had spent the last weeks on the run in the wilderness. He should have expected it, but she had seemed healthy in the vision, and nothing in her voice had led him to expect this.

Something in his gaze must have given him away, because she tilted her sword up. “I’m not so weak I can’t kill a man on his own, even if you are a Jade.”

Lindon spread his palms, showing them empty. “You could be fast asleep and kill me. I have no strength to hide.” He glanced up at the sky over the chasm, where Samara’s ring had begun to fade. “They’ll be sending more disciples after you today, and this time I think they’re finally done underestimating you. Let’s work together.”

Her expression darkened as she looked at his disciple’s robes, and she held the sword so steady that it unnerved him. “I don’t hold deals with the Heaven’s Glory School.”

Lindon hurried to clarify. “I’ve only made some arrangements with them myself, I wouldn’t call them deals. Maybe dealings. But that’s over now, I’m done, I’ve gotten what I can out of them. Time to leave them behind.”

She squinted at him, her weapon wavering.

“Let me paint this scene for you: I need to get out of Sacred Valley, and you need to get away from Heaven’s Glory. We can help each other get what we want.”

She sheathed the sword in one smooth motion, but kept her hand resting on the hilt. “First off, tell me straight. Are you a disciple of the Heaven’s Glory School?”

“I tricked my way in,” he said. “It’s only been two days, and they’ve tried to kick me out at least three times.”

“What about the badge?”

“It’s real. Too real. I only wanted in this school to find you. The…celestial messenger…said that you had a way out.” He felt a little foolish saying it out loud like that, but it was the truth.

She drummed her fingers on her sword, then added, “I’ll be cutting through Heaven’s Glory until I get what I want or they’ve run out of blood. That bother you any?”

“Do you have a grudge against the Wei clan?”

“Who?”

He gave her a friendly smile, hoping it looked sincere. “Then we have no grudges between us. I owe Heaven’s Glory nothing. Burn them down and scrub the mountain clean, it has nothing to do with me.” She looked into his eyes for what felt like a long time, and then she relaxed.

Rather than relaxed, it was as though every muscle in her body gave up at the same moment. She slumped down onto a patch of snow, leaning up against the chasm wall. The dark bruises on her face stood out in stark contrast to the mesh of silken scars. “It’s plain you’re lying, but I don’t know how or why. This would be the worst possible trap Heaven’s Glory could set.”

“Apologies, but let me reassure you that this is not a trap. I want us to work together, and I wouldn’t start a bond like that with a lie.”

With her eyes closed, she stuck out a hand. Even that was covered in a network of scars, from wrist to fingertips.

“Swear on your soul.”

He froze as though the hand itself were a trap. “I’m sorry?”

“We both swear on our souls, and we can trust each other. Maybe you’re lying and maybe you’re not, but once we both swear, then we’re hitched to the same wagon.”

Lindon wasn’t clear about what would happen if he violated an oath on his soul, because no one spoke about it. He’d only heard rumors of sacred artists swearing such vows, and normally only in legends. Still, the rumors agreed on one thing: the more powerful your spirit, the more binding the oath. At the Foundation level, he might escape with only minor damage to his core.

As an Iron—actually, he wasn’t sure what level she’d reached, since she wasn’t wearing a badge—as an Iron or a Jade, her oath would be much more serious. She was taking the bigger risk, and he was dealing in good faith, so there was no reason to refuse.

Still, he hesitated. His parents hadn’t even sworn to each other on their souls when they were married.

Yerin cracked one eye open to look at him, and at last he took her hand, gripping her wrist firmly. She gripped his in the same way…only much, much harder. It was all he could do not to wince.

He was starting to sweat in spite of the cold, and he still hoped she’d call it off once he demonstrated his willingness to swear. “We might want to consider this a little longer before we—” he began, but she cut him off.

“You try your hardest to get me away from Heaven’s Glory, and I swear on my soul that I’ll take you out of Sacred Valley and keep you safe until you’re stable and settled outside.”

A bit of her madra slid through his hand and slipped into his veins. It felt sharp, like a knife lightly dragged across his skin. He followed her lead, clumsily forcing his madra to follow hers back into her hand. “I, Wei Shi Lindon, hereby swear on my soul that I will do my best to help Yerin, the disciple of the Sword Sage, escape from the pursuit of the Heaven’s Glory School. In return, I expect guidance away from Sacred Valley and into the lands beyond, as well as reasonable protection during that time.”

The heavens didn’t descend, and he didn’t feel his spirit tighten. His soul did not change. He waited to see if there was any other effect, but Yerin pulled her hand free. “You were all shiny and polished about it, but you didn’t have to be. Say what you want to say, and your soul will do the rest.”

Lindon looked at his hand uncertainly, as though he expected to see the oath etched in his palm. “Did it work?”

“It’s not a sacred technique, it’s a promise. It worked.” She leaned her head back against the stone and sighed. “Now that we’re tied tight as string on a bow, you can tell me the truth. You were bait, true?”

Lindon didn’t have much honor to offend, but her repeated doubts in his given word were beginning to wound his pride. “I’ll swear on my soul again, if that would convince you. A genuine immortal messenger descended from heaven.”

She squinted at him. “Bleed me like a pig. You’re not joking.”

“I’m not joking, and I’m not lying. She brought me back from the dead.”

“And she…she wanted you to save me?” This time Yerin didn’t sound doubtful, but confused. Maybe a touch hopeful.

Lindon didn’t want to correct her, but he’d been honest so far. “I’m sure she had many purposes in sending me here. But I do know she wanted you to save me.” He thought about hauling her to her feet, but another look at her sword convinced him otherwise. “I’d like to get started on that if we can. How far is the road out?”

She hesitated. “So you know, I thought you were with them.”

“You believe me now, though, don’t you?” If a soul-oath wasn’t enough to convince her of his honesty, he didn’t know what was.

“I do. There’s a chance you’re chipped, and there’s a chance you’re a prophet. One way or the other, I don’t contend that you’re lying. But now I regret I didn’t warn you about the seven armed fighters heading our way.”

17

Lindon’s gaze snapped up to the top of the chasm. “Where? How do you know? When will they get here?”

She spun her finger in a circle. “I wrapped this place tight in formation banners. It’s not a powerful boundary, it doesn’t take much energy, but I’ll sense anyone who steps across. It’s about half a mile out in every direction.”

The bigger the boundary, the more complex the formation and the more madra it took to operate. An alarm boundary would be among the simplest and easiest types, but he still wouldn’t be able to activate one a mile across.

He scanned the entire chasm quickly, trying to take stock of their options. “You hid from me earlier, so you have to have a hiding place here somewhere. We can wait this out.”

She pointed to the back of the chasm, where she’d fought off the Irons in his vision. “Crack is right there, presuming you can see it, and it leads to a shallow cave. It’s tighter than the skin on a lizard, so you probably won’t fit. Found it during that last fight, and I squeeze in there every night to try and chase down some sleep.”

So hiding was no good. He could always walk out and pretend he’d gone looking for the Sword Sage’s disciple on his own. He was wearing Heaven’s Glory clothes, so they might believe him. But if anything went wrong, Yerin would have to face seven sacred artists on her own.

“All right,” he said, “consider this. You hide in the cave. I’ll go up there and talk to them, and I’ll see if I can lead them in the wrong direction. Where are they now?”

Yerin slowly stood, but she didn’t head for the cave. Her eyes were on the sky, and her hand on her sword. “First thing my master taught me about the sacred arts: when the time’s right, you shed blood. There’s no getting around it.”

Her words were so cool and matter-of-fact that they sent a chill through Lindon’s bones.

“The time isn’t right,” Lindon said desperately. He pulled the pile of purple banners out of his pack, rushing around the edges of the chasm to plant them in snow. “I have a boundary formation of my own. We can dig under the snow, hide there, and when they come down…”

Yerin took one unsteady step toward the wall, her weakness apparent. The wind snatched at the dangling shreds of her robes, and even that much force seemed likely to knock her to the ground. Lindon didn’t see how she could even remain standing, much less fight off seven attackers. He almost said so.

Then she leaped out of the chasm.

It looked effortless, as though she had simply begun a step at the bottom of a twenty-foot rock wall and finished the step at the top. He saw her from behind, her hair and her tattered robes blowing in the wind. Her red rope-belt stayed utterly motionless, which attracted his attention until she drew her sword.

Hurriedly he finished planting the seven banners and hiding them in snow. If she’d brought her weapon out, that meant…

A high, young voice rose above the wind, sending Lindon’s spirits even lower. He knew that voice.

“Your master would be proud of your courage, I can acknowledge that,” Elder Whitehall said. “And your skill is outstanding for someone of your age. Truly outstanding.”

“You sure you want to talk about age?” Yerin retorted. He could see her from below, and now he understood why she cut her hair so straight: no matter how the wind whipped or pulled it, not a strand covered her eyes. “The Heaven’s Glory School is lower than I suspected. Even dogs don’t send their pups to fight.”

Whitehall’s voice turned cold. “I’m not trading insults with a disciple. I’m not doing it. I’ve already lowered myself to come here personally, and even a blind man could see your path ends here. You can hardly stand, you clearly haven’t had a whole night’s sleep in weeks, and your robes are ruined. You must be freezing. But I’m here because I respect talent, I really do, and so does Heaven’s Glory.”

They need her, Lindon realized, and a range of new options opened before him. He had assumed they were only trying to eliminate Yerin, which left her with only two choices: run or fight. But they wanted her, which meant she had something to trade. She had leverage.

A head popped over the chasm as someone glanced down. Just an idle glance, but it was enough to doom Lindon.

Kazan Ma Deret looked down on him with a face first confused, and then drenched in self-satisfaction. “The Unsouled is with her,” he called back to Whitehall.

Lindon rubbed his aching jaw. Maybe meeting a messenger from the heavens had used up all the good luck in his life, because since his visit from Suriel, his fortunes seemed to have gone sour.

“…Wei Shi Lindon?” Whitehall said blankly. “What…why? How did he get here?”

“He’s with the Sage’s disciple,” Deret responded, without taking his eyes from Lindon. “This one humbly requests permission to treat him as an enemy.”

“Permission? I don’t care what happens to one or two Unsouled. If there were a hundred of him, I still wouldn’t care. Kill him, leave him there, carry him back on your shoulders, just don’t bother me while I’m working.”

Yerin tilted her scarred face toward him, though she kept staring off at what must be Whitehall. “Can you bury him alone?” she asked, which sunk his heart into his stomach even further. He could have pretended he wasn’t with her, or that she had kidnapped him. Now, he only had one option.

Lindon smiled up at Deret. “I don’t need any help putting down a dog.”

Red-brown bricks, Forged out of solid madra, condensed in the air behind the Kazan disciple. They fanned out like a bird’s tail as he hopped down into the chasm, landing lightly on his feet.

“Start begging now,” Deret said, “while you can.”

Lindon let out a breath of deep relief and moved his hand down to the wooden ward key in his belt. It had been even easier than he’d hoped.

The strings of a zither filled the air with haunting music, and a transparent avalanche fell from the cliff above. It was clearly fake to Lindon’s eyes, like a portrait overlaid on reality, but Deret screamed and covered his face with his arm.

“You forgot already?” Lindon said, and Deret turned toward the sound of his voice. The White Fox boundary distorted his senses, and the Iron hurled a Forged brick straight at the wall. “It’s only been one day, and I win again with the same trick. Don’t they say that even a dog remembers a beating?”

Deret roared, flinging another brick at the wall, once again missing Lindon wildly.

Above, the sky turned gold for an instant as a beam of destructive white-gold light flashed into existence. Elder Whitehall shouted to his disciples, and someone screamed. Seconds later, a thin line of blood trickled down into the chasm.

The white-gold light blasted past again, and this time Lindon felt the wave of heat on his face. Another man’s bloody shriek told him that Yerin was holding her own.

A nearby thunderclap drew his attention back to Kazan Ma Deret. The image inside the boundary wasn’t entirely clear to Lindon, and he certainly wasn’t going to drop the ward key for a more detailed look, but it seemed as though the Iron was contending with an army of razor-clawed crabs. He screamed and scratched at his face as though the illusions were drawing blood…

But he wasn’t using his bricks against the crabs. He may have fallen for the same trick a second time, but it wasn’t as though he’d forgotten. He knew it was a dream, and he only flung Forged madra in the hopes of hitting Lindon or destroying the formation.

What do I do with him? Lindon wondered.

Setting up the White Fox boundary had been a last-minute act of desperation, and Lindon hadn’t had time to come up with a real plan. Now that he was face-to-face with an enraged Iron, he realized that he didn’t know what to do.

Last time, he’d only needed to defeat Deret in front of Elder Rahm. Immobilizing him in the boundary was just as good as beating him senseless. Now…

Lindon couldn’t leave him here. The formation was fueled by vital aura, but even that would run out eventually. Before that, Deret had good odds of hitting one of the seven banners with his randomly thrown bricks. Besides leaving him, what else was there?

When the time’s right, you shed blood.

Like lightning striking inches away, a Forged brick smashed into the rock wall beside his head with all the force an Iron could muster. Chips stung Lindon’s face, and he flinched away so wildly that he fell to the ground. His ear rang like a struck gong.

Any closer, and he would have died. For a second time.

Deret still roared in the illusion, with no idea how close he’d come to victory. But that brick caused the reality of Lindon’s situation to come crashing down.

He had almost died. His story had come within an inch of ending here. The heavens had already intervened once, a celestial messenger had reversed death and caused even time to flow backwards…and none of that would have mattered.

For reasons he didn’t understand, he reached into his pocket for Suriel’s glass marble. It was warm to the touch, and he rolled it in his fingers as he thought.

One thing was perfectly clear: with Deret sharing this chasm with him, Lindon was in mortal danger. And he couldn’t trust heaven to save him a second time.

His gaze was drawn to a spear, abandoned from Yerin’s last fight, half-buried in the snow. He kept low to avoid any potential flying bricks, crawling over to the weapon and cradling it in both hands.

You shed blood.

Before he had a chance to inspect the spear, he ran out of time. A brick struck the banner, and the field instantly blew away like mist on the wind. To Lindon, it really was like watching a cloud drift through the air, but Deret actually staggered as he was jerked from one reality to another. The banner itself wasn’t broken, but it had been knocked out of alignment with the rest of the formation. The boundary was gone. In less than a breath, Deret would regain his bearings and turn around, ready to kill.

Lindon gathered himself. No matter how he reasoned, there was only one thing to do here. He gripped cold, slick wood in shaking hands.

Then he stabbed Deret.

There was less to it than he’d expected. The first stab was basically like sinking a blade into the earth; he jammed it into Deret’s back, then quickly withdrew. The Kazan didn’t react until Lindon pulled the spear out, and then he jerked forward as though something had stung him. He didn’t look wounded at all.

Lindon panicked. Deret would turn and hurl a brick through Lindon’s head at any second, and that would be the end. So he followed the other man forward, stabbing him again and again, expecting any second to end with a missile of Forged madra through the skull.

With no art, with no skill, Lindon stabbed Kazan Ma Deret until a bleeding body fell onto the snow-covered ground. He fell with it, swallowing air as though he couldn’t get enough, still clutching the spear.

And a Remnant rose before him, and he choked back bitter tears.

Made of Mountain’s Heart power, this Remnant was like the outline of an ogre painted in dirt. It stumbled around for a while, flailing at the air with heavy hands, but it was weak and barely coherent. Lindon held his eyes open until they watered, afraid to blink, but the Remnant never gave any indication that it saw him. It pressed into the wall and oozed away, squeezing into tiny cracks like soft mud.

Lindon dropped his weapon as the spirit vanished, panting, his stomach churning. He thought he might be sick.

He’d always accepted the fact that he would kill someone someday. Combat was a part of the sacred arts, and the clans were encouraged to kill one another within reason. He knew his parents had killed people in their younger days, though they rarely talked about it.

But there was supposed to be more to it. He’d imagined standing in triumph over a blood enemy, veins pumping with the thrill of battle, proving his superiority in a final showdown. Not huddling in the cold, stabbing a blinded man.

Deret had given him no choice, and besides, the Wei elders would have given him a reward for killing a Kazan Iron. No one would blame him. If he had hesitated, even for another second, he would have certainly died.

Even so, he kept his eyes off the body. Despite what he’d been told as a child, there was nothing to celebrate here.

Another flash of gold light, this time sweeping in a horizontal arc, and Elder Whitehall shouted, “Stop her! Hold her down!” A black-and-red blur flashed over the chasm as Yerin leaped past.

Lindon snapped himself back to reality, rushing to collect his formation banners. He didn’t look forward to killing anyone else, but leaving an ally to fight alone was the act of a coward. He had to at least try something, even if he was too weak to contribute much.

Once he’d gathered up all the banners, he slipped them inside his outer robe and steadied his grip on the jagged stone wall. His vision was swimming; the day of cycling, the night without sleep, the strain on his madra, and the burden of his emotions were all getting to be too much for him.

One more stretch, he said, focusing on the climb in front of him. He forced himself to forget the march out of Sacred Valley. Just this one last thing, and then I can sleep.

Inch by inch, he hauled himself up.

At the top, the patchy snow had been sprayed pink. Heaven’s Glory disciples lay here and there, mostly wounded, a few probably dead. One held pressure on a deep gash in his arm, his face pale. He stared straight at Lindon, but seemed to see nothing, only rocking back and forth.

Elder Whitehall landed in a crouch at the bottom of a tree, snow flying away from him in a ring. He whipped a line of golden light forward, and the beam slashed through a tree in front of him, dividing it into two charred and smoking halves. It creaked as it toppled, sending splinters spraying into the air. The attack left deep, blackened gouges in the other trees nearby, but none of them collapsed.

Yerin slipped out from behind one of those trunks, her sword flashing. A thin wave of distortion blew outward from her weapon, like the edge of a gleaming sickle. Elder Whitehall ducked, and the sword-madra sliced deep into a boulder behind him. He gathered light to a point in his hand, but she had already disappeared.

Lindon prepared to jump back into the chasm. He’d only ever had personal experience with one Path, and while the elders of his clan could do some astonishing things with illusions, they’d never displayed anything like this. This was a true battle between Jades, and he would be safer if he hid until it was over.

…then again, Suriel had suggested that by leaving the valley, he could gain power even beyond Gold. The very idea beggared his imagination, but that only meant his imagination was too limited. He hadn’t seen enough, hadn’t experienced enough. If he wanted to travel his own path to its end, he had to do so with eyes wide open.

At that moment, Elder Whitehall spotted him.

The elder snarled, whipping a scorching stream of light Lindon’s way. Lindon released the stone, letting himself fall, hoping it would be fast enough…and as he did, he glimpsed a slender figure in black robes leaping up behind the childlike elder, sword bared.

He landed heavily on his back, wind knocked from his lungs. Even as he gasped for breath, he was grateful for the snow and his pack cushioning his fall, but he hoped he hadn’t broken anything. Especially his ribs. Even the thorngrass pill had started acting up, tingling in the most unpleasant way around his injuries.

When he finally caught his breath again, the world outside the chasm was silent. Samara’s ring had all but vanished, and the sun had slipped a peek over the mountain. Only the wind continued, an unending and invisible stream.

With agonizing care, Lindon prodded his flagging body into yet another climb.

Yerin stood at the top of the chasm, loose hair flying in her face, panting heavily and leaning on her sheathed sword as a walking stick. Lindon glanced hurriedly around for Elder Whitehall.

“Where did he go?”

She evened her breathing before responding. “Deeper in. Other side of the mountain. He’s bleeding like a butchered hog, but he’ll be coming back.”

Lindon hauled himself out of the chasm, hoping he didn’t look as bad as she did, but knowing that he was probably worse. “You really drove off an elder and six Iron disciples? By yourself?”

She shot a sidelong glance at him. “Five, I did.”

Deret was still lying in the bottom of the chasm, body littering the ground far from his home. Lindon cleared his throat. “You’re incredible. Your master must have been an expert without peer.”

“He was,” Yerin said, her voice distant. She stared into the dawn in silence.

But Lindon was in no mood to wait around. He slipped the extra disciple robes out of his pack, holding them out to her. He was glad he’d brought them; there were plenty of other sets nearby, but the bloodstains would make them somewhat obvious.

“You should put these on,” he said. “If the heavens are kind, there won’t be any other disciples in the woods, but let’s assume there are. Unless they’ve seen your face before, they won’t recognize you in these. I don’t have a badge for you, but…” He looked around at the bleeding disciples. Only one of them was dead, he realized, though the others weren’t far away. The dead boy’s Remnant peeled itself away from his corpse, like a yellow sketch of a skeleton. It glanced back in Lindon’s direction only once before scampering off into the woods.

“I’m sure you can find one,” he finished.

Without a word of protest, Yerin took the clothes and wrapped them around her tattered black robes. His clothes were large enough that she still had room to spare. Once again, his attention was drawn to the thick red coil wrapped around her waist; she didn’t untie it, but it still ended up outside the clothes of the Heaven’s Glory disciple. As though the belt had melted through her clothes.

She slipped an Iron Striker badge over her neck and gestured to herself. “Anything missing?”

Her clothes were too big, she was carrying a sword, and she looked like she’d been living in the woods for two weeks. But from a distance, she’d pass.

“As long as we don’t run into Elder Whitehall on the way out, you’ll make it.” He was more worried about the elder than anything else, as Whitehall had fled in the opposite direction of the valley. If their luck was bad, they might run into him on the road out.

He reached into his big, brown pack, checking that he had everything important: his boundary flags, Suriel’s warm marble, a few other bits and pieces. He wasn’t bringing much, but nothing else would help him on his journey beyond the valley. He was ready. It was time to go.

Lindon’s heart actually lifted at the thought. He was absolutely exhausted, every resource in his body and spirit expended, but he’d made it. He’d won. On the other side of this snow-capped mountain waited a dangerous and infinite world.

Yerin took a deep breath and straightened. “All right,” she said. “Lead the way.”

Lindon had already turned to face the range of mountains past Samara, but he stopped. Turned back. “I know it’s this way, but beyond that, you’ll have to lead us out.”

“Out? I’ve still got a bone to grind with the Heaven’s Glory School.” She gave him a grim smile. “They took my master’s body, and his sword, and his Remnant. If I was soft enough to leave him here, I’d have walked away from this viper’s nest weeks ago. No, I’ve got a few chores left here, and the chief one is you leading me back.”

It was like a bag had tightened over Lindon’s head. Compared to the freedom he’d tasted just a second before, he felt like choking. Like the prison door had been slowly creaking open, only to slam shut. He couldn’t accept it.

“No. No! You swore.” He didn’t know how punishing the oath would be to him, but for someone of Yerin’s power, it would weigh heavily. She might even cripple her future potential by breaking a vow like this.

Yerin raised one finger. “I said I’d shepherd you on the path out, and I will. Once we’re free and clear. But I’m not popping the lid off this barrel yet.”

While he searched for words, she patted him on the shoulder.

“If it eases you any, I’m starting to trust you,” she said. “A little.”

* * *

Nervously, Lindon had thrown together an appropriate story to explain why he was hobbling in to the school in the early morning with a battered sister disciple, but no one asked for an explanation. One man cursed at the Unsouled for getting in his way, a few passersby expressed sympathy, and a girl reassured them kindly that the Sword Disciple would “see heaven’s punishment come soon.”

No one questioned them further than that. These days, coming home wounded was more common than not.

When Lindon reached his room, he knew he couldn’t stay long, but he was overwhelmed with the desire to simply collapse on the floor. “When Elder Whitehall comes back, this is the first place he’ll check,” Lindon said. His jaw had begun to ache again, and every word sent itchy needles dancing inside his face. “We should be gone before that happens, if that’s agreeable to you. I have an idea where…”

He trailed off as Yerin stumbled past him, clumsily tugging off one shoe as she made her way toward his bed. “We’re not drawing swords in this state,” she said. “We’ll die. Need rest.”

Halfway through taking off the second shoe, she slumped face-first onto the bed. In seconds, she was snoring.

At first, Lindon wondered how she could possibly sleep with the threat of death hanging over them. And she had taken his bed. He slipped off his pack, leaving it next to the door, and reached for her shoe. He had intended to pull it off and put it next to the other, but that was the last thing he remembered.

When he came to, Samara’s ring was in the sky again, and his neck ached from a night spent in an impossible position. He had collapsed on his side, his head jammed up against the side of his bed, Yerin’s fingers dangling in his face.

For a few seconds, he tried to remember how they had gotten here. He recognized Yerin from Suriel’s vision, but the events of the previous day were a blurry haze in his mind.

When the fog cleared and he recalled where he was, fear shot him bolt upright. He had aided an enemy of the Heaven’s Glory School. He’d fought an elder, killed an Iron disciple. Even the Patriarch of the Wei clan would have to pay with his life for such an offense, and here Lindon was sleeping in his room as though nothing had happened. He needed to move. He’d staggered to his feet before he stopped again.

Move where?

He couldn’t leave the valley without Yerin, and he couldn’t go home. His clan would turn him over to Heaven’s Glory for a bent halfsilver chip.

He calmed himself, gathering his thoughts, taking a long look at his situation. Given that Heaven’s Glory would hunt him as soon as Whitehall returned, then Lindon had to treat this place like enemy territory. He and Yerin had stayed here too long already.

But she had her own conditions, and may she rot in the Netherworld for them. She wouldn’t leave the valley until she got what she wanted, and he couldn’t leave without her. He needed her guidance to escape Sacred Valley, and her strength to survive whatever waited outside. Even a Heaven’s Glory elder had been crippled with only a few hours outside of the school’s territory, so an Unsouled would be lucky to last ten seconds. He needed her.

She lay on his bed, her stolen white robes bulky, the blood-red rope tied at her waist looking tight and uncomfortable. She was defenseless, scars all over her skin, some of them fresh.

Though it burned him, he put away thoughts of abandoning her or tricking her into guiding him out. She cared enough about her master’s legacy to stay on the mountain with an entire school hunting her; nothing he could say would change her mind. He wasn’t happy about it, but he could respect resolve like that.

Lindon slid the door open a crack, peeking out. Samara’s ring lit empty gardens and iced rainstone buildings. No one watched his door, at least as far as he could tell.

Whitehall must not have made it back yet, or else he hadn’t spread the word about Lindon. So Lindon still had time to use his identity as a Heaven’s Glory disciple. At the least, he should be able to find out where the Sword Sage’s body was.

He reached for his pack.

“Where you going?” Yerin asked. Her voice was vague and bleary, as though she hadn’t bothered to wake up before speaking.

Lindon glanced back. She was adjusting her sword-belt, moving the hilt around from where it had been poking her in the ribs. “Give me two seconds, and I’ll find out where they’re keeping your master. Until Whitehall comes back, I’m still a disciple.”

He looked like he’d just returned from a fight on behalf of the school—his white disciple’s clothes were stained with blood and dirt, he was scraped and bruised from his head down to the soles of his feet, and his spirit had only just started to recover. The elder should believe any story he spun, if they swallowed the idea that someone at the Foundation level had been allowed to fight the Sword Disciple.

She squinted at him, rubbing the side of her head with one hand. “Don’t bother yourself. I know where he is.”

Lindon froze in his doorway, his frustration returning. “Then why are we here? Let’s pick up your master and leave.”

“Need to harvest his Remnant,” she said, stretching. “I was aiming to steal the gear from the school, but they kept me too busy. This is two steps closer than I ever got before.”

Lindon stared at her. Harvest his Remnant.

“Are you a Gold?” Everyone knew the final step into Gold was harvesting a Remnant and binding it to your physical body, which made you more than mortal. That was why Gold was the pinnacle, a qualitative leap beyond Jade.

Of course, according to Suriel, Gold was just the beginning.

“Not yet,” Yerin answered him. “Taking in the Remnant is the difference between what you all call Jade and what you call Gold. It’s like an heirloom, passed from master to disciple.”

A brief stricken look passed across Yerin’s face, and Lindon reminded himself that she had just lost her master. For some, that could be a bond even closer than blood.

Lindon stepped back and let the door close, and she straightened in apparent surprise. “Thought you were leaving.”

“If we know where we’re going, there’s no need. Now, how about a plan. I’m guessing the gear you need is a spirit-seal?”

Yerin’s eyes moved between him and the door. “Well, that’s pleasing. I thought you’d make an excuse to leave, go warn the elders.”

Lindon wrestled down his irritation. She had forced him into helping, and now she still doubted him?

“We’re both traitors. They won’t treat me any better than you.”

“Crack the door, but don’t walk out. Just peek.”

If Lindon had to play more of her games, he might try to strike out on his own after all. “Why?”

She didn’t answer, waiting for him to open the door. With a sigh, he did. The night still reigned.

“No one’s there,” he said.

“Drop a knee,” she responded.

Feeling like a fool, Lindon knelt in his own doorway. Then he saw what had been invisible to him head-on: a flat shimmer in the air, floating at eye height, like a sword hammered out of pure force. His throat caught. Earlier, if he had taken more than a single step out, it would have sheared through his skull.

He managed to fake some level of calm as he asked, “Are you a Forger, then?”

“Born a Ruler, but I did Forge that.” That wasn’t too interesting of a statement in itself. The First Elder of the Wei clan was rumored to know both the Forger technique and the Ruler technique of the White Fox Path, though of course he was more gifted in one than the other.

“When?” Lindon asked, still staring at the blade that had almost killed him.

“Right before I shut my eyes. We did swear an oath, but we also only met tonight. Didn’t trust you then.”

She’d Forged that hours ago, and it had remained steady and solid. Having grown up around his mother, he knew how much skill that took. If she only dabbled in Forging, she would never have been able to do it.

He couldn’t stop imagining an invisible blade passing through his eyes, slicing his brain into two pieces, but he forced himself past it. “Does that mean I can trust you not to lay anymore lethal traps for me?”

She considered a moment, then nodded. “Not lethal ones.”

“I’m pleased to hear that.” He’d take whatever he could get. “Now, we need a spirit-seal?”

Yerin loosened her shoulders, swinging her feet around to the other side of the bed. She braced her sword in one hand, and she looked more like the formidable sacred artist she was. “You know where they’re kept?”

“The Lesser Treasure Hall. A Jade Forger lives over the hall, and there are script-activated security constructs hidden in the floors.”

Her eyes gleamed and she leaned in closer. “That’s more than nothing but less than something. Now, this Treasure Hall…they keep more than just seals, true?”

Suddenly, it occurred to Lindon that something good might actually come of staying in Sacred Valley. “You wouldn’t believe everything they’ve got in there.”

“That’s pleasing to hear. Now, what did the Wei clan teach you about stealing from your enemies?”

“I’ll bring my pack.”

18

Elder Whitehall had never felt so miserable in his life. He’d long since closed the bleeding sword wound on his shoulder—such injuries were only minor irritations to anyone with Jade madra and an Iron body—but his spirit was exhausted, and an eight-year-old’s legs were not suited to trudging through snow. He felt as though his knees would buckle with every step, and the few scraps of madra he could scrape up were spent melting his way forward with beams of hot gold.

Especially grating was the knowledge that he could have been back at the school by now, a hot mug of tea in his hand and hundreds of disciples rushing out to find Wei Shi Lindon and the sword girl. He would have reached the Heaven’s Glory School long ago.

But that wasn’t where he’d decided to go, and he clung to that decision with dogged resolve. He was heading to the Ancestor’s Tomb.

The Tomb was actually closer than the school, but the way was anything but clear. There were no roads out here; he had to scale rock faces and push his way through snow. With no madra. In a child’s body. If he’d known, he would have brought a Thousand-Mile Cloud.

With every agonizing step, he was tempted to turn back, but he never did. The Sword Disciple had been making her way closer to the Tomb for the better part of two weeks now, and now that she had help from that Unsouled, he had every reason to believe that they’d head straight for her master’s body.

He could bring in help, give away the credit, and never see a single one of the Sword Sage’s fantastic treasures. Or…

Samara’s ring was a bright line in the sky when he reached the Ancestor’s Tomb. The Tomb predated their school by unknown centuries, a titanic monument to an age long past perched at the edge of the mountainside. Behind it was a sheer thousand-foot drop and a picturesque view of distant snowy peaks. The building itself was bigger than anything in Heaven’s Glory, a square mausoleum that stood proudly on vast pillars. Far above Whitehall’s head, a mural of four gigantic beasts locked in battle rose over the entrance.

A man and a woman in Heaven’s Glory colors waited on the steps at the bottom, huddled behind the pillars against the wind. They wore purple sashes, only a step away from Whitehall’s gold, and their badges were jade.

Every elder was a Jade, but not every Jade was an elder. These two had no problems in their mastery of the sacred arts, but they were too young to actually administrate the school, so Whitehall outranked them both. He’d counted on that.

Once he knew they’d seen him, he allowed himself to pitch forward and fall into a patch of snow. It didn’t require much acting.

Footsteps crunched rapidly through the snow, and the male guard shouted something to his partner. Seconds later, a pair of hands scooped up Whitehall’s whole body and carried him to the steps.

Ordinarily he would resent the indignity of being treated like a child, but his relief outweighed any irritation. At last, he was off his feet.

“Elder Whitehall?” the woman asked anxiously. “Are you wounded? We’ll send for healers now.”

Whitehall reached out blindly and seized her hand. “No!” He wasn’t pleased by how young and weak his voice sounded. “Please. I will recover soon, and my pride could not stand the blow.”

Through half-closed lids, Whitehall saw the Jade guards exchange glances. “Of course we will shelter you, elder. If I may ask, why did you come to us? Why not return to the school?”

Whitehall struggled up to a sitting position, grimacing in pain that was only half-feigned. “It was my shame that I was wounded by the Sword Disciple before I could defeat her. How could I show my face as an elder if I returned without victory? I couldn’t. I will rest here for a night or two, and when I am recovered, I will show her the wrath of Heaven’s Glory.”

The guards bowed to him. “Your words are wise, elder,” the woman said. “We have a hut just to the side of the Tomb. It is nothing much, but you are welcome to it.”

Whitehall returned a seated bow. “When the Sword Disciple is dead, I will remember this favor.” They brightened; if Whitehall killed the Sage’s disciple, he would instantly gain status in the school, and a favor from him would become that much more valuable.

A screech like a razor sliding along rock echoed from the Ancestor’s Tomb, ringing in the air and stabbing his ears. The guards winced and backed up together, turning to face the Tomb. The sound faded a second later, but Whitehall already wondered if his ears were bleeding.

“Is that the Remnant?” Whitehall asked.

The male guard kept a hand on his weapon. It was a club, Whitehall noted, not the sword he would have expected. “The Sage has been quiet for over a week, but last night he started up again. Elder, when you return to the school, I humbly request that you send reinforcements to us before our shift is up. If he escapes, we will not be enough to contain him.”

Whitehall rapped his knuckles against the man’s wrist, as he would discipline a student. “Cowardice is not fitting for warriors of Heaven’s Glory. That is not the Sword Sage, it is only a Remnant.”

“I do not mean to contradict the elder,” the woman said, “but last night the Remnant did that.” She pointed to the top of the Tomb, just above and to the side of the beast mural.

In the harsh light of Samara’s halo, colors were muted and edges sharp. He squinted at the corner of the building, along the side of the roof, trying to distinguish between the folds of shadow.

Finally, he saw it, and he took in a breath of freezing air. Between the roof and the wall, there was a crack. It was difficult to see if you weren’t looking for it, but now that he stared directly at the spot, he could see it: a slice of deeper shadow where the Tomb’s ancient walls had been split open. It looked as though a massive blade had slipped into the top of the wall, opening a wound.

“That’s…” he began, but he had no words. The Ancestor’s Tomb was set with deep, ancient scripts that had gathered vital aura into those walls for centuries. They should be next to indestructible by now.

A Remnant had done that?

“The elder knows best,” the male guard said, without a trace of mockery in his tone. “But I thought he should be made aware.”

“After I recover, I will return here with reinforcements,” Whitehall promised. He actually meant it.

He let them guide him back to their hut on the edge of the cliff, drape a snowfox pelt around his shoulders, and heat fish soup for him. If he understood the Sword Disciple’s character correctly, she would be here tomorrow, or a day later at the most. And if he grasped the scope of her power, she would tear through these two Jades.

He hoped they would survive—they had been kind to him, after all—but death in combat was the most honorable end for a sacred artist. If they died for their weakness, he would not be to blame.

And once the girl opened the Ancestor’s Tomb, she would have to face the Remnant of her formidable master. Either it would kill her unassisted, or Whitehall would take advantage of her distraction to kill her himself.

After that, there was no losing scenario for him. A Remnant of the sword aspect was powerful in combat but weak in pursuit, so he would be able to escape. Either he would retrieve the treasures on the Sword Sage’s body, or he would return to the school with the Sword Disciple’s head. In that case, he would have rendered such merits to the Heaven’s Glory School that he should end up with some prizes regardless.

As for the Unsouled, if he knew what was good for him, he would never show up here. There was nothing he could do but die.

* * *

With his pack on, Lindon crouched in the shadow of the Lesser Treasure Hall as it glistened in the pure white light. There were no guards on the porch this time, just a locked door with security scripts and deadly constructs behind it.

He glanced over at Yerin, who stood openly in the street. He’d already explained the security measures to her, but he wasn’t sure she’d heard him. “The script will trigger if we break in,” he reminded her.

She adjusted the blood-red ropes at her waist, which stood out in stark contrast to her white Heaven’s Glory clothes. “And the script’s in the doorframe?” She didn’t whisper.

Lindon nodded.

With a sigh of steel, she drew her sword. It shone in the white light, steady and straight. He thought she was going to explain her plan, but without even opening her mouth, she whipped her blade forward.

Colorless light rippled out of her sword, as though her cut moved forward of its own volition through the air. It was so thin it was practically invisible, like a half-loop of fishing line sliding forward.

It sank into the middle of the door and vanished with no apparent effect.

Yerin’s sword was already sheathed, though Lindon hadn’t seen it, and she strode forward. “I’ve seen these scripts before. You break them before they trigger and they don’t bother you.”

With that, she pushed on the door. The left half swung inward, having been split cleanly down the middle by her sword madra. The side with the lock was still attached, but the side with the hinges was now separated. It slid open easily and soundlessly. As Lindon followed her inside, he looked down at the script on the floor. One of the runes was cracked in two just as the door had been.

Unless the rune was broken instantly, breaking this type of script would trigger it. He couldn’t imagine the sort of speed, the degree of control, it would take to do something like this to a script six inches away, much less from a distance.

He hungered for such skill. If Suriel’s promise held true, he would have the opportunity to learn sacred arts like this. Power even the Wei Patriarch had never imagined.

“Is that something you can teach me?” he asked.

He assumed she would laugh at him, but she turned to face him properly without the trace of a smile. “A disciple is not worthy to take a disciple.”

If she was only a student, how could anyone call themselves a master? “You’re stronger than anyone I’ve ever seen. If you stayed here, you could open a fifth school.”

This time Yerin did laugh, but not at him. “Sacred Valley is too soft. Only storms turn fish into dragons, and there are no storms here.” She turned to the treasures behind their display cases before adding, “If you didn’t know that yourself, you wouldn’t be leaving.”

That was true enough.

“Fill your eyes with this!” Yerin exclaimed, moving past him. “Bud of a Starlotus! It’s a miracle before Copper, but it’ll do wonders for anybody’s madra base. Where’s your pack?”

She stared at the spirit-fruit with a hungry look, holding a hand over it as though she wanted to reach straight through the Forged glass. Just as Lindon had done before. He was going to politely offer her his pack, but she’d already moved to another display.

“A Sylvan Riverseed? That’s a gem and a half. Even if we can’t use it, we can sell it.” She put a hand on her sword.

Lindon considered warning her, but he’d told her about the security measures before. Rahm had Forged these cases himself, and he would have countermeasures in case one was broken. But he’d told her that already, and he had to trust she knew what she was doing.

In one smooth motion, Yerin drew her sword and sheathed it again. The case split in half.

A gong sounded, filling the Lesser Treasure Hall in echoing alarms. Runes in the corners flared ominously red. Two constructs rose through the floor, head-sized eggs of shining gold. Plates on the bottom rotated, spilling blue light, keeping the constructs aloft. Those would be made out of different types of madra, but everything else would be Heaven’s Glory, serving as both power source and physical material.

Light coalesced on the tip of the eggs, and Yerin shot him a sheepish look. “Sorry.”

“I warned you!”

“Yeah, this one’s on my account.”

“I said there would be an alarm on the cases. ‘Don’t break the cases,’ I said!”

“Next time, I’ll give you a shout first.”

The constructs were focused on Yerin, so Lindon was backing away, glancing from case to case in search of something that might save them. “Why would there be a next time?”

A door in the back swung open, revealing a shadowed set of stairs, and Elder Rahm entered the room. They must have disturbed his sleep, because he wore only a shapeless white robe. He didn’t even have on a badge. His hunched, aged figure leaned on a cane in one hand and held a slender sword in the other. The sword didn’t tremble at all.

“If you think you’re getting another chance, you’ve underestimated me,” Rahm said. He shot Lindon a glance. “I thought I told you not to steal from me.”

“This one regrets it already, honored elder,” Lindon said, pressing his fists together in a salute. Manners couldn’t save him now, but they couldn’t hurt.

“He’ll have friends coming,” Yerin said, one hand on her sword and her eyes on the constructs. She hadn’t even looked at Elder Rahm. “Grab the prize, then stuff your pockets while I bury the old man.”

“You don’t have to bury him,” Lindon hedged. “He’s treated me well.”

She didn’t loosen the grip on her sword. “If he lives, I won’t finish him off. That’s the best I can promise you, ‘cause I’m not leaving without a fight.”

The constructs still hadn’t attacked, which meant they were primarily designed to contain thieves until Rahm could deal with them personally. But they wouldn’t remain so passive if Rahm gave the order to attack, or if Yerin showed herself as a threat.

Lindon looked from the constructs to Yerin. “You want to fight?”

“I want to clean this place out.” Her razor-straight hair shook as she turned to look at him, punctuating her words with a grave look. “Sacred arts cost a bundle. Go now.”

Lindon didn’t need to be told again.

The priority was the spirit-seal, of course, but how could he pass up a room full of sacred artifacts? Yerin obviously agreed, because when the first construct blasted out a stream of golden light, she reflected it with her sword into another case, shearing the top off the glass without touching the artifact inside. The second construct fired, and she moved so that it wouldn’t pierce the case behind her.

She was fighting a Heaven’s Glory elder and his two security constructs, and she intended to do so without damaging any of the treasures around her. And judging by her words, she had complete confidence.

One day, Lindon hoped to be more like Yerin.

A plane of glass condensed from light behind her, boxing her in, as Elder Rahm joined the fight. Lindon left them to it. He couldn’t fight, so the least he could do was focus on his task.

It was hard to concentrate with the sounds of battle behind him, but he knew he had only seconds until someone arrived to back Rahm up. He had to work smart. He needed something to break the cases as fast as possible, and something to speed up their escape later.

First, to break the glass. He ran to the racks at the side of the room, where halfsilver weapons were displayed on open shelves. They were comparatively less valuable than the other artifacts in the room, so they didn’t rate a case.

Lindon snatched a halfsilver dagger away. It looked like ordinary silver, but veins of some brighter mineral shimmered beneath the surface, as though the blade contained a constellation. It would shear through madra faster than through half-melted butter.

Still, he didn’t rush straight for the spirit-seals. He ran to the back of the room, where Rahm had shown him a rust-colored cloud.

The Thousand-Mile Cloud filled its case like a bloody mist, and Lindon’s halfsilver dagger worked even better than he’d hoped. It shattered the glass directly, which released a wave of heat—the glass had golden edges, and it must be crystallized Heaven’s Glory madra. The Striker technique released a lance of focused golden light, so their Forgers must create this glass with burning shards. That seemed useless, except perhaps in constructs.

Out of confinement, the cloud inflated to its full size. It was round and fairly large, about three feet in diameter, and dense enough that he couldn’t see through it. It didn’t look solid enough to support solid matter, but he’d grown up with a mattress stuffed with cloud madra. He pressed on it, and it was like pushing on a pillow. It only gave to a certain point, and then it was solid.

This would be their getaway.

A deadly gold beam flashed by his head for an instant, five feet away but still close enough that he could feel the heat, and he dropped into a crouch. Madra trickled from him into the Thousand-Mile Cloud, and it drifted forward according to his direction.

He vaguely remembered where the spirit-seals were, the collection of paper seals painted with scripts that would help bind and manipulate Remnants. He half-crawled through the aisles, circling around the outside of the room to avoid the slashing sword-force and the deadly light flashing overhead.

As he did, he helped himself to the treasures of Heaven’s Glory. Even the danger of the fight around him couldn’t mute that thrill. In his most daring daydreams, he would never have imagined that he could one day choose freely from the vaults of a prestigious school of sacred arts. A smile crept onto his face as lethal madra flashed over his head.

With resources like these, even an Unsouled could rise.

He glanced at everything he grabbed before he stuffed it into his pack. First, he snatched the folded white Starlotus Bud and the tank containing the Sylvan Riverseed. The little blue spirit inside darted around its tree, standing on top of its tiny hill to glance at him curiously. The parasite ring went into his pocket, as he wanted to keep that on his person in case he had to abandon everything else. Only then did he reach the spirit-seals.

The dagger destroyed the glass with ease, and Lindon reached up to snatch a heavy sheaf of palm-sized paper seals, stacked like a deck of cards and tied at the top. Each seal was covered in layers of profound brush-strokes, forming scripts according to principles he couldn’t begin to grasp.

He slid over to the display containing the flying sword, which had caught his eye before. Once he reached Iron, he could use it, and now that he would be traveling with Yerin it was even more valuable. A sword artist like her would be able to work miracles with such a weapon.

No sooner had he broken the case than Yerin came sliding down the aisle on her back as though tossed there by a heavy blow. Her sword was still held in front of her, and the edge of her hair was smoking.

“This is taking a notch longer than I’d thought,” she said.

Lindon risked a glance outside. Sure enough, a small crowd of disciples had gathered at the bottom of the steps. They were murmuring among themselves at the moment, but they could rush forward to assist Elder Rahm at any second.

He looked down the aisle at the dozens of cases he hadn’t broken and spoke through gritted teeth. “Let’s…just…take what we have.” It grated on him to leave so many riches behind, but they’d die if they stayed.

She grimaced and rolled to the side, narrowly avoiding another beam. “Once I ease him on his way, we can go.”

While she struck out at the construct with another ripple of sword-madra, he stared at her. “We don’t need to fight him at all. Get on the cloud and let’s go.”

“The strong don’t run,” she said.

The elder himself stepped into view at that moment, waving his sword. Madra followed the motion, and transparent madra walls bloomed to either side of them. They were trapped in a column, one row of artifacts with Rahm and his two constructs on one side and Yerin and Lindon at the other. Behind them, a group of enemy disciples waited out the open door.

The old man pointed his blade at them. He must have given the constructs an instruction, because they were both silent as he spoke. “We want you alive. Swear yourself to my keeping, give us answers, and we won’t kill you. We’ll allow you to take your own life.”

“Can you keep me alive?” Lindon asked, voice low. “Because you might survive that crowd rushing in here, but I won’t. And you swore to keep me safe.”

She shuddered, expression flickering between anger and agony, but eventually she nodded.

Yerin knelt next to the case with the flying sword, her own blade pressed against the ground. She had lost her Heaven’s Glory robes at some point, leaving her own tattered black clothes, though the stolen iron badge still hung around her neck. “Did your messenger tell you what Path I follow?”

Suriel’s ghost had given him that information, but he couldn’t remember. He shook his head.

“Grab that sword,” she said, pointing at the case. “Then throw it at him.”

Lindon glanced nervously at the battle-ready Jade. “Now?”

“Now.”

The elder faced them impatiently, constructs hovering over each shoulder and weapon in hand. With as little movement as possible, Lindon slid the scripted blade off of its stand.

“Your answer,” Rahm demanded.

Lindon hefted the blade.

Yerin took a deep breath. “This is the Path of the Endless Sword,” she said.

Lindon threw.

As the sword tumbled end-over-end in the air, Yerin tightened her grip on her own weapon. Her blade rang like a struck bell, and suddenly the air was filled with flying splinters as the floor tore itself to pieces. It was as though a thousand hatchets struck the same point at the same time.

The display of halfsilver weaponry echoed the sound weakly, and a few cuts appeared around their case, but they remained intact. Even the halfsilver dagger at Lindon’s belt rang softly, and he jerked as light cuts appeared on his robe. Around the room, three bells rung louder, and three cases burst.

Another bell, and Elder Rahm screamed. His sword had rung in sympathy with the others, and his sleeve exploded in blood. His arm and the right side of his clothes had been slashed to tatters, and his weapon fell to the ground from a hand that no longer had the strength to hold it.

In the air, the flying sword rang as well. Barely visible lines of sword madra reflected from its edge as it flew between the Heaven’s Glory constructs. They were still quiet, having been pacified by Elder Rahm, and so they did not protest as they were sliced to pieces that trailed golden smoke as they drifted to the ground. Only the blue circles on the bottoms remained floating, supporting nothing.

The sword finished its arc and clattered to the ground, nowhere close to Elder Rahm. The old man moaned as he fell to his knees, clutching his ruined arm.

Lindon stared.

Yerin pushed him toward the Thousand-Mile Cloud and the stuffed pack on top, still talking. “That’s called resonance. Uses sword madra to rile up the aura in the air, which gathers around sharp weapons. Doesn’t work so well with halfsilver.”

For that, Lindon was grateful. Otherwise, he might have been split in two by his own dagger.

He sprawled onto the cloud, pushing down the pack full of loot with his body. She hopped on in front of him, feeding her spirit into the cloud construct. It was off like an arrow, shooting through the door and away before any of the stunned Heaven’s Glory disciples outside could react.

“That’s the heart of my Path,” Yerin said. “All swords are one.”

While she spoke, she steered the cloud down the street. It only hovered about three feet over the ground, but under the influence of Yerin’s powerful spirit, it was faster than a galloping horse.

“I will do anything, anything, if you can teach me to do that.”

Streaks of light blasted after them, scorching rainstone buildings, as Yerin navigated them away from the school. Her scarred face was tight with concentration.

“He’s not dead,” she said, ignoring his comment. “But I’d contend that I won.” She nodded decisively. “Yeah, we’ll mark that one up as a win.”

They streaked toward the Ancestor’s Tomb, leaving their pursuers far behind.

19

As the sun rose, Lindon and Yerin flew over the rough terrain of Mount Samara. Yerin kept the rosy cloud skimming the rocks, scattering snow as they blasted north toward the Ancestor’s Tomb.

Meanwhile, Lindon concentrated on not falling off.

Once he had found a position that he felt he could survive, he slowly began picking through his pack of stolen items. Once they landed, they might not have time to take full inventory.

The Thousand-Mile Cloud itself was probably their greatest prize, and Yerin insisted that even Lindon’s madra was enough to power it. Though he would travel much more slowly. According to her, clouds like this were valuable transportation beyond the valley.

There were forty-eight spirit-seals in the stack, and they were prepared to use all of them on her master’s Remnant. But if they had a few left over, the seals would be precious advantages against other Remnants in the future. Still, it was best not to count on that. The Sword Sage was their priority.

The Starlotus bud would help him break through to Copper almost immediately, and he had to remind himself more than a dozen times that it would be foolish to eat it now. The ancestral orus fruit had taken him days to digest, and the Starlotus should take even longer. The last thing he needed was something in his own core distracting him when he might need to fight. Even so, he longed to swallow at least one petal.

Instead, he occupied himself watching the Sylvan Riverseed, the little blue-flame spirit that danced around in its glass enclosure. The river that spun around the inside of the little tank had remained steady as they flew, neither spilling nor splashing, but the spirit had thrown itself against the glass walls to stare at the passing landscape.

Lindon had asked what the Riverseed could be used for, but Yerin herself was unclear. They were rare, she knew that, and you were supposed to raise them. Or maybe plant them. Either way, she was certain it was worth more money than anything else they’d snatched, including the cloud.

The parasite ring was like the Starlotus bud, in that it would eventually help Lindon overcome his deficiencies but wasn’t of any immediate use. He added to that the halfsilver dagger—his parents had owned a few halfsilver weapons, but he’d never had one of his own—and the White Fox boundary flags as the least valuable treasures they’d stolen. The boundary was difficult to obtain, but it also took a long time to set up, and a powerful enough opponent would simply tear through it. He had been lucky to use it against Kazan Ma Deret.

Seven treasures. They were an unspeakable fortune to a Wei clan Unsouled, but looking at them like this, they were almost disappointing. When he compared them to what they could have gotten away with, had they been allowed just another minute in the Treasure Hall…

“Dragon fever,” Yerin said from the front of the cloud.

Lindon jerked up, startled out of his daydreams. “Dragon?”

She laughed into the wind as they skipped off of a outcropping, floating down to land above the ground again. “That’s what master would say. Sacred arts are expensive, and it takes a pile of pills and treasures to advance. It’s when you get lost in gold for it’s own sake, that’s the dragon fever.”

Lindon’s face heated. She’d seen through him without even looking at him. “I’m not trying to take your share. My contributions pale beside yours. But some of them, I think, might not suit someone of your strength.”

“No, don’t get me wrong. I’m burning up with the fever. I’m just boiling to turn around and scrape that Treasure Hall clean.”

He exhaled, relieved. “This is a bigger fortune than I’ve ever seen, and for some reason I’m disappointed it isn’t bigger.”

“Dragon fever,” she said decisively. “Helps to keep your eyes fixed on one thing. Grab whatever else you can, but don’t go blind to what really matters. My master says—” She stopped. Wind whistled by. “My master used to say distraction kills more sacred artists than enemies ever do.”

He couldn’t ignore that pause. Having never been trained, he’d never had a master, but how would he feel if his parents had been taken from him?

Suriel’s vision flashed through his head, Sacred Valley blasted out of existence, and he spoke with real sympathy. “He must have been a great man. Even in the outside world.”

“The spine of the matter is, he only came to the valley for me,” she said. He couldn’t see her face, but suddenly he could barely hear her words over the wind. “Wouldn’t have bothered coming on his own, it was just a safe place for me to train. But it doesn’t matter how strong you are when you’re poisoned in your sleep.” By the end, her voice carried the ring of cold steel.

“I wish I could have met him,” Lindon said. It was true, but it was also what he was supposed to say to a grieving relative.

“He might have taken you with us, had you asked him. He could be soft that way. But first, he’d have killed your clan elders for what they were teaching you.”

Lindon leaned around her shoulder, trying to catch a glimpse of her expression. “Forgiveness, but…what did they teach me?”

He crashed into her back as the cloud came to a sudden halt. A massive square building loomed in the distance, set with huge columns and a stone mural of four beasts locked in battle. The whole edifice lurked on the edge of an enormous cliff as though it had done so since the beginning of time.

“The Ancestor’s Tomb,” Yerin said, and vaulted down from the cloud. “Master went to the Heaven’s Glory in particular just for this. They say it leads down into some labyrinth where even my master couldn’t step easy.”

Her hand was on her sword, black sacred artist’s robes trailing shredded edges in the wind. She pulled the stolen badge over her head and tossed it to one side. “They poisoned him and they stabbed him, so he tried to hide in the Tomb. Died two steps from the door.”

She looked back at him, but her scarred face wasn’t as cold as he’d imagined from someone seeking revenge. It was etched with grief. “Last thing he said to me, he told me to finish forming my Path. He didn’t know he’d be leaving me his own Remnant, but…he did. Nobody else touches his spirit but me, and that’s the fact of it.”

Lindon surveyed the giant Tomb. Two guards had revealed themselves on the front steps, and they would certainly have seen the Thousand-Mile Cloud by now. One of them raised a hand, sending a flash of gold light streaking into the air. A signal.

“There’s not much I can do in a straight fight,” Lindon said honestly. “But I’ll help you however I can.”

Yerin patted him on the shoulder. “Yeah, I’m convinced that you will. You’ve got less choice than a tethered ox.”

He cleared his throat. “I would have helped you without the oath.”

“There’s a chance you would, but now you won’t give up midstream and beg for your life.”

Lindon prickled at that. “There’s no reason for that. I may be weak, but I’m not a coward.”

She rolled her arm in its socket, loosening it up for the fight, and she grinned at him over her shoulder. “Couldn’t know that when I made you swear, could I? I trust you more now. A notch more.”

At least she hadn’t set another trap for him. He sighed and began sorting the Heaven’s Glory artifacts into different pockets. He’d jammed them all into his pack without looking, but now he might need to draw them quickly.

One of the guards activated an egg-shaped golden construct that looked the same as the one Rahm had used, and the other was beginning to set up walls of gold-tinged glass.

“Now, Wei Shi Lindon, we live or die together.” Yerin took off in an explosion of snow, blasting forward with a speed only an Iron body could achieve.

As she shattered the first wall of glass, sending a hot wind billowing out as the glass broke, Lindon took his time packing up the treasures. He couldn’t help until the fight was over, and he wouldn’t run headlong into death. If the heavens considered that a violation of his word, so be it.

The Thousand-Mile Cloud wouldn’t compress, and he determined that it required a special case to fold up. Since he didn’t have one, he fed it a trickle of his madra and dragged it along behind him as he picked his way across the frozen boulders and toward Yerin. It followed like an obedient bird.

Light burned a river of steam in the snow, and a wall of glass appeared to block Yerin’s counterattack. She was steadily advancing, but the two guards and the construct were using every trick at their disposal to keep her at bay. When she flipped in midair to avoid two golden beams and then sliced a fifteen-foot glass wall from top to bottom with sword-madra, Lindon knew it was only a matter of time before she closed the gap. He knew what would happen when she did.

He kept an eye on the battle as he advanced, but by the time he reached the bottom step of the Ancestor’s Tomb with his cloud in tow, Yerin was flanked by two bleeding bodies and fizzing golden plates that had once been a Heaven’s Glory construct.

“Are they dead?” Lindon asked. He wasn’t sure why. It didn’t matter to him if Heaven’s Glory lost two more fighters.

Yerin cleaned her blade on the snow and then wiped it dry on the corner of her robe. “Iron bodies are tougher than snake leather. The man’s not long for breathing, but I didn’t want to stare down more Remnants than I have to. The woman might hang on until her school gets here. She passed out from the pain.”

He picked around the bloody snow, following Yerin up the stairs. “Sacred artists are supposed to be beyond pain.”

“No one’s beyond pain,” she said, and then she stood before a tall door. It looked like wood, but it carried the eternal aura of solid rock. From within, a sound rang out like steel on stone. The note hung in the air, endless and pure.

“Seals?” she asked, adjusting her red rope-belt.

Lindon held up the stack.

“Let me hear your role,” she ordered, but Lindon didn’t take offense. She was stronger than any of the Jades in Sacred Valley; she had more right than anyone to order him around, even if she was barely older than he was.

“I’m putting these seals into a circle in front of the door,” he said. “When you lure it out, I throw a seal directly at it and run while you fight it here, where the seals on the ground can help you. If that’s not enough, I come back and seal it again.”

She eyed him. “If you thought I told you to run, you heard wrong.”

“I have to run to set these up,” Lindon said, revealing an inch of purple banner. “I’m not even running, I’m providing strategic support. Now, you have your ward key?”

“Remnant will tear through that like a bull through a paper door.”

“If he’s tearing through this, he’s not tearing through you.” The air of tension around her was lifting, which was a good thing as far as Lindon was concerned. She’d been talking like someone on her way to the grave, and if she died, he wouldn’t be far behind. Now, he saw the distant shadow of a smile on her face, and she turned as though to respond.

The door tore in half with a sound like screaming metal. He registered nothing beyond sudden light and agonizing noise before something hit him in the chest and he tumbled backward down the steps, slamming onto his back at the bottom.

His body hadn’t had a chance to recover since the last time he’d jammed his full pack into his spine, and he indulged in an instant of self-pity imagining his rare boundary flags snapping in half. Then the reality crashed in: that door had split in two from the inside. The impact on his chest was Yerin pushing him back faster than he could react, or he would be lying at the top of the steps in two pieces.

The Remnant of an expert beyond Gold, the spirit that they had assumed was sealed inside the ancient tomb, had cut through its restraints like an axe through a spiderweb. It hadn’t been sealed.

It had been waiting.

He pushed his battered body to his feet, taking quick stock to make sure nothing was broken or bleeding. Then he saw the Remnant of the Sword Sage.

It was a mass of rippling liquid steel in the shape of a human, as though someone had poured a mirror over a man. Its face was featureless, blank, polished to a flawless reflection. It had no arms or legs, merely an uninterrupted sheet of metal, and it flowed over the ground like a snail.

The Remnant was far more solid, more real, than any Forged construction Lindon had ever seen. The only parts he recognized as madra at all were three hoops criss-crossing its chest: one a loop of vivid white color, one scarlet, and one inky black. The circles spun in rapid orbit around the sword-Remnant’s chest as it surveyed the scene mirrored in its smooth face.

It reflected the two bodies and Lindon slowly edging backward before its gaze rested on Yerin. There it stopped.

The disciple faced her master’s ghost with sword bare. She was a mundane echo of the Remnant; its red ring was her belt, its black ring her tattered robes, its white ring her pale scars, and its chrome her shining blade.

“Disciple greets her master,” she said quietly. A student in her place would normally have saluted respectfully, but she kept her eyes on the spirit.

For a long breath, the Remnant remained quiet. Powerful enough spirits could speak, and there was no doubt that this was the most potent he’d ever seen. It would talk soon, and the reunion of master and disciple would give him time to set the boundary. The Remnant had crashed through the door before he could lay seals, but he’d watch for a chance to hit it directly with one.

Six limbs of liquid metal sprouted from the Remnant’s back, flattening and sharpening until it stood under a halo of blades. It still didn’t speak.

Without a word, it attacked.

The Remnant’s main body stood like a statue, but its blades were invisible as they whispered forward. Yerin moved in response, and weapons crashed in an explosion that sent sharp ripples in every direction. The stairs under them cracked, shards of stone blasting into the air, and gashes appeared in the thick pillars. Snow split as though invisible giants hacked away at the ground with hatchets, and a nearby boulder slid into two pieces.

Lindon hopped onto the Thousand-Mile Cloud and fed it all the madra he could. He hadn’t seen a single meeting of blades, but he heard them all, filling the mountainside in one seemingly constant note. Whatever Yerin might believe, he would never be able to approach the Remnant like this. He’d never see the cut that killed him. He could only hope that she would wound it badly enough that it would lose some of its substance. Without a supply of external energy, it wouldn’t recover, so it should get weaker as the fight progressed. But then, so would Yerin.

A spray of blood told him that the unconscious Heaven’s Glory guards hadn’t made it after all. Two Remnants rose from the corpses, one a string-puppet of burning gold lines, and one a skeleton of yellow-tinged glass. They hadn’t even straightened to their full height when more invisible blades minced them to chunks.

We don’t have time for this, Lindon thought, as he fled as fast as his cloud would carry him. They needed to end this fight before Heaven’s Glory showed themselves, but he couldn’t get close enough to set up his barrier. She had already demonstrated her Endless Sword technique; with two experts using it, they might have been surrounded by hundreds of whirling invisible blades. To pass close enough to plant a flag would be to risk death, and if he reached the Remnant with a seal, he’d be shredded.

He glanced behind, in case the battle might have crept closer to him, and from farther back he could see something he hadn’t noticed before. There was a small wooden hut sheltered in the shadow of the Tomb, and a child in white robes was peeking around the corner at the battle.

The child raised his arm, and golden light lanced toward the fight. Lindon’s heart stopped.

Elder Whitehall.

Something deflected the beam, sending it arcing into the sky, but neither girl nor Remnant could spare the attention to deal with the intruder. He was the vulture, waiting for the wolf and the tiger to kill each other so it could feast on both corpses. He would never let Lindon approach with the seals.

The freezing mountaintop wind felt very close. Whitehall hadn’t noticed him yet. He had a chance here, a chance to at least stall the elder and give Yerin a chance.

But he had no time. Whitehall could notice him any second. He had to act now.

He removed the glass ball with its azure flame, rolling it in his hand. If Suriel looked, what would she see in his fate now?

Before he could think himself away, Lindon leaped onto the red cloud and sped out in a wide arc. He couldn’t move nearly as fast as Yerin could, but it was enough. He circled behind Elder Whitehall.

Then, still scraping the back of his brain for ideas, he charged.

* * *

In the eyes of a Jade, the fight between the girl and the Remnant was nothing short of spectacular. An ocean of silver sword-aura gathered around them, rolling like a sea in storm. Even to Whitehall, their blows moved at a speed that he could barely catch. The disciple in black gathered aura with every motion, which condensed around her blade in a steadily increasing silver glow. She leaped, ducked, slid, and dodged, her weapon never pausing, meeting every strike from the six-bladed Remnant with her own sword or a blast of razor-edged madra.

Whitehall knew some peers in the Golden Sword School that would have sacrificed three fingers for a glimpse at this fight. This was a sword-aspect Path taken beyond anything in Sacred Valley, beyond what anyone could conceive.

He drew Heaven’s Glory energy from his core, focusing it according to the Heaven’s Lance technique. The energy struck out in a line of light and heat, scoring the floor between the two fighters. The girl faltered, taking a narrow slash across the cheek as the glow around her sword flickered. Even the Remnant slid slightly to the left. Whitehall might not have been able to kill either of them on his own, but sparrows didn’t bring down hawks by attacking head-on. They nipped and circled until the larger bird collapsed from exhaustion and fell from the sky.

Then the treasures of the Sword Sage, relics of a world beyond this valley, would be his. Not only might he restore his body, he could become the first Gold since the founding of the Heaven’s Glory School.

He’d leveled another golden lance when something slammed into him from behind.

A thorn of pain blossomed in his shoulder as he pitched forward, and the lance of light flew wild, scorching the surface of the Ancestor’s Tomb. But it didn’t last as long as it should have, guttering out like a candle as the madra in Whitehall’s body went wild.

He landed face-first in the snow, his insides twisting as though his intestines had tried to coil up and escape through his mouth. His spirit burned and writhed in chaos, searing him from the inside out, and he coughed a mouthful of blood onto the ground.

With one hand, he reached up and pulled the spike out of his shoulder. It glittered in the morning sunlight: a halfsilver dagger.

Whitehall turned in a fury, bloody dagger in his hand. His body was still Iron and his spirit Jade; he would recover in minutes. His attacker had done nothing but earn a quick death.

Wei Shi Lindon loomed overhead, and though his spirit made him weak, he had the body of a strong man. Even the huge pack on his back lent an intimidating cast to his silhouette. Whitehall hesitated for a mere instant of purely instinctive fear, the gut reaction of a child facing down an angry adult. His mind was still that of an expert, but there was something primal about looking up to a human being twice his size.

During that half-second of vulnerability, Lindon pivoted and planted a fist in Whitehall’s gut.

The impact didn’t do much—despite his advantage in weight, Lindon still hadn’t reached Iron, so Whitehall had the absolute lead in strength—but pure madra leaked into Whitehall’s core from outside.

His training took over, and he cycled madra defensively, but he might as well have saved his effort. Nothing happened.

Whitehall couldn’t deny a small measure of relief. The Unsouled might as well have tried to put out a forest fire with a splash of water. He grabbed the young man’s wrist in an iron grip, locking him in place, and took a moment to savor the sudden look of fear on Lindon’s face.

Then he struck back.

* * *

Lindon was actually grateful for his experience at the Seven-Year Festival. Without all that practice fighting eight-year-olds, he would never have been able to accurately strike Whitehall’s core.

Not that it mattered, in the end.

He’d counted on the disruption from the halfsilver dagger lasting long enough to let him land an Empty Palm, which would have bought him enough time to run. Whitehall would have recovered in seconds and chased him, but he’d planned for that.

He hadn’t planned for the elder grabbing him by the wrist. He tried to resist, but it was as though his arm had been planted in stone. Panic bloomed in his chest, and he had time for only one panicked thought. Too fast. He’d shaken off the halfsilver in an instant. Lindon had never had a chance.

Whitehall smiled, his lips bloody, and the expression looked demonic in a child’s face. Then he turned around without releasing his grip.

At the last second, when Lindon realized what was about to happen, he slipped his free hand inside his outer robes and gripped the stack of spirit-seals. He didn’t even have time for fear before he was launched into the air.

The elder hurled Lindon toward the fight.

As he tumbled forward, time came into absolute focus. Though the flight must have taken a second, it felt like minutes. The Remnant’s six bladed limbs flashed, Yerin’s sword wove a defensive tapestry, and around them stone was sliced to pieces.

With one clumsy effort, he flung the entire packet of spirit-seals into the Remnant’s general direction. They would most likely be cut to pieces in midair, and even if they landed, they had a better chance of slapping harmlessly into the ground than touching the Remnant. He needed something else.

He could still feel his spirit’s connection to the Thousand-Mile Cloud, so he poured madra into it desperately, clutching at anything that might save him. It would never reach him before he plunged into that deadly whirlwind, but he had to try.

When Yerin saw him, her eyes widened, then narrowed on the falling seals. She didn’t hesitate. Her defensive stance collapsed, and blood instantly sprayed up from her body in five lines as she took the Remnant’s attacks. Her sword gathered force like a heat haze, and as she sliced from bottom to top, a wave of colorless power tore out from her weapon. The madra struck the Remnant head-on, slashing a vertical gash in its pristine surface and knocking it back a few paces, into the falling seals. It shuddered as the scripted papers sank into its body, causing the Forged madra that made up its form to ripple like a slapped puddle.

The rest of Yerin’s slash whipped through the open door of the Tomb, dragging a line of destruction across the tiles and blasting a man-sized tear in the interior wall. Stone crumbled away from the triangular hole the size of a doorway, and he caught a glimpse of the mountains behind the Tomb before his thoughts caught up.

They had won.

He fell anyway.

Instead of slamming into the edge of a sword or the ragged corner of torn stone, he fell into a red cloud hovering three feet above the ground. It caught him on the right side of his body, flipping him over, and yet again Lindon landed hard on his back. The impact to his skull sent stars shooting through darkness, and he was sure something in his pack must have broken this time.

But he lived.

The battle resumed overhead, blades of invisible force whistling as they sliced through the air over his face. Covered in blood, Yerin forced the Remnant back step by step. It was leaking silvery motes of essence now, and the battle slid steadily away from the door.

As it did, Lindon maintained his spirit’s grip on the Thousand-Mile Cloud. Weakened or not, the Remnant’s attacks were still enough to kill him, and he wanted to put as much space between them as he could. With one hand on the construct for support, he half-crawled, half-limped into the Ancestor’s Tomb. There, he would be safe from the fight. There, he could think.

He’d just pulled his feet in past the doorway when a line of gold heat blasted after him, missing him by inches.

Part of his mind was still moving, taking stock of his options, but the rest of him was shivering terror. When Whitehall appeared in the doorway, a child in bloodstained white robes, Lindon whimpered.

The elder took a step inside, glancing from side to side as though checking to see what other trick Lindon had prepared. That sight was like dawn rising before Lindon’s eyes.

Elder Whitehall, a Jade leader of the esteemed Heaven’s Glory School, was wary of him.

Lindon straightened and rose to his feet, though he needed to lean on the Thousand-Mile Cloud to do so. Wind whistled between the open door and the gash in the side, whipping against his skin like ice, but he ostentatiously ignored Elder Whitehall and looked to the walls and ceiling as though checking on his traps.

The inside of the Ancestor’s Tomb was vast and empty, set with as many pillars on the inside as there were on the outside, and the ceiling was covered in another mural of four beasts: a blue serpentine dragon on a thunderstorm, a crowned white tiger, a stone warrior with the shell of a tortoise, and a blazing red phoenix. In the back of the room was an ornate door, presumably leading to the actual tomb, because there were no bodies here. Or perhaps that was the entrance to the labyrinth Yerin had mentioned.

Whitehall brandished the halfsilver dagger in one hand. “I’m not a fool, never think that I am. I’ve caught on to you. You’re no Unsouled.”

Lindon focused on catching his breath, and tried not to betray himself.

“Unsouled don’t have the madra to use a Thousand-Mile Cloud.”

Without the ancestral orus fruit, he would never have been able to activate the cloud. Or the White Fox boundary. Now that he thought of it, that fruit had saved his life more than once.

“Unsouled don’t win tournaments, not even among children.”

Without the Empty Palm, he never would have.

“Unsouled don’t beat Irons, with or without tricks.”

Whitehall had actually seen the hornet Remnants defeat Amon. All Lindon had needed was the strength to open a scripted jar, and the elder had to know that.

The Jade in the boy’s body toyed with the halfsilver dagger, studying him. “I believed you must have cheated to pass the Trial of Glorious Ascension, but now I understand. Anyone can put on a wooden badge. What are you really? Iron? You’re not Copper, a Copper body would have died by now. And a Jade wouldn’t throw away his pride.”

“Apologies, elder,” Lindon said respectfully. “This one is honored by the attention, but the elder surely has bigger problems than this humble disciple.”

Whitehall nodded slowly. “I will soon. Dropping seals on a Remnant in midair while calling a cloud? Those are not the reflexes of a Copper.”

This time, Lindon did allow himself a small smile. He was proud of that one.

“Whoever you are, you’re traveling a fool’s path.” Then Whitehall did something that Lindon hadn’t predicted: he flipped the halfsilver dagger around, offering Lindon the hilt. “Work with me.”

20

“I have no grudge against you,” Whitehall said, the expression on his face far colder than anything a child should have produced. “I don’t even need the girl dead. I want the treasures of the Sword Sage, and nothing more. Here and now, with the heavens as my witness, I’ll swear an oath on my soul to leave you both alive. Furthermore, I will take you as my personal disciple. Whatever you are, you’re not a Jade yet, and in my care you will be.” He held the dagger out in a steady hand, waiting for Lindon to take the hilt.

To win, all Lindon had to do was delay while Yerin harvested her master’s Remnant. “Forgiveness, elder, but it seems as though…” He considered saying ‘this one,’ but it didn’t seem like time for humble speech. “…I have no reason to accept. If the Remnant is sealed, and I mean no disrespect, but Yerin will destroy you.”

“She’s more powerful than any Jade in Sacred Valley,” Whitehall said frankly. “But the battle has weakened her. I give myself even odds of defeating her, but whether I do or not, I hereby swear on my soul that I will first destroy your core. Unsouled or not, you will be truly crippled then.”

Lindon shivered, though he covered it by adjusting his robe against the cold. Unsouled were considered cripples, but they could still use basic madra. With his core destroyed, it would be as though he truly had no spirit—he couldn’t work with scripts or Remnants, and no elixir would save him. Some sacred artists spoke of losing their core as worse than death.

He still needed time.

“Yerin promised to take me beyond the valley,” he said slowly. “I’ve been weak for too long, and I won’t settle for the mediocre strength we have here.”

Whitehall’s eyes lit up, and his grip on the dagger tightened. “Exactly right. That is the heart a sacred artist should have.” He waved his hand around them. “Even this place is built on foundations deeper than we’ve ever explored. Our elders stay Jade because they’re too afraid to risk what they have and dig deeper. I am not.”

From outside, there came a crash, and the sound of metal bent past breaking. Whitehall’s expression hardened. “Choose now. Join me and rise, we’ll leave together, or else I’ll cripple you and take my chances against the Sword Disciple.”

Lindon prided himself on thinking through his options. He had sworn an oath to Yerin, but he wasn’t even Copper. Whatever oath the heavens extracted, it wouldn’t destroy his core.

But though he remained at the Foundation stage, there was some iron in him that would not bend.

He was not a coward. He would not abandon Yerin to captivity. And, more than anything…

“This is my second life,” Lindon said. He pushed off from the cloud, balancing on his own exhausted feet. Whitehall’s eyebrows drew in, but Lindon didn’t care to convince him. “It was a gift from the heavens, and I’d rather die than waste it.” He shrugged. “At least I’ll die trying.”

He stood proudly before Whitehall, tired and weak, his empty hand bared. He had no cards left, no tricks left to play. There was a certain peace to it.

Whitehall’s face twisted in disgust, and he tossed the stolen dagger to the floor. “Trash.” That was all he said. He covered the distance between them in a single step, his palm striking Lindon just below the navel.

And in the last instant, in that knife’s edge of time during the elder’s attack, Lindon remembered that he did have one more card after all.

The Heart of Twin Stars cycling technique had been preparing his core for months now, but he’d always stopped before that final step. Now, as Elder Whitehall injected his burning madra into Lindon’s core, Lindon activated the technique.

He tore his core in half.

The agony was unspeakable, beyond physical, and his scream shook every corner of the Ancestor’s Tomb. Whitehall’s energy flooded into his body. The Empty Palm was only remarkable as a technique because it allowed a sacred artist to affect an enemy on the same level. A Jade did not need a technique to destroy the spirit of an Unsouled; he would simply overwhelm the weaker core with power and let it burst under pressure.

But if Lindon’s core exploded, he didn’t feel it. The agony of tearing it in two blanked everything, washing his world in white. He collapsed to the stone floor, and he welcomed the pain in his body.

When he came to, Whitehall had only taken one step to the door. The skin of Lindon’s stomach was scorched where the palm had struck him, and his spirit cycled rapidly on its own, trying to rid itself of the foreign Heaven’s Glory madra. His veins felt like they were on fire, but even that was a relief next to tearing apart his core.

And when he thought of the core…

His spiritual sense dipped down to the center of his spirit, where two dim balls of light floated inside him like blue-white stars. Weak, but whole and unharmed.

After only a blink of thought, he understood why: when the cores split, they had moved. Where once he had one in the center of his body, now he had one a half-inch to the left and one a half-inch to the right. Whitehall had missed. Heaven’s Glory had entered his body, but it had only burned him. He wasn’t a cripple. At least, no more than before.

He wasn’t any stronger with two cores, of course, and in fact cycling would likely become twice as difficult in the future. But he had one crucial advantage: Whitehall wasn’t watching.

And no matter how strong his Jade spirit made him, he was still in the body of an eight-year-old boy.

Summoning strength from the depth of his spirit, scrounging for every scrap of madra, Lindon rose to his feet and lunged. Before Whitehall could react, Lindon had wrapped both hands around a small waist.

Then he lifted Elder Whitehall into the air.

The elder screamed incoherently as Lindon staggered over to the wall. A shoe caught him in the nose with a crunch, sending blood streaming into his mouth. Lances of Heaven’s Glory struck the painted ceiling, the pillars, the walls, but none reached Lindon. A flailing fist hit him in the side of the head, and the world around him spun. He limped forward, hoping he was going in the right direction.

When the floor fell out from under him, he knew that he’d chosen well.

They pitched out the hole in the side of the wall that Yerin had accidentally opened. Whitehall tumbled away from him, grasping at air with one hand as golden light shot from the other. His eyes met Lindon’s, and he looked pitifully like a confused, terrified boy.

While Lindon couldn’t deny some anxiety, he’d fallen too many times in the last few days. He’d learned to expect it. This time, he’d planned ahead.

He caught himself on the edge of a floating red cloud.

It had taken him the very last drop of strength to drag the Thousand-Mile Cloud along behind him, and when he hauled himself up to its surface, he collapsed in utter weakness. This time, finally, he had absolutely nothing left. No madra, no strength. Even his eyes were covered by tears, his nose and mouth filled with blood, his ears deafened by rushing wind. He drifted as if in a dream, feeling nothing but pain and gratitude for life.

Unguided by his spirit, the cloud drifted slowly toward the ground.

Hundreds of feet beneath him, Elder Whitehall’s body hit the rocks. He swiped tears from his eyes for a better look, horrified that the elder might survive, but then a golden Remnant wrenched itself free of the boy’s corpse. It was a twisted dwarf, a deformed imp drawn in shining yellow lines.

It would be poetic, Lindon reflected, if I killed a Jade just to die at the hands of his Remnant.

Not all Remnants were malicious, but Lindon had the suspicion that Whitehall’s likely would be. It didn’t drift away, but sat on its haunches like a frog, watching Lindon’s cloud descend.

Here he was, with no options left, waiting to slowly slide into inevitable death. It was not how he had imagined dying, but he hoped the story would make it back to his family. They would be shocked at how far he’d made it.

A weight slammed into the Thousand-Mile Cloud, bringing a veil of darkness over Lindon’s eyes, and then the same weight settled on him, pushing his pack into his bruised back. A choked gurgle escaped from his mouth as his breath was forced out under the pressure.

Yerin pulled her outer robe away from his eyes, leaning down to look at him upside-down. She looked…horrifying. He’d thought she looked halfway dead before, but with the fresh blood on her face, she looked as though she’d crawled out of her own grave.

“Don’t fall,” she said, and Lindon took her advice, hugging the cloud to his body.

Her madra filled the construct, and it lurched back into the air. It didn’t seem to want to rise, but she forced it up, jumping it back to the cliff in a series of awkward jerks. Finally, it slid through the gap in the Tomb wall and they both spilled out onto solid ground.

“Gratitude,” Lindon said between breaths.

She raised a hand in acknowledgement…and a steel limb lifted along with it. It looked exactly like one of the six blades on the back of the Sword Sage’s Remnant, and now it dangled from Yerin’s back like the single leg of a spider.

“Is that what Gold looks like?” he asked.

Yerin began to fumble around in her robes, searching pockets. “If my memory’s true, master left me…” An instant later, her hand emerged with a badge of solid gold. In the center, there was a simple picture of a sword. She slipped the ribbon over her neck and held the badge, examining it.

He collapsed onto his back, wallowing in pleasant relief. He hadn’t wasted his life yet. And now he had a Gold on his side.

“Do you trust me now?” he asked.

“More than none,” she responded. She heaved herself into a seated position, and the new limb on her back bobbed with her. “Real test hasn’t even arrived yet.”

Lindon craned his neck, looking out the door, and he almost cried. Three other rusty clouds had come to a stop, carrying men and women in white robes. “Oh look,” he said. “There it is now.”

Yerin didn’t seem to hear him. She was kneeling in the corner of the Tomb, next to something he hadn’t noticed before: the body of a man in black robes. The stone around him was charred in a long, black line, and a sword lay bare beside him. Its blade seemed unnaturally white.

She bowed so deep that her forehead touched the ground. Three times she bowed, as the first man from Heaven’s Glory ran through the door. His hands were glowing golden, and his Jade badge marked him as an Enforcer. Enraged eyes fell first on Lindon.

“Disciple, report!” he demanded.

Then Yerin rose from beside her master’s body. She had left her own sword with him, and was sliding the white-bladed one into a sheath at her side. The silver blade on her back rose like a scorpion’s tail, and she turned her scarred face toward the Heaven’s Glory elder. A gold badge dangled from her neck.

The Jade scrambled backward so fast that it looked like someone had kicked him. He screamed for the others to stop, to back up, to surround the tomb.

Lindon had discovered that he could only stay tense and afraid for so long before his body just grew numb. Yerin could frighten Heaven’s Glory away from the Tomb on her own, and if she couldn’t, it wasn’t as though he would be a great help.

So he was free to pursue an idle theory that had bothered him for some time.

From his pack, he withdrew the Starlotus bud. It was pale white with streaks of pink, the sort of pure color that he normally associated with Remnants, and its petals were curled into a half-bloom, as though it had frozen in the act of opening completely. It was a natural work of art.

He bit it in half.

It tasted like sweet grass with a slightly bitter undercurrent, but it dissolved like sugar on his tongue. He swallowed it in seconds, crossing his legs and straightening his back into a cycling position.

“They have to pull the tiger’s tail, don’t they?” Yerin said. “If they want their share sooner rather than later, I’ll…what are you doing?”

The energy of the spirit-fruit—was it still a spirit-fruit if it was an edible flower? He assumed so—showed in his mind’s eye as a bright pink-tinged white. It dispersed in his stomach, flowing around his spiritual veins in a river of lights that tickled as they traveled. When they had traveled around his body, they tried to enter his core.

Or rather, his cores.

When he had first read the Heart of Twin Stars, he’d theorized a few uses for the technique besides defense. He hadn’t been able to test them without ripping his core in half, but now he had his chance.

While keeping one core tightly closed, he directed the Starlotus madra into the other.

The right-hand core grew brighter, stronger, immediately nourished by the spirit-fruit. It had a small effect immediately, but many of the pale pink dots stayed in the core, tickling him from the inside out. They would be digested over the next days and weeks.

When he’d finished gathering the Starlotus energy into one core, he inspected the other. It was totally clear.

He emerged from cycling with a bright smile on his face. Yerin laughed at him. “You look like you just tore that elder apart with your teeth.”

He rubbed at his front teeth, and his finger came back sticky with blood. He spat out a mouthful, but his enthusiasm was undimmed. “I took half the Starlotus.”

A lance of gold shot through the door, and she dodged to one side, baring the white blade in her hand. “You thought now was the opportune moment to fuzz up your core?”

Lindon climbed onto the Thousand-Mile Cloud, beckoning her to join him. “We’re not fighting, and I wanted to test a theory.”

“If Heaven’s Glory wants me to spill some more blood, I’m not telling them no.” Yerin strode over to the open door, her master’s pale blade to one side.

Even to Lindon’s numb heart, some feeling returned. Panic. “We have to leave now. They won’t follow us outside the valley.” She wasn’t listening to him, so he added, “What would your master say about throwing your life away here?”

She deflected another lance of light, but she didn’t leave the Tomb. “He’d say if I killed one of them for each of my fingers, I could die proud.”

Of course he would.

Lindon considered a number of approaches. His first instinct was to shout at her, reminding her of her oath. He considered begging, bargaining, even leaving her and taking his chances outside the valley.

Quietly, he said, “Please don’t leave me to die.”

She flinched visibly, even as a trio of Heaven’s Glory enforcers came up the stairs, their hands shining gold. The grip on her sword shifted. She leaned forward, then back.

With a growl, Yerin swept her white blade across the doorway to the Tomb. The colorless sword energy hung in the air at neck-height, frozen in place even as she turned and ran toward him.

“You can go rot,” she said, shoving him to the back of the cloud and hopping in front herself. “But bleed me if I’m leaving anybody. Not even you.”

* * *

On their way out, Yerin sliced another pillar. The Ancestor’s Tomb groaned, cracked, slowly crumbling under a lack of support. As they flew out the hole in the wall, the ceiling tilted and collapsed into a landslide of rubble, delaying Heaven’s Glory.

And interring the Sword Sage forever in his killer’s tomb.

They slid down the other side of Mount Samara on the Thousand-Mile Cloud, and as Yerin steered them down the slopes, Lindon kept his eyes on the scenery at the bottom. It was a rolling ocean of green, and every once in a while something stuck its head up over the treetops like a fish breaking the water’s surface.

He drank in the sight, because it was one no one in the Wei clan had ever seen. This was the land beyond Sacred Valley.

“If you’re through with the other half of that flower,” Yerin called back, “I’ll give it a home myself. It’ll do anybody’s spirit some good.”

“Apologies, but I still need it. The other half only went to one of my cores.”

“…you’ve got two short breaths to explain that before I push you off and let you roll down.”

So Lindon explained the Heart of Twin Stars. It turned into something of a winding story, as he had to explain the orus spirit-fruit, his fight with the Mon family, the Empty Palm technique, and eventually the Seven-Year Festival.

“As soon as I found this manual, I had an idea. If I could separate two different types of madra into different cores, then maybe I could learn two Paths!”

“Two Paths,” Yerin repeated. She didn’t sound nearly as excited about it as he was. “That’ll cost you twice the work. You’re having enough trouble with one Path as it is, I wouldn’t scrape yourself too thin trying for two.”

“I’m sorry, you must have misunderstood. I’m not on a Path. They wouldn’t teach me. I’d be open to learning a sword Path, if you had some extra time…”

She turned to him, her scarred face still streaked with blood. “This is why my master would have killed your clan elders.”

“Because they didn’t teach me a Path?”

“I’ll feed it to you in small pieces. You saw me stick solid sword-madra in the doorway, true?”

“Right,” he said. “Uh, true.”

“What kind of a technique do you contend that is?”

“It’s a Forger technique,” he said.

“And when I throw madra out of my sword?”

“Striker.”

“And when I call up aura from every sword in the room?”

That was a Ruler technique, and he saw where she was heading. “I know about all that. Some of the elders in my clan can use techniques outside their discipline.”

She nodded along. “Since you know, then answer me this: if anybody can do anything, what does your spirit matter?”

“Anybody can’t,” he said. “Most people can only learn a technique if their spirit has an affinity for it.”

“Is that true? That’s a mind-bender for me, then, because Heart of Twin Stars sounds like a classic Enforcer technique.”

He paused, because he wasn’t sure. Enforcers could use their madra to make themselves stronger, and their techniques had to do with strengthening the body…but the core was part of the body.

“Here’s another riddle for you. That Empty Palm you worked out? Looks to me like a Striker move.”

“It only reaches a few inches.”

“It’s a rotten Striker move, then, but a runty cub is still a tiger. See, your test everyone in Sacred Valley loves? That bowl of liquid madra? It’s a rotting trap of a test, and it’s filled you all up with lies.”

Lindon’s breaths were coming more and more quickly until it felt like he couldn’t breathe.

“That test doesn’t show you what you are. It shows you what you’re best at. Shows where you start, not where you end up. You start as a Forger, well cheers and celebration for you, that means you’ll have to work extra hard as an Enforcer. Outside of the valley, you don’t get to call yourself a sacred artist until you’ve at least learned the basics of all four disciplines and harvested a Remnant. To my eyes, every one of your elders is still in training.”

“So then…how could I be…”

“Unsouled?” She shrugged. “Never heard that word before coming here. You just started two steps behind, that’s the spine of it. Nothing worth crying about. Some of them polished families can take a squalling baby from Foundation to Jade in two and a half pills. It’s practicing your Path that’s hard, and it sounds to me like you’re halfway through with yours.”

For a long time, Lindon couldn’t say a word. The truth blasted through him, leaving him numb. He didn’t need to find a Path of his own.

He was already on it.

The wind pressed icy needles against eyes covered in tears, and suddenly he was scrambling through the pack on his back, digging out the Heart of Twin Stars manual. It was only halfway complete; the rest of the pages were blank. While Yerin asked him what he was doing and if he was crying, he juggled the manual, a brush, and a jar of ink. Anyone who founded a Path was expected to take careful notes, to pass their knowledge on to future generations.

With careful hands, he wrote at the top of the page:

The Path of Twin Stars.

Epilogue

Information requested: current status of Wei Shi Lindon.

Beginning report…

Wei Shi Lindon and Yerin, Disciple of the Sword Sage, leave Sacred Valley on the back of their constructed cloud. They plan to hide and rest before moving into the forest. Sacred beasts the size of buildings prowl in the shadows beneath the leaves, and even Yerin has no confidence in her power to protect them both. She knows that only if they are stealthy and quick will they survive, and then only if nothing goes wrong.

She is not aware that the Transcendent Ruin has risen in the heart of the forest, for the first time in eight hundred years. Its promise calls to sacred artists for thousands of kilometers around…and to the other, older, darker things that wait in the surrounding wilds.

DIVERGENCE DETECTED: the Desolate Wilds, Transcendent Ruin. Continue?

Divergence accepted, continuing report…

On the peak of Mount Samara, a crippled Heaven’s Glory elder named Anses picks through the ruins of what he calls the Ancestor’s Tomb. His pride is trampled, the power of his school has been questioned, and now it seems that they have created for themselves a powerful enemy. The Sword Sage’s disciple will return, he knows, with greater force and with vengeance.

But despite his certainty, he has a deep-seated fear of the wilderness outside Sacred Valley. He could not survive it, and therefore he believes no one could. In his judgment, the Sage’s disciple must have doubled back. Where will she go if not to the home of her ally, the Unsouled Wei Shi Lindon?

He crafts a message to his fellow elders, urging them to march with all their flagging strength on the Wei clan.

DIVERGENCE DETECTED: the destruction of the Wei clan. Continue?

Divergence accepted, continuing report…

As the members of the Heaven’s Glory School excavate their ancient tomb, a five-tailed snowfox the size of a man waits nearby. He is soundless, scentless, his presence masked to both sight and spirit. He is an ancient sacred beast, one of the original inhabitants of this valley, and he is only seen when he wishes to be.

He has followed the Unsouled Lindon since the intervention of Suriel, the Phoenix, Sixth Judge of the Abidan Court. Though he does not remember the events prior to her temporal reversion, he has noticed the effects of her involvement and believes that Lindon is favored by heaven. He watches the two young sacred artists leave the valley, and for the first time in centuries, he experiences hope. Maybe these children, blessed by the heavens, will save the valley from the Dreadgods’ return.

DIVERGENCE DETECTED: return of the Dreadgods. Continue?

* * *

Iteration 217: Harrow

[Divergence report denied,] Suriel’s Presence said. [Report complete.]

The reports came to her in a mix of words, images, and impressions, retrieved by her Presence and transmitted to her in an instant. She’d looked into Lindon’s past, his surroundings, his upbringing, even his future. He was an interesting distraction.

Her Presence told her he had a seventeen percent chance of surviving the Desolate Wilds, a four percent chance of making it past Gold, and a zero-point-three percent chance of ascending beyond Cradle.

But in every world, in all the thousands of variations on humanity the universe spun out, people always loved to bet on the underdog.

She would return to the reports later, but although they took virtually no time, they did take her attention. She needed to focus now, to treat the situation with the gravity it deserved.

Makiel was coming. And the First Judge of the Abidan Court demanded all of her concentration.

Her hair had been restored to its radiant emerald shine, her eyes to vivid purple. She drifted in high atmosphere, waiting, as fiery chunks flew out from the planet and past her into space.

This world was beyond healing.

A glimpse of rolling, textured blue, and someone stepped into reality. Not Makiel, as she had expected. This man was young and compact, with dark blue skin and rows of tightly packed horns instead of hair. Gadrael, Second Judge and Makiel’s loyal right hand.

He was dressed as she was, in the seamless white armor of any Abidan on active duty. The Mantle of Gadrael streamed from his shoulders like a furiously burning cape of pure starfire, just as the Mantle of Suriel hung from her own. Instead of her correlation lines, which trailed from her fingers like ribbons of gray smoke and connected to the back of her neck, he carried a black circle strapped to his forearm like a medieval buckler.

He’d brought his weapon, primed and ready for use. She summoned her own, the meter-thick bar of blue, but he held up a hand. “Peace, under the Way.”

She clipped the weapon to her waist without banishing it. He wouldn’t violate a truce, but he’d been too quick to offer one. “Tell Makiel I haven’t found him. My Presence can give him a full report.”

“He knows. He’s looking himself, since you remain unmotivated.”

The barb didn’t disturb her, but the content of his message did. She’d been sent to hunt for Ozriel because she was the only one of the Seven capable of finding him without being killed on sight. If she tracked him down, Ozriel would talk to her.

If Makiel found him, they would kill each other.

Gadrael waited for the reality to settle on her. “He thought that would convince you to search. If that wasn’t enough…” he turned to the burning planet. “…this might be.”

The planet beneath them fuzzed and flickered with visual static, even as it burned. Continents appeared in the ocean, vanished, appeared again. Water plumed kilometers in the air, calmed, shot up again. A city rose from the ocean in ruins, and then was drowned.

When one world crashed into another, this was the result. Time, space, and reality itself bent and warped while the Way tried to force order out of the collision’s pure chaos.

“Which one is it?” Suriel asked quietly. She could have asked her Presence, but she wanted Gadrael to hear the question.

“Iteration two-sixteen, Limit. It was scheduled for demolition no later than two standard months ago, its adept population already evacuated.”

But they had no one to remove it, with Ozriel gone, so now Limit had dragged Harrow with it into the void.

“Quarantine protocols?” she asked.

“Effective. I implemented the walls myself.” So no other worlds would be drawn in to this disaster. “It only escalates from here. If we don’t recover Ozriel, or at least the Scythe, we could lose it all.”

He wasn’t wrong. This was Sector Twenty-One, but if it was happening out here, it was potentially only days away anywhere. Sector Thirteen, where she was born. Sector Six, with its rich history and gorgeous natural art. Even Sector Eleven, with one-one-zero. Cradle.

Important worlds like Cradle, Haven, Sanctum, and Asylum would be protected. Even in the event of total system collapse, the Abidan would collect and quarantine these worlds, their last bastion against the infinite chaos.

But in times like this, anything could go wrong. Cradle might be safer than anywhere else, but it wasn’t safe.

“Acknowledged,” Suriel said. “Designation zero-zero-six, Suriel, formally accepts the charge to locate and withdraw zero-zero-eight, Ozriel, under censure.”

Gadrael nodded, his expression firm as granite. It always was. The Way would crumble to dust before he smiled.

She accessed the Way, drawing flows of pure order around her as she prepared to exit Harrow, but the other Judge didn’t follow. He stood on nothing with his arms crossed, black buckler facing the dying world.

“What is your mission here?” Suriel asked.

“Mercy,” Gadrael said.

She stopped. The tendrils of layered blue returned to the Way. She had faced patients in the past that were too far gone, where the only comfort she could offer them was a painless end. She had gained her power, in a large part, so that she never had to face that again. Now even death was no barrier to her healing.

And it still wasn’t enough.

“A shield is meant to protect,” she said. “It’s not an appropriate tool for this.” She drew her weapon.

Gadrael nodded, his arms still crossed. She wondered if this had been Makiel’s plan all along, to make her face the reality of the situation by dirtying her own hands. It wouldn’t change anything either way. This was still her duty.

Heart aching, she activated her sword.

THE END

Cradle: Volume One

Unsouled

Soulsmith

Cradle Volume Two

Contents

Dedication

Prologue

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

To my brother Sam, for reading this.

Prologue

Information requested: disciple training on the Path of the Endless Sword.

Beginning report…

When you’re alone, first look for a weapon.

The master leaves his disciple with these words. The disciple kneels in the winter snow, shivering as the snow presses through her knees. Finding a weapon isn’t her problem.

Thirteen swords are thrust into the snow around her, cold blades turned so that their razor edges touch her skin. With every shiver, she opens another cut. Her thighs, knees, and upper arms are sheathed in freezing blood.

At the edge of pain, exhaustion, and isolation, each of her thoughts becomes slippery. But she knows, clear and distinct as the ring of a bell, that her master has abandoned her here.

It's his favorite training technique: leaving her alone, where no one can save her, and forcing her to rely on her own knowledge to escape. It teaches her reliance, he says. A Path is only one person wide.

She knows he's always right. She's only Iron, not quite ten years old, and she can't question him.

But every time he walks away, he leaves her with the fear that this will be the time he doesn't come back.

She is surrounded by sword aura, silver and sharp in her spiritual vision, and she drinks it in to cycle it, to refine it until it becomes a part of her spirit. Her madra. She has done this constantly since he first left her kneeling in the snow, but it hasn't helped. She knows no technique she can use from this position, has no blade of her own through which she can channel the madra.

She tries to push her power out through her skin, but the swords only shake and open up new lines of blood.

When you're alone, first look for a weapon.

The Sword Sage is not a bad teacher, but he has a preference for cryptic riddles. She has already strained her eyes and even extended her hands—at least as far as she can, without slicing them open on the waiting blades—to search for weapons in the snow. She'd thought he might have hidden something for her, and that treasure will be the key to her escape.

She finds nothing. She kneels for hours, burning in the cold, throwing madra at the implacable weapons. She may as well have shouted at them.

As the morning climbs into afternoon, she has only one coherent thought left. Her master is not coming back. Why should he? A disciple who cannot learn is one not worth teaching. Her master deserves someone who can keep up with his instruction.

Someone who can be trusted.

Her unwelcome guest starts to stir, squirming against the seal that her master has placed upon it. It doesn't speak—it can't—but its presence reminds her that there is another source of power here. Another route she can take, besides sword madra. Another Path.

She will freeze to death before she takes it.

When her vision starts to dim, she knows that even her Iron body is reaching its limits. She screams, shaking herself awake, and the fresh cuts on her body don't even hurt. She draws in as much sword aura as she can, flooding her system with borrowed power, though she won't be able to use it until she cycles it through her own spirit. Full to bursting, she pushes it all away from her.

Faintly, the swords ring like distant bells.

She stills herself, waiting for her tired thoughts to catch up.

When you're alone, first look for a weapon.

On the Path of the Endless Sword, she's learned to Enforce madra into a weapon so that it gathers aura as it moves, strengthening with time. She has learned to pour madra into a Striker's slash, severing a tree branch twenty paces away. She's even learned to crystallize her power into a Forged razor, though it still shatters like glass.

She still hasn't learned a Ruler technique, the ability to manipulate compatible aura in the world around her.

It's a weapon she hasn't seized.

Her madra echoes in time with her breath, gusting out and striking the circle of swords and the aura gathered there. The aura echoes with a pure note, sweet and clear in the winter afternoon.

The swords slide away.

Suggested topic: the fated future of Yerin, the Sword Sage’s disciple. Continue?

Denied, report complete.

1

Lindon unwrapped the bandage from Yerin’s forehead, examining the wound. It was red and angry, a long slash, but shallow. Her master’s Remnant had cut her with the precision of a battlefield surgeon. She was already covered in scars so pale and thin they looked as though they were painted on her skin, and unless he missed his guess, she was going to end up with a fresh new set in a few months.

He tossed the crusty bandage into the fire—fuel wasn’t terribly hard to come by out here, in the hills east of Mount Samara, but gathering sticks was torture on his injured back. He wouldn’t give up any tinder, and burning their old bandages had the added benefit of removing blood scent from their trail. He doubted anyone would leave Sacred Valley to track them, but no one ever died from being too careful.

Yerin sat quietly, watching the fire, as Lindon dug into his pack at his feet. He liked to carry anything he even might need, so his pack bulged at the seams. Seated on a fallen tree as he was, the pack stood higher than his knees.

But he’d been glad he had it over the past five days. He pulled out another roll of clean gauze from a pocket, quickly tying it around Yerin’s head. That cut on Yerin’s forehead wasn’t her worst, so by the time he was finished, she was wrapped like a fish packaged for market. And he wasn’t much better.

“Apologies, but this is the last of the bandages,” Lindon said, replacing another gauze wrapping on her elbow and tossing it into the fire. “I have a set of spare clothes that we can cut into strips.”

“Won’t need it,” Yerin said. “Now that I’ve got something more than wind and wishes in my core, I’ll cycle for a few more days and be all polished up.” She rapped her knuckles on the back of her forearm with the air of someone knocking on wood, though it made the usual sound of flesh on flesh. “Iron body comes with all sorts of treats, depending on what sort you have. Copper’s even easier. We’ll break you through to Copper tonight, and that’ll perk you up quick. Nothing does good for the flesh and blood like advancing a realm.”

Lindon paused with the last strip of gauze in his hand. “Tonight?”

She turned to flash him a quick smile. “Unless you’d choose to wait.”

As she turned, he had to dodge to avoid taking a thin steel arm to the face. The limb sprouted from her shoulder blade, a structure of Forged madra so dense that it felt like real steel, ending in a sword blade that dangled over her head like a scorpion’s tail.

She grimaced, and the arm lurched awkwardly away from Lindon’s cheek. “Haven’t quite tamed that one yet, sorry.”

His task was complete anyway, so he stood up from the log and moved around her. “Copper, you said. I’ll be able to sense vital aura, won’t I? Even…sword aura?”

He thought he understood Copper fairly well, having grown up primarily around children who had reached that stage, but from Yerin he’d learned that half of what he knew about the sacred arts was completely wrong. This was an opportunity for him to learn.

And perhaps to gain something more.

He’d split his core into two parts only days before, embarking on what he called the Path of Twin Stars. This gave him a natural defense against anyone attacking his spirit, but more importantly, he should theoretically be able to hold two types of madra in the same body. He could keep his own pure madra, while learning Yerin’s Path as well.

Except thus far, every time he’d broached the topic, she had refused to teach him.

Yerin’s eyes drifted to her own sword, which she’d taken from her master’s body. “You need a master in truth, Lindon, and those aren’t shoes I can fill.” He started to protest, but she rode over him. “Listen. You ever heard anybody talk about Copper eyes?”

He shook his head.

“It’s a saying I grew up with. Copper eyes see the world, Iron eyes see far, and Jade eyes see deep. Tells you what you’re in for. At Copper, you see aura. You can begin taking it in, cycling it, turning it into madra. At Iron, you’re forging the body you’ll use for the rest of your life, and the actual eyes in your head get better. And when you hit Jade, you can use your spirit to…see. Sense. There’s not a good word for it, really.”

“What about Gold?” he asked eagerly.

She flicked a finger against the silvery steel blade hanging down into her face. “At Gold you hold a Remnant in your core, and you get a little something extra for your trouble. We call it a Goldsign, and it’s the simple way to tell who’s on what Path. Now shut it, we’re talking about Copper.”

Lindon settled down on a nearby rock, the fire crackling between them.

“Ten chances out of a dozen, you’ll have to prepare for a stage before you advance,” Yerin continued. “And what preparation you settle on depends on your Path. My master stuck me in a ring of swords to polish me up for Jade. He wouldn’t let me out until I could push them away on my own. Strengthened me, turned me toward sword madra, prepared me to advance. Like eating a red pepper to prepare for a white one.”

It sounded more like sadistic torture than sacred arts to Lindon, and though he didn’t say anything, Yerin must have noticed the look on his face.

“Wasn’t so bad,” she said, tracing one of the paper-thin scars on her arm. “Taught me character. Anyway, the thrust of it is, I can’t teach you. You’re not following in my footsteps, so I don’t know where to take you from here. Maybe if I knew more…but I don’t. I’m just a Gold.”

Hearing someone say they were ‘just’ a Gold was like hearing an emperor say his summer palace ‘just’ had a thousand rooms, but the idea that he wasn’t ready for a Path sent chills up his back.

“So, if I understand you correctly, then I’m not…I mean, I’ll never be…” He couldn’t squeeze the words out.

She snapped her fingers in front of his eyes. “Are your ears open? What did I say? I don’t know how to get you in condition for my Path. The Path of the Endless Sword is pretty choosy, but most Paths are not. I’ve met more than a few masters who wouldn’t even look at a student before Iron.”

Lindon breathed deeply again as the chills faded, but he didn’t miss a word. “These masters are beyond Gold, you say. What kind of a realm is that?”

“Gold is a wide river to ford,” she said dryly, “especially for somebody who hasn’t so much as touched Copper. You want to advance, you’d best clear out your mind.”

He took the opportunity to stretch his sore back and look around. Samara wasn’t the last mountain they’d crossed since leaving Sacred Valley, and snow-capped peaks hid the halo that would be lighting up the Wei clan’s night. Without the Thousand-Mile Cloud, the horse-sized pillow of opaque red fog that hovered off to the side of their campsite, they would never have made it through the mountains in only a few days.

Here in the foothills, they were nestled between two house-sized boulders and a scrubby bundle of trees. The late-summer wind was mild but unceasing, and it flowed down the mountain with a tinge of autumn chill. Their “campsite” was nothing more than a fire, a collapsed tree Yerin had dragged over for a bench, and a pair of thin blankets he’d placed on the ground.

Behind them rose the mountains he’d left behind. In front of them, the land lowered further until rolling hills spread out beneath them. Yerin called this place the Desolate Wilds, though it seemed more wild than desolate. The hills were carpeted in trees with scorch-black leaves, marred with the occasional strange-colored lights or patch of ash. The forest filled him with dread, as though he stared down into deep water with no idea what sort of monstrous creature might rise from the depths at any second.

Because there were creatures in those dark trees. He’d seen them.

“Before we start, if I may ask…Copper, will it help me survive down there?”

Yerin looked like someone who had lived alone in the wilderness for too long—she was thin and wiry, without an ounce of fat, and her traditional black sacred artist’s robe was faded and tattered. Her hair was black as her robe and cut absolutely straight, which he suspected she did with her sword.

She was a survivor, she had been even before her master was murdered, and she looked the part. She knew what it took to make it out of a deadly wilderness alive, while he’d slept on a cloud-soft mattress since he was a child.

She shrugged one shoulder. “Going down there without Copper is like going in with a hood over your eyes. You’d lose your head without a glimpse of what buried you. Going in with Copper…well, at least you’ll see what’s eating you.”

He knelt opposite her, so that their knees were almost touching. With both their backs straight, he was head and shoulders taller than she was. He slouched a little, almost on instinct—in his clan, an Unsouled who loomed over his betters would be asking for a beating.

Yerin didn’t seem to notice or care. She continued, “Iron is better by miles. Your sacred arts will still be rotten, but you won’t die to a stray breeze. Presuming we can find a few things tomorrow, like a covered place to sleep, we’ll stay here until you hit Iron. We’ll want to make you hit perfect Iron, so we can lag until end of winter. Come spring, we can move down into the trees.”

Lindon’s breath came a little too fast, and his stomach churned with sickening hope. He’d lived almost sixteen years yearning for Copper, and now she was saying he could reach Iron in just a few more months? It was like hearing her promise that, with a little more effort, he could sprout wings and fly around the sky like a bird.

His own parents were only Iron, and they’d been famous in the Wei clan when they were only a little older than him. Come spring, if he returned to Sacred Valley, how would they see him then?

Memory returned, of a vision he’d once seen: a colossal shadow wading through the mountains like a child wading through a creek, devastating the entire valley.

“Is that the soonest we can leave?” he asked, and she looked at him as though he’d proposed setting themselves on fire.

“So you know, you can rush to Iron, but you surely don’t want to. Ruins your chances of reaching Lowgold. And the weakest sacred artist down there will be Lowgold, so even if you survived a stroll through the trees, it only takes one privileged son with a rotten temper to scatter your bones all through the trees.”

“Pardon, but who is Lowgold?”

She stuck a finger at him as though threatening him with it. “You’re proving my point for me. It’s not a who, it’s what you call the first rank of Gold.”

“Rank?”

“I told you Gold was a wide river. The weakest Golds are Lowgold, then Highgold, and Truegold past that. The gap between each one is ten times wider than the gap between Copper and Iron, and if you were a shade quicker and two shades smarter, you’d hole up here for a handful of years until you hit Lowgold.”

If he’d thought he was impressed before, this time his lungs froze. Gold? Even if it took him a few years, Suriel had told him he had three decades. Suddenly he didn’t feel as though he were on such a tight schedule after all.

She waved a hand at him. “That’s the sweetest view of events. Spine of the matter is, we’re not trying to catch the tide. A year or two won’t change much.”

Part of that statement stuck out to Lindon like a burning bush. We’re not trying to catch the tide. She’d included herself, as though she intended to stay with him.

That meant more to him than he was prepared to consider, carving into his heart with a sweet pain. For most of his life, even his family had only taken his side out of blood obligation. An Unsouled wasn’t headed anywhere except straight into the ground, and no one wanted to travel with him on that journey.

Now, here was someone who had already fulfilled her oath—she’d taken him out of Sacred Valley safely. He’d half-expected her to walk off and leave him the second he’d finished bandaging her wounds.

But in five days, she still hadn’t said a word of it.

Still kneeling, he bowed to her, pressing his fists together. “Gratitude,” he said.

She flushed and rubbed the back of her neck. “Well, every path has a first step. Let’s get you to Copper first. How’s that Starlotus?”

He closed his eyes and visualized his madra. He could just barely feel the power trickling through his spiritual channels, which he always imagined as a dim blue-white light running throughout his body like blood running through veins. The energy pulsed in rhythm with his breath, spinning out from his core and returning after visiting his extremities.

Before this week, his core had been located in the same place as everyone else’s: just below his navel, at his center of gravity, where people said the soul was located. Now, it was an inch to the right.

And to the left, it had a twin.

Both cores shone in his imagination, stretched like inflated bladders until they looked like the size of his fist. He could withdraw his madra into a core and cycle the other one, if he wanted to, but there was no point: both cores held an equal amount of the same madra. He’d cycled every night for the past five days, even using the parasite ring he’d stolen from the Heaven’s Glory School, and hadn’t gained an ounce of power since eating the Starlotus bud. He’d consumed one half of the flower to solidify his foundation in one core, and the other half went to the other. Now, according to Yerin, both cores had reached their capacity.

So it was time to advance.

“The flower’s madra has settled down,” he reported, eyes still shut. Though the Starlotus madra had gone down smoothly, his cores had still taken a few days to stop swirling like a pair of whirlpools. “They’re calm, they’ve absorbed everything I can give them, and I’m ready.”

His hands trembled on his knees, though he forced them to be still. Now that he was staring it in the face, he wondered if he was ready for Copper. He’d always thought that, by the time he reached this point, he would know more about the sacred arts and would be able to advance with confidence. Most people were following ancient instructions written in their Paths; the only Path he followed was the one he was making up as he went.

But those doubts were nothing next to the bone-deep hunger that gnawed at him. He didn’t just want Copper, he needed it, and his momentary misgivings couldn’t stop him.

And in front of him, he had a teacher more capable than anyone in Sacred Valley: a legendary Gold.

He exhaled carefully, inhaling again in accordance with his Foundation breathing technique. “I’m ready,” he repeated. “What do I do now?”

“Well, you somewhat squeeze it on down. Like you’re wringing water out of your clothes. Then you keep going until you’re done.”

He cracked one eye. “How do I do that?”

She spread her hands. “You somewhat, you know…” She made a fist. “Squeeze it.”

He closed his eyes again and pictured one core being squeezed, as though in the grip of an imaginary hand. Nothing happened.

“That doesn’t seem to have worked,” he said, carefully keeping any accusation from his voice.

“Well, that’s a rusty patch for you, then. You’re in your own boat now.”

He stared at her. “Is that all you can tell me?”

“First time I remember advancing, I was going from Copper to Iron. That puts me at about eight winters old. If I put this together when I was no bigger than a teacup, you ought to have it easy.” She scowled at him. “And don’t give me that look like you’re trying to stab me with your eyeballs, it’s not on my account that I never walked somebody through advancing to Copper before.”

“Forgiveness, I was only concentrating.” That wasn’t entirely true—she was supposed to be the expert. If he knew how to advance, he’d have done it already.

Once again, he closed his eyes and pictured both his cores. Madra looped out of one like web from a spider, and he withdrew it all, drawing his power back into the core. Even with energy as faint as his, he felt it when it was gone; his limbs weakened, his aches intensified, and the cool wind gained just a little more of an edge.

He focused on his core, tightening his awareness on it, and exhaled. Breathing circulated madra, and when he had finally pushed all the air out of his lungs, his spirit stilled. He focused on that one core, shutting out physical sensations, squeezing with all the pressure of his will.

Nothing changed.

He took another breath, and both cores spun lazily once more. This time, he let a little power slide out from the core on the right…but instead of taking it into his madra channels, he held it around the core like a layer of cloud.

It was a simple hunch. He could control the madra freely, as long as it was outside the core. So he used that madra like a fist to clench down on the core itself.

Lindon felt the result as pressure more than pain, as though his heart were gripped in a vice. His first panicked reaction was to give up, take a deep breath, and try again. But if he breathed in, the madra would cycle, and he’d have to start over. So, ignoring the warning pressure, he squeezed harder.

A spike of pain shot through the right side of his stomach, leading to a tingling, freezing cold that danced over his skin. But now, when he visualized both cores, the one on the right seemed a little smaller…and a little brighter.

He took that breath now, letting the madra cycle through his body and calm his nerves, then he clenched down again. The pain was sharper now, the spasm longer, the cold on his skin lingering. Wind pressed even sharper against him thanks to his sweat, which flooded out as though he’d sprung a leak.

“Yeah, you’ve got ahold of it now,” Yerin said, her excited voice close to his ear. He almost lost his concentration. “Keep ahold of it. I knew a man who stopped midway, and his organs—”

She cut off in a rustle of cloth and a whispering rasp that said she’d stood up and drawn her weapon, and Lindon’s eyes almost opened before he forced them shut again. The core he’d compressed was fluctuating now, beating in an irregular rhythm, and it took all his concentration to wrap another layer of madra around it.

He could feel that she was right, though she’d cut off before the important part. He tried not to listen to her footsteps as she padded around him, facing some danger. If he left his core alone, it would go wild in his body. In the worst case, it could tear him apart from the inside.

He flexed his madra again, and the core reduced in size by another layer. He shivered as icy needles pricked him all over, this time even in the depths of his ears, under his fingernails, in the back of his eyes. He shuddered, but forced his breathing to stay steady. Though he had never followed a Path, he’d practiced his cycling technique for years. His madra didn’t slip.

After the pain in his ears, he heard nothing but a high-pitched whine, though he felt the impact in the ground as something landed next to him. Once again, he focused completely on his core.

If it had been the size of his fist before, now it was only as big as Suriel’s marble, and brighter. The larger core seemed hazier by comparison, less substantial, as though it were half a dream. The Copper core was brighter, more vivid. He hardly had to work at all to visualize it, floating inside him like a star.

Once he’d wrapped it more thoroughly in a tight fist of madra, he squeezed one final time. Yerin’s voice came to him then, though she sounded so distant that he couldn’t make out her words, and he couldn’t be bothered to spare the attention anyway. His whole body stung and tingled, more painfully than before, until each of his muscles twitched. His core was resisting this time, like a nut unwilling to crack, and he had to bend all of his will and all his madra to push.

His core snapped down to a tiny pinprick of light, and he shuddered violently. An icy hand slapped the back of his skull, and he passed out.

He woke only an instant later, or so it seemed to him. The fire flickered with sullen red light, just as it had the last time he’d seen it, and its heat lay on him like an oppressive blanket. He began to move away, only to come to two startling discoveries.

First, as he lay sprawled out on the ground, his injuries should have been torturing him. He’d spent the last four nights snatching only the occasional handful of sleep because of the pain in his back, his ribs, his limbs. All that was gone, replaced with an unsteady weakness, as though he’d slipped into someone else’s body. Despite the occasional cold tingle across his skin, just like the ones he’d sensed while advancing, he felt whole.

Second, there was something wrong with the fire. Spectral red lights drifted around the blaze in an orbit, like flames that had left their candles behind, growing in number at the center of the heat. He had to focus strangely to see the phantom campfire; it felt more like watching his core than something physical, as though he saw with his spirit instead of with his eyes.

Even when he moved his gaze away, the world was awash in color. The ground beneath him ran with veins of bright yellow as far down as he could see, each wriggling slowly like lightning trapped in jelly. He was seeing through the ground itself somehow, which gave him a dizzying impression like he was trapped on the outer membrane of an endless ocean, and he could fall through any second.

The logs in the fire sprouted phantom limbs of green that slowly blackened as they burned, and a furious red current ran beneath his own skin, as though his blood had started to glow.

He tried to sit up, but instead he curled like he’d pulled the wrong string on a puppet. After a few awkward attempts, he finally flopped one arm underneath him and pushed up, muscles trembling. He had to fight his way up to a seated position. He felt as though he’d wrung out each of his muscles like dishrags, but advancing usually left a sacred artist immobilized for a while. He’d recover soon.

Above all, the weakness was proof that he’d made it. He was Copper. By all reason, Copper should be the first, unremarkable step on anyone’s journey, but he felt as though he’d been climbing a mountain for his entire life and only now had reached a ledge.

The thought of Copper sparked a memory, and he snapped his head up again, sparkling with excitement. If the biggest advantage of Copper was the ability to cycle vital aura from heaven and earth, that meant…

The bright ghosts of his surroundings had vanished. It was easy to lose sight of them if he wasn’t focusing, as though they only existed when he held his eyes a certain way. As soon as he concentrated, looking beyond, the vivid phantoms returned.

The floating red flames in and around the campfire felt as though they meant heat, like they were symbols written in a language he had just learned how to read. When he realized what he was looking at, his heart leapt in pure joy.

This was fire aura. He’d always wondered what it looked like. This was the power that everyone absorbed and Rulers controlled.

He corrected himself before his thoughts had gone too far: out here, anyone could learn Ruler techniques. It had nothing to do with your birth. Everyone was a Ruler, and a Forger, and so on, but no one was Unsouled. The possibilities were dizzying.

He still didn’t understand some basic mysteries—his family harvested light aura, not fire, but he didn’t know how to spot the two, much less tell them apart—but the fact remained that he could see aura all around him. With training, he could draw the aura into his own madra, changing its nature and adding to its power.

The key to true strength lay all around him; he was awash in an infinite ocean of treasure.

He clawed for his pack, ready to write down his impressions before he forgot them. He pulled out a loosely bound bundle of yellowed papers that had once been nothing more than the technique manual for the Heart of Twin Stars technique. Now it was his instruction manual for the Path of Twin Stars.

As the founder of a Path, he had to make careful notes on every step. If he traveled as far down this Path as Suriel had suggested he could, his Path manuals could guide young sacred artists for generations.

When he’d finished scribbling down his thoughts—about squeezing his core, about how long it had taken him to cycle the Starlotus bud, about the fact that only one of his cores had reached Copper while the other felt the same as before—he realized the rest of the camp was absolutely quiet.

He didn’t hear anything from Yerin.

In his excitement, he’d forgotten the sounds he’d heard while advancing: Yerin drawing her weapon, something landing heavily next to him.

Lindon glanced to the side, where a ragged spike of Forged green madra had been embedded into the dirt. It was longer than his finger, and judging from the noise he’d heard in addition to the shallow crater blasted in the ground, it must have impacted with significant force.

He scrambled to his feet, swaying with dizzy weakness and shivering from the cold. Something had attacked him, and he hadn’t even known. In a moment, he was sure that fact would seize his heart with fear.

For now, he didn’t have time to consider the fact that someone had been inches from killing him before he could react. There was a threat out there somewhere.

And Yerin was gone.

2

Yerin’s unwelcome guest shifted around her waist, where she'd wrapped it as a belt and tied it into a great ribbon of a knot. Just as her master had shown her. The Remnant hissed, flickering with blood madra until its sullen red glow threatened to give her away.

It was responding to her anger, which had burned out of her control. She went into most fights cold—battle required focus, as her master had hammered into her, and she rarely had a problem with that. But these sniveling rats had attacked Lindon while he was advancing, showing that they had less honor than a crazed Remnant. Advancing to Copper, no less, which was something like attacking a sleeping baby. If she hadn't deflected that spike of Forged madra in time, she'd be alone now.

She’d walked her Path alone before. She’d shaken with fever in a cave, too weak to boil roots for soup. She’d slept in a dusty mausoleum for three days as a Remnant crouched outside, knowing that no one would save her. She’d marched through the ashes of a place that had once been her home, heading nowhere.

Her master always talked about solitude as though it was some great treasure, some tool that aided in focus and training. That was a pile of rot. He was the strongest sacred artist she’d ever met, but some things he just didn’t understand.

She reached into a pocket of her robe, resting fingers on a disk of heavy gold. They wore badges in Sacred Valley, and her master had commissioned it for her in line with local customs, but she had no reason to wear it out here. No reason to keep it, either, except that her master had left it for her.

Yerin wasn't overly attached to Wei Shi Lindon; she'd only known him for a few days, and part of her still expected him to be playing some sort of twisty trick on her. She'd spent no small amount of time wondering if she should kill him and remove the danger.

But having Lindon around gave her someone to talk to, someone to help her with her bandages, someone to help keep the bloody memories and the acid-edged grief at bay. Plus, he kept a bunch of convenient odds and ends in that pack of his. And he was under her protection—like a helpless baby squirrel she’d adopted in the woods.

These cowards, whoever they were, had tried to leave her alone again. Unforgivable.

She knelt at the foot of a tree, watching Lindon stumble around next to the fire. She’d deflected the first attack aimed at him, but their ambushers hadn’t tried a second. That meant they were creeping around, looking for a better angle. For an edge.

She didn't know how many of them there were—more than one, she was certain, or they wouldn't have attacked at all—but they would be trying to wrap her up in a circle.

So one of them would be walking around the wall-sized boulders that functioned as a windbreak for Yerin's camp. She gave them a slow count of a hundred, giving them plenty of time to move. The whole time, she kept her breath measured and her madra in a ready grip; if they launched another attack at Lindon, she'd deflect it with sword resonance. But no attack came.

At the count of ninety-nine, she felt something in her spirit: a brief whisper of corrosive, oily presence right where she'd expected it. Behind the largest boulder.

Madra flooded her legs as she kicked off, reaching the boulder in a blink. Her master's sword, a straight-edged plane of Forged white madra, hummed eagerly in her grip. Her guest hissed and twisted around her waist, sensing blood.

The woman behind the boulder looked even worse than Yerin had after weeks in the wilderness. She was only a few hungry days away from being a skeleton, her dark hair muddy and matted. A leather necklace of teeth hung down over dirty hide clothes that looked a size too big for her, like she'd dressed herself by robbing corpses. Her eyes widened as she saw Yerin, and she brought a shortbow up and pulled the string.

As the woman’s arm straightened, she revealed a monster of green light clinging to her arm—some cross between a snake and a centipede, a tiny Remnant parasite sunk into the woman’s limb. A Goldsign. So she was Lowgold, just like Yerin. No more easy battles, now that she’d left Sacred Valley behind.

A Forged green arrow materialized on the string even as the woman pulled it back, but the battle was over as soon as Yerin had drawn her sword.

Sword aura gathered around basically anything with an edge, so in her spiritual sight, Yerin’s blade shone with a silver halo. She cycled madra according to the Flowing Sword technique, Enforcing the weapon like it was part of her own body.

A low hum, so deep that it was felt rather than heard, passed through the metal. Vital aura responded to the resonance, clustering around the weapon, so the silver glow grew brighter and brighter.

The blade of Yerin’s master passed through bow and woman both, its madra infinitely sharp and cold, like a blade chipped from a glacier. The dirty woman's jaw dropped to her chest as she saw her bow break, and she had a second to look up like a startled rabbit. Then she recognized the pool of blood seeping from her stomach, and one hand reached up in disbelief.

Yerin snatched the green arrow from the air as it fell from the broken bow, jamming it into the woman's arm as she ran past. She’d bet her soul against a rat’s tail that the woman used venomous madra. Those Paths always had ways to resist their own poison, but added to the blood loss and stomach wound...she'd die, but not so soon that Yerin had to deal with her Remnant.

She released the Flowing Sword technique, and the silver glow of the sword aura dimmed.

While the woman shrieked like a dying horse, Yerin passed like a flitting shadow from boulder to trees. The scream should beat her allies out of the bush, maybe make them stutter for a second—

Another fur-wrapped shadow unfolded from the underbrush, driving an awl straight at Yerin's chest. Before her eyes caught up, her spirit had already flared a warning, and she took the impact on the flat of her sword.

An awl was nothing better than a heavy nail set into a grip. It was meant to be driven with the full force of an Enforcement specialist to pierce armor—and, she’d suspect, to pump her full of poison.

Yerin was a skilled Enforcer, but this man had all the leverage and a better position. He'd struck a solid blow while she was running, turning momentum against her. It was a good hit.

But she had the better weapon.

Her white blade took the impact without a scratch, but the force pushed her back like the kick of an ox. She cycled her madra to her limbs, twisting in midair and landing on her feet.

For the first time, she got a clear look at her enemy. He’d done his best impression of a ragged bear, with his oily hair and beard, his hooded fur coat, and the musky stench that she smelled from ten feet away. Not a master of stealth, this one.

He held the awl in one hand, and in the other carried an axe that seemed to be half steel and half Forged madra. Its edge gleamed with a venomous green, just like the other woman's arrow, and veins of the same green penetrated the weapon's metal like a tree's roots through soil. He, too, had the same Goldsign: the centipede-snake creature bound to him, like a tiny green Remnant attached to his arm.

She gripped her sword in both hands and locked eyes with him, while he grimaced at her with black-and-yellow teeth.

She was wounded, blood trickling around her eyes and her body burning from a dozen reopened cuts. Bad as her wounds looked, her spirit was in even worse shape—every minute scrapping with this bear meant another day before she was back to peak form.

Quick fight’s a good fight.

When the dying woman's scream tore the air again, Yerin swept her weapon down in an arc. She channeled madra into the Rippling Sword technique, and sword-madra blasted forward in a crescent, like a ripple of razor-thin glass.

It sliced branches off a tree, but the bandit ducked easily to the side, dodging the Striker move. He hurled his hatchet, approaching from behind with the awl. If she struck the hatchet down, she'd be exposed to his follow-up attack. He was trying to keep her on the back foot, where he'd keep her until he'd stabbed or poisoned her to death.

Which was all bright and shiny, as plans went, but she had skills beyond her advancement level. The Sword Sage wasn’t known for coddling his disciple.

She slapped the hatchet back toward him, just as he'd expected. His eyes gleamed like a tiger spotting a fat pig as he brought the awl forward.

With a mental effort she'd trained every day for years, she extended her attention to the sword aura that clung to her sword. It sheathed her blade in infinite layers, dense and powerful around her master’s weapon, and she struck it with her spirit like a gong.

This was the Ruler technique that had given her Path a name: the Endless Sword.

In her spiritual sight, the aura around her sword burst out in a silver storm. Everything sharp enough to cut within a dozen paces echoed the move, ringing and exploding in razor-sharp sword aura. The flying hatchet burst into dozens of unseen blades, smashing splinters of bark away from a nearby tree and cutting deep into the bandit's skin.

He stumbled and faltered, his awl dipping off-course, and she gathered sword-madra into the Goldsign that dangled over her own shoulder. The metallic sword carried her madra like a riverbank carried water, swift and smooth. It should pass through the bandit's chest and out again like the sharpest spear.

But her spirit cried a warning, and she aborted her attack to roll off to one side, whipping her blade in another Rippling Sword technique.

The wave cut a gouge into the nearest boulder, missing the new enemy, who had popped out of nowhere.

This man was smaller and thinner, a starving rat rather than a scavenging bear. He gripped a wooden spear in both hands, the spearhead a serpent's fang stained with what she could only assume was venom. The man had his own serpent on his arm, and the miniature Remnant snarled at her, revealing a pair of fangs in its mouth. Another Lowgold from the same Path.

Looked like somebody had sent half a sect out here to ruin her day.

She breathed deeply, cycling to hold back her anger, but that was trying to leash a dragon with a bowstring. This vermin had even less honor than she'd thought; they had the numbers and the power, and they still looked to murder a couple of sacred artists more than ten years their junior. In an ambush.

Her surroundings sharpened as she focused her anger and her spirit to a fine point. This fight was about to get bloody and rotten, and she knew it—she may have been the strongest being in Sacred Valley by a long margin, but in the real world, Lowgold practitioners like her were more common than flies on a dead dog. Skill only counted for so much against numbers.

She might even die here, in the woods on the back-end of nowhere, and her guest squirmed at the thought. If she did die, it would make sure that she took her enemies with her.

She didn’t even waste a thought on getting help from Lindon. Putting him in a fight against these men would be pushing a spotted fawn to a couple of wolves.

Only a blink after he’d shown his face, the spearman lunged at her. She ran for the bear; he was still off-guard and under-armed, and letting two men catch her in a pincer attack was just begging to die.

The man dropped to avoid her stab, though her sword still bit the meat of his shoulder. But it wasn’t free—his huge boot caught her on the outside of her leg.

She was using a basic Enforcement technique to strengthen her whole body with madra, but he hit hard enough to shake it. Pain flared in her thigh, and she stumbled off-balance.

If she hit the ground, she would die.

With that panicked thought, she triggered the aura in her sword. It exploded, detonating inside the man's shoulder, sending a spray of shredded meat into the air. He didn't even scream, collapsing on his back and writhing. His mouth flapped open and closed, as though all his air had leaked out through the hole in his shoulder.

Yerin caught herself before she joined him on the ground, but her leg moaned in red-hot pain...and her other wounds joined her in a chorus, dazing her for a critical second. She looked up to see the rat-like spearman coming at her just as blood dripped down into her eye, stinging and making her close it.

One-eyed, one-legged, all but crippled…and alone. Her rage blazed hotter, until she released a shout and staggered forward. A sacred artist lived and died on her feet.

For the first time, one of her opponents got to use a real technique.

The rat-like man grimaced and forced his spear forward. The strike was joined by half a dozen green reflections appearing out of nowhere. It was like he was striking with seven spears at once, and though six of them were made out of madra, she suspected any of them would kill her.

She filled her sword with madra, praying to the heavens that she could break all of her opponent's weapons in one hit. If she did, she lived. If she missed, she died.

Fitting that a sword artist's life would balance on a razor's edge.

Then her spirit flared in warning, and her eyes widened when she realized what it was telling her.

The fawn had thrown itself to the wolves.

* * *

With his pack on his back, Lindon lay belly-down on the Thousand-Mile Cloud. It sputtered and drifted, dragging him over the terrain on the pitiful trickle of madra he could muster. His Copper spirit had a noticeably greater effect, as he could move faster and farther than ever before, but he was exhausted after advancing.

He’d spent most of his madra in the last minute, drifting around the camp and planting six purple flags. He clutched the last one in his hand, urging the cloud toward Yerin and her opponent.

The screams of the dying woman still hung in the air, but Yerin and the filthy rodent with the spear were not distracted. As Lindon fed another drop of madra into the cloud and lunged toward them, they struck: the spear flashed forward, six acid-green mirror images blinking into existence around it, even as Yerin swept her white blade across.

Lindon tumbled off the cloud, resisting the urge to squeeze his eyes shut and desperately hoping that the impact from their attacks wouldn’t kill him where he lay.

As a deadly cold sensation of pure terror passed over the back of his neck, he jammed the formation banner into the soil along with the last of his madra.

The White Fox boundary was kept in place by seven short banners woven from purple cloth and stitched with white script. When arranged in a circle and activated, the formation summoned aura of light and dreams in the immediate area, creating a cloud of illusions.

This was the first time he’d seen the boundary as a Copper, and it was much more impressive. With half an effort, he saw glowing aura roll in like a sunlit cloud, half-formed images shifting and twisting in its depths.

He’d placed the last banner between Yerin and her enemy, with the circle on the spearman’s side. The rat-like man should be trapped at the edge of the boundary.

Lindon rolled into his back, propping himself up against his pack so he could see if his gamble had worked.

The spearman staggered back a step, his six madra-spears shattered by Yerin, his reptilian eyes flickering around. Lindon let out a relieved breath, and only then realized that he was panting—which would throw off his cycling until he restored his breathing rhythm—and covered in a light sheen of sweat. Sliding within a hair’s breadth of death was more exhausting than hiking up a mountain.

Lindon turned to Yerin just in time to see her foot rushing at his face. It was gentle, as kicks went; instead of impacting with enough force to shatter his skull, her foot caught him on the side of the head and hooked him, scooping him to the side and sending him tumbling away from the Thousand-Mile Cloud.

He rolled over every root and stone on the way, sending extra spikes of pain through him, and landed with his pack digging into his spine. He stared up into scraggly leaves blowing in the wind, and it took him a long moment of disorientation to restore his breath and keep his madra cycling.

When he looked back at Yerin, she’d sent a scythe of sword-madra slicing out at waist height. The filthy man ducked so low it looked as though his bones had melted, ducking the attack, and his eyes gleamed as he swept his spear in a half-circle at the ground.

Spears of Forged green madra stabbed out wildly. One of them caught the White Fox banner, shredding the cloth. Another stabbed at Yerin, forcing her to one side, and the rat-like man coiled as though preparing to unleash his entire body’s strength behind his spear.

A sick sensation hung heavy in Lindon’s gut. He’d expected the boundary to do something, if only to slow the man down. It had been the lowest-risk move he had with a chance of working, but the most advanced sacred artist he’d ever trapped in the boundary had been an Iron. A Gold, even a “Lowgold” that Yerin mentioned, was obviously a different beast entirely. He’d tried to catch a wolf in a rabbit-snare.

Lindon ran his mind down the contents of his pack like he was running fingers along a bookshelf, trying to find the key to his situation. Yerin was wounded and visibly struggling; he needed to help somehow. His halfsilver dagger might be even more effective on a Gold than on a lesser practitioner, but he’d have to get close enough to use it. He had the feeling that the man’s spear would end him before he got within ten yards. Maybe he could throw his parasite ring at the man, hoping that the halfsilver content of that device would throw the man off, but at that point he might as well be throwing rocks. Could the Thousand-Mile Cloud do anything?

As he was thinking, Yerin leaped on her one good leg. Despite her injuries and the blood dribbling past her eye, the move still looked graceful. The man brought his snake-fang spearhead up to point at Yerin, but she had already slashed out with another Striker technique.

Bright green madra gathered around his weapon, giving Lindon’s Copper senses the impression of an infected wound. If Yerin was hit by one of those techniques, they wouldn’t have the medicine to save her.

But he’d underestimated the Sword Sage’s disciple.

Before the spearman had gathered his technique, Yerin lashed out in a wave of razor-sharp energy. It blasted down from her blade, crashing through the green power and into the ground…which was when the silver sword-arm on her back struck, sending a second identical attack into the man’s skull. It sliced without resistance from his head down to his feet.

He crumpled into two halves. Lindon jerked his eyes away from the gory sight, turning to Yerin.

She didn’t land so much as slam into the ground, crashing into a bush. He hurried over, heart tight with concern, slipping his pack over one arm. They were out of bandages, but he could cut his spare clothes into strips. That was assuming she only had surface wounds. If she’d broken a bone, he’d have to fashion a splint, and he had only a vague idea how to do that. And if she’d taken the man’s toxic madra or an internal injury, there was nothing he could do. They’d have to risk the journey back to Sacred Valley for medical care, which would only be slightly safer than letting her die on the forest floor.

The thoughts flitted through his mind as he ran toward Yerin, fishing in his pack for a bundle of white outer robes and his halfsilver dagger. He’d found them both by the time he fell to his knees next to her, setting his tools aside to touch her with ginger hands.

Her back rose and fell, so at least she lived, but her white sword was an inch away from her outstretched hand. He couldn’t help noticing how frost had already begun to gather on the nearby dried leaves, which steadily crumbled to frozen pieces. He was already a few feet away from the weapon, but he edged slightly backwards anyway.

Her skin was clammy but her pulse steady, and he could hear her breath gaining the familiar rhythm of a cycling technique. She stirred, trying to sit up, and he grabbed her shoulder to either help her or keep her from moving too much. He wasn’t sure which.

“Where’s the worst of it?” he asked, having decided that was the most pertinent question. If he could bandage the most severe injury, he could at least slow the rate at which she bled to death.

She grabbed him by the neck in a grip like a scorpion’s claw, bringing her face close to his. Blood had matted her left eye closed, and the other was wavering and unfocused, but he stopped himself from jerking back in instinctive fear.

“Remnants,” she grunted out, her other hand groping blindly in the dirt for the hilt of her sword. “Run.”

The dying bandit woman’s scream finally died out, leaving the clearing quiet for half a breath. Then a shrill screech cut through the silence like a snake’s hiss and a teakettle’s whistle at once. An acid green shape rose in the corner of his vision, from the center of the rat-like bandit’s torn flesh.

Lindon didn’t have a clear look at the Remnant, but he got the impression of a twisting serpentine body with insectoid claws running along the side, like a green Forged hybrid of an adder and a centipede. But he didn’t waste time staring at it; he wrapped his spare robe around his hand in a few quick motions, grabbing the hilt of Yerin’s sword with his newly gloved hand. He felt the cold even through three layers of cloth, but he slid it into the sheath at her side before the ice bit too sharply.

That accomplished, he shoved the robe and the halfsilver dagger back into his pack, slipping one arm under Yerin’s shoulder. She hissed in through gritted teeth as he lifted her, and under other circumstances he would have worried about making her internal injuries worse.

As he staggered over to the Thousand-Mile Cloud, Yerin’s weight highlighting the exhaustion of advancing to Copper, he heard another of those sharp whistles rising up to the sky. A second Remnant was rising.

He glanced behind him to the first, which was even more horrible to look at than he’d imagined. Like all Remnants, it looked as though it had been painted onto the world in lines of color, though this one had a luminous yellow-green that no paint could imitate. Its head gave the impression of a snake, its body serpentine and propelled along the ground by rows of segmented insect legs. Worse, on the end of its pointed tail was a stinger.

It moved in a hideous slithering crawl in their general direction, but fortunately for them, Remnants were often disoriented as they were born. He’d seen some Remnants stand still after they were born, others drift aimlessly away into the distance, and still others go completely berserk. This one was so disoriented it looked drunk, weaving awkwardly around the dirt and leaves.

But it was still heading unmistakably toward them.

Lindon reached the rust-colored cloud in a few more steps, but each one felt as though he were walking beneath a headsman’s blade. Both his cores were dim and guttering like candle-flames, but he squeezed the last bit of madra out of one as he collapsed onto the cloud, pack on his back and Yerin in his arms. They lurched down the hill, deeper into the black forest.

Yerin’s breath was hot on his collar, her eyes closed and her voice shaky. “Things as…they are…I’d contend…we shouldn’t stay here.”

Through the trees, two bright green shapes scuttled after them.

3

Life in Sacred Valley hadn’t been easy as an Unsouled, but it had at least been comfortable. He had his own home, all the food he could eat, a cozy bed…and a safe place to stay, which he’d once taken for granted. He was embarrassed by his own ignorance. If he had known how frightening the wilderness was, he’d have blessed the Shi family every night for the roof over his head.

After running from the venomous Remnants, he slid down a sloping hill on the Thousand-Mile Cloud until he’d run out of every drop of madra. Exhausting his spirit left him with a dull ache inside of him, an emptiness, as though he were made less by its absence. And no madra to circulate in his limbs meant that he ran out of strength quickly, hauling his pack over one shoulder and Yerin over the other.

Worse, the piping whistles of the Remnants followed them as they made it down the hill and into the black, blighted trees. Their constant presence pressed down on his mind, keeping him perched on the edge of terror. In hours, he felt as though a fire had passed through his spirit, leaving only a burnt-out husk.

When he could move no longer, he found a tree with a thick trunk and a gnarled hollow at its base. He dumped Yerin into it, too tired to be gentle. She made no sound of complaint, only curled up among the roots with her eyes closed and breathing even. Probably cycling to improve her wounds.

Now that he thought of it, she had an Iron body. He might not have even hurt her by dumping her there. Her steel arm hung limp on her shoulder, blade dangling next to her cheek.

Lindon only wanted to collapse next to her, but the distant whistles continued. He forced his legs to carry him forward, scratching script into the dirt with the end of a stick. He extended the script all the way around the tree until Yerin was in the center of a warding circle at least fifteen feet across. Only then did he fall into the hollow next to her, digging into his pack for a stoppered clay bottle of water.

Yerin didn’t open her eyes to take a drink, she simply plucked the bottle from his hand, guzzled half of its contents, and handed it back. By the time they had both drunk, only a few drops sloshed around at the bottom.

He’d resolved to find a source of fresh water when sleep took him. Even with Yerin’s elbow shoving into his ribs on one side and a half-buried rock on the other, his body simply couldn’t stay awake anymore.

When he woke, three rotten dogs snarled at the edge of his circle.

He jerked back against the tree, swallowing a scream. It took him a few breaths to realize that he wasn’t trapped in a nightmare.

The skin of the dogs was raw, bloody red with spots of diseased black. It was stretched tight over a visible rack of ribs, and their stench soaked the air. Their eyes were scarlet as swollen blisters, and they bared shredded lips in snarls that revealed blood-caked teeth.

Like a child seeking the protection of his mother, Lindon shook Yerin’s shoulder. One eye snapped open immediately, though she had to scrape dried blood away from the other with her fingernails.

Once she could fully see, she surveyed the dogs. “I called Heaven’s Glory a pack of rotten dogs, but I’d never conceived they’d be quite that ugly.”

As though they understood the insult, the dogs hissed through teeth, lunging over the warding circle. Fear stabbed Lindon’s heart and he cycled madra on instinct, for whatever good it would do them.

They stopped with only their front paws over the circle, yowling and shuffling backwards. They lifted their claws to avoid stepping on any of the symbols. They didn’t make the whimpering sounds of an injured dog; their howls seemed to contain rage and resentment, as though the pain infuriated them.

Lindon shivered, staring at the dirt just in front of their paws. The script was written on nothing more solid than loose forest soil, and though the dogs were avoiding direct contact with the script, it wouldn’t hold long. The dogs didn’t have to touch the symbols to scrape dirt over them, and even the dirt might obscure the script before long.

Besides, the warding circle was meant to protect against Remnants. Since the script had affected them more like a screen than a fence, they must be sacred beasts…though they looked hideous and diseased, unlike any sacred beasts Lindon had ever heard of. Based on everything he’d been taught, sacred beasts refined vital aura into madra inside their bodies, and the advancement process perfected their bodies. It made them stronger, smarter, more beautiful.

Whatever aura these beasts cultivated had corrupted them, and he had no doubt that they would tear him to pieces. Even if he could use his Empty Palm, he had no idea where a canine’s core was located.

“I don’t want to rush you,” Lindon said, eyeing the spearheads these creatures had for teeth, “but have you recovered at all?”

She cracked one eye. “Not gonna bleed out, but scrubbing out a couple of pups might get…sticky.”

“Sticky? What makes it so sticky?” He was trying to stay calm—the last thing he needed was to irritate the Gold at his side—but these rotting dogs were prowling around the tree now, and he was sure they were looking for a weak point in the script. If he’d spaced one rune too far out, they’d rush in and pull him apart.

“You scowl when you’re fearful,” she observed. “Makes you look like you’re gearing up for a fight.”

He took deep breaths, trying to slow his heart and keep his voice from leaping up an octave. “I’d fight them if I could, but can you?” Despite his preparation, his voice still broke on the last word.

“Well, I’d observed that sacred beasts have been a little light on the ground the last handful of days. Spied a couple of Remnants, but nothing else. Weak and wounded as we were, we should have been hip-deep in predators before we took two steps out of the valley.”

One of the dogs swept a claw at the air over the script as though scraping an invisible wall. Through his Copper sight, Lindon saw the aura the script had gathered: a circle formed from thin, tall rectangles that reminded him of paper doors. When he looked at the aura, he thought of force, impact, solidity…but rigid and thin, as though ready to break at any second. It was a pathetically thin protection against the beasts dripping blood-tinged saliva only a few feet away.

“Why weren’t we, do you think?” Lindon asked, holding his tone steady.

“If we were with my master, I’d say they were scared off by his presence. But these things see me as prey for a pack. You’re more like a bite they’d feed to their pups.”

Lindon cleared his throat, unsure how to respond.

“Point is, they weren’t scared off by us. Something drew them away.”

Something impacted the tree behind them with a meaty thud, and the tree shook like a thick drum. A dog howled, but blackened leaves drifted down on top of them.

“They were drawn away,” Lindon repeated, trying to focus on Yerin’s words instead of the monstrous fangs. “Does that mean you can’t kill them?”

She pointed with her finger and her sword-arm together. “It means they’re all bunched up.”

Lindon stared after her finger, where the gray pre-dawn haze was clustered thickly. He could see nothing but misty shadows beneath the trees.

But after watching for a second, he saw something move. It barely shifted, just giving him the impression of motion, but it was the size of a house.

He wasn’t sure if the light finally improved enough or if his eyes finally picked out a pattern, but after a few more minutes of squinting into the haze, he saw it. Not one giant beast—an army.

The distance seethed with creatures, scurrying like ants in the grass. He could only make out their shapes; many of them looked like the rotten dogs, but others were the size of bears, or even trees. Leathery wings fluttered in the sky as something passed over the tree.

Black-stained teeth snapped shut two feet from his face, and the hound hissed out a putrid breath, but a cold weight had already settled into Lindon’s gut. They weren’t surrounded by three rotten beasts, but by hundreds.

After a moment of dizzy panic that felt like staring over the edge of an impossibly high cliff, Lindon’s mind snapped into focus. They were safe here, at least for now. He had his pack and the treasures he’d stolen from the Heaven’s Glory School, and he had a Gold on his side. There had to be some way to escape.

Yerin lifted an edge of her outer robe and scrubbed dried blood away from her scarred skin. “Don’t fuss about it. Should be a way out, once I’m full up and ready to use the cloud. You should cycle too, it’ll do you good.”

The Thousand-Mile Cloud was actually outside the script-circle, a dense red cloud with wisps of essence drifting away from it. It would dissolve in a few days without maintenance; Lindon had been sustaining it on pure madra over the past week, just as he had with his mother’s constructs back home.

He was grateful that the rotten dogs hadn’t so much as glanced at the Thousand-Mile Cloud, but the unfortunate reality remained. They would have to breach the warding circle to get to the cloud, and they needed the cloud to leave.

“I’ll rely on you, then,” Lindon said. “If I may ask, how long will you need?”

Yerin closed her eyes again and steadied her breath before answering. “A day or thereabouts. My madra’s in better shape than my body, but I should have everything stitched together come tomorrow’s dawn.” The loops of her red rope-belt squirmed away from the roots.

The dogs hissed again, just far enough away that he couldn’t quite touch them if he extended his arm. One of them lay down on its paws, staring at him with fever-bright red eyes.

On a sudden impulse, Lindon looked past the dog to try and see its aura. It was easier the more he did it, but this time he didn’t know what to make of the vital aura gathered around this monster. If identifying other types of aura was like reading simple characters, this was like trying to read a page that had been sliced to pieces and glued back together in a random order.

The aura gathered around the creature’s shoulder swelled like a blister, slick and crawling black. This aura felt like death and decay, like a maggot’s corpse. The deep purple aura around the dog’s ribs was stringy and muscular, like roots or snakes, and it somehow gave off the impression of chains held in powerful tension. Deep red aura dripped from the hound’s mouth, and Lindon could practically smell the coppery tang of blood.

He let the vision fade, thinking. He'd heard of blood madra, which supposedly held all sorts of sinister powers over living bodies, so he assumed that's what was running from the dog's jaws. But what was the rest? If he had to give a name to the bulb over the shoulder, he'd call it “death aura,” but that was based solely on the feeling it gave him. He'd never heard of death madra or any aura of death, and he wasn't entirely sure what such a power would do. Likewise, he had no clue what his mother would call the tight aura chains. Connection aura? Binding aura?

There were more aspects of vital aura surrounding the dog than just those, and the unity of all those different powers in one body meant something significant. He just wasn't sure what.

But it might be the clue that let them out of here, so he meditated on it. Cycling didn't take much of his attention, as he didn't have to pull aura from the atmosphere and could focus solely on his own madra. He retrieved the parasite ring from his pocket, slipping the scripted circle of twisted halfsilver onto his finger.

Instantly, his madra turned sluggish, as though his madra channels had all halved in width. He had to force his madra to cycle, pushing it through the pattern described in his Heart of Twin Stars manual as though forcing syrup through a narrow tube.

It was twice as hard to cycle with the parasite ring on, but the exercise was supposed to strengthen his spirit twice as fast. He had just reached Copper, but that didn't mean he had time to rest. It was the opposite, as he saw it. He was years behind every sacred artist in his clan, so he had to work harder than anyone else to catch up.

Though it was harder now, cycling still didn't take much of his attention. It was a difficult task, but not a complicated one. His mind was free to ponder the mystery of the hideous sacred beasts with twisted auras.

As the day crept on, with dogs snapping and growling every few minutes, a new concern revealed itself: thirst. By late afternoon, he and Yerin had finished the last of the pathetic handful of water remaining in his bottle, and he had become painfully thirsty.

It was there that he missed his home so much that it hurt. He hadn't slept a full night since leaving Sacred Valley, he was only feet away from monsters held back by nothing more than a flimsy, invisible barrier, his entire body was cramped by a night crammed between rocks and roots, and the stress was wearing on his mind. Back home, no matter how badly the other members of his clan thought of him, at least he had all the water he could drink. And tea at every major meal. He could taste the flowery scent of his mother's tea, could even hear the whistle of the kettle...

His eyes snapped open at the same time as Yerin's, and this time the revolting appearance of the dogs didn't catch his attention. He craned his neck to the left, ignoring the dark shapes slithering through the bushes, until he saw it. A bright green shadow appeared under the afternoon sunlight, waving the claws of a centipede in the air and undulating like a snake.

The Remnants had found them.

Yerin braced herself on the trunk as she wobbled to her feet.

“It's nothing to worry about,” Lindon said, trying to reassure them both. “The circle is intended to protect us from Remnants, so it should work even better against them than against the dogs.”

Yerin limbered up her right shoulder, wincing as though it pained her. “Yep. They're not so strong as the dogs.” She drew her pale white blade, and this time Lindon noticed the icy, razor-edged aura that clustered around the weapon so dense that he could barely see the sword itself. “But they're smarter.”

He understood in an instant why she was concerned. The dogs hadn't left them alone because they couldn't break the circle, but because they didn't know how. These were the Remnants of a couple of Lowgolds—they would be stronger and smarter than any spirits Lindon had seen in Sacred Valley.

The circle might stop them for a while, but after enough time, the Remnants would toss some dirt over it. Lindon pushed himself, slipping off the parasite ring and gripping his halfsilver dagger instead. He'd withdrawn the weapon hours before, comforting himself with the thought that he could protect himself if the dogs managed to break through.

He looked past Yerin, deeper into the scene, trying to catch a glimpse of the vital aura around the Remnants. But he was sidetracked, staring at Yerin's waist. Or, more accurately, at her belt.

He'd known it was some sort of construct Forged from red madra, and had wondered if she wore it as some kind of fashion on the outside. Maybe sacred artists in the rest of the world distinguished themselves with clothes made of Forged madra, instead of the badges.

But looking at it now...it was a dense rope of congealed red power, identical to the aura dripping from the dog's mouth but a thousand times more potent. He could practically taste the blood coming off of it, and it made him want to vomit. Visions of slaughter, of an army's worth of corpses, filled his vision.

How could she wear that? It was like having a river of blood wrapped around yourself.

Lindon retched, as suddenly as though someone had punched him in the gut, but nothing came up. He was glad for that, not only because he didn't have the water to spare, but because the sudden impact of the motion knocked him out of his Copper vision.

Yerin watched him from beneath her straight black hair, eyes understanding. “Knew we'd come to this bridge eventually, but let's cross it later. Agree?”

Lindon refocused and steadied his knife and his breathing both. “No, that's not necessary. It's none of my concern, and I apologize if I've given offense.”

She watched him for a second longer, then hefted her white sword and turned back to the advancing Remnants. “We'll talk,” she said.

Then the acidic green Remnants were there, pulling themselves along on their centipede legs. The rotten dogs turned their tails to Lindon and hissed, lowering themselves as though preparing to leap and attack.

In response, the two Remnants made the motion of snapping their jaws open and shut, but there was no sound. They might as well have been the shadows of serpents biting at nothing. Afterwards, they did make a cry: the same whistling teakettle noise that had pursued Yerin and Lindon since their camp.

Lindon's spirits rose. This was something he hadn't considered; for some reason, he'd assumed the Remnants and the dogs would work together to breach the circle and devour the humans.

Only then did he realize how ridiculous that would be. One pack of predators didn't share prey with another. They would fight each other first, and in the chaos the humans might escape.

Some of the rotten beasts haunting the distant forest let out a chorus of growls. Another pair of corrupted dogs padded out of the underbrush, then another.

His optimism vanished, and Yerin's grip tightened on her sword. If the beasts joined together, it wouldn't be a fight with the Remnants so much as a brief extermination.

Turning from Yerin, he focused on aura again. “Allow me to break the circle,” he said. “When I do, you can keep them off us, and I'll get to the cloud.”

Her back was pressed against his, and he felt her nod. The area in front of him was clear, and he kept one eye on the impending battle between Remnants and rotten dogs. As he did, he slid closer to the script.

There was no reason they couldn't leap over the circle, leaving it intact—it wouldn't stop them. But it would affect any madra from Yerin used while it was active. If she tried to use a Striker technique from within the script, its power would be weakened. Maybe to the point of complete uselessness. And if she drew power into herself as an Enforcer, that power would be dispersed as she stepped over the circle.

In all, it was better to disperse the script before it became a trap for them. But he still felt like he was cutting a hole in his own boat as he slid even closer.

When the vital aura around the rotten beasts flared up like dark fire suddenly fed dry timber, he grew sick. Their auras swelled, growing twice as dense and two or three times as large. Somehow, they were growing more powerful.

Then he realized that every aura had inflated in the same way.

The world was awash in a chaos of color beneath his Copper vision, as the veins of yellow in the earth and the flows of green in the grass flared brighter...and then bent, like tree branches pressed down by a strong wind. The vital aura drained off in a phantom river, pouring away from its source, streaming deeper into the forest.

The flow looked like a rainbow river, and it left the world feeling dry and empty in its wake.

Every monster bolted. The Remnants left first, burbling and whistling as they followed the flow of the vital aura. The rotten dogs had an instant of confusion, in which they turned from their trapped prey to the rushing light, visibly torn. Finally, one of them gave a guttural bark, and all of them tore off. Even the dogs farther away from the warding circle followed, quickly overtaking the Remnants.

In the background, amidst the trees and undergrowth, the bigger rotten beasts left. They ran from the warded tree like they were fleeing a burning building, and in three breaths Lindon and Yerin were alone.

Lindon watched the physical world again, trading glances with Yerin. “You don't happen to know what that was, do you?” Lindon asked hesitantly.

“You're asking me, but who am I supposed to ask?” She stood with her white sword held forgotten in one hand, staring into the distance.

Now that the danger was over, Lindon's whole body went slack, and he leaned against the tree, panting. “Were they scared away? Is there something worse coming?”

Yerin gave him a look of surprise. “What? No, it's plain to see what happened to the beasts. They follow vital aura, so they followed it away. Stone simple. But I'm coming up empty on what makes aura do that. Like it gathered together and then rushed off in a blink. Look; I don't know that I've ever seen vital aura so thin on the ground.”

Lindon looked and found that she was right, though that came as no surprise. The world in his Copper vision was dim, as though the scene had been painted in washed-out colors. “How is that possible?” As he'd been taught, vital aura was like the madra of the natural world. It took on different aspects as it moved through the heavens and the earth, though it was all connected. Even when you harvested aura and cycled it into your madra, that was like taking a cup of water from the ocean. Sooner or later, it would return to the source.

Lindon had never seen the ocean, but he'd read stories. This struck him as though the tide had left completely, leaving the shore bare and dry.

Yerin sheathed her sword and walked casually across his warding circle, not bothering to push the day's worth of dirt away from her tattered outer robe. “Scripts can gather up a bunch of vital aura, not considering aspects. Or push it away, sometimes. But if a script is doing this...I'd contend it's ten miles across, engraved in bedrock, and powered by ten thousand Remnants.”

Lindon didn't question it further. Whatever the event had been, it had saved them from having to fight their way out of an army of monsters. He seized his pack and hurried over to the Thousand-Mile Cloud. There hadn't been time for him to recover much madra, and he wasn't confident of his ability to fly it for any length of time or at any great speed.

“How has your spirit recovered?” Lindon asked, hoping she'd be able to feed power to the cloud.

She hopped up and straddled the front of the cloud as though mounting a horse. “I'm not bursting at the seams, but I'm well enough to ride this pony.” She patted the cloud behind her. “Come on up.”

Lindon knelt first, running his hand along the side of the cloud. As he'd expected, the cloud was slightly smaller than it had been the previous day, its sides wispier. One day of missed maintenance wouldn't affect its performance much, but one weed wouldn't overrun a garden either. It was better to take care of the problem while it was small than let it grow larger.

He let his pure madra flow into the construct, feeling it seized by the script at the cloud's center. Madra pulled from his weaker core, and there was a slight delay as the construct processed the pure madra and used it to nourish its Forged cloud madra.

Like a plant growing a thousand times faster, the cloud grew thicker and perhaps half an inch larger. He even thought it may have bobbed higher, though that could have been his imagination.

The effort drained that core dry, as it had been mostly exhausted already, but he switched to the other and climbed up behind Yerin.

“You're a fussy one,” she noted.

“I've always found that a little work up front makes things easier later on,” he said, climbing onto the cloud and securing his pack between them.

He hadn't quite finished when she kicked the cloud up to speed, sending him lurching back and grabbing onto her shoulders for support.

“I think you may have seen hard work sometime in the past,” Yerin called back, “but you never came close enough to shake its hand.”

She blasted through the forest, faster than they had usually gone on their way down from Mount Samara, black-leaved tree branches whipping by Lindon's ear. He leaned down behind Yerin so her Iron body could protect him, though her small back offered little shelter.

Only once he'd adapted to the speed did he recognize their direction. “Apologies, but...are we chasing the monsters?”

Branches whipped her as they passed by, but she ignored them as though they were nothing more than a gentle breeze. “Aura's heading this way for a reason. May as well find out where that is.”

“We know one thing about where it's headed: there's an army of monsters there. That we know.”

He felt her laugh. “Where did we leave the guy who spilled blood to leave the only home he'd ever known? You're weak, but I didn't suppose you were a coward.”

That prickled his pride, and he straightened. A foolish move, as he immediately took a branch to the face.

Spitting out leaves that tasted of copper and rotten vegetables, he responded. “I'm not saying I won't go, I'm saying I'd like to be somewhat cautious.”

“Oh, I'll be cautious.” She steered the cloud to leap over a bush, rolling down a small hill as he clung to her arms for support. “Somewhat.”

4

Iteration 217: Harrow

In the first strike, she exterminated humanity.

Suriel’s weapon activated as she whipped it down. It expanded in a microsecond, expanding from a meter-long bar of blue steel into a skeleton of blue metal containing a web of light. It looked like a bare tree, each of its branches arcing with power.

While it was sealed, Suriel called her weapon a sword. Now that it was released, the weapon regained its identity as Suriel’s Razor.

It had been handed down to her from her predecessor, along with the identity of Suriel, the Sixth Judge of the Abidan Court. More than a tool for destruction, the Razor was meant as an instrument of healing. An infinitely complex, incalculably powerful scalpel.

Her mind ran along its familiar pathways even as she struck. First, she isolated the bloodline she intended to target. That feature was intended to remove pests in a home or a strain of virus in a body, but she could just as easily expand her focus.

To mankind. They were corrupted now, fused to and altered by the same chaos that destroyed their world.

Once her target was selected, she simply provided the energy, and the Razor did the rest. The Mantle of Suriel, a river of raging white flame that hung from her back like a cape, rolled with power as it drew on the Way. She funneled that power to her weapon, which flashed so brightly they would see it on the surface of the burning planet, kilometers beneath her.

Millions of lights blinked into existence all through the atmosphere, a blanket of tiny stars. Each light flashed, spearing down to the surface, and then was gone.

Her connection to the Way slackened immediately, like a sudden flicker of weightlessness in the center of her stomach. Humans anchored a world, their lives and their minds tying it to the Way, and when they were gone…chaos reigned. She had cut this world adrift.

[Targets eliminated,] her Presence informed her, the voice feminine and impersonal inside her mind. [Ninety-nine-point-eight percent population reduction. Proceed with manual elimination?]

In her vision, points of green ignited all over Harrow, indicating those that had survived her purge. These were the scraps that remained pure, even with their world corrupted. The last remnant of Harrow’s population.

Abidan regulations stipulated that she complete the elimination, as the chaos could infect survivors at any time, but she was Suriel. She had fought her way to one of the highest positions in existence in order to save the lives that couldn’t be saved.

She denied her Presence’s request.

All told, there were two million, one hundred six thousand, three hundred and forty-four survivors scattered all over the dying planet. A huge number of lives, but only a speck of dust next to the number she’d just killed. Days ago, there had been five billion people on this planet. After the violent merge of Limit and Harrow, only twenty percent of the population had survived. Now? A scarce fraction, a handful of sand, easily swept away.

A weight settled onto her spirit, another slab of lead in a tower that was growing too high to manage. She knew the elimination was necessary, but she had still taken so many lives. How many had she killed now?

Her Presence could tell her, but she didn’t ask.

The previous Suriel, her predecessor, had not died in the line of duty. He’d passed the Mantle and Razor on to her when they grew too heavy for him, and then he’d walked away. He lived the life of a mortal now, his power forcibly veiled. She hadn’t heard from him in millennia.

The things he’d done in the name of his office had burdened him, broken him, and he was the Phoenix. His job was to save lives, not to take them. How much heavier was the weight borne by Razael, the Wolf?

Or Ozriel, the Reaper?

The world’s problems had not ended with the destruction of mankind. If they had, the Reaper’s job would not be necessary. Anyone with the power of an Abidan Judge were capable of eliminating a planet’s worth of people, and most Iterations only had a single inhabited planet.

Beneath where she floated, high in the outer atmosphere, the planet rolled in visible turmoil. Seas appeared and disappeared, caught between Limit and Harrow, continents flickered and boiled as though trying to decide on a shape, cities crumbled to dust and were rebuilt in seconds. Clouds spun in rapid circles, taken by chaotic winds, and fire raged across such a vast territory that it was visible from space.

Now, the difficult and painstaking part of her task began.

Gadrael, a compact and muscular man with dusky blue skin and tight-packed horns instead of hair, hovered nearby. His arms were folded so that the black circle on his forearm, the Shield of Gadrael, was pointed out. He wore the same liquid-smooth white armor as she did, and a Judge’s Mantle burned behind him as well.

He watched the world beneath him die without the slightest crack in expression. “Quarantine protocols will remain in effect for approximately six months Harrow time, after which my barriers will vent all fragments into the void and dissolve.”

The role of the Reaper was to eliminate a world without leaving such fragments behind, which could give birth to the most dangerous elements in existence. The best she could do was a messy approximation.

“Acknowledged.” She still didn’t leave.

She had six months to save as many untainted lives as she could.

Of course, that was Harrow time, which was notoriously unstable. This world had drifted from the Way, which governed the proper flow of time. She felt as though she’d been here for minutes, but another world may have seen days pass.

Ozriel could have done this in moments, but he was gone. For the first time, she felt a hint of personal resentment for that.

“After this reprieve, Makiel expects you to throw your full effort into the search for Ozriel. He wants results within a standard decade.”

Suriel turned to him, temper hot. Calling the power of the Way both demanded and produced inhuman self-control, but Gadrael was testing hers. Her Razor thrummed in her hand, sparking and hot.

“Do I have autonomy in this matter?” she asked coldly.

He had to see what she was doing, but he nodded once. “You do.”

Everything about her blazed as she flexed her power—hair emerald, eyes purple, Mantle and armor white, Razor a flickering blue. She burned with the colors of a celestial glacier, until even Gadrael had to conjure barriers over his eyes.

“Then this falls under the purview of the Sixth Division, not the Second. If you interfere before I have finished my operation, I will consider you to have violated the Pact and take action accordingly. Let it be witnessed under the Way.”

She couldn’t kill him, as he may have been the hardest man in all existence to actually destroy, but there were any number of ways one Judge could make life difficult for another. Schisms among the Court of Seven were not common, but they were known to happen. Suriel would not risk the stability of the Abidan on a personal vendetta, but Gadrael—and by extension, Makiel—were threatening her authority.

If she allowed that to happen, she would not be worthy to remain Suriel.

A curtain of rich, layered blue tore open on the starry canvas behind Gadrael, and he stepped back into it, arms still crossed. “Six months,” he said, “then you find the Reaper. We have set aside Iteration two-thirteen as a quarantine zone for your infected, so bypass Sector Control. A channel will be open for you.”

Makiel. He had known she would never leave the survivors, and had planned accordingly. Even before she’d come here, he had known.

The Way zipped closed, and Gadrael vanished.

[Four hundred sixty-two Grade Six anomalies and counting,] her Presence said. [Pursuit recommended before expansion threshold is reached.]

Suriel set thoughts of Gadrael aside. He was a loyal dog, collared and leashed, and she would gain nothing from a conflict with him. Makiel was the one writing the script, and his plans could span eons. She had to meet him face-to-face.

But first, she had a job to do.

A world divorced from the Way gave birth to chaotic distortions. These were nightmarish monsters, entities that strained the rules of existence. If Harrow was allowed to fester over the next half a year, it could give birth to thousands of these abominations. Once they entered the void, they would drift, until even Makiel couldn’t predict where they would emerge.

She had to destroy them now. At the same time, she had to reach as many of the two million survivors as she could, transporting them to a Pioneer world. It wouldn’t be as stable or as nurturing as a full Iteration, but it should keep them alive.

On the north pole, a black spire shattered the ice, shooting thousands of kilometers into space until it stood out like a rigid hair against the surface of the planet. A featureless black tower, an obelisk standing so tall it shouldn’t be able to physically support itself. An anomaly.

Suriel gripped her Razor and blasted forward.

Like a dying animal, a world was most vicious at its end.

* * *

As Lindon hurtled through the blackened forest on the Thousand-Mile Cloud, chasing after a legion of monsters, he contemplated their greatest danger: thirst.

They flew for the rest of the first day and past dawn of the second, and Yerin skirted every Remnant or rotten beast they encountered. But they had no more water, and the few times they stopped at a likely pond or creek, they found the surface stinking and corrupt.

Whatever blight produced the black, rotten trees and the twisted dogs, it extended to the water. They didn't need to taste it to know it was poison.

Before long, Lindon's head pounded and his throat burned so that he could hardly talk. It frightened him how quickly he'd weakened without water.

So when the trees parted to show a pyramid in the distance, Lindon's first feeling was not a call to adventure or a sense of danger, but a heavy relief. A structure meant people, and people would have water.

When Yerin slowed the cloud at the sight, Lindon wanted to strangle her.

She choked out a word, swallowed, and tried again. Her words were simple and quiet, as though she meant to save water by speaking as little as possible. “That's it. Headed there.”

Between the thirst, the lack of sleep, and the tension of the past few days, Lindon was having trouble thinking past the possibility of food, water, and shelter. He grunted something that sounded like “What?”

Yerin stabbed her finger at the pyramid. “Aura.”

With an effort that felt like crossing his eyes, Lindon focused on the aura around the pyramid. The edifice stood as high as Elder Whisper's tower back in Sacred Valley and a thousand times wider at the base, but it was assembled from layers of house-sized stone blocks. It was brown as mud, its first few layers obscured by black trees, but the visible portion was enough to dominate the landscape like a mountain jutting out of a field.

A rainbow of vital aura rose over it, spiraling down into the structure like a narrow cyclone. The aura from miles around had been drawn here, which meant...

He finally caught up with Yerin's observation. If the aura was drawn here, then those trees at the foot of the pyramid would be swarming with Remnants and twisted beasts.

He nodded to show that he understood, even as she took the cloud a little higher. The cloud was meant to skim over the ground rather than fly, and it started to struggle at about ten feet above the earth. At fifteen, it stopped entirely, and Yerin's face tightened in focus as she held them there.

From their new vantage point, they surveyed the land ahead of them. Two things stood out immediately.

First, while they couldn't see any sacred beasts through the canopy, there was something swarming around the pyramid: people. Lindon glimpsed a distant crowd, the peak of a few tents, and even a wagon rumbling across a clearing. These people must hold the structure against the Remnants and sacred beasts. Maybe the pyramid was their home, and they were drawing in aura for some purpose.

But Lindon couldn't consider that for long, because the second feature of the landscape had snared his attention: a wide lake, bright as sapphires, just south of the pyramid. He could only see the corner of it through the trees, but it was obviously not as tainted as the rest of the water around. His throat convulsed involuntarily at the sight.

“We have to get there,” Lindon croaked.

Yerin didn't say anything to agree, she just pushed the cloud to its highest speed and slammed back into the ground, dashing through the trees at reckless speed. For once, Lindon didn't mind that he was almost sent hurtling off the back of the construct. He added his own trickle of madra to the cloud, hoping that it might coax a little extra speed out of their mount.

It wasn't entirely a surprise when they crested a hill and ran straight into a slaughter.

Lindon had long expected to catch up to the host of twisted beasts, and he’d smelled the heavy scent of blood even before they’d reached this hill. But he still wasn’t prepared for the field of torn, dismembered, and disassembled creatures strewn over the ground.

For what must have been a mile across and many miles wide, the black forest had been cleared. Stumpy logs dotted the ground here and there, and the grass must have been lush before some battle mulched the soil. The people camped at the base of the pyramid would have wanted a clear perimeter, so they cleared the trees so that anything advancing on them would be visible. They posted guards, obviously waiting for any Remnants and sacred beasts to attack.

And when that horde of creatures had rushed at them, the guards had turned this field into a butcher’s shed.

Half of a corrupted bear-sized beast hung from a slowly dissipating Forged spear. A pack of six rotten dogs had been blown apart, bodies strewn in pieces around a fresh crater. A pile of glowing green debris marked the death-place of one of those insectoid snakes that had been stalking Lindon and Yerin; one centipede leg was still scratching at the bloody mud even as motes of green essence drifted away from it. Similar scenes of destruction marred every step for a mile.

Across the clearing, a line of sacred artists stood in front of a low wall of spiked wooden logs. Even at a distance, Lindon could tell they were powerful.

There was a unique confidence, almost arrogance, in highly advanced sacred artists. The Patriarch of the Wei clan had carried himself like a lion among cats, and Yerin spoke as though she was destined to win and her enemies had already lost.

The warriors against the wall moved with the same awareness of their own superiority. One figure, carrying a huge hammer on its back, knelt to rifle through corpses as though sacred beasts may have held something valuable. A group of people carrying hook-curved sickles took turns kicking a rotten dog to each other. It was the size of a full-grown wolf, but the sacred artists kept it in the air as though it weighed no more than a leather ball. The twisted hound turned in midair, trying to bite each new human, but a foot always caught it in the side and sent it sailing away.

Someone in blue-and-white robes hung tucked between the wooden spikes, lounging at his ease, with something that appeared to be a bottle clutched in one hand. Yellow hair—possibly a wig—hung down over the wall. A figure in darker blue casually spun a spear in elaborate loops, the spearhead catching the light more brightly than steel should account for.

Lindon almost missed the movement, as it appeared just as relaxed and natural as the ones that preceded it. One second the blue-clad sacred artist was spinning the spear, and the next second he whipped the spear in Lindon’s direction.

The spear didn’t actually go flying through the air, but the light did. A Striker technique, Lindon realized instantly, but too late for him to do anything about it. Silver-white light the width of a finger screamed through the air, blasting for their Thousand-Mile Cloud.

Even Yerin was caught off-guard, judging by the way she jerked backward, but she still responded as befit a Gold. The bladed arm that hung over her shoulder flickered forward, catching the light. It slammed into the flat of her sword, deflecting slightly to the side as he’d seen her do with beams of Heaven’s Glory madra.

With Heaven’s Glory, though, there had been heat as a byproduct. It would have scorched him. This time, he felt no warmth from the light passing nearby…but a slit appeared in the sleeve of his outer robe, as though someone had sliced a razor across his arm and narrowly missed skin.

“Die and rot!” Yerin shouted, and driven by her Iron lungs, the sheer volume of it pounded Lindon’s skull. He winced and stuck fingers in his ears before the next words. “You got a grudge with me, you come out and draw swords like a sacred artist.”

The spear-spinning figure froze, then vanished. When it reappeared, it had moved close enough that Lindon could make out some detail: the spear artist in blue robes was a tall man with an even taller spear. His hair stood straight up as though he’d frozen it in sharp waves, and he rubbed the back of his neck with his free hand.

“You have my apologies, new friend. We’ve seen no one but monsters come from the west.” He paused, then added. “From a distance, anyone would mistake your cloud for a Remnant. Take that into consideration and forgive me, would you?”

He clapped his hands together in what Lindon took as an apology, though he was still holding his spear between his palms.

Yerin hopped off the cloud, gesturing to Lindon. “I’m hauling a Copper,” she said. Her voice was still hoarse from thirst, but anger lent her words strength. “You nick me with your spear and I’ll survive, but how’d you apologize if you gutted a junior?”

The spearman had walked closer, and now Lindon could make out the evident surprise on his face. “Never seen a Copper so big.” The stranger surveyed Lindon frankly, then turned back to Yerin. “Is he, eh…” He tapped the side of his skull.

Yerin stood absolutely straight, steel arm poised over her head like a scorpion’s tail, one hand on her sword and her tattered robe blowing in the gentle wind. “What do they call you?” she asked.

The man in blue tucked his spear under one arm in a practiced motion, bending at the waist. “I am Jai Sen, of the Jai clan whose honor echoes in every corner of the Blackflame Empire. To repay the insult I have caused you and your junior, I would take responsibility for guiding you through the camp of our Five Factions Alliance.”

“Five Factions?” Yerin asked, but Lindon had joined her by then, with pack on his back and Thousand-Mile Cloud drifting behind him.

“Water,” he said, and Yerin pointed to him.

“He’s right,” she said. “Water.”

Jai Sen patted at the cloth wrap that belted his waist. “Ah, forgive me. There’s no drinkable water for a dozen miles outside the Purelake. I should have considered that you’d be thirsty.” He pulled a stoppered waterskin out of his wrap and laughed. “Half a minute into our acquaintance, and I’m already a bad host. Forgive—”

Yerin had already snatched the skin from his hand. She guzzled it down, spilling water over her chin, and Lindon suddenly had the crazed, suicidal idea to jump for her and try to wrestle the water away.

But she tossed the half-full skin to him, breathing heavily, and he had scarcely caught it before squeezing it into his mouth. It tasted stale and musty, as though the water had been wrung from the fur of a wet dog, but he didn’t care. The relief as water cut through the desert of his throat was like shade on a hot day.

He had only taken one swallow before he choked, doubled over coughing, and had to wait until he recovered his breath to continue drinking. He finished the contents in seconds and bowed, presenting the empty skin back to Jai Sen. He would have thanked the man, but he didn’t trust his own speech.

Jai Sen eyed him with interest. “Clearly, you have been away a long time. Where did you come from, I wonder?”

“Our home lies to the west,” Lindon began, his voice still rough, but Yerin cut him off.

“We’re from beyond the Wilds,” she said. “We have no blood with you or your enemies.”

Jai Sen waved that away as though it hadn’t been what he meant at all, but he also looked relieved. “There’s no concern of that, none at all. The only enemies of the Jai clan are monsters and tyrants, and even the blind can see that you are an innocent and intrepid adventurer.” His smile included both of them, but Lindon noticed that his words did not.

“Gratitude, honored Jai Sen, for your generosity,” Lindon said, to improve his image in the eyes of this stranger. “The Jai clan must be great indeed, to defend their home from such an army of beasts.”

Sen smiled proudly, straightening up and planting his spear in the ground. “You have a good eye, little brother. The Jai clan is not the only faction in the Alliance camp, but we have defended this land as though it was our own for hundreds of years. Since the Ruins rose and the dreadbeasts crash every day like the waves of the sea, the Jai clan has slain more than any other.”

Yerin shifted her blood-red belt. “We’re fresh across the border, Sen. Heard no whispers or mentions of these Ruins, though I think we’ve met your dreadbeasts.” She kicked the severed head of a dog so far that it arced through the air and over a hill. Lindon winced and looked away, though Sen didn’t seem to notice.

“Jai Sen, if you please,” he said. “I’m a blood member of the clan. It would be my honor to explain the history of the Transcendent Ruins to you, sister.”

“Yerin,” she said simply.

“And you, little brother?”

“This one is Wei Shi Lindon,” he said, bowing with both fists pressed together. “Jai Sen’s kindness to humble strangers is an honor to his family and a credit to his clan.”

The blue-clad spearman laughed out loud and clapped Lindon on the back. “If you keep talking like that, Wei Shi Lindon, I’ll have to keep you around.”

“If it pleases you, you may call this one Lindon, as his family does.”

Jai Sen looked surprised for a moment, then sympathetic. He squeezed Lindon’s shoulder with one hand. “They’ll take you back someday, little brother.”

It seemed the older man had come to some awkward conclusion, but before Lindon could clarify, a hand on his back shoved him forward.

“Trot,” Yerin said, including Jai Sen with a glance. “This isn't where we want to rest.”

The smell of blood and worse was beginning to choke Lindon, underscored by the stranger scents of decaying Remnants. He turned to give her a grateful look, but she wasn't watching him. Her eyes had landed on the other sacred artists.

Most of the strangers were looking in their direction with interest, and a few began to drift toward them.

Remembering how powerful they were, a chill rippled down Lindon's spine, but he reminded himself not to be a coward. He couldn't let people of this level intimidate him; his goal was much farther away. These shouldn't be frightening enough to discourage him.

But judging by Yerin's gaze, she wanted to avoid a meeting even more than he did.

Jai Sen strode forward, oblivious to her wariness or pretending to be so. “Please don't be offended if I assume you know nothing about the Desolate Ruins.”

The blocky pyramid loomed over them, blocking out light, and it looked even more ominous in his Copper sight.

“That would not offend us,” Lindon said.

“Only a week ago, this was nothing but a minor outpost of the Purelake Temple. Don't trust your eyes,” he said, sweeping an arm out to include the wooden walls and the crowds of people Lindon could see inside. “All that you see before you was constructed on the spot by valiant sacred artists of the Wilds. It's amazing what we can accomplish when we unite, as the Grand Patriarch of our clan once believed.”

Yerin stabbed a finger at the pyramid. “You built that?”

Jai Sen gave a sheepish laugh. “No, naturally not. Those are the Transcendent Ruins, built by masters ancient beyond memory. No living sacred artists could construct something like that these days. But as impressive as it is to the naked eye, the truth will set your minds ablaze.”

He turned to walk backwards, bending over so that he was on an eye level with Yerin. Lindon had to skip a step so the man's spiked hair didn't take him in the eye, and that close he could see that the hair actually seemed metallic; it must be the physical change that came upon artists as they rose to Gold, like Yerin's extra limb.

“Seven or eight days ago, a team of Fishers were working the Purelake in the gray light of early morning. As dawn broke, the lake began to tremble like a bowl in unsteady hands. The waves grew until they tossed the Fisher boat about, and it took all the strength of a Lowgold and a Highgold working together to bring the craft ashore.

“Only, when their feet touched the ground, they learned that their troubles were not over. The earth shook and the land pitched more violently than the water! They ran for help, as Fishers tend to do, when the trees split apart and the Ruins burst into the sky!” He spun and presented the top of the structure as proudly as if he were personally responsible for its appearance. “Last week, the horizon was clear. Now, the power and reputation of the Transcendent Ruins calls sacred artists from all over the Wilds.”

Now that Lindon looked for it, he could make out chunks of soil clinging to the tiered pyramid. Many of them still had grass attached, and he thought he saw the base of an uprooted tree.

If he could tell what they were at this distance, those patches must be enormous. Either someone had driven carts full of earth up to deceive gullible newcomers, or Jai Sen might be telling the truth.

Their guide was still watching Yerin for signs of a reaction, and his smile widened as she skipped a step, her eyes locked on the Ruins. Lindon was impressed by her resistance; he was afraid his own eyes had grown wider than teacups.

Before he could say something admiring the tale, Yerin spoke. “Seven days before now, did you say?”

He laughed and turned back around to face forward as he walked, holding his spear casually across his shoulders. “Some say seven, some say eight. I myself only arrived three dawns ago, so I can't stake my honor on the time. But I've heard the story from enough trustworthy sources that it must be true.”

By this time, they had reached the wall of sharpened wooden logs. This close, Lindon could appreciate how large each trunk really was; it would take two men his size linking hands to wrap arms around one log. And these had been cut, measured, sharpened, and placed in the last week.

He couldn't help but admire what an army of Golds could accomplish. If Sacred Valley had such a force of workers, what might they have built?

In the front of the wall was a wide opening with wagon-tracks worn in the dirt. Lindon supposed it must function as the main gate, as the loose group of young sacred artists clustered around it must serve as guards.

The youngest looked around Lindon's age, about fifteen or sixteen, while the oldest must have been a peer with Jai Sen in his second decade. There were six in total, three men and three women, and they looked like the types of rough brawlers Lindon imagined just might attack complete strangers.

They each wore a hide cloak with the head still on, and from the diseased-looking skins, Lindon recognized more of those rotting creatures that Jai Sen had called dreadbeasts. Each man and woman had the same disturbing sign of their Gold status: a miniature green snake-insect, like a lesser copy of the ones that had chased Lindon and Yerin here, clung to one arm on each of them.

The serpents varied in size, but they all gripped their host’s arm with their centipede legs and coiled serpentine tails around the human’s flesh. They were Forged from acid-green madra, and Lindon would have taken them for constructs except for the way their legs and tails sunk into flesh. They were bonded to the bodies of these men and women, but the snake heads were alive and curious, surveying Lindon with alien gazes.

The guards gripped long and gleaming weapons, and they eyed Lindon and Yerin like hungry dogs.

Lindon tried to stop his breathing from quickening, because he knew they would hear it. These sacred artists were the same as the ones who had attacked them in the wilderness, the ones whose Remnants had chased them here. If these six knew somehow that he and Yerin had been responsible for the death of their comrades...

Jai Sen slapped the shortest woman on the shoulder, and Lindon noted that her serpent was the largest, stretching from the back of her right hand halfway to the elbow. “Wei Shi Lindon, Yerin, it is my honor to introduce the best of the young generation among the honored Sandvipers. They have a long history of friendship with our Jai clan, and are our allies in exploration of the Ruins.”

The young woman looked Lindon up and down as though she couldn't believe her eyes, the Forged insectoid arms of her serpent parasite clacking as its tiny claws opened and closed. “I am Sandviper Resh,” she said. “Are you as weak as you seem?”

The question pricked him like a needle, but he was the weakest one present by miles. He readied an ingratiating smile, prepared to humble himself as far as needed.

Yerin drew her sword and slapped the woman across the face with the flat of its blade.

Among the Wei clan, there would have been a moment of stunned silence before people erupted into action. Here, in the midst of such highly trained sacred artists, everyone but Lindon and the wounded Resh had drawn weapons and shifted into a combat stance in an instant. The parasites on the Sandvipers’ arms raised their heads and let out tiny whistles like teakettles. Spearheads, halberds, and tridents pointed at Yerin. Many of the weapons had venomous green madra rolling around their shafts.

Yerin was matted with dirt, wearing a tattered robe, and half-wrapped in dirty bandages. But she still managed to look even more dangerous than the Sandvipers, as she stood with back straight and icy mist rolling from her master's sword. “This is a new spot on the map for me, Lindon,” she said, rolling her shoulders. “But I’ve laid eyes on dogs like this a thousand times. They’ll bark and bark, they’ll push us around, and then they’ll make us fight so they can prove they’re above us. Forgive me if I cut ahead a bit.”

Resh was doubled over on her knees, one hand raised to her head. When she moved it, Lindon saw an angry red welt on her cheek in the shape of Yerin's white blade. It looked as though it had been burned into the skin.

She gripped a long-hafted axe in the ground and unfolded. “You—” she began, but before she got halfway to her feet, Yerin's sword had already met her on the other cheek. Resh doubled over again.

“Heard this song before,” Yerin said to the woman on the ground. “There’s eyes all around, so the only way you get out of this is by beating me face to face, but it’s too late for that.” Nearby, the group with the hook-weapons had dropped the dreadbeast they’d been tormenting, looking to the Sandvipers with interest. The young man draped over the wall blinked bleary eyes and focused on them. A lone, distant figure with a black cloud over its head actually rose a few feet in the air to get a better look.

Yerin rapped her knuckles on one Sandviper man’s forehead, and he actually recoiled. His green serpent, a tiny thing tightly wrapped around his wrist, whistled a warning. “See, now they’ve got a tiger on one side and some rocky cliffs on the other. They could rush me together and beat me bloody, but then they’re the weaklings who joined hands to beat a wounded stranger.”

Resh rolled to the side, gripping a spear, but Yerin had expected it. She whipped her sword up, leaving an all-but-invisible scar hanging in the air. Lindon had seen one of these before: a razor-sharp blade Forged in midair and left there as a trap. Resh froze, the edge of madra half an inch from her nose.

“You’re strong, you get respect. You’re weak, and you better know someone strong.” Yerin slowly laid the flat of her blade down, resting it on the top of Resh’s head. The Sandviper woman flinched, and frost began to form in her hair.

Yerin looked down, staring until Resh reluctantly met her eyes.

“The Copper’s with me,” Yerin said.

Lindon stood like a statue, too wary to show any sign of pleasure at the humiliation. If the Sandvipers decided to take their embarrassment out on anyone, it wouldn’t be Yerin.

But Resh only nodded.

5

From his perch on the pointed wooden logs that served the encampment as a wall, Eithan saw the girl with the steel arm over her shoulder arrive with an over-aged Copper looming over her. Invisible webs of his power filled the field before him, carrying information back to him in delicate strands, so he’d heard every word of their conversation. As such, he’d learned their names.

“Well, this is a lucky day,” he said, hopping down from the wall. His blond hair flowed behind him like a banner, and a simple Enforcer technique made him drift slowly to the muddy ground. His shoes were cheap and simple, but he couldn’t land and splash mud on his clothes; they were expensive shadesilk imported from the west sewn by a team of artisans in the east with a preservative script stitched into the hem. And they were white, so the stains would never come out.

People in a million fascinating variations swirled and eddied around him, and even with his mind fixed elsewhere, he felt them all. “Yerin,” he said thoughtfully, trying out the name. To his left, a ladder tilted fractionally; it would tip over in a moment, and the man balanced on it would have to use sacred arts to right himself. Eithan pressed one finger against it, pushing it back into balance.

“Wei Shi Lindon.” He liked that name better. Yerin was clearly the disciple of a Sage—her spirit was so pure and clean that only someone at the end of a Path could have helped her create it. He couldn’t afford to offend a Sage without losing his position or worse, and if Yerin’s master was still alive, Eithan would never be able to recruit her.

Fortunately for him, the Sage of the Endless Sword had vanished in this region a few months before. Now here was his disciple, in ragged clothes that had seen a month of wear, her wounds aching, belly tight with hunger, and expression tight with buried grief. His webs of madra brought him all that information and more, and it was a simple deduction from there: her master was dead.

A sad loss for the world, to be sure, but potentially to Eithan’s gain.

A girl hurried by, arms full of flowers, and one was about to fall. He plucked it from the air as it did so, catching its long stem between his fingers. He lifted the nest of yellow petals, inhaling the delicate scent, and then pressed it into the hands of a pretty young woman. She hadn’t been sleeping well lately, her training taking up much of her time, and her master was cruel to her. She was on the frayed edge of breaking.

He read that story in her worn shoes, in the welts on her back, in the slump of her shoulders. When a flower appeared seemingly out of nowhere, she spun around, searching in vain for its source. That easily, her burdens lightened just a fraction.

Only a hair’s worth of difference, but enough hairs could tip the scale. Or something. He was sure he’d heard an idiom like that, at some point.

He returned his attention to the pair of newcomers. If Yerin was a prize, Lindon was a puzzle. Two cores, one even weaker than the other, in an otherwise healthy body. The quantity of his madra was severely lacking, but in terms of density and quality, he’d almost caught up with others his age. He must have had a lucky encounter with an elixir or spiritual herb of some kind. His wooden badge was etched with an ancient symbol: ‘empty.’

That was enough to tell Eithan the story of a boy growing up in an isolated region with no ability in the sacred arts. But there were a thousand stories in the crowd around him, many equally intriguing.

What piqued his interest were the little things: the way Lindon stared around as though to devour every new detail with his eyes, the way he seemed to subconsciously bow to everyone around him with a Goldsign, the pack full of knickknacks he carried on his back.

He liked to be prepared, this Lindon. He planned ahead. He was looking for opportunity even here, in what would be—to someone like him—an ocean of sharks.

And he kept his tools neatly separated, packed efficiently into his pack. He carried very little on his person, just a halfsilver dagger, the badge, a few coins, and a—

Eithan stumbled over his own feet, catching himself on the edge of a stone building.

What was that in Lindon’s pocket?

A transparent bead less than an inch in diameter. Not glass, but a barrier of…Forged madra? If so, it was so stable it wouldn’t dissipate for a thousand years. And seamless enough that even his senses couldn’t penetrate. It had to be a product of someone at least on Eithan’s own level.

Where had a little Copper gotten something like that?

Eithan had only come this far west to find Yerin, or at least someone like her. If he returned to his clan with her in tow, he could consider this trip worthwhile.

But now, it seemed, he may have found a truly unexpected prize.

* * *

The encampment surrounding the Transcendent Ruins, which Jai Sen called the Five Factions Alliance, remained a marvel even though it looked as though it had been tossed together in an hour. Shacks and shops were cobbled together from fresh planks, many in a half-constructed state. The one road was nothing more than a wide track of hastily packed dirt, carrying wagons pulled by bulls, oxen, or Remnants of a dozen descriptions. Children dashed between ramshackle huts, tossing fistfuls of mud at one another.

But the mundane details could not hide the impossible, which surrounded Lindon from every angle. Yerin and Jai Sen walked casually along, unimpressed, but he felt as though he couldn't turn his head fast enough.

A girl that couldn't have been more than twelve years old hauled a boulder as tall as Lindon's shoulders over to the side of the road. When she slammed it down, the ground shook. She paused a moment, glancing over the irregular lump of stone that rose higher than her head, and then drove stiffened fingers straight into the rock. The top of the boulder slid away, crashing into the ground, and leaving the stone smooth and clean on top. A pile of enormous stone blocks waited nearby, and Lindon knew she'd carved those with her fingertips as well. Probably in the same morning.

A group of older men and women dressed in gray strode by, their outer robes sewn with images of dragons and birds in flight. A small cloud hung inches over each of their heads, and when they passed Lindon and his group, their gazes turned to Jai Sen. The clouds darkened, a few even flashing with lightning, and Lindon stared at the reaction in fascination even though the spearman seemed not to notice. After they'd passed, Lindon craned his neck back to continue looking, and the clouds had faded back to pale gray.

In front of a newly erected wooden shop front, a man hovered in midair, examining the second floor with a focused frown. He stroked his black beard, then reached for a strange weapon on his back: a hilt with a blade bent into a wide crescent, so that it looked like a sharpened hook. He leveled his weapon at the building as Lindon passed beneath him, seemingly unconcerned that people were flowing underneath his feet.

And the people. Outside of the Seven-Year Festival, Lindon had never seen so many different people packed into such a tight space. Sacred artists carried swords, spears, whips, hooks, axes, awls, halberds, and weapons for which Lindon had no name. They were dressed in everything from intricate formal robes that burned like a phoenix's flames to shoddy brown castoffs. The crowd came in tides, so that one second they were packed tight as a river, the next scattered like puddles after a rain.

Above it all, the titanic layers of the Transcendent Ruins loomed like a mountain carved of brown stone.

It was so strange compared to Sacred Valley that Lindon wasn't quite sure what to make of it. He was surrounded by Golds, which made him feel even more fragile than an autumn leaf in this crowd. One instinct urged him to dash into a corner and hide.

But another emotion held sway: the dizzying relief of absolute freedom. In the Wei clan, everyone knew him. They knew how useless he was. Here, he would start over from the beginning.

And reaching Gold was nothing, here. Even a child could do it. Even him. Every time he saw someone younger with a venom-green Remnant wrapped around their wrist or a cloud over their head, he couldn't suppress his smile. Those were Goldsigns, and if these people could raise their children to that level, he could make it too.

Ahead, Jai Sen's compliments to Yerin had flowed even thicker than the crowd around them. “It's rare that a sacred artist your age has such keen insight. You must surely be close to Highgold, which is worth bragging about. I myself have only reached the threshold of Highgold; when you're my age, you will surely have surpassed me. As for those Sandvipers, they're not even worth mentioning.”

Yerin had spent the rest of the conversation putting him off with mutters and half-statements, which Lindon was certain had as much to do with her thirst as her disinterest. She'd kept one hand on the hilt of her sword and the other on the blood-red rope she had wrapped around her waist like a belt, as though trying to decide which she should draw. This time, she glanced back and saw Lindon listening.

“That was nothing special,” Yerin said, as much to Lindon as to Jai Sen. “They wanted to back me into a corner, but they'd caught themselves in the same trap. They could have stepped up one at a time, and they'd have worn me down steady and true. But the first one to step up is the first to get slapped down, and that one would lose face. They could group up, and then they'd have beaten me sure as sunrise, but then what kind of standing would they have? Even dogs can win a fight as a pack.”

She glanced back at Lindon again, emphasizing her point. “Sacred artists care more about their reputation than about their lives. You cut one, she'll heal and laugh about it. You embarrass her, and then you'd best be willing to draw swords on her, her mother, and her entire clan.”

Lindon nodded to show her that he'd taken the message, but in truth it wasn't terribly strange. The notion of honor in Sacred Valley was similar, if perhaps a little less aggressive. As the saying went, “A man holds grudges for a day, a family for a year, and a clan for a lifetime.”

Jai Sen chuckled even as he nudged a passerby aside with the butt of his spear. “Well said. It becomes a delicate dance, walking among people with such fragile pride. You and your family must make sure that you stand as tall as possible, so your enemies are too wary of you to bother you. But a tree that grows too tall, too quickly, is liable to be cut down.” He turned enough to include Lindon in his grin. “The wisest course is to join a clan with such a firm foundation that it can never be shaken, with an unassailable reputation and untarnished honor.”

Lindon might have been new to the area, but he could take obvious hints. “Would the Jai clan welcome strangers?”

Jai Sen stabbed a finger at him. “This one is almost as wise as you are, though perhaps he has...lagged a bit on his Path. Indeed, there is no faction in the Wilds as strong or as proud as the Jai clan. Our branch here is comparable to the Purelake Temple in influence, and it is but a fraction the size of our main branch in the Blackflame Empire. As an honored guest under the banner of Jai, none of the Sandvipers would dare to disrespect you again. We would give you the treatment of an outer disciple, which you surely deserve, and any honors or merits you render to the clan will be exchanged fairly for scales or treasures of your choosing. And when we recover the spear, as it was ours to begin with, every member of the clan and our respected guests will all receive a hundred scales as a bonus. We would even feed and house Wei Shi Lindon, as a courtesy to you.”

Lindon was full to bursting with questions, in contrast to Yerin, who looked as though Jai Sen had offered her a pile of mud and a filthy stick. He had intended to ask about the factions of the Wilds, then about 'scales,' which he assumed were some sort of currency, but all his other concerns were pushed from his mind at the mention of the spear.

He stepped between Yerin and Jai Sen, catching the man's attention. “Your pardon, Jai Sen, but we have traveled from far away.” He hadn't planned to keep Sacred Valley a secret, but Yerin had stopped him from revealing it earlier, so he steered toward caution. “We came upon this land by chance, so we know nothing of the spear.”

Jai Sen, who at first had seemed irritated at Lindon's interruption, brightened. He waited until a cart had rattled by, deafening with a sound like clattering pottery, before he spoke. “The spear is the prize of the Transcendent Ruins. The Ruins are a treasure in themselves, drawing vital aura from hundreds of miles around, and filled with ancient secrets of great power. But the one everyone seeks, the weapon that could elevate one faction to the heavens, is the spear.”

He was warming up now, gesturing with his hands so that his own spear bobbed wildly and caused several bystanders to duck and curse him. He continued as though he hadn't heard them. “Almost a thousand years ago, the Desolate Wilds were totally lawless, plagued by beasts and by wild sacred artists no better than animals themselves. Each man considered himself an Emperor, each woman an Empress, and they ruled whatever they could take at the end of a blade. But one day,” and here Jai Sen drew himself up proudly, “a woman emerged from nowhere with a shining spear in her hands. She united these rogue sacred artists under one name, killing those who resisted, and spreading law and civilization across the Wilds. No one could stand against them, because no one could oppose her...or rather, no one could oppose her spear.”

He smiled wider, because even Yerin was listening with obvious interest. “You see, her weapon was said to devour spirits. When she destroyed a Remnant, she consumed its power, until she grew so strong that she could slay entire armies at a stroke. For the next two centuries, while she lived, all the Wilds remained peaceful under her rule.”

He waved a hand as though brushing aside two hundred years.

“The story of her death is a long one, but it's enough to say that the Ruins rose on the day of her death. She entered, taking the spear, and never emerged. Some say that she received the spear from the Ruins in the beginning, and she was only returning the power she had borrowed. I believe that it was a test, that she locked her strongest weapon into a secure vault to safeguard her legacy until a descendant could claim it once again.”

“Will you retrieve it yourself?” Lindon asked. Though it was clear that Jai Sen wasn't the most powerful young sacred artist in the Jai clan—no matter how different the outside world was from Sacred Valley, he wouldn't believe that any clan would send its elites out to guard the gate from dogs—but a little flattery could only help him.

Jai Sen clapped Lindon on the back so hard that Lindon thought he would bruise. “You sure know how to speak. I should keep you around just for that. But I know my place; I'm only here to bring some small glory to my clan, as much as I am capable.” He smiled over at Yerin, and Lindon wondered how much glory an esteemed visitor was worth to the Jai clan.

The tall spearman drew up short next to a cube of gray stone blocks very similar to the ones he'd seen the girl cutting barehanded. They were stacked one on top of the other, bound without mortar until they formed a square house bigger than the entire Shi family complex. Horses and stranger animals filled a fenced area nearby, and men and women with the spears and robes of the Jai clan entered and exited freely.

“This is the Inn of the Drifting Light, an establishment that sprouts up whenever and wherever promising members of the Jai clan need a place to stay.” Jai Sen presented the enormous stone cube with a proud flourish. “As my friend, you are welcome to a room inside. Humble as it may be, I guarantee you won't find better anywhere in the Alliance.”

Yerin gave Jai Sen a shallow bow. “I regret that my exhaustion prevents me from thanking you properly,” she said, in the most formal sentence Lindon had ever heard from her. “I owe you a debt for every favor you've done on my behalf.”

“Not at all, Yerin, not at all. There is no need for such formality between us, not when we will soon work side by side.” He ushered them into the wide, doorless entrance, where a matronly woman had taken up a seat behind a wooden table.

She raised eyebrows when she saw him. “Jai Sen, have they closed the gates already?”

He cleared his throat. “Honored aunt, this is Yerin of no clan. I greeted her arriving at the gate, and she expressed an interest in working alongside our clan during her stay here. She is a guest of mine, and her friend is under her protection.”

The woman appraised Yerin for a moment before giving her a broad smile. “I hope that my nephew hasn't worn out your ears on the way. Finding you shows more insight than I would have expected from him, and it's a credit to your wisdom that you accepted. You have a bright future here, with you so young.”

To Lindon, she said nothing.

Clearly pleased with himself, Jai Sen swept his spear out to the side as he bowed to the room in general. “Aunt, honored guest, I am sorry to be so rude as to leave, but they need my presence at the wall. Sister Yerin, I hope that we might share a meal at sunset tonight, once you have a chance to refresh yourself and to rest.”

Yerin bowed to him in response. “I'm sure I'll have a mouthful of questions once I've wet my throat a little more.”

Jai Sen laughed. “More water for the thirsty travelers!” he said to his aunt. “And a bath, if I may be so indelicate as to suggest it.” The woman nodded firmly and scribbled some words on a tablet.

“Then I'm off!” Jai Sen announced, spinning on his heel—almost catching Lindon in the head with the shaft of the spear—and walking out the door.

As Lindon had expected, a room in the inn was a hollowed-out stone block the size of a closet. A bed stood against one wall and a pile of blankets against the other—Lindon assumed that was for him—with a tiny table crammed into the corner balancing an unlit lamp, a paper covering what he guessed was a bowl of food, and four bottles of water beaded with condensation. As soon as they opened the door, Lindon and Yerin didn't even bother dropping their belongings before they darted for the water. The Thousand-Mile Cloud hovered in the hallway like a lonely puppy.

The woman at the entrance had told them baths would be heated within the hour, so once Lindon had finally slaked his thirst and devoured a bowl of rice, he started flipping through his pack for a clean change of clothing. The ones he was wearing were more appropriate for the fireplace than the wardrobe, after so many days in the wilderness, and in the tight confines of the room he was starting to notice the smell. His longing for the bath sharpened, until it was almost as powerful as his thirst had been earlier.

Yerin, meanwhile, was looking at the square hole in the wall that served as their window. “Think you could squeeze through this?” she asked.

Lindon looked up with his hands full of clean clothes. “The window?”

“If we get caught because your shoulders are stuck and you're dangling half out of the wall, I can tell you I won't be smiling.”

“You want to leave?”

She lifted her sheathed sword, placing it across his shoulders as though taking a measurement. “I'm not staying here, you can take that for true.”

Just when he'd been looking forward to a bath and a bed, even curled up on a stone floor. “May I ask why?”

“If Jai Sen mistook us for Remnant, he's dumber than a sack full of hammers. He wanted to know if I had a sharp enough edge on me to take his attack, and if I didn't, he planned on looting our corpses clean.”

Slowly, Lindon replaced his clothes into the pack. “How do you know?”

“See something enough times, and you start looking for it. Unspoken rule of the world: you kill the last person to own something, it’s yours, and nobody asks too many questions. That's not where it ends, either. He insulted you to see if I'd take it, because the farther I'll bend, the farther he can push me. Those Sandvipers at the gate were supposed to be his friends, his allies, however you want to say it. But he didn't stop them when they were going to make trouble, or stop me from beating on them. That sound friendly to you?”

Lindon had noticed that, but he'd taken it in stride. That was how many in the Wei clan had treated an Unsouled, after all.

“Now he's taken us to a place where we're stoppered up like flies in a wine bottle. Don't know if he still wants to rob us, or kill us, or maybe just what he said: get us working for the Jai clan. But I'll dance to his tune when he makes a puppet out of my corpse, and not a second before. We're leaving.”

She held up her sword to the window horizontally, considered a moment, then nodded. “You first. I’ll push.”

6

The Sandvipers had their own corner of the Five Factions Alliance territory. The space wasn't assigned to them according to some plan or design, as would have been rational, but instead consisted of all the ground they could seize and hold. Typical of sacred artists, in Jai Long's opinion: so consumed with gaining strength that they never considered how they should use it.

Most of the Sandviper territory was taken up by a single, garishly red tent of many peaks. While the lesser minions settled for huts made of twigs and scavenged boards, their future chief reveled in luxury. Sounds floated out of the tent on a warm wind—mingled laughter, the clink of glasses, splashing of water.

Jai Long could have joined them. He had the status, and he'd contributed more merits than the Sandviper heir. But if he was honest with himself, he preferred it out in the cold night.

He sat at a rough table arranged on the mud, a stretch of fabric above him guarding from rain and providing shade. It was hot here when the sun was high, and cold when it wasn't, but his personal comfort was secondary. This position allowed him to focus on his duties, placed him in the way of any attack on the tent, and kept him close enough to respond to any of Kral's whims.

No sooner had Jai Long thought of the name when his master stuck his head out from the tent. Kral was twenty-two years old, and fit from years of martial training. He always gave the impression of an imposing leader, standing tall and confident as though to inspire those around him, gaze fixed on some distant vision of victory...until he smiled. Then, he looked like a rogue trying to charm his way out of trouble.

He was smiling now.

Water ran down his body, and black hair plastered to his face and neck. Even the towel wrapped around his waist was soaked.

“Send for some more water, would you?” Kral asked. The Sandvipers called Kral the young chief, though he hadn't ascended to his father's title yet, because of the great influence he had among the sect. He was issuing a command, but he respected Jai Long enough to at least pretend it was a request. “Somehow we keep losing it.” A chorus of laughter followed that statement from within the tent, and his grin broadened.

Jai Long nodded to a pair of nearby servants, young boys born into the Sandviper sect, and they ran off at his signal to find the jars of water he'd ordered filled earlier. There were constructs in the tent to heat what water they brought, but if there existed any constructs that could create water out of madra, only the Purelake might have Soulsmiths skilled enough to build them. Maybe the Fishers, but he couldn't have any dealings with the Sandvipers' ancestral enemy. Not openly, anyway.

Request fulfilled, Jai Long turned back to his work, expecting that Kral would leave. Instead, the heir sighed.

“You're not a slave,” he said.

Jai Long turned back, somewhat surprised at the statement. “If I thought I was, I wouldn't stay.” He and Kral had reached the same stage of advancement in the sacred arts, but the future chief wouldn't be able to stop him by force. Jai Long wasn't arrogant enough to assume that he was the strongest Highgold in the Five Factions Alliance, but he was certainly the best among the Sandvipers.

If he'd thought the sect was treating him unfairly, he would have cut his way through them, and Kral knew it. The only one that could have overpowered him was the current chief, a Truegold, and Kral's father was out hunting.

Kral nodded to the paperwork. “Then why are you working like one? Come join us.” He peeled the tent flap back a little, and another humid gust bloomed in the night air.

No laughter accompanied this statement from inside the tent, but none of them argued. Kral's friends were afraid of seeming too displeased, but they certainly weren't eager to have Jai Long join them.

He resisted lifting a hand to feel the strips of cloth wrapped around his head. The cloth was red, wrapped so tightly around him that not a hair or scrap of skin was visible from the neck up. Only his eyes peeked out of the middle, and if he could have covered those up without losing his vision, he would have.

“Let's not inflict my company upon them,” Jai Long said dryly. “They're having fun.”

If Kral's companions could have cheered that statement without losing face, Jai Long was sure they would have.

Kral's smile sharpened. “They won't say a word about it, that I can promise you. They know the hand that feeds them.”

They wouldn't need words to express their displeasure, Jai Long knew. No one did, really. When he'd returned to his family with his sister's bloody and broken body in his arms, his parents were more horrified by his face than by the fate of their daughter. What have you done to yourself? they didn't ask him. Was it worth it? they didn't say.

When the Jai Patriarch banished him to the Wilds, the words were hollow and empty, forms without substance. The old man's disappointment oozed across the room, so tangible that it might as well have been vital aura taken form. The star that would have guided the clan into the future had stepped off the Path, ruining his future advancement. And he was hideous...how could he represent the Jai like that?

Nothing truly important needed to be said. When he returned to the clan, unseated the Patriarch, and forced the rest of the family to bow before him, he wouldn't need any speeches either. Above all else, sacred artists respected strength.

Jai Long intended to use his.

“Can you imagine me saying yes?” he asked Kral, and the young chief gave a bitter laugh.

“In truth, no. But what sort of host would I be if I didn't ask?”

Kral had his faults. He pursued sacred arts with admirable dedication, but at every other sort of work he balked. He was lazy, irritable, quick to anger, slow to apologize, arrogant, and even occasionally cruel.

But he'd treated Jai Long well, and it would not be forgotten.

Jai Long said none of this, because he didn't need to. He waved his hand. “You're letting out the heat. Call for me when you need more wine.”

Kral sighed again, but headed back inside. The laughs started up again almost immediately.

Jai Long looked down at the papers beneath him, conjuring a tiny star on the tip of one finger so that he had enough light to see. Four piles of papers sat on the desk, divided roughly into quadrants. Each page was a map. The maps were rough, sketched by many different hands, and incomplete. Jai Long was making notes of his own on the many blank spaces, filling in from other maps and from his own inferences, slowly and steadily building a complete diagram.

There were still many riddles to solve, but he could feel the information gathering into a whole. In another week, maybe two, he'd have an advantage beyond any of the other Five Factions: a map of the Transcendent Ruins.

The stories passed down about the ancient Jai spear were more myth than fact, but two things remained true to a reasonable degree of certainty. For one thing, it was almost absolutely true that the spear remained somewhere in the Ruins. There were hundreds of eyewitnesses to the Jai Matriarch's entrance, and while popular stories said she'd died within, her closest advisors recorded that she emerged from the Ruins weak and battered. She told those advisors that she'd left the spear within, and died days afterward.

He had enough information to consider that story true. But there was a second fact he'd verified, and it was equally important: the spear really had devoured the strength of Remnants and added their strength to that of the Matriarch's. One of her advisors had observed the process, even noting down possible methods and some runes on the spear's shaft that might have been some form of script. The early Jai clan had tried to reproduce the spear, but had ultimately failed.

No one else had considered the nature of that ability, except that it was a powerful way to advance quickly. The others, he was sure, sought the spear for one reason alone: with it, they might be able to break through the bonds of Truegold. There was only one Underlord in the Desolate Wilds, and only a handful in the Blackflame Empire. Advancing past Truegold meant advancing beyond the realms of common sense, to rise from the earth to the heavens in one leap.

They all thought so small.

More accurately, their vision was narrow. Jai Long's competitors, including the Sandviper sect, were so focused on advancement that they neglected to consider what it meant to consume someone else's power.

No one could gather madra that was too different from their own. That was a fundamental law, and one that Jai Long had no reason to believe the spear could break. If he, whose madra carried aspects of light and the sword, tried to absorb a Sandviper Remnant, the spear might allow him to do it. His madra would gain a toxic aspect, and he would have a harder time finding the right aura to cycle, but he should be able to do it.

But then, if he took a Fisher's Remnant, what would happen?

There was a point beyond which the absorption would fail. Even if it didn't, the different types of madra could mix in violent or chaotic ways. It might even damage his core, or the madra could rebound on him and tear his body apart.

No, though everyone envisioned taking the spear and gathering the powers of their enemies into one body, that was just a childish fantasy. It would never work.

The spear would be at its best when devouring compatible madra. In other words, madra from sacred artists on the same Path.

If Jai Long held the spear, he could advance by doing nothing more than cutting down others on the Path of the Stellar Spear—blood members of the Jai clan—and gutting their Remnants.

The spear's nature aligned so closely with his own desires that he almost considered it the will of the heavens.

Even better, the other Factions were considering this a contest of strength. Which was how they considered most things, now that he thought of it. They pushed into the Ruins, fighting the dreadbeasts sealed within as well as the other competitors, with the understanding that the most powerful would come out on top.

Jai Long didn't think of himself as an arrogant man, but sometimes it seemed that he was the only one with eyes in a crowd of the blind.

Couldn't they see that the strongest weren't always the victors?

So he worked on his map even as the young servants returned, carrying jars of water bigger than their whole bodies. As they ran back out, one of them stopped at Jai Long's table and bowed with fists pressed together.

He stayed that way until Jai Long noticed and raised his head. “What is it?”

“I ran into Grenn on the way back,” the boy said. “His mother called him in to cycle, so he couldn't deliver messages to you tonight, so he passed them on to me.”

Jai Long held back a sigh. He'd wondered what was taking his usual messenger so long, and once again he lamented the lack of discipline among the Sandvipers. There was so much he despised about the Jai family, but there was a reason they were a first-class clan in the Blackflame Empire while the Sandvipers remained nothing more than a second-rate sect in the Wilds. Without organization and control, strength meant nothing.

He gestured impatiently, and the boy’s spine straightened like a broomstick. “Sir. Grenn said that the foreman said that the miners can’t go into the southwest corner of the fourth floor. Too many beasts.”

Jai Long scribbled a note. In the four floors closest to the entrance of the Transcendent Ruins, he had accurate maps of virtually the entire area. Only a few spots remained blank, so he’d ordered the mining crews to move their operations.

“Tell the foreman he can expect three more Lowgold guards by sundown tomorrow,” Jai Long said. A single guard would be a great help in protecting the mining crew from dreadbeasts; three was perhaps too many. But this was a race, and he intended to win.

Kral might balk at committing so many of his Sandvipers to what he saw as a slave duty, but Jai Long would talk him around.

The messenger boy stood there mouthing words, awkwardly committing Jai Long’s message to memory. When he’d finished, he straightened again.

“There was a message from the Jai clan too, sir. A Lowgold stranger showed up at the gates today, and she had a Copper with her.”

“Her son?”

The boy shook his head, and his smile had a bit of a sneer to it. “Grenn saw the Copper himself. Said he looked even older than the Lowgold.”

That happened sometimes—a child was born with a tragically weak spirit, or had it crippled in some accident before he could advance further. Those unfortunates deserved pity, not ridicule.

But whatever they deserved, this one had earned not a whit of Jai Long’s attention. “If you deliver me a message every time an outsider shows up at the gates, you’ll walk your feet off.”

“No, that’s not…the Copper’s just strange, sir. Not important. The important thing is that she beat Sandviper Resh in the middle of her squad, and then walked away with one of the Jai clan.”

“Ah.” Now Jai Long understood why the message had mentioned the Copper. If he, as a representative of the Sandviper sect, wanted to avenge Resh’s humiliation, he couldn’t punish a Lowgold under Jai protection. He’d have to target the Copper instead.

“Where are they now?” Jai Long asked, dipping his brush to write a letter to his former clan.

“Uh, they were taken to a Jai clan inn, but it looks like they snuck out. Grenn said he was supposed to tell you that nobody could find them.”

Jai Long’s suffering had begun when he first advanced to Gold. In the heat of battle, he’d been forced to adopt a strange Remnant instead of the one his family had planned for him. Instead of the Goldsign borne by most on the Path of the Stellar Spear—hair as sturdy as a helmet, and rigid as iron—he was cursed with a face that…a face that he didn’t like to think about.

There had been a few other consequences of that Goldsign. His voice hadn’t changed, but his laugh…

It rang out of him, wild and crazy, like the cackling of a deranged murderer. His usual voice was cool and composed, but when he laughed, he sounded like a blood-drunk killer. The messenger boy paled and took a step backwards.

Jai Long swallowed the last chuckles, but a smile still stretched the edges of his cloth mask. “They lost her. The Jai clan can’t find their new recruit, so they turn to me.”

Technically they had turned to the Sandvipers to help, but there was no real difference. He handled most of the day-to-day workings of the sect, and whichever of his relatives had sent this message must have known where it would end up.

Surely, that knowledge had burned them.

“I think so, sir…” the boy said hesitantly.

“I’m amending my previous message. Tell the foreman he will have to wait for his three Lowgold guards. Then go to Sandviper Tern, get three of his best, and tell him the story you just told me. They’re to retrieve the Copper for the mines. Do not kill his protector, but don’t retrieve her for the Jai clan either.”

His clan had handed him a razor-sharp opportunity. In one move, he could regain the standing the Sandvipers had lost at the hands of this stranger, show her that she couldn’t treat their sect lightly, and reinforce to the clan that Jai Long was their servant no longer. And he would gain a miner. Only a Copper, but enough single scales could eventually pile up into a fortune.

The messenger boy was standing in place with brows furrowed, repeating words silently to himself.

“What will you say to the foreman?” Jai Long snapped, and he forced the boy to repeat each message until they were all perfect. One day, he was going to have to train better messengers. Maybe he could purchase a few speaking constructs from the Fishers. Through a proxy, of course.

When the boy finally finished, Jai Long picked his brush back up and dipped it into the inkwell. “Is there anything else?” he asked, by way of dismissal.

“Nothing special,” the boy said, fidgeting in place. Clearly there was something he wanted to say, but not an official message.

“Did you hear something?” Jai Long asked, his attention on the paper in front of him.

“It’s just a rumor. Some of the Cloud Hammers were talking about it, and I only heard them because I was sitting behind a fence and they didn’t know I was there, because one of them asked the other one if he was sure, and then he said…”

Jai Long let the boy ramble on excitedly as he worked. Eventually, a point would emerge.

“…after he’d stopped, he said—I mean not him, the first one—said they’d have to speed up, because Arelius would take everything when he got here. So the second one kind of laughed, but not a funny laugh—”

When the boy’s words registered, Jai Long stood up so quickly that he upended his inkwell, sending it splattering off the edge of the table. Part of his mind noticed with relief that it hadn’t ruined any of his maps, but the majority of his consciousness was taken up by sheer panic. He seized the boy by the shoulders, and it was only a last-minute awareness that prevented him from accidentally ripping the boy’s arms off.

“The Arelius family is coming here?”

The boy’s eyes were so wide that they seemed to take up most of his head, and he looked too scared even to struggle. “I don’t know, brother Jai Long. Please, brother, they just said Arelius. I don’t know what it means, I don’t know…”

That same calm part of his mind noted that the Sandvipers only called him “brother” when they wanted something from him.

Meanwhile, his panic was quickly transforming into fury. After all his work, all his meticulous effort, now a faction from the Empire was just going to step in and take the rewards.

Jai Long didn’t tend to raise his voice. It showed a lack of discipline. Instead, he lowered his tone until he was very quiet indeed. Quiet like the slow rasp of a drawn blade.

“Why,” he said, “didn’t you tell me this earlier?”

Tears had come to the boy’s eyes, and he blubbered incoherently. Jai Long released him, disgusted with himself. He wasn’t the sort of weakling who took his frustrations out on children. This boy couldn’t be older than twelve; he was even younger than Jai Long’s own sister.

Jai Long bowed deeply to the messenger, fists pressed together, as he would bow to a superior. “My deepest regrets,” he said, and the fear on the boy’s face almost instantly transformed to shock. “Now. Deliver your messages as instructed, but on your way, grab every messenger the Sandvipers have. Send them all to me.”

The boy bowed and bolted.

Within the tent, the splashing and laughter had stopped. “Kral,” Jai Long said, and the young chief’s head poked out.

“I didn’t hear much of that, but I will die if you don’t tell me the details,” Kral said.

“The Arelius family may be coming here.”

It took the future Sandviper chief a moment before the gravity of that statement sunk in. “From the empire?”

Jai Long didn’t nod. His silence would be answer enough.

“When?”

“That’s what we need to know.”

Kral vanished for a moment, and when he reappeared, he was tying a loose emerald robe around his waist. He shouted orders, every inch the commanding chief, and Sandvipers boiled out of the camp in droves.

Jai Long snatched up his spear from beside the table, marching off into the darkness. He had his own tasks to perform. He’d already forgotten about the other orders he’d sent tonight; compared to confirming this rumor, other matters were unimportant.

The second the Arelius family showed up, his part in this game was over.

* * *

Information requested: Jai Long.

Beginning report…

The Jai clan began as one of many barbaric factions in the stretch of blighted wilderness known as the Desolate Wilds. The light-aspected combat techniques on their Path of the Stellar Spear made them the most formidable family of sacred artists in the area, and they unified the region more than once over the centuries. Each time, their rule proved violent and brief.

It wasn't until they produced an Underlord that their family rose to prominence, moving their main branch from the Desolate Wilds to the civilization of the Blackflame Empire. They have flourished under the guidance of that Underlord for over a century, never forgetting that their good fortune is held together by a single linchpin.

If their Patriarch is ever unseated, the clan will crumble. And now, despite his great advancement along his Path, he is starting to age. Within one more decade, maybe two, age will claim the leader of the Jai clan.

As such, they train their disciples with unusual rigor. The safety of the next generation will only be secure if they can produce a second Underlord, an heir to their Patriarch's glory.

Thus far, they have failed. No genius of the clan has climbed past the peak of Gold and reached the heights of the Underlords.

But one showed promise.

Jai Long's affinity with the Path of the Stellar Spear was second only to the Patriarch's. At twelve years old, he sparred with disciples five years his senior. By thirteen, he had reached the peak of Jade, and could have broken through to Lowgold if not for the decree of the clan's elders.

To advance from Jade to Gold, one must take on the power of a Remnant. Sacred artists always prefer to receive Remnants from the same Path, to ensure compatibility and prevent deviation, so the elders waited for a Remnant worthy of Jai Long. They waited for a clan elder to die.

When Jai Long turned fourteen, he still had not been granted permission to advance to Lowgold, for the elders remained stubbornly attached to life.

It was during this time that a group of rebels, a disenfranchised branch family of the Jai clan, staged an uprising against the head family.

They practiced their own warped version of the Path of the Stellar Spear, and had been exiled for it. Marginalized and mistreated, as they saw it, their frustration finally boiled over in an attack on the main branch of the clan. Among their targets was the famous golden child of the head family: Jai Long.

As Jai Long was still stuck at Jade, he should have been easy pickings for older warriors. One Lowgold boy of seventeen, seeking to make a name for himself, isolated and challenged his rival in a duel to the death.

Jai Long pinned him to the wall with his spear.

This was a mistake that an older sacred artist would not have made. Killing his rival released a Remnant, a twisted twin to the normal spirit of the Stellar Spear. If the Remnant had attacked, Jai Long—depleted as he was from the fight—would have died.

But Remnants are unpredictable, and this one crawled through the house in search of easier prey.

It found Jai Long's sister, six years old, still asleep. It dragged her from her bed, away from the home, to consume her madra in private.

Jai Long raced after it, catching the spirit in minutes. But the damage was already done: her core was cracked and damaged, her madra channels ravaged, the Remnant stronger than ever. And his Jade senses told him that the rebels were closing in.

He had no chance of escaping safely with his sister. Not unless he grew stronger.

Jai Long trapped the Remnant with a simple script and began the process of drawing it into his core. He had long since reached the limits of Jade and prepared for this step, so he reached Lowgold easily.

Though not as smoothly as he'd hoped.

Though compatible with his madra, this spirit was not quite from the Path of the Stellar Spear. It left him with a Goldsign unlike that of his family: a face scarred and twisted, disgusting to look upon.

When he fought his way free of the rebels and returned to his home, carrying his sister, he did not find the welcome he'd expected. They provided shelter and medical care, but nothing further. Even his parents began to distance themselves from Jai Long, as they found their future in the family jeopardized by his presence.

The next Patriarch of the Jai clan could not have deviated from the Path of the Stellar Spear. His face could not be monstrous.

Even his sister, though cared for out of pity, had nothing for her in the clan any longer. The elixirs and training resources she had once received to bolster her sacred arts were withdrawn, for the family could not place all their bets on a lame horse. She was tucked away to fade, forgotten.

And Jai Long, once the bright star guiding the clan to glory, was quietly shipped away to the Desolate Wilds. His talent could not be ignored, so he was given the task of supporting one of the Jai clan's oldest allies: the Sandviper sect. There, he could benefit his family without bringing them shame.

Here in the Wilds, he has languished all this time. Training. And waiting.

Suggested topic: the fated future of Jai Long. Continue?

Denied, report complete.

7

By moonlight, Lindon could barely make out the words painted on the board: “Bathhouses for rent.”

They looked more like outhouses than bathhouses, rickety sheds of wood only large enough for a single person. They were packed like grave markers in a cemetery, and customers emerging after their bath had to pick their way out through a maze of boxes.

Like the rest of the Five Factions Alliance encampment, these facilities had clearly been tossed together. One young man sat at an uncovered table, chin in one hand. He yawned as Lindon and Yerin approached.

“Two scales each,” he said, not so much as glancing at either of them.

The sun had fallen long ago, and one lantern dangling from a nearby tree’s branch provided the only light. Lindon and Yerin had wandered for hours, trying to find another place that would take them for the night, but most were packed full. The rest demanded scales, obviously the currency of the region, and refused to listen further when Lindon said they didn’t have any.

“A good evening to you,” Lindon said, bowing over a sacred artist’s salute. The man didn’t acknowledge him. “We’re from far away, so perhaps elder brother could help us.”

Some of the innkeepers had addressed him as “little brother” before they realized he didn’t have any money, so Lindon reasoned that it must be polite around here.

The man snorted, still not looking at them. “Who’s your brother? If you have no money, then shoo. Shoo.” He waved them away with one hand.

Lindon could actually hear Yerin’s hand tightening on her sword hilt.

“We don’t have much money, I’ll grant you, but I’m sure we can come to an agreement,” Lindon said pleasantly. He withdrew a shadesilk bag with a portion of his leftover chips in it; he kept most of his chips inside his pack, but he typically carried twenty or thirty for small transactions. He spilled a few of the rectangular halfsilver tokens onto the man’s table.

“We’d be happy to trade, if you think these are worth a few scales.” If they weren’t, he still had the halfsilver dagger to trade. Or if halfsilver was worth nothing more than rocks here, he was sure he could find some treasure they could trade for the local currency. Even the Thousand-Mile Cloud that drifted behind them would be worth selling, if they could get a good enough price.

The man sighed. “Scales or nothing,” he said, raising his hand to brush the chips away from him.

He froze at the sight of the speckled metal, like stars stuck in silver.

His eyes bulged.

And Lindon sensed vulnerable prey.

“I think I can do you a favor, little brother,” the man said, voice straining to stay casual. “I’m sure I can lend you some scales of my own, if you’re in that much need. How about…two of your coins per a scale?”

“True and clear,” Yerin said impatiently, slapping her palm down on the table. “So that’s eight for the both of us?”

The man looked like he’d just seen gold rain from the heavens, but before he could grab the chips, Lindon had already swept them back into his bag.

“I’m sorry, elder brother, but as I said…we’re only poor travelers. I’m not sure we can part with eight of these chips. I’m certain four would be asking you to take a loss, but would five do?”

The man pointed at Yerin. “She said eight was fine! She said it!”

Lindon tightened the strings on his purse and sighed. “She did. So I’m afraid I’ll have to find another—”

The man cut him off by grabbing his arm. “Five is good enough! Five is fine!”

Lindon focused on him like a hawk sighting a rabbit. “How about three?”

This time, the man obviously realized that Lindon had caught on, because a blush ran from his cheeks down his neck. He didn’t back down, though; the value of halfsilver must be higher than Lindon had thought. “It’s hard on me, but three is fine.”

Yerin leaned her elbows on the table. “Is it, now? And you were going to let me drop eight?”

She obviously hadn’t cared before, but now the man was getting Yerin’s full attention. He shifted under that weight.

“It’s a negotiation, little sister, not worth getting upset about.”

Lindon kept his smile from growing. Now that Yerin was involved, her intimidation could only help him.

“Of course you’re right,” Lindon said, “just a negotiation.” He reached two fingers into the purse and withdrew a single halfsilver rectangle. “How about one of these, and you give us each a room?”

“Two keys,” the man said, snatching the chip from Lindon’s hand. Swiftly, he produced a wooden circle with a script engraved into it. Lindon recognized it as rough work, but it was probably enough to engage and disengage a basic scripted lock.

“Feel free to come back and see us later,” he said cheerily.

Lindon bowed in response, wondering by how much he’d overpaid. If he found out a single chip was worth a thousand scales, he’d weep blood.

He turned to go to his bathhouse, but Yerin rapped her knuckles on the table before she did. “There’s a good chance we won’t cross ways again,” she said. “Our School’s High Elder needs us in the Ruins at dawn. Not a man you want to ignore, hear me? Not unless you want to bleed a river.”

She laughed cheerfully, and he tried to join her. Only then did Yerin turn and follow Lindon.

“Could you explain that to me?” he asked.

“Halfsilver’s rare,” she said, “but it’s not that rare. He was looking like you were carrying phoenix feathers soaked in dragon tears.”

Finally the reality dawned on Lindon, and he shivered. “Forgive me. I was shortsighted.” If he hadn’t been so tired, and so focused on making a profit, he would have seen it immediately.

In Sacred Valley, an Unsouled carrying a fortune was begging to be robbed. Out here, a Copper was the same. He’d be lucky if they only beat him.

“Nah, it’s all settled now. His bones are rattling so hard he wouldn’t dare pick up a coin if we tossed it to him. But possibly don’t flash any more halfsilver around until we get away from here.”

Which killed his newborn plan to trade all his halfsilver for elixirs and training resources. He’d only been rich for a few seconds, and now he couldn’t even spend it.

They found a pair of shacks back-to-back. Even though Lindon could barely squeeze inside with his pack, he finally managed it, and he could hear Yerin as she stepped into her own.

He paused, looking at the center of the bathhouse, and he heard her do the same. He’d expected a tub full of cold water, maybe a simple construct for heating if they were really luxurious. Instead, a crystalline pool of water sat in the center of the ground, deep enough that it would be up to his shoulders. The ground surrounding the pool was just dirt, but the water was protected by walls of rugged white rock. It was like they’d grown a hot spring in the middle of an ordinary field.

“Is this natural?” Lindon asked, his voice carrying easily through the slats of the wood.

“No hope of that. Brought the water up somehow, I’d guess.”

Their stalls stood back-to-back, each made of boards loosely slapped together. They did nothing to stop the sounds from her side: the rattle of her sword as she set it aside, and the steady rustle of cloth as she slipped out of her clothing.

He lowered his eyes to the ground though there was nothing to see, his cheeks heating. Most of the girls in Sacred Valley were promised to someone from an early age, so it would have been inappropriate for any besides his sister to spend time with Lindon. Once he was known as Unsouled, none even wanted to.

Now that he was hearing a girl undress, he was irrationally afraid that she would read his thoughts. He intentionally rattled his pack as he set it down to the side, unlacing his robe in determination to act normal. He shouldn’t be flustered by something this petty; he was almost sixteen years old.

He froze with his outer robe down to his waist as he realized she could hear him even more clearly. She had an Iron body; from this distance, she could probably hear him blink. His blush became a fire in his cheeks, and he snuck out of the rest of his clothes like a thief picking his way through a field of traps.

Mercifully, Yerin remained quiet even when he tried to lower himself into the water and gasped at the heat. It wasn’t hot enough to burn him, or so he hoped, but it felt strange and hot against his skin. He wondered how long it had been since he’d had a hot bath, and that thought was enough to get him to slide into the stone-edged pool.

It was deeper than it was wide, so he was practically standing up to his shoulders in warm water, but he still let out a deep sigh of relief. As layers of dirt floated away, the heat sunk deep into tired muscles. He leaned his head against the grass behind him, letting his eyes close.

Yerin's voice came almost as soon as he had closed his eyes. “Sorry we're not getting beds.”

“Hm?” He was so tired, the words almost didn't make sense.

“Beds. You miss your house, true? I get it. We could have stayed with the Jai, it just scrapes me raw to bend to their tricks.”

Lindon couldn't deny some regret that he hadn't been able to sleep indoors for once, but letting the Jai clan do whatever they wanted seemed like the worse option. Even if they had nothing but good intentions, Yerin had been right that their actions weren't honorable.

“You have no reason to apologize to me,” Lindon said. “Without you, I'd be a raw meat in the middle of a wolf pack. If you told me to sleep outside for the rest of my life, I'd do it without a complaint.”

She was silent for a minute or two after that, so he had no idea how she'd taken those words. Maybe she didn't believe him.

When she spoke again, she sounded flustered, though that could have been his imagination. “Well, if you can recall, the Jai clan guy mentioned a Blackflame Empire. I don't know it, but the world's big. There's bound to be some regular villages around here. People who haven’t flocked to the strange and deadly ruins. Tomorrow we can skip it, move on, find some friendlier places.”

“Where will we find somewhere better than this?” Jai Sen's story of the spear had caught him up in its mystery, and being surrounded by Gold martial artists was inspiring. Even the Transcendent Ruins fascinated him; they were a dark and deadly labyrinth left behind by powerhouses of an ancient world. Who knew what treasures lay inside?

If they left, he’d be giving up any chance of finding something for himself.

“It's not comfortable here,” Lindon continued, “I certainly agree with you on that, but why would we leave? Sacred artists from all over are gathered; maybe one of them knows some pure madra techniques. Maybe they could teach me a second Path, or even take me inside the Ruins...” His imagination was spinning at full speed, showing him images of the endless benefits he could gather inside the pyramid.

“You think it's so easy to learn a Path, do you? You even want to try for two, like you’re the first person with that idea.”

Lindon was trying not to feel too embarrassed about his Sacred Valley education, but Yerin didn’t make it easy. “I know I could be wrong, but it was my understanding that most people don’t have two cores.”

“Sure, you have an advantage in that respect. Same way somebody with no legs has the advantage of saving on shoes. But I’ve got one core packed full of sword madra; why don’t I learn a second sword Path? I’d learn twice as much.”

Lindon hadn’t considered that, but now that he thought of it, he wondered why she didn’t.

“First step, I’d have to find somebody to teach me, and they wouldn’t. They know I’m on another Path; they won’t teach me their secrets. That’s handing a sword to your enemy’s son. He won’t thank you for it, and he might turn it against you someday.”

“But if you could find someone to teach you—”

“Still wouldn’t do it. Say I have a job that takes all my time. Just because I want some more money doesn’t mean I’m going to go out and find a second job. Sure I’ll make more, but that doesn’t leave much room for sleeping.” Water splashed around on her side of the dividing wall. “Besides, one Path is enough danger for my taste. I didn't get my scars because I'm so bad at needlepoint, if you hear my meaning.”

He had wondered about her scars in the past. They were too regular, too smooth, so that they looked as though they'd been left by razors. He assumed she'd gotten them from training her Endless Sword technique, and it seemed he'd been right.

“I'm not afraid of a little more pain,” he said. That wasn't entirely true, but he was prepared to endure whatever he had to in order to travel farther down the path of the sacred arts.

“You've had one taste at Copper, and you're thirsty for the whole bottle? Let me tell you, I had the same thoughts as you when I heard about the spear. You know how many sword artists there are in the world? There's enough Path manuals to pave the streets from here to Phoenix Height. If I could take their power by beating them, drain sword Remnants and stealing their power with that spear...I might even reach my master, someday. It draws me. But I don't chase prey I know I'll never catch.”

It somewhat hurt, having his dreams punctured one by one, but he gave her words the full consideration they deserved. She wasn't one to give up lightly—Yerin was the person who stood against the entire Heaven's Glory School and prepared to die rather than retreat from battle. If she wanted to skirt this one, it meant she really believed there was nothing to gain here.

But something about that stuck in him like a needle beneath the skin. He reached over, grabbing a smooth wooden medallion next to his pack: his badge. The character in the center glared at him, as it had every single day for the last eight years. Empty.

“I need something, Yerin, and this is where I can get it. I can finally feel the aura all around me, even now, like I'm lost in endless power...and I can't touch any of it. I need a Path to teach me how. It's like I'm dying of poison, and I'm drowning in a sea of the antidote.”

“You think people just accept any disciple that asks?” Yerin sounded angry now. “You think they teach Paths to anybody? No one will take you, no one will teach you, not until you're worth something. That's the steel truth of it, and you'd best swallow it now.”

The bath was starting to feel uncomfortably hot.

“I can get a faction to accept me,” Lindon said. Yerin's doubt cut him, but he knew his own abilities. There were enough different Paths represented here that he had to be able to find a way in somewhere.

“Are your ears just for decoration? If I say it's hard, it's hard. If a School does take you, they'll nail your feet to the ground. They don't want their precious disciples wandering out, taking their secrets with them. That's years, years, stuck in one place by yourself, because you can bet they won't take me in.”

“Then you can leave!” Lindon said, and he regretted saying it even before the words emerged. He tried to control the damage immediately. “Of course, I wish you wouldn't. It's not...I would like you to stay with me, but I wouldn't want to burden you. You're already finished with your promise to me, so there's nothing...”

It was at that point that he realized he was digging himself a deeper grave, and decided to put the shovel down.

She was silent for so long that Lindon started to overheat. He reached for the paper-wrapped bar of gritty soap that he'd brought with him from home. While he scrubbed himself down, he kept one ear open for Yerin's response.

She remained quiet.

Finally, when he'd rinsed himself and begun putting his clothes on—slowly, to give her as much time as possible to respond—Yerin spoke.

“Let's not go charting any courses yet. We'll find somewhere to spend the night first.” The words sounded dead, so Lindon responded with forced cheer.

“Of course! I wasn't planning on making any decisions tonight.”

At that moment a shadow passed in front of his stall, and footsteps came to a halt in the grass.

“Little sister, little brother,” came the voice of the bathhouse attendant, “it would be best if the two of you finished soon. You're welcome to return any time you like, of course, but it seems as though there will be some trouble...”

A smack echoed around the bathhouse grounds, like the slap of wood on wood, and the attendant sighed.

“...very soon. If you don't have ties to either the Fishers or the Sandvipers, I'd recommend you hurry.”

Lindon tugged on the rest of his clothes, slipped the pack onto his back, and pulled on his badge. When he pushed his way out of the bathhouse, Yerin stood in front of him. Her hair hung limp and wet as well, and she was still tightening the thick red rope that served her in place of a belt.

She tied it into a wide bow, then twisted the whole mass around so that the bow hung behind her. All the while, she kept her eyes off her hands and on Lindon.

The silence was painful. He felt as though he should say something, but what he settled on was, “Shall we go see what's happening?”

“I can't recommend that,” the attendant said. “It's a hornet's nest over there.” He scratched at the back of his right hand, and Lindon saw a bright red circle there. A Goldsign. So even the servants in a place like this were stronger than anyone in Sacred Valley.

Yerin met Lindon's gaze and nodded. “Won't be hard to find them, at least.” She turned and walked off without acknowledging the attendant again.

For his part, Lindon bowed to the man with his fists pressed together before he followed Yerin. The Thousand-Mile Cloud trailed after him, dragged along on an invisible leash of thin madra.

The loud noises had been joined by raised voices, with two groups arranged on the road outside of the bathhouse. One group was wearing furs, and each had a bright green lizard-creature attached to one arm. These Remnants, or parasites, or Goldsigns—whatever they were—acted independently from their host, hissing and spitting at the enemies opposite them, though they never left. Maybe they were attached somehow.

The other group must have been the Fishers, based on the attendant's words. Most of them were dressed in clothes that would have been considered poor even in Sacred Valley: threadbare brown robes, sandals on the edge of breaking, woven reed hats with wide brims that would protect against harsh sunlight. Some of them wore them even now, after dark, though a few more had strapped the hats to their backs. Each of them carried the same weapon, which Lindon had noticed before—a wide crescent blade on a hilt, like a sword that had been bent into the shape of a hook.

One of the Sandvipers reached up and pulled another board away from a building. Like most construction in the Five Factions Alliance, this place was slipshod and half-finished, and it looked like it was only one or two boards away from collapsing. Clearly, the man had done this before, judging by the pile of wood next to the half-disassembled building.

“...we're just passing the time as we wait here,” the Sandviper said casually, peeling another board away from the structure. The whole hut groaned. “If we don't have anything to call us away, we might as well stay a while longer.”

A tall woman stepped up as the representative of the Fishers. Unlike the others, she carried two of those bladed hooks, one in her hand and the other on her back. A sneer gave her a twisted, malicious cast. “While you're waiting here, maybe I'll go back home. I made some new friends today, and they have all sorts of interesting stories to tell us about you.”

The lead Sandviper's face contorted until it looked like hers, and he stepped forward himself. In a flicker of motion so fast that Lindon almost didn't catch it, a pair of long knives appeared in each of his hand. Vivid green madra coiled around each blade. “Give me my miners back, and we can let this go here.”

“If you want to give me my brother's eye back, then we can—”

A new voice, quiet and even, sliced through the argument like a razor. “What is this?”

The Sandvipers parted like a crowd of puppies before a wolf. The first detail Lindon could see of this new figure was a spearhead, which gleamed bright even in the light from the smoky torches. The shaft was red, worked with detail that looked like it may have been script, but the weapon hardly attracted attention compared to the man who carried it.

He was roughly as tall as Lindon, but thinner, so that his build matched that of his spear. He wore ordinary dark robes, like more than half the sacred artists Lindon had seen that day, but he wore something they did not: long strips of red cloth, wrapped tightly around his head. It looked as though he'd tried to bandage himself for grievous injuries to the skull, but his wounds had bled through.

Every one of the strips of cloth was covered, without exception, in what was unmistakably script. Even if Lindon had been close enough to make out the script in detail, he likely still wouldn't have been able to tell what it did.

Perhaps it had some intimidating effect on onlookers, because everyone grew quiet at the masked stranger's approach. The Sandvipers shut their mouths like children before a parent, and the Fishers had all reached for their weapons. Even the few handful of bystanders who had stuck by to watch the confrontation, like Lindon, did not dare to utter a word.

Except Yerin. “He's strong,” she said to Lindon, though even she kept her comment to barely above a whisper.

The stranger stopped at the lead Sandviper, who drew himself and saluted over his fists. “Brother Jai Long,” the Sandviper said, “these Fishers captured some of our miners on their return from the Ruins. We wanted to at least recover the scales, in order to save face for the Sandviper sect.”

Another member of the Jai clan, Lindon noted. And once again in the company of Sandvipers. Those men and women at the gate hadn't just been Jai Sen's friends, then; their factions were close allies. He wasn't sure if that fact would be worth anything, but he tucked it away nonetheless.

“For the Sandviper sect,” Jai Long repeated softly. “Who was responsible for the missing mining team?”

“Ah, that is...I was responsible for guarding them, but the Fishers sent too many for me to handle on my own.”

“Then you were both careless and weak. You have lost respect for yourself and for the sect, and the young chief will punish you accordingly.”

The Sandviper man's hands curled into fists. He straightened his back, glaring. “Then I will hear as much from Kral's own mouth. He does not need an outsider speaking for him.”

Despite Lindon's expectations, Jai Long did not grow angry. He tilted his head back, looking up at thick, black branch hanging over the street. “I suppose he doesn't.”

A man jumped from the branch, landing with knees slightly bent as though he'd hopped off of a curb. It looked so easy. So natural.

The Sandvipers backed away at the sudden appearance of this man, who wore fine black furs and held his chin so high it looked as though he were about to issue a royal decree. He stared at the lead Sandviper like a emperor looking down upon a criminal.

Here was yet another sacred artist who could casually do the impossible, whose very presence overwhelmed lesser Golds.

“Young chief Kral,” the Sandviper greeted him, stuttering a little and bowing even more deeply than he had for Jai Long. “I intended no disrespect to you.”

“When you disrespect my friend, Jai Long, you dirty my honor,” Kral pronounced. Like Jai Long, he seemed to have no need to raise his voice to transfix the whole street. “How will you make amends?”

The Sandviper man dropped to his knees before Jai Long, bowing until his head hit the dirt. “My eyes were blind, honored Jai Long. I will never—”

Jai Long kicked him in the shoulder. The sound rang out in the night, even louder than the wood-on-wood impacts earlier, but the man wasn't visibly affected. He raised his head, confused.

“My pride is not worth our time,” Jai Long said. “Stand up.”

The man staggered to his feet, and abruptly Kral grinned. The smile transformed him, turning him from a haughty prince into a mischievous boy. He threw one arm around the man's shoulders.

“He says all's well, so it's well,” Kral said, patting the man on the back. “Now, what exactly are our friends the Fishers doing out here?”

He looked to the other camp as he said that, friendly grin still in place, but the green serpent on his arm hissed loudly.

The woman in charge of the Fishers held a hook in each hand now. She took an aggressive step forward, brandishing a weapon, but neither Jai Long nor Kral reacted. “This is our territory. What's strange is your presence.”

“Territory?” Without removing his arm from the Sandviper man's shoulders, Kral turned to Jai Long. “Is the camp divided into territories?”

“Not officially.”

“See?” Kral said to the woman. “Nothing official. So what I choose to believe is that my subordinates were walking back to the mines, tired after a hard day's work, and they were ambushed by some thieves looking for easy pickings.”

The Fisher woman turned red. “You dare to—”

“And these thieves,” Kral continued, riding over her words, “were courageously captured by you Fishers, who are now eager to return our stolen property to us. Like the young heroes that you are.”

The woman stopped, uncertain.

“How many scales did they take?” Kral asked the man under his arm.

“Sixty-two, young chief,” the man said nervously.

Kral leaned a little closer. “How many?”

“...sixty-two?”

Kral sighed. “How many stolen scales are these Fishers going to return to you?”

At last, the young man caught the point. “At least one hundred scales, young chief.”

Releasing him, Kral spread both hands. “See what an opportunity for goodwill we have here? Return the stolen one hundred scales to us now, and we'll trust your honor that the miners will be back in our camp come dawn.”

The Fisher woman gave a crooked smile that had no humor in it. “It’s the law of the Wilds, Sandviper. You take whatever you can keep. If you were too weak to keep it…”

Kral's smile faded as though it had never been, and he drew an awl from beneath his furs with each hand. The heavy spikes gleamed with green light. “I have a sudden urge for some exercise. Will you oblige me, sister Fisher?”

Jai Long clapped a hand on his shoulder. “We've spent too long on this, young chief. Sister Fisher, we have other work to be about, as do you. Let our stolen property serve as a down payment for you to deliver this message, because our other messengers have yet to reach your sect: the Arelius family is coming. In no more than a month, their Underlord will take all prizes from us, and we will be left with only scraps.”

The Fisher turned, exchanging glances with someone in the crowd behind her. “We'd heard rumors,” she said.

“They are more than rumors,” Jai Long said. He produced a blue-and-white banner, which unfurled as he held it out in front of him. In the center loomed a single black crescent moon. “A Cloud Hammer sect long-runner returned bearing this, only a day gone. If Arelius hurries, they could be here in two weeks. At most, a month. Send word to your Fisher Ragahn that if we do not share the meal now, none of us will see a crumb.”

The man turned, red-wrapped face expressionless, though Lindon did catch a glimpse of gleaming eyes between the strips of cloth. At least he didn't have the power to see through his mask; that would have been too inhuman.

The Fisher woman's next words were less welcome than a stone through a pane of glass. “Carry the message of a Sandviper worm?” She spat on the ground. “I'd rather cut out my own tongue.”

Jai Long froze with his back to her. Slowly, he lifted his spear from his shoulder and grasped it in both hands. Beside him, Kral took a step to one side, chuckling.

“Is this your official response as a representative of the Fisher sect?” Jai Long asked, voice colder than steel in winter.

“This is my response,” she said with a sneer, and whipped her hook forward.

Lindon didn't see how it happened, but the blade detached from the hilt as she swung, but it didn't fly out wildly. The curved blade flew in a wide arc as though it were on the end of a whip—or a fisherman's line—but there was nothing visible connecting the handle to the blade. It descended toward Jai Long's neck like a headsman's axe.

The red spear spun in a blurring circle, the spearhead tracing a bright line like the tail of a falling star. His move caught the Fisher's hook, taking it out of the air and sweeping it to the ground.

When the curved blade started flying back toward the Fisher woman as though she were retracting it, Jai Long turned. He kept both hands on the haft of his spear, but now his whole air had changed. He crouched like a tiger about to pounce, and his shining spearhead was a deadly claw.

“If the Fishers will not listen to reason,” he said, “then they are not needed.”

8

As Jai Long tensed and readied his spear to attack, shadows slid like dark water down the surface of the nearby buildings. Lindon wondered for an instant what technique Jai Long had used to summon them—maybe he had cultivated shadow madra, which sounded exciting to watch—but the shadows unfolded into eight-legged silhouettes.

A dozen spiders the size of small dogs sunk from the branches above. They hung from threads that were all but invisible in the darkness, and with each fraction of a second they were closer to landing on the back of the spearman's head.

Jai Long must have sensed something wrong, because he leaped back instead of forward, his gleaming spearhead held at high guard.

The spiders stopped about head-height, dangling from their delicate strings. Yerin kept her hand on the hilt of her sword, but they were far enough away that she didn't draw it.

All of the sacred artists in the street reacted differently to the sudden appearance of the creatures, but Lindon's eyes were stuck on the spiders themselves. They were made of dim color, a gray-purple that was the next best thing to black, so at first he'd taken them for Remnants. But he could see through the joints on each of their legs, like they were puppets assembled from Remnant pieces.

More people had gathered along the roadside by this point, and now Lindon scanned from face to face, looking for a drudge. A Soulsmith might have sold this many constructs to someone else, but controlling so many at once took skill and practice. The spiders' creator was probably here, among the crowd.

Most of the witnesses looked disgusted, confused, or alarmed, save for the man with the long yellow hair that Lindon had seen before. At least, he assumed it was the same man; in a camp this size, perhaps there were many disciples of this strange Path that lightened hair color. He was wearing intricate robes of blue and white, so that the cape on his shoulders was raised and separated to resemble wings. It looked as though he'd prepared for a parade.

He met Lindon's glance with eyes of pale blue, no doubt another consequence of his Goldsign. He gave a cheery wave.

Lindon focused on him as the only individual that stood out, but he didn't see a drudge. In fact, the yellow-haired man casually scanned the crowd himself, as though waiting for the one responsible for the spiders to come out.

Only a breath or two had passed since the constructs had descended from overhead, but Lindon had already started to push his way through the crowd to look for the Soulsmith.

He stopped when an old woman drifted down the road from behind the Fishers, her body remaining perfectly still as though she rolled on wheels. He craned his neck to see why, and saw eight legs moving beneath her sacred artist's robes.

What kind of mad experiments were they up to in this Five Factions Alliance? Did Soulsmiths graft construct legs onto human beings? His mother would have called it a horrifying violation of conscience, and she would have hunted down anyone who dared to break such a taboo.

This woman was old, perhaps older than anyone he'd ever seen in his life, with gray hair tied up into a tight bun. Her face was little more than a mass of wrinkles, her body so shrunken that he might have been able to tuck her comfortably into his pack. She held her hands behind the small of her back as she drifted forward on spider's legs, and never reached for the huge bladed goldsteel hook that gleamed on her back.

When she reached the fight, she hopped down and continued on her own two feet, leaving a spider construct behind. Of course she hadn't grafted a spider's legs onto her own, that would have been crazy. That much, at least, was the same here as in Sacred Valley.

The spider she'd left behind was different than the others. It was bigger than the others, its main body lower to the ground, its legs proportionately longer. It was duller than the others, a flat gray, and it didn't seem to have a head; it looked almost like a mechanical disk with spider's legs attached to it.

This one wasn't floating, but Lindon had seen variations of his mother's own segmented brown fish often enough. Drudges didn't look like other constructs—they were duller, usually, more mechanical looking, as though they were made out of real physical parts rather than manifest madra.

This tiny woman wasn't wearing the hammer badge of a Forger, nor the crossed hammers of a Soulsmith, but even so...she was everything that Lindon had ever wanted to be. And no matter how powerful those sacred artists were, she had stopped them with nothing more than the presence of her constructs.

She scurried up to Jai Long, peering at him through eyes almost fused shut with wrinkles. “What is this? Hm? You think Fishers are your mining slaves, that you can beat us whenever you like?”

The young Fisher woman stepped forward, a hook in each hand. “Fisher Gesha, this—”

That was as far as she got before the Soulsmith, Fisher Gesha, turned and made a beckoning gesture. The young woman jerked forward as though pulled on an invisible string, pulled forward into Gesha's waiting slap.

“If I want the words of a silly girl, I will reach back a hundred years and ask myself.”

“Can she really do that?” Lindon asked Yerin, voice low. She gave him such a look that he swallowed the question.

The old woman had turned back to Jai Long, hands clasped behind her back again. “The silly girl called me for help. And I come here, expecting to see dreadbeasts by the thousand, and instead here is a boy with a bag on his head threatening my sect. Do you think that I am not needed? Hm? Do you wish to test yourself against Fisher Gesha?”

Jai Long loomed over the tiny Fisher, but Lindon was impressed when the man didn't take a fearful step back. Instead, he ground his red spear. “I was trying to send a message to the leadership of your sect. It appears I have succeeded.”

Fisher Gesha growled and gave the young man's shins a kick. She might as well have kicked a tree, for all the reaction that provoked. “Prattle prattle prattle. You have a message, tell me the message! Do I have to pull it out of your throat? Hm?”

“The Arelius family is on their way,” Jai Long said.

The Fisher froze, the statue of a thoughtful grandmother. “You have confirmed this?”

“To our satisfaction. I can have the evidence delivered to you tomorrow.”

Fisher Gesha thought for a moment longer, then turned to the tall young woman again. She was still rubbing her cheek, but Gesha leaped two feet into the air and slapped her on the other side. Then once more.

“Stupid girl! Selfish girl! Your pride is more important than the sect, is it? You think that your honor will matter when Arelius gets here? You think the Underlord will let your eyes touch his spear?”

Underlord, Lindon thought. Was that a title of respect, like ‘Patriarch’? Or was that the rank beyond Truegold?

The young Fisher woman looked as though she were teetering on the edge of tears, but her voice was clear. “I assumed their words were Sandviper lies.”

“How can a blind girl see the difference between truth and lies? You pass the words on to me, and I will tell you whether or not they are speaking wind.”

Shakily, the young woman buckled her bladed hooks onto straps on her back, then bowed over a salute to Fisher Gesha. “Your unworthy servant understands.”

“Hmph.” Gesha turned back to Jai Long. “The young are stupid. This was nothing more than an argument between children.”

Kral stepped forward before the spearman could respond. His expression was grave again, a prince negotiating with a respected enemy. “One moment, Fisher Gesha. The young woman and her friends have disrespected us gravely. They have a mining team that belongs to us, along with all the hundred scales they harvested from the Ruins today. If we do not recover our property, it will be a slap delivered to all Sandvipers.”

The young Fisher woman started to speak up, her voice indignant, but the old Soulsmith cut her off. “Was I wrong? Was this a battle between our great sects, hm? Not a childish spat? If that is so...”

From overhead, all of the spiders hissed in chorus, working their legs furiously on their strings.

“...then this old woman will keep you all company for a while.” Her face molded itself into a sketch of a smile.

This time, Jai Long was the one to reply. “We were unwise and unworthy, honored Fisher. The message is delivered, along with our respects. The Alliance will not be divided before the arrival of outsiders.”

He bowed himself back, melding into the crowd of Sandvipers. Kral waved them all away, and they seemed only too eager to leave.

The old woman grunted. “You get too strong too early, and it inflates your head,” she muttered. Then she turned back to the Fishers, leaping into the air once again to grab the leader woman's ear. “I shouldn't have to drag a married girl back to her mother once again, but we'll see what she has to say about you.”

In the trees, shadowy shapes were scuttling down branches to meld with the darkness. The Soulsmith's drudge walked after her on its eight legs until she hopped backwards on it without looking, instantly gaining over a foot in height.

Lindon followed as though pulled, absently tugging the Thousand-Mile Cloud along behind him. Yerin seized his sleeve. “Where is it you're going?”

“I'm going to see if she needs a...well, 'disciple' is a strong word. So is 'apprentice.' Maybe she needs someone to sweep up her foundry.”

“Be careful,” Yerin said, heavy with irony. “You aim that arrow too high, it'll fall back down and catch you in the eye.

Lindon faced her, holding her lightly by the shoulders and speaking as he would to his own sister. “I need someone to guide me. Need. I can't wait for Iron, because without a proper cycling technique, I don't know when I'll get there. I know you don't want to join up, but I have to.”

Something dark passed through Yerin's eyes, like the look his father got after spending too long in drink and old stories, and Lindon hurried to get his next words out. “If it's not too much for me to ask, I'd like you to come with me.”

The cloud left her, leaving confusion. “To the Fishers?”

“If I can convince Fisher Gesha, yes. If not, I'm sure there are other Soulsmiths somewhere around. You won't be a part of their sect, and I respect that. But can you at least...stay for a while?”

He felt as though everyone around could hear every word he spoke, and he imagined their gazes boring into him from every direction. Still, he bowed deeply in supplication. “Forgiveness; this one has no right to ask it of you, but he asks still.”

Every second that passed was another bead of sweat down his neck, but he remained stuck in that position. The witnesses were beginning to whisper, but he closed them out.

It was truly selfish to tie Yerin down with him, but his chances were infinitely better with her than without. And if he was honest with himself, the thought of being on his own in such a massive collection of Gold sacred artists was terrifying. They could kill him by accident, and no one would ever know what happened to him.

She pushed on his shoulder. “Straighten up. Don't beg me like that, it draws attention.” When he straightened, she shifted in place and didn't meet his gaze.

“Follow the Fisher first,” she said finally. “One step before the other. Can't tell you I'm going with you if I don't know where, can I?”

That was all Lindon needed to hear. He bolted down the road toward Fisher Gesha, pack bouncing on his back. Yerin didn't run after him, but he didn't think much of that. She was the one with the Iron body; she could catch up whenever she wanted.

* * *

Following Lindon and Yerin had been even more rewarding than Eithan had hoped; he'd gotten to see an entertaining little show as well. A few sips of rice wine from an untended store shelf, and he had actually enjoyed himself. When the spider woman showed up, it was the perfect twist.

He'd sensed her coming a mile away, so he hadn't been surprised, but then he never was. He had learned to enjoy the reactions of others.

On which topic, he'd been especially delighted with the reactions of his two prospective recruits. Yerin had kept her hand on her sword and her eyes on the biggest threats—Kral, Jai Long, the young Fisher woman whose name no one had mentioned. When the spiders appeared, she had started gathering sword madra from all over the street, so subtly that no one but Eithan had noticed. He was now absolutely certain that she was the Sage of the Endless Sword's disciple, and as such he felt a brief flash of gratitude toward the Sage in the afterlife.

It must be difficult knowing that you had cut and polished a diamond only to have it decorate someone else's crown, but such were the twisting vagaries of life.

Lindon was another pleasant surprise. He had watched the proceedings with undisguised fascination, a hunger burning so hot that Eithan was somewhat tempted to warm his palms against him. He would have been treated badly for his madra deficiency, that wasn't a difficult inference to make, but such mistreatment could have any number of disastrous effects on a young man. It seemed as though Lindon hungered for self-improvement rather than revenge, and he wasn't cringing or sniveling. Eithan could certainly work with that.

Such drive could and probably would get the boy into trouble, but it was also the most indispensible ingredient in taking him past Gold. No one walked far on any Path without both resolve and desire.

Coupled with his pure madra, twin cores, and broad frame, Eithan was wondering if he could have designed a better recruit. The boy was simply a blank canvas, waiting for the brush of a master.

Well, there weren't any masters around, but Eithan would do his best anyway.

He didn't follow Lindon as the boy hurried after the Soulsmith, Gesha. She wouldn't want to take him in as her apprentice, but she had a soft heart, and Lindon would—in his own, innocent way—squeeze that until he got what he wanted. Nor did he follow Yerin as she came to her own decision, though either of those paths promised certain entertainment for him.

Instead, he let a whim lead him and followed the Sandvipers.

Kral and Jai Long were locked in a conversation, and none of their subordinates were eager to interrupt. Eithan skipped along behind, touching down with one foot and using an Enforcer binding to launch himself far enough that he almost appeared to be drifting through the air. When he landed, he simply kicked off on the other foot.

Every eye turned to him, which was to be expected with his bright blond hair, flashy movement technique, and stunning good looks. He was better at stealth than anyone expected, but it had never been his strongest approach. He preferred walking in the front door, preferably with a parade behind him and trumpets in front.

One old man gaped at him, jaw dropping foolishly until his lit pipe was ready to fall out. Eithan snatched it from him as he passed, wiping the pipe carefully on his own sleeve—no need to expose himself to infection, even if only the bravest disease would dare to invade his body—and taking a puff himself.

It was a locally grown leaf, and somehow it tasted to Eithan of autumn shadows. He couldn't entirely explain that. What did autumn shadows taste like? He wasn't sure, but that was the first thought that popped into his head, so he went with it.

Finally, his last leap took him close to the Sandvipers, so he settled to a normal stride and walked alongside them, puffing at the pipe.

“...won't work with us,” Kral was saying. He was appreciably strong for his age, though flaws in his technique and character meant that he would never make it past Truegold without a truly heaven-defying run of good fortune.

“They might not,” Jai Long allowed. This one, on the other hand, had a much better foundation. He could make it to Underlord someday, or beyond. If he did it fast enough, even Eithan might have to bow to him. He smiled at the thought, keeping the pipe clenched in his teeth.

“We don't need their assistance,” the Jai exile continued. “We need them to stay out of our way. Even if the Fishers do work against us, they will at least stay quiet about it for the sake of appearance. That's all the space we need.”

“We're finished with the maps, then?”

“Within the week, but we'll need more miners.”

“You'll have them,” Kral said.

Eithan found their whole way of mining fascinating. They gathered these ingenious little scripted constructs at points of heavy vital aura, then operated the script while waiting for the devices to print scales. Where he’d grown up, the process was much more artistic, but perhaps less efficient. Maybe he could bring one of these devices back, have it copied.

It was an impressive and resourceful process, even if it left the operator vulnerable.

Any aura convergence drew Remnants and sacred beasts like flies to rotting meat, and anyone operating the mining construct was helpless. Hence the guards.

So the Sandvipers had come to the conclusion that using captured prisoners was the most expedient way to gather large numbers of scales in a short period of time. The operators would die, but replacing them was cheaper than sending strong sacred artists to guard them. It wouldn't last as a long-term operation, but in the short term it was a ruthlessly efficient strategy. Eithan wondered if it had been Jai Long's idea.

Jai Long started moving casually in Eithan's direction, and Eithan saw through the young man's intentions immediately. He puffed away at his pipe as though oblivious.

When you saw everything, you usually had to pretend you didn't. It was more polite that way.

“The most we can hope for is a temporary truce,” Jai Long said from behind his scripted mask. “This is a game we can win alone, but not if we allow enemy agents to do as they like.”

The spear strike had quite a powerful technique behind it. If Eithan let it land, it might even split through his chest and skewer him on the rough wooden wall at his back.

But he felt the technique build in the accelerated cycle of Jai Long's madra, in the quick breathing as the young man ramped up his spirit. The muscles in his arm tightened, as his whole body moved in concert like a finely tuned instrument. Eithan saw the move before it was born, felt it in the thousand webs of invisible power that passed through everything around him.

Jai Long was very powerful, Eithan couldn't deny that. But he'd found that people tended to overrate raw power.

The spear passed over Eithan's head, trailing light, as Eithan sank casually to a crouch. A ribbon of smoke traced his descent, even as the smoldering leaf in the pipe's bowl went dark.

He used his finger to tamp it down, taking a half-step to the left. The spear passed to his right. Then, before Jai Long could execute a technique with more madra behind it, Eithan walked into the crowd of Sandvipers.

One of them had a light.

“Forgive me,” he said to the young woman with the scripted bit of wire in her pocket. He held out his pipe. “Would you mind?”

The Sandvipers scattered as Jai Long swept his spear in an arc, glowing with light to rival the moon and enough force to split a tree's trunk. Eithan followed the young woman's motion as she threw herself out of the way of the technique, dipping a hand into the pocket of her fur coat and withdrawing the metal wire.

Jai Long's deadly madra passed over his back. He gave a flick of his spirit, and the end of the wire sparked to life.

He straightened as he used the tiny device to light his pipe, sighing as the leaf caught. Eithan blew a ring of smoke in Jai Long's direction and then tossed the scripted wire back to its owner.

“Thank you.” To Jai Long, he spoke out of genuine admiration. “Your spear is everything I'd heard it would be. The Jai clan must have been blinded when it came to you, that's my honest opinion. Casting you out because of your Remnant. Give them a chance, and I'm sure they'll take you back.”

Eithan had a general policy of being encouraging whenever possible, though he'd found that it wasn't always taken in the spirit he'd meant it.

Kral, for example, had darkened as though he was prepared to pass a death sentence. He cradled a pair of awls that crawled with corrosive green madra, brandishing them like a couple of stingers. The Sandvipers spread out, entrapping Eithan in a formation they'd obviously practiced. The pale blue aura of the air began to crawl with toxic green; they were calling up some kind of poison aura, probably to trap him in a deadly fog.

They'd reacted quickly. He favored them with a half-bow of respect.

But the poison fog would ruin the flavor of his pipe, so he would have to decline.

Eithan turned to Jai Long, who—unlike the members of the Sandviper sect—had no special body to protect him from the incoming poison. The man with the red-wrapped features had paused with spear cocked in one hand, regarding Eithan.

“Who are you?” he asked.

“Ordinarily, you would ask that question before trying to stab me with your spear,” Eithan said, blowing out another mouthful of smoke.

“You've been following us.”

“You're more interesting than most of the people I follow,” Eithan pointed out. “And there is a purpose to this, despite what you may think.”

Jai Long readied his spear. “I am Jai Long, attendant of the Sandviper sect.”

Kral stepped out. “Kral, heir to the Sandvipers.”

The spearman looked at his friend, ready to protest—it wasn't entirely honorable for a sacred artist to fight two against one, but that was the only way this would hold any interest for Eithan.

He spread a hand in a generous gesture. “You're welcome to come at me both at once. I don't have anything else to do for the evening.”

Kral gripped his awls tighter, and Eithan could practically hear him refusing out of general stubbornness. He sighed.

“Fine then. I spit on the honor of the Sandvipers, that pathetic collection of cowards and cripples. You don't have a spine between you, you only use poison because it takes courage to face an enemy in battle, and I could improve on a Sandviper warrior by stapling a snake to a scarecrow's arm. Also your mothers were dogs and your fathers were blind, and so on. Fight me.”

Some of the less mature among them were actually angry. Kral in particular was growing hot around the collar; he wouldn’t be used to people challenging him to his face. The majority of them were either confused or looking for a trap. Jai Long glanced around the road as though to find Eithan's companions.

“I'm alone,” Eithan said. “No need to soil yourselves.”

That was enough to make Jai Long level his spear again, if only in reservation. “If you wanted to kill yourself, you didn't have to bother me.”

Eithan blew smoke in his eyes.

There were eight enemies. Three women, five men. Of those, only Kral and Jai Long were at the Highgold level; the rest were Lowgold, though that didn't mean he could entirely discount them. A Sandviper's venom would do to flesh what a live coal did to a sheet of thin paper, and he was surrounded by toxic aura now; a quick scan of the area with his spirit showed him an ocean of malicious green. All the Sandviper Goldsigns hissed at him, green madra rolling quickly through seven sets of madra channels.

And though he toyed with them, Highgold was actually a fairly impressive stage of advancement. He reminded himself of this even as he enjoyed the smoky taste of autumn shadows.

A power like the one he'd inherited from his father's line tended to make one careless. Superior awareness made him difficult to hit, but did nothing to protect him otherwise. He had to remind himself that there was a reason why people usually felt fear.

But ultimately, even his own reminder did nothing to make him more alert. Why should it? He was born careless, after all.

And this was fun.

A twisting line of starlight represented the Jai clan's spear techniques, and he stepped forward in between one thrust and another. Needles of green fell from above him as a Sandviper tried to drop Forged spikes on top of him, but he brushed into the crowd and the sacred artist had to cancel his attack or risk impaling his friends.

Smoke trailed behind him as Eithan waded deeper into the crowd, hands in his outer pockets. An awl pierced where one Sandviper expected his head would be, but it passed harmlessly through yellow hair as Eithan sped that step up a fraction. A sword slashed at his ribs, but his next stride carried him slightly to the right, and the sword caught another Sandviper in the ribs.

Venomous aura swelled and burst, leaving a cloud of poisonous green fog around him, but he'd already slid to one side, letting that cloud stop Jai Long in his tracks, preventing him from thrusting a spear through Eithan's back.

Though Eithan walked evenly through the pack, puffing contentedly on his pipe, every move the Sandvipers made either struck an ally or blocked another's approach. He moved no faster than they did, simply slid into gaps that his web of madra showed him would be there.

To them, he must have looked like a ghost drifting through.

To him, it was as simple as a child following his father's footsteps in the mud. While enjoying a nice pipe.

Eithan emerged from the other side of his eight opponents. The two Highgolds looked more astonished than the rest of them, as though they'd grasped truths the others hadn't, although that could be because the Lowgolds were mostly groaning in pain at wounds inflicted by the others.

Pulling the pipe from his mouth, Eithan waved. “My apologies, ladies and gentlemen. If it's any consolation to you, I will repay you for this.”

Kral shouted and gathered his madra, preparing to use a broader technique, perhaps the best one of which he was currently capable. Eithan turned to him with interest.

Jai Long stopped his friend with a hand. “What is your name, elder brother?”

'Elder' brother might have been a bit much, in Eithan's opinion. Surely he didn't look much older than Jai Long himself did. But it was an expression of respect around here, so he smiled. “They call me Eithan.”

“Eithan. If for whatever reason we have offended you, I will take responsibility. Don't let petty issues come between you and the Sandviper sect, not when we could work together for mutual benefit.”

Eithan watched Jai Long's dark eyes through the gap in the man's wrappings. He was shrewd, for his age. He'd go far.

“I have nothing but respect for the honorable Sandviper sect,” Eithan said, which wasn't entirely truthful. “I sought a diversion, and you diverted me, for which I thank you.” He bowed with a flourish of his stolen pipe.

Kral pointed an awl at him. “My father returns soon, and he will tolerate no disrespect to our name.”

“I'm sure he won't,” Eithan said, already casting his mind out to the rest of the camp. Surely there must be some other opportunity for amusement somewhere. “Until we meet again, gentlemen.”

He didn't turn around, but Jai Long bowed to his retreating back. There was a wise man.

Kral glowered and prepared a Striker technique that hissed and spat with green fury on the edge of his hand before he growled in frustration and let it die.

So there was a little wisdom in him too.

9

The Fishers led Lindon back to a tall building that looked like more of a permanent structure than anything around it. He thought of it as a barn, wide and tall with broad doors, and Gesha's spiders scuttled up its walls and inside through holes in the roof.

“I'll deal with you tomorrow, girl,” she said to the young woman as they reached the barn doors. “Be here at dawn, or I'll come root you out with my hook.” The razor edge of her curved goldsteel blade gleamed. The tall woman paled and babbled something, then took the slightest excuse to hurry off. Her friends joined her, casting fearful glances back at the Soulsmith.

Gesha stood there, hands behind her back, like a pocket-sized elder. The spider legs of her drudge worked impatiently against the dirt, but she didn't so much as shift.

Lindon glanced around, looking for some reason why she was just staring at the barn doors. Did she expect them to open themselves? Was she waiting for her spiders to open them for her? Or was she waiting for someone?

With his height, the pack on his back, and the rust-red cloud following him around, Lindon knew he cut a recognizable figure in the darkness. He backed up a step, though he was far enough away that he shouldn't have bothered the Soulsmith. He watched, waiting for some clue, as five minutes turned into ten.

Finally, the old woman barked out, “Do you know what happened to the last man who kept me waiting? Hm? I married him. That's a threat.”

Lindon kept looking around, waiting for someone else to step out of the darkness, before she turned and speared him with a glare over one shoulder. “Well? Do they only teach manners to short Coppers, and not tall ones?”

He rushed a bow over fists pressed together. “This one apologizes for his lack of manners, honored elder. This one was ignorant, and did not realize he was being observed.”

A snort ripped out of the tiny woman. “'This one,' is it? Hurry up, get closer. I may have eyes everywhere, but this pair doesn't work like they used to.”

Lindon hurried over, steadying his pack as he ran. He'd planned on doing something drastic to attract the Fisher's attention, but she was inviting him over on her own. She'd noticed him, and that could only be a good thing.

He bowed again when he reached her, both to show respect and to give him an excuse to lean down so she could get a close look at his face. She squinted at him for a moment through a mask of wrinkles, then patted her bun.

“Are you the tallest five-year-old in the world?” she asked suddenly.

“No, honored elder. This one's training was somewhat delayed.”

“This one, that one. If you say that again, I'll spin your Copper head around on your neck. Now, tell me your name.”

“Wei Shi Lindon, honored elder.”

She grunted. “Does the Wei clan teach you to skulk around as you make requests of an elder? Hm? Are you from a clan of skulkers, Shi Lindon?”

Honestly, he was. The Wei specialized in illusions, and as a result typically hid and waited until they could take advantage of the battle. They fought like snowfoxes, not like tigers, but he doubted that answer would satisfy her.

“Apologies, honored elder. This...I would like to offer my humble services to you, in any way I can.”

She glared at him, her spider's legs clacking against stones hidden in the dirt. “Humble? Humble is an apprentice who can't make a levitation plate out of cloud madra. If a Copper could offer me humble services, he'd be a genius. Are you a genius, Copper?”

He wished she would stop calling him that, but he wasn't about to say so. “My mother was a Soulsmith, and I worked as her assistant since the day I learned to cycle. I know my knowledge is deficient and paltry, but I know many of the basic scripts, I can dissect a Remnant into its functional components, I can perform basic maintenance—”

Gesha made a 'tsst' sound and threw up her hands. “You don't think I have enough to worry about? Go. Go! If you bother me again, I'll set the spiders on you.”

Lindon bowed to her, projecting compliance. “Of course, honored elder. You're tired, and I'm keeping you from your rest.”

In an uncanny display of mind-reading, Gesha said, “I'd best not see you here in the morning, waiting for me to wake up!”

That had been his plan, in fact. A bead of sweat rolled across his forehead. “I would not disrespect the honored elder's wishes that way. But if I may be so rude as to offer one last explanation—”

She flicked fingers at him, and a spider ran down the barn door toward him. Not her drudge, on which she still stood, but an ordinary construct that was probably intended to do nothing but observe and report as commanded.

It was made of jointed purple madra, and it ran on the door as easily as on the ground. Its head was featureless except for a couple of mandibles, which opened as it chirped at him. It sounded more like a bird than a snake, which he hadn't expected. Hadn't it hissed earlier, or was that his imagination?

He dropped his pack to free his shoulders and drew the halfsilver dagger. The constructs back in Sacred Valley had been deadly if directed, but predictable enough if unguarded. But this was the product of a Gold Soulsmith at the head of a sect full of Golds. It might drill its legs through his flesh, leaving little spurting holes, or tear into him with its mandibles, or leave him spun up into a cocoon to decorate the ceiling of the nearby barn...

One of its legs hitched and it almost stumbled, its gait uneven, before it righted itself and continued on. A stumble meant a defect. It must be old, in need of maintenance. That was a weakness he could exploit.

But it was close now, so close that he could hear its sharp feet pricking into the dirt, and that one stumble no longer looked like a weakness at all. Sometimes constructs didn't perform as they should. Maybe the ground had been more treacherous than it looked. It was a slim chance to gamble on.

Then it had reached his feet, and Lindon moved.

He seized the pack from the ground beside him with one hand, holding it like a shield as he flopped belly-first on top of the spider-construct.

The spider tried to scuttle out of the way, but he caught it on the edge, imprisoning it beneath his pack. Its legs flailed, and it gave an angry chirp, but it was pinned. He had it.

His body surged down suddenly, as though he'd grown twice as heavy or someone was standing on his back. His head was pulled down until his nose was all but pressed against its slick gray-purple back, and he realized the truth: the spider was pulling him in.

He didn't know how—undoubtedly it was some function of its madra, or some kind of script—but the spider was using an invisible force to pull him closer.

The halfsilver dagger was in his hand, burning to be used, but he kept it gripped in a tight fist. He'd need that option available, but he had something else to try first.

With a good deal of writhing, he squirmed forward enough to get his left hand onto the spider's back.

Then, adjusting his breathing from panic to a measured cycling technique, he fed pure madra into the construct.

Something like the Thousand-Mile Cloud was relatively simple in its construction. It was made of densely packed cloud madra, which floated. You could activate a single script-circle buried at its core in order to get it to move. It followed the direction of the operator's spirit, not any directions in its actual script, so it was a flexible but simple tool. It would never be able to fly off without active guidance.

The spider, by contrast, was an intricate clockwork of branching scripts, interlocking plates of madra, and delicate organs that must have been extracted from Remnants. His madra flowed through it, giving him a vague picture of its functions, and of the scripts that had to remain active to keep it following orders.

A spark of madra came from a crystal flask, a tiny speck of a vessel that must power this construct's operation. Using his own madra, Lindon forced the flow from that flask aside.

It didn't take much power to do so; there was no will behind that madra, so it was easily directed. He simply blocked the flow into the script, keeping it bound inside the crystal.

The spider shivered once, then collapsed. The invisible force on him vanished, leaving him panting in gulps of air.

Irregular, spiky footsteps scraped along the dirt as Gesha slid closer on her drudge, and she would arrive to find him limply hanging on her deactivated construct. He pushed himself up, running shaking fingers along the edge of the spider's leg.

He might have noticed a defect before, a place where the construct was in need of maintenance. If that was the case...

One plate of the leg made a harsh noise as his hand moved over it, crackling like thin ice. He pushed madra into it desperately, fueling it with all the force his rapidly cycling spirit could churn out.

The best way to maintain a construct's parts was to infuse it with madra of the same Path, which would keep that part fresh and new for as long as you wanted. The second best way was to purify madra through a device like a crystal flask or a specially designed script and use that instead. It took much longer, was less efficient, and resulted in less accuracy for some cases that required delicate craftsmanship. But it worked.

In fact, Lindon had only recently understood that the purity of his madra was why his mother let him work with her on her projects at all.

The leg-plate strengthened a little. Enough that it wouldn't collapse under the construct's own weight, at least, which should demonstrate his value somewhat.

He looked up to see Fisher Gesha an inch away from him, her gray bun even with his head, peering into the construct. After a second, she slapped his hand away, feeling the spider with her own fingers.

“Did you steal the Path of the Fisherman? Hm?”

“No, honored elder,” he said, though it was just a formality. If the Path of the Fisherman was what the Fishers followed—and he had a good feeling that it was—she would be able to sense that power on him if he had it. She'd only asked out of irritation.

“Then come here.” She grabbed him by the back of the neck, and he remained perfectly still. In his experience, those with Iron bodies tended to forget the fragility of those without.

She pushed him back a second later, eyes wide. The expression looked comical in her heavily wrinkled face. “You have no training?”

“No, elder.”

“No Path at all?”

“No, elder.”

“You're Copper, but you've never taken a taste of aura?”

“I was never given a Path, honored elder. I don't know how.”

Something like pity sparked in her eyes, and she patted him roughly on the back of the head. “You come from a clan of fools.”

He hesitated before protesting. “They are my family, honored elder...”

“Bah.” She made a spitting noise at that. “No family of yours. But you can make scales for me, so I'll take you.”

He searched her quickly for signs of mockery, disappointment, irritation. Anything that might indicate she was lying. “You'll teach me?”

She slapped him in the back of the head. “I'll work you until your bones are nubs, that's what I'll do for you. You won't get the secrets of the sect until you've brought enough value to us, which you'll do slowly and obediently. Is that clear enough?”

Lindon dropped to his knees, pushing his head into the dirt, blinking back sudden tears. “The disciple greets his master.”

“Stop that. I'm not your master.”

“Your disciple understands.”

“I'm going to make you do what my servants can't do, because they've advanced too far. You understand? Hm? You're lower than my servants.” She waved a hand aside, and the barn door rumbled open.

He understood that he was going to be working inside a Soulsmith's foundry. Even if he did nothing but sweep the floors, it was an opportunity for him. He'd take it. He'd take anything.

“Get in there,” she said. “Maintenance on all constructs by dawn, and don't think you'll get any sleep. If you look like you're going to finish early, I'll make another one.”

“Yes, master,” Lindon said, hurrying inside.

At last, he was going to be a Soulsmith.

* * *

As dawn's first light filtered through the blackened trees surrounding the Five Factions Alliance, Yerin returned, dragging a bright blue corpse behind her. It looked something like a crab painted onto the world in the colors of the sky, and it leaked azure light as she trudged through the outer gates and down the main street.

At her peak condition, she should have been able to run carrying something as light as this, but she felt like her bones had been filled with lead. Now that she settled down and thought, she hadn't had a real rest in...months, probably.

Even now that she'd crossed the threshold to Gold, gaining a shiny metal arm with a sword stuck on it, her body had limits. She was starting to feel them.

Didn't help that every rotten set of eyes on the way in was looking at her like she was dragging a bloody sack of dead dogs behind her. This was a camp of sacred artists, wasn't it? Couldn't be that unusual, seeing someone dragging in a Remnant's corpse.

Or maybe it was the cargo she'd slung over her shoulder that they were staring at.

It took her a handful of wrong turns to find the Fisher section of camp again, by which time she wondered if she could learn to sleepwalk on the fly. The crowd could just wash around her like a river around a boulder, and rot take them all.

Finally, she passed down a street she recognized, dragging the blue-leaking Remnant under trees that had been decorated with spider constructs the night before. It looked different in the light, like it had been dyed a different color.

She grabbed some Fisher pup about ten years old, demanding directions to Fisher Gesha. He looked like she'd popped out an extra eye—worse than that, to be true, since there were more than a few Goldsigns that gave you an extra eyeball—but he gave her rough directions.

When she followed them to a huge barn that had been slapped down in the middle of camp, she almost turned back to show the kid the flat edge of her sword. Soulsmiths required a lot of space for their work, that was true, but it was her observation that they liked to do their business in as flashy a place as possible. Last Soulsmith she visited had built a glowing palace out of shining pillars and sat on a throne of burning inhuman skulls.

But the Desolate Wilds were the back-end of nowhere, where even Sacred Valley looked civilized. Weak, but civilized. Maybe working in a barn was showing off.

She could have rapped on the door, but that would have taken energy. Instead, she simply hauled the door open.

It slid on a track, spilling sunlight into the barn.

The floor was actually covered in hay, but this was clearly the foundry of an active Soulsmith. A rainbow of severed limbs hung from hooks in the ceiling, drizzling colored sparks. Spiders hung from the rafters like bats in a cave, and stalls that should have held animals instead contained massive constructs—duller than Remnants and mysterious in construction. She didn't want to think what constructs that size had been built to do, so she didn't bother.

Lindon was sitting at a long workbench arranged down the center of the room like a feeding trough, broad shoulders bent over a half-assembled spider. He looked older than he was, until she happened to reach out and scan his spirit. Then she’d sense the pathetic strength of a Copper, which she always associated with children. It gave her a queasy feeling, like seeing a grown man with a baby’s head on his shoulders.

It was a relief to see him, though she still hadn't fully shaken her irritation. He’d insisted on joining a faction, like he knew up from down out here without her. He did need some real training, and she couldn’t give it to him, but this was still an inconvenience.

Now that she had eyes on him, her previous worries seemed simpleminded. Foolish. Of course he wasn't going to run off, leaving her alone in a sea of strangers without a single friendly soul. No reason he should.

Fisher Gesha hopped down from an upper floor that Yerin hadn't noticed, caught by the legs of the spider-construct that jutted out from under her robes. She held her hands behind her back, wrinkled face stuck in a mask of irritation. “What is this? Hm? You think we take customers now?”

“Rumor says you take in strangers for a price,” Yerin said. She hauled on the rope binding the Remnant, bringing the blue crab forward. “This is supposed to be worth something.” She'd found it by following a team of Fishers who had skirted around this Remnant as too dangerous. Not so dangerous when she dismembered it from two hundred feet away, it turned out. Now its limbs were bundled up on its carapace, and she pulled it along on its belly.

Fisher Gesha rubbed her chin with two fingers. “What do you want?”

“Shelter in the Fishers for me,” Yerin said. Then she pointed to Lindon. “Training for him. Real stuff, not this sweep-and-gather rot.”

Lindon raised one sheepish hand. “Gratitude, Yerin. I will repay you for this, but she already agreed—”

The Fisher cut him off with a gesture, eyeing the pack on Yerin's shoulder. “You have something else for me, don't you?”

Yerin slapped the bundle down on the floor, unrolling it with one foot. It was a trio of blood-spattered furs that, until a few hours ago, had been worn by Sandvipers.

“Dead?” Gesha asked, eyes sharp.

“Not quite,” Yerin said, because she had known better than to unleash three hostile Remnants in the middle of a crowd. “But I can tell you they're not happy.”

A smile creased Gesha's face. “I think we can find a space for you.”

10

The space they'd found for Yerin was among the main sect, in rooms reserved for the women of the Fishers. They’d given Lindon a spot up among the rafters, in a pile of hay only accessible by a creaking ladder. He had to sleep motionless on his back for fear of rolling off the edge, which meant he spent his nights staring up at the spider constructs dangling over his head.

But he wasn't concerned about sleep. Not when there was so much to learn.

The first day, Gesha had her drudge run over the blue crab Remnant that Yerin had brought, the construct's eight legs moving at blurring speeds to dismantle the spirit and separate it into usable parts. She handed him first a claw bigger than his whole upper body, then a pile of tubes that looked something like intestines, then a Forged blue beak. The whole mess didn't act quite right; it smelled of lightning storms and salty water rather than rotten guts, and it felt more like oiled glass than anything natural.

After he'd separated the parts into buckets, a task he'd often performed for his mother, he sealed them with scripts to prevent them from decaying and 'sent them to storage.' Which meant that he shoved the boxes into the giant closet at the back of the barn, labeled only with a code that he hoped Fisher Gesha could read.

Most of the crab would go back there, to serve as what Gesha called 'dead matter.' These would be the most mundane parts of a construct—maybe the shell of a spider, maybe the hilt of a sword—and were needed only for their physical properties.

The parts she didn't send into storage, the parts she kept out on her workbench, those were more interesting.

Lindon's mother had never allowed him to help with this part, though he'd caught glimpses through cracked doors and around corners. This was the part of being a Soulsmith that required delicacy and skill, but Fisher Gesha hacked away at these treasures like a butcher working on a slab of meat.

She started with a cluster of blue rocky madra about the size of a fist, but after a few strokes of her bladed goldsteel hook, she was left with a...

He wanted to call it a 'heart,' because that was the nearest analogy in a living being, but it didn't look like that mass of muscle that was left over after his father cleaned a deer. It was a tightly wound tangle of tubes, so that Lindon thought it might actually be one tube, so folded and looped in so many different directions that it became a knotted mass.

Gesha held it up in one hand. “We call this a binding, you see? We work with these like a blacksmith works with iron.”

“And the rest of the material? Do you still use it for constructs?” he asked, gesturing back toward the closet door. Even the dead matter of an unusual Remnant would have supplied his mother for months.

She snorted. “We fold it into different shapes, use it to build the skeletons, but the heart and soul of every construct is a binding. If we could work with bindings completely, we would. You think the rest of the Remnant is expensive? No. This is the gemstone inside the mountain.”

She tossed it to him, and he caught it in both his hands. It smelled like a rainy day.

“Put your hand over the tube at the top,” she said. “Point the other end—no, not at me! You want me to toss you out? At the floor! Now, funnel a trickle of madra into it. Just a little, do you hear me?”

Lindon did, careful not to put in too much. The binding made a tiny whining sound.

“Well, more than that,” she said.

He took deeper breaths in rhythm, cycling his madra and forcing more power into the binding. It squealed louder.

Gesha muttered to herself.

He forced all the madra he could into the twisted organ, and finally it spurted out a spray of water.

“Finally,” she said, snatching it back. She shook the binding in her hand, drawing his attention to it. “This was a Purelake Remnant, you hear me? Primary aspect of water. When this sacred artist was alive, she made water from the aura in the air, you see? This was a technique she’d mastered, and it becomes part of her spirit. Her Remnant uses this binding, does the same thing.”

Lindon's jaw almost cracked under the force of his questions.

“Her technique becomes a part of the Remnant? How? Why?”

“Patterns,” Gesha said shortly, tucking the binding away in a drawer. “You've seen scripts, haven't you? What are they, if not shapes that guide madra? What is a technique, if not weaving madra in a certain pattern?” She held out a hand. “You move the right madra, in the right way, with the right rhythm, and you get...” A pair of pliers smacked into her open hand, drawn by some technique she'd used. “You move it any other way, and you get...” She waved her hand. “...nothing. Hm? You see?”

“I believe I do, but please forgive another question. A binding is like a script inside your soul?”

“You think it's that simple? No. A script is a drawing, a binding is a statue. Bindings are pearls, and Remnants are the clams around them. You see?”

On some level, he did. Bindings had weight, depth. A script-circle was nothing but a carved circle of letters. But they seemed to do the same things, so he wasn't entirely sure what advantages a binding had.

He pointed to the drawer containing the binding. “How did you know which end took madra in, and which end spat water out?”

“Experience,” she replied, prying at the shell of what he guessed was another concealed binding.

“How did you know it would create water, instead of something else?”

“Drudge told me.” She ran a hand down the smooth carapace of her large spider-construct, which rested on the desk next to her. “It tastes the aspects of madra for me, you see? It tells me which madra touches on water, which touches on ice, and which is simply blue.”

“And now that you have the binding, you can use it in a construct? One that will automatically produce water? Is that all you can use it for, or can you do something else with it?”

She pointed at him with the pliers. “That is the question worthy of a Soulsmith.” He tried to restrain his smile to polite levels, but he couldn't hold it back. She glowered at him.

“Don't smile. A smile doesn't go with those eyes. You look like you want to eat me for breakfast.” She smacked herself in the forehead with the back of her hand. “Tsst. What am I doing? You are not my student. Sweep! Sweep the floors!”

During the days of sweeping, he watched customers come and go. They usually met Gesha or other Fishers elsewhere, and only the most determined tracked her to her foundry. That was when Lindon found the answer to his question.

More than once, Gesha would take a binding and encase it in dead matter, using her drudge to seal it up so that it looked like a sword, or a shield, a shovel, or whatever the customer ordered. Once, when she'd encased a crystalline binding into a hammer that looked like it was hacked from glacial ice, a burly man in thick furs came to pick it up only seconds after she'd finished.

He had no sandviper Remnant on his arm, and he was dressed in much thicker clothing. The dark furs of his outfit were even dusted with snow, though autumn was only beginning and the days were still warm.

He took the hammer from her without a word, caressing it in gloved hands. Before Gesha could say a word, without warning, he turned and slammed the icy head into the planks of the barn.

Ice bloomed from the center of the impact, blasting away like waves that froze instantly. Lindon jumped at the sound, but a moment later he stopped in awe. A flower of ice had bloomed in the barn.

It could have been the man's own sacred arts that had created the ice, but he suspected that wasn't the case. The man could have tested his own technique anywhere, without the hammer. No, he was trying out this weapon...with the binding inside. He'd seen one produce water, so why not ice?

The sword Yerin had inherited from her master was white and unnaturally cold, and her techniques seemed more deadly with it than without it. Did it have a binding in it too?

Gesha beat the stranger around the shoulders for ruining her barn floor, and made him pay extra scales to fix it. Lindon had heard of other transactions before, but this was the first time he'd seen one, and therefore the first time he'd actually seen a scale.

It was a little disappointing. It was nothing more than a coin, though one Forged of madra to be sure, translucent and threaded with blue. Fifty scales for the hammer, twenty more for her floor, and five because he'd made her get up early. He paid gladly, whistling as he carried his new weapon out over his shoulder.

When Gesha noticed Lindon's interest in the scales, she nodded to him. “You're curious? Hm? Good, because this will be your job now. Once you clean up that ice.”

* * *

Sandviper Tern was a thin man, not tall, with a tendency to avoid Jai Long's gaze. He shifted his weight nervously with every word, and even the serpent Goldsign on his arm was smaller than usual. He gave the impression of a frightened child even when he was perfectly confident.

Which, today, he was not.

“The Copper is with one of the Fisher Soulsmiths,” Tern said to Jai Long's boots. “We had him observed in shifts, but he didn't leave her foundry. She must have taken him in.”

Jai Long looked over Tern's head to the cages full of captured miners. There were two rows of scripted cages, framing a strip of grass that led directly into the cavernous entrance of the Transcendent Ruins. He didn't open his spiritual senses, but the signs of gathered vital aura were everywhere: each blade of grass blew in different directions, a patch of frost clustered like mold onto the edge of one cage while the inhabitants of another sweated, and the clouds over the Ruins churned like they were being stirred by a giant hand.

The heavens and the earth overflowed with power. And here were his miners, shaking the bars of their cages in fear and anger.

Not mining.

“She likely wants him to sweep the foundry, clean up after botched constructs, sort boxes, that kind of thing,” Tern continued, raising his voice to be heard over the racket behind him and shifting his gaze to Jai Long's shoulder. “If she throws him out in the next few days, we'll see it. No need to worry about that. His companion might be more of a problem, considering she—”

“What is happening here?”

Tern straightened and very nearly looked Jai Long in the eyes. “Just a bit of trouble, nothing to concern you, Highgold. A little dissent in the ranks, that's all.”

One of the cages shook forward under the weight of its occupants, threatening to tip over.

“Where did this trouble come from, Sandviper Tern?”

Tern winced, shifting from foot to foot on the grass. “The dreadbeasts, they're...getting worse. We don't know where they're coming from, but there's no end to them. And the Remnants...at the start, they acted like Remnants. A good few of them attacked, but some of them just climbed back into the tunnels, or sat down, or started counting clouds, or what have you. Now, they all want blood.”

Jai Long stared him down, waiting for a further explanation. His masked face disturbed some people—it disturbed everyone, in reality—but it was nothing compared to how they'd react if he walked around with face bare. He was considering giving Tern a nice big grin.

“...the miners won't go back in,” Tern said finally. “The Remnants cut into them last night, and we lost more than one team. Now they won't listen to us. We picked the one that was screaming the loudest, speared him up in front of them, made them watch as he died. Still didn't get them into the tunnel.”

Jai Long hefted his spear. “I see.”

“We could shove them in, but I don't know how we'd get them to work.”

“No,” Jai Long said, “you don't.” He stalked forward, weapon in one hand, gathering Stellar Spear madra into the steel head as he walked. More eyes turned to him with every step, agitated miners and overwhelmed Sandviper guards alike.

By the time he reached the middle of the row, the noise had settled into what—in this crowded camp—passed for silence.

“Take whatever you can keep,” Jai Long announced, and though his voice was even, it carried to every cage. “It's the law of the Wilds. The Sandvipers took you because you could not repay a debt, because you lost a duel, because you challenged us and failed. One and all, it was because you were too weak. Would any among you dispute that truth?”

A few angry voices shouted out in response.

“If you are dissatisfied, if you believe that bad fortune is to blame rather than your own weakness, I will give you a chance to prove it.” Jai Long ground the butt of his spear into the earth and let his spearhead glow like a beacon next to his eyes. “Step forward, and I will have your collar removed. You will face me with honor, like a sacred artist, and show me your strength.”

This silenced most of the voices, but one bulky man stepped up. He was twice as wide across the shoulders as Jai Long, with his muscular neck straining against his restrictive collar. “I have confidence in facing any Lowgold,” he rumbled. “Send one as your champion, and I will face him. There is no sense in fighting a Highgold.”

Only duels between those of the same stage could possibly prove anything, otherwise Jai Long may as well be slaughtering sheep. He looked to Tern.

“Sandviper Tern, remove this man's collar.”

The Sandviper did so, with a glare and unnecessary shove to the prisoner. For his part, the big man gave a deep breath and flexed his hands, no doubt feeling the madra passing through his body unobstructed for the first time since his capture.

“Now place it on me,” Jai Long said, eyes on his opponent.

Every Sandviper stared at him. So did the bulky miner.

Sandviper Tern's mouth gaped. “Highgold, don't you think it would be better for me to face him?”

Jai Long did not move his gaze or adjust his inflection as he said, “You are one mistake away from filling a cage yourself. Your safest path forward is to do what I tell you, precisely when I tell you to do it. Starting now.”

Tern tripped over himself to snap the collar around Jai Long's neck.

The light of his spear dimmed dramatically, and the flow of madra within his core squeezed tight. The restriction of the collar wasn't anything so straightforward as reducing his power to the levels of a Lowgold; it hobbled him in every way, leaving him with nothing more than the physical strength of his Iron body, his combat skills, and the most basic of techniques.

“If this man wins, he goes free of whatever debts he owes to the Sandviper sect,” Jai Long said. “If he does not, his life is mine to do with as I will.”

The big man nodded, signaling his own agreement, and a Sandviper handed him a spear of his own. He ran a hand down the shaft and took the weapon in both hands, feeling its balance, holding it ready.

When the opponent was prepared, Jai Long moved.

It was a simple thrust, honed from millions of repetitions and glowing with the last embers of a weak Stellar Spear technique. The bulky man's dodge was a hair out of place, his counterstrike a beat too slow.

The glowing spearhead passed through his heart and emerged from the other side.

Jai Long withdrew his weapon even as a Remnant—creamy off-white, like fresh butter—peeled itself out of the man's body with a couple of shovel-shaped hands.

It cocked a head like a bucket, staring at the Ruins, and then lumbered away from Jai Long. It followed the flow of aura in the air until it disappeared into the darkness of the entrance.

In the cages, the miners were quiet.

“Your lives belong to me,” Jai Long said, without raising his voice. “When the Five Factions Alliance disperses, I have no more use for them. You will be set free, safe, your debts clear, and encouraged to return home. At that time, you may consider your time in the Ruins little more than a dream.”

He tapped his collar, and Tern removed it with shaking hands. “That is my will. To you, it is law. There is no alternative. There is no escape. If you die in the Ruins, it will be for the same flaw that brought you here in the first place: your own weakness.”

Jai Long turned and walked away, gesturing for Tern to follow him.

Behind him, the cages began to murmur.

“They'll go into the Ruins with you now, but watch for runaways. Have guards return any that escape, don't kill them.”

Tern nodded frantically.

“And what did you learn today, Tern?”

The man stumbled, then hustled to catch up. “How impressive you are, Highgold. Your reputation does not do you justice.”

“So when I tell you to capture a Copper...”

Tern swallowed loudly.

“You wait for an opportunity,” Jai Long said, fixing Tern with his gaze. “If you die of old age, you will do so at your post. The second the Copper leaves, or the Fisher leaves him, you will be there with a sack ready to pull over his head. And, Tern?”

The Sandviper quivered with the effort of looking him in the eye.

“This is not important to me. This is the least of my priorities. But it should be very, very important to you.”

Sandviper Tern dropped to his knees and bowed until his head reached the ground.

* * *

Lindon lost his appreciation for that beautiful, wild ice sculpture after he scraped every inch of it away from the floor with a shovel. When he'd finished, both sweating and freezing, Gesha walked him over to a new corner of the foundry. Something that looked like a metal barrel with handles stood there, with script covering every inch and a few gleaming jewels studding an otherwise unremarkable lid. After close examination, he identified them as crystal flasks.

“This,” she said, slapping the barrel, “is mining equipment. You've heard us talking about miners in the Ruins, have you? Well, there's nothing to it. All a 'miner' has to do is go where the aura is thick, funnel madra into the handles, and the script does the rest. A trained dog could do it. When it purifies enough aura, it comes out the other end...”

She flipped a scale into the pan at the bottom, where it landed with a hollow ping. “...as a scale. You see? Scales come out at the bottom.”

He thought for a moment, looking over the process. “It seems like it’s…cycling.”

“Oh, so even a Copper has eyes. Bulky device and all, that's all it is. Just a way to cycle.”

He was missing something important here, he was sure. “I'm sorry. Why? Doesn’t everyone cycle on their own?”

The scale flew from the pail back into her hands, and she held it up between two fingers. “You don't think this looks familiar? Hm?”

He squinted at it. “I’m untrained, I know, but it only looks like madra to me.”

“Close. It looks like your madra. It's clean, it's pure. You see? Anyone can use pure madra.” She inhaled sharply, and the scale dissolved into what looked like liquid light and streamed straight into her core. She slapped her belly afterward. “For anybody on a Path, cycling pure madra is like adding water to wine. You add a little, and there's more wine, you see? Doesn't affect the flavor much. Add too much, and it's nothing but watery.”

She waved a hand. “Mostly you don't absorb them, it's a waste. You use them on your weapons, or on constructs, or you give a handful to young children. Get them to Copper quicker,” she said, poking him in the ribs. “Everybody can use scales, and nobody can make them directly, so we use them as coins. Works for everyone that way.”

“Nobody can make them...” he began, but she finished for him.

“But you can. You start to see, hm? Mining is dangerous work. When you run the equipment, you're helpless, and places with enough vital aura are very dangerous. The aura in the Ruins is so thick you can practically pinch scales from the air, so Remnants and dreadbeasts will be thick as grass down there. If three miners out of ten comes back alive, I'll shave my head.”

“Then, if you'll forgive another question, why are you doing it?”

She gestured with her curved sword, which Lindon had come to realize was called a Fisher's hook. “We are not. We're trading with those who are. When the Arelius family Underlord comes to visit, he'll take the Ruins and everything inside. Until he does, we're all scrambling to make as much money as we can.”

“Underlord?” he asked, but she clicked her tongue.

“Questions? More questions? You're nothing but a little mine.” She jabbed him with the dull back of her hook. “When a sacred artist reaches the realm beyond Truegold, we call them Underlord. Or Underlady. If you ever see one in your lifetime, you can thank the good fortune of your ancestors. Now, you want questions? You want more questions? Then give me some scales.”

She left him sitting at the bench, figuring out how to Forge madra.

He'd tried before, sneaking tips from his mother as he tried to move his madra in just the right way that meant he was secretly a Forger and not a reject. He'd never had any success, and his failures had always left his spirit exhausted and his body sweating.

This time, he was a Copper.

He started by slipping on his parasite ring and cycling for a while, running his madra through the burden of the ring until it was as strong and pure as he could make it without exhausting himself. Then he held his palms a few inches apart, focusing on the space between.

He gathered all his madra into that space, packing it thicker and thicker. At first, he could only visualize the flow of madra in the same half-imaginary way he saw when he was cycling. But after his third attempt, he was sure he saw something; a flash of blue against the rough wooden tabletop.

Then he stopped, panting, wiping sweat from his forehead. He had to cycle again, pumping his spirit, generating every scrap of madra he could.

He didn’t sleep for most of the night, trying again and again to condense madra into reality. When his spirit failed him, he cycled until he had enough strength to try again.

Just before dawn, he finally collapsed as exhaustion overtook him.

Gesha was disappointed in his failure, but she took it in stride. She couldn’t expect much from a Copper, she said. He maintained constructs during the day, but then he was too tired to try Forging at night.

So he used less power.

Instead of spilling his madra into the whole construct and letting it repair itself, he began directing his power where it was needed. If there was a crack, he focused a line of madra and sealed the crack. If it was simply fading away, becoming weak, he fed power directly into it drop by drop until the part was whole again.

After three days, he finally got the knack. He used so much less energy on his chores that he could try Forging again, allowing him more attempts each day. He stayed up that night alternating between forcing his madra out and cycling to recover, over and over until he finally collapsed.

A single scale, round and crystalline blue, gleamed on his lap.

11

Information requested: the role of a Soulsmith.

Beginning report…

Soulsmiths are craftsmen who work with the stuff of spirits. They form constructs, steal bindings from Remnants and transplant them into sacred artists, and forge weapons. The art of a Soulsmith is honored and distinguished, and it requires no qualities more highly than a sharp memory and a dedication to experimentation.

Every aspect of Forged madra and dead matter—the severed body parts of a destroyed Remnant—must be handled differently. Some can only be manipulated by goldsteel tools, others must be chilled, others wrapped. Some types of madra shatter under the least pressure, only to re-form when unobserved. Others dissolve in daylight, or turn to liquid when pierced.

It is the job of a Soulsmith to know which is which. To know what part of a Remnant can be removed and used, and what part is useless.

Experience is the most useful tool in this process, but a drudge is indispensable.

A drudge is a Soulsmith's most valued construct. It is their assistant, their toolbox, their encyclopedia of information. Even two Remnants from the same Path can look identical but be subtly different on the inside—maybe one holds the most valuable binding in the left side of its chest, while the other carries it on the right. A careless Soulsmith may ruin the work by making assumptions, but drudges are designed to scan the structure of a dead Remnant and look for concentrations of power: bindings.

Drudges have many functions, some unique to the Soulsmiths that created them, but most of their abilities are analytical in nature. The more precisely a Soulsmith can determine the structure of a Remnant, the lower the chance of a ruined product.

Before creating their own drudge, would-be Soulsmiths are expected to practice certain core skills. They must familiarize themselves with a Soulsmith's foundry, practice their own Forging—in order to shape dead matter and create a functional shell around valuable bindings—memorize a set of basic scripts, and test dozens of different madra aspects to prove that they can spot the difference.

A Soulsmith's training takes years of dedication, and is sometimes underestimated because the skills acquired do not translate directly to combat. But a sacred artist with some ability in Soulsmithing is a valuable commodity for any clan or sect, and Soulsmiths can often earn the bulk of a family's income.

Suggested topic: Soulsmith life expectancy. Continue?

Denied, report complete.

* * *

It had been almost two weeks since Lindon had begun working for Fisher Gesha, and in that time, he'd continued every night until his body refused to continue any longer. Even when he finished his work early, he’d spend hours taking notes on what he’d learned, keeping careful records for the Path of Twin Stars, until he eventually passed out on the page.

As a result, it took more and more drastic methods to wake him. One morning, the Soulsmith had coated his entire hay-strewn nook with uncomfortably warm slime from a binding. Noise didn't work; he'd slept straight through a thunderstorm that rattled the rafters and sent the spider-constructs overhead swinging like chimes in the wind.

So when he woke facedown with some man's shoulder digging into his stomach, he wasn't entirely surprised. Even in his groggy, sleep-wrapped state, he recognized one of Gesha's attempts to wake him.

When the bright green lizard-spirit attached to the man's arm turned and hissed at him, that was when he knew something was wrong.

He scrambled for details. The man's boots were crunching on grass, not dirt, so they'd gone off the path. Smoke in the air. Torchlight flickered against the furs the man wore, and a biting chill lingered in the air.

So a Sandviper had taken him in the middle of the night, and had left Fisher territory to bring him somewhere else.

Still drifting as he was, he initially wondered if he could somehow turn this to his advantage. The Sandviper was an enemy, and therefore an honorable target for robbery. Would he have anything on him? Was there some way Lindon could talk his way out of this? Would the Empty Palm disable him, or just make him angry?

As clarity returned, his thoughts changed. Was he headed back to the Sandviper camp? Was this some sort of revenge against Fisher Gesha, or against Yerin? He hadn't personally done anything against the Sandvipers, but now he was going to be treated to a full, painful taste of their powers. Their insidious, venomous powers, which could dissolve flesh like an acid.

He'd dismantled a Sandviper Remnant under Gesha just two days before, and even its dead matter was enough to slowly burn through living flesh. She'd demonstrated on a dead rat.

Worse, she said, the aura they gathered did not kill so quickly. Their Ruler techniques produced a sort of gas that caused seizures, paralysis, and other, less pleasant symptoms. She'd spoken with a shadow in her voice that suggested she'd seen that state entirely too many times.

Now Lindon started to struggle. He'd tried not to, in order to avoid giving away that he'd regained consciousness, but it had become too much. He kept seeing the corpse of the rat, its hair hissing and sizzling away as the flake of Sandviper madra had steadily drilled its way through.

That same madra, in the form of a legged serpent, stared at him from a few inches away. It hissed again, but the sacred artist gave no indication that he cared what Lindon was doing. He trundled along with the consistency of an ox, though with considerably more speed.

It would have been more interesting to Lindon under other circumstances, but while the Sandviper man gave the impression of moving slowly, ground passed beneath him with alarming speed.

He started slowing when sounds of laughter and chatter cut through the night. It had to be the Sandviper camp, though even craning his neck, Lindon couldn't see much more of it than a few temporary buildings and some torch-smoke.

The man walked past the laughing crowd, taking him to one of the only buildings Lindon had seen in the entire Five Factions Alliance that wasn't made of rough, freshly cut wood. Instead, it was entirely constructed from iron bars, with rings of script spiraling up the length of the bars like creepers on tree trunks.

Hinges squealed as the door opened, and Lindon hit the ground hard and rolled before he came to a stop on his back.

Even the ceiling was made from bars, which must get unpleasant when it rained. If Lindon were left here, where Fisher Gesha and Yerin couldn't find him, he'd have to survive those rainstorms huddling in the corner and bunched up against the cold.

Before the Sandviper closed the door, Lindon scrambled for it. He kicked at the dirt, launching himself forward.

The Gold still didn't say a word. He grabbed Lindon with one hand like scooping up a squirming puppy, then tossed him back inside. The door shut faster this time.

None of the other prisoners made a break for it.

There were only five others inside this cage, though there were other cages on the left and right. He couldn't begin to guess how many total, which he imagined might be useful information if he ever got out of here.

As he rose to shaky feet, trying to get a better look at his surroundings, one of his cellmates raised her head to look at him. She was filthy, shrouded in a ragged blanket, and she stared with one eye. The other was a half-healed mess, shredded by what seemed to be claw marks.

Lindon couldn't meet her good eye. He was too busy staring at her missing one as though it had shown him his own future.

The next one in the cage was a man that revealed a missing arm and, when he turned in his sleep, several missing toes.

The third, a boy about Lindon's age. Half his hair had been seared off, and he stared into the distance with a glassy look.

The fourth and fifth clung to one another so that he couldn't make out the details of one against another, but blood clung to the bars behind them and the floor beneath him.

Wounds surrounded him, a tale of misery and pain etched in flesh. All of these were Golds, he was sure—a weak cloud drifted over the one-eyed woman's head, and one of the couple in the corner seemed to have a tail—and they had suffered like this. What had wounded them would crush a Copper to paste.

He took a breath, calming his disordered thoughts, though it felt like trying to spit water onto a forest fire. He knelt and examined the door, studying the latch and the script together, but so many of the symbols were unfamiliar to him. He recognized something similar to the circle he'd used to ward off Remnants, but with ten times the complexity.

That was it. There wasn't much else to examine. No other tools to use, no threads to pull, just idle time to pass before whatever had shredded the other prisoners' bodies was used on him.

Though when he spent some time thinking about it, he thought he might know what had happened. These must be miners.

When he looked up, the blocky silhouette of the Transcendent Ruins blocked out the moon and a good half of the stars. They were camped right at the base of it—so maybe this wasn't Sandviper territory at all, because all of the five allied factions would want to share access to the Ruins.

The Sandvipers he'd met before had mentioned miners, and Fisher Gesha had told him the story of how dangerous it was to go inside the Ruins to draw scales from the air. She'd suggested a survival rate of less than thirty percent.

Lindon took another look around him as he imagined what had happened to the rest.

Laughter echoed around the camp until it sounded almost like screams...no, those were screams, along with some shouts and the ringing of metal.

He craned his neck, trying to stick his head between the bars—though they were too closely set for that—in order to see down the row of cages and storage buildings.

Another cage, just like the one in which he found himself, was rattling back and forth as its inhabitants threw themselves against the sides. It looked as though it would actually tip over, but a couple of Sandvipers appeared out of nowhere at the final instant. One of them sent two bright green lights flickering into the cage—he couldn't see the details, but it was obviously a technique of some kind—and the other grabbed the cage in both hands.

He heaved, lifting the entire cage off the ground, and then slammed it back down.

The screams had redoubled in intensity, but now other cages were rattling, and more guards were pouring out of nearby shelters.

When the commotion spread closer to him, with Sandviper guards running past him to help, Lindon stepped back. He was getting too detailed of a look at what the Sandviper techniques were doing to prisoner flesh.

And his cage seemed least likely to join in. Not a one of his fellow inmates even looked up.

He sat himself with his back against the bars, trying to think. What did he have on him? He didn't have his pack, of course, but even his pockets had been emptied. Except...

A smooth, round ball slightly bigger than his thumbnail sat at the bottom of his pocket, forgotten. He reached in, pulling out the glass marble from Suriel. A single blue candle-flame flickered in the center, pointing straight up no matter how he turned the outside.

The marble had no use, unless he could throw it like a pebble to distract a guard, but it was a comfort. A concrete reminder that the heavens hadn't given up on him.

He rolled it between his fingers as he took further stock.

He was in reasonably good physical condition, and he'd recovered most of the energy in his cores that he'd spent earlier that night. Not that either of those things would help him against the Sandvipers.

Other than the marble, he had nothing but his clothes and the familiar presence of wood against his chest. So they'd left him his Unsouled badge. How considerate.

The badge itself was tied to a ribbon of blue shadesilk, which was bright as day in direct light and absolutely black in the slightest shadow. The interesting reflective properties of shadesilk had allowed Sacred Valley to keep trading with the outside world, but now Lindon found himself considering more about the fabric's strength. Could he strangle someone with it?

Not anyone who mattered, not with a Copper's strength. Maybe he could take a toddler hostage, assuming a toddler passed within arm's length of this cage in a prison camp, but that would be as cowardly of an act as he could imagine.

But if he stayed, he'd face the Ruins.

The sky began to lighten before he'd come to any conclusion on a strategy, and in the distance, he saw an enormous block sink back into the wall of the Ruins. A small army filed out, the Sandvipers in the front carrying weapons, and the collection of people in the middle carrying iron barrels speckled on the bottom with crystal flasks.

They passed close enough for Lindon to make out the wounds on the prisoners—missing limbs, fingers, chunks of flesh. The procession turned to a building that looked like a big, painted wagon...

And Lindon gained his first truly interesting piece of information. The back of the wagon lifted open, and the first prisoner—prodded by a knife—dumped his barrel into the back.

Scales clattered out. They fell into a box specially prepared for the purpose, and then the second miner stepped up, also emptying her barrel. It took twenty or thirty people before the box was filled up and pushed to the back.

To join dozens of boxes just like it.

Lindon's eyes were glued to the stack of boxes, the blue-lit marble spinning in his fingers. Fisher Gesha had said that scales could be used for advancement, but doing so was like watering down your madra. Well, his madra was essentially all water.

How many scales would it take to break through to Iron? Twenty? A hundred? However many he needed, they were right there.

He pushed himself against the bars, eyes stuck on the boxes.

When the prisoners had finished delivery, the door on the wagon slammed shut. Something like an angry trumpet blast sounded, and the wagon actually rumbled forward, sliding out from between a pair of cages.

So the fortune didn't stick around. That was a disappointment, but it was a good policy not to leave their treasures sitting among a group of disgruntled prisoners.

A Sandviper woman walked up, and Lindon backed away from the bars just in time to avoid her slapping her sword against the cage. It rang like a hideous bell, hurting his ears, but not as much as her voice. She propelled her words with the full force of her Gold spirit and Iron body, causing him to clap hands over his ears and his cellmates to scramble to their feet.

“Wake up, wake up. Feed time, and then it's day shift.”

So there was a day shift. Meaning the wagon would show up at sunrise and sunset, for the two mining shifts to deliver their haul.

She pulled the squealing door open, stepping back, and Lindon eyed the gap uncertainly. Was she really trying to fight six people on her own? He couldn't contribute much, but the others were Gold. Even wounded, they should be on her like a pack of wolves.

That was when he noticed the collars, iron and scripted just like the bars.

He touched his neck, in case he'd somehow missed being collared in metal, but his fingers met only skin. He wondered if they'd put one on him later, but he found it unlikely.

He probably just wasn't worth collaring.

Four of the five prisoners shuffled forward at the Sandviper's prodding, but the woman with the missing eye had curled back against the bars. She shook as though weeping, but made no sound.

The Sandviper woman looked bored as she stepped past the other inmates and into the cage, holding her sword in one hand.

Before she could reach the crouching woman, Lindon bent over and grabbed the prisoner by the shoulder. “Stand up. I don't know what's happening, but I know you'd better stand up. Come on.”

He shook her harder, but she didn't respond. The Sandviper pushed him away and raised her sword.

Unlike his imagination, she didn't decapitate the miner in one stroke. Instead, she slapped the edge of her sword against the shaking woman's head with such force that each stroke sounded like a lumberjack axe against a tree.

Lindon winced and took another step back. You probably had to do this much to get through an Iron body, but a single one of those blows would have caved his head in.

A familiar voice came from behind him, sharp and venomous. “There are no pieces of him missing? Hm? This is good for you.”

Lindon spun to see Fisher Gesha, goldsteel hook on her back, standing on top of her mechanical spider legs. She looked the same as always—bun tight on her head, expression disapproving—but there was something about her that made him shiver.

The Sandviper guard stopped beating the prisoner and turned to Gesha, leaning her sword on her shoulder. “What do you think our sect is, that you can come in and order us around? Do you think everyone works for you?”

A gentle, invisible force tugged Lindon out the open door so that he stumbled forward until he was standing next to Gesha.

“You need Copper miners that badly, do you?” the Fisher asked dryly. “Tell your young chief his message was received, but I am taking back my property. Can you remember that, hm?”

Green light spidered up the edge of the Sandviper's blade like veins in a leaf. She glared at Gesha and raised her voice. “Fisher—”

Whatever she was going to say next was cut off when Gesha moved like a flickering snake. She suddenly stood next to the Sandviper woman, one arm behind her back, the other holding her goldsteel hook extended. The sharp inside of the blade's crescent was pressed against the younger woman's throat.

“Silly girl. When I was weak as you, did I disrespect my betters? No, I kept my head on my work. And you have a miner to catch.”

She nodded down the row, where the one-eyed woman was hobbling away, casting fearful glances behind her.

As Gesha removed the hook, the Sandviper guard tore her gaze between the escaping prisoner and her enemy, muttered something under her breath, and bolted off after the miner. It was probably a jog for a Gold, but her movements blurred to Lindon's eyes.

He turned back to Gesha as the guard seized the miner by the hair and started dragging her back.

“Can we take them with us?” he asked, voice low. They probably heard him anyway, considering their hearing, but he had to ask.

She gave him a look of almost comical surprise. “There are worse things than this in the world, Wei Shi Lindon. These are enemies, captured in battle.”

“They didn’t quite capture me in battle,” he said. “They took me in my sleep.” She darkened.

“And so I have taken you back,” she said. “This time. But you are not my grandson, you hear me? Hm? I cannot come to save you every morning. If you cannot protect yourself, I cannot protect you either. Next time, remember that.” She gestured, and his red Thousand-Mile Cloud floated up from behind her. He hadn't noticed it, and he wasn't prepared for the sensation of relief that flooded him at the sight.

“Follow me,” she said, and he did.

His neck was tight from the effort of not looking back to see the others he’d left behind.

Gesha spent most of their journey back cursing the Sandvipers for their cowardice, but Lindon remained lost in thought. When he asked her how she’d found him, she simply said “I looked,” in the tone of voice that suggested he was an idiot.

When they returned to Fisher territory, his plans had clarified enough for him to ask better questions. “Pardon, Fisher Gesha, but I’d be better able to defend myself with a Path.”

Her drudge’s spider-legs did not falter in their smooth, rolling gait, and she didn’t so much as glance at him. “You think you’ve earned it? Hm? You think you’ve given so much to the sect that we must give you something back?”

“I have nothing but gratitude to you and to the Fisher sect,” he assured her, though his only contact with the Fishers thus far had been limited to glimpses of customers in the Soulsmith foundry. “I will never repay my debt for your kindness in this lifetime. I’m only impatient to contribute more.”

Judging by her pleased smile, flattery had been the right choice. “Why so impatient? If you have not walked a Path so far, waiting until Iron is not so late. Focus on Forging two scales a day. When you can do that, you will keep one.”

He wasn’t sure if she’d found his successful scale or not, but he was still a long way away from two scales a day, every day. “If I could, then how long might it take me to reach Iron?”

She was silent for a moment, contemplating the question. “If you work hard, one year is not too short. Not so bad, is it? A year is nothing when you’re my age, I can tell you.”

“Of course not,” Lindon lied, thoughts cast back to the wagon full of boxes. “Not too short at all.”

12

Five days after his release from the Sandvipers, Lindon went to see Yerin. She'd spent most of her time with the Fishers helping them hunt down Remnants and sacred beasts, which seemed to be one of the primary businesses of their sect. There were many Soulsmiths in the Five Factions Alliance, and most of them got their primary supply of bindings and Remnants parts from the Fishers. Refiners paid for rare medicinal ingredients or sacred beasts as components for elixirs, and Fishers prided themselves on diving into the wilderness and emerging with whatever their customers requested.

Yerin provided something that the sect had previously found in short supply: overwhelming offensive power. Though Lindon had sunk entirely into Gesha's Soulsmith business since that first night, he and Yerin had seen each other every few days.

According to her, the Fishers were experts at tracking, navigating the wilderness, and extracting natural treasures for later sale. But they were forced to give up on some prizes simply because their madra wasn't as suited for combat.

As such, they treated Yerin like some kind of long-lost younger sister who had returned to usher in a golden age of economic prosperity. Now, when Lindon showed up at the Fisher housing to see Yerin, she had a room of her own. Previously, she'd had to share one long log cabin with twelve other women. Now, she had her own, smaller log cabin, complete with baked clay tiles for the roof and a hearth and chimney.

She opened the door blearily as Lindon knocked, swiping at her eyes with one hand. The silver sword extended out from her back, touching the invisible traps she'd Forged around the doorframe and dissolved them.

He was glad to see that all the traps were on the inside of the door this time. He'd hesitated enough just knocking, wondering what lethal tricks were lurking in the air.

“I'm sorry for waking you,” he said. “Should I come back later?” He kept moving inside as he asked; the question was a formality anyway.

She shifted that red rope she wore as a belt and stretched, yawning. “Cycling. The snoring doesn't start until about the third hour.”

He'd come at sunset, so she may well have been preparing to sleep, but she still looked better-rested than she had when they'd arrived. The Fishers had replaced her old, tattered sacred artist's robe with a new one, and the fine black fabric looked unmarred despite her days in the wilderness. Her injuries had already healed into new scars—one of the many benefits of the Iron body that everyone but Lindon enjoyed—though her hair had grown out, longer and less even than before.

In short, she looked like she'd had two weeks worth of rest and regular food to get her back into fighting shape. While Lindon himself...

She looked him up and down, growing visibly concerned. “You need to take a seat? You look like a dead dog on a bad road.”

He took that to mean he looked tired, which was true. His fingers were twitching and he couldn't seem to focus his eyes on more than one thing for more than a handful of seconds, but excitement kept him fueled.

Lindon slung his pack off, throwing off his balance and staggering for a step, then he pulled out a sheet of paper and slapped it down on her one table.

She leaned over for a closer look. “They've been making you take a lot of notes, have they?”

“These are the shift changes of every Sandviper guard working regular duty with the mining teams. I've been following them for most of the last week. I made up some of the names, but this isn't all; I know their habits, their replacements, what they like to drink, which teams they're responsible for, when they deposit their scales, everything I could think of.” She lifted the paper as though wondering how he got so much information on there, and he hurried to add, “That's not the only sheet.”

“Why?” she asked simply.

“I know where they keep the scales,” he said, passion burning away exhaustion. “It pulls in twice a day, they load up the haul for the day, and then they take it away to a secure location back in their main camp stronghold. Their guards are tired, their miners are angry, and everyone's rushing so that they can squeeze the Ruins dry before the Arelius family gets here.” His words were tripping all over one another, and he knew it, but he plowed on anyway. “They're too strong when all the Sandvipers are together, but that's almost never true.”

He waited until he had her full attention before hitting her with the selling point. “We can free the miners. All I have to do is activate one of Fisher Gesha's spider constructs, take it to camp, have it disrupt the script—”

“That sounds like a tall cliff to climb,” she interrupted. “You think you can keep it powered that long? And you know how to disable the script?”

Lindon had to clasp his hands together to keep them from shaking. Maybe he had been awake for too long. “It's easy, if you know how and where, which I do because they gave me a personal look. It's like breaking a lock.”

“Breaking a lock isn't usually easy,” she said.

“It is if you have specialized equipment, which we do. We'll have a construct. Anyway, we release enough prisoners, and we can take the wagon. So long as we strike at dawn or dusk, of course, when it's there. If I fill my pack, I expect I can walk away with a thousand scales, and I'm sure you can too.”

“And then we fade away like mist in the sun, do we?” She was still eyeing the paper, so at least she hadn't dismissed him completely, but he'd been hoping for a more enthusiastic reaction.

“Fly away on the cloud,” Lindon said, gesturing behind him to the Thousand-Mile Cloud. That was when he remembered he hadn't actually brought the cloud; he'd left it behind in Fisher Gesha's foundry.

Maybe he could leave some of his work behind today and grab a nap.

“A Thousand-Mile Cloud isn't made of dragon scales. The Fishers have three, and I've seen at least two people zipping around on Remnants. One of the Sandvipers will run us down.”

He'd been waiting for that objection. “I've thought of that!” He dug another paper out of his pack, this one a crudely drawn map, and slapped it onto the table as well. “You remember the bathhouse? It's halfway between Gesha's barn and the Ruins. We only have to fly a short distance to the bathhouses, hide there, and head back to the foundry when we're clear.”

Lindon had prepared for other objections. For one thing, if they didn't dress as Sandvipers, they would be caught upon entry to the camp. But if they did, then the prisoners would attack them when set free. If they weren't being chased, there was no need to hide at the bathhouse, and if they were then the bathhouse wouldn't help.

He had counters to these, nuances to his plans that he'd worked very hard on. He hadn't entirely counted on Yerin handing the paper back to him, smile sharper than the blade over her shoulder. “Let's burn 'em.”

He took the plan from her, a little taken aback. “You'll do it?”

She rested a hand on the hilt of her sword. “We're working for the Fishers now, and they get along with the Sandvipers like two tigers in one cage. And they kidnapped you.” Her hand tightened on the hilt. “You let an enemy take one of yours without response, and you're giving them signed permission to do it again. The Sandvipers haven't slipped out of my memory, any more than Heaven's Glory has.”

Her expression darkened further. “They think I'm not coming back to clean their whole rotten house and burn it down, then they're getting a surprise.”

She'd agreed to his plan, and even his own family had never fought for him. But some of his warm feelings cooled in the face of her vengeful oath.

He wasn't sure why he felt that way—revenge had always been part of the sacred arts, as widely celebrated in stories as honorable duels—but her whole demeanor changes when she talked about revenge. Something in the air felt dark, and heavy, and wrong.

It was his own weakness. That was what his father would have told him, and Lindon knew he was right. Yerin was wiser, stronger, more knowledgeable and more experienced. He was seeing the world as a child.

Suddenly ashamed of his own cowardice, he bowed to her. “You won't go back alone.”

She gave him a look of such gratitude that he forgot all his misgivings a moment before.

Then something crooned, high and desperate, like a mewling baby bird.

They both started, Yerin drawing her sword in a blur of motion. Another cry, and Lindon checked under the table. A third, and he realized where it was coming from: his pack.

Shoving his notes aside, he dug into the main pocket of his pack.

At first, he was looking for a trapped animal. Something that had crawled inside and gotten stuck, maybe a small bird or even a rodent. He had a temporary fantasy of finding the rare cub of a sacred beast before he dug out a glass case.

The case was big enough to hold two pairs of shoes, and entirely transparent. Inside was a miniature landscape of tiny rolling hills covered in grass, even boasting a single tiny tree. A river flowed around the sides of the case so that the land became a green island, and no matter how he turned or shook the box, the water barely sloshed and the leaves hardly shook. It was as though the glass of the case allowed him to look into a tiny, separate world.

And that world had a resident.

The Sylvan Riverseed looked something like a humanoid Remnant the size of a finger, made entirely of flowing blue waves. It didn't seem to be made of water, exactly, but rather madra imitating water, like in the bowl test that had designated him as Unsouled.

He'd all but forgotten about the Riverseed in the weeks since taking it from the Heaven's Glory School. He took it originally because it was supposed to be valuable, but he'd never given it much thought since then, the more useful treasures he'd stolen taking up most of his attention. He'd glanced at it every once in a while as he dug through his pack, but since the Sylvan was usually spritely and energetic, he'd usually just waved to it and left it hidden. It was expensive and he didn't know what to do with it, so he kept it tucked away.

This time, the Sylvan itself had collapsed against the landscape as though dying. Its substance was faded and pale, and it raised its head to let out one more delicate peep.

Yerin whistled. “Well, that's a storm out of clear skies. You're killing it.”

“I should bring it to Fisher Gesha,” Lindon said, placing his finger against the edge of the glass. The Sylvan Riverseed raised one featureless arm, like a doll's arm, in response. “She'll know what to do with it.”

Yerin gave him a sidelong glance. “If you contend that you want to share blood with the Fishers, then I won't be the one to tell you no. But don't think you can hand a treasure to someone and they'll hand it back out of the sweetness of their soul.”

“If you know what's wrong with it, by all means tell me.”

“It looks hungry,” she said, with no basis that he could tell. “What have you been feeding it?”

“I'm not even sure how to open the case,” he said, “but I can look into it.” Which meant that he could try and smash it open later, hoping that the Sylvan wouldn't run off.

“It came with a label, true?”

It had, though Lindon hadn't taken it. He said as much, adding, “It didn't say much. Sylvan Riverseed, they thought it had some sort of water aspect, and they planned to give it to someone with pure madra.” That was why he'd noticed it in the first place.

She spread both hands as though presenting the answer. “There it is, then. Feed it madra.”

“Are you sure that'll work?” It was worth a try, he knew, but he had squeezed a lot out of his spirit already, and he hadn't even Forged his scales yet.

“I'm sure that my sword is sharp and the sun will come up tomorrow,” she said. “Everything else is a roll of the dice.” She'd crossed her arms and leaned in to watch the Sylvan, so she was obviously expecting a show.

With a sigh, he placed both hands against the side of the case and concentrated.

After almost two weeks under Fisher Gesha, his spirit almost felt like it didn't belong to him. The madra responded too easily, moved too quickly, responded to his will too well. While Forging scales was still a chore, he could condense madra now in only a fraction of the time.

A few seconds after he'd begun, a drop of transparent blue liquid materialized in the box. It dropped straight onto the Sylvan Riverseed...

...who animated as though it had only pretended to be dying all along. Its featureless head split into a mouth, and it gulped down the drop of pure madra like a snake snapping up a mouse.

Immediately energized, the Sylvan ran around, cheeping and crooning intermittently so that it sounded like a song. Once again, Lindon Forged another drop of madra, and this time the Riverseed's color deepened.

“It's like a Remnant,” he mused aloud. Maybe it was a Remnant, though it seemed both smaller and more substantial than most he'd seen. Remnants gained in power and intelligence by taking in human madra, the purer the better, which was where the legends of Remnants abducting children came from. He'd used his madra as a bargaining chip with Remnants in the past.

But if he treated this being as a Remnant in a cage rather than a stolen treasure...what was it going to become? What was he growing in his pack?

“If it eases you any,” Yerin said, “now the scales are even better for you. You're hungry for them, and so is your little baby chick here.”

Lindon refocused back on the task at hand. The Sylvan Riverseed was an interesting problem to consider later, but for now, they needed to hit the Sandviper mining operation soon. His information was less valuable by the day, as the guard habits changed, and the Arelius family could arrive any time to put an end to it all.

“I'd suggest you get ready,” Lindon said. “We need to go as soon as we can.”

Yerin tapped her fingers on her sword, and Lindon felt as though a blade had passed through the air just in front of his nose. His eyes widened, sure that she'd just used a technique.

Then strands of her hair drifted down. It was razor-straight again, hanging down as though it had been measured to end exactly at her eyes in the front and exactly at her shoulders in the back.

“Straight and clean again,” she said in a satisfied tone. “Now I'm ready.” She eyed his head. “I can have a try at yours too, now that it's getting a little overgrown.”

He held up his hands, hoping she wouldn't start blasting invisible sword madra at his head. “I could use some more time.” For one thing, he could get some sleep.

She shrugged and walked back to the corner of her cabin, where she knelt on a cushion for cycling. “Pop in when you're ready. If I'm not here, I'm out hunting.”

He left her to it, walking back through the dark, though he almost fell asleep on his feet before he made it back to Fisher Gesha's barn.

* * *

At first, the plan worked flawlessly.

They crept in just before dawn, in Sandviper sect outfits that Lindon had made himself. The furs came cheap from the Fishers, who would never deign to wear the same clothing as their rivals, and their Goldsigns were faked through pieces of green dead matter he'd scavenged from Gesha's supply.

He was proud of himself for that, actually. The little Remnant-creatures attached to every real Sandviper's arm couldn't be duplicated, but he had buckets full of pieces from Sandviper Remnants. Four green legs and a serpentine tube sewn onto a sleeve, and he had something that—from a distance—would pass as a Sandviper's Goldsign.

Yerin's was harder to hide. She couldn't control the bladed arm on her back as well as he thought she should, so it had taken them almost an hour of bending and folding to get it stuck between her furs and her pack. But with the bear-like head of a dreadbeast over her hair, hide concealing the red rope around her waist, and her sword-arm hidden, even Lindon had trouble recognizing her.

He had to admit, it was satisfying when these all-powerful Golds scurried away at a single sight of his Sandviper uniform and an angry scowl.

They'd positioned the Thousand-Mile Cloud behind a tent, close enough to be summoned but not so close that it would give them away. His usual pack was waiting with the Cloud, in case he needed anything from within, and the one he was carrying now contained only the spider-construct.

Everything slid smoothly along, even up to the point where they reached the cages.

He'd worried that he might not be able to find his old cage, but he did so almost instantly. This would be his test case, and ideally a way to survive the prisoner uprising.

Glancing around assured him that everything was in place. Yerin was loitering across the lane, close enough to help if needed. The wagon backed into place almost exactly as he arrived, giving him the fleeting joy of seeing elements of a plan slide neatly into place.

Reaching into his pack, he slowly—and with many a glance around—extracted one of Gesha's spider constructs. The spider was inert, curled up into a ball, and though it stored enough energy for independent action, the crystal flask would be swiftly depleted and its actions would be limited. It would be best to control this one directly, before guiding it to cages down the line.

The cage was mostly empty space, with only three dirty figures huddled inside. He ducked to get a glimpse at each one, but the one-eyed woman wasn't there.

He'd known that was a possibility. Gesha put the miners' survival rate frighteningly low, and the last he'd seen the nameless woman, she was being beaten with a sword.

Too easily, the image came to mind of himself, tucked in a filthy blanket just like the rest and sent day after day into the waiting horrors of the Ruins. The pyramid overhead seemed ominous now, like a monster looming over the corpse of its prey.

With a flicker of his madra, the spider surged to life, slicing across two points in the script according to his instruction. The scrape of spider's leg against iron was surprisingly soft and quick, leading him to wonder what the construct was made of. If it cut iron so easily, he could think of a number of other uses for it.

Finally, he directed the spider up the bars and to the roof, where the final loop of the script-circle was located. This had taken him three days of observation to realize; though he was only an amateur scriptor, he could tell that cutting two of the loops wouldn't be enough. Leaving the final link on the roof made sense from the Sandvipers' perspective, given the risk that one of the prisoners knew some sacred art that could cut iron even with their spirits suppressed by collars.

A scripted key would have simplified this process, but he'd never found one unguarded, and stealing it could have risked everything.

Seconds later, a soft whisk came from overhead as the spider sliced through the last of the protective script. Lindon pushed the door open, wincing at the squeal of hinges, and directed the spider back into his pack.

Even that paltry few seconds of action had drained one of his cores almost completely, and he would need to cycle according to the Path of Twin Stars to restore his madra. In the meantime, he drew power from his second core.

The three figures in the cage all moaned and backed away from him, but as the spider clambered into the pack behind him, Lindon sank to his knees. “Look at me,” he whispered. “We don't have much time.”

Even less than he'd imagined, as he found out immediately when Jai Long stepped out from beside the scale wagon.

The sight of the tall spearman in the mask of red cloth scrambled Lindon's thoughts for a second. He'd already cast his mind forward, to the next steps of the plan, to the things that could go wrong. Jai Long stayed in his tent in the mornings, Lindon had observed that for five mornings in a row, and idle comments from some of the other Sandvipers suggested he'd done the same thing for as long as he'd known them.

But there was still the possibility that he wouldn't notice anything. If he'd just decided to stretch his legs and get a lungful of morning air, he would just brush past two “Sandvipers” going about their ordinary chores with hardly a glance.

That hope died when Jai Long turned his head to look straight at Lindon.

“To save face for the Fishers, I will keep you as miners instead of killing you as intruders. You have my word.”

Lindon's head was still spinning. They hadn't even done anything yet. Where had he gone wrong? Was there an alarm attached to the script-circle on the cage?

No, he was certain there wasn't. The script connected to nothing, it was all self-contained around the cage. It couldn't have activated an alarm, or he would have found it. What, then?

Yerin, meanwhile, had immediately drawn her white sword against young chief Kral. He wore black furs, finer than those of his subordinates, and he still gave off the air of unimpeachable dignity even while holding an awl in each hand.

Jai Long didn't even look to the side, where his young chief faced Yerin. He remained focused on Lindon, spear propped against his shoulder.

“You want to know why?” he asked.

Lindon didn't dare to nod. In his experience, questions like that didn't really need a response.

“Do you know how many Coppers there are in the Five Factions Alliance above the age of six?” Jai Long went on. “There's one. One of my men happened to notice a Copper days ago, when you were sneaking around the camp, and reported you. I knew you could only be the newly adopted Fisher.”

Lindon could put the rest together for himself. Jai Long had assumed he'd come here because this was where he'd been held captive. Then all he had to do was set a watch with Lindon's description...

That didn't hold up. Even though Lindon had run into the Sandvipers more than once, it wasn't as though he'd been in camp long. He wasn't famous. Jai Long had seen him before, but there was no reason he should remember.

“How did you recognize me?” Lindon asked, then belatedly added, “If I may ask, honored Jai Long.”

The spearman studied him from behind the red wrappings as though unsure how to answer. “I had them sense your spirit,” he said, as though it were the most obvious thing in the world.

Lindon had been blind. In Sacred Valley, once a person reached Jade, they could use their spirit to sense things they couldn’t possibly see or hear. They couldn't sense a person's level of advancement without personally witnessing their sacred arts. Somehow, it hadn’t occurred to him that sacred artists on the outside could.

It was an idiot's mistake. He'd let his own ignorance lead both him and Yerin into an ambush.

Yerin knew what was possible, of course, but he couldn't fault her for not pointing it out—to her, it was common knowledge. She'd have assumed that he would take steps to disguise himself as a Copper, or prevent himself from being sensed.

If those were possibilities—he didn't even know that much.

Something tugged at his spirit, and he opened his Copper senses. The aura around Yerin bloomed into a razor-edged dome, like a thicket of swords surrounding her, and the pale blade in her hand gathered sword aura along the edges. She hadn't said a word, but her body was turned half to the side, her weapon held high and her eyes fixed on Kral.

For his part, the Sandviper heir held his awls to his sides, completely relaxed. He didn't seem to be drawing up aura at all. “You're not even a Fisher, are you? Are you sure you want to be buried for them?”

The colorless blades around her sharpened, but she didn't respond.

“Your choice,” he said, lazily lifting a spike to point at her. Green light gathered on the tip, like poison about to drip off. “I am Kral, young chief of the Sandviper sect, and I will instruct you.”

As soon as he finished speaking, a line of venomous green light blasted toward her. She ducked, drawing aura behind her sword like a wave as she swung it upward.

Kral had already reached her, the sword almost at his ribs, but he drove his awl down and pushed Yerin's blade into the ground.

The air roared as her technique sheared a hole through the grass, sending dirt and roots blasting skyward. As though following the steps of a dance, Kral moved forward and drove his second awl at her neck. Sword aura tore at his hand, but they didn't stop him, and Yerin had to throw herself back.

The young chief laughed, shaking off his wounded hand. He wasn't even bleeding. There were red lines, but nothing worse than Lindon might get if he brushed against a briar bush.

Kral gestured, and the aura around Yerin surged. She moved out of the way just as a cloud of toxic gas manifested behind her.

But he was toying with her, moving her like a puppet where he wanted. The awl flashed forward again, this time with four green echoes of itself moving along with it—a Forger trick to duplicate the weapon. She smashed them all, but took a scrape along the shoulder for it.

Her Goldsign burst out then, a flashing arm of steel, blurring as it shot straight for Kral's eye.

Before Lindon could register joy that Yerin might have turned the fight around, Kral's own Goldsign scurried into action. The legged serpent ran down the man's forearm, running onto Yerin's shoulder, and opening its jaws to bite down on her neck.

It froze that way, its tail wrapped around Kral's arm and its teeth on Yerin, as her bladed arm came to a quivering stop a foot from the Sandviper's nose.

“If you draw a blade on a Highgold, you should be prepared for the consequences,” Kral said, in a tone haughty enough for a king. His expression, on the other hand, said he was enjoying himself.

Lindon ran at the open cage door, on the chance he might be able to do something, but Jai Long looked at him.

Just looked.

The man hadn't moved, but somehow his spear had become more prominent, as though his relaxed stance was a half-second away from becoming a thrust that put the weapon through Lindon's heart.

Like a coward, Lindon slowed to a stop. He should throw himself forward, he knew. He should challenge the impossible odds to save his own, even before certain death.

But he would die. At best, Jai Long would simply hold him down and send him into the mines anyway. He could do nothing, and he hated himself for it.

Kral raised his voice without turning from Yerin. “Are the Fishers coming?”

“At least one of them is.”

Hope trickled back into Lindon's heart.

“Good,” Kral said, and the tiny Remnant on his arm bit down.

Blood oozed from Yerin's neck, but that didn't even cause her to make a sound. She simply glared at the Sandviper, even as the tiny green spirit ran back up to nest on his arm.

A second later, her jaw visibly tightened as she gritted her teeth.

Another second, and she'd fallen to her knees, chest heaving.

Then she dropped her sword and screamed.

With Yerin's screams washing over him, Lindon closed his eyes. He couldn't do anything, but he distracted himself by thinking of options—what did he have? There was still a spider in the pack on his back. What about the Cloud?

At a deeper level, he knew he was helpless. He'd always been helpless. He just had to wait for rescue, and that was the most he could do. He had been a fool to expect otherwise.

“You like it noisy in your camps, do you? Hm?” Fisher Gesha said, and Lindon's eyes snapped open. She looked the same as ever, her bun tightly in place, spider legs jutting out from where her feet should be. Her hands were clasped behind her in the small of her back, her absurdly wrinkled face disapproving. Lindon had never seen anyone more beautiful; he could breathe again.

If only she could help Yerin.

“You don't enjoy the screams of your enemies?” Kral asked, sidling over to stand by Jai Long. “I'm sure you do.”

Gesha was giving nothing away. “Enemies? I see none of your enemies here.”

It was Jai Long's turn to speak. “Do you not? Two new Fishers sneaking into our camp, dutifully assigned to us according to the Alliance. If they were working for you, then that's an unprovoked act of aggression on your part.”

Gesha's gaze flicked to Yerin. Not to Lindon.

“Are children supposed to be placid and well-behaved now? I made mistakes when I was young.”

“If they're not yours,” Jai Long continued, “I'll work them in the mines. If they are, then I've captured them as the result of honorable combat, and they will still work in the mines. But in that case, you were the ones who worked to undermine us. Only days before the Arelius arrive.”

Fisher Gesha didn't respond, and he let out a heavy breath from behind his mask. “We cannot allow this, elder Gesha. You know that.”

When the old Soulsmith spoke again, it looked as though her lips had been pried apart with an iron bar. “There has been a misunderstanding between us, hasn't there?”

“It seems there has,” Jai Long said.

“I don't see any Fishers here,” she said, and Lindon let his eyes fall shut again.

“Only you, honored elder,” Kral said, with his respectable expression back on.

“Then I will return.” Without the slightest glance in Lindon's direction, she drifted off on a spider's legs.

Yerin's screams continued.

* * *

Eithan watched, sipping from a bottle of what tasted like distilled poison, as the old Fisher departed. The drama had largely faded at that point, but he stayed to see the night shift of miners arrive. They dropped off their scales, headed to their cages, and switched for the day crew.

Lindon and Yerin were bundled among them. Yerin wore a collar, but not Lindon. Why waste a collar? If a Copper trundled off alone in the mines, he might as well slit his own wrists.

They had given Yerin the antidote to the Sandviper venom only minutes after her bite, but she still shambled along like an animated corpse. A natural sandviper would have been much less painful; the Remnant madra attacked the soul as much as the body, and she would have a difficult time recovering with the scripted collar around her neck. He should know; he'd been in similar situations, once or twice.

Handled correctly, this excursion into the Ruins could end up being a valuable lesson for her. Even an adventure, if framed properly.

Eithan took another sip of poison. In his experience, practically anything became an adventure if framed properly.

Her spirit was still flawless, her foundation solid. The Sage of the Endless Sword had done a wonderful job with her, as was expected. There was the problematic matter of her past—as some of the Sandvipers had learned when they tried to unravel the 'rope' around her waist—but even that could be turned to her advantage. Like adventure, advantage was so often just a matter of perspective.

It was her character that he was interested in now. If she had the strength of will to go along with her powers, as he suspected she did, she would be perfect.

Which brought him to Lindon, who was simultaneously more puzzling and more intriguing.

Someone had meddled with Lindon, in a way that he couldn't quite put his finger on. Maybe it would occur to him later. Either way, the boy was still a featureless ball of clay just waiting to be shaped.

Would he work out for Eithan's purposes? Probably not. But the shaping process was fun, and if nothing else, it would be something to occupy Eithan's attention for a few years.

And if there was fun to be had, why not start immediately?

He downed the last of the bottle, which he suspected really was poison, and tossed the empty container aside. His expensive clothes, made of creamy sky blue and imported from the Ninecloud Court, would suffer in this next part. But those were the sacrifices one made to stave off boredom.

Just as the procession of miners was about to enter the gaping maw of the Ruins, Eithan hopped over to stand beside Jai Long.

“THEY'LL KILL US ALL!” Eithan shouted into Jai Long's ear.

The spearman's reaction was gratifying. He spun with a sweeping, glowing arc of his spear that would have taken Eithan's head off if he were anyone else. He ducked beneath it, then straightened again.

Jai Long leveled his spear again, though Eithan was just standing there. Sandvipers started to boil out of their surroundings, clutching weapons.

The man in the red mask studied him for a moment before speaking. “What are you doing here?”

Eithan raised his hands. “Surrendering myself into your custody, good sir.”

Jai Long’s spear wavered. “And why is that?”

“As just punishment for my many sins and imperfections. I am a cursed man, wracked by guilt.”

He smiled.

Slowly, Jai Long lifted his spear, then gestured for a Sandviper to come forward. A short man in furs scurried out, carrying a collar.

“I will be placing a restrictive collar on you,” Jai Long said, holding out the iron loop. “It is scripted to inhibit your madra.”

“A wise and prudent decision,” Eithan said, bowing forward to present his neck.

As though fearing a trap, Jai Long crept forward step by deliberate step, collar in one hand and spear in the other. Eithan sighed, but waited with all the patience he could muster.

Finally, cold iron snapped around his throat. “Adroitly done,” Eithan said, straightening up and clapping his hands together. “Now, the previous group is already in the Ruins. I’ll go on and catch up—we’re wasting valuable mining time.”

Jai Long stood over him, spearhead glowing with madra. The young man had a decision to make. And Eithan smiled pleasantly at him until he made it.

Jai Long took one step to the side, the light in his spear fading.

Wise decision.

13

The square hallway was wide enough for all twenty miners and their five Sandviper escorts. Three of the guards moved in front, two in back, but most of the prisoners didn't seem to need guarding. They stumbled along with empty gazes, all of them with wounds both old and fresh.

Each of the prisoners, including Lindon, carried one of the scripted iron barrels that Fisher Gesha had called mining equipment. It was light enough for the rest of them, with their Iron bodies, but Lindon's arms began to burn after half an hour of carrying it. By the time he started sweating and pushing to keep up with the rest of the pack, they still hadn't passed the first hallway.

The hall itself would have been worth a closer look, if it didn't take all his concentration to stay upright with the barrel. Script ran along the walls, with runes etched deeper than his fingers and wider than his hand. It must have continued for miles, judging by how long they'd traveled.

He couldn't even comprehend the scale of a circle like that. It must only be a small part of whatever mechanism drew in vital aura from all over the region, which made it more ambitious than anything he'd ever imagined.

They finally came to a stop in a room shaped like a cylinder, where five other hallways identical to their own had ended. The room was smaller than he'd expected, and while they weren't crowded, he could see why the Sandvipers hadn't taken more miners.

His first question, when one of the guards raised a torch, was why this room had been made of a different type of stone. Unlike the blocks of the hallway, these were splashed with darker shades of color, as though the blocks had been spattered with...

He missed a step.

Fragments of bone were more common than pebbles on the floor. All clean, and none larger than his thumbnail. A distinct scent of copper and rot lingered in the air, and the stone was stained twice as high as his head.

Whatever happened here, it hadn't left any bodies. The dead had been blasted apart.

The old miners had begun to huddle together, setting their barrels down in the center and gripping the handles. A handful, including Lindon and Yerin, glanced around as though waiting for instruction.

The same guard Lindon had seen before, the bored-looking Sandviper woman with the sword, tapped her weapon against the stone to gather their attention. “The activation script for your harvesters is on your handles,” she said, in the tone of someone who had repeated the same instructions for so long that the words came out on their own. “If you stop mining, we leave you here. If you run, we leave you here. If you harass or disobey a guard, we leave you here. Meal comes at midday. When battle starts, don't panic or run, just trust us to cover you. You panic, and we'll leave you here.”

With that, she turned and took up a position covering two tunnel mouths. Three of the other guards did the same, though one continued to patrol among the miners.

Lindon set up next to Yerin, who was still pale and shaking from the venom.

“We’ll pay them back for this,” Lindon said. “A hundred times over, we’ll pay them back.” It wasn’t the sort of thing that would comfort him, but he suspected Yerin would appreciate revenge more than sympathy.

She smiled in one corner of her mouth even as she gripped the harvester's handles. “Master always said I should get captured once or twice. Shows spine when you break free.”

The guard shouted at them to work before Lindon could respond, but his spirits lifted. If Yerin hadn't given up, there was still hope.

If nothing else, running the harvester would be good exercise for his madra. If he got his hands on a few scales, he might even be able to advance while he was down here.

Now that he'd settled on a goal, Lindon grabbed the handles and sunk his spirit into the script.

The harvester activated almost immediately, drawing Lindon's senses to the aura in the air around him...

He swallowed back a scream.

It was a silent storm, a chaotic gale of blinding color that flashed and blasted in every direction as though it would tear everything apart. He couldn't pick a single aspect out of the maelstrom—anything, maybe everything. It felt as though it would peel the flesh from his bones with sheer force, though it passed through him harmlessly.

When the harvester began, it pulled the slightest breath of that aura from the air, running it in a corkscrew pattern through the center of the iron barrel. The energy circled between the crystal flasks at the bottom—purifying the aura and converting it to madra, no doubt—and Lindon's spirit was only necessary to keep the script running so that the process continued. The crystals were steadily filling up, and when they were full, he supposed the final stretch of script would activate and pop out a scale.

He wasn't sure, because he had to release the harvester when his core ran dry. He leaned over the barrel, panting heavily.

The Sandviper guard wore the hide of a bear-like dreadbeast and had an axe in one hand. Lindon had to flinch as the man stalked closer, growling.

“Back to work,” the man spat, jabbing him with the butt of his axe.

Lindon met the man's eyes, trying to look earnest. “I'm sorry, honored elder, but I'm only—”

The man hit him again, hard enough that the room spun in a haze of pain. “Don't give me that look. You think you're getting out of here? The dreadbeasts are coming, and they're going to...Where's your collar?”

He swung the axe harder, and if Lindon hadn't let himself collapse with the blow, it would have broken his shoulder.

“What have you done with it?” the man roared, lifting his axe again. Lindon sputtered out protests, holding up a hand to protect himself. Yerin moved, standing in front of him.

Something skittered across the floor like a stone across the surface of the pond, and the guard tripped.

His foot flew out behind him, and for an instant, Lindon expected him to plant his face in the floor. But he was still a Gold, and he caught himself with one palm against the ground, flipping upright. He spun around, pulling a second axe from his belt.

“Which one of you?” he growled, choked with anger.

A man in the corner lifted his head and met Lindon's eye, winking.

Lindon stared. It was that same yellow-haired man. He'd been captured too? How? When?

The leader of the guards raised a hand. “Be peaceful, Tash,” she said. “You tripped.”

Tash shouted a protest, but he didn't even get the first word out of his mouth before she spoke again. “And he's a Copper. Collar won't make him any weaker than he already is.”

The guard looked back at Lindon in disbelief, and then something brushed gently against Lindon's spirit. If he hadn't been paying attention, he might not have noticed.

So that was what it felt like, having his soul tested by another. He would have to remember that.

Tash shoved him one more time with the butt of the axe, then left him alone. For the rest of the day, Lindon was allowed to stop and cycle whenever he needed, though the first time he was sure Tash would split his head for stopping the harvester. Instead, the guards treated him like he didn't exist. When Yerin so much as glanced up, they shouted her back down. He was an exception.

That had to be an advantage, somehow.

He glanced back to the yellow-haired man, only to find that the man wasn't against the wall anymore. He was right next to Lindon now, though Lindon hadn't heard a thing.

“Isn't it ingenious, this thing?” he said, gesturing to the harvester. “In the Blackflame Empire, we don't have anything like it.”

Tash turned around, his skin blooming red. “Quiet!”

“My name is Eithan,” he said with a bow. He made no attempt to quiet himself, and even several of the others turned around with looks of disbelief. “And you are Wei Shi Lindon. The Copper. You're famous! Although infamous might be more accurate, really.”

Tash had an axe in each hand and looked ready to use them. Lindon scraped his harvester across the ground to put a little distance between him and Eithan.

The yellow-haired man followed him. “You know, there's an opportunity for you here. The measure of a sacred artist isn't talent; it's how you respond to risk.”

Lindon turned away, trying to make it clear that he wasn't speaking. Tash had arrived, an axe in each hand.

“It's kind of like this,” Eithan said, and pivoted on the balls of his feet to deliver an overhand punch.

Straight at Lindon.

Lindon released his harvester, jerking to the side. He slammed into Tash's legs, and no matter how strong the Gold was, he'd been caught in mid-stride. He stumbled, halfway falling, and caught himself on the lip of a nearby harvester.

The guard looked up at Lindon with a face like a furnace.

“What do you do when you're met with danger?” Eithan asked conversationally. “Do you fight? Do you beg for forgiveness? Do you listen to me? Now, Yerin.”

Yerin's hand shot out, stopping Tash from planting his axe in Lindon's skull. She looked back at Eithan, looking as stunned as Lindon felt.

“One step to your left,” Eithan said, and Lindon followed his instructions. In a blur of motion, Tash had already thrown one axe, and it whistled through the air to clatter against the wall.

Now everyone was staring at Eithan, Lindon included.

“Let him go,” Eithan said, and Yerin released Tash just as he swiped at her arm with his remaining axe.

“Lindon, take two steps back and then sit down,” Eithan said, but by now Lindon was catching on. The man was singling them out for some reason, pushing them into trouble, and Lindon wasn't going to stand for it any more.

Of course, he didn't have to be rude about it.

He took a step forward and gave a shallow bow. “Forgiveness, elder brother, but I don't—”

Something large and snarling passed over Lindon's head, ruffling his hair, and latched onto Tash. The man screamed, and blood sprayed up onto the walls.

“Well done,” Eithan said, patting Lindon on the shoulder.

For the first time, Lindon noticed more openings halfway up the walls. They were half the size of the hallway that had admitted the miners, but they were plenty big enough for the dreadbeasts that appeared out of nowhere, hurling themselves down onto the miners.

“Weapons up!” the woman in charge shouted, raising her own sword, but her command had come late. The guards already had their weapons in hand, and the miners crouched by their harvesters.

The creature on Tash looked like a monkey with skin mottled bruise-purple and meat-red, and by the time Tash managed to pull the dreadbeast away, he wore a mask of blood. He gurgled as he took a staggering step forward, and Lindon looked away.

Only two of the miners stood in the middle of the deluge: Eithan and Yerin. Yerin had lifted the harvester with one hand—it was taking her obvious effort, which must have been the collar's effect—and punched a rotting dog with the iron barrel on her fist.

Eithan was wandering around seemingly at random, taking a casual stroll around the room, but none of the dreadbeasts ever latched onto him. He grabbed Lindon by the shoulder as he passed, which pulled Lindon to his feet just in time to avoid a foxlike beast's snarling attack. Eithan threw his arm across Lindon's shoulder in a fatherly gesture.

“There's a lineage of sacred beasts, you may have heard of them, known as the Heavenly Sky Tigers. It's a bit much for a name, I know, but they're quite famous.” One of the miners was being dragged down a tunnel with his arm in the muzzle of a rotting wolf. A casual blow from a nearby guard sent the dreadbeast tumbling.

“These tigers breed every year or two,” Eithan went on, ignoring the carnage around him. “Each litter has two, and exactly two, cubs...but only one ever survives to adulthood. Can you guess why that is?”

Yerin had taken a slash across the shoulder, and she was beating a monkey-creature to death with her bare hands. Lindon strained forward to help, but he couldn't escape from beneath Eithan's arm.

“I'd be happy to hear this story later,” Lindon said, forcing calm into his voice.

“It's because the cubs fight each other to the death,” Eithan said. “As a child, I found it tragic. My family kept a breeding pair of these Heavenly Sky Tigers, and when they gave birth to a brother and a sister, I was determined to save them both. I kept them in separate enclosures, fed them separately, raised them as I would a pair of children.”

Blood spattered Lindon's forehead, and it took all his concentration not to scream.

“In the end, they wasted away and died. Both of them. I tried everything I knew to save them, but it was useless. Later, I found out the truth: for a Heavenly Sky Tiger, the body of their sibling is like an elixir. If one does not consume the other, their madra isn't strong enough to support their bodies, and they will inevitably die.”

Eithan clasped Lindon with one hand on each shoulder, looking into his eyes with an earnest gaze. The head of a dreadbeast flew behind him, trailing blood. “Do you understand the story, Lindon?”

“It's a parable about overly protective parents,” Lindon said hastily, straining his eyes to catch a glimpse of the creatures prowling around him.

“Not just parents,” Eithan said. “Sacred artists. Without risk, without battle, without a willingness to fight, you will stay weak. And weakness means death. Do you agree?”

Even if he hadn't, he would have wholeheartedly agreed just to get Eithan's help. “Elder brother is so wise!” he said, his words tripping over each other. “This one agrees, and will gladly discuss it with elder brother at length.”

Eithan clapped him on the back, smiling proudly. He took one long glance around the room, where the room had fallen into temporary silence. A few miners lay in bloody pools on the ground, as did Tash, but most of them had survived.

The leader raised her sword. “Run!” she shouted, and started down the hallway entrance.

Lindon looked up to the tunnels, expecting more dreadbeasts, but none came.

Instead, a rainbow of light slowly bloomed on the floor, and Remnants started to climb up from corpses.

Something seized Lindon from behind, grabbing him beneath both arms. He flailed in blind panic before he was hurled up, sliding perfectly into one of the tunnels into the wall.

It didn't even hurt much; he scraped his chin a bit on the stone floor, and his ribs might be a little bruised, but he'd slid into the tunnel at exactly the right angle to avoid injury.

He scrambled back to the entrance, looking down, where he saw Eithan smiling up at him. The yellow-haired man gave a cheery wave, and then reached to one side without looking.

Yerin swiped at his hand, but he was ready for her.

A second later, she slid into the tunnel beside Lindon. She growled as she stood, one hand groping for a sword, the other held in a fist at her side.

“Who is he?” Lindon asked.

“A dead man, if he doesn't explain himself true and proper.”

Eithan landed neatly on the lip of the tunnel as though he'd moved ten feet vertically in one step, fine white-and-blue robes billowing behind him as he walked. “Follow me. Most of those Remnants can climb, and some of them can fly.”

A blue wing spread across the entrance to the tunnel, accompanied by a cry that sounded like the song of a zither. Eithan doubled his pace. “Whoops, faster. We should go faster.”

Yerin matched his stride, gesturing back the way they'd come. “You don't have the spine for a fight?”

Eithan hooked a finger underneath his collar. “We could find a way to get these off, if that's what you'd prefer. But you should know that I...well, you might say there's only one string to my bow.”

“Can you see the future?” Lindon asked. In his own mind, he was already convinced of the answer. Eithan had moved before the guards or beasts did, every time, and he'd known when the dreadbeasts were coming.

“Better! I can see the present.”

A Remnant cried behind them, like a low horn, accompanied by a human scream.

Before Lindon could express his skepticism, Eithan continued. “I have a thousand eyes and ten thousand ears. I know everything that happens within range of my spirit, so as soon as an enemy starts to move, I simply step aside. It's like fighting the blind.”

“Can't hit too hard with that,” Yerin observed.

Eithan bowed to her. “Just so! Superior awareness is perhaps the greatest power of all, but as far as weapons go, knowledge lacks a certain heft. Though it does make me frustrating to kill—no one's managed it so far.”

“If you don't mind telling me, how did they capture you?” Lindon asked. He kept his tone casual, but he was listening for a lie. If Eithan could do what he claimed, it would have been easier than lifting a hand to avoid the Sandvipers. He'd entered the mines on his own.

But why?

Eithan smiled broadly and reached out a hand to Lindon's head. Lindon tried to step aside, but the older man's palm landed regardless. He ruffled Lindon's hair. “Oh, I remember when I was your age. Young, spirited, distrusting of strangers. They say the years wear your innocence away, but it took me better than a decade on my own to learn the freedom of trust.”

“That's not looking much like an answer,” Yerin said, which nicely mirrored Lindon's own thought.

“Very well! As a reward for your observational skills, I'll tell you the truth.” Eithan spun around, speaking as he walked backwards. “I came from the Blackflame Empire, located far to the east. Not long ago, I happened to sense a great power coming from the west. I brought it to the attention of my clan, who instructed me to investigate. When I arrived here, I found this incredible pyramid had drawn up all the aura for miles. Of course, I wasn't the only one—every sacred artist in the Desolate Wilds had beaten me to it.”

“Is there something in the Ruins you want to take back to your clan?” Lindon asked. The spear Jai Sen had mentioned loomed in his imagination.

Eithan waved a hand. “The Ruins are loud and well worth investigating, but a treasure to a wilderness sect is not necessarily worthy of attention from a major Blackflame clan.” He glanced up at the ceiling. “There's quite a nice spear in here, but it looks like it would be most suitable for the Jai clan. It's not useful for me, so I gave up on it a long time ago.”

“You can sense the spear?” Lindon asked, suddenly hungry. If Eithan could lead him straight to the weapon everyone wanted...

But he'd said something more surprising. “You don't want it?”

“We have access to Soulsmiths of our own,” Eithan said dismissively. “A spear isn't interesting. Far more than a mere weapon, we value talent.”

He was recruiting for a major imperial clan, and here he'd singled out the two of them. Lindon found himself forgetting the spear too. With Eithan's resources behind him, he wouldn't have to scrape for every scale. If he understood correctly, with a powerful family supporting him, he could reach Gold tomorrow.

“Forgiveness, I was blind,” Lindon said. “I should have known that treasures in our eyes are just trash in yours. If I may ask, which—”

Eithan cut him off. “I know this is like asking an amputee what happened to his legs, but I'm dying of curiosity. What happened to your core?”

Lindon glanced down at his midsection as though his core had just become visible. “My core?”

“You have two of them. Were you born that way? Is that why you're so weak? Or did someone damage your soul?”

Eithan asked with a tone of open curiosity, but Lindon had never felt that feather-light shiver of someone reaching out to sense his soul. Either he'd missed it, or Eithan was aware of everything that happened close to him. Including the strength and nature of souls.

Lindon swelled with questions. How far did his sense extend? Was it some kind of sacred art that he had to use, or was he just aware of everything? Did he have to focus to avoid being overwhelmed?

But those were questions he could ask later, after he'd earned his way into the protection of Eithan's clan. For now, his job was to make himself valuable to Eithan.

“Pardon my rudeness. I was surprised that you'd noticed. I was born...” He had planned to say 'Unsouled,' but that had no meaning outside Sacred Valley, so he corrected himself mid-sentence. “...with a weak soul. Instead of wasting resources developing me, my clan chose not to teach me sacred arts. I split my core myself, as a defensive measure.”

Eithan nodded along to every word, as though he'd expected exactly that story. When Lindon had finished, the man stopped walking—they'd put quite a distance between themselves and the Remnants by this point, though the occasional haunting echo did drift down the hall—and put his palm against Lindon's chest.

“Breathe in to here,” Eithan said.

Lindon glanced over to Yerin, but she looked just as confused as he did, so he followed instructions. He filled his lungs until his ribs pressed against Eithan's hand.

“Now breathe out halfway.”

Lindon did, until Eithan told him to hold his breath there.

“Your breathing technique helped you split your core?”

He nodded, still holding his breath.

“That explains why it's all focused inward.” Eithan waved a hand vaguely in front of Lindon's middle. “Your madra flow is all knotted. It's not a bad breathing technique for pure madra, and you haven't damaged your channels yet, but it's better to correct now. You have a Path manual?”

He glanced at Lindon as though expecting Lindon to produce the book on command, and Lindon finally let his breath out to respond. “It's inside my pack, but unless you know a way out...”

Eithan tapped his chin with one finger, thinking. “Do you have a madra filter? Some condensation elixirs? You must have something to improve madra quality, if you made it to Copper without harvesting aura.”

“I have a parasite ring,” Lindon offered.

Eithan beamed. “Perfect! Now, where did you leave this pack?”

Yerin cutting in, pushing her way between them and holding up a hand as though she held an invisible sword to Eithan's throat. “Let's not throw our doors wide just yet. You say you're from the Blackflame Empire. Who are you?”

He drew himself up as though proud to be asked the question. “Young lady, I am the greatest janitor in all existence. I am the son of a janitor, last in a long line of janitors that stretch all the way back to the Sage of Brooms...and beyond!”

“Janitors?” Yerin asked blankly.

“Lest you think I'm speaking figuratively, let me clarify. My clan organizes the street sweepers in Blackflame City, we supervise sewer maintenance, we dig ditches and light lamps and sweep chimneys. 'Dirty hands are a mark of pride,' those are the words by which we live.”

This from a man who looked as though he'd never held a shovel in his life. His fingers were long, his skin pale, his hands soft, his clothes far more expensive than anything else Lindon had seen in the Five Factions Alliance. In short, he looked more like the spoiled young master of a noble clan rather than any janitor.

“Please excuse me if I still seem...untrusting...” Lindon said, “but surely such a role does not fit your esteemed station. Do you perhaps mean that you keep the streets clean of crime, or you're a clan of assassins ridding an empire of the unworthy...”

Eithan was sliding his hands over the wall now, as though feeling the stone for weakness. “I grew up in the sewers of Blackflame City, ankle-deep in what you might call 'sludge.' They used similar scripts to control intake and outflow, so if this works on similar principles...ah, there we have it.”

A single rune sparked to life, sending a ripple of light flaring down the line of script in either direction.

With a grating sound, a stone slab slid upwards, revealing an open doorway onto a flight of stairs leading up.

“Maybe this was some kind of ancient sewer,” Eithan speculated. “Anyway, I have a task for you, Wei Shi Lindon.”

Now that he thought of it, Lindon realized that Eithan had known his full name the first time they'd met. Even the street sweeper of a great empire was infinitely more powerful than the four Schools of Sacred Valley, so Lindon bowed deeply over a salute. “I will do my best to serve.”

“Your current breathing technique is sufficient if you're planning to split your core again, but it's building a wall between you and Iron. To reach Iron, you have to push madra out of your madra channels, forcing it into every scrap of your flesh. It's very difficult without elixirs, and your madra is currently focused into your core...and nowhere else. You need a new breathing technique.”

Eithan stood straight, facing Lindon. “Inhale as I do, and as you do so, cycle your madra in wide loops to every extremity of your body. As you exhale, gather it together again, all at once. I'll show you how.”

Lindon had practiced a simple breathing technique since the day he first got his wooden badge, until it eventually became his natural breathing rhythm. He'd changed it according to the instruction in the Heart of Twin Stars manual, but it wasn't any more complex than his original technique, only different.

Likewise, the technique Eithan taught him wasn't complicated. It didn't use any principles Lindon didn't already know, which had come as a relief.

But it was hard.

He could barely hold the new cycling pattern standing straight and watching Eithan, and he was sure that he'd lose it as soon as Eithan stopped giving him pointers. He said as much to Eithan, who laughed.

“That's the nature of any acquired skill. It will feel like breathing through a wet rag for a while, and your body will tell you to stop. But one day, you'll look back and wonder how it was ever difficult.” He pointed up the stairs. “Now, as your first challenge, hold that pattern as you run up to the next floor.”

Lindon peered into the shadows at the top. “Do you have a light?”

“You do,” Eithan said.

He reached into his pocket and pulled out Suriel's marble. He was somewhat self-conscious holding it, as though he'd been caught in a lie, but there was no way Eithan would know what it was. Even if he'd sensed it, it was just a light in a glass.

Sure enough, Eithan gave the marble a curious glance, but that was all. Lindon held it up, took a deep breath, and began to cycle as he ran.

Behind him, Yerin protested. “He's about as sturdy as a newborn kitten. If there's anything up there, it'll tear him to rags.”

“Remember my thousand eyes,” Eithan said. “These Ruins may as well be my own home.”

The blue light of the marble was faint, but it was enough to show Lindon when he reached the end of the stairs and found himself in a large room. He couldn't see anything beyond the patch of floor at his feet.

The jog hadn't been long, but his lungs were still burning with the effort of holding the breathing technique. He started to shout back that he'd made it, but when something hissed in the shadows, his words died.

It was only about as big as his arm. A tan centipede with a carapace the color of a sandy dune. It had a head like a snake and two rows of insect claws, and its tail arched up into a scorpion's stinger.

He’d never seen one in the flesh, but their Remnants had left him with an impression all too clear. The first sandviper hissed at him, baring fangs…as a second scuttled up, keeping a wary distance from its twin, angling toward Lindon.

Eithan's voice came from the stairs beneath him. “I know what's up there, and he can handle it.”

Then came the growl of stone, like a lid scraping over a coffin, as the door slid shut.

14

Lindon's shouts and pleas came muffled through the stone door, and Yerin gathered what little madra she could onto her fingernails. Sword madra gathered onto sharp edges, so her nails were not the best container.

She would have used her Goldsign instead, but the scripted collar was choking her madra at the source, and she was still shaky from the Sandviper venom earlier. Her muscles squirmed like snakes in a bag, and she barely had enough focus to hold the technique together. If she tried to control the steel arm on her back, she might end up cutting her own head off.

But she'd die and rot away before she gave up without a fight.

She held her fingers up like claws to Eithan's eye. “Pop it back open.”

He didn't flinch, looking at her like a wronged child. “But he's not finished yet.”

She slashed at him, but he'd already started walking to the side, as though he'd picked exactly that second to take a stroll. Her technique rippled through the air, almost invisible without her spiritual sight, and madra cracked against the stone.

“I came here to find some promising recruits,” Eithan continued, pacing around her. She turned so he didn't have a shot at her back. “I was also bored, but the recruits are important too. You see, the families of the empire compete largely on the strength of the younger generation, because disciples are the indication of a clan's future power. Since we’re looking fairly sparse in the disciple department, I'm keeping an eye or two open for outside talent.”

Lindon's cries for help were filling the hall now.

“I’ll go along with you,” Yerin said quickly. Eithan wouldn't have been the first to try and forcibly recruit the Sword Sage's apprentice—even while her master had been alive, every sect and school they'd crossed had tried to make her a better offer. But none of them had taken a hostage.

If she went with him now, she could break out later. Her master would have loved it.

Eithan paid no more attention to Lindon's screams than he would to a chirping bird, brushing some dirt from his shoulder. “It would be irresponsible of me to turn you down. As I said, we've been backed into something of a corner. But there's a saying where I come from: 'a bad student is a weight around his teacher's neck.' I'd rather go back empty-handed than take someone who isn't ready.”

Yerin still couldn't control her Goldsign well under the collar's influence; the bladed silver arm wobbled as it rose into the air, and she couldn't keep it straight. But it was ten times easier to funnel sword madra through the blade on the end than through her fingernails.

She gathered her power into it and fixed Eithan with her gaze. “He dies, and I'm not going anywhere.”

Eithan's eyebrows lifted. “Oh, you're more than good enough on your own. A Sage is a Sage after all; he had the good fortune to pick you up early, and your foundation is flawless. It would be an honor to pick up where your master left off.” He swept his arm toward the stone door. “But I find myself intrigued by your Copper friend.”

Yerin's focus wavered, and some of the madra in her Goldsign dissipated. “What is it you want from him?

“To teach him.” Eithan patted the door like a favored pet, even as Lindon shouted on the other side. “It's so rare to find a truly blank canvas.”

“You’re looking for pure madra? Raise your own kid.”

“No no, that's easy enough. The quality I’m looking for, indeed the most important quality for any sacred artist, is drive. He needs the resolve to push through any obstacle in his Path, and that kind of focus is very difficult to teach. But here we have someone who split his own core, a Copper working side-by-side with Golds. Something’s driving him, and it might be enough to take him to the top.”

She found herself speaking through clenched teeth. “He’s blind, you hear me? The world’s all jade beds and silk sheets for him. He’s never seen how ugly it gets. He doesn’t know.”

He’d been mistreated by his clan, that was true. But he’d never fought for his own life. He’d never clawed his way out of a pile of bodies until he was elbow-deep in blood. He’d never woken to find that his only family was dead…and pushed through that crushing weight to draw his sword anyway.

Eithan leaned one shoulder against the wall, considering her. “What do you think I’m trying to teach him?”

Suddenly, he sounded just like her master. It brought up memories she’d just as soon have left buried.

A white forest, long ago. A ring of swords in the snow.

Yerin ran a thumb across one paper-thin scar on the back of her hand, remembering. Her madra dissipated, her Goldsign retreating.

Eithan was smart enough not to crow about his victory. If he had given her so much as a smug look, she’d have peeled his face away. Instead, he spoke as though nothing had happened. “Your foundation is excellent, as I’d expect from a master like yours. But I’m sure you know your advancement is lacking.”

She didn’t even need to nod. Within Lowgold, she could call herself strong. But the gap to Highgold was a chasm. She could barely control her Goldsign, much less the powerful madra that had come with her master’s Remnant. She’d left it mostly alone so far; when she touched that reserve of inherited power, she felt like an infant strapped to the back of a war-trained stallion. She didn’t even like to think of it.

“I’m sure the Sage of the Endless Sword would have had greater insight in regards to sword Paths, but I can offer a few observations of my own.”

She looked from his pristine hair to his expensive, unstained clothes. “You think you’re a sword artist, do you?”

If he said he was, she wasn’t listening to another word from this liar’s mouth.

“I prefer not to use a weapon at all. None of them seem to suit me. But sword Paths are common because they’re very simple.”

She was still trying to figure out if he needed his teeth punched out for that insult when he continued. “You need to push yourself.”

She gave that some measured thought. True, she’d felt something when she fought off three Sandviper soldiers on the slopes of Mount Samara. Not comfortable, exactly, but like she was moving along a familiar road. And it hadn’t been long ago when she’d honed herself to the peak of Jade by engaging in endless battle with the Heaven’s Glory School.

Eithan continued, still leaning against the door that held a begging Lindon. “Advancement along sword Paths is very straightforward at this stage. Immerse yourself in the sword, cycle on the battlefield, and find opponents who will push you to the very edge of life and death. There’s a reason why it’s one of the most common aspects.”

Yerin nodded once. Her teacher had said similar things, but every stage of advancement was different. He’d actually stopped her from fighting when she was Iron, for fear that she’d ruin her foundation for Jade. “You know where I can find any of that in here?”

He grinned and pushed off from the wall. “You’ll need your sword to really practice, so just sit and cycle until I return. We have to make sure you’re in your best condition, don’t we?”

Eithan paused for a moment, then added, “If he dies before I get back, you should know that I am sorry. But some Paths are shorter than others.”

Before she could respond, he hooked a finger under his iron collar and tugged. With a wrenching shriek, the iron split and tore.

He tossed the ruined metal behind him and left, whistling a cheery tune.

Yerin pulled at her own collar, just in case someone had replaced it with a rusted copy, but it remained firm. She could just barely scrape together enough madra to Enforce herself, but not enough to tear metal with her bare hands. She and Eithan should have been on the same level: left with nothing more than the strength of their bodies. They might as well have been Iron.

How had he done it?

Something smacked against the door from the other side, and Yerin stopped fiddling with her collar. She stared at the scripted line of stone, aching for her spiritual sight. Without it, she felt like she had one eye plucked out.

“Lindon?”

Silence for a moment, then something scrambled on the floor. Seconds later, Lindon’s voice came through, ragged and breathless. “Can you open the door? Is Eithan there? How did he close it?”

Yerin sighed. “I’m coming up empty on that count. You’re stuck with a rusty patch, that I can tell you.”

A muffled sound that she couldn’t identify came between her words and his response. “Yerin,” he said, “I’m going to die. I can’t…I can’t do this, I’m running them around in circles, but I don’t have…anything.”

She wasn’t sure that she heard every word, but she got the main thrust of it. She’d said the same things to her master, over and over again, ever since she was a girl.

Yerin sat, leaning her back against the door. “You’ve got no cards left in your hand, you’re staring death in the eyes, and nobody’s there to pull you out. That sound true so far?”

“Yerin, please, it’s coming back.”

She continued. “That’s how you advance. When you can’t count on anybody else, that’s when you know if you’ve got what it takes. It’s painful, it’s bloody, and it’s hard. You can take shortcuts if you’ve got a fortune to burn on elixirs and treasures, but if you don’t…”

Another scuffle came from behind her, and Lindon didn’t respond. He may have been fighting, but she continued talking as though he could hear. “The sacred arts are a game, and your life is the only thing you’ve got to bet. You want to move up? This is what up looks like.”

Silence was her only response.

She sat against the door, remembering all the times she’d stared death in the eyes. It had started when she was a young girl, before she’d met her master, and she was sure the heavens would strike her dead for her sins. That had lasted for…longer than she cared to recall.

Lindon didn’t deserve anything like that, but here he was anyway. The longer the silence stretched, the more certain she became that he was dead. She couldn’t say she hadn’t seen it coming; if you bet on the longest odds, you were going to lose more than you won.

But she waited in the endless dark of the Ruins, only the flickering light of the script on the wall for company, straining her ears as time slid by.

When she finally caught a sound, it almost deafened her. The explosion was like a cross between a wolf’s howl and the crack of a firework, and it came with a green flash from the gaps around the door.

She was on her feet in a second, slapping the heel of her hand against the door and demanding to know what was happening.

For the first minutes, she heard only scrapes and grunts from the other side, like a man dragging something heavy across the ground. After an age, footsteps.

“Forgive me,” Lindon said, his voice strained and tight. “I was begging like a coward, and I made you listen. I am ashamed.”

“Everything steady in there, Lindon?” she asked, straining her ears as though she could hear an injury. “All your pieces still on?’

This time, she thought she heard a faint note of pride. “Sacred beasts are still beasts, after all. I crushed them under a rock. Their Remnants were the tricky part, but I tossed a scale between them and they fought for it until one died. Had to tear the dead one’s tail off and use the stinger to finish off the other, but that’s nothing to a sacred artist, right?”

“Just one more day,” Yerin said, letting out a deep breath and relaxing against the door again. “Don’t know why you’re crowing about it. Any day where I haven’t beaten a Remnant to death with its own limb is a holiday.”

He gave a weak laugh. “Forgiveness. I let my head get too big.” He hesitated, and then added, “If you could find a way to open the door, I would still be grateful.”

For a second, she thought it was a heaven-sent miracle: at his words, the door actually started to grind open.

“I had every faith in you!” Eithan called from only a few feet down the hall, and Yerin staggered to her feet. She hadn’t felt him approach at all. She knew it was the collar’s effect, but it was still unnerving, as though he’d popped out of nowhere.

Eithan removed his hand from the script, smiling broadly. The Thousand-Mile Cloud floated behind him, sullen and red, with Lindon’s pack seated comfortably on top of it. Two packs, in fact: his big one, bulging with all the knickknacks he carried around, and the smaller one he’d planned on filling with scales stolen from the Sandvipers.

And beneath it, peeking out from the edge of the cloud, her sheathed sword.

“If you can get out anytime you want,” Yerin said, “let’s leave. This place is like a graveyard stuffed into a cave.”

“Why leave?” Eithan asked. “Everything we need is right here.”

The door had opened completely by then, revealing Lindon standing stunned at the bottom of the stairs. He was leaning with one hand on the wall, displaying a collection of scrapes and bruises, but the corpse of a Sandviper Remnant lay sprawled on the stairs behind him. He held a bright green stinger as long as his arm in one hand, hilt wrapped in cloth so he didn’t have to touch the toxic madra directly. He’d torn off one of his sleeves to provide the fabric.

Truth was, he actually looked like a real sacred artist. With his sharp eyes, broad shoulders, and the severed Remnant arm bleeding sparks of essence, he looked like a Jade ready to advance to Lowgold. It was a much better look on him than how she’d found him, all clean and cringing and weak.

Eithan tossed the two packs to Lindon, who had to drop his improvised weapon to catch them. He stumbled back a few steps, almost falling onto the stairs.

“Make sure to take notes,” Eithan said, pointing to the pack. “Wear your parasite ring and keep your breathing straight. I put some scales in there for you, but I’m keeping the cloud.” He patted the construct with one hand. “I need a bed.”

Then he slapped the wall, and the door started sliding shut again.

Lindon lunged forward, but Eithan had already thrust his palm forward. He struck Lindon in the chest, sending him tumbling backwards.

When the door slammed closed, Lindon screamed wordlessly from the other side.

Eithan brushed his sleeves, smiling at Yerin as though he’d heard nothing. “That should keep him occupied for a few weeks. Now, I believe I mentioned something about you needing an opponent.”

He tossed her sheathed sword to her and drew a weapon of his own: a pair of wrought iron fabric scissors.

“Best weapon I could find,” he said apologetically, snipping them open and closed. “Now, if you’re ready, let’s begin.”

* * *

Jai Long was having Fisher problems.

Kral's father, the chief of the Sandviper sect, still hadn't returned from his hunt. He'd sent word that he was alive and well, but that was little comfort to Jai Long, because the chief's absence meant that Kral was in charge.

And Kral took responsibility in one way: by leaving it to Jai Long.

So it was that he found himself standing next to the First Fisher, Ragahn, waiting for the old man to say something.

They stood in the shade of an old tree—its leaves were half blackened by the rot of the dreadbeasts, like so much in the Desolate Wilds, but it provided a relief from the sun nonetheless.

Ragahn, the leader of the Fisher sect, looked like a beggar who had chosen that spot to plead for coins. His gray hair hung loose, his feet were bare, his robe brown and stained, and his Fisher's hook—the blade longer than his arm and sharp on the inside—was made of rust-patched iron, dangling carelessly from his belt. He held a net over one shoulder, packed tight with severed dreadbeast parts. They were fresh, still dripping blood, and the stench was almost painful.

But Jai Long stood there, his expression covered by the strips of cloth that masked his Goldsign. He peered out through the gap in the red mask, resisting the temptation to cover the silence.

The First Fisher had come to him before dawn, almost exactly two weeks after Jai Long had sent Gesha's recruits into the mines. He'd assumed that was what the visit was about, but the old man had never said. He simply grunted, indicated that Jai Long should follow him outside, and then left.

For the next hour, they'd stood underneath a tree, as the bloody pieces in the Fisher's net slowly dried.

Jai Long wondered if this patience was perhaps the secret of Ragahn's advancement. The beggar chief was one of the few Truegolds in the entire Wilds, which meant that he'd gained complete control over the Remnant in his core. His Goldsign was very subtle; a stranger may not even notice the webs between his fingers.

Once, Truegold had seemed like the pinnacle of achievement. He'd worked himself half to death to get closer, eventually achieving Highgold himself, only to discover that his particular Goldsign would never go away. His face would remain hideous no matter how far he advanced.

Now, he had other reasons to work. The Jai clan wouldn't take his sister back anymore, and she had no one else. To create a home for her, even Truegold wouldn't be enough.

Finally, the First Fisher spoke. “Have you finished your map?”

Jai Long didn't dare to twitch to betray his support. He responded with bland confidence. “My miners keep their eyes open.”

Ragahn adjusted his grip on the net. “You have. So why aren't you holding the spear?”

He was right. Jai Long had finished the map over a week ago, but they still didn't understand the script running throughout the Ruins, so he couldn't access the chambers he needed to open the top of the pyramid. The spear should be inside, though he had no independent confirmation of that. If it wasn't, he was going to have some harsh questions to answer when Kral's father returned.

It was frustrating, because Jai Long may have been able to force his way in with a more varied toolset. He had access only to artists on the Path of the Sandviper, as well as his own Path of the Stellar Spear. Neither of them were suited for scouting or breaking seals.

But Fishers adopted a peculiar twist on the aspect of force. In some way that Jai Long didn't understand, they could draw objects in like fishermen pulling on invisible lines. They might have some way to open the doors without manipulating the script.

If the First Fisher was here to strike some sort of bargain, then a little honesty might be in order.

“The script has slowed our progress,” Jai Long allowed. “I'm confident that we will make our way inside, given enough time.”

“Time,” Ragahn repeated, as though chewing on the word. “The Arelius family is almost here. I've seen the black crescent banners myself. Three days, no more.”

Jai Long would hardly have met with an enemy without a weapon in his hand, and his knuckles whitened around his spear's shaft. He'd hoped for a little more time. Unless something changed, he wouldn't be able to break the script in three days.

He was about to bend his own pride far enough to ask for help when the First Fisher spoke. “I'll buy your map.”

“You want to pay for it?”

“It's useless to you. May as well make a profit. I'll take it, clean out the Ruins before the Underlord gets here.”

Leaving nothing for Jai Long, much less the Sandvipers.

The First Fisher would no doubt pay well for the map. He was one of the richest individuals in the Wilds, despite his appearance, and he had his reputation to consider. If he shorted a sect like the Sandvipers, none of the other factions would deal with him.

But that would require Jai Long to admit defeat.

“I would be happy to share whatever bounty we find inside the Ruins with anyone who participates in its retrieval. If you would like to lend me your abilities, I will distribute rewards on merit.”

Ragahn chuckled deep in his chest, as though trying to rid himself of a cough. “The bones of the earth will bend before a sacred artist's pride.”

He heaved the net of severed dreadbeast limbs off his shoulder and dropped it next to the tree trunk, turning to Jai Long. He spread empty, webbed hands in a show of peace. “We'll compete with honor, to save face for our sects.”

“You can't call that a competition,” Jai Long said, contempt in his voice. “The other factions will never stand for it.” Ragahn was a Truegold, with the power to do whatever he wished, and Jai Long couldn’t stop him. But honor and fear for the Fisher reputation should keep the old man from pushing a mere Highgold around.

The First Fisher slowly shook his head. “You question my honor again, boy, and you're taking your life in your hands.”

Jai Long carefully did not shiver.

“No, I happen to have a disciple. He's Highgold himself, like you are, and he's more than happy to stand for a traditional duel. Aren't you, Lokk?”

He raised his voice on the last word, and Lokk of the Fishers stepped out of the trees a hundred yards away. He raised a hand in greeting, then dashed toward them, covering the distance with impressive speed. Jai Long had met the man before; he was early in his second decade and had already reached Highgold, which made him a peer with Kral and Jai Long.

He was short but thin, with disproportionately long arms and a pair of steel Fisher's hooks on his back. He and his sister were the only two Fishers who used a pair of hooks in battle, as far as Jai Long knew.

He wondered if the man had been waiting in the woods for over an hour, just in case his name was called. With a man like the First Fisher as his master, he probably did a lot of waiting.

Lokk bowed over his fists to Ragahn. “The disciple greets his master,” he said, then bowed again to Jai Long. “We could settle this debate by exchanging pointers, as fellow travelers on the path of sacred arts.”

This move of the First Fisher's didn't surprise Jai Long. Sects and Schools dueled one another as often as clans did, for any and all reasons: for pride, for trading rights, to settle disputes, to avoid wholesale slaughter. The faction capable of raising the best disciple was considered to be the strongest, and the strongest got what they wanted.

He had no problem with the logic, but Ragahn was trying to get him to draw his weapon. If he did...well, it was rare to emerge from a duel unscathed. And since Jai Long was currently the de facto leader of the Sandviper sect, any wound on his part would result in a weakening of the Sandvipers as a whole. Win or lose, the First Fisher would get what he wanted. And if Jai Long refused, his reputation would take a hit that might be more fatal than a physical wound. Even the Sandvipers would turn on a coward.

Fortunately, Jai Long had planned ahead. He gestured, and a watching Sandviper relayed his signal.

Kral emerged from a nearby building, standing tall and proud. His fine furs were as rich and dark as his hair, and his sandviper Goldsign twisted around his arm. He covered the distance between them in seconds, arriving before Ragahn in a gust of wind.

The two Fishers exchanged looks with one another, but Jai Long couldn't read their expressions.

“Fisher Lokk,” Kral began, his tone imperious. “I, Kral of the Sandvipers, request an exchange of the sacred arts. Let the words of the stronger sect be heard.”

The old man crossed his arms. “You'd risk your young chief?”

Jai Long almost laughed. Ragahn knew full well who guided the Sandvipers in Gokren's absence. “The Fishers are worthy of facing our best.”

Kral swelled at the praise, though he knew it wasn't sincere. Though they were both Highgold, Jai Long had never lost a sparring match to the Sandviper heir.

But that didn't mean he wasn't good enough to deal with a beggar's apprentice.

Fisher Ragahn nodded as though he thought Jai Long was speaking good sense. “Very well. Fight until the winner is clear. If there is danger, I'll step in.”

It traditionally fell to the elders to intervene in a fight and stop injuries on either side, but there were usually elders representing both halves of a duel. If Lokk was in danger, Jai Long had no doubt that Ragahn would move like lightning, but Kral was almost entirely on his own.

Not that you would know it from watching him. The Sandviper heir cast his furs onto the ground behind him, slowly sliding each awl from his belt as though expecting the mere sight of them to daunt his opponent. He ran green madra along the edge of each spike, displaying them like a street performer.

Lokk, by contrast, drew a curved blade in each hand and stood there. If purple madra flickered somewhat between the hilts and the blades, it looked like an accident. His expression was placid as still water.

If Jai Long was honest, he found the Fisher's display more intimidating.

No one signaled the beginning of the match, but both men sprang into action nonetheless. The first exchange was sudden and violent; hooks flew out from their handles as though attached to invisible ropes, whipping toward Kral. The Sandviper gathered green madra into a swirl around his awl, stabbing forward.

Three spikes of Forged Sandviper madra condensed around his weapon, driving forward with him.

The Sandvipers called that move the Four Fangs of the Serpent, but it was really a very ordinary Forger technique. It was only the most basic type of Forging—the madra would stay solid for a few seconds, and then dissipate—but it was still effective. It would be like facing four attacks at once.

Lokk's hooks crashed through the Sandviper technique, sending fizzing shards of green madra spinning to the ground. The grass fizzed around the venomous madra. The tips of his blades landed on Kral's back, puncturing the skin, but the Sandviper chief had taken the move in order to land a move of his own. He continued driving the awl forward, aiming at the Fisher's chest.

Just when Jai Long started to hope that Kral was really pointing at the other man's shoulder—because he didn't want to have to defend the young chief from an angry First Fisher—he learned why Ragahn had chosen to wait under a large tree.

A rope of purple madra flashed into existence behind Lokk, connecting his spine to a branch of the tree. It shrunk rapidly, hauling the Fisher up and away from Kral's attack.

Hauled back by a rope of his own madra, Lokk landed neatly on the lowest branch. He held only a pair of hilts; the bladed hooks were still stuck in Kral's back.

“Thank you for going easy on me,” Lokk said, his tone polite.

Ragahn turned to Jai Long as though asking if the duel was over, but Kral's expression was distorted in fury. He dropped one awl, and the aura around the tree rippled green.

“Down!” Fisher Ragahn shouted, making a beckoning motion to his disciple. Invisible force caught Lokk, pulling him away from the tree.

He stopped in midair, hovering only a few feet from the trunk. He hadn't undone his own Forged tether, and now he was bound in place.

The First Fisher leaped into the air, but Jai Long's senses were already overwhelmed by bright green aura.

Sandviper madra drew on aura from toxins, poison, and corrosion of all kinds. It was a Path born in the swamp, originally created as an adaptation to the dread corruption of the Wilds.

And this tree's leaves were half blackened.

Ruler techniques were faster and more powerful when the necessary vital aura was ready to hand, and the tree was riddled with poison. It burst into a harsh green cloud as though exploding in emerald flame, covering both Fishers.

Jai Long dashed over to Kral, seizing one of the bladed hooks as best he could without slicing his own hand open. He tugged one out of the flesh, leading to a pained moan from the Sandviper chief.

“It's only pain,” Jai Long said, pulling the second free. “Your ascension to Iron was worse.”

“I beat him,” Kral panted.

“Let's see if it was worth it.”

Ragahn had emerged from the toxic cloud—unscathed, of course—with an unconscious apprentice in his hands. Lokk twitched wildly as his master drifted down to the ground, as slowly as if he were lowered on a wire.

Jai Long stood straight, grinding the butt of his spear into the ground. “Your disciple fought well,” he said.

The unspoken words floated in the air: ...but he lost.

Fisher Ragahn turned a gaze on him, and though his expression was still blank, his eyes held a deeply banked anger.

He was a sacred artist too, after all. His pride was more dear to him than his life.

Fortunately, that same pride was keeping his anger in check.

“The Fishers will honor our debts,” he said. “You'll have my best for the next three days. But if Arelius shows up and takes everything, I'll hold you accountable.”

He flew off, lashing himself to the trees with a long line of purple madra and pulling himself forward.

“They aren't the most grateful losers,” Kral said, wincing as he straightened himself. The wounds would pain him for a few days, but Sandvipers were tenacious. He'd heal quickly.

“We haven't won yet,” Jai Long said.

There were still three days to go.

15

Lindon levered himself up to a seated position, the flare of pain letting him know that he may have a cracked rib. He set the pain aside. It was nothing to the damage in his legs, which lay swollen and useless on the ground in front of him. He hadn't been able to walk for days.

He reached over and slid the glass case closer, using the three un-broken fingers on his left hand. One of his eyes was swollen shut, but through the other he watched the Sylvan.

She spun in place, arms swaying as though dancing to some music he couldn't hear. He'd started to think of it as female, though he had no reason to think she had a gender at all. Maybe it was the flowing madra of her lower half, which made her look like she was wearing a dress.

Regardless, the Sylvan had been his only companion these two weeks besides Yerin's voice through the door. He'd fed her what dribbles of his spare madra he could afford to Forge, and she'd grown almost half an inch. Her translucent blue form looked more solid, though that could have been his imagination, and she expressed a greater range of actions. Just yesterday she had swum a full lap of her tank inside the ever-flowing river.

Lindon looked up from the case to regard his fortress.

It was a slipshod attempt at defense—he'd used the claws of the spider-construct in his pack to cut dead matter away from the Remnants that regularly attacked him. With those pieces, those bright blue shells and shimmering green limbs, he'd boxed himself in. His back was to the door, and his fortress was piled up against the stairs. He'd backed himself into a corner, which had led to a few tense moments as he had nowhere to run, but he refused to move his fortification to the top of the stairs. If the door ever opened, he wanted to be able to run through in an instant.

Though he was starting to lose hope that the door would ever open.

While watching the Sylvan, he reached over to a binding shaped like a twisted blue seashell. He had to replace the dead matter in his walls every day or two, as it bled away regularly, but he used his own madra to supplement his few useful bindings. He'd been fortunate to find this one, which Gesha had demonstrated for him a few weeks before: it produced water.

He drank only a few swallows; he didn't have any more madra to spare. Most of his power each day went to refreshing the essential bindings and his weapon, the severed Sandviper stinger with the cloth-wrapped hilt. He cycled the rest of it, pushing madra through every square inch of his body.

Despite the haze of agony that hung over him constantly—and the series of sudden, vicious attacks that had driven fear so deep into his soul that he thought it would never leave—he was pleased with the weeks of work. The razor-edged tension had done wonders for his advancement, since there was nothing to do here but cycle and prepare to be attacked. And the slightest moment of inattention would result in his inevitable death.

One of his cores was at the peak of Copper, almost ready to overflow and pour through his body in the transition to Iron. He'd finally raised his second core to Copper as well, but focused most of his effort on one. That had been Yerin's advice.

Eithan's breathing technique had almost gotten him killed in the first few days, when he lost his breath in the middle of a fight and his madra fell out of control. Now, he rarely lost the rhythm, and he'd started to see the advantages: his madra recovered much more quickly, and he was sure he could advance to Iron any day he wanted.

That wasn't entirely true. He wanted to advance right now, because breaking through the barrier to Iron completely reforged the body. Advancing to Copper had cleansed him of scrapes, cuts, and bruises, and Iron was supposed to be a more thorough transformation. When Yerin told him that it would heal his broken legs, he'd almost cried from the effort not to force an advancement now.

But if he advanced before he was ready, he would damage his own foundation. That was the only thing that held him back. If his Iron body wasn't perfect, he wouldn't be guaranteed Highgold, much less the heights Suriel had challenged him to reach.

The blue marble sat in a corner, its flame straight and steady inside the glass barrier. He stared at it every day as he cycled, meditating on it. Suriel had believed he could do this. She'd known he would meet suffering even worse than this, and he would come out on the other side stronger.

He seized on that like a mantra, clutching it like the edge of a cliff.

Only one problem remained: his progress was too slow.

He'd only pushed madra through half of his body at most. He could execute a basic Enforcer technique now, making himself stronger for short periods of time, which he had hastily scrawled into the Path of Twin Stars in excitement. But he needed to suffuse his body with madra, soaking it completely, and he was at least another week away from that. Probably two.

And his body was done.

With two broken legs, one eye swollen shut, two broken fingers on each hand, a cracked rib, and more wounds and complaints than he could even remember, he wouldn't survive another attack. The day had been quiet so far, which was a blessing from the heavens as far as he was concerned, but something else would come. A twisted dreadbeast, a sandviper, a Remnant. At least he stood a chance against the Remnant, thanks to the scripts he'd left scraped into the top of the stairs.

But even if he survived today, he'd never last until he finished laying the groundwork for Iron. If nothing else, he'd starve. Sandvipers tasted like chicken livers soaked in acid, but they were the best thing he'd found to eat in here. On the fourth day, he'd even been fortunate enough to find a binding that produced fire.

As injured as he was, he couldn't catch food anymore. He'd burned through Eithan's supply of scales in a week, using them to push the barrier of his core further and further, and then he'd started Forging his own.

At first, he'd wondered how a scale he'd Forged would help further his own advancement. It felt a bit like eating your own arm for sustenance. But it was quite simple, in practice: he Forged the madra, condensing it into a scale and setting it aside. Then he cycled to restore his madra to its peak condition and swallowed the scale again. Pushed beyond its capacity, his core stretched a little.

Gradually, by repeating that process over and over, he'd stretched his core to the limit of Copper. When his body was ready, he'd push the core just a little further, and then it would spill over and run through all the channels he was patiently preparing.

But that brought him back to the original problem.

He'd poured out his concerns to Yerin, who listened until the end. She'd kept him sane during these two weeks, though she was never as impressed with his accomplishments as she ought to be. To her, any sacred artist should be able to survive for a few weeks under constant attack.

Finally, when he'd finished explaining that he couldn't possibly finish driving madra through his body before he died, and she had to convince Eithan to release him, she sat in silence for a moment.

Then she said, “Have my eyes gone soft, or is it getting bright in there?”

At first he assumed that was one of her expressions, and 'bright' meant his situation was getting more hopeful. Then he looked at the walls.

Between the glow of Suriel's marble and the soft luminescence of the Remnant bodies piled around, it was actually quite bright in his little nook. So it took him a moment to realize that there were faint sparks playing inside the script that wrapped the chamber.

He contained his excitement. It really meant nothing to his situation, though any sign of change thrilled him. “Have you asked Eithan? Is he there, by chance?”

Eithan had said nothing to Lindon directly over the past two weeks. Not a word. Yerin had consulted with him a few times on an answer to one of Lindon's sacred arts questions, but otherwise he might as well have left. He spent his days with Yerin, locked in combat that Lindon could hear crashing through the door, and more than once Lindon had shed actual tears of envy.

Now, the light in the script meant the possibility of hearing from Eithan. And that conversation could be the key that opened the door.

Yerin left, and only minutes later, a new voice came through. Lindon closed his eyes, for a moment just savoring the sound of someone else's voice. It had been so long.

“I'm sorry to cut this phase of your training short, Lindon, but it looks as though someone has lit a fuse for us. They're fooling with the script, so power is flowing into empty chambers. Bad news is, this door's going to open soon.”

Lindon's spirits soared.

“But don't worry. The power is being drawn to the top of the pyramid, so every dreadbeast and Remnant in the Ruins will follow us.”

His spirits crashed back down to earth, and he almost cried.

The wait for the door to slide open felt longer than the previous two weeks. Lindon stared at the blank stone slab, every twitch of his body sending notes of pain through him like a symphony of agony.

Finally, the lines of script running along the wall flared brighter. Light grew along the bottom, and the door lifted away from the floor.

Tears welled in Lindon's one good eye, and he swiped them away. Better if they saw him as a grizzled survivor of suffering, rather than a boy waiting to be rescued. Though gaining a reputation as a coward would be worth it so long as they took him away.

When the door opened, Eithan was holding an arm over his nose. “I didn't expect you to smell of rosewater and lavender, but it would have been considerate of you to bathe.”

Lindon stared at him over the crude splints binding his two broken legs.

Yerin advanced without comment. Her hair had grown slightly uneven again, and the new sacred artist's robe that she'd received from the Fishers was little more than a collection of black tatters. She smiled at him out of one corner of her mouth and then stepped past him, gripping her sheathed sword.

With a grunt, she hauled one of the half-ruined Remnant corpses away from his wall and peered out. “Still scarce for now,” she said. “But we should scurry.”

Eithan looked Lindon up and down. “It's been hard on you.”

Lindon held his eyes very wide so he didn't tear up.

Lowering his sleeve, Eithan revealed a curious expression. “Was it worth it?”

With his less injured arm, Lindon pushed himself up straighter to slowly execute a seated bow. Sweat beaded on his forehead from the pain in his ribs, but he forced himself through it. “Gratitude, elder. This one cannot repay the favor.”

These two weeks had been the worst in Lindon's life, but half a month of agony was nothing compared to a lifetime of helplessness.

Now, he was on the verge of Iron. Iron might be nothing but a child's accomplishment out here, but his parents were only Iron. He hadn't even turned sixteen yet, so he'd surpass his sister.

If he returned to Sacred Valley, the Wei clan wouldn't just welcome him back. They'd reward him. He would be their new idol, the one they paraded in front of the other clans to show their superiority.

The idea was so sweet that it almost choked him.

Far more important was that he'd taken his first steps on the Path Suriel had shown him. He might really surpass Gold, and Eithan had helped him.

For that alone, he really did owe the yellow-haired man a debt he couldn't repay.

Eithan smiled broadly, pleased with his answer. “That's good,” he said. “Because it isn't over yet.”

Yerin glanced back over her shoulder, giving him a look of pity.

“You're only halfway through pushing madra channels through your entire body, so if you advanced to Iron now, you'd be crippling your own future. Lowgold would be difficult, and you may reach Highgold in your old age.”

Never would Lindon have thought that reaching Gold would be the lowest he would aim for.

“Even if you had finished, you will have reached only the most ordinary sort of Iron. If you were very gifted or lucky, perhaps you could reach the peak of Truegold. Underlord would be a distant dream.”

“Pardon my rudeness, but does that mean there's another option?”

Eithan's smile widened further. “You need a perfect Iron body.”

Lindon liked the sound of that. “Yerin mentioned that sacred artists prepared for each stage, but I’m afraid my family didn’t have such a custom. To us, Iron was Iron.”

“Well, contrary to what your family may have taught you, Iron comes in several flavors. Every serious sacred artist trains their body before advancing.”

Once again, Lindon was acutely aware that he’d missed something that everyone else considered common sense. “I’ll do whatever I have to,” he said. And then, a bit late, “…what do I have to do?”

“How did your master prepare you, Yerin?”

“I was probably seven, maybe eight,” Yerin said conversationally. “Master dropped me in a black pool, and it stung like fire. Water drilled right down into me until I thought I was dead for sure. Three days and three nights I squirmed like a worm on a frying pan, breathing through a reed. Then he let me out.”

She slapped one arm. “Steelborn body, he called it. You don't see much out of it until you're past Gold, but once you hit Underlord, it's supposed to be the best Iron body in the world for pure brute strength. Same one my master had.”

“And a wise man he was,” Eithan said. “A fine choice for you, and for your Path. Me, I was born with eyes faster than my hands, so to speak. I needed the reaction speed to keep up with my detection, so my family put me through the training for the Raindrop body. Poetic name; you're supposed to be able to thread through drops in a rainstorm without getting wet, though I've never found that to be true.”

“What did you have to do for that?” Lindon asked.

“I played games. Catching birds as they ran off, running as fast as I could, hitting balls back with sticks, that sort of thing.”

Yerin and Lindon both remained silent for several breaths.

“What can I say? Not everyone grows up suffering in the wilderness.” He leaned closer to Lindon, though he did pinch his nose as he did so. “We could give you your choice, if we had a month or two. But we don't, we need to move you very soon. Today would be ideal, since tomorrow I'd give you even odds of being devoured alive.”

“Ideal,” Lindon said. “Yes, I agree, that does sound ideal.”

“I thought your schedule would open up. Ordinarily I would give you options, as I said, but now we have to forcibly create more madra channels and prepare you for Iron in a single day. That narrows our conditions somewhat, so I would suggest the Bloodforged Iron body.”

Lindon perked up at the name. This one sounded like a legendary technique, something worthy of a powerful sacred artist. “We can do it here?”

“It's the same one the Sandviper sect uses for its initiates,” Eithan said, “though of course they call it the Sandviper body. They've really run themselves a rut when it comes to naming their techniques, I can tell you that. They use it to avoid killing themselves with their own venom.”

“If it makes you immune to poison, I can see how that might be helpful,” Lindon said. It wasn't as exciting as he'd imagined something called the 'Bloodforged body' would be, but he guessed it was practical. Especially if he had to cross through more Sandviper Remnants on the way out.

Eithan considered the statement for a moment. “'Immunity to poisons' is really an impossible concept. Any compound that harms the body is a poison, and there's no one solution for them all. What this will do is naturally draw on your spirit to accelerate your body's ability to restore and protect itself. It should help you against poison, parasites, diseases, infection, and so forth, as well as small wounds.”

Anything sounded good to Lindon compared to lying here in pain. “If that's what you recommend, then I humbly accept your advice.”

Eithan held up a finger. “Before you agree, you should know that there are two ways to create this body, but we're going to have to do it the fast way. And the fast way is terrible.”

Steel rang as Yerin's sword left its sheath. An instant later, a Remnant cry followed like a high note from a flute.

“Back to work for me,” she said. “But you want to speed things up, that would be golden.”

She dashed out of view, and the Remnant screamed again.

“I think it's time for the fast way,” Lindon said to Eithan, who nodded.

“That's what I thought too.” Then he pulled a squirming sandviper out from behind his back.

Lindon recoiled, pushing himself against the wall to get as far away from the creature. Its centipede legs kicked at the air, its serpentine head baring fangs as it hissed. Its carapace was tan and bright, exactly the color of a desert in the sun.

Eithan held it calmly, regarding the monster with something like fascination. “This isn't one of the corrupted dreadbeasts of this region, you know. It's a perfectly natural sacred beast, it just happens to be hideous. For the first step, you must allow it to bite you. Once the venom is in your blood, you can use your madra to guide it, and it will actually burn channels into your body that madra will be able to follow later. It's unbelievably painful, but it's quick, and you will heal once you advance to Iron. But you have to guide it yourself to keep it from running wild, which means you have to stay conscious.”

Lindon's mouth was hanging open in horror, but he didn't close it.

“It gets more disgusting,” Eithan continued. “As the Sandviper sect found out so many years ago, you also must drink the blood of the sandviper itself. It helps slow the venom's progress into your organs, making it easier to control. And slightly less likely that you will die.”

Fumbling for his pack, Lindon pulled out the sheaf of yellow papers that was originally the Heart of Twin Stars and was now his personal Path manual. A small brush and portable inkwell followed. He flipped to one of the later pages, filling in the details that Eithan had shared. The motion gave him time to think, with each stroke steadying his shaking hands. Even the pain in his damaged fingers faded as he worked.

Eithan waited patiently even as Yerin fought in the distance.

Finally, Lindon had finished recording, and his own heart had settled. If this was the path forward, he was going to walk it. He'd come too far to turn back now.

But first, he gathered up one of the straps on his pack and placed it between his teeth.

“I'm ready,” he said, voice muffled around a mouthful of padded leather. With eyes squeezed shut, he extended his wrist.

“Breathe carefully,” Eithan said. “Cycle.”

As Lindon did so, pain flashed like someone had stabbed through his arm. Then the venom came, and his blood burned.

If anything, Eithan had understated the pain.

Venom cycled in his veins along with every pulse of madra, and Eithan poured coppery blood through his clenched teeth. Lindon bit down on the leather strap through a mouthful of sandviper blood, and bit down just as hard on memories.

The mountains of Sacred Valley, knocked over like towers of sand. Everything he loved, washed away.

Li Markuth, like a monster in a world of children, and Suriel who could pack him up like an old toy.

If this pain was all it took to approach them, it was a small price.

Lindon pushed the venom everywhere he hadn't already worked his madra, forcing it into his muscles, his skin, even the very center of his bones. It was an endless moment, but still over sooner than he'd thought.

His aching jaw went slack, the blood-stained leather strap falling from his teeth. He panted, losing control of his cycling technique just to fill his lungs with oxygen.

He tried to open his good eye, but the lid wasn't cooperating. Now that he noticed, his limbs were moving out of his control; his fingertips twitched and his back arched as though someone else had tied strings to him and started to pull.

Finally, he wrenched his eye open and was distracted by his own flesh. Black veins stood out along his skin, tracing lines like a map over every inch of himself he could see.

“Is that all?” he croaked out, and Eithan stared at him for a moment.

Then he gave a pure, rich laugh.

“You tell me,” the man said finally, wiping a tear from his eye with one finger. “Not even I can sense your insides better than you can.”

Lindon closed his eye again, cycling madra to get a sense for his own condition. The venom had indeed permeated his own body...but not as thoroughly as he'd expected.

“I think I could fit some more in,” Lindon said, though half of him couldn't believe the words were coming from his own mouth.

Eithan shrugged. “I'm no Sandviper. I've only read about the Bloodforged Iron body. But if you don't think this is enough...”

He tossed the mangled corpse of the sandviper aside and reached into his outer robe, producing a second live specimen.

Lindon recoiled again, just as he had the first time. “Would you mind telling me where you're getting those?”

With his free hand, Eithan lifted the bloody strap to Lindon's mouth. “Once more,” he said.

Again, Lindon bit down on the padded leather and squeezed his eyes shut.

* * *

Five of the little sacred beasts had been all that Eithan could scrounge from the Ruins—it seemed that once they knew he was hunting them, they'd started to run away.

The fifth was still alive, squirming in his hand and sending out its madra to try and burn away his hand, but he kept it suppressed with his own spirit. The other four were dead, having been drained of both venom and blood. The husks rested on the ground at his feet, twisted and broken.

In that respect, they looked much like Lindon.

His body wasn't moving much anymore, as he'd run out of energy sometime in the night. When he twitched, it was like lightning moving through dead flesh more than any conscious attempt at motion, and his skin was all but invisible beneath swollen black veins. Sandviper blood ran from his teeth as his own blood ran from his ears, the corners of his eyes, and even sweated through his pores.

He'd lasted more than a day, which had left even Eithan astonished. His standards were high—too high, really—but this Copper had still surprised him.

Yerin had done well for herself too. She'd fought almost without rest for a full night and most of the next day, and was even now finishing off a pack of twisted dreadbeasts. He kept his eyes on Lindon, but it almost didn't matter; he could still see Yerin, shoulders slumped in weakness, dragging her sword behind her as she limped back to their little enclosure. She passed through their barricade on the stairs, eyes moving to check Lindon's condition...

...and Eithan stepped aside to avoid the sword plunging into his back.

“You buried him,” she snarled, heat in her eyes and aura gathering around the edge of her sword.

He held up both hands to show his innocence, forgetting for a moment that he held a live sandviper in one. That didn't paint the best picture.

“He asked me to!” Eithan protested.

The sword-arm on Yerin's back stabbed in Lindon's direction. She really was getting better with her Goldsign, thanks to his guidance. “He asked for this?”

Under other circumstances, Eithan would have had trouble believing it too. “I'm performing as instructed. If it helps, I'm as horrified as you are.”

Her eyes filled with disgust, and she drew her sword back, flooding it with madra for a strike that would be...at best, inconvenient to avoid.

Instead of dodging, he seized Lindon’s wrist, holding up the boy’s blackened hand. It was curled into a fist so tight that blood leaked out of the palm. Eithan scrubbed away dried blood and grit from a line of metal on Lindon’s finger: a halfsilver ring.

“Do you happen to know what this is?” he asked, and before she could respond, he answered for her. “This acts as a filter for madra, refining madra quality during the cycling process. But it makes cycling twice as hard, and it takes twice as long. Like running with weights strapped to your legs.”

Yerin’s narrowed eyes moved from him to the ring. “He put that on himself?”

Eithan released Lindon’s arm, wiping his hand with a cloth he happened to carry in his pocket. It was difficult to do with only one free hand, the other still clutching a sandviper, but he managed. “I’ll admit, I shut Lindon in this room without concern for his will. But he has kept that ring on every day since the door first shut. And now…”

Lindon spoke precisely on cue. “One more...” he grunted, his voice scraping through a ruined throat. “One more.”

Eithan shrugged at Yerin's look of astonishment. “As soon as he asks me to, I'll stop.”

Then, before the girl could react, he turned and thrust the sandviper's fangs into Lindon's arm.

He tore the creature's head half off with one hand, preparing to drip the blood into Lindon's mouth as he had done before, but the boy's back seized up. His eyes—well, the one eye not hidden by swelling—rolled up into its socket, and foam bubbled up quickly at the mouth.

“Ah,” Eithan said, setting the sandviper corpse aside. “That was too much.”

Yerin dropped her sword and fell to her knees, pressing fingers against Lindon's throat. “What's the cure?”

Eithan wiped his bloody hand off on Lindon's clothes, then fished around in his pocket until he grabbed the scale waiting at the very bottom. “The venom has escaped his control and passed into the heart, so he's dead.” He withdrew the blue crystal coin, holding it up for her consideration. “Unless we trigger the transformation to Iron.”

He hesitated a moment, considering the accuracy of his own words. Honesty was very important.

“There's always the possibility that it will take too long, and then he'll be brain dead,” he clarified. “He can't breathe like this, you see.”

Yerin snatched the scale from his hand.

Clutching it in her fist, she broke the structure and reverted it to madra, using her spirit to force a flow of blue-white energy into Lindon's mouth.

That wouldn't be enough. His madra wasn't cycling at the moment, and her soul wasn't strong enough to do it for him. Not quickly, anyway.

So Eithan did it for her.

He pushed his palm against Lindon's core—the one swollen with energy, ready to spill over and advance into Iron—and guided the scale's madra within. It flexed, resisting for a second before cracking like a broken dam.

The madra flooded all through Lindon's body, expelling all physical impurities and transforming him with the power of the soul. His core would condense and restore itself into a smaller, denser form, transmuted from Copper to Iron.

Eithan took a quick step back.

The Iron transformation was never neat or pretty, as the body expelled impurities through any medium, but this was particularly gruesome. Black blood oozed through Lindon's skin, his muscles convulsing beneath as though they were liquefying and pouring out. Black tears ran from his bloodshot eye, and apparently his throat wasn't quite as far gone as Eithan had thought, because his screams were deafening.

The black substance oozing from Lindon's body carried a stench like bodies rotting in a cesspool, so Eithan headed up the stairs to the relatively pleasant air. There were only a few corpses decomposing up here, so at least he might get a whiff of something clean.

He left Yerin to watch over Lindon. If the boy died, that would be shame, though it wouldn't set Eithan back much.

But he expected a better result.

16

As one of the highest-ranking representatives of the Sandviper sect, though he wasn't a Sandviper at all, Jai Long had the honor of supervising a young man's advancement to Iron.

He'd reluctantly bowed to tradition, on the condition that the ceremony could be conducted in a tent at the entrance to the Ruins. If the Arelius family had continued at their current pace, they'd be arriving sometime tomorrow. He and the Fishers believed they had figured out the last of the script around the final floor, but they wouldn't know until they tried.

It was a delicate time, but tradition wouldn't wait.

The boy's whole family had gathered to see this paragon of their younger generation receive his Sandviper body at the tender age of eight years old. It was an impressive sign of dedication for such a young boy. Jai Long himself had reached Iron before that, but he'd had resources the Sandviper sect did not.

Jai Long clutched the sandviper in one hand, his spirit clamping around the creature's powers just as his fist imprisoned its limbs. With the other hand, he delicately squeezed the gland around the serpent's fang.

A drop of venom swelled, and he wicked it off with a needle.

The needle went onto a jade plate prepared for the purpose. He set the plate aside and withdrew a bowl the size of a thimble. With one stray whisk of Stellar Spear madra, he sliced the sacred beast's skin.

A few drops of blood filled the bowl, and Jai Long replaced the sandviper in its cage.

This whole process was supposed to be accompanied by a ceremony as the boy learned the glorious history of the sect and his own place within it, but Jai Long went about his business in cold silence. No one corrected him. They were afraid of him, one and all; afraid of his status within the Jai clan, afraid of the stories that surrounded him when he'd been banished. Afraid of his strength.

Kral stuck his head into the tent, grin blooming. “Bren! You're a man of the Sandvipers today.”

The boy—Bren, Jai Long supposed—matched Kral's grin with his own. He seemed only too relieved to look away from the red-masked stranger in his tent.

After a few more compliments for the boy and his family, which instantly put them at ease, Kral walked over to Jai Long. He gave a low whistle at the sight of the blood. “That's not too much, do you think?” he asked, keeping his voice low to avoid spooking the child.

“I'm sure you had more,” Jai Long said, not bothering to lower his tone. The most talented young members of the sect received two or three needles of venom, with an appropriate amount of blood to go along with it.

“Most people don't,” Kral pointed out. Then he raised his head to look at Bren, and he raised his volume to match it. “But he'll be the pride of the sect in a few years. I'll do it myself.”

The boy practically shone with pride, which made Jai Long wonder why Kral hadn't just done this whole procedure himself.

The young chief gave a few ceremonial words, offered Bren the bowl of blood, and then—when the boy had settled into a cycling trance—pricked him on the wrist with the needle.

Bren's jaw tightened and sweat beaded on his brow, but he only grunted once. His father gave a proud smile.

For Jai Long's Iron body, he'd been forced to undergo a ritual that blistered all the skin on his body, broke most of his bones, and kept him in bed for three months afterwards. For a half-civilized sect that survived in the harsh Desolate Wilds, the Sandvipers were soft.

As Bren cycled in preparation for his transformation, Jai Long pulled Kral aside to give him a report.

“The Fishers have gotten us through most of the doors,” he said, and this time he did speak quietly. This was sensitive information, after all. “We think we have a grasp on the rest of the script, but there's still one door between us and the final chamber. I suspect there may be another way—”

The flap of the tent brushed aside, and a Sandviper charged in with his chest heaving and face bright red. No sacred artist would push himself so far beyond the bonds of his breathing technique without a good reason.

Bren's family frowned in disapproval that someone had interrupted their son's ceremony.

“On the horizon,” the messenger said, panting. “Come and see.”

Jai Long had a good guess what he'd see, and he dashed from the tent without a word. Kral stayed behind to give a word to the waiting family, but Jai Long dashed up the side of a nearby tower. Its unsteady wooden planks creaked alarmingly, but he reached the top in seconds.

With that vantage, he could see the hideous Desolate Wilds spread out before him. The Purelake was a glimmering sapphire, the rest of it a black mess.

Except for a small group on the horizon, which his Iron eyes picked out immediately. They were a motley bunch, dressed in different colors and styles, but it was the banner they carried that caught his eye.

Deep blue and white, with a black crescent in the center.

The Arelius family had arrived.

He leaped from the top of the tower, landing next to Kral. “We're out of time,” he said, ducking into the tent for just long enough to retrieve his spear. Bren was still cycling, oblivious.

He emerged with his weapon, and heard Kral already issuing orders.

“Gather the Fishers,” the young chief said. “Inform the Jai clan. We're going in now.” To Jai Long, he said, “And, uh...if we can't open the door?”

Jai Long gripped his spear in both hands. Up to this point, they had tried to avoid unnecessary damage to the structure of the Ruins for fear of disrupting the script. They were dealing with an incredibly powerful script-circle they didn’t understand; the slightest disruption could change nothing, or it could detonate the Transcendent Ruins with enough force to obliterate the Wilds.

He had commanded his teams to avoid even chipping away at the walls, for fear of hidden scripts. Until he gave the order.

“We will make a new one.”

* * *

Lindon woke to a splash of icy water.

He jerked upright, gasping, hands raised to defend himself from the blow he knew was coming. But the first thing to hit him was the stench—it smelled like a dead pig rolled in rotten eggs.

He rolled blindly away from the stink, but it followed him. His hands were resting in a putrid pool of black sludge and red blood, and more of it caked his skin.

His sister Kelsa had been covered in something similar when she advanced to Iron. Did that mean...all this came from his own body?

The puddle of filth had filled the entire space at the bottom of the stairs a finger's width deep, and it trickled out the open door. He couldn't believe it all came from his own body.

Another splash of water landed on him, squirted from the twisted seashell binding in Yerin's hand, and Lindon hurriedly rose to his feet. His pack rolled off his stomach, one leather strap severed in the middle.

He'd bitten through it.

He staggered as he stood, his balance shifting strangely. Every step seemed to take him too far, too quickly, and his body felt like it would drift off the ground and float to the ceiling.

“Cut that out,” Yerin ordered. She sent another stream of water splashing over him from the binding in her hand. “I'm trying to clean you off, and you're jumping around like a chicken.”

“You made it,” Eithan said, in a tone of clear surprise. He watched like Lindon's mother examining a new breed of Remnant. “A flawless transition to Iron. Amazing. I'd like to say you have my extraordinary guidance to thank, but...well, how do you feel?”

Lindon glanced at his hands, turning to consider the unbroken flesh. A dreadbeast had fallen on him, leading to twisted fingers, but you couldn't tell now. He took another step, gingerly testing for pain on his formerly broken ribs. He breathed deeply, cycling according to the technique Eithan had taught him.

Once again, his eyes filled with tears and he had to blink them back. But this time, it was because the pain was gone. He could stand.

Another spray of cold water blasted him, scraping away another layer of black.

Eithan rested his hand on a brown backpack sitting on the stairs beside him, safely away from the pool of sludge. “I transferred your belongings over. It's not quite as big as your original, but I...doubt you'll want to use that one anymore.”

His original pack, empty and slack, was soaked in blood and sludge, one of its straps dangling in two severed ends. His mother had made him that pack, slaving over bits of leather and patches of canvas for weeks as she would have a particularly complicated construct.

If she knew it had helped him reach Iron, she would have been overcome with joy, though it still felt like leaving another piece of home to die.

He walked over to his new pack—actually the one he'd taken from Fisher Gesha, used to store her spider-construct—and staggered as a single step launched him five feet closer. He caught himself in the stairwell, face-to-face with Eithan.

The yellow-haired man carefully pinched his nose and stepped up a stair.

Lindon reached up his hands to catch Yerin's next blast of water, scrubbing his skin on stone until it was clean. Then he rifled through his pack, looking for the spare clothes he'd packed.

When he reached the bottom, next to the tank of a happily playing Sylvan Riverseed, he remembered that these were his spare clothes. He'd never had the previous set cleaned, and they were missing from the pack. Eithan must have gotten rid of them, and Lindon couldn't blame him. But that still left him without anything to wear.

Lindon looked up to see Eithan holding something out to him: an expanse of pastel pink fabric embroidered with metallic thread-of-gold flowers.

“I noticed your deficient laundry situation, and I thought to offer you something of mine.”

Only then did Lindon notice the...elaborate curtain...was actually a sacred artist's robe. It didn't have an outer robe to it, but was all one piece, with loose sleeves and enough room in the legs that it wouldn't inhibit movement.

Under the circumstances, he couldn't complain. It didn't matter what the robe looked like, it was better than one he had on.

He glanced between the pink and gold ensemble in Eithan's hand and his own ruined set of bloody rags, considering.

“Yerin, if you don't mind,” Eithan said.

Her silver sword-arm flashed, briefly overlaid with light in Lindon's spirit-sense, and his clothes were slashed to ribbons. He snatched at them, trying to preserve some level of modesty.

She turned quickly, which surprised him to some degree. He'd thought of her as a Gold first, but she was still a girl his own age. Now that he thought of it, that might have been a blush coloring the back of her neck.

Eithan grabbed the twisted blue seashell from Yerin's hand and activated it, sending a flood of water gushing out. It didn't end until Lindon spluttered at him to stop, minutes later, every inch of his body scrubbed clean by the force.

Something bright fluttered toward him, and he caught the pink-and-gold robe out of the air.

“It's surprisingly absorbent,” Eithan said, “and it will dry before you know it. The threads are plucked from the mane of a sacred beast known by the natives as a 'Celestial Lion-Horse,' and it is both comfortably warm and pleasingly cool. I had to hire a whole family to work on it for months. It's supposed to be worn as the inner part of a set, but I'm forced to waste it on you.”

“Gratitude,” Lindon said, wincing as he wrapped it around his wet body. If it was that expensive, he hated to ruin it. He could sell it instead. How many scales would this buy him? Come to think of it, how many scales would it take him to reach Jade?

He chided himself for thinking of Jade so soon after reaching Iron, his hands moving automatically to fold and tie the robe.

Maybe it was the expensive fabric, but something felt strange.

He stopped halfway, considering. The robe was tight across the shoulders, and the robe—which he'd expected to reach the floor—only stretched to his ankles. He looked back up to Eithan.

“Do I seem taller to you?”

Eithan glanced him up and down. “Older is the word, I think, more than taller. Your muscles have developed further, and we need to get some food in you, because you've burned most of your fat in the transition. You don't look like a child spoiling for a fight anymore, but there's still...what do you think, Yerin?”

Yerin turned back around and considered him. “Like he's ready to tear into someone with his bare hands.” Coming from her, that sounded like a compliment.

Eithan moved his hand back and forth. “Eh...I'd say he looks like an evil sect leader's rebellious son.” He thought a moment longer and added, “Wearing his mother's robe.”

Lindon's response was cut off by something flying through the air toward him; his hand blurred as he caught it, body responding as fast as thought.

“I thought you might want that,” Eithan said, and Lindon opened his hand to see the wooden badge carved with the symbol for empty.

He stared into it as a tide of joy swelled in his chest.

After a few breaths of silence, he spoke. “It doesn't fit me anymore.”

He clenched his fist closed, crushing the badge with no more effort than it would take to smash a dry leaf.

The pieces spilled from his palm, landing like so much trash, but he tucked the shadesilk ribbon into his pack. It was still valuable.

Eithan slapped him on the back. “There's nothing quite like advancing, is there? It's like you're reborn.”

Lindon couldn't agree more, but he gave a humble bow. “I'm only glad to be past the pain.”

“We will have to get you something to eat soon,” Eithan reminded him. “Otherwise, your body will devour itself from the inside out.”

Lindon's look of horror must have been something to see, because Eithan gave him a pat of reassurance. “Nothing to worry about. We have a whole day, probably, before that starts to happen. Plenty of time. More urgently, our break time has ended.”

Yerin nodded and drew her sword, running up the stairs.

“The way forward opened while you were sleeping,” Eithan told him. “The only way out is now at the top of the pyramid, which just so happens to be where the Jai clan spear awaits. What fortuitous chance!” He flourished his wide sleeve, gesturing the way forward. “And a small army of dreadbeasts and Remnants stands in our way. What a wondrous opportunity for training!”

Lindon slid his pack onto his back and reached for the weapon he'd hacked from the Sandviper Remnant two weeks ago: the bright green severed stinger, longer than his own limb, with white cloth wrapped around its hilt to serve as a grip.

He grabbed it, habitually running madra into it to replace the essence it lost over time. It flickered with color in response, rippling brighter, and the motes of madra drifting upward slowed. He was very careful not to let his madra flow into the binding within; it was as dangerous to him as to anyone else, if he used it carelessly.

The severed stinger had never been a heavy weapon, but it seemed absolutely weightless now.

“I admit, I look forward to finding out what an Iron body is like,” Lindon said. That was not nearly enough to describe his feelings. He'd dreamed of Iron his entire life, which seemed to him to be when one really learned to use the sacred arts. And his weeks of agony stretched behind him like a long shadow.

He hungered to find out what that suffering had bought him.

“Fortunately for you, a perfect test awaits!” Eithan nodded forward, where Yerin stood with white blade bared in front of another doorway. And another set of stairs leading up.

Lindon had survived his weeks alone in the Ruins according to his usual methods: he'd trapped, dodged, or tricked every Remnant or dreadbeast that slithered close to his shelter. He'd killed his share of creatures for food, for resources, or in self-defense, but they had almost always been restricted by a script circle. He'd used the Remnant’s venomous needle to butcher helpless foes, not to fight.

So his heart pounded and his eyes twitched at every movement as they made their way up the stairs. Yerin walked ahead with blade drawn, seemingly unconcerned, and Eithan took up the rear. He was whistling.

These stairs were much longer than the ones where Lindon had set up camp, and wider too. They could have easily walked side by side and had room to swing weapons, but by tacit agreement, they all stayed away from the walls.

There were monsters in those walls.

Each stone block was missing a chunk in the middle, leaving a square tunnel onto darkness, and Lindon could hear things slithering or skittering across stone. It was the first drawback he'd felt in his new Iron body: yesterday, he wouldn't have heard the things crawling in the shadows.

It must be worse for Yerin and Eithan, but Yerin acted as though this were no more dangerous than a hike through the woods. A glance back showed that Eithan was walking with eyes closed as he whistled, palms laced behind his neck and elbows in the air.

They had only walked for one intense minute, the stairs spiraling upwards, when Eithan said, “On your right.”

Lindon jumped left and readied his scavenged weapon in both hands. Yerin only turned her head slightly to the right. As something bright red flashed out of the darkness, a Remnant with claws bared, her Goldsign flashed.

The smooth silver blade was a blur as it slashed the Remnant in two. Dead matter hissed as motes of essence escaped like smoke from a flame.

On some instinct that hadn't fully formed, Lindon started to open his Copper senses to feel the vital aura and search for another threat. A hand on his shoulder stopped him.

“Try not to stare into the sun,” Eithan suggested, then continued whistling.

After a moment, Lindon understood. The Remnants and dreadbeasts were gathering because of how thick the vital aura had become. Lines of script running along the top and bottom of the wall provided all the light they needed, proving that the script was fully powered. It would be funneling all the aura for miles into the room at the top.

“Behind you,” Eithan said, and Lindon staggered forward.

He spun just in time to see a monkey with rotten skin grabbing at his shoulder, its lips peeled back in the grin of a fanged skull. His hands moved before he told them to, swinging the stinger with all his strength.

He smashed the monkey to the ground.

With half a thought, he withdrew the weapon and stabbed again and again, puncturing the monkey's hide each time. It shrieked and clawed at the Remnant part.

And a pulse of red-streaked force billowed out from the monkey, catching Lindon and slamming him into the ceiling.

Like sacred beasts, dreadbeasts were effectively monstrous sacred artists, and every one of them had a level of advancement beyond his. This was not a mistake he would have made before hitting Iron, and for an instant he thought it had cost him his life.

But he hit the back of his skull against the ceiling and landed on his feet. More than the impact to his head, what stunned him was that he was...fine.

The strike to the skull had hurt, but more like being struck by a stick than slamming his head against a rock. And he hadn't had to try to land on his feet, as though his body had known what to do without him.

He shook himself awake—an instant's hesitation could prove fatal, when facing a stronger enemy—but the monkey just scurried back into its tunnel.

Some shrieking followed its exit, as though it had gotten into another fight just out of view, and dark blood splattered onto the stairs.

“Hm,” said Eithan. “They're certainly excited.”

Lindon and Yerin broke into a sprint at the same time. He didn't check to see if Eithan was following; he suspected the yellow-haired man would survive if he was dropped into a pit of Remnants with nothing but his bare hands.

More Remnants and dreadbeasts boiled out of the walls as they continued, and Lindon learned about his Iron body.

For one thing, if combat before had been like trying to stay alive in the middle of a panicked nightmare, now he felt as though he were tearing his way through a lightning-fueled dream. His hands moved faster than his thoughts, his weapon a green blur, and keeping up with Yerin's running pace was easier than walking. His hearing was so acute that every breath of air was a note in a symphony, and he spotted movements he would never have noticed before: the tense of muscles in a wolf's shoulder, the flick of a sandviper's tail.

Compared to his previous self, he felt unstoppable. His blood burned in his veins, and madra flowed steadily from his Iron core, his breathing even and measured.

At the same time, he saw the difference between Iron and Gold.

Just when he was feeling like a dragon in human skin, a pale gray Remnant with six arms boiled up from the depths of the tunnel, howling like wind through a forest. It seized his weapon in one hand, his empty arm in another, and both his legs as its head peeled back to reveal a gaping mouth.

Lindon struggled, but he might as well have still been Copper; it looked insubstantial and blurry, like a weak Remnant, but it still had physical strength far beyond his own. Scrabbling from behind told him that there was a dreadbeast coming from the other direction, and Yerin was dealing with two enemies of her own.

Eithan was still whistling with his eyes shut as he dodged four creatures, but Lindon couldn't count on him.

The hands squeezed tighter and tighter until Lindon's breath came too quickly to fuel his cycling technique. He tried everything he could think of until his wrist went numb, and the Sandviper stinger clattered from his hand. Only then did he scream Yerin's name.

She went from a black-and-red blur with a sword of white to utterly still in a moment. Her Goldsign flashed, and Lindon felt an invisible pulse move through him despite his spiritual senses remaining closed.

It was the technique she'd demonstrated before: the Endless Sword. But this time, she didn't hold back.

The Remnant was blasted away from him, shredded into a thousand shapeless pieces and a cloud of dissolving madra. The dreadbeast behind him didn't even get to make a noise before it was reduced to a chunky puddle, and Eithan quick-stepped forward to avoid the chunks of blood that his own enemies had become.

Five or six cuts appeared on Lindon's arms where the Remnant had grabbed him, flaring to life like fires after a lightning strike, but he was staring at Yerin. She took a deep breath, restoring her breathing before she spoke. “Everybody stable?”

Lindon nodded wordlessly and she took off.

He scooped up his weapon, vaguely ashamed of himself. Just because he'd let the power of an Iron body go to his head, he'd forgotten the sheer force of the sacred arts. Of all the weapons in a sacred artist's arsenal, physical strength was among the least. He might be able to compete with Yerin in the force of his grip now, but she could carve him into pieces with her will.

It was a sobering reminder, but it was also somewhat liberating.

He had something to look forward to.

It wasn't much longer before they reached the end of the spiraling staircase, and by now the constant attacks were taking their toll. He hadn't used much madra, having no techniques in his repertoire that would help against monsters, but Yerin was noticeably weakened. They'd both taken wounds, in contrast to Eithan, who continued whistling as though his surroundings didn't affect him at all.

At the end, with the snarling of monsters behind them, they reached a door.

It was a heavy slab of stone, just like the ones before, but this one was carved with an intricate mural. It was divided equally into four sections, each depicting a different sacred beast: a serpentine dragon on a cloud flashing with lightning, a crowned tiger, a stone warrior with the shell of a tortoise, and a blazing phoenix.

Though Yerin moved forward to place her palm against the door, he froze at the sight.

He'd seen this before.

17

Yerin removed her hand from the door, readying her sword. “It's some brand of riddle. Script keeps going right on into it, and there's a key buried here somewhere.” The howls of Remnants echoed up the stairs from behind, and the edge of her blade gathered force. “Take a step back.”

“Wait!” Lindon shouted, then coughed politely. “I mean, ah, please wait, if you don't mind. We've seen this before.”

Eithan sat down on a step and began fiddling with his thumbs.

The shrieks from below grew louder, and a Remnant like a giant purple onion squeezed itself out of the wall to Eithan's side. Before it had completely emerged, he kicked it back.

Yerin took a step back and looked at the door. “I do think you’re right. That looks more than a little like the picture in the Ancestor's Tomb.”

“That's a week away on the Thousand-Mile Cloud,” Lindon pointed out.

“Well, that's a head-scratcher,” she said, and then drew her sword back again. The edge of the blade distorted as though a haze of heat had gathered around the weapon, and she took a step forward.

Lindon's instinct for self-preservation kept him from stopping her before she smashed her technique into the door's surface.

It struck with a rush of power that was deafening in the enclosed space of the stairway, ringing in his ears as though someone had struck a bell over his head. Madra and aura flooded forward with her strike until his view of the action warped like he was watching through murky water.

When it cleared, a single chip of stone was spinning on the floor. Otherwise, the door was completely intact.

Lindon would have taken this moment to stop her from damaging the door any further—it was connected to some unknown script, and might bring the entire roof down on their heads if they interrupted the circle, not to mention its connection to Sacred Valley—but he happened to glance behind them.

Dreadbeasts scrambled all over each other as they clawed up the stairs, seeming to blend into a multi-headed mass of corrupted flesh.

Yerin braced her feet against the ground, her Goldsign drew back like a snake preparing to strike, and she gripped her sword in both hands. Colorless sword madra rippled around her until it was like he was looking at her through a cage of razors edge-on. As she gathered power, she focused on the door as though she meant to destroy it with the force of her stare.

Without giving himself too much room to think, he picked up his severed Remnant part and pointed it at the oncoming rush of beasts. His madra flowed down the weapon, trickling toward the binding.

“The big one,” Eithan shouted, but through his ringing ears Lindon heard it as a whisper. The man was standing now, but he was actually leaning his shoulder against one of the wider sections of wall, completely at his ease.

Lindon listened, adjusting his aim to point at the biggest of the dreadbeasts: a warped purple creature like a bear with heavily muscled arms. When he was close enough to see the bloodshot veins in the monster's arms, the dreadbeast hauled itself back on its hind legs. It looked as though it intended to come down on Lindon like an avalanche.

He stepped forward, thrusting the bright green stinger like a spear.

And just as he did, he activated the binding.

He used his weaker core, the Copper one, because it was just barely strong enough to fuel the weapon. The activation drew his core dry, and if that had been his only source of madra, he would have collapsed immediately.

But he pulled on his Iron core instantly, keeping his legs steady even as the binding activated.

Three hazy green duplicates, like less-real copies of the stinger, flickered into existence around his thrust. It was as though he drove four spears instead of one.

The bear fell on top of his weapon, but one of the Forged spears lodged in its hide. Another caught a Remnant in the head, and his actual spear drove even deeper into the bear's belly. The fourth strike missed, dissolving out of existence in a moment, but Lindon threw himself back as soon as his point bit home.

The venom only took an instant to scour the bear with agony, and it went berserk, flailing its paws and roaring so loudly that it hurt Lindon's ears even through the ringing. It turned in a circle, snapping its jaws as though trying to bite out the infection, and every other Remnant and dreadbeast fell upon it.

A hand caught him by the back of his robes and pulled him up the stairs just as a bloody, severed limb landed at Lindon's feet.

Eithan plucked at his own sleeve, indicating Lindon's clothes, and then shook his head.

Well, if Eithan wanted to pull him out of trouble to avoid getting blood on his borrowed outfit, Lindon wouldn't complain.

An explosion drummed his bones, and he spun with an arm thrown up over his eyes. Stone fragments pelted him through a cloud of billowing dust, and the remaining half of the door tipped over and slammed to the ground with the speed of a calving glacier.

Yerin's knees buckled as her technique faded, and she fell to the ground panting. Eithan and Lindon ran by her, each grabbing an arm without discussion, pulling her into the room beyond.

It was a broad, featureless hallway with an open doorway at the end. In the very center lay a circle of script.

The dreadbeasts wouldn't continue slaughtering each other for long, but Lindon spared a moment to admire the advanced script-circle on the floor. There were at least ten layers to the circle, lines of runes and sigils wrapping an empty space in the center.

Lindon and Eithan hurried around the edge, though Yerin regained her feet and ran on her own strength halfway through. Though the circle was much more likely to affect sacred beasts and Remnants, none of them were willing to run through the middle.

The outer circles brushed against the wall, so they were running on runes, and each step sent a little shock through the soles of Lindon's feet. His madra trembled as it cycled, as though drawn down to the floor.

He pushed on, and together the three of them reached the open doorway in seconds. There was, in fact, a door on the other side. This was a more ordinary type of door than the stone slabs before, made merely of dull gray metal and heavily caked with a series of script-circles. It had been left propped open, and judging by the dust sitting at its base, it had been that way for a long time.

Yerin and Lindon heaved together, and Lindon couldn't suppress a flash of pride that he was strong enough to help Yerin with something.

The heavy door slammed shut, its scripts glimmering for a moment as they drew power from the ambient aura. He and Yerin fell to the ground, gulping mouthfuls of the dusty air, and generally savoring their survival.

Eithan stood to one side, hands on his hips. “I have to say...this is fairly impressive.”

Lindon followed his gaze, taking in the space lit brightly by warm orange lanterns that were surely some kind of rune light. The lights were covered by paper screens to soften their glow, and it was a good thing; some of them shone too bright, uncomfortably bright, while others flickered off and on in a disquieting rhythm. They must have been powered by the vital aura taken in by the Ruins’ script, but either the script was broken, or it had been too long since they’d last come to life. The glow was uneven and left half the room bathed in irregular shadows.

The room looked more like a rich clan’s library than anything he’d expect to find in an ancient ruin, the colored tiles set with dusty carpets and beautifully carved tables. One of those tables held a collection of jade statuettes, one a cracked dragon with the head of a lion, the others a series of creatures stranger and more hideous. A glass-covered case displayed some tools of halfsilver and goldsteel, as well as more exotic materials that Lindon didn't recognize, but at least half of the spaces were empty.

Books sat open on stands carved for them, their curling pages painted with arcane diagrams and characters. They had browned from age, and Lindon was certain that if he so much as breathed on a corner, the paper would dissolve.

A row of silver hooks hung from the ceiling, which stood out as he couldn’t think of a purpose for them. They varied in size, but none of them held anything beyond empty air.

A long glaive made of Forged madra, with a blood-red shaft and a gleaming golden sword blade at the end, sat on a frame halfway up the wall. A circle of script surrounded it, sealing its power and preventing it from dissolving. Beneath the weapon, an image was painted directly on one wall: a circle, blank on one half, the other half complex and twisted with a network of lines.

Lindon stared at the pieces of the room for too long before they fit together into a whole.

This was a Soulsmith's foundry.

When he realized that, he shot to his feet and dashed to a nearby table, rummaging through it. He found nothing likely, despite pulling a few drawers open, so he slid to the next one, frantically shuffling through a pile of sealed ebony scrolls with scripts worked in gold filigree on their cases.

Yerin stepped up beside him, giving him a curious glance. “Looking for the spear?”

“Take the other side of the room, if you wouldn't mind,” he said, casting the scrolls and digging in a box on the floor. “A Soulsmith worked here.”

“I'm not seeing your point.”

A box caught his eye, ornately carved and polished and standing as tall as he did. It was covered in a layer of dust, like most everything else in the room, but otherwise it looked exactly like the sort of wardrobe they would use in the Wei clan. Wider, though. If he stretched his arms out as far as he could, he wouldn't be able to touch both ends with his fingertips.

He shot for the wardrobe before answering Yerin, throwing the doors wide.

White light erupted from within.

Pain shot through his newly sensitive eyes, and he blinked away the blinding light. When he could see again, Yerin was standing in front of him; she'd moved between him and the potential source of danger.

But it wasn't a defensive construct waiting for a victim—though he really should have considered that possibility before throwing the doors open. It was a shining bar of Forged madra, long enough to stretch from one end of the wardrobe to the other. It was held by a set of carved wooden supports, held just below eye level as though waiting for him to take the weapon.

And it was a weapon. A spear, formed seamlessly from madra by ancient Soulsmiths. It shone with the light of the stars, congealed into a weapon whose power he could feel radiating against his skin.

Yerin's breath slowly left her, and even Eithan gave a low whistle as he strode over to take a look.

“In my grandfather's day, Soulsmiths valued beauty as much as function.” He moved his hand along the shaft of the spear without touching it. “The script flows with the contours of the weapon, guiding it so even the aura is a work of art. Exquisite.”

Lindon could just barely pick out a few lines of script on the shaft, which looked like white paint on white, but the spear had held his attention too long already. He dropped to his knees, searching the drawers at the bottom of the case.

The real treasure should be down here.

After digging through a handful of junk, he withdrew an ivory box wider than both his spread hands together. It was heavier than he expected, for being only about an inch deep, and the lid was etched with a pattern of interlocking leaves.

Carefully, he lifted the lid. There were no notes and no brightly colored bindings inside, so he almost tossed it aside.

Then he realized what they were, and suddenly he couldn't breathe.

The badges were slightly smaller than the ones from Sacred Valley, but otherwise they were practically identical. Eight badges sat within the box, each marked with a hammer—the symbol of a Forger.

The first row contained a badge each of copper, iron, jade, and gold. That much he expected. But the second row moved from halfsilver to goldsteel to materials he couldn't identify. One of them was a deep, fiery red, and the other a blue so rich it was like a Forged slice of the sky.

He reached a shaking hand and lifted the iron badge. It was lighter than a feather in his hand, but he handled it as though it were made from glass. Delicately, he threaded one end of his shadesilk ribbon through the loop at the top.

“Well, look what you found,” Eithan said, and Yerin leaned over his shoulder for a closer look. Lindon paid them no attention.

He hung the iron badge from his neck and closed his eyes.

After a moment, Eithan cleared his throat. “This anthill has been well and truly kicked,” he said. “I'm afraid that very soon we will have to share our meal with the…other ants.”

Lindon snapped out of his reverie. “Dreadbeasts?”

“Worse. Humans.”

The Sandvipers must have found their way through the Ruins, though he supposed it didn't matter much if it were the Fishers or even the Arelius family. Whoever it was, they would strip this place bare.

Lindon slid the ivory box into his pack, shuffling a few other necessities around to make room, and then dug back into the wardrobe's bottom drawer.

In this one, he finally found what he was looking for.

A script-marked box contained three indents in the silk lining within. One of these holes was empty, but the other two contained a pair of bindings. They were bright white, made of the same arcane material as the spear, and shaped like spiraling drills.

Quickly, he scanned the notes near the bindings. “Generation Fourteen shows all the qualities we’d hoped for,” they read. “It demonstrates the capacity to devour and process madra with a high degree of efficiency, though each individual contains only one binding. If a sacred artist could cultivate similar techniques, our efficiency may double…”

The next page had been scribbled in haste, judging by the carelessness with which the characters were slapped on the paper. “The failed specimens may be the key to success. Their auras alter as they devour one another, growing faster than we’d ever predicted. Theoretically, there is no upper limit on this growth, but the spirit warps the flesh. Further study needed; could lead to achievement of the primary goal.”

Lindon stuffed those notes in his pack, continuing to read. The labels confirmed what he'd thought: these were the bindings at the heart of the Jai clan's spear. The mechanisms that drained madra from victims.

The Jai clan could have their spear back. Powerful it may have been, but it was just a single weapon.

Learning to make such weapons...that was the real fortune.

Of course, Lindon didn't have such a high estimation of his own abilities. He would learn what he could from the bindings and from the notes, and he may even keep one of the bindings for later examination, but knowledge like this was worth more than a leg to a Soulsmith. Gesha would have sold the entire Fisher sect for something like this.

Tucked away with the bindings were a trio of polished black river stones, each marked with a tiny script-circle that Lindon couldn't identify. He tucked them away, just in case, but as he was making space in his pack for the box of bindings, he was interrupted by a deafening crash.

The door at the other end of the room, on the opposite end from where they'd entered, had buckled and fallen inwards. A pair of fur-clad Sandvipers filed out to either side of the door, weapons writhing with green madra. Jai clan members followed them, with spears and gleaming hair and meticulous blue sacred artists’ robes, and then a couple of wary-looking Fishers.

Jai Long's red-wrapped head emerged next, spear held low with its point toward the ground. The sect heir, Kral, followed him with a roguish smile.

“Fan out,” Jai Long ordered. “Spear first, then—”

He didn’t get the rest of the command out of his mouth.

Yerin whipped a wave of sword madra at him, her Striker binding thin as a razor but with the fury of a storm. One of the Sandvipers met madra with madra on the edge of his axe, green power eroding her technique. The force still pushed him back a step.

Before he'd come to a stop, Yerin had raised her sword. The white blade rang like a bell.

And every blade in the room answered.

Glass crashed, lights flickered, and the air filled with a storm of splintered wood and shredded paper. Lindon's vision blacked out as something grabbed him by the hair and pulled him back just as the spear's display case exploded.

The eruption of sword aura from Yerin's Ruler technique might have killed him, crouched as close as he was to a powerful blade. He struggled to his feet, setting his pack aside, and thanked Eithan in a shaky voice.

“No trouble at all,” Eithan said, watching shreds of paper drift down around him like an early snowfall. “It's an honor to save the helpless.”

One of the Sandvipers was bleeding and slumped against the wall, struggling to stand, but before Lindon caught sight of the others, a constellation of stars flashed out of the debris, blasting toward Yerin like a flight of arrows.

Her sword gathered a shimmering edge as she wove the weapon in a complex knot, knocking the technique from the air, but her robe still gathered another collection of tears as the lights ripped through her loose sleeves. One gouged the looping ribbon of her red belt, and motes of red essence rose like smoke from the wound before it filled in again, sealing itself.

Lindon dropped back to his knees, scrambling on the floor for his stinger weapon. He considered searching for the Jai ancestor spear, but he’d lost sight of it in the rubble, and he needed something to defend himself while he snuck around the room. Iron he may be, but a fight was out of the question; if he was caught between Jai Long's technique and Yerin's, the only thing left of his Iron body would be his badge.

But this was an ancient Soulsmith foundry, loaded with all the elements of a secret project. There had to be some construct he could use against the Sandvipers. He gripped his stinger in one hand and crawled along the aisle, scanning the wall for the bladed glaive construct he'd noticed before.

He wouldn't be able to use it to fight, but a distraction would serve him just as well.

A boot slammed down on his weapon.

Lindon's eyes crawled up, past the sable fur lining the boot, over the midnight pelt hanging like a cloak, to Kral's face. The Sandviper heir looked down on him gravely, like an executioner gazing upon a condemned prisoner.

He hadn't used a technique yet, so he must want to talk. Lindon had something he wanted: the location of the spear, along with its foundational binding. That gave him leverage. If he kept Kral from joining Jai Long, maybe Yerin could hold out long enough for—

His thoughts were interrupted by the toe of Kral's boot slamming him in the forehead.

He flipped over and landed on his back, skidding into a table of bronze and polished wood. It didn't hurt as much as he thought it should, but he was still shakier than a struck gong, and he rose to his feet like a newborn fawn. The sight of bright green in the corner of his eye reminded him that he'd maintained his grip on the Remnant weapon. That was something, at least.

Kral raised one of his eyebrows. “Iron. I thought you were a Copper.”

Lindon lowered his weapon and spread the other hand, showing it empty. “Nothing more than a humble Iron, honored Highgold. There’s no blood between us, and I see no reason why any should be spilled.”

Kral nodded along with every word, then flipped his hand as though gesturing for a servant to leave his presence. Three liquid drops of green madra appeared in the air in front of him, splashing toward Lindon. He hastily raised the Remnant part, but the Striker technique still landed on the skin of his arms, burning like liquid fire.

He gritted his teeth to keep from screaming, tightening his knuckles around the weapon and forcing watery eyes on Kral. The bites of the real sandviper had been a hundred times worse than this. He focused on that thought.

But Kral had disappeared.

The young chief's black cloak was still dropping like an abandoned shadow, and hadn't yet crumpled onto the floor, but Kral was gone. As Lindon was still registering that fact, something slammed into his back. He crashed into the table across from him, his head smashing through the solid wood.

A thick shaft of vivid green madra stabbed into his shoulder, and his breath whooshed out at the blazing spike of agony. Only a few hours with a new Iron body, and he'd already ruined it.

He struggled up, instinctively trying to escape the pain, but a green haze covered his head. When he inhaled, it tasted like metal in his mouth, and burned like fire in his lungs.

Kral's boots padded away, leaving Lindon face-down in wreckage, pinned to a destroyed table on a spear of Forged Sandviper madra.

“The Copper's dead,” Kral said lazily. “Actually, I suppose he reached Iron, didn't he?”

“So he did,” Eithan said. His voice was pleasant, as though he was chatting with a friend. “If he died, then he has only his lack of ability to blame.”

“I…can only agree. You're more reasonable than I expected.”

The voices were hazy through the pain and the lack of oxygen, but Lindon found himself listening nonetheless. After the past two weeks, this level of agony was nothing. It was almost familiar.

In fact, it was fading quickly.

“Why don't we come to an arrangement?” Kral continued, his words almost swallowed by a thunderous crash behind him. Yerin and Jai Long, no doubt. “I've seen your ability, and I can recommend you directly to my father.” He paused as another crash echoed through the room. “In fact, I don't think we've been properly introduced. I am Kral, Highgold of the Sandvipers. My father is Gokren, Truegold and chief.”

“My name is Eithan.”

The Forged spear pinning Lindon's left shoulder to the table had already dissipated significantly, enough that he could push himself up. His head was starting to spin for lack of air, and he staggered to the side, inhaling a breath.

The burning venom in his veins had already subsided to nothing more than an uncomfortably warm tingle. Even his stab wound didn't scream quite so loudly, though his left arm was still dangling useless and blood dribbled down his side to the ground.

He was injured enough that he should have been senseless on the ground in pain, but every breath cycled madra through his channels and lessened the pain by another notch. In fact, his madra was entering his flesh and simply...vanishing, as though his blood had devoured it. His Iron core was emptying at an astonishing rate.

The Bloodforged Iron body. Sandvipers used it to combat their own toxins.

And Kral didn't know he had it.

The Sandviper heir was standing with his back to Lindon, an awl in one hand and his fur cloak in the other. Over his shoulder, Jai Long was pacing toward Yerin, who was leaning on her sword to stay upright.

“If you have no sect, Eithan, a sacred artist of your skill would be welcome among the Sandvipers.”

Lindon rushed over to the shattered wardrobe, dropping to his knees and gouging them on the debris. He didn't care, wrenching the lid open and dividing his attention between the box and the Sandviper leader. If Kral glanced around, Lindon was dead.

Eithan leaned casually against the wall, his gentle smile fixed on Kral. “I'm here looking for fresh recruits. I don't intend to be recruited myself.”

Lindon fumbled one-handed at the pile of garbage next to him, looking for the spear, but he grasped his stinger first. It would have to do. His fingers caught it on the bright green material instead of the hilt he’d wrapped, which burned his skin like acid, but this pain was just a breeze next to a thunderstorm. He set it aside, using both hands to lift free a scripted box.

Two white, spiraling bindings waited within. He slipped one into his pocket and picked up the stinger with his other hand.

“Especially not by a sect as weak as yours,” Eithan added.

Lindon could practically feel a winter breeze as Kral responded. “I suspect you may have misspoken, my friend.”

“I'm afraid not. If I belonged to your sect, which I’m proud to say I do not, I would be painfully ashamed of you. What kind of a Highgold fails to kill an Iron?”

Kral's spine stiffened, and he started to turn.

Lindon slammed into him with the end of his bright green stinger, the end digging into Kral's ribs. Blood splashed, and Lindon poured all of his remaining madra into his makeshift weapon. The energy was soaked up like rain in the desert, and the binding activated.

Three acid-green echoes of the stinger flashed into existence, stabbing into Kral from three different angles. They didn't penetrate far, only scratching him before dissipating, but that was enough to release their venom. Lindon knew that from experience.

Not that it mattered.

Kral had an Iron body of his own, and Lindon had hoped to find a better opportunity to attack than this. Eithan had rushed him, threatening to expose him with words, so he’d taken the angle he could get.

As a result, Kral steadied himself in an instant. His jaw was set in pain, but he was barely scratched. Madra gathered around his fist, and he started to turn and deliver the technique that would reduce Lindon to a pile of smoking bones.

With the desperation of a cornered animal, Lindon tore the drill-shaped white binding from his pocket and stabbed down.

The white spiral flashed as it touched blood, blinding bright, and drew Lindon’s Iron core dry like an alcoholic pulling at a bottle. Sandviper madra rushed out from the wound in Kral’s back, visible as bright green lines running up the drill, but Kral himself did not move. He stiffened like a man in the grip of a seizure, eyes peeled unnaturally wide. The technique withered and died on his fist.

The madra flowed into the binding…but not into Lindon. He’d wondered about that. The binding simply drew out the power, but it took the script on the spear to draw it into himself. The white drill rippled green, brighter and richer with every passing instant. It grew more solid, less like an object painted into existence and more real. In only a breath of time, it was so detailed that it looked as solid as a poisonous green seashell.

Then it exploded.

Lindon released the binding just in time to avoid losing a hand, but green light burst like a dying star, and he was launched backward. At the same time, something spattered him that burned like acid.

His vision blurred in the overwhelming sensation of being devoured by insects, and his mind couldn't keep up. He thought he blacked out for a moment, but he couldn't be sure.

When he came to, nothing had changed except the pain lessening slightly. His skin was red and tender, but as the last dregs of his madra vanished, healthy skin crawled into place.

He didn't have the strength to stand, and his spirit felt like a rag that someone had squeezed too many times, and he finally stopped healing when his madra was completely exhausted.

All he could move were his eyes, and he craned them to their limit, searching for Kral.

The Sandviper heir lay in a bloody, crumpled heap on the ground. His feet twitched, and Lindon couldn't tell if they were the last throes of death or if he was about to stand up and end Lindon once and for all.

Yellow hair fell over his vision, and Eithan frowned at him. “That was a very expensive robe.” He lifted a scrap of burned pink cloth lying next to Lindon, which dissolved even as Eithan lifted it.

Lindon croaked an apology.

Eithan produced another robe—this one was sky blue, with a pattern of violet birds spreading their plumage—and draped it over him. “This is why I always carry a spare.”

Spear-wielding members of the Jai clan had surrounded them by now, shouting demands, even as a pair of Sandvipers crashed to their knees next to Kral. Some Fishers loomed over Lindon, hooks in hand, but they didn't look any friendlier.

A flash of starlight, and Yerin flew backwards like a ballista bolt. Jai Long stalked toward her, spear readied, but his red-wrapped head turned as though he'd caught a scent of something.

His figure vanished, and then he was vaulting over the members of the Jai clan, landing next to Kral. He shoved the Sandvipers out of the way, placing his palm against the fallen heir's core.

When Jai Long's hand dropped away and his shoulders slumped, Lindon desperately wished for the strength to run away.

The man in the red mask rose like a Remnant, spear clutched in one hand, and his eyes focused on Lindon.

18

Jai Long's weapon crept so close to Lindon's eye that the gleaming spearhead filled his vision with light.

“His core is shattered. He won't even leave a Remnant. What did you do to him?”

Every word shook with barely restrained rage.

Lindon's eyes were stuck to the point of light inches from his head. “If I tell you...” he began, but his voice failed him.

“I will not let you live,” Jai Long said evenly. “I won't even kill you more quickly. You'll answer my questions now, or you'll answer them later, and it won't change your fate even slightly. You killed my friend.” He nodded to some Sandvipers on the side. “Bag him.”

Lindon squirmed, but that did nothing but make him feel as though nettles were scraping along his skin. He'd run out of madra before his Bloodforged body had finished healing him, so the venom still lingered in his veins and on his skin. His shoulder had settled into a numb sort of distant agony, as though someone had packed the wound with snow.

His imagination chewed on everything they could do to him once they had him in the bag, and Yerin still hadn't risen from where she'd fallen. Had she died? Her Remnant hadn't risen, but she would be in no shape to help him. Nor could he help her.

He only had one hope left.

Eithan stepped in front of Lindon in a rustle of white and blue cloth. “Under other circumstances, I'd let you kill him. I'm a firm believer in self-sufficiency. But this seems just a tad unfair.”

Jai Long shifted his gaze to Eithan, and even the aura responded to his intensity. Lindon didn’t have to open his Copper senses to see a halo of light surrounding the Highgold, and invisible blades gouged lines from the floor around his feet. “I am Jai Long, Highgold formerly of the Jai clan. I suspect you are a Highgold yourself, maybe even Truegold, but know this. If you stand before me now, you will make yourself an enemy of the Sandviper sect and the entire Jai clan.”

“They care so much for an exile?” Eithan asked. He sounded curious.

Jai Long did not pause a beat. “For me? No. For their reputation? Everything. You will have stood before a clansman for the sake of an Iron, and they will only save face by killing you. Stand aside, or we will water your home with blood and sow the ground with salt.”

The worst part was how each of his words was delivered flat and absolute. The Jai clansmen behind Jai Long shifted and looked at each other, but they didn't put down their spears. The Sandvipers looked ready to draw blood with their teeth, and even the Fishers glowered.

Meanwhile, Eithan rummaged around in the pockets of his outer robe.

“I don't disagree with you on any particular point,” he said, “and certainly I don't wish to impugn the honor of the famous Jai clan.” He bowed to the spearmen in blue. “Having said that...in truth, this was my fault. I didn't introduce myself properly earlier.”

From his outer robe, he withdrew an intricately filigreed golden badge. It was bigger than the badges used in Sacred Valley, and far more ornate. There was no ribbon of silk threaded through it, as though it were meant to be displayed by hand.

Lindon couldn't see what was printed on the front, but it made the Jai clan go pale and throw their weapons aside. Even the Sandvipers backed up a step as though pushed back by a heavy wind.

“My name is Eithan Arelius, heir to the Arelius family, Underlord in service of the Blackflame Empire, and the greatest janitor alive. This young man is an agent of my clan, working under my aegis and my protection, and any action against him will be considered action against me.”

Eithan relaxed and tucked the golden badge back into his robe, but not before Lindon caught a glimpse of a black crescent moon on white, set deeply into the badge, with sapphires playing around the edges.

Lindon finally started breathing again, and he couldn't quite remember when he'd stopped. There would be no bag for him after all.

But Jai Long's spear didn't waver.

“The Arelius family is still a day out,” he said, his voice flat as a lake and cold as steel. “No Underlord moves ahead of his clan, and they have no reason to move in secret. The Arelius Underlord would have taken control of the whole Five Factions Alliance and commanded whatever he wanted.”

With a clear lack of concern, Eithan strolled over to the wreckage nearby and bent down. He emerged with a gleaming white spear, which shone like condensed starlight in his hands.

“What I want,” Eithan said, “cannot be commanded.”

Like a man throwing an undergrown fish back into a lake, he tossed the spear into the debris from which it came.

While every eye followed the arc of the Jai ancestor's spear, Eithan moved to face Jai Long.

And something pressed down on Lindon's soul.

It was like the feeling of having his spirit searched, but ten thousand times stronger. A thousand-pound weight pushed down on his core, weighing his madra, making him feel as though he were being pressed into the ground. He gasped for breath.

Everyone else seemed to have it worse. Several of the Golds around him fell to their knees, some of them screamed, still others gasped as though trying to breathe underwater. The Jai clansmen gripped their gleaming iron hair as though it pained them, and the miniature Remnants attached to each Sandviper's arm went insane. They hissed and twisted into the flesh of their host as though trying to burrow their way inside.

Jai Long's spear wobbled as though it suddenly weighed a thousand pounds, then it crashed into the floor. It came within a hair's breadth of slicing open Lindon's cheek.

A red-wrapped head slowly lifted, pushing against a heavy weight, until Jai Long looked Eithan in the eye.

“You know, you've insulted me more than once now. Some other Underlords of my acquaintance would have you pulled apart, piece by piece, over a month's time. Others would simply obliterate you.”

The pressure vanished suddenly, and everyone—from Lindon to Jai Long—took a gasp of breath at once.

“But I'm famous for my good humor and forgiving temper,” Eithan said, clapping Jai Long on the shoulder. “You've lost a friend, so I think you've more than earned a few lapses in judgment. And, of course, you've earned a campaign of vengeance against Lindon here.”

Every eye turned to Eithan, disbelieving. Including Lindon's.

“He's a part of your family,” Jai Long said warily.

“A flower in the greenhouse is never half so beautiful as one in the wild. Don't you find that to be true? I like to think it's the added edge of danger. Nothing reaches its full potential unless it's threatened.” He placed a finger along the edge of his chin, considering. “Give me one year with him. After a year of my instruction, if he's not your match, then he has only himself to blame. Does that sound fair to you?”

“He's Iron,” Jai Long said. “I may as well kill him now.”

“Then you're waiting a year in respect for my wishes. In compensation, I won't strip this place to the bones and then break it looking for marrow. Everyone will receive the treasures that they have earned, in order of their contribution to the excavation effort.”

The sacred artists behind Jai Long brightened at that, especially the Fishers, who almost as one packed away their hooks and bowed to Eithan.

“As the first to arrive,” Eithan said, “the new members of my family will select their rewards.” He glanced over to the side. “As Yerin can't join us at the moment, I will choose for her.” He reached onto a nearby table and grabbed a bag seemingly at random. It clinked as he lifted it.

“Now, Lindon.” Eithan reached down and drove a stiffened finger into Lindon's core. Madra flooded into him, and Lindon sat up with a gasp. His newly revitalized spirit flooded through his body, making the pain sharper. He grabbed at Eithan’s shoulder, holding himself upright.

But his thoughts were already rushing forward. Before anyone could say anything, Lindon had scooted over to where the last remaining madra absorption binding was waiting in its case. He snapped the lid shut and raised it. “I'm not so proud as to try and take the spear from the experts of the honored Jai clan,” he announced. “I will settle for this small binding, to improve my meager skill as a Soulsmith.”

Jai Long might already hate him, but that didn't mean he couldn't build up some goodwill.

“Wise choice,” Eithan said with a nod.

Lindon scrambled for some of the papers nearby. “...and these research notes, which teach me how to use the binding properly.” It would be a waste if he couldn't be a little greedy. And he saw no need to mention the badges or the scripted black stones, which he'd already scavenged and placed in his pack.

Eithan turned to Jai Long. “I have no need of anything for myself. I already achieved what I came for. Jai Long, as the leader of the other party to reach the summit of the Transcendent Ruins, what treasure do you claim?”

“Hold a moment, honored Underlord,” an old woman piped up, and Fisher Gesha drifted in on her spider's legs. An old man who looked as though he lived on the street followed her, with a rusty iron hook on his waist hanging almost all the way down to his bare feet. Beside them walked a man in a blue sacred artist's robe, with steel in the wings of his gleaming iron hair: a Jai clan member, surely, and one who carried himself with a stately and commanding grace.

Jai Long ground his spear into the floor, knuckles white around the weapon's hilt. Lindon slid backwards and found his pack, where he crammed his prizes. Eithan seemed to have the situation well in hand, but Lindon wasn't about to risk someone taking these treasures away from him.

Fisher Gesha's wrinkled face folded into a smile as she drifted up to Eithan. “It isn't appropriate for juniors to eat before their elders have a taste, is it? Hm?”

The man from the Jai clan inclined his head to Eithan. “Jai Long has served our clan's allies well, but he is not in favor. The Underlord should rest assured that we will reward him appropriately, once we have catalogued the contents of the Ruins and distributed them according to the will of the clan.”

The ragged-looking old Fisher said nothing.

Gesha stabbed a gnarled finger in Lindon's direction without looking at him. “Besides, that boy and the Lowgold accompanying him belong to the Fishers. They were soon to take their oaths, and it would be such a shame to have invested so much in their futures, only to have someone else reap the rewards. That deserves some compensation, don't you think? Hm?”

Eithan chuckled good-naturedly, bowing in return. “Honored leaders of the Five Factions Alliance, it's a pleasure to meet you. I was born Eithan Arelius, and thanks to the good fortune of the heavens, I reached the stage of Underlord at quite a young age.”

Without warning, all three elders collapsed.

Gesha's spider-legs snapped as her drudge broke beneath her, and she shrieked as she fell to the floor. She barely caught herself with her hands, trembling as she tried to support her own weight. Hair flew free from her gray bun.

The old Fisher had gotten his hook out before he fell to his knees, and he braced himself against the ground with his rusty iron weapon, but his breath came heavily through clenched teeth. The man from the Jai clan remained standing, but only barely.

Eithan walked up to him and rubbed his hands in the metallic hair, running his thumb along the edge of a rigid black peak. “I've always wondered about the Goldsign for the Path of the Stellar Spear. Frozen hair? It's astonishing. Does it hurt?”

The Jai elder grunted out something that might have been a response.

“Does it hurt?” Eithan repeated softly, rapping his knuckles lightly on the man's frozen hair. Metal rang like a muffled bell.

“No...Underlord...” the Jai elder managed to force out.

“Oh, really? How does it feel, then?”

“...helmet...”

That was the only word Lindon understood, but Eithan nodded. “I see, I see. Thank you for indulging my curiosity.” He moved on to the old Fisher man, taking a knee in front of him. “Fisher Ragahn, I assume. It's polite to introduce yourself when you're meeting a superior, you know, but I know who you are regardless. It must have been hard on you, reaching Truegold, but you did what you had to. Anything you had to. A kind person couldn't inherit the Fishers, could he? And if he did, he wouldn't remain kind for long.”

Eithan lowered his head, making sure that his eyes were even with the Fisher's. “I can respect that, Ragahn. But there are things you should and should not say to your superiors.”

He moved over to Gesha, who looked as though she was suffering more than the others. She was Highgold, Lindon remembered, and the others must be a stage higher.

Eithan crouched next to her, fingers laced together thoughtfully. No one else dared to disturb his silence by moving.

“I've dealt with people like you all my life,” Eithan said at last. “You earned everything at the edge of a spear, so you’ve picked up some unfortunate habits. Oh, but you're a Soulsmith, aren't you? You earned it making the spears.” He picked up a severed edge of her drudge's cracked leg. “I can deal with you like human beings if I take the time to get to know you, to slide into the walls you've built, to slip through the cracks in your pride. But I don't have the patience for that today.”

He tapped her forehead with the edge of the spider’s limb. “I am picking up the pair that you discarded. Do you have any objection?”

Slowly, Gesha's head shook once.

“Splendid. And the rest of you. You take what you can keep, isn't that the law of the Wilds? Do you have any doubt that I own everything and everyone inside the Ruins right now?”

The Jai elder choked out a few words. “The...clan...head branch...”

“Do I dare to offend the head branch of the legendary Jai clan?” He paused for a moment as though thinking. “Why wouldn't I dare? If I cut off your legs and threw you from the top of the Ruins, I'd have to spend an hour writing a letter of apology to your clan's Underlord. Do you think I would back down from such a threat?”

The man just shook.

Suddenly all three trembled with obvious relief as the pressure vanished. They sat, panting, on the floor.

Eithan stood, all smiles, arms spread generously. “But that’s so morbid, isn’t it? We’re all friends here.” He ignored the elders, turning to the young man in the red mask. “Jai Long, I believe it's your turn to make your selection. And choose well; I'll want you to pose a healthy threat to my pawn. I mean, ah, the valued young member of my family.”

Lindon's eyes seemed to be stuck on Eithan. The man had never lost his smiling, pleasant demeanor. Ever. If he had driven the spider's leg through Gesha's forehead, would he still be smiling?

And what about when he watched Jai Long tear Lindon to pieces in a year? Would he be smiling then?

Jai Long reached over and lifted the shining white spear from the debris.

* * *

Information requested: Jai Long’s future.

Beginning report…

Spears flash as Jai Long tears his way through the halls of the Jai clan. His spear is pure white, and it drinks the power of slain Remnants; with every death he causes, Jai Long grows stronger. As he destroys his family’s homes one by one, he draws closer to the Jai Patriarch.

LOW PROBABILITY: in the heat of battle, he steps left when he should have stepped right, and a Jai Lowgold puts a spear between his ribs.

LOW PROBABILITY: In a crisis of conscience, his little sister has a change of heart, persuading him to set aside his crusade. They move to a city at the far edges of the Blackflame Empire, where she meets a local man and raises a family. He trains alone, and eventually dies in isolation.

HIGH PROBABILITY: The Jai cannot stop him without an expense that would cripple the family. As the Patriarch searches for a way to stop this one-man rebellion without causing his carefully cultivated power to crumble, he learns of Jai Long’s upcoming duel.

Suggested topic: the future of the Sandviper sect. Continue?

Topic accepted, continuing report...

Sandviper Gokren returns from his hunting trip at last, full of news from the outside world and hauling prizes that will sustain his sect for months. He brings with him an ancient bracer, scripted and made of a strange material, as a present for his Highgold son.

When he arrives, he finds his son’s corpse.

The stories of Kral’s death largely do not penetrate the deaf haze of grief, but he grasps the main points.

Kral was killed by an Iron, bringing shame to the entire Sandviper sect and his family in particular.

This Iron was taken away to the Blackflame Empire, sheltered by a young Underlord.

This family is protecting his son’s killer. And in one year, Jai Long will take revenge on his behalf. Gokren knows he must only wait.

Suggested topic: future of Jai Long and Wei Shi Lindon. Continue?

Topic accepted, continuing report…

WARNING: DEVIATION DETECTED.

Entity [Wei Shi Lindon] has deviated from primary course. Further data required for accurate calculation. Best estimates follow:

HIGH PROBABILITY: The Jai Patriarch approaches Wei Shi Lindon with a proposition. Lindon fills one of his cores with the Path of the Stellar Spear, enjoying the most powerful elixirs and training methods the Jai clan can procure. Jai Long is sabotaged by a series of attackers in the days leading up to the duel, and he begins the fight weak. Lindon manages to score one severe wound before he dies, and the Jai Patriarch uses that wound to suppress Jai Long.

LOW PROBABILITY: Lindon fails to find a suitable Path to supplement his Path of Twin Stars, and runs from the battle. He is caught by the Jai clan and executed in captivity.

LOW PROBABILITY: Lindon devises a weapon specifically designed to counter Jai Long’s spear. He acquits himself well in the duel, but dies of his wounds.

Suggested topic: powerful Paths of Cradle. Continue?

Denied, report complete.

19

Yerin couldn’t be sure if she was awake or dreaming. Her body had no weight to it, drifting on the breeze without direction. Must be a dream, then. The last thing she remembered was facing a Highgold, so cheers and celebration to her for surviving. She hadn’t so much as torn the wrapping around Jai Long’s head, but she hadn’t retreated or died either. Her master would call that a win. She floated into memory, allowing it to carry her back to sleep.

Her arm prickled.

She glanced down, just to make sure everything was all prim and proper, only to see a spider the size of a fox suspended from the ceiling, poking her skin with needle-sharp legs.

She tried to jerk away, but whatever kept her suspended in the air also had her tied like a pig for roasting. She was held in an invisible trap with a giant spider clinging to her arm.

Yerin’s breath froze, and before she could think, she tore everything apart.

Sword madra blasted out of her in every direction, shredding the spider…and the unseen bonds that held her suspended halfway to the ceiling. She landed in a crouch, spider parts clattering to the ground in a sizzle of escaping madra. A construct, then. Of course it was. She shuddered anyway.

The walls of her room were made of rough wood that still smelled fresh. One door—the only entrance or exit besides a single shuttered window. The hearth in one wall was too narrow to let anything in besides a construct or a tiny sacred beast, and a script-circle helped ward against those. She’d checked those herself, inside an hour of moving in.

She would have recognized the room faster had she not just reduced all the furniture to kindling. This was the little cottage the Fishers had given her, where she’d stayed for less than two weeks. That almost won the medal for the longest time she’d lived in the same place.

Her robe was soft, white, a single layer, and tied at the waist. The sort of thing you’d put on a patient while they were unconscious. Whatever had tied her to the ceiling hadn’t left any fragments of rope lying everywhere, which meant it had been a Fisher technique. The spider would have been one of Gesha’s constructs.

She’d lost the fight to Jai Long, so by rights she should be dead. Instead, she was receiving healing from the Fishers.

What had Lindon done?

She took a step forward, circulating madra to her feet to keep out splinters, and her body sent her a pointed reminder: if they were in the middle of healing her, it was because something was wrong. That hint came to her in the form of a shooting pain up her leg, which made her stagger and grab the wall.

Footsteps pounded the grass outside, and she gathered madra into the steel blade of her Goldsign. It wasn’t as useful a medium as her master’s sword, but she could still cobble together a Rippling Sword technique to defend herself. If she could find a real weapon, she figured she had an even shot of cutting her way out of the Five Factions Alliance camp. Though that would leave her alone in the Desolate Wilds with no idea what had happened to Lindon. Or Eithan, but she wouldn’t shed an undue number of tears if the yellow-haired man had gotten himself buried.

The door cracked open, and the blade poised over her shoulder, on the edge of slashing down.

Lindon’s voice drifted in. “Yerin, I don’t want to seem untrusting, but…please don’t cut me.”

Yerin let out a breath as she sunk to the ground, strength leaking out of her legs. She leaned against the wall and called back, “Two steps closer and I’d have carved you into a roast.”

“That’s why I waited.” He poked his head into the door, showing off a shy smile. He was still too tall for someone so weak. “I thought I might explain what happened before you went looking for the story yourself.”

“So long as they answered my questions proper and quick, they were in no danger.”

Actually, Lindon may have been the only person in the Fisher camp that she could threaten as she was. Her spirit felt like a guttering candle, her body like a sack of tender meat, and her unwelcome guest had started to strain against its cage. She rested a hand on her red belt, with her as always, still tied into an intricate bow—the shape designed by her master to bind its power.

It twisted slightly beneath her palm, straining against the seal. It was no threat for now, but its restrictions would weaken with time.

Sand rushed through an hourglass; an incense stick burned steadily down. She wasn’t sure how many years she had left, but if she didn’t advance far enough to keep her guest suppressed with her own power…

Then she wouldn’t be herself anymore.

Now that she thought of it, someone had dressed her. Which meant someone had gotten a good look at the ‘rope’ tied around her waist and had decided not to fiddle with it. That showed strange wisdom; most sacred artists would poke a bear to see if it was sleeping.

Lindon knelt opposite her, the closest thing to a chair in the room being a thumb-thick splinter. He arranged himself carefully, sitting with his back straight true and proper. You could take a kid out of his clan, but you couldn’t pull the clan out of him with a set of red-hot pliers.

Then her eyes snagged on his clothes.

He was wearing the typical sacred artist’s outfit, which went by different names in different lands: wide sleeves that left the arms free, a loose hem hanging down to the ankles to allow a broad range of movement techniques, a cloth belt tied around the waist. Usually, the sacred artist’s sect or clan would determine the patterns and colors of the robe, and this was what had stolen Yerin’s attention.

The robe was deep blue in some places, white in others, and marked over the heart with a black crescent moon the size of a palm. She’d seen that symbol before; it had whipped these Five Factions artists into a frenzy.

The Arelius family.

So they’d shown up after all, just as the Fishers and Sandvipers had feared. And Lindon was wearing their colors. He’d joined someone after all.

His explanation of the events that had occurred while she was unconscious—told in Lindon’s way, soft and polite—painted the picture clear.

Eithan was an Underlord. She found that the easiest part to believe. He had always treated Highgolds as though they weren’t fit for his eyes, and there were times training in the Ruins where she’d caught a shadow of something in him that reminded her of her master.

Not that a mere Underlord could stand in the shoes of the Sword Sage, but he’d rule like an emperor in a distant land like this.

No, Eithan as an Underlord she could expect. But there were a few other points she found too sticky to release.

“You buried Kral? A Highgold?”

Lindon brushed her aside with an explanation of the binding he’d found in the ancient foundry, as though he were ashamed by his own contribution, but pride lurked in his eyes and his words.

An Iron taking on a Highgold, whatever the circumstances, was like the sun rising green. That was a story his grandchildren could be proud of.

Which might explain the second sticking point of his story: that Eithan Arelius, renowned Underlord, had wanted him.

“He came here looking for recruits,” Lindon explained, “and he thinks we’d be…suitable.” Something haunted his expression for a moment. Maybe hesitation. But what was there to hesitate about when it came to an Underlord’s personal invitation? For an Iron to exchange words with someone like Eithan was enough good fortune for five lifetimes.

What was he worried about?

But there was a more urgent question. She didn’t think she’d missed so much—if she had slept for days, she would have expected hunger, thirst, a powerful pressure in her bladder. But besides her weakness, which was plain and clear after a fight, she felt like she’d only slept for a few hours.

“How long was I out?” she asked.

“Only six hours,” he said, and that settled that. Still, it tore a new hole in his story, and one that she’d almost missed.

“You’ve got a fox’s luck,” she said. “Kral didn’t so much as cut you?”

He gave her a guilty look, pressing a hand to his shoulder. “Forgiveness. I didn’t mean to suggest that I walked away without a scratch. He ran a Forged spear through, right here.”

She stared at his shoulder, which he rubbed as though it ached. Even if Lindon was exaggerating about being run through, which she doubted, he’d still been struck by a Highgold’s Forger technique less than half a day before.

“Underlords must have some great medicines, I’d guess.”

“It was mostly the Fishers who worked on you,” Lindon said, still rubbing his shoulder. “Eithan didn’t do much, but they tied themselves into knots trying to serve him. If I hadn’t told them they should be gone when you woke up, I’m sure they would still be in here.”

“I’m not concerned about me,” Yerin said. “How are you moving that arm? You should be dead and buried, but you’re up and hopping in six hours.”

Lindon’s brow furrowed. “I have an Iron body now. Just like you.”

“Not like me.”

Jai Long outclassed her in power, but her skill was the highest card she had to play. She’d managed to avoid too many direct hits, so she’d taken many small wounds, but nothing like a through-and-through stab. Even so, she’d needed the urgent attention of a healer, and she still wouldn’t be sharp enough to hold an edge for a week or two.

That was all plain and proper, part of a normal life—she’d barely taken a step on her Path without some gruesome injury. But Lindon just walked his off in half a day.

She flashed back to a figure caked in blood and black ooze until he looked like he’d crawled out of a wildfire. She would have bet a pile of jewels that he was dead, and she was prepared to take that price out of Eithan’s skin.

Instead, he’d advanced to Iron.

What kind of body had they given him?

He picked up on her response, and his voice shook. “Is that wrong? Should I be worried?”

She gave him a light kick, shaking his perfect posture. “Your new Underlord can handle it.”

He winced. “Apologies. I accepted his invitation before you woke up.”

“You’d have been cracked in the head if you hadn’t,” Yerin said, which was true. It was the sort of opportunity that only a madman would turn down.

But that still left the ugly question: where did it leave her?

An endless winter forest stretched out before her, filled with nothing but snow and no one but her.

“No, I owe you more consideration than that.” He bent slightly, giving her a little seated bow. “Forgive me.”

She forced herself to her feet, one hand on the wall. “Don’t fuss about that. Irons are allowed out of the house without a shepherd. You’ll settle in with the Underlord, stable and true.”

Her master’s sword wasn’t in the cottage, and she needed it. When you’re alone, first look for a weapon.

Lindon opened his mouth as though to speak, but quickly shut it again. The silence stretched.

Until he jerked back as though struck, eyes widening on the window. She spun around, bladed arm poised and gathering madra.

The shutter had come apart slightly, and one bright eye was peeking through. It was framed by a few locks of yellow hair and about an inch of smile.

The face vanished from the window, and an instant later Eithan Arelius kicked in the door. “I’m sorry to disturb you, children, though I couldn’t help but overhear every word.”

Yerin’s spirit may have been drained down to the bone, but she still couldn’t believe she hadn’t sensed someone as powerful as an Underlord a mere ten feet away. At least he couldn’t have been there for more than a few seconds, or she would lose trust in her abilities completely.

“How long have you been listening?” she asked, not relaxing her bladed Goldsign.

He tapped his chin thoughtfully. “For about…four weeks now,” he said, then turned his smile on Lindon. “Now, as unique and special as you are, where did you get the impression that I wanted you and only you?”

Lindon’s expression showed only confusion, but he rose to his feet in order to execute a bow. His iron badge dangled from his neck. “Forgive me, Underlord.” Yerin would bet a stack of silver against a pile of hay that he had no idea what he was apologizing for.

“Of course you’re a treasure,” Eithan said, placing a hand on Lindon’s shoulder. Then his other hand snaked out and grabbed Yerin as well—she stopped her bladed arm just before it stabbed him. “But I’m not looking for a single treasure. I want the set.”

Yerin exchanged looks with Lindon, and though she gave no outer sign, it was as though her heart unclenched. She wouldn’t have to scrape by on her own after all. At least not for a little while.

“So we’re a set,” Lindon said.

“Sounds like we are,” she responded. She gave him a little smile, and he rubbed his head sheepishly.

Eithan cleared his throat.

“Well,” he said, “one half of this set is supposed to be embedding bindings into constructs.”

Lindon bowed. “Apologies, Underlord. I thought Yerin might need a familiar face when she woke.”

“That’s kind of you, and of course I have no objection to kindness. If you think kindness might keep you alive. In one year. When a Highgold is decorating the walls with your insides.”

Lindon’s head snapped up, focused on Eithan. “Honored Underlord, thank you for your consideration, but I must beg you for guidance. How can I defeat a Highgold in one year?” He sounded like a starving man asking for his next meal.

“Under the right circumstances, it’s possible for an ant to fell an ancient tree,” Eithan said. “So it’s certainly possible. But this will be the…” He hesitated. “I was going to say ‘the worst year of your life,’ but you’re very young. Let me put it to you this way: if you can hear my name at the end of this year without screaming until your lungs bleed, I haven’t done my job properly.”

Lindon paled, but his voice remained firm. “I thank you for the kindness, Underlord.” He bobbed his head to Eithan, then to Yerin, and left the cottage. Presumably to work on his Soulsmithing.

Eithan watched him leave, arms folded. When the door shut, he chuckled. “You didn’t warn him.”

Yerin watched the Underlord the same way she might watch a venomous Remnant rising from a corpse. “About what?”

“I know you noticed the…flaw in his assumptions.”

Reluctantly, she nodded. There was no point in pretending when he’d seen through her already. “In a year, Jai Long won’t be Highgold anymore.”

He spread his arms wide, radiant with the joy of a man presented with a glorious gift. “My respect for the Sage of the Endless Sword only grows. When he chose you as his disciple, he proved himself the wisest of men.”

Though it may not have been the sharpest move, she kept going. If he was going to turn on her, better to know it now than to live with a knife at her back. “You can say what you want about ants and trees, but I’d contend Lindon can’t win against a Truegold. Not in a year.”

Eithan held up a single finger. “A Truegold or better. Remember that he holds the spear of his ancestor now. But otherwise, you’re correct: Lindon certainly will not win. He cannot. And yet he must fight anyway. It’s exciting, isn’t it?”

The yellow-haired man’s cheerful demeanor had always scraped her against the grain. She’d somewhat gotten used to it during her two weeks of training with him, but now the old irritation was worming its way back like a splinter beneath a fingernail. And anger came with it.

“So you’re setting him up to bleed,” she said, without bothering to hide the accusation.

He drummed his fingertips together. “In a remote range of mountains at the southern edge of the Blackflame Empire, there lives a small sect of earth artists known as the Deep Eye School. And they are artists in the truest sense of the word; their stone sculptures sell for millions on the open market. To train in their Path, Deep Eye disciples spend years examining the aura of every rock and every boulder on the mountainside. Only when they’ve found the perfect material will they begin to sculpt.”

He moved his hands as though holding a block of stone between them. “Once, I had the good fortune to visit them and observe their process. To me, it seemed as though they spent all day staring at rocks. So I asked them what they were looking for. And they answered me: they were looking for the most beautiful flaws.”

Yerin kept her voice flat. “In this story, Lindon’s a rock?”

“And he has an exquisite flaw. He was born too weak. He has learned to get by as the weak do, tricking and bargaining and scraping his way through a world of giants.” He smiled in satisfaction. “If I wish to make him a giant, that is the flaw I must use.”

“That’s your intention, is it? To make him a giant?” She had been leaning toward joining his family—she hadn’t been lying when she told Lindon that only a fool would pass by an opportunity like that—but now she understood his hesitation.

Eithan smiled too much.

“Sounds like you’re aiming to give us both a gift,” Yerin said, cycling madra to her bladed arm. She didn’t plan to use it, but it gave her a sense of control. “I don’t like gifts when I don’t know the why behind them.”

His smile took on a wistful hue, and he stared into the distance over her shoulder. “Why?” he repeated. “That’s an elusive beast, and one that’s difficult to pin down. Let me simply say that being born with too little power is not the worst problem one can have.”

She knew where this path was headed now, and she withdrew the steel arm on her back. Her master had given her a similar speech, long ago.

“Fate is far worse on those born with too much,” he said. “In the Empire, I’ve heard it said that only one in a hundred Lowgolds ever makes it to Highgold. The same holds true between Highgold and Truegold. Between Truegold and Underlord? One in a thousand.” He gestured as though spreading a fact before her. “By definition, each advancement means you leave behind everyone you know until, eventually, you’ve surpassed them completely. That’s the very nature of the sacred arts; it is the definition of success.”

That was a fact she knew well. She may be little more than average now, but that wasn’t where she’d started out. Nor was it where she would end up.

Whether the heavens were kind enough to grant her mercy or not, she wasn’t destined to stay mediocre for long.

“I’ll admit that’s been my experience,” Yerin allowed, “but my master used to say that no Path is wide enough for two.”

He’d lost his smile somewhere along the way, and he was giving her a look of such intensity that she wondered if she was seeing him for the first time. “And that is exactly the problem I wish to solve. I have been looking for people to walk with me every step of the way.”

“Where to?” she asked.

“To the end.”

He let that hang in the air, resonating with honest yearning like a pure musical note. The end of the sacred arts. It was the definition of a myth, the unattainable goal sought by every Path.

“You think Lindon can keep up?” He had his story about a celestial visitor, but Yerin would think it impressive enough for a lifetime if he hit Gold someday.

Eithan gave a little shrug. “He’s a gamble, I’ll admit. But if it pays off, then I’m more worried about you keeping up with him.”

Yerin stared at him.

“Unless, of course, you come to terms with your…unwelcome guest.”

She kept her hand from moving to the blood-red Remnant she kept wrapped around her waist like a belt. He knew. He’d known, and he invited her anyway.

“I already had a master,” she said at last. “I’m not calling you that.”

“Eithan will do fine,” he said. And smiled.

THE END

Cradle: Volume Two

Soulsmith

Blackflame

Cradle Volume Three

Cradle: Foundation

Cradle Collected: Book One

Will Wight

Contents

Dedication

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

To the nameless minions who give their lives in my books to make the heroes look better.

We will always forget you.

1

Information requested: the Path of Black Flame.

[WARNING: Significant deviations detected. Report accuracy compromised. Recommend renewed contact with Iteration 110 to restore functionality.]

Beginning report…

For over five centuries, the Blackflame family held their empire by virtue of unstoppable force. Before facing a single Blackflame sacred artist, an entire sect would surrender.

All across the Empire’s lands, rebel strongholds and rival Schools were burned in dark fire. None stood against the Blackflames because none dared; to be suspected of insurrection was to be destroyed.

The Path of the Unstained Shield excels in protection, the Path of a Thousand Hands in versatility. The Path of the Cloud Hammer is respected for mobility and force, the Path of Silver Grace for its elegance. The many Paths of the Redflower family grow food and bring rain throughout the Empire, and the Path of Jade Eyes is unmatched in healing.

The Path of Black Flame was stolen from ancient dragons. It is the art of pure destruction.

But mortal humans are not suited for the power of dragons. Slowly, the Blackflame family declined, their minds and bodies eroded by the destructive power of their sacred arts. Eventually, even the citizens at the heart of the Empire thought of the imperial family as symbols and legends.

More and more of the day-to-day workings of the Empire were left to the Blackflames’ traditional servants: the Naru clan. They became the face of the Blackflame Empire, with their loyal reputation and shining emerald wings, and the people grew to know and trust them.

Fifty years ago, when the Blackflame family had faded to ashes and myths, the Naru quietly ascended the throne.

The first Naru clan empress has since moved into private seclusion, and her son now rules the Empire.

As for the Blackflame family themselves, most died out decades ago, gradually eaten from the inside out by their own madra. The only remaining Blackflames are [DATA NOT FOUND].

If their family and their Path are revived, the consequences could be—

Connection severed.

Restoring connection…

Connection failure.

[Archived information regarding Cradle remains accessible, but analysis of current conditions and projections into the future will be disabled until contact with Iteration 110 is restored.]

Report complete.

* * *

Goldsteel tongs poised, Lindon knelt over the carcass of a twisted wolf.

The dreadbeast looked as though it had been subjected to dissection and decay already, its skin bloody red with spots of diseased black, but it had looked that way even before death. It was cobbled together from mismatched parts, a botched and diseased creation.

He might have passed out from the smell if not for the perfume-soaked cloth wrapped over the lower half of his face, and even so he tried to breathe through his mouth.

Lindon had already made his incision down the ribs of the creature, pinning flaps of skin back to get a look inside. He’d had to saw through a layer of meat and tendons, and his gloved hands were speckled with foul blood.

Now he tried not to choke on perfumed air as he took a deep breath to steady himself.

Fisher Gesha loomed over him, a disapproving presence. Gesha was possibly the oldest person he'd ever seen, like a shriveled pile of wrinkles packed into a sacred artist's robes. Her gray hair was tied into a tight bun on the top of her head, and eight legs of mechanical Forged madra stuck out of the bottom of her robes, lifting her high enough to see over his shoulder.

“Carefully, now, carefully,” she directed. “You hit the binding at the wrong angle, you’ll chip it like a teacup.”

Lindon dipped his head slightly in lieu of an apology, then slid his hand into the wound.

Back home, he’d helped his father clean meat from a hunt, but this body had started to rot even before its death, and Lindon struggled not to gag.

He could only get two fingers past the ribs, but they quickly ran into a mass of sharp, solid edges, as though someone had glued broken glass into a fist-sized bundle of shards. He hardly brushed the binding with his fingers for fear of shattering it.

He withdrew his hand most of the way, holding open the incision.

“In a Remnant, the binding would be easier to remove,” Fisher Gesha told him, still watching from the side with hands clasped behind her back. “No muscle to cut through, hm? Simple, simple, simple to remove. But dreadbeasts keep their souls in their bodies, nasty little things, so they leave no Remnants. Their techniques grow in them like this, alongside their organs.”

She was trying to cram as many lessons into him as she could before Eithan took him away, so that the Underlord couldn’t say she’d been neglecting his education. While Lindon appreciated the effort, it was something of a distraction to have to listen when he was trying to remove a delicate piece of Forged madra from a corpse.

Inserting his tongs, he got a solid grip on the binding. Madra could react unpredictably with physical objects, but goldsteel was a unique substance. His tongs looked like ordinary gold until the light caught them, and then they flashed pure white.

Goldsteel could get a firm grip on virtually any kind of madra, which was why it was often used for Soulsmith tools and defenses against hostile Remnants. He held the binding firmly in place, careful not to squeeze too hard and shatter it.

Then he slid two fingers back into the dreadbeast, next to the trapped binding. He pinched a bundle of slick muscle.

And, cycling madra to Enforce his fingers, he tore it away from the binding. It was like pulling apart warm bread.

He would never have been able to tear meat so easily only a week ago, before advancing to Iron. And the dreadbeast was dead, so it was no longer Enforcing itself with its own madra supply.

After he had ripped free every connection from the binding to the surrounding body—and tilted his tongs a few degrees in every direction, to make sure it could move freely—he gradually slid the binding out.

It was a ball of jagged spikes, the yellow of its material barely visible beneath blood and bits of tissue.

He wasn’t sure how the madra of such a binding would interact with the physical body, but he still winced at the sight. This had been inside a living creature. It must have caused agony every time the beast moved.

Then again, the binding may not have Forged itself into existence until the wolf died. And it wasn’t as though Lindon cared for the suffering of a dreadbeast anyway.

He dropped the blood-soaked binding onto a tray that Fisher Gesha had prepared for the purpose, then something caught his eye. He turned back to the wolf’s body, inserting the tongs once again.

There was a glimmer of something behind the wet space where the binding had once rested, a speck of white too bright and clean to be bone. He pushed some of the muscle away, though he found himself leaning at an awkward angle to get around the ribs.

The white object was a tiny spiral no bigger than his thumbnail, but it was warped out of shape, like a half-melted wax seashell. The white was speckled with a rainbow of other colors—and, of course, drenched in blood—but he reached the tongs in for it.

At the first touch, the binding dissolved like chalk in rain.

Fisher Gesha smacked him on the side of the head. Before his advancement to Iron, she might well have killed him.

“You don’t touch madra you know nothing about,” she warned, shaking a finger at him. “Very dangerous.”

Lindon bobbed his head to indicate he’d heard her, but he couldn’t just leave it alone. “But honored Fisher, I believe I saw one of those before.”

In fact, he suspected he had one in his pack. His white spiral binding was large and pristine, whereas the one in the dreadbeast had been small and shot through with other colors, but he thought they may be the same crystallized technique. The same technique that had gone into the Jai Ancestor’s Spear, allowing it to steal madra.

She slapped him again, on the other side of the head this time.

“You’ve seen one? I have seen a thousand. Spent my life hunting these woods, you think there are surprises here for me?” She jabbed a finger in the direction of the corpse. “When a dreadbeast eats an animal, the meat goes to its stomach. When it eats a Remnant, the madra goes there.”

Lindon brightened. “If this can steal and process madra, like the Ancestor’s Spear does, doesn’t that make this a treasure? Every dreadbeast has the material for a new spear!”

He was working himself up with every word, envisioning himself standing in an arena against Jai Long with a white spear of his own. And a core bursting with stolen madra.

Gesha brushed her hands off on the front of her robes, though she hadn’t touched anything. “In my grandmother’s day, they tried such a thing. Used those bindings to make weapons and take power from the ones they killed. But it did to men the same things it did to…them. Everyone who used such weapons became monsters, hideous and deformed.” She shuddered. “If we could make the spear of the Jai ancestor ourselves, why would we prize it so highly, hm?”

Clearly, she didn’t know what he’d taken from the Soulsmith foundry at the top of the Transcendent Ruins. “But Fisher Gesha…I have the notes from the ones who made the spear.” He watched her as he spoke, anticipating her shock.

Without changing expression, she reached into the pocket of her outer robe and pulled out a wooden document case. “You mean these notes? Yes, you left them out the other night. These are ancient, you should be more careful with them.”

He would have reached for them if not for the gore on his hands. “I’m sorry, I was overeager.”

“Mm. These are brilliant; they will provide you with years of study and inspiration.” She tucked them back into her pocket. “Someday. First, you must learn the basics.”

Disappointment tightened into panic—he had wanted to use knowledge of the spear as a trump card against Jai Long. “If I may speak openly, honored Fisher: I was hoping to create a weapon according to those notes.”

“If an infant wishes to forge a sword of his own, should his interest be encouraged? Hm? No. I will return these to you when you have learned to stand on your own feet as a Soulsmith, and not before.”

Lindon wanted to argue, but he was unlikely to earn anything more than another hit on the head. And the smell was getting worse every second he knelt over the dreadbeast’s corpse.

Reluctantly, he let the topic slip away.

He dropped the tongs onto the tray next to the one binding they had secured, then staggered away to take a deep breath. They had left their belongings many paces away, to avoid the mess and stench—Lindon’s carried in a bulky pack that he normally wore on his back, and Gesha’s in a sealed chest of polished wood.

Lindon stopped to remove his bloody gloves and rinse his hands at a station he had set up for this exact purpose. With a wisp of his spirit, he activated a blocky blue construct that he’d nailed to a tree.

Blue liquid trickled from the box, madra Forged into water by a binding inside. Not real water, but anything would do to wash off this tainted blood.

It was only a crude device, barely worth calling a construct at all, as Gesha had repeatedly reminded him. But it worked, and water madra was common here in the Desolate Wilds, as the disciples of the Purelake School outnumbered most everyone else in the region.

Given that most of the nearby trees were at least spotted with black corruption if not entirely black, and the wildlife seemed to share the affliction, Lindon could see why pure water might be a valuable enough commodity to support a powerful School of the sacred arts.

When he’d cleaned his hands, Gesha had already rinsed off the binding and stripped away the extra muscle, leaving the Forged madra exposed: a spiked crystal of yellow madra, streaked with layers of deep red and pale orange.

Most other Forged madra tended to be one solid color, but this chaotic blend seemed to suit the dreadbeasts. They gave off a riot of conflicting auras, as though different powers warred within them.

Lindon thanked Fisher Gesha as he reached for the tray. “Are you sure you want to guide me so far? Rinsing a binding for me, that could be considered holding my hand.”

It was only intended as a light joke. Those had been Eithan’s words when he sent Lindon out to train his Soulsmithing with Gesha: “Don’t guide him too far, if you wouldn’t mind. I don’t need someone who can’t walk without his hand held.”

Thus far, Gesha had taken the Underlord’s instructions seriously, refusing to even carry her own trunk out into the forest and making Lindon haul it himself. But she’d seemed to relax as they’d hunted over the last two days, so he thought a small joke might ease the remaining tension.

Apparently he’d judged wrong.

Her face darkened, and she shoved the tray at him with enough force that he stumbled back. Despite her age, she was still a Highgold, and he was only an Iron.

“You want to report me to the Underlord, hm? You want to waste his time? Well, see if I help you any further!” She turned to shout at the air, as though she suspected Eithan was hiding close by and listening. “Not a finger more, you see? Not a breath!”

“Forgiveness, honored Fisher, forgiveness. This one intended no offense.”

“Offense? No offense, but see if I risk landing in a boiling kettle with the Underlord just to help you. If a dreadbeast comes up to nibble your toes, see if I pull you out of the fire. ‘You told me not to help him,’ that’s what I’ll tell him.” In a quieter voice, she added, “...and I told you to stop with 'this one, that one.’ That is what offends me.”

Lindon gave her a shallow bow and then turned to her trunk, throwing it open. On the top level were all her most common Soulsmith’s tools save her drudge, on which she stood. The spider-construct had identified the location of the binding in the dreadbeast’s body, and it would take much of the guesswork out of building a construct, but he wouldn’t have access to a drudge until he built one himself.

The tools all had components of goldsteel or halfsilver, the gold surfaces flashing white and the silver ones embedded with stars. They weren’t made entirely from the exotic metals, but there was still enough inside the trunk to count as a fortune back in Sacred Valley. Here, where the materials were even more rare, they might qualify as a sect’s treasure. He was lucky the Fishers had allowed Gesha to take them out…although, with Eithan Arelius standing behind Lindon, they may not have had a choice.

Before selecting his tools, he ran his madra through the binding. It drew one of his cores almost dry, using it to launch a technique. A knuckle-sized bolt of golden light blasted from the binding, tore through the leaves and earth, and smacked into the tree, chipping away a piece of bark.

“Striker binding,” Gesha said immediately. “Aspects?”

“At least earth,” Lindon said. The color reminded him of earth aura, so he went with his instincts. “Maybe force? Some wind? If you could take a look with your drudge, we could know for sure.”

“Not for sure. A drudge only checks for what you tell it to check for. There is no substitute for experience. Now then, what would you do with this binding?”

A construct, essentially, was a puppet with a single technique embedded in it. The binding was the technique. Scripts could tweak the specifics, but the bulk of a construct’s abilities were determined by the power of the dead matter in its shell and the binding at its heart.

Lindon reached into his pack and slid out a book Gesha had given him only three nights before: The Combination of Spirits. It was written by hand, rather than printed by construct like most of the books from Sacred Valley, but he found the observations of ancient Soulsmith teachers fascinating. “I haven’t had time to study in depth, but I had some inspiration. You see, here it mentions a Striker construct that won’t activate until a certain amount of time passes. You could put one circle on an arrowhead—”

“Launcher,” Fisher Gesha interrupted. “You think my question did not have a correct answer, hm? It does. The correct answer is: a basic launcher construct.”

Lindon hesitated. “I’m sure that would work, but the binding serves the same basic purpose already.” A launcher construct was little more than a container with a Striker binding in it.

As far as constructs went, launchers were boring. Nothing of what they did amplified or enhanced the binding’s technique in any way. In Lindon’s opinion, you might as well just keep a Striker binding in a script-sealed box and take it out when you needed it.

Gesha reached into the pocket of her outer robe and pulled out a second book: Soulsmithing for Coppers. On its cover was a picture of a smiling tree holding hands with a friendly-looking Remnant.

“You forgot one of your new books, hm? Lucky I grabbed it before we left.”

She tossed it to him, and he forced a smile. “Thank you for correcting my careless oversight, Fisher Gesha.”

“Mm. You’ll find instructions for a launcher inside.”

Lindon peeled open the book, flipping past overly large illustrations of children putting simple constructs together. It was a grating reminder that he had first Forged madra only a few weeks before.

Technically he supposed he was at the level of these children, but he was pushing himself in every other aspect of his sacred arts. Why did he have to start from the beginning only here, as a Soulsmith?

But Gesha’s stern gaze did not relent, so he sighed and walked back over to her trunk, removing the claw of an earth-Remnant, which still twitched with life if he held it too close to the ground. It would serve as the ideal body for this weapon.

With a goldsteel scalpel, he split it open, placing the binding within.

He ran his spirit over the loose construction, letting his power drift into the dead matter. With focus and a few deep breaths, he took control of the Remnant pieces.

The claw began to shine again, like it had when it was part of a Remnant. Lindon felt when his spirit filled the dead matter and the binding equally, empowering them both.

Then he fused them together.

The claw shrunk, compressed, and reshaped itself slightly. The binding melded into the substance of the claw, sealed inside so it was all one piece.

And that was all.

Now it was a shining yellow rod tipped with claws, which would launch a blast of rock-hard energy when provided with madra. It wasn’t much of a weapon, but it counted as a success nonetheless.

All the Soulsmiths in Sacred Valley had been Forgers because the process of creating a construct was similar to Forging: you take control of power and give it form. Lindon could have re-formed the dead matter to look more like a sword, or a box, or most anything else, but he hadn’t bothered. It was just a launcher.

More than Forging ability, Lindon had learned, crafting a construct required compatibility. The power of the Soulsmith soaked into the power of the construct, and some aspects of madra did not blend well. In those cases, the Soulsmithing process could result in a useless product, or a deadly mistake.

Pure madra was compatible with everything, but it was also weak. It added nothing. Fisher Gesha’s madra was attractive—as in, it literally pulled objects together—and that meant she could fuse dead matter to bindings with no trouble at all, and her madra was still compatible with most everything. There were a few powers she couldn’t re-Forge without danger, but she had a drudge to identify exactly when those were present.

Pure madra wasn’t the best for any given construct—it weakened the original power of the madra like water added to wine. But it did technically work with anything.

Lindon would take any advantage he could get.

Back in Sacred Valley, every Forger thought they knew something about Soulsmithing, because making a construct was fairly easy. But making one safe? One that performed as intended every time, and lasted for as long as possible?

You had to measure the dead matter and the binding precisely to avoid unexpected interaction, handle the materials correctly, dissect the Remnant properly, and know how to customize and tweak the functions with scripts afterward.

Unless you were making a launcher.

Gesha nodded approvingly. “You move quickly, and with confidence. This is good. Only another week or two, and we will take further steps.”

He tried to keep most of the disappointment out of his voice as he said, “A week?”

Gesha’s hand struck like a hawk taking a mouse, slapping him on the back of the head. This time, it really stung. “Keep your eyes on the present, not the future, hm?” Her spider legs shuffled, turning her back on him.

“Your instruction has been invaluable, honored Fisher,” Lindon said, although in truth she hadn’t taught him much at all before the last few days. It seemed that his endorsement from Eithan had promoted him from ‘servant’ to ‘student.’ “I bow to your wisdom.”

She reached over her shoulder, resting a hand on the hilt of her hook. Like all the members of the Fisher sect, she carried a giant bladed fishhook as a weapon, sharp on the inside. Hers was plated with goldsteel, and he’d personally seen her dissect all sorts of Remnants with it.

“You wish to run before you can stand up straight,” Gesha said firmly. “You do not travel any Path by skipping steps.”

He had skipped every step he could, and ever since leaving Sacred Valley, he had succeeded beyond his wildest dreams.

But he didn’t say that out loud.

“The honored Fisher is wise.”

“Mm. You are blind.”

“Yes, Fisher Gesha.”

“Oh, you know this?”

“Yes, Fisher Gesha.”

“That is strange to me. A man who knows he is blind would be very careful of his surroundings, lest he be taken by surprise.”

Something grabbed Lindon’s ankle and pulled him off balance.

Before his Iron body, slamming his chin against the hard-packed earth would have blinded him with pain, and perhaps lost him a tooth. Now, he only felt pressure hitting his jaw, and he instantly twisted to see what had snared him.

A line of purple madra stuck to his ankle like spider’s silk, stretching back to a figure of purple light lurking in the trees. Like all Remnants, it looked like a collection of brush-strokes, as though someone had painted it into existence. This one was tall and sunken, with inhumanly long limbs and the gaping face of a fish. Its thin, webbed fingers were tipped in claws, and its blank purple eyes were fixed on Lindon.

His heart hammered, and he had to focus to keep his breath even and steady so that his madra didn’t slip out of control. Not long ago, he would have panicked at this sudden attack.

But that was before Eithan had locked him in a stone ruin alone for two weeks. Panic could wait until the fight was done.

The spirit was still two dozen yards away, but it already had him. The purple string fastened to his ankle stretched back to the Remnant’s outstretched hand.

Lindon filled his hand with madra and struck out, driving an Empty Palm into the string…but the line only quivered. It remained fastened to his ankle, one end stuck as though it had grown out of his skin.

The Remnant made a sound like a bubble popping, and the line started dragging Lindon across the forest floor.

His breath came in ragged gasps, and he was having more trouble keeping his breathing technique steady. When he tried to grab the string and pull, his hand passed right through the madra.

Gesha was drifting alongside him, the legs of her spider-construct matching his pace. “You think too highly of yourself, and this is what comes. A Jade would have sensed my approach when I returned to camp. A Jade would have felt this fellow coming.”

“Honored Fisher,” Lindon grunted, straining to reach one of the goldsteel tools that remained on the dirt. “Help me, please!”

“An Iron child in these woods should have no more pride than a mouse, no more courage than a rabbit. But you have your eyes on the future. You stare only at your goal far away, so you miss the traps before your feet.”

Mustering all his strength, Lindon Enforced his arms, driving his hands into the soft earth. The Remnant pulled him through the dirt for another moment, plowing two furrows before his momentum stopped.

Gesha stopped as well, still speaking idly. “This is a lesson for all sacred artists, not just Soulsmiths. A snake who tries to swallow an elephant will only choke.”

Lindon may have been too preoccupied with the Remnant trying to eat him than with Gesha’s instruction, but he couldn’t see how her lesson applied to his current situation. Certainly, he should have taken the time to put down some sort of alarm circle around the camp before he started working on his construct. But he didn’t see what that had to do with his unauthorized Soulsmith experiments.

And did they have to have this talk now? He was face-down in the dirt, clinging desperately to earth with arms outstretched, shoulders aching so badly they were starting to shake.

Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Gesha slowly draw her hook and examine it in the light. Clearly, she was in no rush to help him.

“You are always trying to skip steps, yes? To cheat. This is carelessness, and it will land you in more trouble than this.”

“I understand, Fisher Gesha,” Lindon gasped. “Please, let me free.”

Something grabbed him by the right hip, and then by the back of the neck. More webs, stretching out from the purple Remnant.

“Maybe you do, maybe you don’t.” Fisher Gesha beckoned with her left hand, and a purple line appeared between her fingers and the Remnant. “One way or the other, do not tell the Underlord I helped you out of danger.”

She heaved on her line, and the Remnant was jerked off its feet as though it weighed nothing, tumbling over the ground as her purple string shortened. When it was dragged to her feet, she swept her goldsteel hook through the spirit’s neck.

Bright sparks of violet essence sprayed into the air like blood, and the Remnant’s head fell away.

The force pulling on Lindon released, and he sagged into the ground, his arms and shoulders crying out in relief. “This one humbly thanks you, Fisher Gesha.”

“Not this one,” she said. “Before we return, tell me what you have learned today.”

“I am careless. I overstep myself, leaping forward when I should progress slowly and carefully.”

“Mm. So long as you have learned.”

He didn’t tell her what he had really learned.

He would have caught the Remnant’s approach if he were Jade. And she, a Highgold, had swatted it like a fly.

That was the real lesson: if you were powerful enough, you could accomplish anything.

2

Tears glistened in Jai Chen's eyes as Jai Long held her hand. “Kral died fighting beside me,” he told her. “He went quickly and courageously. He died a hero.”

“The Underlord…killed him?” his little sister asked. She labored to push her voice out, every breath a fight against the invisible weight on her chest.

Jai Long squeezed her hand a little harder, but restrained himself so as not to hurt her. “A boy he brought with him. Just an Iron.”

Jai Chen's eyes opened wide, and her arms fluttered as though she’d tried to raise them. “An Iron?”

“He struck like a coward. From behind, with a stolen weapon. Even another Highgold couldn't have faced Kral and lived.”

The tears welled up again, and Jai Chen sniffled. “Young master Kral...” She couldn't seem to choke out the rest of the words.

Jai Long smoothed her bedsheets. “I would have told you before, but I've had many preparations to make.”

He reached down, unlatching a scripted case. From within, he produced his surprise: the Ancestor's Spear, a glowing shaft of Forged white madra scratched lightly with lines of script. Jai Chen struggled upwards in bed to get a look, straining to push herself upright.

“From the very top of the Transcendent Ruins,” he told her, as she extended hesitant fingers to touch it. She looked at him for permission, and only rested her hand upon it when he nodded.

“It's warm...”

“It draws madra from others into me,” Jai Long said, and she jerked her hands back. “No no, you can touch it. It only means I’ll become stronger for every clan member I...defeat.”

“Then you’ll avenge young master Kral?” she asked quietly.

He placed the spear back into its case, latching it back, so the precious madra didn't dissipate. The scripts on the spear prevented madra decay, but the Sandviper Soulsmiths couldn't say by how much. It was always best to be careful—if he lost this weapon, there was no replacement.

“I would have avenged him on the spot, if not for the Underlord.” He patted her arm. “But the Arelius family is not entirely without honor. They will allow me to face him in the arena, in one year's time.”

Sadness crept over her face, but it took her a few full breaths before she could speak. “Back to the Empire? But we…we…” He waited patiently as she focused on her breathing. “…we were going to leave. Do…do you…want to go back?”

Only to butcher them, he thought, but he spoke calmly. “The Jai clan has refiners and Soulsmiths. If I break into their vaults, perhaps I could heal you myself. Even if that doesn’t work, I could earn the support of the Naru or the Kotai. Or one of the Schools; they say the pills of the Jade Eyes can even restore the freshly dead.”

Her smile was twisted by pain and bitterness. “You don’t…think we can…leave?”

He patted her arm to buy himself time to think before he answered. “When I'm finished, there will be no one left to follow us.”

The topic had grown much darker than he’d planned, but they talked for an hour afterwards of lighter and happier things: food, gossip, memories of Kral. When her exertions took their toll and she fell asleep, he picked up his case and excused himself.

Leaving her behind him, etched with the scars of his failure. Her body was perfectly healthy, damaged only by years of weakness and isolation. On good days, her smile was so wide and open that it almost made him forget anything was wrong.

Her spirit told the real story.

Despite himself, he swept his spiritual perception over her, lighting her spirit in his mind’s eye. For a moment, he took in the wreckage left by the monster that had rampaged through her soul.

Her madra channels, which should have spread throughout her body in clean, even loops, were twisted and broken. Half of the passages were dim, blocked, and the other half too bright as madra built up in the wrong places. Her core was wrapped in a web of cracks, leaking light like a broken lantern.

Enough madra trickled through her ruined spirit that she could just barely move. Even that much was a miracle, the result of healers working day and night for a week after her accident.

The culprit lay coiled in his core even now, the Remnant’s madra blending with his own as it gradually dissolved, its memories and sensations lurking at the back of his mind. By the time he reached Truegold, he would have digested it completely.

It was the most total, thorough revenge he could imagine.

He had been exiled from the main branch of the Jai clan because the Remnant was from a different Path, and he’d brought his sister along because she had no one left to support her.

The clan could have restored her. It might have cost them some rare materials, but they could have done it. They didn't, because she was of no value to them.

Which had shown him the extent of the clan’s loyalty. Why should he be loyal in return?

He shut the door of his sister's cabin gently, so as not to wake her, nodding to the Lowgold Sandvipers standing guard on either side. These were warriors he'd selected personally, and they knew they answered to him. They would die at their posts.

Though that loyalty might soon be tested, judging by the green banner flying over the Sandviper camp. Jai Long gripped his case more tightly and looked to one of the guards.

“He’s back?”

“His bats landed only minutes ago,” the guard confirmed. He exchanged glances with his partner, and Jai Long knew their thoughts as clearly as if they’d spoken aloud.

Would the Sandviper chief blame Jai Long for his son’s death?

Jai Long found the newly returned group of Sandvipers clustered around a repurposed stable, a cluster of filthy, fur-clad men and women he could smell halfway down the street. They had been in the Wilds for months, too far to respond to the call of the Transcendent Ruins, and now they had arrived to find the heir to their sect murdered.

Days ago, Jai Long had ordered this stable cleared out and cleaned, prepared to host Sandviper Kral’s body. The corpse was preserved by rare medicines, waiting for a mourning father.

The Sandvipers parted to allow Jai Long to pass, though their Goldsigns were not so courteous. The miniature sandviper Remnants on their arms coiled and hissed, reflecting their hosts’ anger.

Jai Long pushed open the door and slipped inside, holding his polished spear-case. He was already primed to tear the Ancestor’s Spear free in an instant; Gokren was a Truegold, and more than capable of killing Jai Long if he reacted poorly. The weapon might be the difference between defeat and survival.

Gokren, chief of the Sandvipers, was a wiry man with slicked-back gray hair and a pair of short, one-handed spears crossed on his back. He wore furs from chin to toe, with the shed skin of some great snake wrapped around his neck like a scarf.

He was not a tall man, and Jai Long was used to him standing with his spine rigidly straight, looking down an upraised chin as though everyone else stood beneath him.

Now he’d collapsed on the floor like a child, sobbing. He gripped his head in both hands, nails driven into his scalp. His reptilian Goldsign let out a long, crooning cry.

Jai Long let the door slide shut behind him, unaccountably disturbed. Somehow, he had pictured a man of Gokren’s power and dignity standing over his son’s body with arms folded, demanding recompense from those responsible. Maybe a single tear would roll down his face, or his commanding voice would catch for an instant, as a brief acknowledgement of human grief.

He had never expected Gokren to weep as though an enemy had torn out his own heart.

Jai Long had pushed his feelings aside in favor of action, but now his own grief stirred from where it had settled. Gokren had crumpled at the base of a long table, on which a pile of mismatched furs rested. One of those furs had been flipped back, revealing a pale face and a curtain of dark hair that spilled over the edge of the table.

Sandviper Kral had been the first one to welcome Jai Long when he and his sister had been exiled to the Wilds. He had been the only one to look Jai Long in the eyes instead of staring at the crimson bandages wrapping his face, the only one to visit Jai Chen and tell her stories of the outside world. He was the only one who tried to give two exiles a home.

And there he was, cold on a table.

Because of a spoiled Underlord’s whim and the tricks of his pet Iron.

When the anger slipped its bonds and burned through him, hot and hungry, Jai Long’s hand tightened on his spear-case until the scripted wood creaked and threatened to crack.

Gokren must have heard, because he turned toward Jai Long for the first time, eyes red and face soaked in tears. His voice scraped out wet and raw: “Tell me. Please.”

Jai Long wasn’t sure he’d ever heard the Sandviper chief make a request of anyone.

“It was the Arelius Underlord,” Jai Long said. Gokren stared blankly at the floor, so that Jai Long wasn’t sure if he’d heard. He continued the story anyway. “He approached us in disguise, slipping into the Ruins as a worker. Once inside, he freed himself and his followers, leading them to the prize. He beat us to it by minutes, and we would have surrendered the prize to him if he had only told us his name.

“While I fought his disciple, he distracted Kral so that an Iron child could stab him in the back with some kind of hidden weapon. We believe it was developed by the Fisher Soulsmiths, but an Underlord could have any number of tricks.”

Jai Long watched Gokren for any reaction, keeping his perception open in case the Truegold prepared an attack out of rage. But Gokren only sat there, watching the ground.

“I would have killed him if the Underlord hadn’t revealed himself,” Jai Long said. It sounded like an excuse, but it was only the truth. “But he has no affection for the Iron. He allowed me to take a prize from the Ruins, and he gave me a year. At the end of that time, I will meet his Iron in a duel, and he will not interfere.”

“…where are they now?” Gokren asked.

“The Fishers are keeping their borders tight, but they should have left days ago,” Jai Long said. His information was sadly lacking, but he was confident in his conclusion. The Arelius Underlord had no reason to linger in the Desolate Wilds an hour longer than he had to.

“An Iron,” Gokren mumbled. He pressed one hand against his eyes. “My son…an Iron. They left him no pride when they killed him.”

For his sister, Jai Long had played up Kral’s death in battle to make it seem as though he had met a respectable end. That wouldn’t work for Gokren, so Jai Long stayed quiet.

Gokren took a moment to master himself, then rose. He cast one last glance at Kral’s body, brushing hair away from the pale forehead.

“I know you will avenge him,” Gokren said quietly. Jai Long had come in here expecting a battle, but there was no fight in this man. At least not directed at him. “In a year, you will take back his honor, and I must only endure.”

Gokren straightened, and a shadow of the Sandviper chief’s poise returned. “But I know you will not spend this time idly. What is your plan?”

Jai Long hadn’t been sure how to approach this topic. He had feared that Gokren might learn about the Ancestor’s Spear from one of the Sandvipers and decide to take it away. He wasn’t worried about that possibility anymore.

Placing the long wooden case on the floor, Jai Long flipped it open and revealed the shining white weapon.

Gokren clenched and unclenched his fists, watching the spear. Minutes rolled by as he stared, the acid-green Sandviper on his arm hissing every now and then.

“You’re going back to your clan?”

Jai Long said nothing, which was answer enough.

“Will Jai Daishou stop you?”

The Underlord Patriarch of the Jai clan was a legend; with his own hands, he had built the Jai from a remote clan in the wilderness to an Imperial power. If he acted, Jai Long’s dreams of revenge would melt like snow in the summer sun.

“To him, propriety is the highest virtue,” Jai Long said, bitterness in the words. If the Patriarch had been the slightest bit flexible, Jai Long and his sister would still belong to the head family. “Every step must be taken in its proper order, and he will defend that order to the death. He will not act until his Highgolds, Truegolds, elites, and Elders have all fallen.”

Green light dripped from Gokren’s body, half-Forged madra from the Path of the Sandviper, but he didn’t seem to notice. “They will feed themselves to you, one by one.”

“And by the time Jai Daishou reveals himself, I will be more than his match.” The Underlord had once groomed Jai Long to be his replacement, after all. The Ancestor’s Spear would allow him to close the gap on his own.

But Chief Gokren shook his head. “The gulf between Gold and Lord is wider than you imagine. It requires a certain insight that I’ve never gained.” He flexed his hand into a claw. “If it was only a matter of power, I would have broken through long ago. But you may not need to face him. Rumor says he is dying; is this true?”

Reflexively, Jai Long remained quiet. Those were clan matters, and not to be spoken of before outsiders.

That thought was replaced by disgust in an instant. Years away from the main Jai clan, and Jai Long was still keeping their secrets. How deep their poison sinks.

“Unless they’ve discovered a miracle cure, he won’t live five more years.”

“You only have to avoid him for one. By the time you kill the Iron, you’ll have gutted the Jai clan. Then you retreat west, back here, and we’ll hide you until the Underlord dies.”

Jai Long searched for words, but none came. At best, he had expected the Sandviper chief to berate him for leaving. He’d even come prepared for a fight.

He’d never dared to hope that Gokren would break a long-standing alliance for him. He was tempted to tell the grieving father to reconsider, that he was risking the future of his sect for personal vengeance.

But the truth was, Jai Long needed every ally he could get.

The Sandviper crossed the room and grabbed Jai Long by both shoulders. His grip was painfully tight, his eyes fevered. Jai Long had to suppress the instinct that told him to break the hold and escape.

“You were a brother to my son,” Gokren said. “Your enemies are mine.”

Jai Long’s eyes welled up, but he pressed fists together and bowed.

Gokren squeezed his arms one more time and then released. “Unless they’ve fled already, some of those enemies are right here in camp. Let’s see if you can’t test out that new spear.”

He threw the stable doors wide open, and the Sandvipers at the entrance straightened in respect. These were the veterans of their sect, the oldest and most loyal warriors. Kral’s death would stain them all. They simmered with suppressed anger, eager for a chance to vent their pain and shame.

“We march with Jai Long against his clan,” Gokren announced, tearing one of his short spears free. “Sandvipers! We hunt.”

Jai Long was prepared for hateful looks cast his way, for words of hesitation and blame, for the Sandvipers to turn their anger on him.

Once again, he saw how deeply he had misunderstood his allies.

They roared in agreement with their leader’s words, their sandviper Goldsigns shrieking to the heavens. They clapped him on the back as they passed him, whispered words of encouragement, or pressed their foreheads against his for an instant before rushing off to battle. Not an instant of hesitation, not a word of blame.

With a new family at his side, Jai Long marched to destroy his old one.

* * *

Lindon had to spend one more night in the woods, scripting their camp against Remnants and dreadbeasts and curling up in a crude tent only yards away from Fisher Gesha’s. After the day’s attack, he had woken with every cracking twig and gust of wind, groping for his launcher construct.

But dawn broke without event, so he and Gesha returned to the Five Factions Alliance camp with the rising sun. He read as they walked, committing simple scripts to memory.

“Put that away and listen to me,” Gesha ordered as they approached the camp walls. “You are no longer a Copper with one friend and no enemies. You should learn to conduct yourself as a member of a great family, hm?”

Lindon opened his pack and slid Soulsmithing for Coppers inside, resting it beside the Sylvan Riverseed's glass case. “I await your instruction.”

Her mouth tightened and guilt flashed across her face. “I did not teach you well before Eithan Arelius took you in.” He started to disagree—a polite fiction, because she really had been a terrible teacher before the past few days—but she cut him off. “It’s true, and I’m not afraid of the truth. You were never my disciple before the Underlord picked you up, no matter what I told you. But I could never treat a member of the Arelius family so disrespectfully as to ignore them.”

“Gratitude. Your instruction is appreciated, but I have no voice in the Arelius family. Nothing you say to me will reflect on them.”

That wasn't entirely true, and they both knew it; before he was attached to Eithan Arelius, Gesha could have cut his head off in broad daylight and the passersby would have simply stepped around his bleeding trunk. Now, she'd have to answer to an Underlord.

But Eithan didn’t have time to listen to Lindon’s petty complaints. Lindon wasn’t some spoiled noble’s son with a doting father; in fact, he wouldn’t be surprised if the Underlord cast him out of the family on a whim.

Gesha sighed. “This is a lesson for you, as you travel into the wider world. Reputation is a sacred artist's greatest treasure. If the Underlord hears that I have disrespected you, he will take that to mean that I do not respect him. You see? The powerful have no mercy for those who step on their reputations.”

Their conversation stopped as they passed through the entrance of the guarded wooden wall and into the Alliance camp, walking down hard-packed dirt roads past buildings that had been hurriedly tossed together from raw lumber and bare stone.

They had a few moments before they were alone again, so Lindon had some time to think. Gesha was trying not to say it out loud, but Eithan frightened her. She was terrified that something Lindon said might lead to her execution.

Lindon knew that Fisher Gesha was a Highgold who could twist him into a knot without ever touching him, but she was still a four-foot-tall old woman who could have been his grandmother. His heart softened when he saw her careful and afraid. “I won't carry news back to him, I swear it,” Lindon said. “He won't hear anything from me.”

She gave him a grateful look, clearly relieved that she hadn’t had to spell it out. Then she gave a brief chuckle. “He's an Arelius,” she said dryly. “If the rumors are true, then he'll hear about it regardless.”

Lindon laughed along, but she seemed half-serious.

That made him consider her fears again. If Eithan was really that dangerous, maybe he should reconsider accepting his invitation.

Then again, this could be the one area where he had more experience than Fisher Gesha.

Eithan may be an Underlord, with a level of power Lindon could scarcely imagine, but he’d seen Suriel with his own eyes. He wasn’t sure how far she ranked above an Underlord, but he was certain Eithan couldn’t hold a candle to her.

“He hasn't descended from the heavens,” Lindon said, smiling slightly. “He can't see everything.”

“Not everything,” Eithan said.

Lindon stumbled back, bumping into a wooden wall at the side of the street. More gracefully, Fisher Gesha hopped down from her spider-construct and sunk to her knees, pressing her forehead against the ground.

All around them, sacred artists of all ages dropped to the dirt as well. At first, only a few had caught sight of Eithan, but more and more people noticed. In only a breath, the sparse crowd of perhaps two dozen people had all fallen to their knees with heads bowed. Only Lindon and Eithan remained standing.

This was the Fisher section of the Alliance encampment, so most of the people were Fishers or their allies, but it was still disturbing to see all these people recognize Eithan on sight. Only a few days ago, Eithan had pushed through a bustling crowd a hundred times this size without interruption.

For his part, Eithan stood in the center of the road as though he’d waited there all along, though he certainly hadn’t been there a moment before. His yellow hair fell past his shoulders, and his smile was broad and cheery. He kept his eyes on Lindon and Gesha, as though the strangers didn’t exist. Today, he wore a teal outer robe embroidered with golden fish leaping and playing among the waves.

“Your unworthy servant greets the Underlord,” Gesha said, and there was a murmur of agreement through the crowd.

“Underlord,” Lindon said, hurriedly sketching a bow of his own. “Forgive me, I was...startled.”

Eithan brushed that away with a gesture. “There will be no forgiveness. To the blood pits with you!”

Gesha trembled on her knees, and Lindon laughed awkwardly.

The Underlord looked at them, gauging their reactions, and eventually shrugged. “Not every joke is appreciated in its time. Tell me, Soulsmith Gesha, would you mind if I borrowed my little brother here? Feel free to say no, although of course I will have your corpse mounted on a flagpole for the slightest defiance.”

“The will of the Underlord be done,” Gesha said from the ground, her face still in the dirt. Her shaking had grown more noticeable.

None of the strangers dared to make a single sound.

Lindon passed a hand over his face. With lowered voice, he said, “Please, Underlord.”

Eithan's eyes widened. “Am I to be condemned because she takes things too...no, fine, all right.” He knelt at Fisher Gesha's side and spoke in a much gentler voice. “I beg your pardon, Soulsmith. Please rise and address me face-to-face.” He raised his voice. “All of you, on your feet and on your way.”

With the speed of Gold sacred artists, the crowd vanished. It was as though the breeze had blown them all away.

Gesha rose, but she did not face him.

“On my word as an Underlord, you will not be punished for anything you say here or have said today,” Eithan said impatiently. “Now follow my instructions, Highgold.”

Finally she let out a breath and met his eyes. “Thank you for your mercy, honored Underlord. Tell me how I might serve you.”

Eithan looked to Lindon. “You see how much faster it is when I just tell them what to do? It's infuriating. I don't want to phrase everything as a command for the rest of my life.”

“It sounds hard on you, Underlord,” Lindon said carefully.

“Yes, the endless subservience and instant obedience wear on me. But if you call me anything other than 'Eithan' again, I'll have you sleep in a cave full of bats.” He stroked his chin for a moment, considering. “You could call me 'brother' instead, if you preferred. Yes, that would be—”

“Thank you, Eithan,” Lindon cut in.

“Hmmm. Well, as I was saying: Fisher Gesha, I must borrow your pupil for an hour or six. I'll return him to you in one or more pieces.”

“As you will, Underlord.”

“And I had something to ask you as well.” Eithan drew himself up and addressed the old Soulsmith with full authority. “You will not be punished for any decision you make here, on my word and the honor of my family. We depart for one of my homes in the Empire very soon, perhaps today. I would be honored to have you accompany Lindon as his Soulsmith tutor, but you are free to decline and stay with your sect. There will be no repercussions of any—”

“I decline,” Gesha said instantly. She didn't even look at Lindon. He hadn't expected any different, but it still stung.

Eithan clapped his hands. “A firm decision! Wonderful. Then, good-bye!”

He extended an arm to shepherd Lindon and turned as though to continue walking down the road, but Gesha had already scurried away. A wooden door slammed shut; Lindon wondered if she’d escaped into a random nearby building.

“For a woman her age, she really is spry. Good for her. Not everyone keeps up with their physical exercises as they get older, and a healthy spirit lives in a healthy body.”

Lindon adjusted his pack, hitching it up on his shoulders. “I’d like a chance to bathe before I continue my training, if you don’t mind. I’ve been in the forest for three days, and water is scarce.”

Eithan turned to him with an expression of obvious disappointment. “Do you think you’ll be able to defeat a Truegold in a year with such halfhearted resolve? How much valuable training time do you plan to waste on baths?”

Lindon bowed hurriedly. “Forgiveness, please, I spoke out of turn.”

“No, I was pulling your strings again. But you really shouldn’t waste soap on yourself yet, you filthy mud-caked animal. After a day of this training, you’ll be covered in sweat. And probably some blood.”

Eithan considered for another moment as they walked. “In fact, it would be best to expect the blood.”

3

Eithan led him all the way across the territory of the Five Factions Alliance, the ramshackle encampment that had sprouted up after the Transcendent Ruins rose from the ground. The cobbled-together buildings of stone and lumber leaned up against the base of the Ruins like roots at the foot of a great tree.

Lindon hadn’t been back inside since Eithan had rescued him from Jai Long’s wrath. He fervently wished never to go back; fifteen days trapped in darkness was enough for a lifetime.

The pyramid dwarfed everything else for miles around, like a mountain made of stacked blocks. Its bottom tier took up more space than the rest of the encampment, and its top tier scraped the clouds. Now that the Soulsmith foundry at the top was open, the scripts powering the Ruin had settled into equilibrium. They no longer had to draw vital aura from miles around; instead, it relied on a steady trickle from its immediate surroundings.

In Lindon's Copper sight, each block of the pyramid looked like a softly yellow-glowing cube of golden lightning. That would be the earth aura in the stone itself; the same power that ran through the ground beneath his feet, just far more concentrated. Whenever he looked down into the earth, he had the dizzying sensation of staring into a yellow ocean filled with glowing, crackling bolts.

Aura empowered the entire world with strokes of color: the wind blew hazy green, the sun's rays were a gold richer than the earth, and the broad lake next to the pyramid shone with vivid blue-green ripples. Each person was a mass of color with vibrant green and bloody red predominating.

It was like staring into a world of fractured rainbows.

Lindon had to close off his senses before his head began to throb. Focusing on any aura gave him information about that aura’s aspect, so opening his aura sight was like staring into the sun and reading a hundred books at the same time. A headache followed in seconds.

The thousands of sacred artists who had gathered to explore the benefits of the Ruins had started to drift away as soon as the pyramid stopped drawing in aura. Now, only three days later, half of these newly built buildings were abandoned. The dirt paths leading all over the Alliance encampment were all but empty, not choked with traffic as they had been only half a week before.

But news had already traveled fast. Everyone they spotted on the road bowed at the sight of Eithan, murmuring respect as he passed. Usually seconds before scurrying out of their way, lest the Underlord become displeased.

Eithan continued to ignore everyone, chatting with Lindon and occasionally stopping to sweep dust from a windowsill or snip a branch from a bush with the black iron scissors he seemed to carry everywhere. He never glanced at anyone else, whether they bowed or not, and many of the strangers looked relieved by that fact.

Lindon knew better.

Eithan didn't look at them because he didn't need to.

They finally arrived at the end of Fisher territory, amid a collection of wooden buildings that looked as though they had been built in a day and abandoned just as quickly. A bucket of nails rested on a half-finished fence, and a hand plane sat abandoned in the grass.

Eithan gestured to the biggest building, which smelled of fresh-cut wood and sat in a bed of sawdust and wood chips. “Behold,” he said, “your new training hall! The crew started and finished it last night.”

It was a barn. Fisher Gesha’s foundry looked almost exactly the same, except this one was unpainted.

Why was Eithan having new buildings constructed? Weren’t they leaving soon?

“I'm eager to see what's inside,” Lindon said diplomatically.

“Are you? That’s strange. I designed it to look as uninteresting as possible.” Eithan swept up the plane and the bucket of nails, placing them next to a pile of other tools. “I’m sure Yerin’s reaction was much more entertaining.”

Lindon resisted the urge to apologize, instead approaching the barn.

There was an average-sized door on the side, obviously made for foot traffic, and broad doors in the middle designed for livestock. Although if it was built only a day ago as a training hall, why would there be animals here at all?

After a second's indecision, Lindon hitched up his pack and hauled with both hands on the livestock door.

Yerin sat inside, legs crossed, with a white-bladed sword across her knees. She was roughly Lindon’s age, about sixteen, but while Lindon had been raised among the comforts of civilization, Yerin looked like she’d grown up in a never-ending knife fight.

Blades had left their tracks in the pale scars on her face and hands, in the tattered edges of her coal-black sacred artist’s robe. She cut her hair with her sword madra, so it ended in absolutely straight lines across her eyes and above her shoulders.

The rope tied around her waist was the red of spilled blood, but Lindon couldn’t bear to look directly at it. There was something alive about that belt, as though it could slither away at any moment.

Her Goldsign grew from behind her shoulder, a silver arm ending in a blade like a scorpion’s stinger. Even seated on the floor in a cycling position, she looked deadly, as though she were poised to dive back into a battle.

She nodded a greeting to Lindon, but addressed Eithan. “Daylight's wasting. Am I going back to cycling, or are we going to start hitting these guys?”

She jerked a thumb behind her, and Lindon took a glance over her shoulder. Except for the beams supporting the roof, the barn was wide open from wall to wall. And filling that space was a circle of eighteen wooden dummies.

They were only crude outlines of men: rough shapes of a head and torso, with boards sticking out like arms. They had no legs, only a single pole driven through the floorboards beneath them.

But what drew Lindon's attention, and made him walk forward for a closer look, were the runes carved into those boards. The dummies had been arranged all around a script-circle the size of the barn, and it was one of the most intricate circles he'd ever seen. There were two lines of script circling the dummies, one on the inside and one on the outside, and the runes were packed small and tight; each symbol was only the size of his thumb. He picked out a rune he recognized here and there, but a circle like this was far beyond him.

A second circle, much smaller, overlapped at the far end of the barn. It was only big enough for a single person to stand inside, and a wooden podium rested in the center. Lindon guessed that those were the controls.

Eithan put his hands on his hips and looked over the eighteen dummies with the smile of a proud father. “Six Soulsmiths worked alongside the carpenters all night for this, and I have to say, I think they did a wonderful job.”

Lindon could tell that the runes had been carved quickly, but he was still having trouble accepting that this had been done in one night.

“This is a traditional training method from my homeland,” Eithan said, walking over to stand by one of the dummies. “I've seen similar setups elsewhere, but I’m partial to this design. Yerin, did your master ever take you through one of these?”

“Master wouldn’t let me draw my sword on a wooden man,” Yerin said with a shrug. “If it didn't bleed, it wasn't good enough training.”

“I suspect that, in a few years, you’ll have drawn enough blood to satisfy even your master. No need to start too early.”

Yerin looked pleased by the compliment, but Lindon was wondering what exactly the Underlord had planned for them over the next few years.

Eithan moved on. “These dummies are more than wood, you see. They are moved by small constructs inside, and are used to practice basic steps in combat.”

Yerin's face fell, her disappointment clear. Lindon perked up.

She might not need such simple instruction, but Lindon was looking forward to his turn in the circle of wooden men. He was lacking in many areas, and hand-to-hand combat was one of them. As an Unsouled, he had been encouraged to practice the simple exercises of the Wei clan, but never trained for a real fight.

Eithan strode over to the podium at the center of the control circle, pointing a finger at Yerin while moving his other hand over the podium. “I know how you feel, but be patient. I'm making a point.”

The air between Eithan's hand and the podium rippled. The smaller circle around Eithan lit up white, then the light flowed into the bigger circle. Soon, the entire barn was lit with pale runelight.

Suddenly, one of the wooden dummies spun on its axis. A previously invisible circle of runes lit up on its left arm—green—then in its lower torso—blue—then on its face—white. The lights faded away in seconds.

“Hit the circles as they light up. Simple, isn't it? If you do it correctly, and your strikes carry enough madra, the circles will stay lit instead of dying out. When all three circles on all the dummies remain active at the same time, you have won.”

Air rippled between his hand and the controls again, and a deafening chime sounded from all the dummies at once. They each spun in place, and the three circles on their bodies continued to shine instead of dying out.

Eithan stepped away from the controls, though the circles in the floorboards remained lit.

The dummies stayed bright for a handful of seconds, their three rings shining, before finally going dark.

“Yerin, if you wouldn't mind demonstrating for Lindon how the system works, I'd like to see you defeat the dummies. As quickly as possible, please.”

Yerin stepped between two of the mannequins, tucking her sword-arm closer to her shoulder so it didn't catch on a wooden head. “I just have to hit them when they light up?”

“In the correct timing. If you miss one, the target will go dark again, and you'll have to start over.”

She nodded, approaching a dummy. “How do I start?”

When she stepped closer, a green circle of runes lit on the wooden plank it used as an arm. Before Lindon had fully registered the light, Yerin had already struck it dead-center. The arm swiveled back from the force...

...and the other arm came to life, swinging at the back of her head.

She caught the blow with her left hand, striking at the dummy's torso with her right in the instant the blue circle appeared. The wooden man bowed in the middle to deliver a headbutt, but she sidestepped as though she could see it coming, her sword-arm whipping forward to strike the white circle.

Before the chime sounded, signaling that she'd beaten the first dummy, she was already stepping up to the second.

If Lindon hadn't attained the Iron body, he wouldn't be able to catch her movements. The three strikes would have looked like one motion. He'd seen his clansmen punch through walls and dodge arrows, but he'd never seen anyone move so quickly, so easily.

Not up close, anyway. He'd watched Yerin fight before, but when she was in an actual battle, her movement seemed...rougher. More natural, somehow. This was smooth and practiced, like she was executing a routine for the hundredth time.

“This is her first try?” Lindon asked, as Yerin stopped a separate strike with each hand while delivering a kick that lit up a green circle. She'd taken down three dummies already.

“This much is expected,” Eithan said, examining his fingernails. “Jai Long could clear this course with his eyes closed.”

Lindon slipped his hand into the pocket where Suriel's marble rested—a transparent orb about the size of his thumbnail with a single blue candleflame burning within. Its warmth comforted him, reassured him.

Eithan flashed him a smile. “Don’t worry,” he said. “The heavens are on your side.”

Lindon started. Did Eithan know about Suriel? Lindon wasn’t particularly afraid of the story getting out, since no one would believe it anyway, but how had Eithan found out? Had Yerin told him?

Could the Underlord read minds?

“…because the heavens sent you to me,” Eithan went on. “That’s nothing if not a miracle.”

Slowly, Lindon let out a breath.

The eighteenth chime sounded, and all the dummies glowed softly. Yerin slid backwards and came to a stop in the center, her breathing a little ragged.

“Fifteen seconds,” Eithan announced. “Not bad for your first time. The dummies are set to delay you more than injure you, but after a week or two, you'll go through this like wind through a forest.”

“What's the fastest I can get?” Yerin asked.

“Twelve seconds is the minimum the script can handle. When you reach that, I'll have a better one built.”

Yerin crossed her arms. “How fast is yours?”

“An excellent question. As I said, I grew up on a course very similar to this one, but recently I had the Arelius Soulsmiths build me a course set for two seconds.”

She waved a hand at the surrounding dummies. “You could clear this in two seconds, if the script let you?”

Lindon's eyes widened as he tried to picture that, but Yerin looked skeptical.

Eithan laughed. “Couldn't your master do as much?”

“You are not my master,” she said with confidence.

He'd already moved over to the controls, and the colored circles on the dummies died down as the circle reset. “I am not, and I'm sorry I never got the chance to meet him. There aren't many who know him in the Blackflame Empire, but he has quite the reputation in the outside world.”

The outside world. Lindon hadn’t even seen the Empire yet, and he was already impatient to reach beyond it. The world Suriel had shown him was impossibly vast, and Eithan had seen more of it than anyone else Lindon had met. That alone was enough to make him thankful he’d joined the Arelius family.

The Underlord gestured to the circle. “Lindon. Pretend that I have given you this task to prove yourself as a new member of my family. Act as though these are not training dummies, but enemies, and I have tasked you with our defense.”

Lindon looked past Eithan's smile. There was something hidden in those words, though he wasn't sure what. Nonetheless, he shifted the way he thought about the training circle.

If this were a real life-or-death scenario, he’d need more information.

He walked around the edge, glancing at the dummies. As he'd expected, the target circles weren't invisible; they were simply sketched lightly in the surface of the wood and difficult to make out at a distance. The dummy was ringed with other such scripts, carrying instructions and power from the circle on the floor. He'd have liked to look at the constructs within—even if he couldn’t understand how such advanced devices worked, he at least might learn something.

Finally, his steps carried him next to Eithan. “Let me clarify, if you don’t mind. As long as I light up the circles on a dummy, I have defeated the enemy?”

“Just so.”

Lindon nodded. Then he reached a hand out over the controls and sent madra flowing into a command circle.

There were nine circles engraved on the wooden podium, and it took him a moment to find the one he wanted. The first made some dummies spin around, the second darkened the circle, the third had no reaction he could see, but the fourth worked. Eighteen chimes sounded at once, and all the targets on all the dummies lit up.

“Victory,” Lindon said, “for the Arelius family.”

He bowed so that Eithan wouldn't hear any disrespect in his words, but Eithan only nodded. “Five seconds. He seems to have beaten you by ten, Yerin.”

Yerin's ears reddened noticeably, but her tone was dry. “Well, cheers and celebration for him. Let's have him try it the right way, see if he lasts more than a breath.”

Lindon kept the proud smile off his face—this was no time for gloating. “No, that’s not necessary, I know I could never keep up with you. And it seems like all the enemies are dead.”

A smile did touch his face then, as he glanced at Eithan for signs of approval. Eithan’s gaze had gone distant, and he stared into the wall of the barn for a moment before waking with a start.

“Ah, I’m sorry. It seems company is on its way, so we’ll have to work faster than I’d planned. Why don’t you do as Yerin suggests, Lindon?”

Lindon's smile withered as though it had never been.

Moving hesitantly, his mind working for an escape, Lindon slid his pack to the ground and stepped into the ring. He calmed himself with reason—there was nothing to be nervous about. Of course he wouldn't be able to match Yerin's time, but no one expected him to. She was Lowgold, and he was only Iron. They wanted to see him perform a training exercise, that was all.

A few moments ago he had been excited to give it a try; with a little effort, he called some of that feeling back.

The wide circle of runes on the ground glowed white, giving the dummies a somewhat ghostly cast. He stood in the center of the circle, taking a deep breath. He cycled his madra faster in preparation for battle, running his madra to his limbs, readying the Empty Palm technique.

“Begin,” Eithan called, and Lindon stepped forward.

A green circle lit up on the inside of its wooden arm, and he struck it immediately with a low-powered version of the Empty Palm. The full use of the technique would exhaust him quickly, but this was enough to inject madra into a script. The target brightened as he hit it.

Then a second wooden arm smacked him on the back of the head, sending him facedown into the fresh planks.

This is the second time I've been hit in the head today, he thought as he struggled back up to his feet.

Eithan was still grinning, and Yerin wore her own satisfied smile. “Good news!” Eithan said. “You’ve beaten my time.”

Lindon bowed to cover his flushed face. “Your pardon; I have forced you to watch an embarrassing sight.”

Eithan leaned his elbows on the control podium. “I said I had a point to make. Yerin, which was the best way to clear the course?”

She gave Lindon a sidelong glance. “I’d still contend that facing it head-on is the best way.”

“Why so?” Eithan asked. “Activating the controls accomplished the same result.”

“Real enemies don’t have control scripts, do they?” She glared at the wooden dummies as though she longed to behead them. “Can’t lean for too long on a cheat. The top way, the solid way, is to make yourself strong enough to cut through anything.”

She spoke with such ringing confidence that Lindon found himself swaying. That was the path that had led her to powers beyond anything his clansmen had ever dreamed of.

He couldn’t pick out anything she said that he disagreed with, but somehow he felt like she was leaving something out.

Lindon inclined his head to her. “You two are the experts, so please correct me if I speak out of turn. But in my humble experience, you cannot wait until you are stronger than your opponent to fight. Sometimes the game is rigged against you, and your only option is to flip the board.”

Yerin gave him a blank stare. “You’re my prime example. You saw you couldn’t make it six feet in this world without a Goldsign, but your clan wouldn’t let you train. What did you do? You walked right off. You’ve been fighting against stronger opponents since the day I met you, rigged game or no.”

Lindon searched for a response, but none came.

That was exactly what he’d done.

Suriel had shown him that he wouldn’t make it anywhere without a certain level of strength, so he’d struck off on his own. He should be the first one in line to agree with Yerin.

But he couldn’t. Something about her words gnawed at him.

Eithan hopped over, hooked one arm around Lindon’s neck, and dragged him over to Yerin. He threw his other arm over her as well. She looked as uncomfortable as Lindon felt, but Eithan beamed down at them both like a proud father.

“You both have a piece of it, don’t you? Yerin, you have to watch yourself so that you don’t fall into a rut in your thinking. But Lindon…so do you.” He ruffled Lindon’s hair, which was uncomfortable and strangely claustrophobic. “In our big, broad world, there’s a certain difference in strength that no number of tricks will circumvent. For instance…”

He grinned more broadly. “…at your current stage, the two of you couldn’t give me so much as a headache even if you stabbed me in my sleep. Though I know you adore and idolize me, so let’s give a more reasonable example: if you want to survive Jai Long in a year, you must learn sacred arts the right way. Even with the full support of the Arelius family, and Jai Long on the run from his clan, you’ll at least need to reach Lowgold in a solid and proper manner so you don’t collapse into a pile of jelly when he glances in your general direction.”

Lowgold. It was the sweet fruit that dangled out of Lindon’s reach.

But he hadn’t even reached Jade yet. Once he’d longed for Jade, and now he saw it as nothing more than a moat to be crossed. One of many. Even once he reached Lowgold, he’d still have a long journey to match Jai Long.

“Thank you for the instruction,” Lindon said. “I never intended to suggest that I wouldn’t work hard. I’ll train harder than Jai Long, harder than anybody.”

“I forget how young you are,” Eithan said fondly.

Abruptly he released them, taking a step back and turning to face the door. “We’ll resume this discussion soon, because our guest has finally arrived!”

Yerin frowned and put a hand on her sword.

“If you recall,” Eithan went on, “you have yet to meet my family.”

Lindon had wondered where the rest of the Arelius family was. Scouts from the Sandvipers and Fishers had spotted Arelius banners approaching weeks ago, and Lindon had expected to meet them by now.

Eithan extended hands to the doorway as though presenting a prize. “It is an honor and a pleasure to introduce…my brother.”

The barn door swung open.

The man standing in the doorway looked perhaps ten years younger than Eithan, putting him just past twenty. His hair was the gold of fresh wheat, which must have been an Arelius family trait, but his was tightly curled. He held himself with grace and poise, standing proudly with one hand on the hilt of the slender sword at his hip. A silver bracer covered his right forearm from his wrist almost to his elbow.

He did not wear the traditional layered robes of a sacred artist, but otherwise it looked like he had the same taste in clothes as Eithan: his shirt and pants were deep blue silk, stitched with intricate silver thread, and looked as though they’d been tailored for him only the night before.

He made eye contact with Yerin, then Lindon, nodding to them both.

Before he could speak, Eithan cried out, “Cassias! Brother! It’s been too long!”

Cassias smoothly sidestepped without glancing at the Underlord, and Lindon wondered how often anyone managed to dodge Eithan.

“I’m not his brother,” Cassias assured them, tilting his chin to say over his shoulder: “I am not your brother.”

“Cousin Cassias it is, then!”

“Nor are we cousins, except in the loosest sense. Distant, distant relatives, we are.”

Eithan didn’t seem put off. “Well, we’re like brothers, anyway. You should have come to see me more than two days ago. Did you have to spend so long playing with the Jai clan at the border?”

Cassias straightened, pivoted on his heel, and addressed his…‘brother.’

“You saw what happened at the border, I’m certain. And I have my own questions about what I saw from you. If I'm not mistaken, you provoked a Jai clan exile and killed the heir to one of their vassal sects.”

“Not me,” Eithan said proudly, turning to Lindon. “You'll note that young Lindon, here, was the one who brought down the Sandviper heir.”

Lindon felt the attention in the room turn to him, and he almost flinched back. This felt uncomfortably like the Underlord was trying to shift the blame onto him. His earlier misgivings about the Arelius family returned in force, but he showed Cassias a smile and a shallow bow.

“I am Wei Shi Lindon, honored Cassias. Please excuse me for any inconvenience my actions may have caused you.”

“Not at all, Lindon, not at all!” Cassias said immediately. “I am more than aware of what happens when my family's Patriarch gets too...enthusiastic. You were caught up in his plans, and it is I who should apologize on his behalf.”

To Lindon's astonishment, Cassias bowed deeply. “Forgive us, and do not hold this against our family. On my name as an Arelius, I will send protection for you when you return to your home. You need fear no reprisals from the Jai clan or the Sandviper sect.”

When you return to your home. Did Cassias not know he was coming back to the Blackflame Empire with them, or was he trying to give Lindon a graceful way out?

Either way, the greedy part of Lindon wondered at the nature of the 'protection' he had mentioned. If Cassias was willing to part with a weapon or a high-grade elixir, Lindon might be better off taking them and making his own way...

Yerin pulled at the ragged edges of her sleeve, shooting glances at Lindon every second or two as though checking his reaction, but Eithan laughed.

“You didn't watch us too closely, I see! Yerin and Lindon are coming with us. I have adopted them as outer members of the Arelius family.”

Cassias straightened slowly from his bow, keeping a blank expression fixed on Eithan. “I...see,” he said at last. “I apologize, Lindon, I was not...aware.” He seemed to be struggling not to say something, his jaw tightening at the end of every sentence. “Did you inform the branch heads, Underlord? Did you receive their permission?”

“Time flows on, and plans must keep pace!”

“Plans,” Cassias said, the word falling like a handful of mud.

“Which brings me to another subject,” Eithan said, and suddenly his entire demeanor sharpened. Though nothing about him changed visibly, Lindon shuddered, the madra in his body shivering in its cycle. An Underlord stood before them now, not just Eithan. Yerin even took two steps back, gripping her sword—for comfort, Lindon hoped, and not because she thought she might have to use it.

Eithan continued, his voice still pleasant but carrying an underlying edge. “Your encounters with the Jai clan at the border. Explain what happened.”

Cassias glanced from Lindon to Yerin. “I would be happy to inform you aboard Sky's Mercy, if you'd like to—”

“We're among family here,” Eithan said softly. “Say it.”

“Very well.” Cassias relaxed, folding his arms and leaning up against the barn wall. He seemed more comfortable dealing with a businesslike Underlord than a friendly, playful one. Lindon could relate. “I was not only following you to bring you back. My father sent me with dire news shortly after you left.”

“Then the Jai clan has seized our assets,” Eithan finished, steepling his hands together.

Cassias' eyebrows lifted. “They have. In Serpent’s Grave alone, we’ve lost the flame garden, three warehouses, the sword hall, and two of our medical contractors. Each time, they claim they’re settling a private debt. They’ve sabotaged two major sanitation projects that I’m aware of, and eight full crews have vanished. We don't know if they were bribed away or...silenced.”

Eithan spoke in the same lighthearted, half-joking tone as always, but the shivering sense of danger hadn't evaporated. “That’s one city. What about the rest of Jai territory?”

“When I left, the worst of their actions were confined to Serpent’s Grave. There have been a few unsanctioned duels between our people and the Jai clan, but nothing worse. Of course, that was a month gone.”

“And the other clans?”

“The Naru have admonished the Jai clan for their actions, but the Emperor’s support will arrive as soon as a winner is made clear, and not before. The Kotai clan has yet to make a statement, but as long as we keep their streets and sewers clear, they won't even notice.”

With every word, Lindon felt less and less prepared for this conversation. He had no idea who the major players were in the Blackflame Empire, no sense for the different clans. Or even the function of the Arelius family; Eithan had introduced himself as a janitor, but Lindon couldn't tell whether that was a joke.

“Where did they stop following you?” Eithan asked.

“Two miles east, one mile north. They were forced to break off pursuit, which allowed me to slip through.”

Eithan closed his eyes.

Slowly, his smile brightened before his eyes snapped back open. “That puts a wrinkle in their plan, doesn’t it?”

“We have a brief window to leave, and I humbly suggest we take it.”

Eithan raised fingers to his chin, staring at something in the far distance, thinking. “Soon. I have to adjust to this new information.”

Yerin’s arms were folded and her Goldsign quivering. Judging by the look on her face, she wasn’t happy about being left out of the conversation either. Lindon didn’t want to stress his welcome by asking too many questions, but he strained under the weight of his curiosity.

Finally, Cassias remembered they were there. “The Jai clan was trying to prevent me from returning with the Underlord. They weren’t bold enough to openly destroy a cloudship flying the Arelius colors, but they’ve made my life difficult for the past few weeks. If the Jai warriors down below hadn’t called for help, I would not have been able to land.”

“Called for help?” Yerin asked. “What’s got their feathers rustled?”

“I was too high up to see clearly, but it’s strange. It seems they were attacked by one of their own.”

4

Sandviper techniques lit up the shadows with an acid-green glow as they tore through a wooden wall, their caustic madra melting straight through the rough lumber planks. Wood hissed as it dissolved, the sound almost loud enough to drown out the pleas for mercy that came from beyond.

When the wall fell to pieces, four Sandvipers walked into the one-room shack. A flash of white light, then green, a scream, and the fur-clad Sandvipers came out carrying a pair of struggling figures.

Both wore sky blue robes and had black hair that shone like metal in the moonlight. One captive had hair close-cropped so that it looked like a tight helmet, but the other’s fell in a stream of dark, gleaming iron.

A young man and woman of the Jai clan, cowering for shelter and hoping the attack would pass them by. They might have been brother and sister, or young lovers, or two strangers who happened to duck into the same abandoned house.

Jai Long didn’t care. His spiritual sense washed over them, confirming that Stellar Spear madra flowed through them both, sharp as an axe and white as snow at noon.

“Both,” he said, and Gokren gestured to the Sandvipers. They snapped collars around the two Jai necks. When they realized the scripted metal cut off their access to madra, the man’s eyes bulged, while the woman continued to beg through a mask of tears.

The Sandvipers dragged them away to join the others.

Jai Long had never used the Ancestor’s Spear before. He knew only the legends—that the original Matriarch of the Jai clan had used the weapon to steal the power of her foes. As far as he knew, he might be helpless while siphoning madra, and it was safer to experiment on captives rather than opponents.

They had captured eight sacred artists of the Jai clan. Twice that number had escaped, and even more had been killed rather than let themselves be taken.

Half of the Jai clan shelters in the Five Factions Alliance had been reduced to rubble.

Only days ago, when the power of the Transcendent Ruins was at its height, Jai Long and the Sandvipers would never have been able to pull off a raid of this scale. They would have been overwhelmed by sheer numbers.

Since the Ruins had been picked clean, most of the Jai clan had drifted back to their homes. The Sandvipers had all stayed, waiting for the return of their Truegold chief.

The chief who now stood with Jai Long as his sect members streamed into homes like a swarm of ants, carrying out Jai stragglers.

Seven lights flared in Jai Long’s senses, and his eyes snapped to the sky. Shadows flapped against the stars, carrying shapes against their backs, but Jai Long’s spirit told him who they were.

Reinforcements. Somehow, the main branch of the Jai clan had sent backup against him already.

Jai Long let his breath out in frustration, but it came through his twisted teeth in a long hiss. How? The nearest stronghold of the main family was weeks away by air. But only the main branch had the authority to summon an elder.

Six of the figures were at the peak of Lowgold, but the seventh was a Truegold master. Before Jai Long could see him clearly, the elder swung his spear, and a white beam of light flashed like lightning.

Sandviper Gokren vanished from Jai Long’s side in the same instant, and then he was standing next to the beam of light as another Sandviper stumbled away. The elder’s technique scorched a line in the dirt instead of skewering the Sandviper through the chest.

As expected of a Truegold. Before Jai Long had even shouted a warning, Gokren had sensed the attack coming, determined the target, and pushed the man aside.

Jai Long hurriedly flipped open his spear case, removing the shining shaft of white light. He tossed the case aside, ready to defend himself. If the elder struck again, he might not be able to protect anyone else, but he could at least survive.

He had half-expected the Jai elder to gloat from up above and then rain techniques down on their heads, but instead the seven figures descended toward the street. As they got closer, Jai Long could make out their mounts: bats the size of horses, with wings like unfurled sails. The sacred beasts were dirty gray-white, but their eyes shone like tiny stars in the dark.

As the Jai landed, Gokren breathed deeply, cycling his madra so steadily that Jai Long could feel it, like a mighty river rushing next to him. The Sandviper chief ran a hand through gray hair, pushing it back even further, then gripped the short spear sticking over his shoulder.

“I’ll move the Truegold back,” he said quietly. “A pair of my hunters will move with me. You lead the rest, but I don’t have anyone here who can stand face-to-face against that pack.”

The six Jai clan warriors landed their bats only fifty yards down the road, fanning out to cover their mounts. The elder stood behind them, his spearhead rising higher than the silver helmet of his hair.

These were strangers to Jai Long, people he must have left behind years ago in his exile to this wilderness territory. The Lowgolds all had a few traits in common: black hair that gleamed like polished metal, blue outer robes marked with the star-and-spear emblem of the Jai clan, and tall spears that they held with confidence.

Though they were less advanced than Jai Long by one stage, they would never have been chosen as escorts unless they were competent. And while the Sandvipers specialized in hunting the beasts of the Desolate Wilds, the Jai clan was equipped for battle.

“I need them to harass only,” Jai Long said, his voice as low as Gokren’s. “Split them up, keep them from crashing on me all at once, and I’ll handle them.”

Gokren’s fingers flickered in a signal, and Jai Long felt the Sandviper powers behind him spreading out.

“Sandviper chief,” the elder drawled, ignoring Jai Long entirely. “You’ve interrupted our business tonight.”

Chief Gokren jerked his head toward Jai Long. “Not me.”

The elder pushed through his escorts, using the butt of his spear as a walking stick. Jai Long’s opinion of the man fell lower. He was grinding his weapon into the dirt with every step—didn’t he know what that would do to the wood?

“We’ll expect a generous apology for this,” the elder said. “Go back to your homes and wait for me there. I will have a word with the exile about his new weapon.”

Jai Long swept out his perception, looking for another Stellar Spear presence. This group was too far from home to be alone—they would have brought supplies, and left at least one scout to report their fate if they were attacked.

To his shock, he felt only the dim presence of a few more bats roosting two streets down. Extra pack animals, but no sacred artists.

“Where is your scout?” Jai Long asked.

The elder sneered at Gokren; he still refused to look in Jai Long’s direction. “We’re in the territory of our branch family. Word of what happens here will reach the Underlord, and the chief knows that.”

Gokren was a seething mass of power standing next to him, his Sandviper madra foul and bitter in Jai Long’s senses. Despite their battle plan, Jai Long couldn’t believe the Sandvipers would actually fight for him. The Jai clan were his enemies, not Gokren’s.

But if they left him, he would be facing six trained fighters and a Truegold elder. His breath came faster, his madra cycling quicker as he looked for an exit. If he moved quickly enough, he could pull them into the Wilds. Away from Jai Chen, and into terrain where he might be able to fight them one at a time. So long as they didn’t get back to their bats.

Gokren moved.

The Path of the Sandvipers had no techniques for speed. In a battle of Truegolds, Gokren would be among the slowest.

But he was still far faster than the Lowgold guards.

His short spear flickered out, launching a green ghost of itself that flew at the Jai clan like an arrow. His second spear was in his left hand, already shining green with another technique.

The elder moved like a ghost, breaking the Forged missile into sparks and knocking Gokren’s spear aside before he could reach the average soldiers.

The Sandviper chief ended in a low stance, his spears spread to either side like wings. The Jai elder stood on the defensive: back straight, knees bent, weapon pointed straight as a ruler at Gokren’s chest.

“Your life is over,” the elder said, almost sadly.

“My life ended three days ago.”

After another long moment, the Truegolds vanished. By unspoken agreement, they leaped over the buildings to the left, moving to where their battle wouldn’t kill their subordinates. Leaving Jai Long and twenty Sandvipers facing six elite Jai sacred artists.

Jai Long ran forward like a wolf into a pen of sheep.

The fighters of the Jai clan did not flinch. They formed up into a wall, side by side but with enough distance between them that they could fight. One raised a hand-carved whistle to his lips and blew.

The seven bats rose with a screech, blacking out the stars. Their wings sent a gust of wind blowing across Jai Long’s face, and with screams like glass shattering, they pounced on the Sandvipers.

Jai Long cursed himself. He had forgotten about the bats.

He cast them out of his mind, even though the battle sounds behind him were horrific. He had his own worries to deal with: he was charging into half a dozen enemies, and it was too late to stop. Even if he was charging alone.

Though he was still a good thirty feet away, the Lowgold bodyguards raised their spears and stabbed in his direction. Six spearheads blazed white as they executed the Jai clan's orthodox Striker technique: the Star Lance.

Lines of finger-thin light blasted toward him, each sharp enough to drill through his skull, but his weapon was already spinning

He spun his spear in both hands, executing a technique of his own: the Serpent's Shadow.

His spearhead trailed ribbons of white light as it spun, and those ribbons came to life, slithering through the air with a will of their own. The Forged snakes raised their heads and hissed, coiling themselves between him and the incoming techniques.

Such was the gift his Remnant had left him.

The Star Lances tore holes in his serpents, breaking off chunks of madra with every impact, but none of the techniques penetrated to Jai Long.

Jai Long didn’t wait to see what his enemies would do next. He cycled his madra according to another technique: Flowing Starlight. This was an orthodox Stellar Spear technique, which his Remnant had left largely unaffected.

The Jai clan won their duels through superior speed.

The light-aspect madra circled through his channels faster and faster. Lines of white light slid out from his stomach, covering his skin in glowing, serpentine lines, marking the progress of Flowing Starlight. They looped around his shoulders, spilling up his arms and down his legs.

Power gathered in his limbs along with the lines, and when two knots of madra curled up and ended at his eyes, the world around him slowed.

This technique was a way to gradually prepare the body for handling intense speed. It reinforced and fueled him, finally sparking his senses so that they could keep up with his newly empowered limbs.

Six pairs of eyes narrowed as they realized what he was doing, six spirits revolving just like his, lines of white light spilling out of their robes and flowing onto their limbs as they engaged their own Enforcer techniques to catch up with him. The marks on their skin were a matrix of straight lines, not a nest of twisting serpents as on his, but there would be no functional difference in the technique.

Except that he was a Highgold. They were too slow.

He had been reluctant to test out his spear in battle, but now it seemed he had no choice. Whether he liked it or not, he was about to have his questions answered.

Jai Long closed the thirty-foot gap in a blink, coming in low next to the first enemy. The man had started his own Flowing Starlight technique, so he was fast enough to get the butt of his spear between him and Jai Long. But that was all he could do.

The white spear swerved around his, stabbing him in the lower abdomen. Into his core.

Most sacred artists Jai Long knew would have hesitated to fight someone a stage lower than they were, and even if they were forced into that undesirable position, they would avoid killing their opponent. It was shameful and embarrassing to lower yourself to that level, especially in public.

But Jai Long had no pride he didn’t mind losing.

Jai Long’s spiritual perception confirmed he'd struck the right target, and he withdrew his spearhead in an instant. The man's madra leaked out visibly, spilling starlight and blood in equal measure, but his spear should have stolen some of that power. Had it worked at all? He didn't feel any—

A rush of force slammed into his hand from the spear, flooding his madra channels with white light, and he stumbled in his steps.

This was only a fraction of the victim's full power, but it was enough to make Jai Long feel like his channels were about to burst. The next Lowgold thrust at him even as a second swept at his legs, and off-balance, there wasn't much Jai Long could do to stop them. A spearhead sliced his shoulder, and a shaft of solid wood hammered his shin.

He fell onto the grass, pain flaring, but he still gripped his weapon in one hand. Half a breath of hesitation meant death.

Jai Long flooded his madra into the Serpent's Shadow, sweeping his spear in an arc. He left a burning rainbow of white light between him and his opponents, which came to life as a snake thick as his arm. The living technique slithered to face his opponents, hissing.

The snake seized a spear in its jaws, shearing the weapon in half. The head tumbled away, wooden shaft smoking. A Jai woman brushed her arm against the body of the Serpent’s Shadow, and she cried out, blood spraying from the cut—the light was sharper than the edge of a razor.

The other enemies ran to surround him, encircling him and preparing their attacks. They had caught up to him in speed by now, as skilled in the Flowing Starlight technique as he was.

Four spread out to cover him, his Serpent’s Shadow fading even as it hissed and lunged and tried to protect him. He watched them through watery eyes, his breath uneven, spirit straining to contain the energy he’d swallowed. The glowing lines on his skin pulsed unsteadily, flickering between too much energy and too little.

Any moment now, the four enemies would coordinate, and he would die. He had to break their cooperation somehow, try to get one of them between him and the other three, to throw off their cooperation. He watched for the slightest opening even as madra thundered through him, burning his thoughts at the edges, distracting him with every breath.

Then the heavens intervened on his behalf.

A Sandviper stumbled away from the bats, blood streaming over her face, but there were four acid-green javelins Forging over her head. Before anyone reacted to her presence, she gestured to one of the Jai clan, and her technique blasted forward.

The Jai fighter saw it, bringing his shining spearhead around, but he was a beat too slow, his attention fixed too fully on Jai Long.

Four green lances pinned the young man to the ground.

Jai Long didn't waste the instant the Sandviper had bought him. He swept his spear in a whirlwind around himself, drawing twisting lines of Serpent's Shadow in the air until he was surrounded by a nest of seething white snakes. The effort of Forging such a huge defense would have usually drained his core, but now it just relieved some of the pressure.

Star Lances cracked on the outside, burning holes in his protection, but none were strong enough to completely break through.

He focused on controlling the storm of madra inside of him, funneling it into his spear, piling the energy into the pale spearhead until it glowed.

This was the second Enforcer technique in the Path of the Stellar Spear: the Star’s Edge. It reinforced his weapon rather than his own body. Madra surged according to a rough pattern, fueling the deadly star at the end of his spear. By the time it was so bright he couldn’t look directly at the weapon any longer, he could breathe again.

Now, his core was merely full.

Jai Long released his Forger technique, and the cage of white snakes dispersed into essence. Thousands of white pinpricks rose into the sky like a bucketful of glimmering dust falling the wrong way.

With his Flowing Starlight twisting around his skin and the Star's Edge on his spear, Jai Long glowed like the moon fallen to earth. Two of them were pulling bloody spears out of the Sandviper who had distracted them, and the other two were desperately trying to put some distance between them and Jai Long.

Finally in control of himself, Jai Long faced four off-balance enemies.

He finished them all in a second.

The first woman he stabbed in the chest, to see if he had to strike the core dead-on to absorb its powers. Another rush of madra filled him, though not as fully as the first kill had. The second man he sliced in the arm, and if he gained any madra from that, he didn't feel it. He finished him off with a stab straight through the skull. The third took a spearhead to the throat, and the fourth through the belly.

All before the first of the four bodies hit the ground.

Leaving him to deal with his own exploding soul.

White light stormed through his channels, tearing him apart as though he'd swallowed a razor-sharp flame. He tried to vent it from his skin where he could, white light spearing through him and leaving tiny, bleeding cuts with every ray.

It was like getting stabbed by a dozen nails at once, from the inside. He screamed.

Through a haze of pain and tears, he saw the Remnant rise.

Only one. The bodies he'd cut with the Ancestor's Spear remained still and quiet, but the single individual the Sandviper had killed vented its Remnant into the air.

Even through his mind-numbing agony, Jai Long glared at the spirit. His thoughts were strained, fogged, but he still recognized the classic Stellar Spear Remnant. The Remnant he was supposed to have bonded.

He could barely see it, half-blind as he was at the moment, but they always looked the same.

It looked like a constellation. Points of bright light formed joints, hands, eyes, and a heart, like stars floating in the air. Thin, faded lines connected those points until the spirit looked like a bent, hulking skeleton torn from the night sky.

The Remnant's roar sounded like the rush of a bonfire.

Jai Long staggered forward, leaving bleeding footprints in the grass behind him. More shards of madra cut through his skin, but he could no longer feel them.

Gokren yelled something to him, but he was beyond hearing.

With no technique, no art, he jammed the Ancestor's Spear into the lines of the Remnant's rib cage.

This power was nothing like what he'd stolen in battle. It flowed into him, still and obedient, a gentle rain instead of a vicious flood. His core drank it up greedily until it strained against its limits, pushing to expand and contain this feast.

Jai Long dropped to the ground, cycling desperately. If it weren’t for his long hours of cycling every day, he didn’t think he would have made it. His soul moved without his conscious will to guide it, looping in precise patterns as it had done millions of times before.

Every Path had cycling techniques for different purposes: cycling to absorb and process aura from the atmosphere, cycling to use a technique, cycling to restore lost madra, and cycling to refine and control the power you already had. It was that fourth pattern he used now, revolving his madra along with his breath. Faster and more urgently than he ever had before.

The stolen light burned him and tore at him, even as the power from the Remnant threatened to drown him.

He knew nothing but guiding that river, losing himself entirely in the rhythm of the madra spinning within him, processing as much of the power as he could.

He swallowed everything he was able, making it a part of him, stretching his core to its breaking point, but it was like trying to drink a lake one cup at a time. There was more here than he could have handled in a week, and it threatened to tear his soul apart.

He shouted again, thrusting his spearhead into the sky.

A Star Lance thicker than his head rushed out of him, sending a beacon of white light into the clouds.

The extra madra in his veins dimmed slowly down. When his wounds finally stopped shining, the pain shrunk to manageable levels, and his breath grew too ragged to continue cycling, he let the technique and his weapon drop. He sagged, face-down, into the wet grass.

At some point, the sun had fallen to the horizon. Golden light died as twilight approached.

With a twitch of his head, he could see Gokren standing to his right, arms folded. The Truegold was bloody, missing one spear and leaning all his weight on his left leg, but he didn’t look worried. He stood within arm’s length of Jai Long, apparently unconcerned about the dangers of standing next to a Highgold blasting uncontrolled madra in every direction. The certainty of an expert.

Jai Long struggled on the ground, reaching for his spear. His madra was completely fresh and full, but his channels had been seared, and he felt as though one more technique would be one too many. But he'd learned years ago that he couldn't assume anyone else would protect him, not even Chief Gokren. If someone else decided to attack, he had to muster up a defense from somewhere.

Gokren clapped him on the back of the head, though the wrappings around Jai Long’s hair cushioned the impact. “They’re dead. Not the bats—my hunters wrangled them up. All seven of them, and only two of mine. Not bad for a night of work.”

He spoke lightly, but there was a steely resolve when he said ‘two of mine.’ He may have been prepared to lose his followers, but he wasn’t happy about it.

Before Jai Long could muster up the strength for a single word, Gokren pulled out his one remaining short spear and tapped the Ancestor’s Spear lying on the grass.

“That would work for me, wouldn't it? If I could find some Sandvipers who weren't worth as much as their madra.” He bent down, running a finger along the body of the weapon. “It's white, but it isn't Stellar Spear madra, is it...no, it's something else.”

Jai Long struggled over to the spear, grabbing it with weak hands and cradling it to his chest. Gokren straightened up and folded his arms again. “Don't go shy on me now, boy. I could take that from you if you were at full strength, and you're not. You think I’m going to turn on you now, after I pulled arms on the Jai clan for you?”

Jai Long felt guilty for a moment, but he didn’t loosen his grip on the spear. He’d seen people do worse things out of greed.

Gokren shook his head, but turned away and raised his weapon in one fist. “A good hunt!” he roared.

The other Sandvipers cheered. They had gathered without Jai Long noticing, staring at the white spear. It was unlimited power, in their eyes. They could gain weeks of power in minutes.

It was all there for the stealing.

They circled him in a wall of fur-clad bodies, crowding him. He hugged the spear tighter, but despite the fresh madra filling his core and eager to be used, he didn’t think he could fight if the heavens descended and ordered him to. His body and spirit felt like twisted-out rags.

Gokren saw him and let out a heavy breath. With one motion, he seized the Ancestor’s Spear and wrenched it away.

Jai Long sagged, weak and helpless. This was how it ended. He’d finally begun his revenge against the clan that had rejected him, and now…

Gokren picked up the case, slid the spear inside, buckled it closed, and tossed it to the ground in front of Jai Long.

“Get some sleep,” the sect chief said. “We’ve got a long journey ahead.”

5

Lindon hit the rough board that served as the dummy's right arm, then its torso, then the head. The circle was unpowered, the target lifeless. If he fueled the training course, it would knock him over instantly, so he practiced on the dead version first. Once he got the routine down, he could try the real course.

The targets flickered with color when he struck them, as his madra passed through the correct spot. They would have stayed lit had the main circle been powered.

He stepped back, rubbing his knuckles. They didn't hurt, but they would have before his Iron body. It was a strange sensation, knowing that his hands should be scraped raw by the rough wood.

From further away, he examined the dummy again, as though watching it could help him somehow.

He just needed to be faster.

Each dummy had a different pattern of strikes and blocks, but he'd gone through all eighteen already, committing them to memory. His mind could keep up, and his body should be fast enough. But he still couldn't quite do it. Only an hour ago, he'd powered the circle again, and the dummy had still knocked him on his face.

The sun had long set, the barn lit by a single flickering candle that was starting to burn down. He could have used a scripted light, but it would have lasted for less time than a candle before needing to be powered again, and he wanted to conserve his madra.

It left the dummies bathed in shadow, lending them a sinister aspect. Only the brief flicker of a scripted light at each of his strikes dispelled the darkness.

Lindon moved forward, running through the three strikes again. He sped up this time, pushing his Iron body to the limit, and missed the third hit. The first two sent light rippling through their tiny runes, and the third remained dark.

He forced himself to slow down, breathe deep, and keep the power cycling steadily through his madra channels.

Cool air rushed in, and a door shut.

Yerin walked inside, only the silver blade over her shoulder and the red belt around her middle standing out against the shadows. “Training hard, or you have a grudge against wood people?”

Lindon hurriedly straightened himself, squaring his shoulders and smoothing his clothes. She'd seen him in worse states, but he didn't want to look like he’d exhausted himself against a bunch of wooden statues.

“Only working out a few things,” he said, leaning closer to one of the dummies as though trying to figure out its script.

She eyed him for a moment and then walked inside the circle, plopping down onto the ground. She leaned up against a dummy's support pole and sighed. “I'm the last one to tell you to stop working. Heaven's truth, I just got done with three hours of meditation cycling and two hours of technique practice. But even my master would say you need an easy day every once in a while.”

“I've stopped to cycle two or three times,” he said, but then he wondered if that were true. “Maybe it was four times. Or...six?” How long had he been here?

He glanced at the candle, which was a half-melted lump of wax in the middle of the circle. The woman who'd sold it to him had sworn it would burn all night. Perhaps it had.

A break couldn’t hurt, so he sat beneath the dummy next to her.

Without a word, she passed him a rag. He nodded his thanks, then began wiping the sweat from his head and neck.

“Trick to an Iron body,” Yerin said, “is to recognize when you're tired and when you're not. Gets harder to tell the difference. You'll pick it up after a while, but until you do, you're more than likely to run your feet down to the nubs.”

Lindon's eyelids did feel heavy, his arms ached, and his hands were cramped...but those sensations faded almost as quickly as they came. Madra trickled steadily from his core, called by his Bloodforged Iron body to heal his fatigue.

“Is that so?” He looked at his hands, feeling the tight ache in his knuckles drain away with his madra. “Incredible. I really can’t tell.”

“That’s how you run into more trouble than you can handle. If you ask me, you’ve got…” Something shivered through Lindon’s spirit, and he recognized the touch of her spiritual sense. “…well, that’s a puzzle and a half.”

He’d seen Yerin walk into battle with a smile on her face. Now, after scanning him, she was frowning and mumbling to herself, staring at his stomach.

Though he had just toweled off, sweat broke out over his skin again.

Lindon dove into his own soul, almost in a cycling trance, clutching at his core with both hands. “What’s wrong? What have I done? Did I cycle too much? Am I dying?”

“You’re about a thousand miles from dying,” she muttered. “As expected of an Underlord, I guess.”

“Eithan? Did Eithan do something to me?”

“He handed you that Iron body, true?” Lindon didn’t remember Eithan handing him anything, but he guessed it was true enough. “Unless I’m wide of the mark, it looks like it’s keeping you fresh. You could work your body until your core’s dry.”

Lindon had felt the same thing already, but he had assumed it was a function of the Iron body. “ my ignorance, but isn’t that normal?”

“It’s normal for the Undying Lizards of the Bluefire Desert. I hear it’s normal for some plants.” She jabbed him lightly in the stomach. “People get tired sometimes.”

New possibilities bloomed in Lindon’s imagination, and he had to resist the urge to start taking notes. “As long as I restore my madra, I could keep training? How often should I stop and cycle, do you think?”

“Whoa there, rein it in. If you could work all day and night, you’d be fighting Eithan in a year, not one little Jai Long. The spirit needs rest just like your body does. You don’t want to strain your madra channels, I’ll tell you that one for free.”

She clasped her hands together and stretched them over her head. “You're an Iron, not a Remnant; you still need sleep. Food. Your spirit’s a weapon, and you've got to keep it clean and polished. But you don’t have to worry about pulling a muscle, or collapsing in a heap. I’d kill you for that, if I thought I could take it off your Remnant.”

Lindon chuckled uneasily, wiping his face with the towel again. So he could work for longer than most people, but not too long. What was the limit? How could he tell? It was easy to know when he was running out of madra, but what did strained madra channels feel like? How much more time was his Iron body buying him, exactly?

Lost in thought, he almost handed the sweaty rag back, but he caught himself at the last minute and tucked it inside his outer robe. He could wash it in the lake in the morning.

Lindon dipped his head in thanks and spoke carefully. “Gratitude. You’ve given me a lot to think about. But if you’ll allow me another question: what are my chances? With Jai Long? Do I have enough time?”

“You’ve got no time at all,” Yerin said immediately. “Sleep or no sleep, if Eithan doesn't have something planned for you, then you're dry leaves to the fire.”

The truth of that settled onto him, and Lindon couldn't think of anything to say.

Yerin scratched the side of her neck, and in the dim light, he thought he saw her flush. “I, uh...sorry. Didn't intend to say it like that.” She hesitated for another moment. “When I was Iron, my master didn't press me to fight a Highgold in a year's time. That's a rotten gamble, no matter what training he gives you.”

Yerin knew he couldn’t do it. That he was going to die in a year.

He stared at the dummy across the circle because he didn’t want to see the truth on her face.

“I’m not going to gamble,” he said quietly. “There are other ways to get to him, before the duel. He eats, he sleeps, just like anybody else. He has enemies. He has a family.”

Yerin’s Goldsign arched, as though the blade were trying to get a better look at Lindon’s face. “Dark plans for an Iron,” she said, voice dry. “You want to hold his crippled little sister hostage, do you think? You want to go to his enemies for help instead of Eithan?”

“I don’t know enough about him yet,” Lindon said, embarrassed. “You know, there’s always poison. Ambush.”

“There’s always poison,” she repeated. “Yeah. You could poison his food, then wait until he falls asleep. Put a different poison on your knives, so even if he wakes up, he can’t…”

She trailed off, blinking rapidly.

Her master. That was what the Jades of the Heaven’s Glory School had done to her master.

Lindon fell to his knees, pressing his forehead against the cool wooden floor. “I did not think. I—”

He glanced up and saw that she was holding up a hand for silence. She waited for a few seconds, visibly swallowing a few times, before she spoke. “They were dogs and cowards,” she said at last. “Don’t think like them. You don’t learn to stand against your enemies by crawling in the dirt.”

“As you say. I have no excuse.”

“You’re on the path now, stable and true. In a year, you won’t recognize yourself.”

He certainly couldn’t disagree with her now, not to her face, but he filed his plans away carefully in the back of his mind. Surely Eithan wouldn’t mind if he prepared for contingencies.

Lindon had just risen to his feet when the door slammed open, and Eithan marched in, carrying a lantern caging a burning star. It lit the barn like midday, making Lindon wince and shield his eyes.

Eithan saw them and paused, as though he'd just noticed them. “Oh, I'm sorry, I hope I'm not interrupting anything.” Before they could respond, he added, “I was just being polite, I heard it all.”

Lindon was going to find it hard to relax over the next year, if Eithan listened to every word he ever spoke.

The Underlord walked over to the melted candle and kicked it aside, sending a puff of smoke into the air and chunks of wax tumbling across the floor. He set his lantern in its place at the center of the course, then turned to face them with hands on hips.

“I will be truthful with the two of you: I'm facing a bit of a crisis here.”

His demeanor was cheery as ever, but his smile had shrunk to nothing more than tightened lips. Maybe this was his serious face.

“We'll do whatever we can to help you, of course,” Lindon said, knowing that he could never help an Underlord do anything.

“You made a mess out of something,” Yerin said, her tone absolutely confident.

Eithan pointed to Lindon. “I will take you up on that offer, don't worry.” Lindon's heart sank.

Now Eithan pointed to Yerin. “That's an uncharitable way to put it, but I can’t say you’re wrong. You know, I do wish I could tell the future. There are sacred artists out there who can, to varying degrees. It would make planning so much easier. And I don't expect you to understand this, but seeing everything makes surprises so much worse. You always feel as though you should have seen them coming.”

He sighed, flipping his hair over his shoulder. “That's enough of my problems, so let’s talk about our problems. The Jai clan has all but declared war on our family.”

“All but?” Yerin repeated. “Is it war, or no war?”

“If they declared it openly, the Emperor’s forces would cripple the aggressor in a day. But the Skysworn stay out of the petty squabbles between clans. As long as the Jai pretend that’s what’s happening, the Emperor will stay clear.”

Lindon had seen similar situations back in Sacred Valley, as the Wei clashed along the border with the Li, and the Kazan raided them both. He saw the problem immediately.

“They’ll claim Jai Long.”

Eithan nodded to him. “He and his sister were exiled here so that they could serve the main family without being underfoot and embarrassing. Has to do with his wrapped-up face.” Eithan waved a hand vaguely around his own head. “They still won’t take him back, but once the duel is over, they can pretend he was one of them all along. He wins? They take credit. He dies? We killed a Jai Highgold, and they’ll use it as an excuse for open war.”

He sighed. “And I thought all I’d have to do was write a letter…”

There was an obvious solution here, but Lindon proposed it carefully. “Not to overstep my bounds, but the situation has changed. Couldn't you tell the Jai clan that you changed your mind?”

Eithan braced one foot on the star-filled lantern and leaned forward. “One's word is the currency of the powerful. Reputation and honor are all that prevent us from slaughtering each other, and keep us operating with some degree of civility. What stops an Underlord from killing everyone weaker? Their reputation. What shields their family from reprisals and attacks? Their reputation. Many experts value their good name more than their life.”

A dark pall settled over Lindon. Eithan wouldn’t change his mind about the duel, then. That had been one of Lindon’s final hopes.

“Besides, I still have a use for your victory,” he said. “Jai Long’s defeat will give me leverage, whether the clan claims him or not, so I would still prefer you fight. However, there is another option...” Lindon’s dead hope flickered to life again. “...I can allow you to leave the family. Your actions would not reflect on my word if you weren't a subject of the Arelius.”

Lindon turned to Yerin, who wore a troubled expression but said nothing. Would she come with him, if he left? She might, if he asked her, but would that be fair to her? He didn't know much about the Arelius family, but he knew they represented both a risk and an opportunity. Yerin could grow there, with the support of a well-connected clan.

For his part, anywhere outside of Sacred Valley was a land of limitless opportunity. The Fishers could advance him past Iron. He had other roads he could take.

But he'd be giving up the chance to be trained personally by an Underlord.

Eithan met his eyes, speaking earnestly. “I'll be as clear as I can: the Arelius family employs hundreds of thousands of people, and their livelihoods will be impacted by the results of this duel. If you stay, I will do whatever I have to so that you win. Even if it kills you.”

Lindon leaned against a wooden dummy for support. “Killing me…to win. I see. How likely is that to happen, exactly?”

Eithan's smile broadened. “It's my last resort. I have every confidence that I can raise you to victory without destroying your future. I can't say you will enjoy the process, though. And I will catch you every time you try and run away.”

Yerin still hadn't said anything since Eithan entered the room. She stood with one hand on her sword and one on the blood-red rope around her waist, as though considering her options.

“If you don't mind,” Lindon said, “I'd like some time to consider.”

Eithan straightened, brushing wrinkles out of his turquoise robe. “Perfectly understandable, but I'm afraid we're running short of time as it is. We're leaving at dawn. If you would like to join us, look around the Fisher territory for a tall building with blue clouds surrounding the foundation and Arelius banners hanging from the walls. That is our vehicle out of here, so if it's still there, so are we.”

He executed a small, shallow bow in Lindon's direction and then started to walk off. Over his shoulder, he called, “I don't like to make decisions for others, Lindon...but I hope to see you in the morning.”

The door swung shut behind him, but it fell into Yerin's hand. She hitched up her red belt as though to distract herself.

She still looked troubled, even as she spoke. “In the sacred arts, you don’t want the clear path. You want the rocky one. The strongest aren't the ones who climb the highest mountains, but the ones who choose to do it one-handed and blindfolded.”

She hesitated as though to add something else before shaking her head. “But it’s a short distance between ‘rocky’ and ‘looking for suicide.’ I don't know what you should do. I...I don't know.”

Then she left too.

* * *

Lindon blinked sleep from bleary eyes, sitting up on the barn floor. The touch of sunlight streaming through the wooden slats warmed him, bright and cheery. He started to cycle his sluggish madra, prodding his body into waking and his mind into thought.

Last night, he'd stayed up after Eithan left, trying to clear his mind and make the right decision. He'd known what the best answer was: to stick with the Arelius family. But that didn’t make the decision easier.

If he stayed, the Fishers could take him to Truegold.

Truegold. Would that really be his limit?

When he had walked among the Eight-Man Empire, Suriel had said that even ten thousand Gold sacred artists couldn't scratch their armor. How far above Truegold were they?

How far above them was Suriel?

He’d pulled Suriel’s marble out of his pocket, and the sight of the steady blue candle-flame inside the glass orb had made up his mind. He'd activated the course, matching his newfound determination against the eighteen animated wooden dummies.

When he joined Eithan and the Arelius family at dawn, he wanted to do it after squeezing out every second of practice he could. Maybe he could produce a miracle, defeat the course, and join Eithan and Yerin with pride.

The dummies had knocked him flat, but he'd gotten up again and again. Eventually he'd stopped to cycle, but meditation had turned to sleep...

Sunlight streamed in through the walls.

He jumped to his feet, the unfamiliar power of his Iron body launching him two feet in the air before he landed.

He was late.

He'd missed them.

Lindon stormed through the door, hoping against hope that they'd decided to wait a few hours for him.

The instant he opened a crack, air blasted him in the face, shoving the door all the way open and slamming it against the frame. The wind was almost strong enough to push him off his feet, Iron body or no, and the light was blinding.

He had to throw up his arm against the all-present light, which surrounded him as though he’d been tossed into the sun.

When his eyes finally adjusted and the gusts slowed for a moment, he squinted into the brightness and saw...not the dusty yard outside the barn. Not the collection of ramshackle buildings making up the Five Factions Alliance.

An endless ocean of sunlit clouds, stretching out beneath him.

Lindon shouted and fell backwards, kicking the door shut, trying to catch his breath. The barn was in the sky. In the heavens, maybe? Had Suriel grabbed this whole building and lifted it from the earth?

He grabbed the warm glass marble from his pocket and rubbed it between his hands to comfort himself. As his breath and mind settled, he started to notice details he hadn't before: the floor dipped and sagged beneath him, like he was lying on a boat drifting over a lake. Wind whistled through and around the barn.

Lindon leaned on a wooden dummy to prop himself up, catching his breath and staring at the door as though it might open and drag him out into open air.

Wood creaked, and he turned to see the back door swinging open. Eithan stuck his head in, smiling.

“A good morning to you!” he said cheerily. “Come join us for breakfast.”

Lindon took a deep breath before answering. “You didn’t leave me.” He closed his eyes and took another breath. “This one thanks you, honored Underlord.”

“I kept an eye on you after I left. I could tell you'd made up your mind, so when you didn't make it on time, I decided to drag you along.”

Following the Underlord, Lindon pushed open the back door of the flying barn. It swung open into bright lights and furious wind, but there was another door only a foot or two away. This door was painted dark blue, with a black crescent at eye level, and the frame was all white. The colors of the Arelius family.

Between him and the door was a stretch of dense blue cloud. To the left and right, he saw nothing but endless sky and white fluff. Beneath him, a soft blue carpet.

Lindon hesitated, but Eithan didn't. He was already striding across the cloud with full confidence, his steps pressing down as though he walked across a mattress.

It's a Thousand-Mile Cloud, Lindon reassured himself, just...bigger. Big enough to carry two buildings.

If he'd needed an illustration of the Arelius family’s wealth and power, this would do.

Eithan held the door for him as Lindon fought the wind to enter.

He stepped into a cozy sitting room, all decorated in Arelius colors. Dark blue chairs and couches were arranged into a half-circle around a fireplace of black metal. A spiral staircase led up to a second story, and a pair of tall, arched windows spilled sunlight into the whole space.

Through an open doorway against the other wall, Lindon saw into a second room, this one surrounded entirely in glass that looked out over the clouds. Cassias stood in the glass room over a podium that looked like the control panel for the training course. As Lindon watched, he spread his hand and injected a pulse of madra speckled with silver. Circles lit up one after another on the polished board.

The house veered to the right, cutting through the clouds like a ship through waves.

Yerin had her legs crossed on one fluffy chair, her hands on her knees and breathing measured. When Lindon crossed the doorway, she cracked her eyes open and gave him a little smile.

“Sharp decision,” she said.

“I fell asleep.”

Eithan hopped over the polished wooden counter that separated the rest of the room from a wall of brightly colored bottles, then started fixing himself a drink. “This is Sky's Mercy, the personal cloudship of the family's Patriarch. It serves us as a mobile base when we need to take our business outside of the usual territory.”

Cassias didn't turn from his controls, shouting over his shoulder to Lindon. “We stay as high as we can, for the sake of stealth. Sometimes we must fly lower, when there are dangers in the skies or the vital aura runs low. That’s when we risk being spotted.”

Lindon took a few more seconds to process the sea of gleaming clouds outside the windows. “The Cloud Hammer School spotted you, then?” They were the ones who had first spread the word of the Arelius family’s coming.

“I passed through a group of their disciples cycling up here,” Cassias responded. “I’m sure they intended no harm, but there's no such thing as a secret.”

The floor rose and dipped slowly, as though the cloud breathed beneath them. At the bar, Eithan was pouring two bottles into a third. He didn't spill a drop.

Lindon turned to the Underlord, imagination wrestling with the possibilities of flying buildings. “You lifted the entire barn off the ground?” If the family could build this, he could only imagine what other treasures they were hiding.

“I dropped quite a few scales for the Fisher to build that training facility,” Eithan said, flipping the bottles into the air and catching all three. “It would be a waste to just leave it behind. We had to expand the cloud base a bit, but it's well within acceptable limits.”

“Not well within,” Cassias responded, but Eithan pointed to the top of the staircase.

“And look who else came with us! Fisher Gesha, how are you feeling?”

A few hairs had come loose from the old woman's bun, her wrinkled face looked pale, and she rested heavily on the bannister, which was shaped like a serpentine dragon's head. She didn't look as though she had the strength to walk down the stairs, but she was standing on her drudge. The eight long spider legs dragged her down the stairs smoothly, as though she were gliding down.

“I apologize for showing you this sight, Underlord,” she panted. When she saw Lindon staring, a drop of acid entered her voice, and she snapped, “Can't stand boats, can I? I stay off the water, thank you very much, and sailing on the clouds is just the same as sailing anywhere. Hm? You have something to say?”

Lindon leaned closer to her, more concerned about her presence than her tone. “Fisher Gesha, did you...choose to come along?” He didn't want to say too much, because Cassias and Eithan could hear him perfectly well, but he could too-easily picture Eithan snatching up the Soulsmith on a whim.

She studied him for a moment, then reached up and patted his cheek. “I must look like a disaster, to have an Iron worry about me. No, the Underlord told me to think about it, didn’t he? Well, I did. I've lived my life among the Fishers, and it’s been a long life. It's about time I see the wider world, perhaps bring something back, hm? A little knowledge, perhaps.”

One of the spider legs reached up to poke Lindon in the stomach. “And I can't leave a half-grown cub to stumble around in the wild on its own, can I? No, I can't.”

Lindon’s throat tightened, and he blinked rapidly. She had stayed with him. He bowed as deeply as he could without going to his knees. “Thank you, Fisher Gesha.”

She stayed silent.

When he finally raised his head, she was gone.

One of the tall windows had swung open on its hinges, and Gesha dangled half-out with her head in the rushing wind. She retched, the spider legs stretched out as far as they would go to keep her tall enough to reach the window.

Eithan was sipping something from a shallow bowl. “It can take a few days to adjust, if you have a tender stomach,” he said. “But we'll have plenty of time together. It will take a month to reach our destination, which we will put to good use.”

Yerin woke from her cycling meditation again, cracking her eyes. “You finally bothering to teach us?”

Eithan hopped up to sit on the bar, taking another drink from his bowl. “The question is, are you ready for me to teach you?” He let that hang for a second as he took another sip, then added, “And the answer is no, you're not ready, so I'm going to spend this month trying to prepare you.”

He nodded to Yerin. “First, I'd like you to take turns on the training course. Yerin, you will try to beat your previous time...”

She rose from her seat, ready to try immediately.

“...using only your Goldsign.”

The bladed metal arm hanging over her shoulder twitched. She turned to stare at him in disbelief. “I'd have a better chance of clearing it with my bright smile and winning personality.”

Eithan turned to Lindon. “And Lindon—”

“Oy. Hey. Don't ignore me.”

“I at least expect you to clear all eighteen dummies after a month. Don't worry about your time, for now. While you’re working on that, you can bring your second core up to Iron, and brush up on your Soulsmithing. Fisher?”

Gesha leaned back inside, shutting the window with one hand and dabbing at her mouth with a cloth in the other. When she spoke, her voice had an extra rasp. “You should be able to identify all the properties of the seven basic aspects of Forged madra, as well as their combinations. I have the books with me.”

Yerin slapped the flat edge of her bladed Goldsign against the wooden bar. “You want me to fight with this thing? Why don't I just tie a knife to the end of a string and use that?”

Eithan studied her over the rim of his bowl. “You think, perhaps, that I don't know what it takes to reach Highgold?”

“No, that's not...” Yerin’s ears started turning red. “I'm the last one who would...”

“You think you know better than I do which exercises will allow you to integrate your Remnant's skills and abilities into your own? If your master left you a more complete training regimen for you to follow after Lowgold, then by all means use that.”

Yerin's ears had turned bright red. “I didn't aim to say that, Underlord.”

“Hmm.” He smiled. “You're young, and I'm unaccustomed to explaining myself. I'll try to be clearer in the future, but do as I tell you.”

She kept her eyes on the floor, tilted away from Lindon, but she nodded. “It's not so far apart from what my master used to have me do.”

“The only difference,” Eithan said, “is that you trusted him. Trust comes with time. And during that time, you will clear that course with your Goldsign or I’ll tie you to a string and drag you behind the house like a kite.”

She straightened and marched for the door.

Lindon started to follow her, but Eithan stopped him. “Before you do your morning cycling, take...” –he reached behind the bar with one hand, balancing his bowl in the other, and rummaged around in a drawer— “Aha! Take this.” Eithan tossed Lindon a pill the size of his knuckle. It was smooth, with swirls of blue and white mingled together. “Behold, the Four Corners Rotation Pill.”

Yerin stopped with her hand on the door.

“It's a pill to make your madra easier to cycle, and it should help you raise your second core to Iron fairly quickly.”

Lindon itched to write the name of the pill down in his notes. He had to record every step of his advancement in The Path of Twin Stars manual. Which brought him a moment of panic, as he realized he didn’t have his pack with him.

He let out a breath of relief as he spotted his pack—with the manual inside—leaning up against the wall. A polished wood-and-jade chest leaked wisps of red from the closed lid, so he assumed his Thousand-Mile Cloud was inside.

“Use the pill together with your parasite ring,” Eithan said, pouring himself another drink. “The effects should complement one another, so that it feels like cycling normally, but you'll see twice the benefit. By the time we land, I hope to be able to take you straight to Jade.”

Lindon cradled the pill in both hands as though it was his key into the heavens. It smelled like honey and rainy days, and the only thing stopping Lindon from popping it into his mouth was his desire not to waste a single second of its effect.

Yerin had already turned from the door to look at Eithan. “How far did that lighten your wallet, would you say?”

Eithan shrugged, but Cassias called back, “About five thousand scales, the way they measure them out here.”

Fisher Gesha's eyes bulged.

“Well, that's a gem and a half,” Yerin said. “You got one for me?”

Eithan waved that away. “It's just a fundamental training pill. Lindon will be taking one of these every day, but I have some more interesting supplements for you. Right now, your best advancement material is your master's Remnant.”

Yerin grimaced, but accepted it. She would have preferred a pill of her own, Lindon knew, but at least Eithan’s reasons were good ones.

Lindon could barely pry his eyes away from the Four Corners Rotation Pill. This was worth more than every year's end gift he'd ever gotten from his parents, and he was supposed to take one every day. Eithan was like an endless treasure box.

Cassias stepped away from his controls, walking out of the glass room and toward the Underlord. “I would urge you to remember what happened when you took over the training of our family Coppers.”

“Oh, that's nothing to worry about.”

Cassias turned to Lindon. “I personally rescued a girl who ran from his training into a place called the Thousand Beast Forest. She survived by hiding from two-headed bears. I found her crouched in a cave, dirty and bleeding, but she begged me to leave her rather than take her back to train.”

Lindon moved his gaze from the pill to Eithan and back. “That does seem…harsh. Perhaps she may have been pushed a little too hard, don’t you think?”

“Don’t worry, I don’t train my students like that anymore,” Eithan said, holding up a bottle to the light. “I was far too lenient before. After weeks of my training, that girl should have been fighting those bears. With her fists.”

Yerin shrugged and opened the door. The wind grabbed the tattered edges of her outer robe, making them trail behind her like smoke. Her red rope-belt, tied in a broad bow behind her, was untouched by the wind.

“If you don't feel like you're going to die when you're training, then you're doing it wrong,” she said, and stepped outside.

Cassias nodded to her back as though acknowledging the point, Eithan laughed, and Fisher Gesha gave an approving grunt.

Lindon swallowed his own misgivings, pushing aside the sinking feeling in his stomach. This was the attitude of the strong. He had to focus on that, and not on what he imagined Eithan’s training had done to the poor Copper girl.

Popping the blue-and-white pill in his mouth, he followed Yerin.

6

Jai Long entered his sister’s cabin to find her struggling into a set of sacred artist’s robes. She pushed her arm through one sleeve, trembling with effort, and cinched her robe with both hands as though the cloth belt was made of heavy chain.

She dipped her head when she saw him, though she had to grip her wardrobe to stand upright again.

He tried to sound cold, but instead his voice came out with a sigh. “What are you doing?”

“Going…with you.” She spoke as firmly as she could, but she was looking at the ground, unable to meet his eyes.

Even before the accident, she’d always been shy. And stubborn at inconvenient times.

“I have four Sandvipers staying behind to take care of you,” Jai Long said, gently taking her by the shoulder to lead her back to bed. “You’ll have to stay with the Purelake School for a while, in case anyone from the clan comes looking for you.”

She remained standing, and he was afraid to put too much pressure on her shoulder. Jai Chen glanced up at him like a guilty puppy.

“We don’t…have to…go,” she said, each breath drawn with difficulty.

He couldn’t move her without her cooperation, so he folded his arms. “I’ve already jumped off the cliff. Six Lowgolds and an elder came to the camp looking for me last night, and none of them left.”

She didn’t need to know that they’d been looking for him because he’d been killing Jai clansmen in their homes. There were no civilians in the Five Factions Alliance; everyone who had come to the Transcendent Ruins had done so to try and pull profit from the jaws of danger. Those were sacred artists and warriors that he’d killed.

Though most of them hadn’t died like it.

But he didn’t need to tell his sister exactly how dirty his hands were. That didn’t matter; she was staying out of it.

“We could…go west,” she suggested hopefully.

He started to tell her no, but hesitated. She was referring to a legend. In the mountains to the west of the Desolate Wilds, there was supposed to be a hidden valley that occasionally emerged to trade with the outside. The inhabitants were weak, but protected by a curse.

Jai Chen had been obsessed with the legend since she was a girl. It seemed ideal to her: a hidden safe place.

In his experience, there were no safe places. He immediately wondered what terrible dangers lurked in the valley no one entered.

But even if the valley didn’t exist, the mountains were at the very western edge of the Blackflame Empire, and no one had actively controlled that border for fifty years. It was so remote that even maps drawn in his father’s day hadn’t bothered to include it.

The lands west of the Wilds were unknown to him, but they certainly wouldn’t have a Jai clan.

“We can hurt the clan if we go east,” he said. “We can take revenge for Kral. Do you really want to go west instead?”

The day before, he wouldn’t have asked her such a question. He wasn’t as sure of his course as he had been yesterday.

He had burned to avenge himself on the Jai clan for years, but now that he had the means, he was starting to realize what a monumental task he’d begun. To abandon it now, before he’d gone too far, had a certain appeal.

If they left, this would end as one minor attack on a branch of the clan. No one would look into it too closely, and in five years, no one would remember he or his sister were ever here.

Jai Chen surveyed the floor, clenching her hands together as she thought. Finally, she straightened her back and spoke with resolve.

“I will…go with you. No…running…away.”

He gave her a wry smile, though she couldn’t see it. “It will take weeks to get there, and we don’t have a cloudship this time. It will be painful, and messy, and you’ll hate every inch of the journey.”

“If you…hear me…complain,” she said, “leave me…behind.”

Once she was packed, he carried her outside, where Gokren had a motley collection of flying creatures assembled. Thousand-Mile Clouds, collared Remnants, strange constructs that looked like wide broomsticks, a sacred eagle with feathers like dawn, a hovering leaf wider than a man, a huge levitating cauldron, and two dozen gray-white bats.

Some of the sacred bats had been taken from the Jai clan, but the Sandvipers had a colony of the same breed of bat, and two of their trainers used to work for the Jai clan.

Gokren was supervising the collection of mounts and vehicles. He turned, smoothed back his gray hair with one hand, and eyed Jai Chen. After a moment he gestured to a white Thousand-Mile Cloud.

“Load her up,” he said, looking up to Jai Long. “We’ll get a canopy rigged to hold off the wind and give her some privacy.”

Jai Long bowed his thanks and settled his sister onto the cloud.

By the time he’d finished, the sun was setting, and most of the vehicles had gathered a load of packs and bags. Gokren lit his pipe, holding it between his teeth as he pressed the end of a scripted lighter into the bowl.

“You could fly me there and return,” Jai Long said, hating himself with every word. He needed their help; he shouldn’t be turning them down. “You don’t have to risk their lives for my revenge.”

Gokren let out a mouthful of smoke. “I’m not an idiot, son.” He paused as though he’d said something profound, letting bluish haze drift skyward. “I don’t throw my sect away for nothing.”

He took another breath, let it out. “Old powers like the Jai clan are as traditional as they come. After you hit them, they’ll send a Highgold after you. When you beat him, it’ll be a group of Highgolds next. Then whichever Truegold ranks the lowest, and only then will the elders start to move.”

If it weren’t for the Ancestor’s Spear, that plan would eventually work. The clan could afford to slowly drown him in sacred artists.

With the spear, he would feed on whoever they sent. To him, every Jai clan enemy was a treasure chest of scales and elixirs.

“I won’t reach Underlord that way,” Jai Long said, though Gokren knew that better than he did. If advancing from Gold to the Lord realm was simply a matter of stockpiling power, no one would ever be stuck at Truegold.

“That’s true enough, but I think I can get you there.” Gokren watched the best of his sect saddling their mounts and preparing to leave their home. “Took me forty years to reach Truegold. I’ll never be an Underlord, not in my lifetime…but I understand some things. By the time Jai Daishou moves himself, you’ll either be Underlord or the next thing to it.”

That was Jai Long’s plan, though he had expected it to take years. He had meant to wage a long, secret war against the clan, stealing their madra and slowly advancing. Once he could face Jai Daishou as a fellow Underlord, the game would change.

With Gokren’s help, his chances improved dramatically, and his timeline shot up. He might reach the peak of Truegold before the end of the year.

“It’s still a roll of the dice for you,” Jai Long pointed out. He had to be honest with anyone willing to risk their life for him.

Gokren removed his pipe, gazing into the bowl as though it would tell him the future. “I might be gambling,” he said, “but I’d say I’m backing the favorite.”

* * *

On the fourth day after they left, Sky's Mercy had to duck down to the ground to let the constructs recharge. The house landed in an open field, the blue cloud slowly dying away until both Sky’s Mercy and the training barn had settled safely onto the grass.

The barn creaked and moaned as it came to a rest, but the main house remained solid and silent. Lindon was glad he’d taken Cassias’ advice and stayed out of the barn during the landing process, or he would have feared for his life.

The second they landed, everyone left the cloudship and returned to the wonderful embrace of solid ground.

Eithan allowed Gesha and Lindon to look at the scripts and constructs sustaining the giant Thousand-Mile Cloud. It was intriguingly simple. Only one circle on the bottom of the main house to guide levitation, and four pillars—one at each corner—to produce and control the cloud madra. The controls were more complicated than the actual mechanism for flight.

But the madra involved...

Both of Lindon’s cores added together would only add up to a normal Iron sacred artist, but compared to his old self, he was a powerhouse. Even so, he couldn’t activate any of the scripts involved if he drained all the madra in his body.

The house drew vital aura from the sky to keep itself powered, but it could only drain so much while in flight. Cassias activated the collection script, and ribbons of white and green aura—visible only in Lindon’s Copper sight—streamed into the four pillars of the house. The only script Lindon had ever seen consume more power was the one that had activated the Transcendent Ruins.

Lindon had peeked inside earlier, and besides the Forged madra devices that produced the cloud, each pillar held a crystal flask the size of his head. The aura ran inside those crystals, condensing and processing into the madra that powered the cloud.

It would take three days to fill up the crystals, Cassias said. He had made it to the Desolate Wilds in a month, but that had been carrying one person. Not five people and an extra building.

If they had to spend three days drawing aura for every three days flying, it would take them twice as long to return.

Eithan assured them that he intended to make it back in a month, but they would still spend one day grounded for every three in the air. No one asked him how he planned to recharge their power reserves—he was the Underlord, so he knew what he was doing.

He spread out a blanket and had a nap in the sun, but the rest of them were expected to spend the day doing chores. Lindon regarded the idea with dread: if he was hauling water or scrubbing floors, then he wasn’t training. He wasn’t getting any closer to defeating Jai Long.

But just because he wasn’t practicing sacred arts didn’t mean he couldn’t improve.

When he was sent to fill a man-sized wooden tub with water, and then bring it back to Sky’s Mercy to fill up their reservoir, he refused to Enforce himself with madra.

He didn’t know any real Enforcer techniques, but everyone used madra to reinforce their body to some degree. Cycling madra to tired limbs, focusing it to lift something heavy—Lindon had been doing that since he’d learned to walk.

This time, he kept the madra firmly in his core, relying solely on the strength of his Iron body.

Before he’d carried the tub downhill for two miles, filled it up with water, and carried it two miles back, he’d never appreciated just how heavy water could be. The tub was big enough that he could bathe in it comfortably, big enough that he looked like an ant carrying a grasshopper carcass as he made his way back. Without his Iron body, he would have collapsed halfway up, even using his madra.

He arrived red-faced and sweating, limbs shaking, and his breathing disordered. But after ten minutes of letting his Bloodforged Iron body restore his fatigue, he set off again.

This might not improve his sacred arts, but at least he could build his muscles. ‘A healthy spirit lives in a healthy body,’ as his clan used to say.

After four trips, the reservoir was full, and Gesha was impatiently waiting on him. They needed dead matter for his Soulsmith practice, so Lindon, Yerin, and Gesha went out to track and kill a wild Remnant.

Gesha found her prey within two hours, but Lindon stopped Yerin from killing it. Forcing his trembling hands to be still, he looked down on a giant frog that seemed to be made from blue-green blocks.

“Let me try first,” he said, affecting a casual tone.

Fisher Gesha’s eyebrows went up.

Yerin put her sword away. “Scream and bleed when you need help.”

Lindon learned some valuable lessons that day. First, he learned that the Empty Palm blasted a chunk out of Remnants, who were made of solid madra. That would surely come in useful later.

Second, he saw how strong Remnants were in the outside world.

Yerin was true to her word, blasting the frog into a pile of blocky dead matter the second he screamed and bled. She tied the pieces of the spirit’s corpse together and dragged the bundle back, while Fisher Gesha carried Lindon.

His Bloodforged Iron body had restored him enough that he could walk on his own by the time they reached Sky’s Mercy, though one of his cores was empty and the other only half-strength.

Back in Sacred Valley, an Iron would be enough to fight anything but a very advanced, intelligent, or strange Remnant. Those were children compared to these.

In the Transcendent Ruins, he had battled Remnants most every day for two weeks…but he hadn’t battled them, had he? Not really. He had used traps, and script-circles, and ambushes. Even when he’d personally killed a few, he had used weapons, or fought them together with Yerin and Eithan.

Now that he thought of it, this may have been the first Remnant that he’d stood and fought, relying on nothing but his sacred arts. And it had driven a two-inch spike through his calf.

It showed him how far he had to go. As though he needed another reminder.

After they’d brought the Remnant inside, the sun was setting. Eithan finally woke up, stretched, and saw that the stream of aura flowing into the four pillars had slowed to a trickle.

He opened up one of the columns at the corner of the house, revealing that the green-and-white madra swirling inside the crystal flask had only filled it a third of the way. “Good enough,” he said. “I'm on a schedule.”

Then he carefully rolled up one gilt-edged sleeve and pressed his hand to the collection script, which gathered up aura and distributed it to the four crystals.

The script took in the proper aspects of aura automatically, but it could accept virtually any madra. It would take that madra, purify it, and use it to reinforce the existing cloud madra, but the efficiency was terrible.

Thanks to Fisher Gesha's tutelage, he could calculate exactly how terrible: cloud madra was the best to fill the flasks, twice as much pure madra would achieve the same result, and any other aspect would take four times as much power to generate the cloud and lift both buildings into the air.

Eithan filled all four crystals in seconds. Dark blue clouds popped out of each of the four corners, swelling and lifting both buildings off the ground. The levitation circle on the bottom shone bright, showing that it was at capacity and ready to be used.

The Underlord shook one hand as though it had fallen asleep and then walked inside.

Cassias and Yerin treated this as normal, but Lindon and Fisher Gesha had exchanged astonished—and somewhat fearful—glances before heading in. Gesha had confided in him later that she, a Highgold, would have taken four or five days to fill up the circle.

Lindon wondered how long it would be before he could do something like that.

Three days later, Lindon had gained a new appreciation for elixirs.

The Four Corners Rotation Pill doubled the speed at which he cycled his madra and expanded his core, noticeably speeding his advancement. Unlike the orus fruit or the Starlotus bud, it didn’t provide much external power, but the cycling effect alone was invaluable.

When he put on his parasite ring, it usually felt like he was hanging weights on his spirit, slowing his cycling but filtering the quality of the madra. With the ring and the pill together, he could cycle at his full normal speed, but his madra would still be filtered. Twice the result for the same effort.

He brought his second core up to Iron by the seventh day, which was actually something of a disappointment.

His Copper core had compressed to a brighter, higher-quality core with ease, matching the second ball of pure madra floating in his spirit. He had confided to Yerin that he’d hoped for a second Iron body, but she’d looked at him as though he wished he’d sprouted a third eye.

“How many bodies do you have? One? Well, there you go, then.”

Eithan had been prepared to give him a pill a day, but thus far it took Lindon two days to process the energy of each pill. In a week, he’d only used three, with a bit of energy left over.

Still, that was fifteen thousand scales. He pictured the Sandviper wagon he’d seen stuffed with boxes of scales back in the Desolate Wilds, and wondered if all of those together had added up to fifteen thousand. How many scales had they mined from the Transcendent Ruins every day? It couldn’t be too much more than fifteen thousand, and that was a whole sect of Golds working together.

In the training course, he could clear six of the wooden dummies every time before he messed up: he either missed a step and took a blow or ran out of madra in one of his cores.

That wasn’t enough to dampen his enthusiasm, because he was improving. His movements were sharper and faster than they had been the week before, and his madra control was getting better. Every time he struck a target, he had to inject the exact right amount of madra on contact—too little, and the circle wouldn’t light up; too much, and the extra energy would be wasted. His Empty Palm was therefore improving by leaps and bounds, as he learned to project his madra more efficiently and precisely.

Cassias and Fisher Gesha praised his progress, but he wasn’t satisfied. After the first few days, he’d taken to wearing his parasite ring while training.

The ring was meant to be an aid in cycling to grow his core, not in combat, and it hampered his control over every Empty Palm. It was like trying to practice swordplay with a heavy rock strapped to the end of his blade, and he was tempted to tear the ring off with every strike.

But when he returned to defeating six dummies consistently, even with the parasite ring on, he finally felt as though he was making real progress.

Yerin, in her turns on the course, was frustrated that her progress using only her Goldsign was slower than Lindon’s with his entire body. She could only light up four dummies before she was forced to block a blow on her shoulder, or she injected too little madra through the silver limb and a circle failed to light.

She seemed to feel that she had fallen behind Lindon somehow, even though she had literally tied both of her hands behind her back. And she took out her frustration on him, which he felt was hardly fair. Why was it a mark against him that he was finally a little stronger than her Goldsign?

His training as a Soulsmith was still in its infancy, though Fisher Gesha tutored him every night before his evening cycling. One night, she spread seven boxes out before him, flipping open their lids and revealing seven different types of Forged madra. They were all in different forms—one a liquid, one a sludge, one a collection of irregular chunks like pebbles, one a quivering pile of glass-like shards—and each a different color.

“These are the seven most common aspects of madra, you see,” Fisher Gesha said, pointing to each in turn. “Fire, earth, wind, water, force, blood, and life.”

He had studied these aspects before. There were other types of madra that he felt should have been equally common, but these seven were most widespread because they were the easiest types of aura to cultivate. Light aura was everywhere, but it was difficult to convert to madra, and required special techniques to harvest.

The surge of pride Lindon felt when he heard that had surprised even him. His Wei clan practiced a Path of dreams and light, and now it seemed that might be an impressive combination, even by Gold standards.

“You will re-Forge each of these aspects into discs,” Fisher Gesha continued. “Solid discs, don’t just move them into a circle, you hear me? I had a disciple once…troubled girl. Anyway, reshaping madra besides your own is the fundamental skill of a Soulsmith. If you can’t do that, you can’t do anything. Bring your discs to me, and if I approve them, then we’ll try Forging them into needles.”

By then, Lindon had grown used to setting extra challenges to push himself, so he decided to skip the discs and dive straight into Forging needles.

Over the next few days, he bent all of his time and effort to the task, eventually succeeding…with six of the seven aspects.

Even water madra could be forced into a solid shape if he focused himself, though it wouldn’t stay there, but life…he spent an entire extra day focused on Forging life madra, skipping his training, before he finally gave up and returned to Fisher Gesha in shame.

“It’s impossible,” she said, eyeing his seventh box. “Life madra on its own is a liquid, and that’s the end of it. Even life Remnants are giant blobs of ooze. I didn’t tell you because I wanted you to say you couldn’t do it, hm? Thought it might get you to think about your limitations.”

She looked over the other six needles, which were supposed to have been simple discs. “Doesn’t seem to have worked, did it?”

On the night of their eighth day, he was cycling power into his core, using up the last of the Four Corners Rotation Pill before he snatched a few hours of sleep. He breathed evenly in the pattern Eithan had taught him, building up his power one step at a time and slowly pushing the bounds of his core.

After about an hour, he slowly opened his eyes.

…to see Eithan peeking in through a crack in his door.

The first few times Eithan popped up unexpectedly, Lindon’s reactions had been entertaining enough that the Underlord kept trying to catch him off guard.

But you could get used to anything if it happened often enough.

“What can I do to serve the Arelius family?” Lindon asked, rising from his bed. Eithan had done so much for him already, the least he could do in return was ignore the Underlord’s…quirks.

Eithan kicked the door open and grinned like a child playing a prank. “Cycle! Now!”

Lindon reasoned that Eithan had also earned a measure of trust, so he dropped to his knees, hands in his lap, and began to cycle. Just as Eithan had shown him in the Transcendent Ruins.

At first, every breath using this cycling technique had felt like trying to inhale water. But he’d grown so used to it over the following weeks that he rarely had to consciously think his way through the technique anymore.

Eithan tapped his fingers together as he waited for Lindon to settle into a cycling rhythm. When Lindon’s breathing evened out, Eithan’s grin broadened.

“Now,” he said, “close your eyes. I’m going to teach you a trick.”

I should trust him, Lindon reminded himself. I owe him.

Once he’d returned to the position he’d held before he was interrupted, Eithan’s voice cut in. “Madra is very responsive to your imagination. It’s part of you, just like your thoughts. So as you study more advanced techniques, you’ll find that holding a clear mental picture is just as important as moving your madra in certain patterns.”

That fit Lindon’s experience. As he advanced, his madra was easier to visualize, and he was better able to get the power to do what he wanted without forcing it into a pattern.

“I’m going to teach you a cycling technique. Once you’ve mastered it, this method will take you to Jade and beyond.”

Lindon leaned forward eagerly, eyes squeezed shut, suddenly afraid to miss a word.

“This is a technique for processing your madra, not for battle,” Eithan went on. “If you try to fight while cycling like this, you might as well tie your ankles together.”

Lindon wondered if he should be taking notes.

“In your mind, focus on your core. Ah, I mean one core. Pick one.”

The core that had reached Iron first was brighter and more solid than the other, so he focused on it, letting the bright blue-white ball fill his vision as the other one fell behind into irrelevance.

As he breathed, his madra cycled, spinning out from his core to run out to the rest of his body and then swirling back.

“Your core is made of stone. Picture it as a huge, stone wheel. It’s all you can see. It’s like a wall of heavy, solid stone.”

Lindon focused on that image, superimposing it over the blue-white sun.

“Now, as you exhale and cycle madra through your body, the stone grinds away at the edges of your core. It’s heavy, and it rolls slowly, pushing your core outward.”

That was harder to hold. Madra usually flew out from his core freely, but he had to slow it down, forcing his core to rotate and running power through it a scant inch at a time.

He felt like he was pushing that stone wheel up a hill with all his strength, all while trying to keep madra from slithering through his grip. If he lost concentration for one second, the strings of madra would escape and the wheel would fall back down, crushing him.

The effort of moving his madra in such an unnatural pattern caused his channels to strain, as his spirit groaned under the effort. Sweat dripped over his eyelids as he concentrated, and each exhalation was agonizingly slow.

“Now, when the madra comes back in, spiraling from your limbs to your core, the stone wheel shifts. It slowly rolls back the other way, grinding your core again.”

It was like letting the wheel roll downhill, only to haul it to a stop and pull it back up again. He poured all his madra into the effort, controlling his spirit with every ounce of his concentration.

There was an instant in the middle where he felt like he was manually stopping his own lungs. He gaped like a fish, his lungs frozen as though the stone wheel sat on his own chest, before he finally got it moving the other way.

Eithan waited for him to get himself under control before graciously reminding him that he still had to hold his previous cycling pattern. It took Lindon another half an hour to match the old timing, and by that time his soul felt like he’d pounded it flat. Only minutes of cycling, and he was more exhausted than he would have been after hours of practicing in the dummy course.

But Eithan wasn’t finished.

“Once you have a grip on that, you want your wheel to spin as slowly as possible without stopping. Breathing in the same pattern, I want to see how slowly you can move your madra, how heavily that wheel turns, how that huge stone wheel is almost stopped and your madra is just crawling along.

“Then you exhale, and it goes back the other way.”

Only two more minutes, and Lindon began to seriously wonder if he was going to pass out. He couldn’t wait for Eithan to leave so that he could take a real breath.

“This technique is called the Heaven and Earth Purification Wheel,” Eithan said, and Lindon felt his weight settle onto the end of the bed. “It has a long and fascinating history.”

Lindon would have cried, but he couldn’t spare the breath.

“I’ll spare you the details.” Lindon almost let out a sigh of relief. “But to reach Jade, you need to form a spiral in your core. The spinning motion will condense the quality of your madra, increase your receptivity to spiritual forces, speed up madra recovery, help your control…all sorts of benefits. Eventually, the suction force will become strong enough to contain a Remnant.”

Though he itched to take notes, Lindon would lose the breathing technique if he so much as opened his eyes. And that would be disrespectful to the Underlord who had gone through the trouble of teaching him a technique.

If only he would leave.

“Every Path has their own Jade cycling technique, and it emphasizes certain aspects of the spirit. Some are particularly good at processing aura efficiently, others help you recover your madra in minutes, and so on. It’s a deep and varied field. But I selected this technique just for you!”

Lindon tried to thank him, but grunting out a single syllable almost lost him control of the revolving stone wheel.

“The Heaven and Earth Purification Wheel slowly grinds away at your core’s borders, focused entirely on improving your capacity to contain madra. It does what you tried to do by Forging and swallowing your own scales: it uses temporary power to push at the bonds of your core, expanding your ability to permanently store power. But while swallowing scales loses some energy in the Forging process, this keeps the entire cycle contained, so there’s no loss. It’s also slow, difficult to practice, and you will feel like you’re choking and dying.”

Lindon nodded and almost choked.

“But it works with any madra, including pure. If you fill your second core with another Path, this technique will work for that too. And your Path of Twin Stars breaks one normal-sized core into two smaller cores, so without special elixirs or a technique specifically focused on capacity, you’d never get even one of your cores up to its normal size.”

Lindon finally lost the technique. His madra slipped out of his control, he gasped as though he were coming up for air, and the power he’d been damming up in his core surged through his body. His eyes snapped open, and he jerked to his feet like a puppet with strings pulled.

Eithan nodded. “That can happen.” He rose, brushing his robe off as though preparing to leave. “All cycling methods have tradeoffs, so if after a few days you have objections, I can recommend a different technique. But control can be learned, quality can be improved with elixirs, collecting aura only takes patience, and as for recovery…why would you need to recover madra quickly when you have more than you could ever use?”

Lindon was still trying to recover his breath, but he swiped his sleeve across his sweaty forehead and bowed slightly. “I won’t give up, Underlord. I trust your wisdom.”

“Underlord isn’t my name,” Eithan said, before pointing to Lindon’s pocket. “You might want to avoid wearing that ring of yours for the time being. This technique is hard enough without hobbling yourself.” He touched his forehead and nodded. “Well then. A good night to you.”

The door shut behind him.

And then immediately opened again. Eithan poked his head back in. “You’re going to keep cycling, aren’t you? You’re not going to slack off while my back is turned?”

“Your back is never turned,” Lindon said, voice dry.

“And don’t forget it.” Eithan widened his eyes, staring at Lindon intently as he slowly shut the door.

Lindon took a few moments to breathe before sitting down on the bed. He had started to picture the stone wheel before he slipped his hand into his pocket and ran into the cold circle of halfsilver.

Eithan had said not to use the parasite ring, but Lindon was trying to push himself beyond what his teachers required. Then again, the thought of trying that cycling technique with the additional burden of the ring physically made him shudder. It was like wrapping his lungs in bands of iron.

He was pulling his hand out of the pocket, leaving the ring behind, when he brushed past another small object: a slightly warm ball of smooth glass.

Lindon gripped it in his fist, picturing the steady blue candle flame. Jade wasn’t his goal. Jai Long wasn’t his goal. Even Underlord wasn’t his goal.

If Eithan could have saved Sacred Valley, then Suriel would have shown him a vision of Eithan. He had to reach further than Eithan thought possible.

He settled into a cycling position and slipped on his ring.

7

When the moon rose on their thirty-second night of traveling, Cassias Arelius walked away from the control board of Sky's Mercy. The script didn't need constant maintenance, but he felt better with someone watching the sky. If a Three-Horned Eagle rose out of the clouds, they would be in trouble without someone close enough and quick enough to steer out of the way.

Not that any Arelius would miss the approach of a threat like that, even with his eyes closed. His web of madra showed him nothing but clouds and empty air for a quarter-mile around them.

And the Arelius Underlord was aboard. Even the wind couldn't sneak up on Eithan.

“Would you like to take the last shift?” he asked Eithan, who was sprawled out on the couch with a book in hand.

In less than ten hours, they would arrive at Serpent's Grave. If he could have drained his core dry to push Sky's Mercy any faster, he would have—his wife and son were waiting for him down there. They'd left their home back in the capital to follow him, and then he'd abandoned them for two months to chase down their delinquent Underlord.

This was his job now, however much it strained him to be away for so long. Eithan was the reason he'd been able to marry Jing in the first place; only an Underlord’s word had convinced their families to agree to the match. Even putting up with Eithan for the rest of his life wouldn’t be enough to repay that favor.

Though he had taken Cassias’ place.

Cassias was born to be Patriarch of the Arelius family. He was a direct descendant of the bloodline, his appearance and conduct were impeccable, and from an early age he had impressed everyone with his skill in the sacred arts.

But none of that had been good enough for Jing’s family before Eithan took his side. He’d traded away his position as Patriarch’s heir with a smile on his face, but the occasional reminder could still…sting.

Eithan yawned and shut the book. “Nothing but clear sky between us and a safe landing.”

A web of invisible power stretched throughout Sky's Mercy, bringing Cassias little snippets of information: Fisher Gesha's sheets rustling as she turned, Yerin's eyelids crinkling in a disturbing dream, Lindon's chest rising and falling evenly. There was no privacy when an Arelius was around, but it was polite to act otherwise.

Everyone knew what the Arelius could do, but they didn't know about the limitations. Publicly, the family liked to pretend they had none.

Now that he'd confirmed the outsiders were asleep, Cassias spoke freely. “They can’t hear us. Tell me when we’re really close enough for you to guide our landing, please.”

He’d known Eithan for six years now, and worked closely with him for most of that time. He could tell when the man was bluffing. Usually.

And one of Cassias’ first tasks after Eithan’s arrival had been to determine the limit of the Underlord’s senses.

Stretching, Eithan spoke through another yawn. “My father used to say the First Patriarch could watch over his descendants from another continent. Maybe even from…beyond the grave.” Eithan waggled his eyebrows up and down.

“Do you often listen to myths?” Cassias asked lightly.

“Yes. That's the secret to reaching Underlord: studying old tales. That, and bladder health.” Eithan headed to the back, to the side of the bar. “If you'll excuse me, the house can fly itself for a moment.”

Cassias was left alone in the central room of Sky's Mercy. It had been his home for the last two months, and over the course of his life he'd spent even longer inside, but he'd grown up expecting it would belong to him.

Now, it was Eithan's. Cassias was only borrowing it.

Everything in life was a trade.

Before heading upstairs to his own bedroom—there were six aboard Sky's Mercy, as well as the washroom, the bar, a training room, and a silent chamber for cycling—he stopped.

Over the month since departing the Desolate Wilds, he'd built up a certain curiosity. Now that the other three were asleep, and the two children had both left the circle of wooden dummies alone, he had a perfect opportunity to indulge that curiosity.

Eithan would know what he was doing, of course, but it was best to operate as though Eithan knew everything. The Underlord could stretch his web to a target miles away, if he was focused on a specific spot, but he saw everything within a hundred yards without even trying.

Cassias pushed the door open, took two steps on cloud through the bitter, cutting wind, and entered the repurposed barn.

Only slanting bars of moonlight cut through the shadows, but Cassias could see all eighteen dummies with his bloodline powers. An arm here, a slice of head there, a piece of a circle, but it was enough for him to fill in the gaps. As he moved, strands of his detection web swept through each of the dummies in turn. It was as though he could run his fingertips over everything in the room, slowly gaining a picture.

He finished in a few seconds, confirming what he'd suspected. Because he knew Eithan was listening, he shook his head and sighed.

“You're not trying to kill him?”

When he re-entered Sky's Mercy, he found Eithan standing at the control panel. “Of course I'm not,” the Underlord responded. “When a mother bird pushes a chick from the nest, is she trying to kill her child?”

“That's a Lowgold course,” Cassias said, his tone dry. “I trained on something similar until only a few years ago.”

“It should be similar indeed. I took the plans from your training room back in the main house.”

Cassias cast his web back over to the barn, sweeping his sensations through the dummies. It wasn't as quick or as detailed as it had been when he was standing an arm’s length away, but it was still thorough.

With very little surprise, he realized Eithan was telling the truth: the two courses were virtually identical. It would be a relief if he ever caught the man in a lie instead of a half-truth, bluff, or exaggeration.

“You're teaching a child to wrestle by locking him in a closet with a wolf,” Cassias said. His tone straddled the line between polite subordinate and stern caretaker.

He had gotten to know Lindon over the last few weeks—the boy was earnest, quick, and almost entirely ignorant about the sacred arts. Cassias didn’t want to see him hurt.

Someone had raised him completely disconnected from the real world, and he needed a thorough, solid education. It would take years to prepare him with all the knowledge he needed to face society, especially as a representative of the Arelius family. Their enemies would tear him apart, if he weren’t ready.

Eithan seemed determined to cram those skills into him in a matter of months. That wouldn't help him or stretch him; it would burn him up like dry tinder.

“Jai Long is dangerous, even for a Highgold. Best to start Lindon on something as safe as a wolf, wouldn't you say?” Eithan was sitting on the control panel, reading his book again as the night sky stretched out the windows behind him. He didn’t even bother to face the glass.

“You really want him to fight against a former Jai clan heir? Still?” It wasn’t technically proper to question the Underlord, not even in private, but Eithan had never been one to lean on propriety. Besides, dealing with him was a trial that would stretch anyone’s manners.

Eithan flipped a page. “You've been watching Lindon and Yerin both. What do you think?”

“Yerin is a treasure vault,” Cassias said immediately. “I can't imagine completing a Lowgold training course using a Goldsign like hers, but she almost has it. Her madra is incredibly stable if she really reached Lowgold only a few months ago, and at this rate she could reach Highgold inside a year. She was born for the sword arts.”

“Not just born,” Eithan said. “Made. And Lindon?”

“He's...talented,” Cassias said hesitantly. In truth, he didn't know what to make of Lindon's ability. His mind and attitude were admirable enough, but his spirit...

He had two half-sized cores filled with Iron-quality pure madra, a few very interesting trinkets in his pack that Cassias had respected his privacy enough to ignore, and an Iron body that was far beyond his capacity to support.

He knew Eithan must have led Lindon to that particular Iron body, but he didn't know why. Lindon having to carry that body was like a child trying to control an Underlord's weapon; they might be able to flail it around a little, but in the end, it would do more damage to them than to anyone else.

“He's a mess,” Eithan said, flipping another page.

“I wouldn't put it quite like that,” Cassias said, but he was relieved he hadn't had to spell it out.

“His Bloodforged Iron body takes too much madra to sustain, and he's weak as it is. No matter how physically resilient he becomes, he's no more than half a sacred artist.” Eithan looked over his shoulder and showed Cassias a grin. “Have I hit the mark?”

Cassias lowered his voice. They were still all sleeping, but this was the sort of subject matter that should be discussed discreetly. “Why train him, then? The branch heads will worship you for bringing home the Sage’s apprentice. You don’t need a second disciple. And I can name you a dozen sacred artists Lindon’s age with twice his skill.”

Eithan hopped down, tossing his book onto the control panel. He walked over and threw an arm across Cassias' shoulder. Then he turned so they were both looking out over the night.

“Imagine with me, will you?” Eithan extended his free hand as though presenting a glorious future. “Imagine if he could restore each of those cores to full size and raise them to Lowgold. With pure madra in one, he'd be a unique resource, and he could still follow a combat Path in the other. That’s two full cores, so he could bring out the full capabilities of the Bloodforged body with energy to spare.”

“It’s a delightful vision,” Cassias said. “He would throw the Lowgold rankings into chaos. In ten or fifteen years, he could grow into a pillar of our Arelius family, and follow me and Jing to the top of the Truegolds.”

Cassias shrugged out of Eithan's arm and turned to look him in the eye. “But he won't be ready in a year. Even if he were, he would be no match for the Jai clan exile.”

Eithan's eyes sparkled. “But you haven't heard about his second Path.”

When Eithan told him, Cassias was speechless for a moment. After a pause, he forced himself to start breathing. The Underlord was just needling him again, to watch him squirm.

“Please don’t worry me like that,” he said at last. “I almost believed you.”

“Then you were almost correct.”

The horrifying possibilities of Eithan’s plan started to creep into Cassias’ mind one by one, but he refused to consider them. “He’s not born of the Blackflame line. He couldn’t handle the madra.”

“Didn’t you wonder why I’d given him a top-grade Bloodforged Iron body?”

“But you can’t get him the aura though, surely, unless you’ve tucked a dragon away…in the…”

He trailed off. Horror dawned on him as he realized where they were going.

Eithan beamed. “Serpent’s Grave. We’re heading right into the dragon’s mouth, as it were.”

…that might work.

Heavens help him, but that might actually work.

“No,” Cassias said, still refusing to acknowledge the truth. “The branch heads will never allow it. The Skysworn will never allow it. The Emperor will never allow it!”

“There’s an old saying about asking forgiveness rather than permission,” Eithan said, “but the essence of it is, ‘I’m going to do what I want.’”

Cassias had given up his spot in the family for Eithan. He’d suffered for Eithan’s mistakes, taken the heat of the family’s anger over Eithan’s childish whims, and hauled his family halfway across the Empire to Serpent’s Grave…and then left them again, because Eithan had wandered off.

But even he had limits.

His shouts woke Fisher Gesha. She made it to the top of the stairs to see the Underlord with a hand over Cassias' mouth, stopping him from calling out to Lindon.

Cassias hadn’t even gotten a chance to draw his sword; Eithan had seen every movement coming, broken his techniques before they formed, broken his stance, and broken the flow of his madra. It had taken him no more effort than scooping up a kitten.

Cassias stopped struggling, his shoulders slumped. There was no standing against an Underlord.

As Lindon and the entire Arelius family would soon realize.

* * *

It was their last day before landing in the Blackflame Empire, and Lindon was up early to train. Not earlier than Yerin, who was sitting with legs crossed outside the circle of wooden dummies at dawn, already cycling.

And now, this was to be his final attempt at the eighteen-man course before landing in Serpent's Grave. He slipped the parasite ring into his pocket and cycled his madra, standing in front of the first dummy.

He glanced at Yerin so that she would start counting. She nodded. “Run it.”

Lindon moved with a speed born of habit, striking at the targets on the right arm, torso, left arm. Without looking, he raised his forearm to block the counterstrike.

He could hear the bone creak.

The sudden pain was a flash of lightning down his arm, but he'd already moved to the second dummy. The injury cooled just as quickly, his Bloodforged Iron body drawing his madra directly to fuel his recovery.

It had been impossible for him to complete the course. Even if he'd executed each step perfectly, every hit that landed on him took too much of his madra. He'd asked if he could stop the drain, and Eithan had looked at him as though he were crazy. “Can you stop your body from healing? No. That's what bodies do. Yours just does it a little too well.”

With two Iron cores and three weeks of training under the Heaven and Earth Purification Wheel, he could barely, just barely, finish the eighteenth dummy.

This run went smoothly all the way up to number sixteen, where he placed his foot too wide and didn't have the footing to take the overhead blow. He blocked with both arms crossed, but he was supposed to stay on his feet. This time, thanks to his misstep, he went down to a knee.

He couldn't allow his last attempt to end in a failure.

Lindon slammed the heel of his hand into the dummy's chin, pushing an Empty Palm through the bottom of the circle and into the center. The madra penetrated, even though the hit had been off-center, and the circle glowed.

He lunged for the next dummy, clearing the last two without incident.

As soon as the last bell rung and the last light shone, he draped himself over the wooden frame, panting and sweating. Both his cores were weak and empty, and it would take him half an hour to refill them even under the effects of the pill.

But that wasn't the important part. He looked to Yerin expectantly.

“Twenty-one, by my count.” She chuckled at his relief as he sagged off the dummy, collapsing to the floor. “That's more than nothing. I'd have been proud of that at Iron.”

“I don’t believe you had a course like this when you were Iron,” Lindon said, lying on his back and staring up at the ceiling.

“No, I had to fight half a dozen starving wolves with a shaving-razor.” She sighed and moved into the center of the ring. “You got a count going?”

He hesitated. “Yerin, we're already there. I don’t mean to suggest anything...”

“Start the count,” she said, steel in her voice.

He started counting.

She leaned into the first dummy, her Goldsign blurring silver. First target green, second target blue, third target white. One-two-three and she was onto the next one. Even with just the bladed arm, she was faster than Lindon.

Yerin complained that she couldn't make the Goldsign do what she wanted it to. Over and over she said that, until Lindon was sick of hearing it. To him, she always looked in complete control.

She reached the ninth dummy in seven seconds, and this one had a target low in the abdomen—where the core would be, in any sacred artist but Lindon—one in the chest, and one in the center of its head. It was one of Lindon's favorites, because it only moved its arms defensively; it never hit him back.

Yerin struck the lowest circle easily, the second a little slow, and her third blow was knocked aside by a wooden hand.

All the previous eight dummies, which had remained lit until then, dimmed slowly as though the light leaked out of them.

She stood there panting, glaring at her wooden enemy, and Lindon thought the red rope around her waist had brightened from dark red to the pure crimson of fresh blood.

Finally, she screamed, her Goldsign striking forward and taking the dummy's head.

She didn't look at Lindon or excuse herself, dropping to the floor right there and beginning to cycle. Her cheeks and throat were flushed with anger, her scars standing out in stark contrast to her red skin.

Lindon was already walking to a box in the corner, which was filled with replacement heads. They'd picked up some extra wood on one of their landings, and every time Fisher Gesha said he needed practical experience, he hollowed one out and filled it with the simple scripts and basic constructs the dummies needed to function.

The outer scripts and core constructs of each dummy were all unique, but the heads were the same, which fortunately made them easy to replace.

He screwed it on—the original wood was lighter than the replacement, and he would need to carve a target circle onto it. He pulled out a short-bladed knife to start, but Eithan threw open the door.

“Twenty-one seconds is fairly good,” Eithan said with a broad smile. “Now, if you'd gotten below twenty seconds, then you'd have done something.”

Lindon bowed, accepting what little compliment there was. After weeks of working with Eithan, he'd started to realize exactly how high the Underlord's standards were. If he used a technique to blow a hole in the moon, Eithan would ask why he hadn't taken care of the sun, too.

“As for you, Yerin...” She didn't open her eyes at Eithan's words, apparently still cycling, but Lindon was sure she was listening. He'd gotten to know her better over the last few weeks too.

“...you're still trying to get your Remnant to guide you. You’re making things harder for yourself.”

“He’s talking to me,” Yerin said stubbornly, eyes still closed. “If I could hear him clear, I’d be two stages stronger by now.”

Eithan’s smile was filled with pity, as though he looked down on a dying old woman. “No will of your master remains in the Remnant. You’re hearing impressions that echo from his remaining memories.”

“It’s him, so I’m listening.”

“The easiest way to reach Highgold is to break down your Remnant for power. You are staring at a feast from afar while wondering why you’re so hungry. All other paths to Highgold are—”

She bounded to her feet, cutting him off. “I’m not going to bury his voice. You know how much of his teaching I’d be giving up? You think you can make up for that? Are you a Sage?”

“If only I were,” Eithan said calmly. “It would solve many of my problems.”

She stepped forward, glaring up at his chin. “A Sage’s Remnant can do things you can’t imagine. I’m telling you, he’s in there, and he’ll get me to Highgold in a snap.”

Eithan placed two fingers on her forehead and slowly pushed her back until she was standing an arm’s length away. “The path from Lowgold to Highgold is learning to use more than the excess energy your Remnant provides you. You normally break down the Remnant itself for power, digesting its skills and its madra. There are other ways past Lowgold, certainly, but this is the most direct path.”

Her face reddened even further, her Goldsign drew back as though to strike, but Eithan continued with his tone and smile still friendly. “We have time. Perhaps you’ll choose to feed on your master’s Remnant, or perhaps you’ll find another way. Or you could do neither, and Lindon and I will leave you behind.”

Lindon flinched. He had been perfectly happy to stay out of that conversation. For the past four weeks, Yerin had ranted about Eithan’s instruction and how he didn’t understand her master like she did.

Eithan clapped his hands together. “All right! Let's leave your failures and inadequacies aside for the moment. Even now, we are arriving at our destination. You should clean yourselves and join me in the sitting-room, because I suspect you'll want to see this.”

Eithan left Lindon and Yerin behind, which suspended them in silence as they toweled off and packed up.

“It's less than easy to keep a Remnant under control,” Yerin said after two minutes of quiet.

“I can't even imagine,” Lindon said honestly. Someday he would, though. He looked forward to it.

“I am trying. My master knows how to reach Highgold without cracking into his Remnant, I just need to hear what he’s telling me.”

Sometimes Yerin spoke like this when she needed to bounce ideas off Lindon, even when he had no clue what she was talking about. He usually nodded and let her work it out aloud.

But he could tell the difference between needing a sounding board and needing encouragement.

“You're pushing against Highgold, and you're complaining that it's too slow?” Lindon asked, exaggerating his surprise. “You're disappointed because you're not a Highgold by...sixteen summers? Seventeen?”

She shrugged. “Thereabouts. The count gets a little thrown off for a while.”

“And you’re not just a Gold! You were hand-selected by the Sword Sage himself! Compared to Eithan…” He hesitated, because he wasn’t sure how powerful the Sword Sage was. He’d never heard of the man until Suriel had mentioned him as Yerin’s master.

“He was much stronger than an Underlord,” she said quietly.

“Underlords and Sages are fighting over you. It wasn’t until this year that I could push an eight-year-old Copper off his feet, while you could carve your way through a mountain with a dull spoon.”

“I have more than one reason why I can’t just drift merrily along,” she said, but a smile had started to creep onto her face. “You don't have to polish me up, you know. I'm just venting smoke.”

Lindon tucked the parasite ring into his pack, making sure all the pockets were closed and fastened before he hoisted it onto his shoulder. “I'm not ‘polishing’ anything. The heavens opened up and showed me visions of all the greatest people on the planet, people who can wrestle dragons and strike down armies. Then they brought me to you. You’re all so far above me you might as well be stars.”

The words hung in the air for a moment before he heard them, and then some heat rose into his cheeks. He didn't look away, though.

Yerin gave him a lopsided smile, and this one sunk into his memory: her smile, the thin scars standing out against her skin, her black hair mussed from training so it didn’t look straight anymore.

“That has a sweet sound to it, now you've said it,” she said at last. The instant passed, and she turned to open the door onto the screaming wind. “Heavens never came down to show me anything, and that's the truth.”

* * *

Eithan stopped in his tracks even as the front windows filled with crags of black stone: Shiryu Mountain, the peak where the last of the dragons had gone to die. He'd intended to leave the children to their little moment—they would need to trust each other even more than they trusted him, and trust was always built on small, personal moments—but a phrase caught his ear, carried to him on threads of power.

The heavens opened up and showed me...

He tended to smile by default, but now his grin stretched his lips to the breaking point. He'd wondered. From the first glimpse of that little glass ball in Lindon's pocket, the one with the steady blue flame, he'd wondered. Some of the boy's comments, some of his actions, had made him more and more certain.

And now...now he knew.

The heavens opened up...

Very interesting indeed.

8

With Cassias actively working at the control panel and Eithan standing proudly in front of the windows, Lindon and Yerin looked down over the city of Serpent's Grave.

“This,” Eithan announced, “is the birthplace of the Blackflame Empire. The imperial capital has moved over time, and moved again, but here is where it all began: where the last of the dragons who once ruled this land were finally brought down.”

“Dragons?” Yerin asked, unsettled.

“That's where the empire got its name. After the dragons were destroyed, a certain family found a source of their power, ruling for centuries like dragons themselves. That source lies beneath us, although of course it's been all but tapped out over the generations.”

Lindon had been raised to believe dragons were myths—or if they did exist, only in the heavens. But Suriel had shown him a dragon beneath the sea.

And besides, something had left all those bones.

The black mountain beneath them rose from a desert like the crest of a dark, frozen wave. A vast spine, yellowed with age, twisted and curled around the rock, with a serpentine skull resting at the mountain's foot.

It was the most complete skeleton in Serpent's Grave, but far from the only one. A claw here, a pile of sharpened fangs there. And Sky's Mercy had yet to begin its descent—if he could see them from here, what would they look like on the ground?

“Serpent's Grave,” Lindon said aloud, and Eithan pointed to him.

“Well named, isn't it? I have to applaud the empire’s straightforward naming sense.”

The floor fell out from Lindon’s feet.

He caught himself on the edge of a table, which was bolted to the floor, and sank into one of the chairs. He'd discovered over the course of the journey that it was best to take a descent sitting down.

Yerin joined him, and Cassias was braced against the control panel with eyes locked on his landing, but Eithan stood with his hands in the pockets of his red-and-gold outer robe. His head was almost pressed against the glass, which reflected his smile.

As they fell lower, Lindon started to make out details among the bones. Dark spots in the bones resolved into holes—windows and doors, through which people streamed. The streets wound around the biggest bones but cut through others, which had been hollowed out or stacked together to make buildings.

Lindon leaned forward in his seat. Over the years, these people had carved a city into a dragon's graveyard. A long, straight bone, sticking out of the earth, was covered in windows and ringed with stairs. A fractured skull had a huge gong mounted in the eye socket. Four claws reached out of the ground with man-sized lanterns dangling from their tips.

The city had even crawled up the mountain, so that the black stone bristled with towers. More bones rose like a thorny crown from the mountain’s peak, with palaces nestled between its spikes.

Lindon was overwhelmed at the sight of it all. Sacred Valley had what they called towns and cities, but this city dwarfed his imagination. Even leaving aside the size, he had never heard so much as a legend about a city of dragon’s bone.

This was the world Suriel had opened for him. His myths didn’t even come close.

Sky's Mercy was circling one location: a rib cage, with the gaps between each rib closed by pale stone and mortar. A pair of banners—blue and black and white—flew from the highest peaks, proudly displaying the Arelius crest. Cassias descended until they were almost on top of the bones, then drifted to the end closest to the mountain.

Massive greenhouses stretched in rows behind the buildings, their glass roofs letting in sunlight and allowing Lindon to see the fields of crops growing inside. Scripts shone along the outside walls, and rain fell from one of the ceilings.

The sacred artists here had advanced beyond the need to live off the land. They had bottled up their farmland and taken it with them.

One plot with enough space to hold another enclosed farm had been left empty, little more than a wide square of reddish dirt. Cassias steered them until they floated over that square, and slowly edged down the last few feet.

Eithan turned from the window and walked to the door, hair streaming behind him. “I don't know about you,” he said, “but I'm ready to get to work.”

Cassias left the controls, running a hand through his yellow curls. He had worn his best today, and he smoothed every crease in his shirt as though worried about leaving the slightest imperfection.

Lindon was wearing a sacred artist’s robe in the Arelius colors, but it was weathered from the trip. He wondered if he should have asked for something more presentable, but Yerin was wearing the same tattered black she always did, and she didn’t seem concerned.

Eithan threw open the door, revealing a hundred people arranged in ten rows of ten, all clad in blue with the black crescent on their backs. Lindon had a very good view of their backs, as they had all prostrated themselves on the ground with their heads pressed against the reddish dirt.

“The Arelius family greets the Patriarch,” they shouted, in a unified voice that shook the ground.

Yerin winced and knuckled her ear. “Wouldn’t have turned down a warning.”

“Patriarch?” Lindon repeated. Eithan heard him and turned.

“Oh, yes, I’m the head of the family. I expected you to have guessed that by now.”

Cassias stepped in front of Eithan, his steel bracer Goldsign gleaming in the sun. “Number one, step forward and report.”

The leftmost servant in the front row, a heavyset woman in her middle years, stepped up and bowed to the Patriarch.

Even she was dressed for a festival. Polished blue-and-silver combs held back her gray-streaked hair, her servant’s uniform looked perfectly new, and rings glistened on her fingers.

Lindon first thought that even the servants lived like royalty here, but he supposed the Underlord’s arrival was a big day. Perhaps this was like an audience with a king.

She didn’t make her report in front of everyone, as Lindon had expected. Instead, she moved to whisper in Cassias’ ear. After a moment, Cassias turned to address Eithan in a normal tone.

“Since I have been gone, our misfortune has multiplied. Our fourth-ranked crew of lamplighters working on the mountain have returned with severe burns. They refuse to implicate anyone, but they were working on the peak, just outside the palaces of the Jai clan.”

Eithan dipped his head, and the servant woman continued whispering in Cassias’ ear.

Lindon exchanged glances with Yerin. The whispering was pointless. Eithan could hear everything, and could probably read a list of issues pinned against a wall halfway across the city. The Underlord gave no indication that this bothered him, or was in any way unusual.

He nodded through a few more reports before Cassias said, “We’ve recently received reports indicating a natural spirit has formed in the sewer.”

Eithan looked over in surprise, though he must have heard the story at the same time Cassias did. “Have we let the sewers back up so badly, then?”

“It’s a life spirit. Apparently the Jai clan had a mishap some weeks back, when their refiners dumped failed elixirs into the same chamber where the Soulsmiths disposed of their dead matter. It was an…unexpected reaction.”

Cassias’ tone told Lindon exactly how ‘unexpected’ it had been, but Eithan only nodded again. “Two and a half miles east,” the Underlord said. “Just south of the Sandstorm Quarter, directly beneath the fountain shaped like a three-headed dragon.”

Cassias turned to the rows of kneeling servants. “Ninety-nine and one hundred,” he said. The two people in the back rose to their feet, bowed, and then scurried off.

The woman whispered again. “The paint was beginning to chip outside the Jai clan’s second-ranked auction house,” Cassias reported. “We repainted overnight, but the new coat was scraped and marred in the morning. The Jai clan reported our painters, but it was our top-ranked crew.”

Someone tugged on Lindon’s sleeve, and he leaned down to hear what Fisher Gesha had to say. Yerin leaned in next to them, listening.

“You’ve noticed the ranks, hm? Everything here in the proper Blackflame Empire has its place, numbered and categorized. You always know which restaurant is the best, which public lavatory is the worst, which servant is more useful than another. Everything they do here is about climbing one number higher, you see?”

Yerin huddled closer. “That’s a twisty way of doing it.”

Gesha hit Lindon on the side of the head. “The opposite of twisty, isn’t it? Everything’s clearly laid out. Higher-ranked businesses can charge more, the highest-ranked disciples get the best resources, and the top families get more support from the empire.”

“What did you mean the proper Blackflame Empire?” Lindon asked. “And why did you hit me?”

Gesha hit him again. “Blackflame Empire covers more land than you think. The Emperor holds the title to the Desolate Wilds, only there’s nothing he wants out there, so he leaves us to ourselves. The empire stretches past the mountain range to the west of us, but I couldn’t tell you just how far, could I?”

Lindon had grown up in the mountain range to the west of the Desolate Wilds, and he could say with confidence that no one there had heard of the Blackflame Empire. It was widely accepted that the land outside Sacred Valley was untamed and barbaric.

Eithan joined their conversation, speaking out one side of his mouth. “The Emperor hasn’t been able to hold on to the full scope of its territory for two generations now, though don’t let the imperial clan hear you spreading that around. As for the ranking, I’m proud to say that we are the first of the major servant families, subject only to the great clans of the empire. I myself am considered the eleventh strongest of the Underlords.” He flashed a smile. “But I’m first in charm!”

Lindon wondered if charm was actually ranked.

Cassias discreetly elbowed Eithan, concluding his report with, “Due to a series of anonymous reports, the Skysworn are currently investigating us for negligence. The Jai clan have publicly proposed that the Redflower family supervise sanitation, with our employees given to their authority. The Redflowers have repeatedly declined.”

Eithan straightened himself up and looked over the servants. “I have witnessed the business of the family, and let it be known that I am more than satisfied with our performance. The inner and outer members of the family have honored our name, and our employees have behaved with dedication and loyalty. I could not be more pleased with how this family has conducted itself in my absence.”

Cassias stared wide-eyed at Eithan as though he’d never seen him before. The servants all reacted differently: some bowed lower, some raised their heads to gaze on the Underlord, and others shouted loyalty to the Arelius family or insults to the Jai clan.

“We thank you for the honor, Underlord,” Cassias said, turning to the servants. “Dismissed.”

The servants shouted in unison once more: “The Arelius family thanks the Patriarch.” Their voices were surely Enforced, judging by how the shouts made the nearby sand shake. This time, Lindon was prepared for the noise, and he cycled madra to protect his ears.

Though they were dismissed, they stayed on their knees waiting for the Underlord and his entourage to leave. Eithan strode through the rows of prostrate figures, Cassias keeping pace beside him. He beckoned Yerin and Lindon to join them, so Lindon hitched his pack up on his shoulders and followed, his red Thousand-Mile Cloud drifting along behind. Yerin walked with him, and Fisher Gesha scurried behind on her spider legs.

“You conducted yourself with admirable dignity back there,” Cassias said to Eithan, as they passed into the giant rib cage. The ceiling between the ribs was painted in murals of a thousand colors, showing sacred artists locked in battle with dragons. The ribs themselves were etched with delicate scripts, though none of them were lit.

Eithan smoothed back his long hair as he walked. “They didn’t need a friend today, they needed to know I would solve their problems. I had to inspire confidence.”

Cassias looked him up and down. “It’s like I’ve never met you.”

“It was nothing much, but feel free to shower me with praise.”

They continued chatting even as they entered a vast chamber, but Lindon was absorbed by the noise and motion of the Arelius family in action. Workers in blue-and-black scurried here and there—some of them carrying brooms, others buckets. Some wore blood-spattered aprons, others carried sacks over their shoulders. A fireplace big enough to burn wagons took up a chunk of one wall, with a chimney carved into the bone. Servants separated piles of trash and tossed pieces into the flames.

Half of that same wall was taken up by a long desk with six smiling people behind it, all wearing Arelius badges on their chests. Workers lined up in front of them, only to be pointed in a certain direction; it must be where they received their assignments.

A collection of maps were tacked against the opposite wall, some freshly painted, others yellowed with age. Workers with white signs painted on their uniforms—Lindon took them to be leaders of some kind—looked at the maps and compared them to lists in their hands.

It all reminded Lindon of the bustle surrounding the construction of the Seven-Year Festival, but on another scale entirely. Instead of a hundred Wei clan members working on a dozen jobs over a huge arena, here were a thousand employees of the Arelius family packed into a single room while carrying out hundreds of tasks. This was what they did every day.

Yerin was gripping the sheath of her sword, not its hilt, and eyeing every person they passed. “Is it always this...noisy in here?”

Cassias heard her and turned, walking backwards and holding a hand on the hilt of his thin saber. He leaned the weapon to the side, moving the sheath out of the way of a passing servant without looking. “The empire prides itself on its appearance, and we are the ones who keep it beautiful. We must stay organized. This is only the seventh largest city in the empire, so there are only four central facilities like this one. In Blackflame City itself, there are a dozen, all bigger and busier than what you see around you.”

They passed out of the bustling room and into the sun again, which glared at them over the head of a pale stone statue that must have been ninety feet tall. It was rounded and smooth with age, but it depicted a figure with wild hair and torn clothes, eyes furious and teeth bared in a snarl. The statue had a dagger raised as though to strike.

It seemed like an odd likeness to carve outside a janitor's headquarters, but before Lindon could say as much, Eithan pointed to it.

“The family's original Patriarch,” he said. “There are legends about him all over the world. Serpent's Grave was one of the first outposts of the Arelius family on this continent. It isn't the headquarters anymore, even in the Blackflame Empire—they've moved to the capital city, to stay close to power—but everyone gathers here once every ten years.”

Cassias sighed. “Though that tradition may also be lost to time.”

Eithan's smile dimmed. “Yes, well...we'll see in four more years, won't we?”

They walked until they reached the base of the spiraling bone tower Lindon had seen in the distance. Cassias abruptly stopped, polishing the silver bracer on his arm with the corner of his sleeve—it was his Goldsign, but the man cared for it like jewelry. He adjusted his collar, brushed dirt from his pants, checked his sword in its silver sheath, and looked at his reflection in the bracer.

“You look almost as good as I do,” Eithan said, waving him on. “Go on. I can handle family business at least as well as you can.”

Cassias gave him a doubtful look, but still hurried into the tower.

“His wife and son are in there,” Eithan said, which fired Lindon’s imagination. Cassias had mentioned his wife half a dozen times over the journey here, calling her the strongest Highgold in the empire, but Lindon had taken that as the praise of a husband.

Now that he knew they rated everything, he wondered if maybe she was the strongest Highgold in the Blackflame Empire. And if that were true, where did Cassias rank?

“…so he will be distracted for at least a day or two,” Eithan continued. “That’s enough about the family business, let’s get to what really matters.”

The doors to the tower swung back open, and Cassias stuck his head out. “I heard that.”

Lindon wondered, not for the first time, if there were some way to get the powers of the Arelius bloodline for himself. Cassias had told him no, he had to be born into the family, but Lindon didn’t stop wondering.

Eithan must have heard Cassias, but he didn’t turn back, guiding their group away from the tower and back toward the main building. “Number one-thirteen,” he said, and a man separated himself from the crowd of blue-clad servants around them, going to his knees before the Underlord.

“I want you to prepare Underground Chamber Number Three for entry. Also, take Fisher Gesha to the Soulsmith quarters.” He ushered Gesha forward, and she scuttled up to join the servant. Her coffin-sized wooden chest was strapped to her back, dwarfing her, but she carried it as though it were hollow.

“Fisher Gesha is an honored guest from the Desolate Wilds,” Eithan said, and the servant glanced up in evident surprise. “However,” Eithan continued, “she is to be treated as a guest from anywhere else.”

Servant One-Thirteen bowed without a word, letting the Underlord and the rest sweep past him. Fisher Gesha nodded to Lindon, and he saluted her back, fists pressed together.

Lindon had every reason to believe his Soulsmithing lessons were to continue, but separating from a friendly face in this strange city still made him nervous.

Eithan glanced up at the sky, held a hand in the air for no reason that Lindon could tell, and then reversed direction. He took them back out to the base of the First Patriarch’s statue, putting one hand on Lindon’s shoulder and one hand on Yerin’s.

“Are we posing for a portrait?” Lindon asked, seeing no other reason why they should arrange themselves in front of a statue while Arelius servants streamed by.

“Not for a portrait, no,” Eithan said, and turned his smile on an old man walking through the crowd.

This man stood tall and straight, though he must have been at least eighty, his white hair flowing down his back. His white robes were intricate and flawless, and like every other set of clothes Lindon had seen since stepping off Sky’s Mercy, they seemed to have never encountered a single stain or speck of dust.

His face was clean-shaven, and he held his hands behind his back as he came to a stop in front of them. The wind snatched at his sleeves and the hem of his robe, but it didn’t touch his hair, which led Lindon to take a closer look.

The pale strands gleamed slightly in the light, and each hair seemed somehow thicker than normal, now that he looked closely. After a second of inspection, he realized what he was seeing: metal wire.

The Goldsign of the Jai clan.

“Jai Daishou!” Eithan said happily. “What brings you down the mountain on this fine autumn morning?”

Jai Daishou kept his gaze fixed on Eithan, never so much as glancing at Lindon or the servants streaming around him. “I was told you would arrive today, and I wanted to offer my greetings in person.”

“How generous of you! Please, allow me to introduce the two newest members of my family. This is Yerin, the top-ranked student of the outer family, and Lindon. The second-ranked.”

A feather-light touch brushed across Lindon’s spirit, and the old man’s wrinkles creased into a frown. “Second.”

“I ranked them myself! Lindon, Yerin, this is Jai Daishou, the seventh Underlord of the Blackflame Empire.”

“And Patriarch of the Jai clan,” Jai Daishou added, his frown deepening.

“Ah, that’s right. He is also the Patriarch of the third-ranked of the three great clans.” Eithan’s smile was sunny.

Jai Daishou examined the other Underlord for a long moment. “I don’t know if you’ve heard, but your family’s performance in the city has slipped while you’ve been gone. I can only imagine what it’s like over the rest of the empire, without your personal supervision to guide them.”

Lindon rubbed sweaty palms on the inside of his pocket, keeping his eyes down lest he attract the Jai Patriarch’s attention. Of all the things he had expected to happen when they landed, he had never imagined he would end up between two Underlords in conflict.

He flicked a glance at Yerin, but she was glaring at Jai Daishou openly, arms crossed and Goldsign quivering.

“I’m quite pleased with how the family performed in my absence,” Eithan said.

Jai Daishou’s attention briefly touched on Lindon and Yerin, and he let out a soft noise of disapproval. “An Underlord should have higher standards.”

“Really?” Eithan sounded baffled. “I’ve always thought my standards were too high. Well, let me know if the Arelius family can help you defend your territory in the upcoming days. Jai Long can be quite a threat…unless, of course, you intend to take action yourself.”

That sounded to Lindon like the only genuinely pleasant comment Eithan had made over the whole exchange, but Jai Daishou bristled as though Eithan had insulted his children. “The Highgolds of the Jai clan are more than capable of dealing with an exile.”

“I’m relieved to hear it! I knew you wouldn’t be forced into action by a single Highgold.” The Jai Underlord’s face darkened further, but Eithan laughed harder than Lindon thought was appropriate, eventually tapering off and wiping a tear from his eye. “Ah, it’s refreshing to have such a friendly conversation.”

Jai Daishou had the look of a man about to set a house on fire.

Eithan gave his opposite a shallow bow. “I know it’s been brief, but I appreciate you seeking an audience with me so quickly. When I have more time, I’ll be happy to pay your Jai clan a visit in return.”

He turned, dragging Yerin and Lindon with him, and started walking away before Jai Daishou had a chance to say anything. Lindon couldn’t stop himself from glancing back, to see how the enemy Underlord would take the insult.

The Jai Patriarch folded his hands behind his back again.

Then, suddenly, Lindon’s body weighed five times as much. Air rushed from his lungs as his knees slammed into the stone of the courtyard, his head bowing as though a giant palm pressed on his spine.

He gritted his teeth and spent all of his madra to Enforce his body. Even with his full strength, he only lifted his head a fraction.

It wasn’t just Lindon. Everyone was on the ground; children cried, splayed out on the stone. A wagon had dumped over, spilling garbage onto the street, and most people he could see were gasping for breath.

Yerin’s jaw was set, and she was very deliberately breathing in and out, but she was on her hands and knees just like he was. Even Eithan’s knees were bent, his hands held out for balance, his smile gone. The strain showed on his face.

Lindon couldn’t take a breath. His mouth gaped, but it was as though the air had turned to stone.

“I have done you honor by speaking to you in person,” Jai Daishou said calmly. “Don’t spit in my face, Eleven.”

Eithan raised his hands and pulled against the air, as though he were trying to pry open an invisible door. He strained for a long moment before, finally, something gave.

The pressure vanished. Lindon gulped down a deep breath. Eithan staggered to lean against the statue of the First Patriarch, red-faced and panting.

Jai Daishou’s lip twitched into the first stage of a smile. “You have had a long journey. When you recover, come see me, and I will grant you an audience.”

He departed, striding off through the courtyard at his own speed, paying no heed to the servants who scurried out of his way.

When Lindon had recovered himself, he looked to Eithan. In joining the Arelius family, he’d picked up their enemies and rivals as well, and Eithan might not be capable of protecting an Iron from significant threats. Maybe Lindon would be safer if he stayed further away from the Underlord.

But as soon as Jai Daishou rounded a corner far away, Eithan stopped breathing heavily. He straightened his back, smile returning to its place.

When he saw Lindon’s concern, he winked. “People here are all so concerned with high rankings. I’ve always felt that you get more done when you’re not in the spotlight, don’t you think?”

Yerin rolled her shoulder in its socket. “It’s too late to save face. You were hauling like a plow-horse.”

Eithan laughed. “I was, wasn’t I? Well, maybe I have provoked too strong of an opponent this time.” He didn’t sound too concerned about the possibility. Reaching into his pocket, he flipped Yerin something that looked like a wooden coin. “Yerin, have one of the servants direct you to the refinery. Show them that token, and ask them for a Purple Feather Elixir.”

She brightened immediately. “This will smooth my path to Highgold?”

“Your path to Highgold is very smooth, if only you would listen to me, but this will help you advance your madra base without tapping into your Remnant. Cycle as much as you can over the next three or four days, until the pill wears off.”

Yerin gripped the token in her fist and ran off without another word.

“What about me?” Lindon asked hopefully. He had received a dozen Four Corners Rotation Pills over the course of the journey, though their effects had begun to fade during the last week or two. But if Eithan had something more powerful in reserve, Lindon wanted a taste of it.

Eithan rubbed his hands together in apparent anticipation. “You and I, Lindon, are headed for my personal favorite room in the entire city: the Arelius family library.”

* * *

Jai Long hopped down from the back of his bat, sliding down its bristly gray-white fur to the ground. His boots crunched on sand.

All around him, the Sandvipers landed their own mounts. Gokren rode a bat just like his, which had been generously donated by the Jai clan, but the others traveled on Thousand-Mile Clouds of various colors, or flying constructs, or various treasures. Most of their equipment had followed them in a levitating cauldron big enough to stew five men, but it was lagging a day behind.

He ignored the rest of the group, heading straight to a white Thousand-Mile Cloud with a tent erected on it.

Inside, Jai Chen was struggling to sit upright. “Are we…stopping…already?” she asked, her voice soft but threaded with effort.

Jai Long grabbed her by the shoulder, helping her sit up. He wanted to unravel the red bandages around his head and speak to his sister face-to-face, but he needed Sandviper loyalty enough that he didn’t want to scare them off.

“We’re here,” he said, and she lit up. He scooped her out of the tent, pretending not to hear her protests that her hair wasn’t straight.

She had suffered the indignities of travel without protest, and now he carried her to look out over the desert. Into the sun, which rose behind a black mountain. At the city of dragon’s bone.

This was her first glance of Serpent’s Grave in almost ten years, and she covered her mouth and teared up at the sight. Their parents lived in the city somewhere, as did their brothers and sisters.

She smiled at him, wide and open and tinged with grief. Jai Long knew she was glad to be home, despite everything, even if the sight of her birthplace pierced her like a sword.

Behind his mask of bandages, he smiled too.

For very different reasons.

9

Lindon had spent much of the past five years working in the Wei clan archives. He was confident he knew what a library was supposed to look like.

But this room, located behind and beneath the bone tower that housed Cassias' family, was just a twenty-foot by twenty-foot square box. It had only one door, and all the walls were pale, yellowed bone. On the ceiling, a few scripted circles glowed with runelight, illuminating every corner.

A small altar of bone rose from the center of the room like an arm, with a claw cupping a ball the size of Lindon's fist. The ball was made of copper plates, and he thought he saw whirring flashes of color between the plates.

All in all, it was nothing like a library.

Eithan waited with hands on hips, clearly anticipating Lindon's reaction.

“Are the books...in the walls?” Lindon finally asked.

The Underlord clicked his tongue. “What are books but a mechanism to store knowledge? If we have something much more efficient available,” –Eithan picked up the copper ball— “then why would we need books?”

Lindon peered at the ball. It was a construct of some kind, obviously, but beyond that he couldn't guess. Maybe it would project words onto the wall—some of his mother's White Fox constructs could do as much, crafting images from illusions.

“This is the single most valuable object the entire Arelius family owns,” he said, spinning it on the tip of one finger. “Most of us aren’t aware of that, but it's true. We primarily use the powers of our bloodline to find areas that need cleaning or maintenance, but as an...unintentional side effect...we also tend to collect other information.”

He tossed the ball from hand to hand. “All of that information pertinent to the sacred arts—including secrets about the Paths of our rivals—is stored in here. Some of it also gets copied into dream tablets, scrolls, books, and so forth, but everything goes here.”

That was intriguing. If they could study the sacred arts of their enemies, they could walk into any battle with the upper hand. If Jai Long's sacred arts were in there...

“How do we get it out?” Lindon asked.

“Well, first, you have to be a blood member of the Arelius family.” Eithan continued tossing the ball in his left hand and touched the right against his chest. “Fortunately for you, I am. The original Patriarch left this treasure for his descendants, and they have learned from it and added to it one generation at a time.”

“That's incredible. Truly, it's a treasure that I'm honored even to lay my eyes on. But how do we get it—”

Eithan didn't do anything Lindon could see, but the copper plates slowly pushed out from the center of the ball. A light flashed red.

And suddenly a featureless, crimson man stood in the center of the room.

It looked like a Remnant left behind by one of the wooden training dummies: a head without a face, body slender and unremarkable, limbs lifeless and smooth. It was solid red, without details or distinguishing marks.

“Your Path of Twin Stars interests me,” Eithan said, spinning the expanded ball in one hand. He muttered something to the orb, and it flashed again.

The red man came to life, crouching on the balls of its feet and raising both hands. It pivoted, driving one hand forward and low, and a pulse of barely-visible madra extended from the blow. An Empty Palm.

Lindon stared at the scarlet mannequin hard enough to burn a hole through it. Never mind looking at his enemy's abilities—if he could study his own techniques like this, watching them from the outside in...how much could he learn? He could perfect his every movement.

“There are possibilities for the Path of Twin Stars in the future,” Eithan said. “Pure madra is rare enough that it has many advantages, which you've already realized...but it also has quite a few disadvantages.”

Another flash, and this time a green man appeared, its hands wreathed in flame. The first figure, the red one, stepped forward to deliver an Empty Palm to its opponent's core...

...and the green figure grabbed it by the face with burning hands. The scarlet head winked out, leaving the red man with bare shoulders.

“As a Path, it has remarkable utility, but it leaves you practically defenseless,” Eithan went on. The copper ball flashed red, and the red man stood—whole and alone—in the center of the room once again. “It also happens to be slow to advance, since you can't take in aura while cycling. You must rely on purifying your own madra and increasing it with external factors. Elixirs and such.”

Eithan leaned against the wall, smiling, the ball tucked under one arm. “So...I know you're aware of these problems, and you've thought of some possible solutions. What are your thoughts?”

Lindon had assumed Eithan was heading somewhere, and he was still fascinated by the possibilities of the red man and the copper ball. The question left him flat-footed.

“I know I need to develop more techniques, so...if you have some pure madra techniques in there...”

“That's a good line of thinking, and we should come back to that in the future. But we have roughly ten to eleven months before you have to fight Jai Long.” Eithan shrugged. “Let's call it ten, to leave some margin for error. Ten months, and you will fight someone so much stronger than you that he may as well be a living dragon, as far as you're concerned. What do you do about that?”

“I need a second Path,” Lindon said immediately. “It was one of my first ideas for my second core: you leave one pure, and fill the other with another aspect of madra. But I'm not sure if I can—”

“It's not perfect,” Eithan interrupted. “Everyone thinks of learning a second Path at some point, though usually they want to learn another set of techniques compatible with the madra they've already cultivated. You know why that rarely works, don't you?”

“There's only so much time in the day,” Lindon said. “And only so many resources you can dedicate to advancement. Instead of ending up twice as powerful, you end up half as skilled in two areas.”

“That's all true,” Eithan said. “But?”

“But...it's difficult to find someone to train you in two different Paths?”

“That's also true, but it’s not what I was getting at. You've explained why learning two Paths is difficult...but it isn't impossible. It can be done.”

Lindon searched Eithan's face, looking for signs that this was a joke, or a trick, or a setup of some kind. “How?”

“Oh, it's just as you said.” He waved the copper ball lazily. “You need to work twice as hard, or spend twice as much time, or have access to twice as many resources, or preferably all three. But I think learning another Path is exactly what you need to do.”

The ball flashed, and the green man showed back up, its fists once again surrounded by flame. But this time, the red man took a defensive pose, hands up and protecting its body.

“The Path of Twin Stars has plenty of room to grow,” Eithan said, and as the green man drove its fiery fists forward, the red man caught both burning hands in its own.

The fire went out.

The red man followed with a kick to the lower abdomen, the air rippled with colorless madra, and the green man staggered.

That had looked like an Empty Palm executed through a kick. Lindon had tried that on the dummy targets, but his control over his own madra wasn't anywhere close to good enough to execute something like that.

And how could pure madra cancel techniques?

“Would you show that again?” Lindon asked, but both figures vanished. The red man returned to the center of the room a moment later, blank and still.

“You can't take your Path forward until you learn the basics of the sacred arts,” Eithan said. “Learn how other Paths work first, and carry those lessons over to the Path of Twin Stars.”

Lindon moved his gaze from the motionless red man to Eithan. The Underlord seemed to be saying that he could start from step one with a brand new Path and fight Jai Long…in ten months.

Which even Lindon thought was absurd.

“Forgiveness. That sounds too good to be true.”

Eithan's smile gleamed. “It's not impossible.”

Lindon took a deep breath, his mind whirling with possibilities. “I’ll need to spend all my time cycling. Will I have time to learn the techniques properly? Ah, before that, what Path should I learn?”

“That's up to you.”

He should have expected Eithan to keep stringing him along, but he didn't even know how to respond. How many Paths were out there? Which could he learn?

His first thought was the Path of the White Fox, but he didn't know if even the Arelius family would have information on Sacred Valley. Or if illusions could defeat Jai Long at all.

“I have many plans,” Eithan said, “and many ideas. But I've long believed that it's better for someone to choose their own direction and then accept guidance than to be pushed where I want them to go. Now, I'm willing to show you any sort of Path you like...but I wait for your direction. The world of sacred arts lies open to you. What Path would you like to see?”

“Jai Long's,” Lindon said immediately.

Eithan nodded. “Good choice.”

The copper plates around the ball spun, and suddenly white light was running in loops through the center of the red man's belly and chest. Lindon could see it as though the figure's flesh had become transparent, and he recognized the patterns: madra channels. It was using an Enforcer technique.

A moment later, straight lines formed on red skin, sliding from the core out to the limbs.

“You're fighting Jai Long,” Eithan said. “He was trained in the Path of the Stellar Spear, the signature Path of his clan.”

The red man extended one hand, and a red spear fell into its hand. A thrust drove the spear forward, then swept it to the side, fighting an invisible opponent. Spinning the spear, the man moved faster and faster, occasionally blasting a river of white light that splashed harmlessly against the bone wall. As he fought, needles of that same white madra formed over his shoulder, shooting off as soon as they were completed.

An Enforcer technique for speed, a Striker technique to attack, and a Forger technique to defend and cover its movements.

“However, he deviated by bonding a Remnant with subtly different aspects. Now...” The pattern on the scarlet skin changed from straight lines to twisting, serpentine lines. The figure spun its spear just like before, but the spearhead left a trail of white light that hung in the air and came to life.

Like a pale Remnant, the serpent of Forged madra turned to Lindon and opened its jaws in a silent hiss.

The red man traced curls of light through the room, like a man painting on a canvas, until it was surrounded by a spiraling nest of snakes.

“Imbuing Forged madra with temporary life is an advanced technique, far beyond Jai Long. He can only produce this result because he absorbed a Remnant from a Path we’ll call…unnatural.” Lindon reached up for one of the snakes, to see if the lines of color were illusions or actual Forged madra.

“Treat each snake as though it’s made of razor-sharp wire,” Eithan said, and Lindon snatched his hand back. “In the fight, I mean. Jai Long will use these to cover his approach—” Suddenly the figure lunged for Lindon, who flattened himself against a wall. The shining white serpents covered the entire room; there was nowhere else for him to go.

“—to block your escape—” Eithan continued, and just as Lindon tried to slide under the light, the red man swept his spear up from the ground and walled him off with white madra.

“—and to corner you for the kill.” A snake coiled and snapped at the tip of Lindon's nose.

Though he knew it was a training exercise, Lindon's heart was still hammering. Gingerly, he passed a corner of his sleeve through the light. When it survived unharmed, he tried with a finger.

He felt nothing; no heat, no resistance. With his other hand, he passed through the red man, and once again it was like waving his hand through only air. It was just like the Path of the White Fox, then. Forgers could make solid illusions, and Strikers could produce foxfire, but in the end it was all only light and dreams.

He let out a breath he didn't know he'd been holding.

“This isn't even his only technique,” Eithan said conversationally. “Just his most common one. If we get you to Lowgold, perhaps your Empty Palm technique could affect him...but he would never allow you that close. In a thousand fights, you would fail a thousand times.”

Eithan stopped talking, and all the slithering lights left by Jai Long's techniques vanished. The red man reappeared in its starting position, empty-handed.

Lindon waited for his heart to return to a healthy rhythm before he rose back up the wall to his feet. “So then. I need a second Path that covers for my weaknesses and targets Jai Long's.” He hesitated for a moment. “Or...I'm not sure how to ask, but are there any...famous, or especially powerful Paths out there?” The myths and legends of Sacred Valley were filled with tales of unbeatable Paths, so if those really existed, Lindon didn't want to be stuck with a mundane one.

Eithan raised one eyebrow. “You think you need a special Path? Are ordinary Paths not good enough to meet your esteemed estimation?”

Lindon ducked his head. “I knew it was childish to ask, excuse me. I only wanted—”

“No, you were right. Powerful Paths, coming right up.”

The ball flashed emerald, and the green man reappeared. This time, this one held the spear, and as it twirled the weapon, the spearhead shone like a star. The Path of the Stellar Spear, though Lindon couldn’t tell if it was the original version or Jai Long’s twisted one.

The red man cupped its hand and gathered a ball of deep purple light. The technique trembled against invisible restraints, as though pushing against the air, and an equally vivid purple sword appeared in his left hand. The weapon crackled and shook, also straining against some unseen bond.

“Path of the Broken Star,” Eithan announced. “This Path branched off into the Stellar Spear many generations ago, and the original is far more...potent.”

The green man started off defensive, weaving a net of squirming snakes behind, just as Jai Long could do.

The red man disappeared, leaving a violet shadow of Broken Star madra behind. When the scarlet figure reappeared, there was a gap sliced in the barrier and a hole driven through the green man's chest.

“Jai Long might last a little longer than that,” Eithan said, “but not too much so. If you mastered the Path of the Broken Star, you'd make a splash throughout the Empire.”

The featureless figure still hadn't extinguished its sword, and it buzzed and crackled in the air.

Lindon was tempted to choose this one instantly, but he couldn't pass up the opportunity to see what else was on offer.

“Now, disadvantages: it demands exacting madra control, its techniques are notoriously difficult to apply in real-world situations, and there's only one place to train it: a secret city long lost to the Jai clan.”

Lindon felt suddenly cheated. “If we can't find it...”

“It's lost to the Jai clan. Not to me. While it would give me great pleasure to see you defeat their heir with the Path they've been desperately hunting for centuries, it would take us at least three months to gain access. That leaves you seven months to go from ignorant initiate to skilled sacred artist, and I...well, let's say that you would have the chance to surprise me.”

Watching the purple blade, Lindon had to wonder. If there was another way to delay Jai Long or put off this confrontation, maybe he could find the time he needed to learn. It was worth considering.

The red man flickered and reset to the middle of the room, his Forged weapon gone. The green man reappeared, once again spinning Jai Long's spear.

Eithan continued for the better part of an hour. He demonstrated the Path of Crawling Shades, which would turn Lindon’s shadow into a symbiotic Remnant of darkness that devoured enemy techniques. He shows off the Path of Twisting Rivers, which used a technique of combined Ruler and Striker disciplines to accelerate Forged water until it sliced through steel.

The Path of the Last Oath was designed for and by Soulsmiths, and relied on Forging basic constructs on the fly and using them like disposable puppets. With its power, Lindon could counteract Jai Long’s shining serpents and bury him beneath the weight of his own improvised minions. The Path of Grasping Sky would allow him to grip Jai Long with a Ruler technique and then crush his windpipe as a Striker.

Lindon was very intrigued by the possibilities—and by the vast emerald wingspan that came with it—until Eithan told him that the Grasping Sky was the Path of the imperial clan.

Lindon preferred not to make more enemies than necessary, so he reluctantly set that Path aside.

Eithan snapped his fingers as though something had occurred to him. “You know, if Paths of the nobility interest you, I do have one last possibility...”

A dull flash, and the red man reappeared. This time, its hands were swallowed by a substance that looked like black fire, or a thick concentration of inky smoke. The black was streaked with scarlet, so that the figure held two handfuls of dark and bloody rolling flame.

That caught Lindon's interest immediately. The fireballs were intimidating, and this fit his image of a sacred artist: conjuring balls of strange-colored fire. His own clan had used purple foxfire for centuries.

“The Blackflame family united this empire, and ruled it until the Naru took over only five decades ago.”

The green man raised his spear, but the red one blasted it apart, a bar of dark fire slicing through emerald flesh. The technique sliced through him like a red-hot blade through snow.

“Their power came from the dragons that originally roamed these lands. It's one part fire to one part pure destruction.”

This time, after the green man died, it came back in seconds. It wove a net of twisting serpents in the air with its spearhead.

Black flames ate through the technique, and then the enemy.

“It's not versatile at all, really. It's a potent, violent Path designed for war. Its chief advantage is that it doesn't demand a great degree of control; the main technique involves spraying fire in the general direction of something you want to destroy. Doesn't require much finesse.”

The green man appeared again, moving to strike the red man in a blink, but it passed through a curtain of black flames and died once more.

“Children of the Blackflame family were deadly threats even at Copper.”

Lindon waited for the hook. He didn't like the rigid nature of the Path much; those techniques were made for blowing things apart, and nothing else. He would prefer something with some subtlety to it, some creativity.

But it did offer him exactly what he was lacking: the ability to break through Jai Long's techniques. And it didn't demand expertise, just a basic competence in Striker techniques.

It appeared to be exactly what he needed.

“There have to be some disadvantages,” he said.

“Oh, of course there are. There's a reason why the family lost the Empire and all but died out: this madra eats away at your body as you use it. Blackflames tended to lose their reason in their later years, or else they ended up twisted husks. Their bodies couldn't keep up with their power.”

Eithan waited expectantly, and Lindon soon caught on. “But mine...”

“The Bloodforged Iron body is tailor-made to resist corrosive breakdown like this, though it will burn through your madra like a bonfire through dry leaves. So you won’t be able to rely on that for long.”

“Didn’t the Blackflame family have bodies like mine?” The resources for Lindon’s Bloodforged Iron body had come from a cave in the Desolate Wilds; he had to assume a rich clan from an empire would have the means to do even better.

“They chose their bodies to maximize combat potential, but you? You just need to survive. A real Blackflame disciple might tear you apart head-to-head, but you won’t lose control of your limbs by the age of sixty. You also have the advantage of a second core, and switching to Blackflame only as needed will minimize the strain. So long as you take the time to cleanse your channels after using Blackflame madra extensively, it shouldn’t eat into your lifespan at all.”

Then it was perfect for him. “Why did you show me those other Paths, if you were going to lead me to this one all along?”

Eithan put on a shocked look. “I am a man of my word. If you decide you want to learn another of these fine Paths, then by all means, I will accept your decision.”

Lindon stood, considering. The Grasping Sky was eliminated because of its political implications, the Crawling Shade because it would make Lindon look too sinister to trust. The Last Oath was purely defensive, which wasn't what he needed to win a duel. Broken Star would take too long to find.

“What about Jade Rivers?” Lindon asked.

“Oh, absolutely! Absolutely. As long as you think you can perfectly master a combination Ruler, Striker, Forger technique in the next ten months. And if you think you can evade a Truegold's attacks while taking five seconds to prepare that technique, yes. A fine choice.”

Lindon rubbed his forehead and gave in. “The Path of Black Flame, is it?”

“Since the only family ever to use it was the Blackflames, that's what we commonly call it. Either the Blackflame Path or the Path of Black,” he exaggerated the pause, “Flame. We like our names simple here.”

“Is that family going to come after me for using it?”

“Who cares what they think? They're dead. Mostly.”

“…mostly?”

“And I doubt the Imperial clan will be incredibly happy about us demonstrating the powers of their predecessor in public, so we're left with that little problem, but that's a minor detail. It isn't illegal to practice the Blackflame Path, unlike the Path of Grasping Sky.”

“That was illegal?”

“There are only a few places to harvest Blackflame aura in the entire Empire, but to our spectacular good fortune, the Path was created right here in Serpent's Grave!”

Lindon looked around the room. “We can practice here?”

“Not in this exact spot, no. What you're looking for is a location that naturally flows with the aura you'd like to practice. In this case, something that resonates with both fire and destruction. Destruction is one of the most difficult aspects of aura to find and cultivate, but fortunately for us, dragons radiate just as much of that as they do heat.”

Seeing the bones of a dragon was one thing, but Eithan seemed to be implying something entirely different.

“Pardon, but it sounds like we’re going to see a real dragon.” It was like learning he was about to feed a lion by hand: a unique experience, but far more terrifying than anything else.

“There's a cave in this very city where the Arelius family has sealed a descendant of the ancient dragons, and that cave is filled with such madra! What luck!”

Lindon finally caught on. “By chance, does that cave happen to be Underground Chamber Number Three?”

Eithan beamed and clapped him on the back. “By now, my servants should have the seals undone and a medical team standing by. After you!”

10

Sand blew in waves against a cliff of black stone. A cave mouth opened into the mountain, rough and round, as though it had been chewed into the rock by a worm twice the height of a man. A script encircling the entrance shone scarlet, and though there was no door, a red haze rippled in the air—visible even without Lindon's Copper sight.

“There's a door deeper in, though the servants will have opened that for us,” Eithan explained as they approached. A huge stone had been rolled away from the entry, resting now to the side. “We don't want to hold it open for long. You can never be too careful when you're trying to prevent deadly beasts from escaping.”

Lindon gripped the straps of his pack tighter, feeling the weight of his halfsilver dagger in his pocket.

Half a dozen sacred artists in various uniforms dropped to their knees as Eithan approached, all of them wearing the colors of the Arelius family. One servant stood apart, outside the haze of the entryway, bowing at the waist.

“The scriptors have undone the prime seals,” he said. “Two stand ready to repair the script in the event of a breach, and three of the servants before you are trained healers with madra of blood and life. They lived through the fall of the Blackflames, and they should be able to counteract the Path’s powers if you make it outside.”

“Exemplary work as always, One-Thirteen,” Eithan said, pulling out his iron scissors to snip a stray thread from the servant's outer robe. “Keep it up, and soon I’ll have to start using your name. Do you have any—”

He was interrupted by a deep, bass roar that rumbled up from underground. It resonated in Lindon's chest, and he thought he could feel the sand beneath his shoes shaking.

He slipped one hand into his pocket for Suriel's marble, rolling its smooth, warm surface between his fingers.

“Agitated today, is he?” Eithan asked.

“His handlers say that company soothes him,” One-Thirteen responded, with a nervous glance behind him. “It seems they haven't had any volunteers since Lady Nakali lost her leg.”

“Ah, well, I can't say I blame them. Though the Soulsmiths made her a fine prosthetic, didn't they?”

“No expense was spared, I’m told, although surely she misses her flesh and blood.”

“Well, at least she can roast meat on her kneecap now. That should be some comfort.” The roar came again, and this time the cave mouth darkened with a red, smoky light. Eithan sighed. “I'm back now, so I’ll do my best to relax him. If all goes according to plan, I may have a permanent solution for you.”

The servant turned to regard the entry, but Lindon got the impression he was trying to look anywhere but at Eithan. “Underlord, if you don't mind, the handlers wanted me to remind you of the…merciful solution. He has rendered us great service, and it seems honorable to grant him rest. Please pardon my disrespect.”

Eithan rolled his shoulders and placed his palm against one of the runes on the side of the doorway. A ripple of almost-visible madra, and the light of the script died. “In this instance, One-Thirteen, I would rather extend grace than mercy.”

The haze in the entrance dissipated, and wind billowed out of the tunnel. The air outside had a slight chill to it—though there was no snow in Serpent's Grave, winter was almost upon them—but the breath of the cave felt like it was blowing from the door of a lit oven.

Servants bowed them inside, and as soon as Lindon and Eithan had passed the entrance, the field generated by the script sprang up behind them.

They walked down a long stone tunnel, its sides and floor scraped rough by the passing of ages.

“Who are we going to see?” Lindon asked, because asking what they were going to see felt somehow rude.

“We are going to meet Orthos, one of the family's oldest and most stalwart allies.” Eithan spoke with a wistful sadness, though his smile lingered. “Long before my time as Patriarch, Orthos served as a liaison between the Arelius and the imperial Blackflame family. Only ten years ago, he overused his power defending us from attack.”

Eithan waved a hand. “Defending them from attack. Had I been here...Ah, as I was saying, Orthos’ own madra overwhelmed his mind. He gave too much of himself for the sake of protecting my family. The branch heads spent a fortune trying to restore him, to their credit, but it was eventually decided to end his misery.”

Another roar shook the stone around them, and a ruddy light welled up from deeper in the twisting corridor. This time, Lindon thought he heard pain in it.

“I arrived around that time, and I countermanded the order. I can't say they were wrong for trying to spare him years of suffering, and some within the family think I'm cruel even now to keep him alive. But if there's a chance to restore him, we owe it to him to try until we can try no longer.” His voice turned grim. “I've ended lives to avert suffering before, and sometimes it is inevitable. But it's never a decision to make lightly.”

Lindon was still curious about Orthos, but a different question took priority. “If you’ll allow me a rude question, I have wondered for some time now: are you not from the Blackflame Empire?”

“Not entirely,” Eithan responded easily. “I spent most of my childhood in Blackflame City, as I believe I’ve told you before, but I was born half a world away. The Arelius family is a wide tree, my young adopted brother, with many roots. I've only returned to the Blackflame branch for…six, almost seven years now.”

The tunnel was starting to even out, with the red glow becoming slightly brighter. The air seemed to buzz against Lindon's skin, with a slight tingling vibration that he thought would soon grow uncomfortable.

“Incredible that you rose to the head of the family in that time,” Lindon said.

Eithan chuckled and adjusted his shimmering red-and-gold collar. “Oh, they couldn't promote me fast enough. Having an Underlord at the head puts them on the same level as the three great clans, so I would improve our standing even if I spent all day drinking peach wine and eating honeydrops. But although I do make a dashing figurehead, I prefer to take more...hands-on control of the family's operations.”

Lindon couldn't help a pang of sympathy for the Arelius family elders. Or “branch heads”—whatever they were called here in the Empire. Trying to prop Eithan up as a puppet leader seemed like trying to saddle a whirlwind.

When the tunnel ended, it didn't open up as broadly as Lindon had expected. Instead of a huge room, he found himself at the juncture between five other tunnels, all similar to the first. The ceiling was barely over his head, and the rock looked as though it had been chewed to a sharp edge. The air here sizzled even more strongly than outside, until it felt like insects crawled over every inch of his exposed skin.

The moment they arrived, footsteps like drumbeats approached, along with a sullen glow the color of live embers. Lindon clenched and unclenched his fists, cycling his madra in preparation for a fight, and kept his mind on the dagger in his pocket.

But what good would any of that do against a dragon?

“Bid welcome,” Eithan announced, “to the last great descendant of Serpent's Grave.”

A massive black shape shouldered its way through the tunnel like a man pushing through a tight doorway. It turned blazing eyes on Lindon: they were inky pools of darkness, those eyes, with a circle of furious red where the iris should be.

The skin of the creature’s reptilian head was cracked and leathery, pure black, and clusters of blazing embers burned on its back.

By the light it carried with it, Lindon saw the creature clearly.

“Is this...is this what a dragon looks like?” Lindon whispered.

“A dragon? No, no, I said it was a descendant of dragons.” Eithan threw out a hand in presentation. “Orthos is clearly a magnificent turtle.”

Lindon had wondered if the shadows were playing tricks on his eyes.

Orthos was a massive black turtle, the peak of his shell rising as high as Lindon's head. He was as long as a horse but thrice as wide, and his squat body looked heavy enough to sink a ship. The facets of his shell glowed sullen red around the edges, and black smoke rose from him in hazy waves.

He locked eyes with Lindon, growling like an avalanche. Lindon cycled desperately, pulling his dagger into sweaty hands, ready to dive behind the column in the center of the chamber.

Orthos’ mouth dropped open, his jaw gaping so wide it looked unnatural, and smoky red light began to rise up his throat.

“Some days are better than others,” Eithan said, stepping between Lindon and the draconic turtle. “He recognizes me on occasion, and will even guide my servants through the tunnels. But other times...”

Black fire billowed out of the turtle's mouth, filling the walls with oppressive heat and a prickling so sharp it became painful. Lindon's eyes watered, and he pushed himself against the column of stone.

Eithan swiped his hand in a single gesture, blasting the Blackflame madra apart like a gust of wind tearing through a cloud. “Be polite, Orthos. You have a guest.”

The light in the turtle's eyes turned orange, like a living flame, and he roared his defiance. Lindon dropped the halfsilver dagger to the ground in his haste to clap hands over his ears.

And Eithan moved forward, shoving the sacred beast's mouth closed with both hands. The roar cut off with a snap.

“I know it is difficult,” Eithan said, his nose inches away from the turtle’s. “But gather yourself and hear me. A boy has come to train here. He is one of the family.” Orthos struggled, but couldn't escape the implacable grip of the Underlord. “He could help us, do you understand?”

Orthos’ eyes finally moved up to Eithan's, and crimson irises dimmed into a look of helpless confusion.

Finally, the turtle growled once, and Eithan released him. “I'm sorry for getting rough. If this works as I intend, you could both learn from one another.”

“Bond…” the sacred beast said, in a voice like a rumbling volcano.

Despite Lindon’s encounters with Elder Whisper, it still surprised him to hear a six-foot turtle speak.

Evidently that one word exhausted Orthos’ energy, because his eyelids fluttered and then slid closed. He sank down onto his belly, letting out a breath like a furnace.

“That’s the plan,” Eithan said, patting the leathery head. “As I said, Lindon, this place is rich in aura of fire and destruction. I could teach you the Blackflame Path, and you could cycle here, work hard, and eventually grow into a fine sacred artist.”

“I am eager to learn,” Lindon said. “I know there is no shortcut for work.” Ten months wasn’t much time, but he was resolved to at least try to master sacred arts the orthodox way.

At least until that failed him.

“…instead of all that, I’d like to take a shortcut,” Eithan continued.

Lindon let out a sigh of relief.

“Building up aura in your core takes time. You cycle aura every day, a fraction of that aura is converted to madra, and your core slowly transforms to produce madra of that aspect on its own.” He waved a hand. “Since we have a deadline, I want you to share madra with my friend here.”

“Of course,” Lindon said, thinking of the scales he had Forged for Fisher Gesha. “Allow me a few days to gather some.”

“I like that attitude, but I think you may have misunderstood me. As I said, Orthos is plagued by a buildup of Blackflame madra in his system, ravaging his mind and his body. We bring him purified madra to cleanse his channels, but it’s like sprinkling water on a bonfire. However, if we can link your core with his…” Eithan spread his hands. “He gets relief from the burden of his immense power, and you get a piece of that power for yourself. It’s a win all around.”

Lindon looked to the turtle hesitantly. “Do I just…pour madra into him, or…”

“Even easier than that. There’s a contract that humans can make with sacred beasts, and it functions in a similar manner to a soul oath: two spirits binding themselves to one another. It must be mutual, just like an oath. And it’s typically done while both the contractor and the contracted beast are young, so the child’s madra is pure and the beast’s madra has not yet fully developed.”

Eithan ran his hand over the smoldering shell, evidently not the slightest bit worried about burning himself. “Orthos is almost three hundred years old. Far from a hatchling, even by the standards of his line. If he were to share his power with a child, the child’s body would quite literally explode.”

That image did nothing to soothe Lindon’s misgivings. “But that’s what you want me to do?”

Orthos snorted. His eyelids fluttered, and his shell flared red. Eithan snatched his hand away and took a careful step back.

“There are some risks, to be sure. If Orthos is too far gone to consent, the contract will fail. There’s the chance that it will work at first, but it won’t be enough to save him. In that case, you’ll still have your Blackflame core, but we’ll have to put him down after all. You’ll bond his Remnant at Gold.”

The turtle slowly rose to his feet, and the temperature in the cave rose another few degrees.

Eithan moved between Lindon and Orthos, shaking out his sleeves in preparation to use some technique. “However, if this works as I hope it will, you won’t need his Remnant at all. Instead, when you’re ready to break through to Gold, he will use his power to help you bridge that gap.”

Lindon wanted to walk forward, but the creature’s sheer size, overwhelming heat, and the uncomfortable needle-prickling of destruction aura kept him where he was. “Is this still my choice?”

“Certainly. You have a choice between sharing the power of an ancient dragon-beast or, instead, spending three hours a day in meditative cycling until you can begin to touch the faintest whiff of Blackflame power.”

Lindon marched up and placed his hand on the turtle’s head.

His madra slipped into the sacred beast with no resistance—an advantage of pure madra. Orthos’ madra was black and blood-red twined together, dark and hungry, like a malevolent wildfire. Lindon almost broke contact immediately; the turtle’s spirit was so overwhelming and unrestrained that he was sure it would consume his madra instantly.

Black eyes filled with circles of shining red swiveled up, meeting Lindon.

“It’s not a complicated technique,” Eithan said. “Swear to share your core with him, and to accept his power in return.” After another second, he added, “I’ve found that saying it aloud helps the process. That goes for you, too, Orthos.”

“I swear to open my core to you and share my power,” Lindon said, though he was ashamed to hear his voice quaver a little. The hand on Orthos’ head was starting to get uncomfortably hot.

Orthos’ mouth slid open. Thick, inky flames gathered in the back of his throat, streaked with red like blood.

Eithan moved forward. Lindon took a step back, half-lifting his hand away from the sacred beast’s head.

“I swear,” the turtle thundered, in a voice that slammed into Lindon’s ears.

A stream of pure madra flowed from his strongest core, sucked away beyond his control. Lindon stumbled back, releasing his touch, but the bond between their souls did not break. Orthos drank in his power until the core was almost empty.

Then a black-and-red river plunged into Lindon, burning through his madra channels like molten iron through his veins. It didn’t hurt nearly as much as he felt it should have; the worst part wasn’t pain, it was the feeling that his spirit was burning up. Crisping and blackening like a leaf in a fire. That he was dying, hollowed out.

Everything that was Lindon was burning away.

“Heaven and Earth Purification Wheel!” Eithan shouted.

Lindon was still staring at his burning core as though at the stump of his own hand. His mind couldn’t process it aside from a sense of numbing horror.

But Eithan’s words shook him awake.

He dropped to his knees, picturing the stone wheel, pushing it harder than he ever had before. Now came the pain, scorching his soul in a way that was more than merely physical, but the fire helped him as well as hurt. Every rotation of the wheel drew in more Blackflame madra like a spindle gathering thread.

He could hardly breathe, but that didn’t bother him now. All his mind, soul, and will was focused on the heavy stone wheel, churning away.

Either this would work, or the dark fire would burn him to ash.

* * *

Eithan watched the two of them with hands on his hips. Orthos and Lindon were both screaming, though he doubted either heard it, and tongues of Blackflame madra leaped around the cave, scorching through Lindon’s clothes, leaving grooves in stone. The aura of the place had gone wild, making this cave an oven and steadily devouring anything inside. A Copper who stepped inside this place would have the air scorched from their lungs and their skin crisped and blackened.

So far, the plan was unfolding beautifully.

He picked up Lindon’s pack and carried it to the entrance tunnel, where the air was relatively cooler. The books inside wouldn’t have lasted much longer without bursting into flames, and the pack itself would have eventually followed.

Without turning his head, Eithan watched the boy and the turtle. They would still be a while. Advancing to Jade usually took some time, after all, even if you had help.

In the meantime, Eithan took the opportunity to flip through Lindon’s possessions.

He set aside the books, bandages, medical kit, rune-light, emergency rations, extra clothes, inkwell, spare brushes, blank scrolls, needles, thread, scripted fire-starter, sculptor’s chisel, carving-knife, soap, seven purple boundary flags—one broken—and a frying pan, carefully remembering the relative position of each item.

Eithan had seen everything in here already, from the first moment they met, but he didn’t want Lindon to know he had interfered with anything. That would spoil the surprise.

Finally, he unearthed what he’d been digging for: the Sylvan Riverseed’s case.

It was a box of scripted, reinforced glass, big enough to contain a small cat. A river flowed around the edges, guided by a water-aura script that kept it in motion, but the center of the box was filled by a little grassy island. A finger-sized tree rose from one of the hills, life aura flowing through it in a verdant green web.

Beside the tree stood the Sylvan itself, looking curiously up at Eithan through the lid of its tiny world.

Sylvan Riverseeds were natural spirits—beings like Remnants, only born of accumulated vital aura rather than the death of a sacred artist. They only formed in places where the aura was both extremely strong and in perfect balance. If the aura slanted toward one aspect or another, a different natural spirit would form.

Typically, you would find that balance of aura in the heart of a forest, next to a spring or a river. In such a place, air and earth, heat and cold, life and death all coexisted at the same point in roughly equal amounts.

This spirit looked like a featureless puppet about three inches high, its body the vivid blue of a sunlit lake. It raised a hand to him, and its head split into a wide mouth, like a baby chick begging for food.

Other Sylvans were better suited for different purposes, but Riverseeds were gentle and flexible. They could work with power of virtually any aspect, supplementing and supporting other forces.

Which made them excellent raw materials. They were so malleable that a skilled craftsman could make a Riverseed into a guardian, a weapon, a guide, an elixir, a power source, a drudge, or—in some cultures—a very expensive cocktail.

It was fortunate that Fisher Gesha had never noticed Lindon feeding his pet. There wasn’t much a Soulsmith couldn’t do with a Sylvan Riverseed.

Not the rarest treasure, a Sylvan. But valuable. He had used elixirs made from Riverseed power to help Orthos, though such measures were only temporary. Only a long-standing contract could slowly mitigate the damage that centuries of Blackflame madra had done to his spirit.

Over the weeks since Eithan had adopted Lindon, he’d considered many possible options for the spirit. In the end, he settled on the simplest possible result: he’d leave the Sylvan as it was. Its own pure, gentle powers would balance the corrosive, deadly Blackflame perfectly. No alteration needed.

But perhaps a bit of…enhancement was in order.

If the Sylvan had grown a little faster, Eithan wouldn’t need to act at all. But Lindon’s scales weren’t the most nourishing food.

Eithan ran his thumbs along the glass, tripping a hidden catch and popping open the lid. The Sylvan ran around in circles at the sight, excited, making plopping noises like the drip of water into a pond.

Extending one finger, Eithan conjured a spark of soulfire.

The gray-white flame was half-transparent, like the memory of a flame rather than a flame itself. Unlike a natural blaze, it was perfectly round, spinning slowly and throwing off the occasional flare like a dull, tiny sun.

This was only a fragment of the writhing, spectral gray mass of soulfire that hovered in his spirit, just a few inches above his core. Other Underlords would weave as much soulfire as they could afford, hoarding it against an emergency, but Eithan counted on his ability to make more at a moment’s notice. Thanks to the sense provided by his bloodline, he could always find more fuel.

Heat surged against his back, reminding him that time was still ticking on, so without any further hesitation, he flicked the spark into the Riverseed.

Soulfire sunk into the Sylvan’s body, and a deeper blue color spread like dye. In an instant, it went from a bright, sunny blue-green to the deep sapphire of the open ocean. The spirit surged and stretched, inflated by the influx of power, growing until its head would scrape the bottom of the glass case’s lid. Its hands split into fingers, long blue hair grew from its scalp, and its body flowed into more human curves.

After only a second, the Riverseed panicked.

It flailed its arms, staring at horror at its new fingers. That sight drove it to the far end of the case, jumping into the flowing river. Realizing it was now too big to submerge entirely, it scampered back and huddled under its tree instead.

Eithan chuckled. The enhancement of soulfire was painless and harmless. It could be a bit disconcerting, but in the end, it was nothing but a benefit.

But it did require a certain amount of power for the changes to stabilize. With that in mind, he Forged a scale himself: identical in size to Lindon’s, it was a vivid blue-white, and anyone with the least skill in perception could sense its power and density. In the Blackflame Empire, they would call this a superior-grade scale, and it would be worth about ten thousand of Lindon’s.

Eithan created it in an instant, letting it drop into the case.

Even huddled under the tree, the Sylvan snapped at food. Its mouth opened wide, and it swallowed the scale in a second, which quickly broke down into nourishing energy.

The transformation surged forward again, the spirit growing even more defined. When the details finally settled, Eithan was somewhat surprised to see what stood there: it was very clearly a tiny woman in a flowing dress, all seemingly formed from azure liquid.

It wasn’t unusual for more advanced spirits to start taking on humanoid forms, but Eithan had expected it to look more like him. Evidently Lindon had a strong impression that the spirit was female, which had influenced its shape.

She peered up at him with what had been a featureless face a moment before. With one finger, she brushed what looked like hair out of her new-formed eyes and gave him a sharp grin.

Then she straightened up, all of four inches tall, and bowed at the waist.

Eithan inclined his head graciously in return, and shut the lid.

* * *

Orthos’ spirit felt like a boulder stopping up a volcano: a heavy, steady presence restraining boundless fury. Lindon could feel him even with his eyes shut, could point to the turtle in complete darkness.

But then, he could feel everything now.

His body was like a rag that had been squeezed dry, but his spirit soared. Orthos’ presence blazed next to him, and the power of the cave surrounded them both like a warm blanket. Pinpoints of energy dotted the caverns for at least a few dozen yards before his perception faded out. Some of those points felt dangerous, even hostile, but some were calm, or else so alien that he couldn’t read them at all. He found that he could tell which of the points were stronger and which weaker, just as he could tell which stars were brighter than others.

All of them, it seemed, were weaker than Lindon.

Eithan stood at the entrance to the chamber—Lindon couldn’t see him, but he could feel him, a steady presence that was strangely blurred. For the first time, he couldn’t tell whether the power behind that blur was strong or weak.

Lindon focused on that presence, and his perception flowed out, like a finger he’d reached into the distance. He couldn’t hear or see anything this way, not like the Arelius family apparently could, but all the powers of madra and aura were clear to him.

He placed that finger of awareness on Eithan, and the Underlord laughed. Lindon’s eyes snapped open; Eithan was standing over him, much closer than Lindon had expected.

“How are you enjoying Jade?” Eithan asked, reaching out a hand to help him stand.

“This is Jade…” Lindon checked his cores. Sure enough, one of his cores was no longer the bright blue of its twin, but a ball of black flames shot through with the occasional flash of red. The Blackflame core rotated slowly without his direction, grinding in rhythm with his breath.

“Barely,” Orthos grumbled. The bright circles of red in his black eyes were fixed on Lindon, and a new emotion soaked into Lindon from their bond: arrogance. The turtle took a bite out of the rock as though it were made of cheese, speaking through a mouthful of gravel. “You almost burst under my power.”

He had, but he was already forgetting the pain: Orthos had taken him another stage higher.

The Patriarch of the Wei clan was only Jade.

Lindon bowed at the waist, speaking with sincerity. “Gratitude, honored Orthos. I am grateful beyond words for the gift of your power, though I am not worthy of even this small fraction.”

Orthos’ pride flared up, and he stood straighter, until his shell almost scraped the low cavern ceiling. “Yes. You will not lack for rewards in my service.”

Eithan patted the turtle’s nose, though Orthos jerked back like an affronted child. “Congratulations on your new subordinate, Orthos. If I may remind you: this clarity of yours will not last for long. If you want Lindon to share this burden with you, you should see to his training yourself.”

The dragon-turtle snorted, and black flames shot from his nostrils. “My memory is dim, but I remember you. You never spoke with proper respect.”

Eithan slipped his hands into the pockets of his outer robe. His grin widened. “Do I owe you respect?”

“I do not fear Underlords,” Orthos said, words underscored by a growl that shook the earth. “Your advancement means nothing before a dragon’s breath.”

Eithan drew himself up. “Sir! If this is an issue of respect, we should settle it like proper citizens of the Blackflame Empire. Let a friendly exchange of techniques decide whether you take the reins of Lindon’s training, or whether I kneel to you as my master.”

Though the Underlord’s smile had been wiped away by an expression of haughty dignity, a playful sparkle remained in his eyes.

Orthos’ satisfaction radiated through their bond, and his eyes glowed bright. “Trial by combat,” he said. “Let it be so.”

The temperature spiked again as Eithan and Orthos faced each other, ready to do battle.

Lindon grabbed his pack and ran.

As the battle broke out behind him, his spirit shook with fear and warning…but that didn’t stop him from digging around in his pack for his box of badges.

It was time to exchange his iron for jade.

11

“Vital aura is the power of the world,” Orthos said, limping up the tunnel. His left foreleg wasn’t visibly injured, but the pain he felt at every step flashed through Lindon’s soul. “Even a hatchling understands this.”

Despite the turtle’s injury, Lindon still had to hurry to catch up. Based on his limited Jade perception, he would say Orthos’ power was comparable to a Truegold, and he had speed to match. “Please excuse my ignorance. I am honored to have a teacher with such power and wisdom.”

Orthos’ head rose slightly, pleased and proud. “I have never lowered myself to teach Coppers before, but you have latched yourself onto my soul. I should at least treat you like a descendant. Hm. Vital aura. It builds in everything, over time, and can grant great power.

“A stone is a piece of the earth, and it builds earth aura. An ordinary stone has only a mouthful of aura, but as the centuries pass, it grows stronger and stronger. It will continue absorbing power from the earth until it transforms. If left undisturbed, an ordinary rock will grow into a nugget of Titan’s Bone: all but unbreakable.”

“Forgiveness, but surely all stone should be unbreakable by now, if this is only a function of time.” Lindon reminded himself to ask Eithan about Titan’s Bone.

“Sacred artists have an endless appetite,” Orthos grumbled, scooping up a mouthful of rocks nearby and crunching them like candy. “A vein of vital aura piling up in the ground is a treasure trove for earth artists. They will stop at nothing to harvest it for their own advancement. A single candle-flame might be enough for you to cycle, but for a true expert, such a weak source is useless. They might as well try eating air.”

Orthos lumbered up the path, his emotions growing distant as he drifted into a memory. “Advancement is an endless hunt for greater and greater sources of power. You start by feeding on the aura in candles and campfires, but sooner than you think, you’ll be hunting for dragon hearts and sunreaver stones and sacred flames. Always climbing…”

Back in Sacred Valley, the Wei clan had cycled aura at dawn, when the light from Samara’s ring and sunlight had intermingled, and when dreams still lingered in their minds. Lindon had never thought of aura as something that could be taken away; light and dreams were not stationary objects that could build up vital aura over time.

The explanation made sense. The Transcendent Ruins had drawn in vital aura from miles around, leaving the surroundings dim and washed-out in his Copper sight. Lindon had thought of that process as something like taking in a breath: the Ruins may have inhaled, but that didn’t mean there was any less air outside. Now, he imagined it more like draining a bucket and waiting for rain to fill it back up.

“We cycle aura to trap a portion in our souls, adding to our power,” Orthos continued, returning to the present. “It changes the nature of our madra, and over time, it teaches your core to generate madra of that aspect.”

That much, Lindon understood. “Is there such thing as pure vital aura? With no aspect?”

Orthos rumbled deep in his throat. “There are more aspects of aura than sparks in a wildfire, but they always take some form. Always. Asking for pure aura is like asking for dry water.”

“And Ruler techniques?”

“Madra controls aura, and aura controls nature. Water artists can walk on the ocean, call rain, and so on. Earth artists open doors in stone. Force artists can make a feather hit with the power of a collapsing boulder.”

Lindon thought he understood. The Path of the White Fox could craft an illusion out of madra, but its Ruler technique affected the mind and eyes directly so that the target believed they saw something.

But he was still testing his Blackflame core, running his awareness over it like a child unwilling to release a new toy.

“What use is there for fire aura? Surely you can set things on fire with madra, rather than bothering with a Ruler technique.”

Orthos was quiet for a full minute, chewing on the occasional stone. Lindon was considering how best to apologize when the turtle finally spoke.

“For some Paths, this is true. For ours…” One red-and-black eye swiveled to meet Lindon’s gaze. “Imagine you have finished a battle. Your breath has driven your enemies before you, and now their corpses lie smoldering on the field. Smoke and flames rise in testament to your power, and courage has left your foes. They flee. You know you cannot catch them all.”

A dark, twisted root stuck out from the wall. Suddenly Orthos snapped at it, tearing a length of wood the size of Lindon’s arm out of the stone.

He spat it onto the floor, where it burst into smoky, black-streaked flames.

“They trip over the burning bodies of their comrades as they run,” Orthos said, “but there is no flight from your fury.”

He turned to glare at the floor.

And in a great explosion of heat, the root burst into flames. Lindon had to take a step back; the fire reached the ceiling and filled the tunnel for an instant. It was the healthy orange of a natural flame, not the dark stain of Blackflame, though it was spotted with the odd blotch of black or red.

The fire roared for a second, lapping up the walls as though looking for something else to consume, and then died in an instant.

Of the arm-length root, there was nothing left but ash.

“We called it the Void Dragon’s Dance,” Orthos said, crushing the ash beneath his paw. “In one moment, the flames devour everything on the battlefield, leaving only smoke and dust.”

“As long as there’s enough fire around to begin with.” Lindon pointed out the distinction automatically, his mind distant. Half of him was overcome with awe at the raw power Orthos described, and couldn’t help imagining turning that frightening weapon against Jai Long.

The other half was quiet and subdued, afraid of the deadly possibility locked in his own core.

“Hm. And as long as you have enough time,” Orthos added. “Taking control of aura takes time and concentration. You can toss Striker techniques out with every breath, but a widespread Ruler technique takes time to build.”

The tunnel had ended, opening onto a chamber with a yellow skeleton curled at the center. Unlike the bones in the city outside, this set was complete: a long serpent’s body with four clawed limbs and one reptilian head filled with fangs. A delicate matrix of bones draped over the ribs must once have supported wings.

This dragon’s skeleton also wasn’t large enough to house a building. It was twice the length of Orthos’ body, at most.

But it flickered with black fire. The flames crawled along each bone like worms, occasionally sending up a dull red spark that gave off just enough light to see. Lindon’s Jade sense told him the room was filled with power, so he cracked his Copper sight.

He shut the sight again immediately. The dark radiance of destruction and the fiery aura of heat crowded out everything else, so he couldn’t even see the power of earth in the rocks beneath. This was a wellspring of Blackflame energy.

“Sit,” Orthos commanded, and Lindon scrambled to the ground without hesitation. “Cycle as the Underlord has taught you, but this time, reach to the vital aura around you. You have my power; Blackflame aura will come as you call, and will merge easily with your core.” Orthos turned to go, snapping up another rock and swallowing it whole. “Cycle for three days, and then the next stage of your training will begin.”

“Thank you for the instruction. Please, stay with me just a moment, until I get the—”

His contracted partner had already left. Lindon could feel the turtle’s soul moving swiftly down the corridor.

At least he had packed food. But where, in these dark, broiling tunnels, was he supposed to find water?

* * *

Jai Long waited at the end of a dead-end street in Serpent’s Grave, Shiryu Mountain looming over him like a titanic gravestone. The shop to his left belonged to the fourteenth-ranked tailor in the city, while to his right, a family ran the ninth-ranked restaurant.

Both buildings were immaculate constructions of newly painted wood, their signs colorful, their lanterns smelling of fresh oil. Even the alley between them was spotless except for a light coating of sand, and he was sure the Arelius family would sweep even that away before dawn. Every stranger who passed the alley’s mouth looked like they were on their way to an imperial feast: the women had their hair pinned up and ornamented, their faces painted, while the men wore so many layers of color that they looked armored.

Even their Goldsigns were ornamental. Jai Long saw silver bracers, golden haloes, polished horns, emerald eyes, gleaming tails, and a single pair of broad green wings that marked a member of the imperial Naru clan.

After so long away, Jai Long had almost forgotten. Appearance and rank were everything in the Blackflame Empire. The more of one you had, the less of the other you needed.

With one hand, he tightened the red bandages wrapping his head. The other hand clutched the case for the Ancestor’s Spear.

Stellar Spear madra flashed somewhere up the street, and white light bloomed. The crowd he could see through the alley cast disgusted looks backward, speeding along to their destination.

Jai Long flared his madra, cycling it rapidly and signaling Gokren and the Sandvipers that he was about to engage. Then he walked out of the alley.

Some of the passersby sensed the power of a Highgold and gave him curious looks, but they quickly looked away again when they realized he’d covered his face and failed to display any of the hallmarks of a famous faction. Just a nobody.

A few yards down the street, three Lowgolds of the Jai clan were harassing an Arelius street-sweeping crew.

Right on schedule.

The Jai spears were still slung over their backs, so they hadn’t managed to provoke a fight yet. Their metallic black hair gleamed in the light of the dying sun.

The blue-clad servants of the Arelius family were huddled against a wall like trapped deer. One of them clutched a broken broom.

“You struck him,” a young Jai woman said, pointing to her clansman. “Everyone saw you, just admit it. Say it.”

The Arelius family workers scanned the nearby crowd, looking for a way out.

Out of curiosity, Jai Long turned to an old woman standing outside the tailor’s shop, holding a bolt of cloth. “Did you see that?”

She looked him up and down, sneering a bit at his face. “You could do better than that, you know. We could weave you a mask that an Underlord would be proud to wear, even on a…budget.”

The Jai fighter blasted Stellar Spear madra into the sky again, still demanding something from the Arelius servants.

Jai Long nodded to them. “Did you see what happened there?”

The old woman frowned. “It’s as you see. The Arelius family attacked the honorable Jai warrior from behind, breaking a broom over his head.”

With a thought, Jai Long quickened his madra again, doing nothing to hide his power. The force of a Highgold echoed up and down the street, and even the Jai clan cut off mid-sentence to turn and look.

“Ah, I believe I was mistaken,” the old woman said, bowing until she stared straight down at the bricks of the street. “If I think back, yes, I may have seen the Jai clan corner these Arelius servants unprovoked.” She peeked up hesitantly. “Unless…is honorable sir from the Jai clan? I am prepared to swear that the Arelius dogs—”

Jai Long turned and walked toward the Jai clan fighters, slinging his spear case over his shoulder. He wouldn’t need to use the Ancestor’s Spear after all. The three Jai Lowgolds dipped their heads in his direction.

“Good evening to you, Highgold,” the woman said warily. “Are you perhaps from a branch family?”

The white lines of Flowing Starlight began creeping over his skin. The world slowed.

His original plan was to find a team of Jai Lowgolds and kill two of them, capturing their Remnants, and letting the third report him to the Jai clan. As long as no one saw the Ancestor’s Spear, they would only send a single Highgold after him next time. If he couldn’t let one live, he would use the Spear to drain all of them and eliminate all witnesses.

But there were too many witnesses on the street to eliminate, and plenty to bring word back to the Jai clan that a rogue Highgold was hunting their people. So long as he didn’t draw his spear, the clan would hear exactly what he wanted them to.

These Lowgolds might not have been high in the rankings, but they were at least trained. Before the marks of Flowing Starlight were visible, they’d already sensed him, pulling out their spears and assuming aggressive stances.

Too late.

Jai Long thrust both hands out, and a gleaming white snake shot from each palm. A spear would conduct the energy better, but he didn’t require the aura of his weapon. The Stellar Spear had no Ruler techniques suited for battle.

The two enemies at his side shouted and thrust out their weapons, the spearheads gleaming like stars, ready to break his serpents.

He’d already moved, gripping the young woman in the center by the throat. White energy flared, and her head tumbled free. Her hair clinked as it struck the street.

The Lowgolds were finding it harder to disperse his snakes than they’d thought, and now he was standing between them. His hands flashed out again, and two more heads rolled.

Only a second had passed, and Jai Long stood in a pool of blood, bodies, and dissipating white madra. One woman lifted her skirts as she passed, though she was well clear of the blood, and gave him a disapproving look. A worker in the restaurant shouted at him for the smell. The old woman outside the tailor’s shouted, “And no more than they deserved, sir!”

Traffic didn’t stop.

The Arelius workers gave relieved sighs and rose to their feet, but they looked as though he’d saved them from a loudly barking dog.

“Will you be dealing with the Remnants, honored Highgold?” one of the Arelius street-sweepers asked. “Or should we have a crew dispose of them?”

Jai Long pulled some scripted paper seals from his pocket, which he’d prepared for exactly this occasion. He hardly had to stretch out his perception to feel the sources of toxic madra moving toward him: the Sandvipers, here to help him capture the Remnants for later consumption.

“I have men coming,” he said, and the servants bowed as they backed up a few steps. One of them had produced scrub-brushes and a bucket; they were already planning to clean the street as soon as he left.

Someone shouted something about the Skysworn, but the white Stellar Spear Remnants had already begun to rise. They each looked different, but they were all thin and bony and looked as though they were sketched on the world in vivid starlight.

He slapped seals on them before they had entirely left their bodies, and by this time, the fur-clad Sandvipers had found their way to the street. They bound the Remnants in scripts and carried them off, taking them three streets over to a wagon they had prepared for exactly this purpose.

As soon as they started walking, the Arelius family closed back in to clean up the mess.

Fate was strange. In ambushing the Jai clan tonight, Jai Long might have done Eithan Arelius a favor.

He started to laugh—the serpentine Remnant had left him with a disturbing laugh, cold and high, like crashing metal.

Around him, the Sandvipers carrying the script-bound Remnants shuddered, but he pretended not to notice.

* * *

Yerin dodged the black scissors racing for her face, cycling madra to her limbs to Enforce her speed as much as she could. She still almost took a slash across the cheek, but avoided it, feeling the sharp aura gathered around the blade as it slid past her.

Eithan had overextended for the thrust, leaning onto his right foot to drive the scissors at her. His left arm was tucked behind the small of his back, into the dark blue outer robe that fluttered in the breeze behind him, and he still wore that small, smug smile.

She returned a thrust of her own, punishing his extension, driving the blade at his ribs.

He flared with power as his madra surged, and he vanished. She cut nothing but air. She spun to face him behind her; he hadn’t veiled his presence, so she could feel him just as she would feel a bonfire. Simple trick to spin and keep the pressure on.

A thought that wasn’t her own floated out from her core: she was making a mistake.

She shouldn’t turn and waste that critical instant moving her body; instead, she should channel the Endless Sword through her Goldsign and whip it behind her, covering her movement and giving her enough time to turn.

Without waiting for her permission, her Goldsign obeyed the voice.

The steel-silver arm dangling over her shoulder whipped backwards on its own instinct, against her instructions. It strained to reach Eithan, stealing some of her madra to slash at the air, but she had already begun to turn. Her motion pulled the blade out of line even as it tugged her off-balance.

When she righted herself, she stared down the tip of black scissors.

“It's hard enough to quiet one mind,” Eithan noted, spinning his scissors around one finger. “All but impossible if you have to work with two.”

She ground her teeth, slamming her sword back into its sheath with too much force. Her unwelcome guest squirmed in her core, probing her self-control, looking to use her anger as a crack. It was getting stronger these days; if she didn’t advance soon enough, she’d be the voice in the back of its head.

“Two would be sugar and peaches. I'm juggling three.”

Eithan flipped his hair over one shoulder. “That’s two more than you have to. Your Remnant is not your counselor, it is your resource. You should strip it down and use it for parts.”

He didn't understand. He couldn't, even if he knew what this parasite around her waist really was. It made sure she understood what it wanted, though it didn’t use words. It wanted to be used.

Better than anybody else, Yerin could tell when something in her head was trying to talk to her.

And her master’s Remnant, sealed away in her core, felt the same. He had something to say, so it was on her to listen.

Eithan might know sacred arts up and down. Maybe his advice would be right, for a regular Lowgold with a regular Remnant. But he didn’t know what it felt like to carry somebody else’s soul around with her.

Unless he wore her skin for a day, he couldn't know.

“What have you learned today?” Eithan asked.

“Shouldn’t turn when the enemy gets behind me. Should have sent an Endless Sword over my shoulder to keep the pressure on, but I tripped over my own feet trying to turn.”

That was the lesson her master was trying to teach her: he’d sent her a message telling her what to do, but she’d been slow to listen.

“Hmm.” Eithan flipped his scissors into the air and caught them, all while watching her. “You know, sword artists don't tend to be the philosophical types. Some sacred artists can think their way through bottlenecks and roadblocks in their advancements, but those on sword Paths...they tend to prefer fighting through their problems.”

“That's a truth,” she muttered.

“Well then, how fortunate for you that you have a teacher who is willing to engage all your preferences and whims.” He glanced up at the sun. “We should be right on time, actually. How would you like to take your frustration out on an endless parade of artificial enemies?”

“I think you'll have to race me there.”

He began walking across the sandy courtyard where they'd been practicing, still spinning the scissors, and Yerin followed him.

“I've taken the liberty of restoring and preparing the three ancient Trials of the Blackflame family. I think you'll find them...invigorating.”

Yerin didn't ask him any questions—he wouldn't tell her anything he didn't want her to know, and anyway, she'd see about these Trials for herself soon enough. But she was curious.

Lindon had been gone for three days, learning to cycle this new Path. Eithan’s description had been impressive enough that she wanted to see it with her own eyes, but she had her doubts.

On the one side, Lindon was finding it hard enough to progress on his own Path. Giving him more to practice was just packing more weight onto an overburdened mule.

On top of that, she'd never trusted fire artists. They never met a problem without trying to burn their way out, which struck her as...crude, if that was the word. Simple. A sword was precise and controlled, but fire just burned everything.

There was another side, though: the Blackflame family had been richer than a nest of dragons. Wouldn't surprise her if they'd left something shiny behind.

They arrived at the base of the black mountain, where a circular hole in the rock was blocked by a copper door and a reddish haze. Golden sand blew against the stone, whipping against her exposed skin.

“Welcome to Underground Chamber Number Three,” Eithan said. He gestured to the two attendants in Arelius family uniforms, who quickly began opening the door and undoing the script.

“Hang on there,” Yerin said. “This is where Lindon went.”

“He’s been acclimating to the aura in one of the side chambers, though he should be finished by now. We have to go…deeper.”

He wasn't kidding. They walked for an hour, through baking hot tunnels filled with smothering aura, lit only by the occasional red spot smoldering like a bloody ember. Even just sensing the aura would have made her sweat; being down here was like wading through hot mud. Hot mud filled with needles—her skin prickled in the presence of all this destructive aura.

After the hour, their narrow tunnel began angling upwards. “Let's pick up the pace, shall we?” Eithan suggested, and vanished.

Yerin almost stumbled over her own legs in her haste to follow. She poured madra into her Enforcer technique, hurling herself through the dim tunnel, and twice she nearly cracked her skull like an egg on an outcropping.

After a second hour of that, she finally emerged into blinding sunlight. It was enough to stop her like a slap to the face, wincing as her eyes adjusted.

While she was panting and sweating—as much from the oppressive heat as from exertion—Eithan stood cool as a statue in midwinter, leaning against the side of the cave.

“I'm sorry to keep you waiting,” he said, and at first Yerin thought he was talking to her.

“Not at all, not at all,” Lindon said, and for the first time she noticed he was there, looming head and shoulders over her. He had his bulky brown pack on, both straps, and a black iron medallion showing a hammer.

He stood straight as a spear, staring intently at Eithan.

When she first met him, that stare was rare. Only when he was really interested. But ever since Eithan locked him in the Transcendent Ruins, his eyes had gotten sharper and sharper, like he thought he might miss the one key detail that would lead him to defeat Jai Long.

He gave a shallow bow. “It took me all morning to climb up, and I was glad for the rest.”

Yerin swiped at her forehead with a sleeve and tried to slow her breathing. Losing a race to an Underlord was one thing, but she hated to look like she had lost her breath from a little run.

Now that Yerin's eyes had adjusted to the surroundings, she took a look around. They were tucked away in a sort of cleft in the black mountain, open to the sky, but dark rock rose like spires all around them. This miniature valley seemed to stretch for miles, though she couldn't see far over the uneven ground.

Most of it looked blasted and blighted, as though a lightning storm had scrubbed it raw, and the few plants she could see seemed like they’d been dug out of the Blackflame caverns. The grass was black, stringy and tough, and the flowers had dark petals covering dim spots of smoldering red. The bushes were scraggly with glowing red at the edges, as though they had been half-burned and were ready to burst back into flames at any moment.

When she switched to her spiritual sight to glance at the vital aura, the Blackflame power was so thick it choked out everything else. She could barely get a glimpse of life or wind through the overwhelming miasma of black destruction and red heat.

At the other end of the valley stood a free-standing red doorway, just a couple of painted logs with a tiled archway over the top. It was wide enough to admit a team of horses, and dragons of black paint coiled up each support.

Through the doorway, the land was choked with stone columns, so thick they looked like a dense forest. She extended her perception to see if she could sense where the columns ended, but her sense was stopped at the doorway. By some kind of script, she guessed.

“Are there two courses out here?” she asked doubtfully.

“Just the one,” Eithan responded. “It's divided into three separate Trials: one for the signature Enforcer technique of the Blackflames, one for their Striker technique, and one for Rulers. Blackflame madra is hard enough to Forge that they never developed an official Forger technique.” He cleared his throat. “But yes, to answer the question on both of your minds, you will be taking it together.”

She gestured to the red-and-black gate. “We're intended to walk in there together, then?”

Eithan gathered them up with one hand on Lindon's shoulder and one on hers, ushering them closer to the gateway. “These are the ancient Trial grounds for the first generation of Blackflame sacred artists. For centuries, this was how they passed their Path down to their descendants, preserving their legacy.

“Once you enter, the script will seal behind you, and you won't be able to leave until you complete the three Trials.” Eithan considered a moment. “Or until you admit defeat, but where's the fun in that? You will find food, water, and shelter here, outside the entrance, and once you’ve defeated a Trial you can retreat freely. No need to take the same test twice, is there?”

Lindon turned his gaze to the west, and Yerin followed it. In a deep crag, she caught sight of a narrow waterfall. Something scuttled behind it.

“If you don’t mind me asking, how long will we be living out here?”

“These Trials have been known to take months, or even as long as two years in some cases.” He gave Lindon's shoulder a squeeze. “I trust you won't spend quite so long. And when you emerge, you'll be considered a Blackflame sacred artist in truth.”

There was Lindon’s goal, all nice and bright and clear, but what about hers? She wasn’t likely to dig anything of value out of a course that an Iron could run.

“If you’re looking to teach me another Path, I’m happy with the one I’ve got,” she said, words dry. “Lindon can run this maze on his own.”

Eithan turned to Lindon. “Orthos was supposed to deliver a package to you.”

Lindon hurriedly reached into his pack and pulled out a leather-wrapped bundle, which Eithan took from him. He unrolled it on the ground before Yerin.

Half a dozen fine swords had been strapped to the leather. From the way the aura played over them, they must be sharp as razors—even the Blackflame aura tickling the edges had started to gleam silver.

They were perhaps too sharp to use as weapons, but to gather sword aura? Perfect. “That’s a sweet enough gift, but I’m still not seeing why I should stay here. Could just carry these down the mountain.”

He waved a hand. “I tried my best, but predicting people's actions is harder than I make it look. Now, you may be wondering what kind of training ground is designed to work for both a Jade and a Lowgold.”

Surprised, Yerin's eyes flicked back to Lindon, and she opened her spiritual senses at the same time. Sure enough, he felt like a Jade: his spirit had a weight to it, a gravity, that no Iron could fake. He could actually sense what he was doing now, where before he'd been working blind. On top of that, his core was packed with burning, dangerous madra. More than he could have possibly harvested from aura in just a handful of days.

Elixirs. Eithan must have stuffed him full of the good stuff.

He saw her notice, and a little bit of a proud smile touched his lips. Well, he was right to be proud—wasn't long since he'd been happy enough to reach Copper.

Her chest tightened. She was glad for him, but…her unwelcome guest was tickling the back of her spirit. If she didn’t advance soon, she wouldn’t keep ahead of it.

And here Lindon was, hopping from Copper to Jade in three months like nothing. Sure, breaking from Lowgold to Highgold was like smashing through a thick stone wall compared to the rickety wooden gate blocking Iron from Jade, but even so. Why was she the one standing still?

“That's call for cheers and celebration!” Yerin said, forcing a smile. His shoulders straightened, and he brightened until you'd have thought she'd given him a crown.

Eithan beamed along. “Yes, one step closer to survival! Hooray!”

Lindon’s smile withered.

“Now then,” Eithan continued. “The Blackflames had attendants and even family members on many different Paths, but they all trained together. This course was meant to be passed as a team. I have no doubt that you'll both learn many—”

A dark blue Thousand-Mile Cloud passed over the cliff towering over them, moving with a speed that left it a blur in the air.

Eithan sighed. “If I had my way, everything would go according to plan, and no one would ever surprise me.” That sounded like a pretty rotten future to Yerin.

Cassias knelt on the surface of the blue cloud as it came to rest on the earth, with his right hand pressed against the cloud and his left resting on his sword. The silver bracer on his arm gleamed in the sun, and his curly hair reflected gold.

He faced his Underlord with determination. “Do the branch heads know you’ve opened this course, Eithan? Does the Naru clan? I thought we’d agreed—”

“Obviously I did not agree,” Eithan said, steepling his fingers together. “Now, I’d like you to leave before you ruin any of the surprises for our new recruits here.”

Lindon was focused like an arrow again, but Yerin was the one to speak. “Let’s hear some more about those surprises.”

Cassias turned to her, but then Eithan’s power flared. He appeared in front of Cassias in a flap of his blue robe, his hand clapped over the other man’s mouth.

“That would be cheating, wouldn’t it?” he said, shaking his head at Yerin.

Cassias’ eyes went flat, and something dangerous stirred in his spirit. He reached for his sword, straining to get enough leverage to draw on Eithan.

It was the first time Yerin had seen a real scrap of steel in him. That was the attitude a sword artist should have: if spirits stand in your way, cut them down. If an Underlord stands in your way, well, you do your best to cut him too. Her master would have approved.

Suddenly, Cassias’ body shook. All strength leaked from him, and he went limp, sagging to the ground.

Eithan pulled a cloth from his pocket, wiping the hand he’d held against Cassias’ mouth. “Now then—”

“Whoa, let’s back up a step or two,” Yerin said. “He had a message for us. You just want to sweep that away?”

“As I’ve said before, I’m very good with a broom.” He overrode Yerin’s objections by raising his voice and simply talking over her. “As I was saying, I have no doubt that you’ll both benefit in many ways from this experience. You should acclimate yourself to your new home before attempting the course.” He gestured to the wall next to the waterfall, where there were a handful of room-sized holes in the stone wall.

“You can leave whenever you’d like, but if you leave the way you came in, I’ll take that as an admission of defeat.”

Eithan turned to meet both of their gazes as he said that. Yerin didn’t know what Lindon was thinking, but she wouldn’t be backing out. Even leaving them a way to escape was soft work, by her thinking. The Sage of the Endless Sword would have backed her into a corner and made her fight her way out.

“Very good, then!” He waved them over. “Away you go! And you’ll be spending quite a bit of time in there together, but do keep your hands off one another. I need you focused, not distracted. I will be watching to ensure your…compliance.”

Yerin couldn’t look at Lindon after that, but she glared at Eithan. “Sacred artists are disciplined. If I got distracted, I’d have been dead and buried years ago.”

“You’re…sixteen years old, I’d say, give or take a year.” He pointed to his own eyes, and then to them. “I’m always watching. Now, in!”

Lindon bowed to the Underlord. “I’m grateful for the opportunity. In the interest of training as quickly as possible, did you happen to bring any pills? Elixirs?”

Eithan grimaced. “We’ll be light on elixirs for the next few months, I’m afraid, but I’ll come deliver you whatever we can spare. The Jai clan seized our last refinery in Serpent’s Grave.”

Yerin wasn’t about to let that pass. “Hope you don’t forget me, once you’ve got something to spare.”

“As I believe I mentioned before, I have something special in stock for you. You’ll simply have to wait and see.”

On the ground, Cassias stirred, his glassy eyes taking on a spark of awareness. He mumbled something through thick lips, trying to speak.

While Lindon and Yerin were both distracted by the fallen man, Eithan vanished again. Yerin jerked her eyes up, sweeping her spiritual sense out to catch the Underlord, but he was gone.

Eithan and Cassias had both vanished.

Lindon hitched his pack up onto his shoulders. “Does it worry you that he just left before explaining how this course works?”

“Not a special worry, no,” Yerin responded. She’d have been pleased with a few straight answers, but she was used to working without them. Her master treated explanations like they were made of wintersteel and crusted with diamonds.

“You get pushed into more than a few impossible challenges, and you start getting used to it,” she said. “What itches at me is that he’s keeping secrets.”

Lindon rubbed the back of his neck. “He can’t tell us everything, though, can he?”

She checked the leather-wrapped roll of swords under her arm and marched over to check out one of the caves. No sense wasting time. “When my master told me to do something cracked in the head, I marched in step because I knew he could be trusted. Eithan, though? I don’t even know what he wants us for. Won’t be much help in cleaning up the city, will we?”

Lindon followed her to the caves, frowning as he pondered. He looked so grim and serious when he was thinking.

The five caves were dug into the back of a little alcove in the shadow of the black cliff. Nearby, the waterfall streamed down into a crystalline pool, and a cluster of scraggly black bushes held berries nearby.

“I’ll take what I can get,” Lindon said at last. “If he’s willing to sponsor me on my Path, the rewards are worth the risk. I just have to hope he’s not looking for anything too terrible.”

“I’ve never liked betting on hope,” she muttered, but that wasn’t entirely true. When you got swept up in the nets of someone powerful, you didn’t have much left to your name but hope.

Hope that they were looking out for you, and not just using you as grain in a mill.

* * *

Cassias’ body had deserted him, and by the time he could move again, Eithan had snatched him away from Lindon and Yerin. They were deep in the caverns now, and Eithan wouldn’t let him crawl back.

But his bloodline powers were still working. He’d heard everything.

Eithan still stood there in his fine outer robe, hands tucked behind his back, smiling in self-satisfaction as he waited for Cassias to stir. It was black as tar in the tunnel, but he could still see well enough through his detection web. The Underlord, he was sure, could see perfectly.

“How did they offend you, for you to make them suffer so?” Cassias asked, his voice weak.

Eithan raised one eyebrow. “Offended me? Quite the opposite; they have impressed me again and again. I might actually have placed a winning bet this time.”

Cassias had heard Eithan talk about a bet before—one that had gone wrong. Which had resulted in the destruction of the Arelius family main branch, over six years ago.

“They won’t win anything in there,” Cassias said, struggling to his feet. “I can’t say why you directed Lindon to this Path at all, but there are safer ways to teach him.”

“You think safety is one of the values I hold most dear, do you?”

Cassias stabbed a finger in the direction of the exit, assuming Eithan could see it. “The Black Dragon Trials were designed for a team of five Lowgolds, all trained to work as a unit. They were supervised by the elders of the family, who would call off the Trials or order breaks for the participants, as necessary.”

“I seem to recall reading about that, yes.”

Cassias longed to break something in his frustration, but his training and upbringing only allowed him to grow more stiff. His back straightened, his jaw tightened, and the grip on his sword hilt whitened his knuckles. “The Jai are strangling us. We cannot throw away recruits when we’re short on manpower as it is. Not to mention the sheer time and expense it must have taken to open this place back up and power the Trials. Underlord, this is irresponsible to the point of negligence.”

It was the most openly he’d ever contradicted Eithan, but Cassias couldn’t say he was sorry. Eithan had finally cleared his way to marry Jing, and Cassias would always be grateful, but he couldn’t watch the man run his family off a cliff.

Eithan turned his head, looking into the darkness, and his whole demeanor seemed to shift.

Cassias knew that Eithan had grown up in Blackflame City, but they had never met. He’d never even heard of Eithan Arelius until six years ago, when the man stumbled through a portal to the other side of the world. Already an Underlord.

Life and blood artists beholden to the family had confirmed that he wasn’t far past thirty. That was partially what had created such an impact in the Blackflame Empire: Underlords so young were not unheard of, but they were rare as phoenix feathers. Eithan had the potential to advance to Overlord, a stage that only the Emperor, Naru Huan, had currently reached.

During the time Cassias had known him, Eithan had behaved like a child playing with toys, like a rich man indulging his idle whims, like a genius in the grip of his eccentricities, and—very occasionally—like a powerful and dignified Underlord.

But now Cassias found himself watching a new side of Eithan. He looked weary. Uncertain.

It shook Cassias more than he cared to admit.

“We settle for so little,” Eithan said at last. “We protect what we have instead of reaching for more. Even when the door is open, we refuse to walk through it.” He clenched a fist in front of him. “Cassias, I can take this family through that door. I can drag the rest of them, kicking and screaming, into a future better than you or I could ever imagine.”

He sighed, and his arm dropped back to his side. “But I can only see so far. I think these two could be the sails that carry us far beyond this empire…but what if I’m wrong? I could squeeze this family dry, betting on a glorious payout fifty years from now, and the Jai could devour us tomorrow.

“I feel blind.”

Speechless, Cassias sat with Eithan in the silence. And the endless dark.

12

The five caves dug into the side of the black cliff were each identical. They were just deep enough to provide shelter from the rain—though not the wind—and they were stocked with a single reed mat and blanket each.

Yerin took the first one they came across, stabbing her row of swords into the soil outside the cave’s mouth so that they would start gathering aura. Lindon had no need to do anything of the sort—the vital aura was thick with the power of Blackflame here. He felt like he would harvest it if he took a deep enough breath.

After placing his pack into the cave next to Yerin’s, Lindon went into the other three caves and gathered the extra mats and blankets, bringing them back to his cave. Might as well have spares. Then, together, he and Yerin explored their basin.

It didn’t take them long. They were restricted to an alcove against the side of the mountain containing the five caves, a waterfall and pond, and twenty-four dark, thorny bushes with black-veined red berries that burned to the touch.

The pond and waterfall were warm and tasted of sulfur, but after a short examination, Yerin said the falling water should be safe to drink.

While Lindon took his own turn inspecting the water, Yerin nudged him. “Looks like we won’t be alone after all,” she said, pointing to the cliff wall.

Mud-brown crabs the size of dogs clung to the rock, so dark that they almost blended into the black rock. At first he only saw the one she’d pointed out, but his Jade sense weighed on him until he could feel more sets of eyes on him. He looked more closely, and realized that dozens of the crabs were clustered all over the wall.

As if it had sensed the attention of humans, one of the crabs peeled its legs away and scuttled down the wall, sliding into the pool beneath the waterfall and vanishing.

Lindon scooted away from the water.

“He said we’d find food and water inside,” Yerin said. “Guess we have. I’ll leave it to you to roast one of them up, when we get hungry.”

“Then I’ll leave it to you to bring it down, when the time comes,” Lindon responded. He thought he could capture one, but he couldn’t rid himself of a vision of all those dozens of crabs swarming down the cliff at once, crashing into him like a many-legged wave.

Which made him realize there was no stone to block the cave entrance. He’d have to find a way to keep the giant crabs out while he slept.

Once they had inspected the camp to their satisfaction, they moved back to the red archway.

Yerin and Lindon stood side-by-side, looking through. Beyond was a dense forest of smooth pillars, packed close enough together that Lindon could see nothing else between them but shadows. They stretched up to the height of the rocky cliffs above, where they merged with the black stone.

Just on the other side of the archway, between them and the pillars, there were two other objects.

One, a rectangular slab standing roughly Yerin’s height, was etched with writing and pictures too distant to read. The second was a waist-high pedestal holding a gray crystal ball.

Lindon had left his pack back in the cave, and now he slid off his parasite ring and put it into his pocket next to Suriel’s glass marble. His madra immediately moved more easily with the parasite ring gone, the Blackflame power burning merrily within him.

“This is the first Trial, I’d guess,” Yerin said.

Lindon nodded to the two characters painted on the archway pillar, above the dragon design: ‘Trial One.’

“That, or they’re playing a sadistic trick on us.”

They traded a look and then, together, stepped through the archway. Sure enough, there was a script embedded between the pillars: he could feel it ignite as they stepped forward. Icy power washed over his skin, and then he was through.

He stood before the stone tablet, which was crammed with diagrams and ancient characters. Lindon examined it for a few long breaths, committing segments to memory and wishing he’d brought paper and ink.

Yerin cleared her throat. “What’s it saying to you?”

Lindon scooted over, making room for her at the tablet. He gestured to the outline of a man, filled entirely with intricate loops. “This looks like the madra pattern for their Enforcer technique.” He brushed dust from the four characters comprising the name. “Black…fire…fierce…outer robe?”

“That has a nice sound to it, doesn’t it? The legendary Black Fire Fierce Outer Robe technique.”

“Well, what would you call it?”

With a thumb, she rubbed a scar on her chin. “Couldn’t tell you. Can’t read a word of it.”

She sounded defiant, as though daring him to make a comment about it, but he was immediately ashamed. “Forgiveness. I was fortunate enough to learn the basic characters of the old language as a child. It’s not so different from our language, though it looks much more complicated. You see—”

He was about to point out some of those similarities when she interrupted him. “Doesn’t make a lick of difference. Can’t read my own name.”

Lindon stared at her for too long before realizing how awkward that must be for her, then he shifted his gaze and pretended he’d been examining the stone all along. “That’s…ah, I’m sorry. Did the Sword Sage not…”

“Not much writing to be done with a sword,” she said, in a deliberately casual tone.

In the Wei clan, everyone learned to read before they learned their first Foundation technique. But it fell to the individual families to teach their children; he’d never considered what it might be like for someone raised outside a family.

“Well, ah…this section at the top is a simple sequence. It explains the history of the Blackflames.”

His fingers brushed the vertical lines of writing, each column separated by pictograms: a dragon flying over a human, then a human standing over a dragon, then a human with a dragon on a leash.

“When the humans came to this land, the dragons ruled. They burned through all opposition, ignoring all defenses. No one could stand against them. Finally, a...I think this means 'great disaster'...came to this land from the west, bringing the dragons down from the sky.”

That was interesting; Sacred Valley and the Desolate Wilds lay to the west. There were no pictures illustrating the great disaster, to his disappointment.

“Once they fell, the humans began to learn the sacred arts of the dragons. It helped to even the score, but their understanding was incomplete. While they were still studying the arts, the dragons discovered a way to...”

Lindon hesitated. “It says here they leashed the humans, but it seems to imply that the humans were the ones to benefit. Maybe a deal? A contract.”

Understanding sparked. The first Blackflames, at least, had bound themselves to the dragons just as he had done with Orthos.

“Some Paths bind their kids to sacred beasts,” Yerin said. “It’s like gluing a sword to your hand so you don’t drop it, if you ask me.”

Lindon spent a moment wondering if she was trying to insult him before he realized she didn’t know. He hadn’t seen her since making his contract with Orthos…who was drifting around the mountain as the mood took him. If Lindon wasn’t mistaken, Orthos would probably check on him before he finished the Trials.

“Not to ask too much of you, but if you happen to see a giant, flaming turtle wandering around out here…please don’t attack it.”

Yerin stared at him like he’d started babbling nonsense.

“Well,” Lindon continued, “it seems that the remaining dragons linked themselves to the Blackflame ancestors for some reason. With the power of the dragons...”

He tapped a picture of a man with a dragon standing over a large crowd of humans, and Yerin nodded. “Yeah, I can figure that one.”

There was a line of text just beneath the story, separated from everything else. These words were engraved more deeply, so the passage of time had hardly touched them.

“The dragon advances,” he said aloud.

“That’s a long stretch better than ‘Fierce Robe Burning Fire,’ true?”

“It’s not a technique name. It looks like their family words, or maybe the philosophy of the Trial.”

Yerin looked bored, so he moved down to the next section.

“Now it's talking about the Trials, and the language gets harder. The Blackflame ancestors placed three Trials here for the three basic techniques of the Path, that much is clear. This one is the...you know, the Fierce Fire Robe. It's their Enforcer technique. Seems like it burns...”

He trailed off.

“You'd expect fire madra to burn,” Yerin said.

“No, that's...ah, it seems to burn away the body of the user.” He searched his mind for another interpretation, but came up with nothing. That would explain why Eithan thought he needed the Bloodforged Iron body to handle the Path, but he wasn't exactly enthusiastic about burning himself from the inside out.

“That's a gem for you, isn't it?” Yerin asked. “If a technique costs you something, means it must be a good one.”

Lindon grunted noncommittally and gestured to the smoky crystal ball on the pedestal. “I'm supposed to run the technique through the crystal, and that will activate the Trial. Apologies, but it looks like we can't move on until I’m familiar with it.”

She folded her arms. “I'll wait.”

He looked from the madra diagram to her. “This could take me days.”

“Really?” Yerin tapped a knuckle against the illustration of the madra channels. “This?”

The diagram seemed to require him to make dozens of small directions and adjustments to his madra flow with every breath. To use it without thought in a fight would take him months.

“I defer to your experience,” he said, “but I think three or four days is reasonable.”

Yerin slid her sword around on her belt, then plopped down to the ground. She patted the dirt in front of her. “I'll be buried and rotten if I let you take days for something that simple. Have a seat, I'll walk you through it.”

Lindon took one final glance at the diagram and then sat with his back to the stone, his knees against Yerin's. Once again, he wished he'd brought paper and ink; tracing the madra pattern would have helped commit it to memory.

“Do what I tell you, when I tell you, you hear me?” When Lindon nodded, Yerin straightened her back. “Close your eyes.”

He did so.

“We're keeping this to a crawl, now. Deep breath in, and picture your madra running like tree roots through your whole body. You inhale, and the roots spread.”

It was the same sort of visualization Eithan had mentioned while teaching him the Heaven and Earth Purification Wheel. He followed along, and his madra responded with surprising ease.

“Exhale, and burn it all up. There's a fire consuming those roots, you're burning them, and that fire is the fuel that drives you.”

When Lindon focused on the fire, it was as though the Blackflame madra leaped forward like a hungry beast. It spread from his spirit and sunk into his body, but the sensation was painless, just a hot and disturbing tingle as though his muscles were slowly fizzing away to nothing.

He opened his eyes. “As expected of the Sword Sage’s disciple,” he said, saluting her with fists pressed together. “I almost felt it work. A few more tries, and I think…what?”

She was wearing a smug smile. “Almost?” The silver blade over her shoulder inched forward, leaving a polished steel surface in front of his face. “Do it with your eyes open this time.”

It was harder to picture his madra flow with his eyes open, so this attempt took him longer. But this time he was watching when his madra flared and the tingling sensation washed through his veins.

The reflection of his face was suddenly blurred by a haze of red-and-black fire.

Lindon almost fell backwards.

Yerin gestured to him. “That covers you all over, like burning smoke. It's got a menacing look to it, I'll tell you true. Jai Long will have to bring a diaper to the fight.”

He rose to his feet. “How? So quickly?”

She drew her sword so that she could reach the stone tablet with its tip, pointing to little symbols next to the madra pattern. Lindon had taken them for reading directions in the ancient script.

“Can't read a word, but you'd see these pictures on most old Path manuals. I had more talks about cycling theory with my master than we had hot meals.” She shrugged. “You're just moving your own spirit around, aren't you? The feeling does you more good than remembering some directions.”

She'd left her Goldsign in place as a mirror, so Lindon flared the technique again. This time, he got a clearer look: a thin aura of black and red rose around him in a haze of power. He would be shrouded in Blackflame madra when he used this technique.

“What does it do?”

“Ask your...stone book, there.” She scratched her nose, then added, “But I could take a guess. Looks to me like a basic full-body Enforcement. Works different depending on your madra, but basically every Path has something like it. Your body's protected and powered by madra while you use it, until you run out of madra or have to drop it.”

He studied the stone, which seemed to agree with her. As far as he could tell. “If it's so simple, then why did they record it here?”

“You're asking me, but who am I supposed to ask? Not every Path has complicated techniques—sometimes they're stone simple, and it's all about how you use them. Or maybe this was the Trial they gave to Copper kids.”

From the tone of the tablet, Lindon doubted this was something so frivolous as a playground for children. And Eithan would never have sent him somewhere easy, he was sure of that.

Lindon flared the aura again, trying to see how long the sensation of painless, corrosive heat would last. He couldn't hold it longer than a blink before the technique fell apart; he'd need to work on keeping his madra control steady and predictable. “It protects me, you say?”

“It Enforces you—figure you know what that means by now. But every Path’s madra does something different. You'll have to play around with it.” She hopped up, brushing her knees clean. “Hit me.”

He looked at her sword.

“Got to try out your shiny new technique, don't you? Hit me.”

Not for a moment did Lindon think he'd hurt her. Quite the opposite, in fact: he was worried her counterattack would slice off his arm. “I will do as you say, then. Excuse me.”

The technique flared, and as soon as he felt the heat and saw the black-and-red haze around his body, he kicked off from the dirt. He'd been used to Enforcing himself with pure madra, and he had a sense of how strong his Iron body could be.

When he kicked off, it sent a pain flaring in his knees. The ground exploded behind him and wind rushed by his ears as he launched into the air.

Lindon had an instant to scream before he slammed face-first into the packed dirt a dozen feet behind Yerin.

Dirt ground into his eyes, into his lips, between his teeth. His body slapped down to the earth a second behind his head, and a brief moment passed before he could lift his face enough to spit out a mouthful of dirt.

He groaned as he rose to his knees. It hadn't hurt as much as he'd expected, as though he'd taken a hit on a suit of armor instead of to his flesh.

Worse was the internal strain. His knees ached and the bottom of his feet felt bruised.

Yerin gave a low whistle. “Well, isn't that a kick in the pants? You always have to get used to a new Enforcer technique, but…bleed me like a pig, it looked like you strapped a couple of lightning bolts to your legs.”

That felt about right. His Bloodforged Iron body had already come to life, draining Blackflame madra to heal his strained knees.

In fact...he hadn't noticed it before, but madra was trickling into every corner of his body for healing. His black-and-red core was already guttering like a spent candle.

Had he really spent his madra so quickly?

After a moment of thought, he realized the reason: the Enforcer technique strained his joints and burned away at his muscles, and his body responded by drawing on madra to heal him. He'd drain himself dry in five breaths.

“What's got your tongue?” Yerin asked, walking over to him. “Didn't bite it, did you?”

“This Fierce Burning Outer Robe costs me more than I thought.”

“First thing, we're not calling it that.” She chewed on her lip as she thought. “Burning Cloak,” she said at last.

He cast a glance at the stone. “The 'fierce' character is core to the reading of the name, and there's a different symbol for a rain cloak than for a sacred artist's outer robe—”

“Burning Cloak,” she said, more firmly. “That's a real technique name. You want to call it Fierce Burning Clothes on Fire in your own head, that's on your account, but I'll cut you every time you say it out loud.”

“It will be an honor to use the Burning Cloak technique,” Lindon said with a little bow.

“True enough, it will.” She jumped, casually clearing fifteen feet and landing next to the stone. “Now, fire up that crystal ball and let's test the edge of this Trial.”

If Lindon spent any more madra, he would be crawling in the dirt instead of fighting. “Lend me a moment to cycle, if you don’t mind.”

She gave him a wry look, but her scars lent it a sinister, threatening cast. “I'm not throwing you into a tiger's den, I just want a look at the enemy. We don't like what we see, we back up.”

She had a point. The arch hadn't closed when they passed through it, and there was nothing preventing them from heading back to their caves at the first sign of danger.

Besides, he was curious himself. There might be prizes to this Trial beyond simple knowledge.

He walked over to the crystal ball, cycling the Heaven and Earth Purification Wheel to replenish his madra. It strained his spirit and his lungs, and he couldn’t tell if it restored anything at all—sure enough, the technique was trash for refilling a core.

Lindon rested his hand on the warm, smoky ball that sat on the pedestal. Now that he was close enough, he could see threads of red running through the gray, like the crystals he'd seen in Orthos’ chamber.

“The tablet says nothing about what we'll face when I start the Trial,” he warned, but Yerin gave a heavy sigh.

“Jabber jabber jabber, we’re burning time. Light that candle.”

One breath in, one out, and a black-and-red nimbus flared around Lindon's entire body.

When the crystal touched that light, it flared red.

Beneath the ground, a script kindled to life.

Though Lindon saw nothing, he could feel it, like a circle of fire ten feet beneath his shoes. He was aware of it in the same way he was aware of his own limbs.

Yerin drew her white blade. “Eyes up.”

* * *

Cassias followed Eithan, because he had no other choice. The Underlord had seized his Thousand-Mile Cloud, and it was either climb on behind him or be left behind in the tunnel.

As soon as Cassias set foot on the cloud, Eithan took off, sending the construct straight up and out of the valley. Sheer black walls passed them on either side, but with an Underlord’s madra propelling them, they reached the peak in seconds.

This was really a secondary peak of Shiryu Mountain. The Jai clan main complex occupied the highest peak with the living quarters for the head family and their subordinates. Cassias could see glimpses of their palaces high above and almost a mile away.

Serpent’s Grave proper spread out far beneath them, a mound of bones in an ocean of yellow sand. But Eithan didn’t take them down; instead, he flew them around this peak, overlooking the valley where the two children would live for the next few weeks.

There was a temple carved into this peak. Not sitting on top, where it would be visible from miles around, but carved as though to seem part of the stone. Only from the back could you see the stairs leading up, the braziers resting to either side of the entrance, the polished archway leading into shadows deeper within. From any other angle, this place would be invisible.

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.”

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 ground, 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 one 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.”

“A technique?”

“Sure. Probably stole the binding out of some advanced Remnant, strapped it into a script circle, and tied it to that crystal.”

Lindon pulled out a brush, dipped it in ink, and began taking notes. What was he even writing down? This was the basic of basics.

“Jai Long does it,” she said. “Fought him for a breath or two in the Ruins, and his moves looked like snakes.”

He nodded along with her words, still writing. “How can a technique have a mind of its own?” He stopped, brush poised, waiting for her answer.

“Plenty of the really powerful sacred artists can Forge something that looks like it’s alive. Carries a piece of their Remnant with it, or so they say, but I can’t speak to the details of it. My master could Forge a sword that would fly around and chase an enemy until they died or broke the technique.”

Lindon’s brush dashed over the page. “So all we have to do is break the technique.”

“All we have to do,” Yerin muttered. “Listen. Whoever left that binding behind was at least as powerful as Eithan. Better, more than likely. And it’s meant to test your Enforcer technique, meaning you’re intended to tear through it. That’s a tall order when I’ve got to fight by myself.”

She slammed the shell full of water down next to her so that it sloshed up and over her wrist.

He blinked, eyes wide and innocent as a child’s. “You were amazing today; I’ve never seen anything like it. I would only have gotten in the way.”

That was the attitude that scraped her nerves. You couldn’t always fight when you had a plan or a secret weapon. Nobody ever waited for you to sleep a full night, have a hot meal, and cycle your madra before they attacked you. No, you were more than likely to fight half-asleep, with a bleeding arm and a gut full of poison.

When she’d fought Jai Long herself, she’d just cut her way through a pyramid filled with dreadbeasts and crazed Remnants. Did he do her the favor of waiting until she was in her best condition? No, and neither would anybody else.

“If I waited to fight until I was ready,” Yerin said, “my bones would be rotting in Sacred Valley right now. You have to dive in there, or you might as well scamper back home.”

Well, at least he had the grace to look embarrassed. “I didn’t expect we would fight right away.”

“Yeah, you thought the Blackflame Trials might be testing your foot speed?”

“I was hoping to gather information. If we could just run past it, we might have been able to walk through to the next Trial. Wouldn’t Eithan be amazed if we left here only a day after we started?”

Yerin gaped at him. “You think Eithan wants us to run out of here quick? You don’t think he’d drop us right back at the entrance if we didn’t learn the lesson?”

Lindon flushed, examining his inkwell as though it held the deepest wisdom of the sacred arts. “No, of course, but surely there’s not just one way to solve a problem. If we come up with a solution on our own, then…”

Yerin stood up, brushing herself off. “I’m going to cycle,” she said abruptly, cutting him off.

She walked off, storming past the swords thrust into the ground in front of her cave. The vital aura had finally started to gather around them, generating enough sword aura for her to harvest.

Yerin knelt just inside, calming her breathing to cycle the aura steadily. It had the effect of calming her down as well, leaving her alone with her thoughts.

Lindon hadn’t lost the fight for her.

Sure, it would have been nice to have a second person fighting alongside her, if only to split the enemies. As it was, she had been on the defensive the entire time, battling as hard as she could just to survive for a while longer. That was no way to win a match, and she knew it.

But she’d had no choice. Her madra was squirming out of her control.

Not due to her uninvited guest—it was quiet and placid for the moment, content without straining against the Sword Sage’s knot.

No, it was the Sword Sage himself who was causing this problem.

She had to force her Goldsign to defend her when all it wanted was to strike at the enemy. Her master had left her a second, buried set of instincts inside her that kept trying to teach her how to attack. Her master had been a predator for most of his life. It wasn’t in his nature to stand back and protect himself in front of an enemy. Ever since she’d absorbed his Remnant, she’d only felt fully in control when she was attacking all-out.

Eithan might be right that cracking open her master’s Remnant was the fastest way to Highgold, but that meant there were other ways. Slower ones. As long as she worked hard enough, she could stay a step ahead of her unwelcome guest and keep her master’s voice around at the same time.

Her master was trying to teach her a lesson. And he was going to keep his hand on her sword, pulling her his way, until she learned what he wanted to teach.

This was her last chance to learn from the Sword Sage. She couldn’t waste that opportunity just because Eithan told her to.

Besides….she wouldn’t admit this out loud, but if she tapped into her master’s Remnant, his voice would go away. It would just be her and her unwelcome guest in her head. Alone again.

Yerin continued cycling, focusing on her breath to calm her frustration. She still had plenty of time to reach Highgold. This impatience could only hurt her progress.

Besides, she’d get another crack at the Trial tomorrow.

* * *

Iteration 217: Harrow

Suriel landed on hard-packed sand next to a lake-sized plate of chrome. In Limit, this had been a piece of a giant machine. In Harrow, a desert.

When Limit lost its grip on the Way and slammed into Harrow, the two worlds merged together and split the difference.

On the horizon, mountains flickered in and out of existence, as they tried to stabilize in one Iteration or the other. Here, Suriel’s presence was stability itself. Her connection to the Way anchored the world around her to order.

For the most part.

A fractal distortion in space unfolded into a field of impossible shapes before blooming into a two-story creature of dark glass. It had the legs of an origami centipede and the body of a black mirage, and it strained her human senses just by its proximity.

The creature of corruption reared over an upturned iron wagon, which had been half-buried in the sand. A woman crouched beneath it, filthy and ragged, having sheltered there for the better part of two weeks as reality crumbled around her.

Drawn to her sentience, the monster would have devoured her to remove her connection to the Way and to extend its own existence in the material world.

Suriel drew her Razor, now a meter-long rectangular shaft of blue metal, and blasted the creature apart. It dispersed into hissing shards of chaos that were difficult to perceive—they looked like burning nightmares.

Suriel activated one of the many functions in her Razor and the armored wagon dissolved, leaving a terrified woman huddled in the sand, surrounded by what looked like a nest of garbage.

Something hissed at the edge of Suriel’s awareness, trying to get her attention, but she ignored it.

[Mu Bak Ti Yan,] Suriel’s Presence said, and the woman’s head jerked up at the sound of her name. [You have been chosen to live. You will begin on a new world, where you will work to settle a wilderness. Do you accept this task?]

Mu Bak Ti Yan stared at the Presence, a gray figure of smoke on Suriel’s shoulder. Then she stared at Suriel.

In her original world, Suriel had been a pale, scrawny woman with hair like seaweed and eyes that took up half her face. That woman was still there, only…perfected.

Her hair was the color of sunlit emeralds, her skin ivory, her eyes a bright violet etched with vivid runes of Fate. Her childhood friends would have said she had the body of an immortal—flawless and statuesque—which was only appropriate, since they had died of old age more than four thousand years before.

She wore the armor of the Abidan, smooth and absolutely white, as though it had been poured into place. Her correlation lines looked like smoke trailing from the fingertips of her left hand up to the back of her neck, though they functioned more like an instrument’s strings. And, of course, she had just used the meter of blue metal clipped to her hip to blast apart an incomprehensible creature of madness.

In Limit, there were beings called Terava, which looked like perfect human men and women but possessed godlike power. The Teravan were natural energy projections that only took human form to feed, but Limit had never learned that.

Mu Bak Ti Yan, born in the dead world of Limit, must have thought she looked like a Terava.

Suriel raised one gauntleted hand in a gesture of peace, but the woman spooked and ran. She kicked up sand and fell to her hands and knees, still trying to crawl.

For the past two weeks, Suriel had been trying to track the human living in this desert. Most of the planet was clear already—its population dead or rescued—and this was the only inhabited planet in this universe.

As the sentient population fell, the power of chaos grew stronger. And the Way more distant.

Which made precisely pinpointing anyone’s location almost impossible, at least for an Abidan. She had relied on her old powers, following the trail of Mu Bak Ti Yan’s life-force, but the corruption of reality interfered with that as well.

Hunting one elusive prey through twenty thousand square kilometers of madness was more difficult than she remembered. Maybe she relied on the power of the Way too much; she was growing rusty.

Suriel waved her hand, and a blue-edged portal flared into being just in front of Mu Bak Ti Yan. It showed a grassland on the newly formed world of Pioneer 8089, where clusters of crude huts surrounded a great silver bird.

The woman stumbled through the portal, and the silver bird crowed, alerting the rest of the population. A tiny orange moon shone alone in the night sky; none of the stars had formed yet.

That was normal. Iterations started from clustered world fragments and grew outward, like seeds.

Suriel cut off the portal, and the door through the Way vanished, leaving Mu Bak Ti Yan trapped in a world far from her own. She had never gotten verbal agreement for the relocation, which was against Abidan protocol, but people usually only refused resettlement until they realized that staying meant horrifying death or mutation.

Of the two-point-one million survivors that had remained human through the merge and corruption of Limit and Harrow, she had saved one-point-four million in the half of a standard year since she’d been working here. The others had either died or evaded her notice long enough that she had no hope of finding them before the end.

On the first day, she’d sent half a million people to Pioneer 8089. They’d had to form orderly lines through the portal. By now, she was lucky to find one a week.

And this world didn’t have a week left.

She could feel it: the Way was losing its grip on this Iteration. Before she could locate anyone else, Harrow and Limit would accompany one another into the void.

Suriel lifted herself into the atmosphere, the land below her shifting from continent-sized machine to desert and back again. The atmosphere was even more chaotic than the surface, twisting like six hurricanes at war with one another, but she felt nothing inside the bubble of her isolation shell. She dove into stars under its protection; wind was not a worthy opponent.

From above, the world was a rapidly shifting mass of images and impressions, like a nonsense puzzle with pieces that randomly rearranged themselves. It was straining at the Way, ready to break.

And Suriel finally turned her attention to the hissing that had tried to grab her earlier. It sounded like a whisper just at the edge of hearing, like someone trying to call her name from a dream.

[Further contact established,] her Presence reported. [Transmission location still unknown.]

“Best guess,” Suriel said. She liked talking to her Presence, and had chosen its form for that reason: it almost looked like a person. She enjoyed conversation, and that simple psychological trick was enough to cut away the pressure from the isolation of her job.

Usually.

[The most recent transmission raises estimate accuracy to fifty-four percent.]

It was better than the last three times she’d tried to find the source of the transmission. It sounded like an Abidan beacon, as though someone had left a call for help, but Sector Twenty-One Control would have heard about it before she arrived. And it should have been as clear as a voice in her head.

It was quiet and hidden behind static, which meant that either it was not an Abidan beacon, or it had been broken during the violence of the merge.

Suriel blasted through the atmosphere toward the coordinates her Presence indicated, not bothering to keep herself subsonic. No one would notice, and this world no longer had a connection to Fate that could be disturbed by legends of a flying goddess.

She could have bent space and arrived directly there, but direct spatial travel was imprecise, better suited for very short travel—like range of sight—or very long travel where precision mattered little.

Besides, the beacon had persisted for months in the most chaotic environment possible. It would last a few more seconds before she arrived.

The flight brought her to an ocean. It had been an ocean in both worlds, so it was still an ocean, even if the chaos meant that it sloshed like a cup of water on a flying dragon’s back.

The whisper did seem a little louder here, though no more clear, so she dropped into the water.

As soon as she did, a signal reached her Razor. This beacon triggered in response to her weapon, then, though she could choose if she allowed the Razor to respond.

Curious, she let it transmit back, and a green light appeared in her vision. Coordinates a few hundred kilometers away, still within the ocean. Though her Presence warned her that finding something specifically keyed to her on the surface of a random dying world was dangerously suspicious, she followed it.

There was only one person who would leave her a message here. This might even be Ozriel’s hiding place.

That would be just like him: predict where she would end up, and then hide there, waiting for her. Waiting on a dying world would just add style, as he saw it.

She tore through the water, but was forced to stop in less than a second. A spatial crack the size of a finger stretched vertically for hundreds of meters, its edges sputtering with chaos, and its heart looking into the void. Water gushed through it in an endless waterfall, but that wasn’t what concerned her.

Cracks like these were often left behind after an Abidan’s battle.

Extending her senses as far as she could, she found other cracks, getting wider and wider as they drifted into the sky. With the chaotic interference, she couldn’t detect anything further than about a kilometer, but they might very well keep going. If this had been a battle between Judges, the spatial cracks could have gotten wide enough to swallow suns.

There was no testing that now. This Iteration’s stars had already vanished—there had only been one inhabited planet in each universe, so it was the last to disappear before the world fragmented.

She flew on, dodging other spatial cracks. If not for the chaos of the merged worlds and Limit’s corruption, she would have sensed these the second she landed in this reality.

Finally, beneath a storm of spatial cracks, she found the location of the beacon.

It waited for her beneath a city-sized dome of stone.

There was Abidan technology here, because the dome remained stable and unaffected despite the chaos of the water above and the world outside. She slipped lower, but as she got closer, a hole opened in the stone.

[It would be wiser to alert Sector Control,] her Presence said.

If it really was Ozriel down there, and she turned him in before hearing what he had to say, he would never forgive her. She drifted in through the hole.

The inside of the dome was very simple. It was all a single room, its structure reinforced by the Way to add stability, and big enough to swallow a city.

But there were no streets or buildings inside.

Only pods.

Transparent, organic pods in rows for hundreds of kilometers. All filled with people, sleeping and drifting in liquid.

The pods had been arranged in grids with space between them, so the people emerging could leave and walk away, but there were no other facilities. No shelters, no water, no plants. Each pod gave off a slight radiance, but that was the only light.

[Twelve million, four hundred forty-five thousand, six hundred thirty-two people,] her Presence reported. [And some shipping crates containing culturally significant icons.]

“Point of origin?”

[Iteration Two-one-six: Limit.]

Of course. The Abidan had evacuated the elite of Harrow, and she herself had saved a million and a half survivors of the combined world, but no one had saved the population of Limit. Their world was destined to end, so the Abidan had allowed it.

Except for Ozriel. He’d saved enough to preserve the unique genetics and cultures of a doomed world.

But there was one more feature of the space inside the dome: spatial cracks, which buzzed like a storm in the air. The structure of the building and the pods were still intact, but Ozriel must have protected them. Otherwise, the void would have swallowed them by now.

Even so, the chaotic interference was so strong here that the air crackled with it, and Suriel had to move carefully around each crack. Not that they would threaten her, but she might stick to them like iron to a magnet.

The cracks were thickest surrounding a door at the far end of the compound…a door marked with the image of a scythe.

Well, that was simple enough.

With one hand, she shoved the heavy stone door aside, and the chaos hit her like a stench. The room on the other side of the door was only as large as a one-room office, and positively black with spatial cracks, so that it looked like the weapons of two Judges had clashed in here.

Except that a conflict like that would have destroyed this shelter and most everyone else in Limit.

She couldn’t see much in the room past the nest of hissing cracks in reality, but half of a desk remained in the center. A fist-sized ball glowed blue on that table: a beacon, though all the chaos in here must have degraded it. And on the far wall, a spray of ancient blood and flesh, as though a man had exploded right before the door was sealed for a century.

[Impossible to identify remains,] her Presence reported. [Chaos and time have destroyed them beyond the point of analysis.]

The beacon was still resonating with her Razor, indicating that it held a message. She reached out to accept it, but hesitated.

Not out of reason, or to buy herself a moment to think. She was scared.

Ozriel had come here to prepare for Limit’s death. He had left this message here for her after a battle…or had he prepared the message before the battle began, stretching out past the planet?

Either way, it wasn’t good news. This message was not about to tell her that Ozriel was safe, happy, and ready to return to work.

She was afraid for herself, afraid for the Abidan, and afraid for the man she’d known even before she’d joined the Abidan Court. He had always been Ozriel to her, but there had been a time before she was Suriel, the Phoenix. They had been friends.

She accepted the message, and her senses were consumed in endless white.

This was a perfectly ordinary way to send a message in Sanctum, headquarters of the Abidan. Sharing senses and experiences was common, and crafting an experience like this would have taken Ozriel seconds. But the world of this message crackled, tarnished by damage and chaos. The world of white was speckled with imperfection, as though she watched it through grainy film, and interference was a constant hiss in her ears.

At least she wasn’t alone.

Ozriel stood before her in his polished black armor, the Mantle of Ozriel streaming behind him like a boiling cape of shadow, and the white hair running down his back. But it was all fuzzy, like a half-forgotten dream. His face blurred, though she could fill in the gaps from memory: cold and distant and grim.

In person, he had more of a sense of humor than any other Abidan she’d ever met, but he always wore an expression like a man bracing himself for terrible news.

“Sur…looking lovely…get to the point, because…murdered.” He was speaking, speaking to her, because he’d known she would find this. Of course he had. But whatever he’d predicted, it hadn’t included a battle in this room ruining his message.

The scene congealed for a moment, until she could almost believe he was really standing in front of her. “…didn’t abandon you. I’ve identified the sixteen worlds…a facility like this one…” She could make out his lips moving now, but it was as though she’d gone deaf.

“…sure you’ll…quarantine. I sh—…actually kills me.”

His expression darkened, and he looked over her shoulder. The Scythe appeared in his hand: a long, curved blade like an obsidian scimitar. At least, that was how it presented itself.

She was sure this was the heart of the message, but she heard nothing but a whisper of static. Finally, his voice faded back in, just on the edge of her hearing.

“…if I didn’t act, it would all stay the same. I don’t—“

The dream world squealed with feedback, and colors twisted in her eyes as the message’s recording was violently cut off.

That wasn’t interference. He’d been attacked while speaking, ending the message.

So the battle had started here, but continued off into the world. Or had he recorded it elsewhere and the beacon survived the battle?

…survived a battle that he, perhaps, had not.

“Presence,” Suriel ordered verbally. “Reconstruct the probable content of Ozriel’s message. Authorization Suriel zero-zero-six.” The Presence was more than capable of simple predictions, but interactions between Judges usually required verbal confirmation. Sanctum wanted any jurisdictional overlap to be well documented.

[Incomplete information supplemented with standard Ozriel prediction model. Best recreation follows.]

The message was audio-only, but it was as though Ozriel was speaking right into her ear. The voice of her friend, full of weary humor.

“Suriel. You’re looking lovely today, I’m sure. I’ll get to the point, because I have an unexpected visitor who needs murdered: I did not abandon you. I have identified the sixteen worlds that will be corrupted while I’m gone, and I’ve prepared a facility like this one in each. I’m sure Makiel will send Gadrael, and then you’ll volunteer. If I’m still gone, chaotic interference makes it impossible to predict beyond sixteen, so go ahead and initiate quarantine. I shouldn’t take much longer, unless this actually kills me.”

His voice turned serious. “We have to change, Suriel. If I didn’t act, it would all stay the same. I don’t—”

The sound cut off.

Of their own accord, her eyes slid back to the blood on the walls. He’d seen her standing here. From hundreds of years ago, he’d seen her.

He was still watching out for her, if not for himself.

Her heart hammered in her ears, her respiration sped up a fraction, and her adrenal glands squeezed hormones into her bloodstream. She chose not to cut off the physical responses.

Let her feel fear for her friend.

14

On the fourth morning since starting the Trials, Lindon slid the Sylvan Riverseed’s case out of his pack, holding out a pair of freshly Forged scales.

The Sylvan waved at him, smiling cheerily.

He stared back.

Someone had replaced his tiny, faceless spirit with a miniature woman Forged out of water madra. Until she opened her mouth at the sight of Lindon’s scales, waiting to be fed, he suspected it was a different creature entirely.

Where once she had been a translucent bright blue doll, now she was a deep azure woman with long, flowing hair, a dress that swirled around hidden feet, teeth that showed clearly when she smiled, and curious eyes.

Those eyes were now scrunched closed as she held open her mouth, waiting for her meal. Lindon thought he could see her tongue.

She had a tongue now. And eyelids.

Dazed, he ran his eyes along the edges of the case, looking for changes. He found one immediately: a spot in the corner where the scripted glass didn’t fit perfectly together.

That was certainly a change. He’d spent hours searching the tank for any imperfections, trying to figure out a way to open it without breaking the glass. He ran his thumb along the flaw, and that corner of the case popped open. He repeated the process on the other side, and the lid of the case rose.

The Sylvan was still begging for food, so he slipped the madra coins inside without taking his eyes from the case itself. They dissolved as soon as they reached the Sylvan, flowing down her throat in streams of light.

Eithan. Eithan did this.

Either he had to accept that the Sylvan had drastically changed her form in the week since he’d fed her—and that someone else had figured out how to open her case and then closed it again—or the Underlord had done something. But what? And why?

He was itching to investigate, but he wasn’t even sure what questions to ask. If he had a drudge, he could examine the composition of her madra and see what had changed. Fisher Gesha could tell him, but if he left the mountain, he was considered to have given up.

In the absence of any clear answers, he placed her back into his pack. He’d inspect her more closely later, to see if Eithan had left any obvious hints for him.

Putting the Sylvan out of his mind, he and Yerin challenged the Enforcer Trial a second time.

Lindon cradled the red-and-black crystal in his arms, dashing through the stone forest with Burning Cloak active. Every second sizzled as his muscles burned from the Blackflame madra, every step sent dirt flying behind him and drove splinters of pain through his knees, and every breath came slow and heavy, as though he were trying to suck air through a wet blanket.

It was like running through a nightmare: gray shapes chased him from every direction as pain wracked his body. Though he knew he was moving faster than he ever had before, he still felt as though he were slogging through mud.

Finally he dropped the breathing technique, heaving a deep breath of pure air that sent sweet life flowing through his veins, but then his madra channels couldn’t handle the burden of the Burning Cloak. It flickered and died, the seal dimmed, and a soldier’s blade knocked the crystal from his hands.

A silver blade of madra blasted from the woods, slashing the soldier in half, but the gong had already sounded: failure.

* * *

The soldiers changed.

They always carried stone weapons, but sometimes those weapons blazed with sword aura until they could take a slice out of the surrounding pillars.

Not all the soldiers ever carried the gleaming silver weapons, but Yerin preferred the ones that did. She could sense them coming thanks to the aura gathering around their weapons, and the Endless Sword technique would mince them. When those showed up, she could eliminate them in a blink, and she and Lindon could make it deep into the columns before a living statue slipped past her and caught him.

But they never made it any further.

The frustration grew until she wanted to take a sword and carve her way out of this valley by pure fury. She could do so much better than this. If she could use her true ability, she would split every single sword-carrying soldier open on their own aura and then carry Lindon through to the end like a baby.

Not that Lindon was a burden anymore, which was enough shock for a lifetime in itself. He had surprised and impressed her in the days since they’d started the Trial. The Burning Cloak fit him like a good sheath, giving him everything he’d lacked before: explosive speed, bursts of strength, and enough confidence to stand against his enemies fist-to-fist.

Truth was, fighting next to him was a treat, now that he could keep up with her. They could only challenge the Trials every three or four days, when they were in their best condition: his spirit didn’t recover as fast as hers, and her injuries stuck around longer than his did. She looked forward to the Trial days, because that meant fighting together, as a pair.

If she could have used her full skills, fighting next to Lindon as they learned to train and grow as a team, she’d have been on holiday. It would have been the best time in her life since the Sword Sage plucked her out of the ashes of her childhood home.

But she was hobbled. Weighted down.

Her uninvited guest strained against its seal, gaining on her day after day as she remained stuck at the barrier to Highgold. She had to dedicate half her attention to keeping it under control, so it didn’t squirm further into her core. Every night she tied the bow tighter around her waist, trying to reinforce the Sword Sage’s seal, feeling the bloodthirst of the red rope seeping into her.

On its own, that wouldn’t be enough to cripple her—she’d dealt with this parasite most of her life. But now even her own madra was fighting her.

Her Goldsign still slipped through her control sometimes, lunging against enemies when she wanted it to pull back. If anything, it was getting worse; now her own techniques were also trying to defy her. Her master’s instincts, buried inside her along with his Remnant, would tell her to Enforce herself and run into battle. Madra she’d been preparing to hurl at her enemies would flow into her sword instead, sharpening her weapon. She had to switch tactics, adapting to her master’s lesson and costing precious seconds in battle.

Together, it was like trying to fight with someone else’s hands. Some days it felt like she couldn’t take two steps without her own body betraying her.

She could tap into the silver Remnant in her core, and sometimes she was tempted. But even when he was stealing her madra, ruining her chance at passing the Trial, it was still another chance at hearing his voice.

She couldn’t give that up. And any insight into the Path of the Endless Sword was rarer than diamonds for her; without her master’s voice, she would be the only expert remaining on her Path.

She’d cross over to Highgold eventually, even without silencing her master again, she was sure of it.

Every day, the gong seemed to grow louder.

* * *

Lindon knelt, driving an Empty Palm deep into the ground. He’d raised his pure core to Jade, and the technique penetrated deeper than he’d dared to hope, almost disrupting the script that powered the Trial. If he could break it, that would disrupt the function of the Trial long enough for them to pass through.

But it wasn’t enough. The soldiers swarmed him, beating him until he dropped the crystal. He screamed as the gong sounded.

The cool winter breeze that had once flowed into the valley had long since grown hot. Lindon and Yerin gathered food with wordless efficiency now, choking down the oily, gritty crab meat and retiring to their own caves to cycle.

Lindon cycled Blackflame for two hours every night, drawing aura of heat and destruction into his endlessly grinding stone wheel.

It would burn everything, that aura. Lindon came to think of it as a hungry power: the blazing drive for more, more, more. It filled him as he cycled, until he wanted to tear the Enforcer Trial apart with his teeth.

The dragon advances. That was what the Enforcer tablet had said, and those seemed like the words of the Blackflame madra itself. It wanted to advance like a furious dragon, tearing apart everything before it.

If only he could.

The parasite ring weighed down his spirit. He knew that in the long run it would help his training, but every day he almost threw it into the pool.

The Heaven and Earth Purification Wheel made his breath so heavy and long that it burned his lungs, every cycle of madra so torturously slow that his spirit ached like muscles cramped and trapped. Whenever he caught a normal breath, free of the technique, he almost sobbed with relief.

His own Blackflame madra ate away at his madra channels, leaving black residue like soot in his spirit. If he didn’t cleanse it, he’d be leaving injuries and blockages in his soul, harming his future development. After using Blackflame too much, he had to spend several hours cycling pure madra to clean out his madra channels. It was hard to sit there all afternoon, cleaning his spirit, and not feel like he was wasting time.

Real Blackflames probably had a method to deal with that problem, but he had no one to ask. Orthos had kept his distance, circling through the mountain but never intruding on their Trial grounds. Sometimes Lindon felt him in the distance, his spirit burning with madness, and other times he was calm as a dying fire. In both states, he stayed away.

The Sylvan Riverseed’s appetite had increased since her transformation. She begged him for pure madra even when he was exhausted and could barely push his spirit through a single cycle.

The Burning Cloak had cost him weeks of training before he could use it naturally. The explosive bursts of strength and speed it provided meant he had to learn to do everything over again: run without hurling himself into a tree, throw a punch without breaking his own elbow, cut food without slicing off his own fingers. Yerin had even set him up with a juggling routine until he could keep three stones in the air without losing the Burning Cloak, dropping a stone, or hurling one of the pebbles out of the valley. Every day they spent perfecting his precision felt like a day lost; a day when he could have been challenging the Trial.

Even his body betrayed him, leeching his core every time he was wounded, draining him dry and leaving him limp and powerless on the ground. The Bloodforged Iron body was the only reason they could challenge the course as often as they did, but it also crippled him after every failure.

Over it all, Jai Long loomed like a specter. This Trial was supposed to be the first step to defeating him, but Lindon had tripped and fallen at the first stair.

…though as painful as each day was, as miserable as he felt in those nights when he wept alone in his damp cave, he couldn’t deny the results.

After months of work, his Burning Cloak covered him in a thick blaze of red and black. He could keep it active for twenty minutes, so long as nothing cut him and activated his Iron body, and he could drive his fist straight through a Forged soldier.

His cores felt like a pair of lakes now, where they’d once been buckets. They didn’t look any larger than before, but they felt deeper, like the Heaven and Earth Purification Wheel had drilled down to profound depths. He spent more madra in a single Trial attempt now than his entire spirit could have contained only months before.

The improvement kept him going, got him out of his cave in the morning, kept him from abandoning his breathing technique as a trap, made him pick up the Trial’s activation crystal again and again even though he’d sooner embrace a venomous snake.

Continuing meant taking another step forward. Giving up meant accepting death at Jai Long’s spear.

Between them, he and Yerin were now destroying fifteen or sixteen soldiers every run, getting closer and closer to the end of the Trial.

But they never made it.

He’d tried every answer he could think of: hurling the crystal, digging to break the script, building a simple construct out of half-formed soldier parts, running straight through the columns without stopping, altering the script that ran the Trial. Nothing worked. It seemed the Soulsmiths who built this course had thought of everything.

Time blurred and faded away. Only the endless cycle of day and night mattered, because the Trial only worked during the day.

He stopped hearing the gong. When the soldiers caught him or his Burning Cloak flagged, he simply walked away.

* * *

It had been four months since Eithan had first opened the temple at the top of the mountain, and Cassias had grown used to his duties.

Since Yerin and Lindon usually needed two or three days of rest between attempts, he could bring his work with him. He’d moved a table up to this peak, writing letters and reading reports while keeping half of his detection web on the children. After sixteen weeks, this hidden temple looked more like an office than his actual office did.

Cassias spent most of his time alone with paperwork or his own training. He found he enjoyed it; letting Eithan handle the bulk of Arelius affairs suited him. He’d needed a break.

In contrast, the children were having the most stressful experience of their lives.

He sipped tea as he watched the children cycle in the morning, through the scripted window. He no longer expected they would give up—if they hadn’t done so by this point, they likely never would. They would die in an accident during the Trials before they surrendered.

Cassias had given himself over to that prospect with weary acceptance. In four months, you could grow used to almost anything.

Somewhere in the back of his mind, he still hoped that today would be the day Eithan would grow tired of this project and pull him away. Almost half of the allotted time to Jai Long’s duel had passed, and even a blind Copper could see that Lindon wasn’t ready.

Certainly, he’d improved during his time in the Trials. Cassias almost couldn’t believe a Jade could improve so fast. Yerin was straining against the limits of Lowgold, perfecting both her skill and her advancement, but Lindon was reaching the point where he could almost—for a brief breath or two, with the Burning Cloak active—match her in a fight.

That itself was a feat worthy of pride, but he was far from defeating Jai Long. In fact, if Yerin could finally break through that last barrier to Highgold, Cassias would suggest that Eithan pit her against the Jai exile instead. She would still be a stage behind him in advancement, but Cassias wasn’t sure that would matter.

He could recognize a prodigy when he saw one.

Still, neither of them had received any instruction in the last months, besides whatever was written on that tablet the Blackflames had left behind.

Cassias wasn’t sure exactly what date Eithan had in mind for the duel, but Lindon had at most seven months remaining. Even with a teacher, Cassias couldn’t imagine a favorable outcome for them.

Without one, Lindon would certainly die.

Cassias gave a heavy sigh and sipped his tea. He would have to appeal to the branch heads, get them to rein in Eithan’s…enthusiasm about this duel. But he doubted they would go against the Underlord for the sake of a Jade. Cassias himself would have thought the same, if he hadn’t spent so much time in the last half a year watching the children struggle. Now, he couldn’t help but wish them success. No matter how unlikely it was.

When Yerin and Lindon had finished their morning meal and cycling session, Cassias set down his tea and prepared himself. They would be challenging the Trial now.

But instead of dragging himself through the archway, as he usually did on Trial days, Lindon went back into his cave like he’d forgotten something.

A few breaths later, he dashed back out, seizing Yerin by the arm and dragging her inside.

Cassias extended his awareness, reaching in to watch the cave.

* * *

Lindon pulled Yerin inside and gestured to the Sylvan Riverseed, who scampered around the cave, curiously examining his bedroll and the occasional rock.

“Did she break out?” Yerin asked uncertainly.

“No, she’s…it’s…watch my soul!” Lindon wouldn’t have understood what happened if he hadn’t seen it for himself. Instead of explaining, he called Blackflame into his channels.

But instead of guiding it, he let it rampage through his spirit. The result was an uncomfortable spiritual pain, like a red-hot iron pressed against his stomach while a bird screeched next to his ear.

It was only a little madra, and it burned out quickly, but he hadn’t controlled it at all. His madra channels felt scorched at several points, and a black substance had built up like rubble in a tunnel. This was the effect of Blackflame corrosion, and the reason why he had to cleanse his spirit with pure madra every day.

When the madra was controlled, the blockage wouldn’t build up so quickly. But if he slipped, it would happen in seconds.

Yerin glared at him and snatched her arm out of his grip. “Are you cracked? Now I have to burn my time away while you sit there and cycle your spirit clean.”

Lindon reached his hand out to the Sylvan.

Grinning like they were playing a game, the Riverseed darted up and slapped her palm against his. A blue presence dripped into his spirit, rolling through his madra channels.

Wherever that deep blue light ran, the corrosion of Blackflame vanished. Even his madra channels felt refreshed, as though they’d never been scorched by out-of-control power.

The spirit paled to the color of a summer sky, leaning against Lindon’s shin to stay balanced. With one hand, she pointed to her gaping mouth, and he fed her a fistful of pure scales that he’d prepared for that purpose.

After using her power, she grew pallid and weary on her own, and then demanded even more scales. She would sap all the power in his pure core and then beg for more before she was back to her usual state.

In seconds, Yerin went from irritated to speechless, which gave Lindon more than a little satisfaction. He had almost collapsed when the Sylvan had reached up and grabbed his fingertip while he fed her, scrubbing his spirit clean.

Somehow, it felt better not to be the only one surprised.

Yerin darted over to the Riverseed, scooping her up in her bare hands.

The spirit squirmed out of her grip, scuttling over to hide behind Lindon’s leg. She bared her teeth at Yerin in a threatening grimace.

Yerin’s face fell. “She doesn’t like me?”

Lindon was as surprised as she was. The Sylvan had never interacted with anyone but him, as far as he’d seen, but she’d always seemed active and curious. Whenever she saw Yerin through the glass of her case, she had pointed and waved.

He extended his perception to the Sylvan. A sacred artist would feel a scan as a light brush, but it usually seemed to comfort her. She was weaker after expending her power, but she had enough madra for a second attempt.

“Go to Yerin,” he said, gesturing. “Go on. Do to her what you did to me.”

The Riverseed shuffled a few steps forward, but turned over her shoulder to give Lindon a doubtful look.

“It’s okay. I’m right here.”

The Sylvan dragged herself over to Yerin, keeping her eyes on the stone floor. When Yerin stuck out a hand, the spirit slapped her finger once and then scampered back to Lindon, climbing up to sit on his shoulder. She had lightened some more, and she swayed as though dizzy.

“It’s only been a few days since she would come out of her case,” he said apologetically. “Did it work?”

“I feel like I should be more than a little hurt right now,” Yerin said, eyeing the Sylvan. “Worked, though, true and stable.”

Yerin had built up a slight blockage in her own soul—one of the hazards of cycling within such an ocean of Blackflame aura. It was nothing compared to Lindon’s, but she took longer to get rid of it.

Lindon patted the Sylvan on the head with a finger. He wouldn’t have to control his Blackflame madra so carefully during the Trial, and he could dive right back into another attempt without cycling pure madra to cleanse his channels.

Originally, he hadn’t even had enough madra to support one attempt, much less two. But after months of cycling the Heaven and Earth Purification Wheel, he had the madra for two, maybe three attempts if he stretched it. The major bottleneck now was how much time it took for his madra channels to recover after being strained and scorched by Blackflame.

Which, now that they had the Sylvan Riverseed, was no time at all.

“If we don’t get hurt too badly…” he began, but Yerin cut him off.

“If I don’t hurt myself, that’s what you’re saying. It’s true. Long as I’m not cut too deep, I’ll be ready for a second try two breaths after the first one. If we don’t have to wait for you to coddle your spirit anymore, we can get some real work done.”

She was grinning by the end, but Lindon braced himself. Two attempts in a row.

Together, they walked through the archway.

* * *

Cassias fixed most of his attention on Yerin. She slaughtered the formation’s soldier projections, tearing them apart with her white blade, her Goldsign, her mastery of the sword aura. Any soldier he empowered with his own madra was only destroyed faster; their weapon gathered sword aura more efficiently, so Yerin’s Endless Sword tore them up.

Without the ability to empower the soldiers, he could only guide them. At the moment, his most efficient tactic was simply to throw projections at Yerin, hoping to bog her down.

When Lindon barreled through the middle, diving through the forest of pillars, Cassias was caught off guard. But only for a moment.

If he could bring down Yerin early today, he could take care of Lindon without much care. So he diverted two soldiers to slow Lindon down.

Cassias was so consumed by his task that he forgot his original goal. He had grown up a genius of the Arelius family, its heir, and he had won virtually every competition he’d ever entered. Even giving up his position in the family to Eithan hadn’t felt like a loss so much as a trade.

But he wasn’t used to losing. After four months, even the idea of letting the children win on purpose had entirely faded away.

He needed to make them give up.

* * *

The two soldiers pincered Lindon, each driving a silver-gleaming sword at him from a different direction. On a previous run, they had pierced through his hand, and it had taken his Bloodforged Iron body a week to restore the damage.

But this time, Lindon wasn’t trying to reach the goal.

Any formation like this one had to draw power from the local aura, which meant it took time to recharge. The more energy he could draw out of it this time, the weaker the Trial would be for their second attempt.

Well, the weaker it should be. The theory was sound, but they’d never been able to challenge it twice in the same day before.

He smashed the seal down on a soldier’s head, Burning Cloak flaring around him. The projection burst apart, leaving a Forged sword to dissolve on the ground.

A sword pricked him over the shoulder blade, but with Blackflame madra roaring through him, he barely felt it. He turned with such speed that it wrenched something in his back, seizing that soldier’s face in his palm.

Lindon hadn’t learned any Striker techniques on the Path of Black Flame yet, but he’d worked with the power enough over the last few months that he’d grasped a few basic tricks. He could kindle a black fire, though it was loose and uncontrolled, only spraying a few inches from his hand.

In this case, that was enough. He gripped the soldier and sent Blackflame madra flooding into it.

This was the most primitive Striker technique possible; it was more like an Empty Palm than a hurled fireball, but red-and-black power surged into the soldier, dissolving it, burning it to gray essence in seconds.

Without hesitating, Lindon advanced. Between his Iron body and the Burning Cloak, his spirit was burning down quickly, and he had to make sure the course spent more energy than he did.

* * *

Cassias couldn't project new enemies fast enough to deal with Yerin. She had given up any idea of moving forward, pouring everything she had into shredding her opponents. Even some of the stone pillars had been shattered, collapsing in a pile of boulders.

There were some earth-aspect Ruler constructs built into the course that could rebuild those columns, but they would take even more of the course’s stored power. Even if Cassias provided madra of his own, rebuilding the battlefield wouldn’t be cheap.

But the Trial had built up enough momentum. Yerin was on the defensive, Lindon was forced back, and they were surrounded by gray soldiers.

Once again, it was his victory. They wouldn’t surrender the Trial after this, but they were one step closer.

As Lindon dropped the activation crystal and held up his hands, Cassias leaned back in his chair. They’d given up especially quickly today, despite causing more damage to the course than average. Maybe they really were getting frustrated.

He found himself a little disappointed. They had learned and grown as sacred artists over the last four months, and it really would be for the best if they quit and trained normally from now on…but part of him had been hoping they would succeed.

Cassias sighed and triggered the course’s repair function. The stored energy would dip unusually low, but two days of drawing on the mountain’s powerful aura would restore it. Even if they tried again tomorrow, he would be able to funnel some of his own madra into the course to make up the difference.

Once it was done, he slid the chair over to his desk and began his paperwork. He’d have the rest of the day to himself, and there were work orders to be filled.

* * *

After about an hour of cycling, Yerin walked over to Lindon’s cave. He was sitting with legs crossed into a cycling position, breathing evenly. His little pet Sylvan sat on his head, mimicking his posture and playing with his hair.

The spirit grimaced when she saw Yerin, giving her a suspicious look.

That was more than a little unfair, in Yerin’s view. She’d never drawn swords on the spirit, nor even said a harsh word. Maybe Yerin should feed her, like a skittish dog.

Lindon hadn’t reacted to Yerin’s presence yet, his breaths still steady and measured. In her spiritual perception, he gave off the warm impression of a cycling fire artist, with the added air of danger that came from Blackflame. His jade badge hung from a shimmering silk ribbon and rested against his chest.

Now that they’d spent so long running up against the Blackflame Enforcer Trial, he looked like a real sacred artist. He’d burned off the last bit of softness left from his clan upbringing, his frame hardening and filling out. He was covered by a layer of dirt and ash from their run of the course earlier, his hair messy, his sacred artist robes torn, tattered, and singed.

He showed a sharp difference from the boy she’d met in Sacred Valley. He still had a long stretch of road left to travel, but now she could actually see herself fighting alongside him. Not just in the Trials, either; when she thought of her own violent, uncertain future, she could picture him standing next to her.

Nothing but wishful thinking on her part. If odds played out, he’d be killed by Jai Long and she’d end up as a snack for her unwelcome guest. No sense in planning for anything else until the knives weren’t quite so close to their throats.

She kicked his knee, and he blinked awake. “Oi. Get Little Blue to scrub me clean, and then let’s go.”

He was still gathering his thoughts after having broken out of his cycling trance. Now that she looked for it, he was breathing a little heavy, and his skin had a light sheen of sweat. Whatever cycling technique Eithan had taught him, it must have some weight.

“Little Blue?” he asked.

“Can’t keep calling her the Riverseed. She’s got a face.”

Lindon lifted his eyes as though trying to see the Sylvan sitting on top of his head. “Ah, you’re right. We should name her.”

Yerin rolled up her sleeve and held out a wrist. “Call her what you want, but get her to hop on over here.”

It took Lindon almost a minute to coax the Riverseed onto Yerin, and she scurried off as soon as her job was done. Once again, even a spark of her power was enough to scrub Yerin’s spirit clean of the Blackflame aura buildup. On top of that, her spirit was peaceful and refreshed, like she hadn’t fought in days. Yerin couldn’t feel a particular aspect to the madra, but it was calm and soothing.

If only Little Blue didn’t hate her so much. Maybe it wasn’t her; maybe Sylvans could smell the unwelcome guest inside her.

Yerin adjusted her blood-red belt. Would only make sense, if spirits didn’t like that. Meant Little Blue had good taste, more than anything.

That was an answer she could live with.

* * *

Cassias vaulted out of his chair and over the table, landing in front of the wooden console. The script in the window flared with the touch of his spirit, showing him a heaven-down view of Lindon and Yerin fighting their way through half-formed soldiers. The smoky gray crystal in Lindon’s hand pulsed red, and they’d made it further into the course than they had in the morning: most of the soldiers still hadn’t formed, including the giant guardian in front of the exit.

It was only a half-hearted scan of his spirit that had let Cassias know the course was active. Yerin and Lindon had never attempted two runs of the Trial in the same day, and the ancient training course simply wasn’t designed for it. Its power was already running dangerously low, and there were clear consequences: the soldiers were forming much more slowly, and their combat power was weaker. Lindon smashed through one in a single punch, moving into the latter half of the pillars.

If Cassias had been any slower to notice, they would have torn through the unsupervised and weakened Trial, and they might have passed before Cassias realized anything was wrong.

Well, not any longer.

Cassias poured his madra into the correct scripts, the interlocking circles carrying his power down and into the Trial itself. His core, usually shining silver with the light of sword madra, dimmed—transferring his power down through so many scripts was terribly inefficient. He would save more power by hopping down there and fighting them both in person, two against one.

But he couldn’t let it be said that Naru Cassias Arelius picked on the weak.

His power flooded into the projections, making the soldiers form faster, Enforcing their weapons. He strained his spirit.

Slowly, Lindon and Yerin’s advance ground to a halt.

* * *

Lindon turned in midair, kicking off a pillar and launching himself higher. An archer clung to the stone fifteen feet up to snipe at him from above; he grabbed it by the throat and dragged it down to the ground, slamming it into the earth, ignoring the silver arrow that had pierced all the way through his thigh. Blood ran down his leg, costing him a bolt of pain with every step, but the burn of the Blackflame madra and the rush of his Bloodforged body let him ignore it.

The columns thinned, revealing the red arch of the exit.

Three soldiers stood between him and the gateway, spreading out and keeping their sabers level—they were getting smart now, moving to encircle him, to keep him trapped. They knew where he was going.

Or they thought they did.

The fury of Blackflame filled Lindon. He tore the arrow from his leg, hurling it at the nearest warrior, who knocked it out of the air with a gray shield.

But it cost the soldier a moment of its attention. Lindon had dashed after the Forged weapon, projecting a pulse of Blackflame madra into the soldier’s midsection. It blew apart like an over-inflated bladder.

The next one closed the distance to swat the crystal from his hand with its sword, but Lindon seized a dissolving blade from the broken enemy, snatching the blade from midair and using it to knock aside the other weapon's attack.

Then he gripped the sword and drove it through the soldier with sheer force, pinning it to the ground.

The third and final enemy dropped its sword and shield for a spear, which it could use to keep him at a distance and poke holes in him until he ran out of madra. If he let it get that far.

Flaring the Burning Cloak, he leaped. His legs screamed at the strain, but the ground beneath him exploded.

At the top of his jump, he twisted to grab the soldier’s head with one hand, and his momentum continued carrying him forward. The Forged warrior smashed into a stone column, bursting with the force, dissolving in his hand.

Lindon shouted with the exhilaration of the moment, landing on both feet. Soldiers collected themselves in chunks of gray madra, and he ground his teeth, ready to tear them apart.

The dragon advances.

He could see the exit, and his Blackflame madra was ready to push him forward still, Orthos’ core pulsing with the eagerness of a predator before the kill.

But the huge stone giant with the spiked helmet still stood in front of him, a trident in each hand.

Yerin stumbled up next to Lindon, scratched and bloody, panting in the even rhythm of a cycling technique, pale sword clutched in her hand.

He looked at her and they both nodded, turning to face the giant together.

Then Lindon let the crystal ball fall to the ground, and the test ended.

“Looked a lot shabbier that time, that’s a truth,” Yerin said, resting drawn blade on her shoulder.

Lindon’s Blackflame core was down to one smoldering red-and-black ember. “I think I can manage one more.”

“Third try,” Yerin said. “Let’s go.”

15

Panting, Cassias fell back against the wicker chair. He'd exhausted his madra so quickly that his soul felt numb, and his limbs trembled.

Four months. The Enforcer Trial was only supposed to take a few weeks, but considering the circumstances, Cassias would find it hard to say they’d failed.

Even after the fall of the Blackflame family, the Naru used this course to train their disciples. But they only ever trained teams.

This Trial had been built to test a single disciple on the Path of Black Flame, fighting with four of their closest protectors. None of the participants would be higher than Lowgold, but the five would have been trained to cooperate since childhood.

The bodyguards would fight as a unit to keep the soldiers away so that the Blackflame could concentrate on holding their Enforcer technique—what Lindon and Yerin called the Burning Cloak—for the duration of the course.

In this Trial, the Blackflame was never supposed to fight. It was a test of teamwork and spiritual endurance.

No one had ever thought to make it a rule that you couldn’t challenge the Enforcer Trial twice in one day. Theoretically, it was impossible: the Burning Cloak put too much of a strain on the body to maintain for long, and even the Blackflame family had to cleanse their madra channels after an attempt. When you added in the injuries that a team would inevitably collect during a run of the course, it was a rare five-man squad that could complete a Trial run once a day.

‘The dragon advances’ was the advice for anyone attempting the Trial: they had to act so that the dragon, the Blackflame sacred artist, continually advanced. If they slowed, they would inevitably get bogged down in combat and lose control of the Burning Cloak.

Lindon and Yerin had evidently interpreted that advice differently. They relentlessly advanced until the Trial broke before them.

Any Blackflame Highgold would have had the skill and power to do the same, of course, as would many of the top-tier geniuses from the clan…but none of them would have needed a second attempt. Endurance didn’t come into it when you blew through the Trial on your first try.

But Lindon and Yerin had challenged the course until the course gave up. Yerin was a Sage’s disciple, so she should be expected to produce miracles, but Lindon? How did he have the madra capacity to fuel both his Bloodforged Iron body and the Burning Cloak? While carrying the crystal and fighting at the same time? Even accepting that, how had he cleansed the damage that Blackflame madra must have done to his madra channels?

What had Eithan done to him?

When Cassias thoughts turned to Eithan, his heart sank. He was not looking forward to bringing Eithan the news.

The Underlord would be insufferable after this.

* * *

Lindon and Yerin both collapsed after completing the Enforcer Trial, bleeding into the dirt.

Now that they had reached the Striker Trial, they could walk back through the stone columns freely without the Enforcer Trial coming to life and spitting out soldiers. Once Lindon could move again, he resolved to spend an hour doing nothing but walking through the empty Enforcer Trial, just to prove he could.

The Striker Trial itself was an open field of scorched, blasted soil, with another red arch in the distance. Another stone tablet and pedestal waited for them near the entrance, and Lindon wanted to drag his broken body over and start reading the introduction to the Striker technique.

But Yerin had already begun limping back toward their caves, so Lindon followed her. The slab of rock would be there when the wound in his thigh closed.

And now, though Lindon had prepared to challenge the Enforcer Trial for several more days in a row, they were back home so easily.

The Blackflame-scorched crab meat and fiery berries had never tasted so good.

“...they tried to bury me with their bodies,” Yerin said, waving a stick in the air like a sword. Her forearm was wrapped in white bandage, as was her entire left eye and her right leg, but none of it affected her motion with the stick. “Had to scrape and claw my way out. Toward the tail end of it, I had my master's sword in this hand, a soldier’s sword in this one, and my Goldsign launching every technique I could. My madra's going out like a river, and I can barely see. I think for sure they’re going to bring me down again.”

She tossed her stick into the fire, grinning. “And then two of them turn like they hear something. They're off like arrows, and that's the straw that tips it. I cut through the rest and come through, looking for you, just in time to see you smack one to pieces against a pillar. If that's not a story worth crowing about, I've never heard one.”

Lindon's pride helped distract him from the throbbing pain in his thigh and shoulder. He pressed his fists together, looking at her. “I would never have passed without you taking more than your share. Gratitude.”

She half-heartedly kicked dirt at him. “I don't need that. Not like it was your Trial alone, was it? Goldsign did what I wanted it to that time, and I'm this close to Highgold. I know it. Didn’t have to crack my master open or anything.”

A drop of rain hissed as it fell into the fire. Another sent up a puff of dirt as it landed nearby, but he was sitting with his back to the cave. An outcropping of stone kept him dry.

Lindon stared into the remaining flames, thoughts growing heavy. Yerin stuck a hand out, testing the rain, and then slipped over to his side of the fire to join him.

She sat with him, shoulder to shoulder, for a minute or two before speaking out. “A worry shared is a worry halved.”

Even halved, he had enough worry for both of them.

“Still a long way to go before Truegold,” he said, voice dry. “What do I have left, six months?”

“I'd be cracked in the head if I said I was going to hit Truegold in six months,” Yerin agreed. “Especially if I was starting from Jade. There are ways to pump you up on the day, just for one fight, but none of them are stable for your health.”

“Then…what am I doing?”

She stayed quiet, looking into the fire with him. The rain picked up, slowly dousing the campfire, turning the dark, greasy flames to smoke.

“Back home, they'd have named me heir to the clan by now,” Lindon said. “Jade before seventeen summers. They'd call me a genius, or blessed by the heavens. But that’s not enough to keep me alive.”

She leaned her shoulder into his. “Back in your home, they stacked up pebbles and called them mountains. When you left, you slipped out of a trap. As for dying…” She gave a soundless laugh. “Not your problem alone, is it? Eithan’s to blame for dangling you over the fire; he’ll have to do his share of pulling you out.”

Yerin slipped her hand into his and gave him a squeeze. Her fingers were rough and callused. “I’m here too, for all that’s worth. Don’t want to see you buried yet.”

Lindon’s heart hammered, and he had to concentrate to control the flow of his madra. He had lived in this valley with Yerin for the past half a year, but the contact between them had been almost entirely related to the sacred arts—she would give him pointers during practice, or discuss that day’s attempt at the Trial, or help him catch food. They had both been aimed at the Trial like a pair of hawks unleashed for the hunt.

Now, this simple contact felt like sinking into a warm bath after a long day working in the snow. He squeezed her hand back without a word, and she left it there as they leaned against each other.

Together, they sat and watched the rain.

…until they heard the scream.

It started as a distant shriek, but rapidly grew closer. Yerin was on her feet with weapon in hand instantly, her silver Goldsign arched and poised.

Lindon rose more roughly, favoring his wounded leg, but he had recovered enough Blackflame madra to begin cycling for the Burning Cloak. If this was a fight, maybe some unexpected beginning to the Striker Trial, he would be ready.

Eithan slammed into the ground a second later, face-first, kicking up a cloud of dust.

Both Lindon and Yerin took a step back, coughing and waving dust away. When the cloud cleared, the Underlord was still lying there spread-eagle, turquoise-and-gold robes settling into the dirt, his yellow hair a mess around him.

He suddenly convulsed, making a choking sound as he sat bolt upright. An instant later he hacked a mouthful of mud onto the ground, grimacing at the taste.

“That was more of a—ah, let's say—rapid descent than I intended,” Eithan said, rubbing dirt from his face with the heel of his hand.

The top of the cliff loomed over them, scraping the sky. He had to have fallen over a hundred feet, if not more. “Underlord, are you...are you all right?”

Yerin folded her arms. “Takes more than that to ruffle your feathers, doesn't it, Eithan?”

Eithan spat some more mud onto the ground. “I'm not so sure. My feathers might be intact, but my ribs are going to have some complaining to do for the next morning or two.” He coughed loudly into his hand, and then inspected his palm.

“It’s a pleasure to see you, after all this time,” Lindon said. “Are you here because we passed the Trial?”

“You mean, why did I fall out of the sky and onto my face just now?” Eithan asked, rising to his feet and brushing himself off. “A wise question. I've been keeping an eye on you, as I promised, and now that you've cleared the Enforcer Trial—none too soon, I might add—I decided to pay you a visit. And as I was making my way to you, I...” He coughed once more, more lightly this time. “...slipped.”

Yerin looked him up and down. “Underlords slip off rocks every day, do they?”

“I don't make a habit of it, but it was a steep descent, as you can see.” He gestured to the cliff, which was the next best thing to a sheer wall. “Even I make mistakes from time to time. Anyway, I was waiting for the most appropriate time to make my entrance, and...well, it was raining.” He held out a hand. “Looks like that's cleared up, and just in time!”

His grin returned in full force, and he bulled forward before Lindon could ask any more questions about his entrance. “Half of your year remains, as I'm sure you know, so I come bearing gifts.” He turned to Yerin, giving a shallow bow. “For you, little sister, I have located that greatest of rarities: a Spirit Manifestation pill.”

Yerin stared blankly at him. “If you're expecting me to start dancing for joy...”

“The Spirit Manifestation pill is very delicate and expensive, refined from some of the most valuable herbs and blood essences on the continent. It takes decades to finish, and each individual elixir can be considered a refiner's masterpiece!” Yerin didn't seem impressed, but Lindon was leaning forward, eyes wide.

If Yerin's gift was so rare and valuable, he could only imagine what was coming his way.

“Each pill is customized to the individual consuming it,” Eithan said proudly. “In this case, it will fill you with enough sword madra to help you break open the boundary to Highgold…without disturbing your master’s Remnant in the slightest.”

Now Yerin's face paled, and a hand moved down to the red rope wrapped around her waist. Lindon always tried to avoid looking at the belt; it seemed to squirm in the corner of his eye, and in his spiritual senses, the rope felt like it was soaked in blood.

“Light dawns! Yes, you can stay ahead of your...rude lodger, there...and keep your master’s memories for as long as you like.”

Yerin drifted toward him as though sleepwalking. “Do you have that pill tucked away? No, not unless you've put a veil over it. Where did you leave it?” She looked like she was going to seize him by the collar and start shaking.

He held up a hand. “It has taken me months of hunting, bartering, and begging to secure a half-finished pill, and it has to be completed to your personal specifications. I have the best refiner in the family working on it whenever he's not occupied with other matters, but it will still be many months before it is finished. However, when it is complete...” He folded his hands together respectfully. “...well, I regret that the honored Sage of the Endless Sword will not be there to witness your glory.”

Yerin stalked away, leaning with one hand against the cave wall, breathing heavily. Lindon wished there was something he could say to her, but he was still wondering about her “lodger.”

In spite of himself, he was somewhat disappointed by that. She knew all about Suriel, but she hadn't trusted him enough to tell him her secret. It wasn’t as thought he had any right to know, but would have been nice.

“And for you, Lindon,” Eithan said, interrupting his thoughts. “I've located a Blackflame Truegold’s scales. Pure scales are useful to anyone, as you know, but scales from the Path of Black Flame could save you months of cycling.”

The implications of that were not lost on Lindon, and he dropped to his knees, bowing deeply. “This one cannot express his appreciation, Underlord.”

Eithan waved at him irritably. “None of that. I need you with a straight spine, not a bent one. Stand up.”

Lindon did so, but he still pressed his fists together in a salute.

“The scales are up for auction in three months’ time, after which I will bring them back to you,” Eithan continued. “I will hold it as a reward for completing the third Trial. With the aid of the scales, you could reach the peak of Jade in an instant, and then Orthos could take you to Gold. Lowgold fighting against Truegold...”

He rubbed his chin. “...well, it's not as though it’s never happened. Your Path is suitable, and a heron could technically kill a lion, if it poked the beast's eyes out at exactly the right moment. But, ah, I still wouldn't bet on the heron.”

That dampened Lindon's enthusiasm considerably. Judging from the Underlord’s words, advancing to Lowgold was the best he could hope for, and it still wouldn't change his fate.

“If you can complete the two remaining Trials in six weeks each—much, much faster than this one—you’ll have plenty of time to process those scales! So now that you’re properly motivated: fight, fight, fight!”

Lindon sat staring at nothing for long after Eithan left.

Suddenly the future looked so bleak.

* * *

Lindon knelt in front of the Striker tablet while Yerin stood over him, listening.

“With the power of the dragons, the Blackflames destroyed their enemies. Their allies feared them, but...” Lindon hesitated in front of a group of four characters stacked together. They seemed to be some sort of idiom, maybe a proverb that had once been common.

After he thought he had it, he continued. “A ruthless enemy is a reliable ally. When their enemies were no more, they had peace.”

And that was the legacy he was inheriting now: a Path of ruthless destruction. It was a sobering thought.

He ran his finger down the tablet, skipping past the madra diagram and the description of the Striker technique—he would need Yerin to help him decipher those anyway. He landed on the words in the center of the stone.

“The dragon destroys,” he said aloud.

The dragon advances.

The dragon destroys.

“Makes you ask what the third stone says,” Yerin said. “The dragon dances, maybe. The dragon naps. The dragon takes a break because he already killed everybody.”

Lindon skipped to the Striker technique. “Fierce…River of…Fierce Flowing Breath. I’m fairly sure that’s what it means. They certainly say 'fierce' twice.”

Yerin folded her arms. “It’s dragon breath.”

She pointed to the pictogram of a man projecting a line of fire from his hands. It was next to a picture of that same technique streaming from a dragon’s open jaws. “Maybe they called it Fiercely Fierce Breath, but everybody knows what comes out of a dragon’s mouth.”

Lindon looked at the loops indicating the madra flow, and at the characters floating over it. “Would you mind teaching me, then?”

She rapped her knuckles against the stone. “I could tell you without reading them. Cycle your madra to the palms of your hands and keep it there. Let it build and build like you've stopped up a river, and when it's just about to burst, push it out.” She shrugged. “My Striker technique starts the same way, except through a sword. And mine has three more steps.”

Lindon looked at his hands, gathering madra into his palms while trying to focus on maintaining his breathing and cycling according to the diagram all at the same time.

Yerin grabbed him by the arm. “Maybe take a step or two back, if you don’t mind. I'm not looking to roast today.”

Lindon bowed in apology, moving ten steps to the right and contemplating the broad, blackened expanse of hardened dirt that was the Striker Trial. He was itching to see what they'd have to face in the Trial itself, but one step at a time; he wouldn't even be able to start without the ability to execute a Striker technique.

He steadied his breath, focusing first on the madra diagram, making sure that his madra was flowing through the right channels. Then, once he had his madra moving in the right direction, he ignored it.

In the last few months, he'd gotten something of a sense for the nature of Blackflame madra. He could move by feel, without relying on convoluted patterns, gathering power in his palms and letting it pool there. He had done something similar with the soldier earlier, pouring raw power into the projection and letting it explode.

He held both hands out toward the empty space. Nothing visible changed, but he could feel the madra building and building, the pressure growing, until his hands felt like they would dissolve from the inside.

In that moment, he gathered the force of his spirit and shoved.

When Lindon had first learned the Burning Cloak, the technique had started thin, weak, and inefficient. He had worked for months to increase its potency, to use its power effectively. He had expected something similar with the Striker technique: this first attempt might produce nothing more than a tiny tongue of flame, but he would build it up to a roaring dragon's breath.

So when the madra burst out of him in a furious, flaming storm of black and red, scorching the air in an explosion that sent him tumbling backwards ten feet and coming to rest in a tangle of limbs, he was...surprised.

Yerin waited for him to stumble to his feet and press his hand to his skull, checking for bruising, before she nodded sagely. “Yeah, that's how it happens.”

The dirt was blasted away in a starburst pattern where Lindon had been standing. It wasn't deep—the soil here was packed tight, and had been charred over and over for years—but it stood out. The aura seethed in his Copper sight, the black and red powers boiling, but they slowly calmed.

“It didn't get very far,” Lindon noted, steadying himself against the cliff wall. That explosion had singed his hands, even though it came from his own madra—it must have ignited the air. His Bloodforged Iron body was already drawing power to the injury, sapping his core further. That one technique had taken more out of him than five minutes with the Burning Cloak.

“River doesn't get too far without banks,” Yerin said. “Out of control, it's just a flood. Spills everywhere. You want it to go where you want it to go, you have to guide it.”

She tapped the stone again. “There’s a pointer here. Push it outside your body, but keep it under control.” She held her hands a few inches apart as though cupping an invisible ball, and swirls of sharp silver energy began collecting in the air between them. They whirled and slashed in bright flashes, as though she’d contained a dozen blades of light.

“Pack it together,” she continued. The silver light bunched up into a ball the size of his thumb, but she kept pouring more madra into it. “Then, when you can’t keep it dammed up anymore…” A wild, spiraling blaze of silver light whirled between her hands. “…let it go.”

The ball flew out of her hands, a silver fist-sized spiral of sword madra. It spun erratically in the air, going no more than a yard or two before it slammed into the ground.

The technique exploded.

A thousand sword slashes detonated in all different directions, slicing the air, carving hundreds of crisscrossing grooves in the earth. Some of them looked deeper than the length of his hand.

The storm of sword energy faded, leaving Lindon stunned. “Have you used that technique before?”

She shrugged. “Pulled that out of thin air. Not really a winner for me; it only goes a step or two, see, and I could do it faster with my sword. Sword madra likes to move, not to be bunched up like that. Should be stable enough for fire madra, though.”

It hadn’t looked anything like the diagram: she’d fired a twisting ball, not a stream of energy that struck in a line. But different aspects of madra should be expected to work differently, and this technique had been developed for Blackflame.

Lindon was expectant as he held his hands about six inches apart. Even if he ended up with an explosive fireball instead of a dragon’s breath, that was a more devastating weapon than he had now.

Cycling his madra according to the Striker technique’s pattern, he gathered power in his palms. Then, focusing on the space between his hands, he let the power flow out.

The air between his hands blew apart.

This time it wasn’t enough to knock him away, but he did stumble back a few steps, his hands scorched. The front of his outer robe had started to unravel, and his belt was singed.

“You’ve got to keep hold of it,” Yerin said.

“That’s what I’m trying to—” he said, before his second attempt exploded.

After three more failed attempts, Lindon eyed the far side of the Striker Trial grounds. They were mostly identical to the Enforcer grounds, with one notable exception: there was no crystal ball on the pedestal next to the tablet, and no pedestal on the other side. Obviously he wasn't supposed to carry anything across.

Judging by the nature of the Trial, he had to assume he was intended to launch a technique all the way over there. But if he wanted to extend his Striker range from a few inches to over a hundred yards, then he had to hope his talent as a Striker exceeded his talent as an Enforcer.

“I can practice tonight,” Lindon said, putting his hand on the pedestal. “Let’s get started.”

Yerin rubbed a thumb along one of the fresh scars on her jaw. “Looks like you're trying to fly before you grow wings, if you ask my opinion.”

Lindon was already gathering madra into his hand. One hand, this time. “We have to see how far we have yet to fly, don't we?”

“Truth.” She drew her sword eagerly—he'd known he wouldn't have to do much to convince her. “Light this fire,” she said.

It took him a few more seconds to push the madra through his palms, and this time his madra was recognizable as fire. It spilled all over the pedestal, doing no damage whatsoever to the smoky crystal or the stone, and only knocked Lindon's arm back instead of his entire body.

The technique didn't stretch any further, but progress was progress.

As soon as his madra entered the crystal, circles came to life all over the Trial grounds. The ground rumbled, and a field of hazy gray light sprang up in the center of the field.

There was some good news: at least he didn’t have to hold the technique this time, as he had for the Enforcer Trial.

The scripts continued working, making more changes, but Yerin reached down and hefted a rock twice the size of her fist. With a casual flip of the wrist, she hurled it half the length of the grounds, into the gray wall.

The rock sizzled and disappeared.

“As you’d expect, they won't let you just walk through.” She flicked her sword, and a rippling wave of silver-tinged light sliced through the air. It passed through the gray field intact; Lindon could sense its energy streak past the aura barrier.

So madra passed through, but not solid objects. Fascinating.

Shadows gathered past the gray wall, visible as though through dirty glass, but Lindon jogged up to the transparent wall itself. “Is this a technique, do you think, or some kind of script?”

Yerin had followed him, though she watched the shadowy figures gathering on the other side rather than the wall. “Could be either one, I'd say. Gathers up destruction aura into one place, leaves madra alone.”

Lindon opened his Copper sight, and sure enough, the entire wall was a hazy mass of black, twisting lines that carried the meaning of destruction, dissolution. They meant 'the end.'

He focused back on the physical world, looking for the edges of the wall, sending out his spiritual sense to probe for the script that had projected it. “Blackflame has a destruction aspect. I wonder if I could—”

Yerin shoved him aside as something heavy passed through the air where his head had just been.

He caught a glimpse of the weapon as he fell to the dirt: a heavy stone spear.

More spears flew out of the gray wall, flicking out in rapid succession, each aimed at Yerin. She moved quicker than Lindon could follow without the Burning Cloak active, ducking one spear, knocking a second off course with her Goldsign, and sidestepping the third.

The spears flew back to the end of the grounds, clattering to the ground just before the entrance arch.

The instant Lindon started backing away from the wall, a spear struck like a lightning bolt, flying straight at him.

The Burning Cloak ignited, and he shattered the spearhead with his fist.

Chunks of stone started dissolving as soon as the spear broke—Forged madra, then. Just like the soldiers.

That was a relief. Real stone would have been much more difficult to deal with than a Forger technique.

He waited a breath for another spear, but none came. Then he took a step back.

Two spears flew at him, one on top of the other.

Even in the Burning Cloak, he couldn't keep up, smashing one aside but taking a grazing cut to the inside of his arm from the second. And the Cloak would fall any second; he didn't have the madra to maintain it, not after botching all those attempts at the Striker technique.

He froze in place, trying to conserve madra and movement, and no more spears followed those two.

A steady stream of spears flew out at Yerin, who slowly retreated.

“Stop moving!” Lindon called, and Yerin froze after snatching two spears out of the air.

The remaining spears clattered to the ground, blood flowed down Lindon’s arm to drip from his fingertips, and Yerin stood panting with a spear in each hand.

The wall remained still.

Cautiously, Lindon let the Burning Cloak drop. The blazing black-and-red energy around his body faded.

Though it was difficult to see through the cloudy wall of gray aura, he could make out a few shapes: three irregular balls of shadow, each floating in midair, clustered in a rough triangle with about twenty feet between them. The balls were only the size of his head—at least, as far as he could tell—but they bobbed and flowed like liquid.

While moving his body as little as possible, Lindon raised his voice. “I see three dark spots. Do you think they could be the source of the spears?”

“Targets, I'd say,” Yerin responded.

“Could be both.”

Very slowly, Yerin hefted one of her spears. “Let's test it.”

In one smooth motion, she hurled the spear.

Another spear shot out at her, but she ducked and let it pass over her head. At first Lindon thought the weapon she'd thrown would dissolve into the gray wall, but then he remembered it was Forged madra: the destruction aura would just ignore it.

But it was also a moving object.

Another spear launched from the other side, striking Yerin's spear with a sound like a tree splintering. They clattered to the ground, slowly breaking apart.

“That's a neat little trick,” Yerin said, still crouching with her one remaining spear.

Lindon thought he had the measure of it now. The wall was to keep them from closing the distance, to force them to use Striker techniques, and the spears were to keep pressure on them. They needed to knock the three targets down without attracting the attention of the spears, so they needed to be fast without much movement.

He could see the path laid out for him: he'd have to throw fire quickly and precisely, while still defending himself from the spears. It would take months of rigorous practice to train his reactions, not to mention building up his spirit. But Eithan had only allotted him six weeks for this Trial.

He needed a shortcut.

Lindon wanted to go back to the cave and start working, but he was stuck frozen in the center of the Trial grounds. He hated to ask, but with his madra as weak as it was, he could only think of one way out. “Forgiveness, but...do you think you could cover me as I run?”

“If I can't, worst thing that could happen is a spear through the back.”

She said it like a joke, but he was already picturing a spear thick as his wrist impaling him through the ribs. Even his Bloodforged Iron body couldn't keep up with that.

He stayed still. “I'm sure that a spear to the back is nothing to you, but even with my Iron body, I’m not sure if I want to—”

“Start running, Lindon.”

16

After a week, Lindon could almost form a ball of Blackflame between his hands. It would explode immediately, so he’d taken to practicing bare-chested; otherwise, he would have burned away his outer robe on the second day.

Their attempts on the Striker Trial had been less than successful, as they had quickly realized that Yerin couldn’t destroy the targets. The black blobs floating behind the hazy wall of aura would just re-form if they were cut.

To destroy the targets, they needed Blackflame.

Lindon condensed another blob of dark fire, casting his palms in a deep crimson radiance. His mind and spirit were drawn to a point, utterly focused on his task, as beads of sweat rolled down his face.

The ball of burning madra between his palms swelled, growing until it was almost the size of a fist—a little more, and he could consider the first stage of the technique passed.

When he sent one more pulse of madra into the ball, it exploded.

He flipped onto his back, slamming his skull against the hard-packed earth and staring up into the blue strip of sky he could see through the opening to his canyon. His breaths came heavily as he tried to find his cycling rhythm, pulling his madra together for another attempt.

A red-tinged shadow loomed over him, and blazing red circles on fields of darkness swiveled to meet his eyes.

“Orthos,” Lindon panted, gingerly climbing to his feet so that he could bow. “It has been too long.”

The giant turtle grumbled something that might have been agreement. “I am not pleased,” he declared, snapping up a small boulder.

Lindon hurriedly pulled his sacred artist’s robe back up; he’d pushed it down to the waist, which was not a polite way to meet a guest. “Pardon, honored Orthos. I was not expecting a visitor.”

He had sensed Orthos’ presence growing closer, but the turtle had gotten close to the canyon many times over the last few months. He’d never entered. Besides, Lindon’s attention was devoted entirely to his half-formed Striker technique.

“With so much attention on your training,” Orthos said, “you should be making progress.” The last word was packed with such spite and rage that Orthos’ eyes went from red to the bright orange of an open flame. Lindon felt the radiance of the anger in his spirit, and he took a step back, instinctively cycling his madra for a fight.

Orthos snapped his head to one side, bottling up the anger again, mastering himself. “You see?” he said at last. “The pure madra I took from you is not enough to balance the corrosion any longer. I need to pour more power into you, and you are not ready. I am displeased.”

Orthos’ spirit was in better shape than when Lindon had first sensed it; the painful, burning heat was better contained, and now it moved in regular cycles instead of a wild mass of flames.

But it still felt like a volcano on the verge of erupting. “If you need some scales, I’ve Forged a few more,” Lindon said. He’d left his pack a few feet away, and he dug through it for a handful of blue-and-white translucent coins. He tossed them to Orthos, and they dissolved into pale blue streams in midair that sank into the turtle’s body.

If they made a difference, Lindon couldn’t see it.

“That will not be enough,” Orthos rumbled. “If it were, the Arelius family would have healed me already. They can afford more than a few low-grade scales.”

“I’m sure they would. They have great respect for you.”

Orthos snorted, blowing out a few inches of dark flames. “As they should. They serve me in return for my protection.”

Lindon hadn’t seen Orthos providing any protection; it seemed more like the Arelius family was protecting him. “Is that how you were injured?”

“Any dragon would defend what belongs to them,” he said dismissively. “Even if they died for it.” Orthos’ spirit was usually alight with arrogance, but he didn’t seem especially proud now, like he was talking about a usual chore.

“What threat required you to act personally?”

“A rogue Blackflame,” he said, as though it were obvious.

Eithan had said the Blackflames fell fifty years ago, but it hadn’t been so long since Orthos was driven mad by his own power. Were there still other Blackflames out there, struggling with their spirits as Orthos did with his?

If there were, would they see Lindon as a threat, or a potential recruit? Either possibility shook him.

Orthos dug a stone out of the dirt and popped it into his mouth. “This is a waste of time. Show me your ignorance, and I will instruct you.”

Before the turtle changed his mind, Lindon hurriedly adopted the basic cycling pattern lined out for this Striker technique, gathering madra in his hands. He held his palms only a few inches apart, focusing on the air between them, pushing madra into a ball.

The black flames flickered into being. They wanted to rush out, but Lindon held them in place, keeping them swirling in the air between his hands. He added another layer, then another, trembling with the effort of keeping the madra contained.

“I’ve seen enough,” Orthos said, knocking his front paw against Lindon’s hands. The Blackflame madra went out like a snuffed candle—fortunately not exploding—and turned away from Lindon. “I don’t know what the family called this technique, but it was made in imitation of a dragon’s breath.”

Lindon silently thanked Yerin.

“Watch me, and learn.” Orthos opened his jaws wide. Ruddy light gathered in his throat.

With both his eyes and his perception, Lindon focused on the technique. Madra flowed up from Orthos’ throat, gathering and stopping in the back of his throat. More and more madra poured into a black fireball that spun, faster and faster, until it grew to half the size of Lindon’s head.

Then Orthos compressed it so that it was no bigger than a fist, and poured more power into it.

The whole process only took a second or two, and Orthos packed down the energy three times, always keeping the ball of fire spinning. The turtle was holding the madra with his spirit, but he didn’t grip it tightly; he cupped it like an egg until he was ready to pack it down.

With a roar, Orthos released the technique.

Lindon had expected a rough cloud of flame billowing out of the turtle’s mouth. Instead, a dense, almost liquid-looking bar as thick as a man’s leg blasted into the sky. The Blackflame madra streamed into the air, smooth and compact, radiating heat.

The bar of black fire punched through a cloud, drilling a hole in the middle as it blasted into the sky.

Lindon stared up in awe. “It is an honor to be instructed…” He trailed off as he sensed a change in Orthos’ spirit.

The turtle stumbled away, each step thumping against the earth like he walked on a drum. His eyes burned orange, and Lindon felt such a confusing mix of emotion through their bond that he couldn’t separate one thread from another: anger, exhaustion, confusion, fear, and pride fueled one another, blazing into a hot mass.

There was a flutter of black robes, and Yerin came to a stop in front of Lindon, staring up into the sky. She raised her white blade to point at Orthos without looking.

“I don’t place a heap of bets, but if I had to bet a box of gold against a horse’s hair, I’d say that was your giant Blackflame turtle.”

“He’s not well at the moment,” Lindon said.

“You have a leash for him, true?”

Blackflame madra shot out of Orthos’ body like sparks from a campfire as he stumbled around, his spirit a mess of confusion.

“It’s spiritual damage built up in his channels. If I could get the Sylvan Riverseed—”

Yerin tackled him in the middle and scooped him up, throwing him over one shoulder. Before he could react, his world lurched as she leaped away.

Just in time. His spirit sent him a warning, and he flinched an instant before another wave of Blackflame blasted away a chunk of the cliff. Rocks the size of his torso rained down, and Orthos whirled on them, roaring like they were his ancestral enemies.

They passed through one red archway and into the forest of pillars before Yerin let him down. “Is he going to trail us?” she asked.

“I don’t think he remembers we were there,” Lindon said. “I’ll see if he notices me this time or not.”

Yerin’s scarred face froze. “You’re…turning back?”

“I don’t want to,” he said apologetically. “I left my pack back there.”

* * *

Usually, there wasn’t much for Cassias to do in running the Striker Trial. He could guide the spears to some degree, or empower them with his sword madra, but none of that would significantly increase the difficulty or value of the test.

His real role was going to come during the Ruler Trial, the most difficult of the three Blackflame Trials, so he spent most of his time packing that course’s reserves with power. They wouldn’t run through that like they did through the Enforcer Trial, he could guarantee it.

Cassias was reading reports when he sensed Orthos’ arrival. He’d grown up with stories of Orthos, so he was initially nervous, until he reminded himself of Lindon’s contract. The sacred beast should be much more stable than before.

That was a relief. If he went crazy, the children’s lives weren’t the only things at stake: this course was a loan from the Empire, and it was worth more than the Arelius family made in a year. If Orthos ruined it, Cassias would have to answer to the branch heads.

Now that he thought of it, maybe that was why Eithan had left him in charge…

Shaking his head, he returned to his reports. The Jai clan had slowed their aggression, giving the family some breathing room at last. It seemed that having Eithan back and working was having some effect after all.

He was still working on the reports when he sensed the power of Blackflame blaze up. Cassias actually shouted and drew his sword, primed for battle, before remembering that the enemy was outside.

He manipulated the window, focusing on the Striker Trial—on Orthos. The turtle was going wild, spraying Blackflame madra in all directions, tearing up dirt and stone alike. He would exhaust himself in a few minutes, but if the contract wasn’t enough to restrain him, Cassias needed to call Eithan.

When he saw a figure in dark blue robes creeping closer to Orthos, Cassias first thought the window was malfunctioning. Lindon snuck up right behind the turtle, snatched his pack away—it had miraculously avoided obliteration—and dashed back toward the Enforcer Trial.

Orthos must have sensed his presence, but somehow, the turtle didn’t kill him.

Cassias let out a slow, heavy breath and returned to his table. Snatching up a fresh sheet of paper, he began a report to Eithan.

* * *

Lindon and Yerin didn’t attempt the Striker Trial again for a few days, instead hiding from Orthos. The turtle wandered back into the tunnels soon after venting his anger in the Trial course, but he didn’t go far. Lindon could feel him prowling in the nearby tunnels, like a predator waiting to strike.

He’d grabbed the Sylvan Riverseed and tried to use her to heal Orthos, but the turtle had tried to attack him on sight. So he’d stayed away, resolving to try again the next time Orthos regained his sanity.

Though Lindon stayed in his cave for three days, he didn’t waste the time. Instead, he tried out an idea.

He didn’t have the skill to keep Blackflame madra under control for as long as Orthos had. That was the result of years of practice, and Lindon wanted results now.

But it wasn’t as though he needed to pierce the clouds with his Striker technique. He just needed to hit some targets through an aura shield. So he asked himself: what was the minimum he needed to complete the dragon’s breath?

Lindon explained the process to Yerin as they finally snuck out of their caves and headed back to the Striker Trial. His pack was mostly empty this time, half-filled with a few necessities.

“I only needed something to hold the madra together for a few seconds,” he said as they stepped through the arch to the Striker Trial. “Once the madra is dense enough, it’s easier to control, and the dragon’s breath will go as far as I want it. So I came up with these shells: they’re made of pure madra, so they hold the Blackflame power in place just long enough before they melt away.”

The gray wall of aura boiled up, and Yerin scratched at her neck. “Cheers and celebration for you, but it doesn’t sound like you learned the Striker technique.”

“No, I did! I did, I’m just using some…props.”

She eyed him over one shoulder as she pulled her sword free. “You try out a technique for the first time in battle, and you’ll be walking away with your guts in your hand.”

Lindon reached into his bag, pulling out half a dozen blue-white globes the size of his hand. He set them on the ground as though they were made of glass; the slightest impact would reduce them to dust. Pure madra was not an effective weapon, even Forged.

“I’ve practiced,” Lindon said, though it had only been a few days. “Keep the spears away, and I can destroy the targets.”

“You might recall I don’t smile especially bright on cheating,” Yerin reminded him. “Don’t want you to take the wrong lesson.”

“I’m happy to practice the Striker technique when we get out of here. Once I get those scales, and you get your pill.”

She nodded to him. “We have a bargain.”

He stood, cupping an empty shell of pure madra in his hands, and they both faced the wall of aura. Three black blobs floated behind the hazy barrier, though they had been quiet so far.

The Striker Trial didn’t seem to respond to small movements, or the spears would never stop coming. Only large, quick motions attracted the course’s attention. Yerin stood perfectly still, Goldsign poised over one shoulder and white blade held off to one side.

Lindon clutched the pure madra shell in his hands and concentrated, sending a ball of Blackflame into the center. A dark stain showed through the semi-transparent madra, growing larger as he poured more Blackflame inside.

Always keep it spinning. Pack more inside. Keep it spinning…

His control slipped once, but instead of exploding, the half-formed technique ate through the inner layer of the shell like it was made of ice. The barrier was thinner now, but he continued pouring Blackflame inside.

After a few seconds, it melted through the outer bubble of madra, and Lindon was holding a rolling ball of Blackflame madra suspended between his palms. It was stable now, and much easier to keep under control; only while it was forming did it take concentration to stop an explosion.

“You close to done?” Yerin asked him, barely moving her lips. No matter how loudly they spoke, it didn’t seem to matter to the Striker Trial, but she had decided to stay cautious.

“Now,” Lindon said, and she stepped left. A spear shot out at her, and she slapped it aside, but another streaked through the air.

Lindon held the ball of black fire between his palms, raised it until it was level with one of the targets, and pushed.

A bar of Blackflame, thick as his arm, tore through the air. It streamed through the gray wall of aura, passing through the center target and blasting it apart like a wisp of cloud.

The other two targets both sent out Forged spears, and Yerin knocked them away, but more came. It appeared they were speeding up.

Lindon clenched his jaw as he watched the dissolving target. If it re-formed from this…

A gong echoed through the canyon. Maybe the same gong that had announced failure in the Enforcer Trial. And this time, the target didn’t re-form.

The spears were coming so fast now that Yerin’s motions were a blur. “Two…left…to go…” She forced out, in between blasting Forged weapons apart.

Lindon snatched up the next hollow ball of pure madra.

* * *

When the third gong sounded, Cassias stepped away from his paperwork. It had only taken them ten days for the Striker Trial, though he hadn’t watched their final, successful attempt; Orthos must have given Lindon some pointers.

Cassias cycled his madra, touched his spirit to the silver aura around his sword, and readied himself. The Ruler Trial was his true test; he would pour everything he had into this one. They would either give up, or he would be forced to admit that Eithan had been right about them.

When he moved to the panel, he left behind the two reports that had arrived today. Both regarded the city’s Underlords:

The first message warned him that Jai Daishou had deviated from his schedule today. It seemed that he was going to take care of Jai Long’s rebellion personally. That was a relief to Cassias, though Eithan might take it differently; if the Jai Underlord was acting, then Jai Long wouldn’t survive to fight Lindon.

The second message said that Eithan had returned to the city. He’d left again only a week or so ago, and Cassias hadn’t expected him back for weeks, so Eithan must have received his report about Orthos. Other than the Underlord, there was no one in the Arelius family who could soothe Orthos without killing him.

Both letters contained valuable information, but nothing alarming. If Jai Daishou meeting with Jai Long was cause for alarm, Eithan would know and deal with it. Cassias could focus on his task.

In situations like this, at least, Eithan was reliable.

* * *

For months, Jai Long and the Sandvipers had waged a guerilla war against the Jai clan. That mostly meant ambushing them as they tried to sabotage the Arelius family, which was still enough to make Jai Long laugh.

Every time the Jai clan tried to capture another Arelius warehouse, Jai Long was there, gathering food for his spear. Every time they moved against Arelius street crews under cover of night, Jai Long spilled their blood in the streets. And servants bearing the black crescent moon were always right there to scrub it clean.

He was doing a better job of protecting the Arelius family than their Underlord was.

More than once, he’d wondered about the legendary powers of the Arelius bloodline. If they really could sense a speck of dust on a single tile at the top of a hundred-foot roof, as the stories claimed, then Eithan had to know what Jai Long was doing in the city. He could have stopped Jai Long at any time, removing a steadily growing threat to his own adopted disciple.

But he’d been the one to promise that disciple a duel in the first place. Jai Long was glad he didn’t work for the Arelius; that family must treat its disciples lives as tinder for the fire.

Thanks to Jai Long and Gokren, the Jai clan had been forced to lighten its grip on its enemies. Jai Lowgolds had a curfew now, and the clan had distributed valuable communication constructs to carry word of any suspicious sightings. Most of the clan had retreated to the very peak of Shiryu Mountain, living as close to their Underlord as possible, and a Highgold had been assigned to every house.

Not that it would do them any good. Jai Long had broken through to Truegold weeks ago.

At this point, draining Lowgolds of their Remnants did virtually nothing but replenish his core. Only Highgolds or better would help him advance, and Truegolds were the best.

Which was why he was here, crouching on the roof of one of the Jai clan’s lesser palaces, waiting for the first Truegold patrol of the night. The sun was dropping behind the mountain, casting long shadows over Serpent’s Grave, so it would be harder to see now than in the middle of the night.

Ordinarily, the streets outside the Jai clan homes would be packed at sunset, but the curfew required everyone except designated clan guards to be inside a safehouse before dark. None of the palaces in this district were secure, so they would be empty. Defended only by a Truegold at the beginning of a long patrol.

He gripped the case for the Ancestor’s Spear. There would only be one opponent this time, so no need to capture a Remnant—he could drain the elder dry right there on the street. No witnesses.

Gokren and two Sandviper Highgolds waited nearby, ready to provide backup if Jai Long encountered any difficulty. He was powerful enough now to rank in the top twenty or thirty of the Jai clan, but a true elder had been practicing the sacred arts since long before Jai Long was born. Who knew what crafty tricks they might have prepared.

As Jai Long slowly cycled, keeping his spirit calm, he felt it: the approaching force of a Truegold soul.

He hadn’t needed to scan the target directly to confirm that it was a Truegold, because they weren’t bothering to hide their power. There was a slightly muffled feel to it, as though they’d tried to veil themselves but had given up halfway. Maybe it wasn’t intentional; nerves could interfere with cycling. Perhaps they feared the attacker in the shadows.

If that was true, they would try to flee and sound the alarm rather than doing battle. Jai Long would have to strike so hard that they never had the chance to shout.

A white-clad figure with pale hair strode by beneath him, hands clasped behind the back. Through the shadows, Jai Long couldn’t make out if it was a man or a woman, but the force of a Truegold radiated from them.

Jai Long leaped off the building, Ancestor’s Spear shining in his grip. Stellar Spear madra ran through his muscles and bones, Enforcing him for the landing, bracing his body for the strike.

The Flowing Starlight technique settled in as he fell, until the wind seemed to whip past for long breaths of time. The white-haired head tilted, and Jai Long prepared himself for impact.

Then dark eyes swiveled up to meet him, showing no surprise.

An invisible fist gripped Jai Long’s heart and squeezed.

Jai Daishou, Underlord of the Jai clan, took a single step to the side and let his rebellious descendant crash to the ground.

Less than half a year had passed since Jai Long arrived in Serpent’s Grave; he’d expected to have months more before Jai Daishou personally acted. By then, he would have had more leverage.

He’d underestimated the Underlord’s insight, or overestimated his pride. Either way, the bill had come due long before Jai Long was prepared to pay.

Just like that, his revenge was over.

The impact of landing shocked Jai Long’s entire body, rattling his bones, and the bricks of the street cracked beneath him. The pure white shaft of his spear was driven two feet into the ground, and he’d landed in a crouch.

But slamming into the earth was nothing compared to the force of seeing Jai Daishou here, staring at him with the icy strength born from a hundred years of absolute rule.

A corrosive Truegold aura moved closer: Sandviper Gokren. He would have heard the crash, sensed the flare of Jai Long’s madra, and known that the trap was triggered. He’d never seen the Jai Underlord before; he would assume that Jai Daishou was just a Jai elder who had gotten the better of Jai Long.

He would try to help.

Jai Long’s stomach twisted, but he forced himself to meet the Underlord’s eyes. “This humble junior greets the Patriarch,” he said, his voice firm. He might have been about to die, but at least he didn’t have to show fear.

Jai Daishou turned to regard him head-on, his wrinkled face a mask, and Jai Long could no longer suppress his body's trembling. The old man's gaze was placid, like a frozen lake, but Jai Long shook as though he stared down a hungry dragon.

“You have killed sacred artists of your own clan,” the Patriarch said. “For quite some time now.” His tone remained neutral.

“Let the punishment fall on me alone,” Jai Long said, through clenched teeth and a burning throat. The words tasted bitter; he longed to spit defiance and die trying to shove his spear into the Patriarch's heart.

But if the Underlord had known about Jai Long’s activities, it was best to assume he knew everything. Including Jai Chen’s presence in the city.

If the Underlord grew too irritated, he could wipe her out with a motion of his hand.

There was nothing Jai Long could do to prevent his own execution, but if he had to bow and scrape with his last breath to save his sister, he would shame himself a thousand times over.

Jai Daishou nodded. “Humility is a virtue, when you face a stronger force. I am pleased to know you've learned to swallow your pride.” One slow, shuffling step at a time, he made his way over to Jai Long. The pressure built with every step, until he stood only a foot away. It was like being within arm's reach of an earthquake.

The Patriarch extended one hand and waited.

Jai Long knew what he wanted, so he forced his pride to bend even further. As though it weighed a thousand pounds, he slowly extracted the Ancestor's Spear from the earth and held it out, presenting it with both hands.

The Underlord lifted it with a more pleasant expression than Jai Long had ever seen on his aged face. He held it in one hand and ran the other over the weapon, feeling the script. The spearhead looped in one slow arc, tracing a line of white in the air, as Jai Daishou closed his eyes and savored the sensation.

“I have your sister already,” Jai Daishou said, eyes still closed, and Jai Long’s heart crumbled to ash and blew away. “My men picked her up hours ago. I had intended to use her life to stop you from throwing your life away in a suicidal charge, but you have at least a spark of wisdom.”

He had known it was a mistake to take her out of the Desolate Wilds. He had known it, but where could he have left her? Where could an Underlord not reach?

Jai Long prostrated himself, scraping his cloth mask against the sandy bricks. “She knew nothing of my actions. Please.”

“You have cost me twenty-three Lowgolds, eight Highgolds, and three Truegolds. So far. More importantly, you forced me to stop my actions against Eithan Arelius, which has given a servant family the opportunity to surpass our rank and join the great clans of the Empire.”

Madra flared like the rising sun, and Jai Long jerked his head from the tiles in time to see Jai Daishou disappear in a flash of white.

An instant later, he was back, holding Gokren from the back of a fur-lined collar. The Sandviper’s gray hair was mussed, and his left leg looked broken. He tried to choke out a word, but the Jai Underlord released him, and he collapsed in a heap on the ground.

“You will repay me everything I have lost,” the Underlord said, and Jai Long knew neither he nor Gokren were escaping with their lives. He owed the Jai clan three Truegolds, and here were two, ripe to be plucked.

But Jai Chen still had a chance to survive.

Jai Long lowered himself to beg again, but the Patriarch held up the Ancestor’s Spear like a scepter. He regarded the weapon, lips pursed as though he’d bit into a lemon. “Regrettably, I do not have much time remaining. Five years at most, they tell me. And in the entire clan, I have found no one else who can replace me in that short span of time.”

Jai Long's breath came faster. He'd known the Patriarch was reaching the end of his lifespan, but if he said five years, that meant it was more likely two or three. The old man had always been one to exaggerate facts for his benefit.

“Even with the spear?” Jai Long asked politely. For his sister’s sake, he resisted the urge to laugh in the Underlord's face. There were hundreds of thousands of loyal Jai clan members, and he couldn't find one among them who measured up to Jai Long.

He hoped the regret burned.

“The spear is a wonderful tool, but a tool is all it is. Advancing to Underlord requires an element of insight, of inspiration, that no weapon can provide. Increasing and purifying your madra will take you to the limits of Gold, but no further.”

The old man spun the spear at minimum speed, agonizingly slow, but every motion fluid and perfect. Centuries of training engraved their habits deeply.

Neither Gokren nor Jai Long made a single sound between them. Every second he wasted was another breath for them to live.

“If any of my elders could replace me as Underlord, they would have already,” Jai Daishou said as he danced with his spear. “The Ancestor’s Spear will not allow them to bridge that gap. I once had many possible successors, and one by one, they have failed me. So I come back to you…with my help, you could be Underlord in another year.”

A tiny hope joined anger, despair, and humiliation in the war inside Jai Long's heart.

“You will only guard the clan in my absence, of course, you will not succeed it. You are a stopgap measure, a deterrent to keep the jackals at bay until a true heir can be raised from the Path of the Stellar Spear. Swear your soul to my control, utterly and completely, and you are a tool that can be used.”

He came to a stop, swung the spear up to rest on his shoulder, and looked down on Jai Long. Waiting.

“My sister,” Jai Long grated out.

“As the only sibling of our clan guardian, of course she will have access to the very best treatment the Jai can produce.”

Jai Long inclined his head. “On my soul and my power,” Jai Long said, “I swear to take no action against the Jai Patriarch or the Jai clan, to follow the orders of the Jai Patriarch absolutely, and to act always in the best interests of the Jai clan.”

His soul tightened, restricted by his words, but a true oath always had two sides.

Jai Daishou spoke immediately. “In return, I swear on my soul and on my power to protect Jai Long and Jai Chen as my own children, so long as their loyalty remains true.”

This was a flimsy shield, but a shield nonetheless. Far more of a protection than he and Jai Chen had ever had on their own in the wilderness.

All his madra tensed, as though a knot had been tied around his soul, but then the sensation eased. Jai Long let out a breath.

Though a voice in his head cursed him as a coward, he shook with relief. His concern for his sister had drowned out everything else, but he hadn’t wanted to die. At least living as a Jai clan dog would lead to a cure for Jai Chen.

Jai Daishou tucked the Ancestor’s Spear under one arm. “You’ve gotten enough use out of this. It won’t raise any Underlords, but I can always use more Truegolds.” He glanced down at Sandviper Gokren as though regarding something he’d tracked in on the tip of his shoe. “Now then. That was sensitive information you just witnessed.”

A cloud darkened Jai Long’s relief. He had been so focused on the discussion that it hadn’t occurred to him to think about their audience.

The Patriarch crooked his finger, and Jai Long staggered to his side, pulled up by a compulsion so strong it was almost physical. “Underlords may be blessed by the heavens, but we are far from saints. When it becomes necessary, we must dirty our hands.”

The old man clasped his hands behind his back and turned toward the light disappearing over the peak where the sun had died. He said nothing else.

Jai Long gathered his madra and looked down at Gokren. The Sandviper’s skin had paled, and there was fear in his eyes.

Fear and resentment. He had never seen his son avenged.

“Let him swear loyalty,” Jai Long said. It was a stretch of his luck, and Jai Daishou might strike him down for sheer impudence, but he had to try. It was the least he could do for the man who had risked the existence of his sect to follow him here.

The Underlord half-turned and showed Jai Long a cold smile. “Exercise your own judgment and do as you wish. But I will not be burdened by the weight of extra oaths.”

Jai Daishou turned his back again, long metal strands of hair swinging behind him. “But hurry,” he said. “I have a task for you.”

Jai Long spoke before the Patriarch could change his mind. “Sandviper Gokren, I swear on my soul and on my power that I will have you executed…if you repeat a word of anything that happened here today, or betray us to our enemies.”

Gokren brightened, straightening his back. “On my soul and my power, I swear not to divulge a word of your conversation with the Jai Patriarch, nor to provide any information or assistance to your enemies. I offer my life as forfeit.”

The oath tightened, and Jai Long bowed to the Jai Underlord’s back. His role now was to wait for instructions.

“Eithan Arelius’ disciples are challenging the Blackflame Trials,” Jai Daishou said.

Since the fall of the Blackflame family, their Trials had been used to train students from many Paths. Those with the proper access keys could activate the Trials even without Blackflame madra, and the course would challenge any Lowgold, not just one on the Path of Black Flame.

The Naru clan only permitted a handful of disciples to use the Blackflame Trials each year, but the Arelius family kept the course defended and maintained. It made sense that they would have access, though using the Trials without permission sounded unwise.

Most Underlords would never defy the imperial family, but Eithan Arelius…

“The Arelius Patriarch acts on his own whims,” Jai Long said. “Unless…is one of his disciples a descendant of the Blackflames?”

If so, that was truly chilling. A new sacred artist on the Path of Black Flame would be a scandal to shake the Empire.

Jai Daishou turned back and regarded his descendant with scorn. “Certainly not. The only Blackflame they have is that insane turtle, and he’s too old to form a contract. But the truth is bad enough. If Eithan Arelius thinks it is worthwhile to risk Naru displeasure by opening the Blackflame Trials, then he must believe his student has a chance against you.”

Jai Long tried to fit that information into any form that made sense, but failed. Wei Shi Lindon was an Iron. Even if they fed him scales instead of food and elixirs instead of water, they could at best advance him to Jade. If the heavens themselves descended on his behalf, perhaps he could make Lowgold. Jai Long wouldn’t retreat from a duel with ten Lindons.

“I will not risk a future Underlord in a duel that the opponent has any chance of winning,” Jai Daishou said calmly. “That would be an absurd gamble with nothing to gain: you earn us no respect if you win, and endless shame if you lose.” Gokren’s face twisted in rage, but he bottled it up before he got himself killed.

“Patriarch, I am far more than—” Jai Long began, but the Underlord cut him off with a smug smile.

“I have another plan. Recruiting you was my final step, and now we can begin.” He turned to walk away, gesturing for Jai Long to join him.

Confused, Jai Long walked after him, Gokren trailing after.

The Jai clan built their homes in this position on Shiryu Mountain for the view. A curving wall of stone a hundred feet high blocked the wind and sand from behind them, while Serpent’s Grave stretched out before them, far below. From this high up, you could get a sense of the majesty the dragons had left behind, their skeletons stretching from one end of the city to another. A single skull made up an entire residential district, and looked as big as Jai Long’s hand, even from this distance.

Jai Daishou walked out past the houses, to the edge of the cliff, looking down at the city. The sun had long set behind the mountain, casting darkness over Serpent’s Grave. Cold wind tore at Jai Daishou’s robe and blew between the gaps of Jai Long’s mask.

“It is difficult to deal with an Arelius Underlord,” the Patriarch said. “They see all your hidden weapons, hear all your plans. You can’t make any preparations. You can’t say a word. Only when the Underlord leaves for months at a time, forcing the one other blood member of the Arelius to go after him…then you can make your plans.” He held up a finger.

“But you can’t strike. He has left the city defended in his absence, arranged for countermeasures. Your preparations lie dormant for weeks and months, as you wait until all the pieces to fall naturally into place.”

The full scope of Jai Daishou’s words hit Jai Long like a falling star. The Jai Underlord had collected his family together in safe houses. Not just to protect them from Jai Long, but to gather his fighting power in a way that the Arelius family wouldn’t find suspicious. With the clan’s forces marshaled, there was only one remaining variable: the enemy who had struck at them over the last several months.

Jai Long shivered. He’d been trying to cut off a spider’s legs, only to find himself caught in a web. If he hadn’t surrendered instantly tonight, Jai Daishou would have torn out his heart. The plan was already in motion, with no room for delay.

The Underlord raised his white spear into the sky. “And then, having never spoken a word to alert the watchers…you strike.”

A bright light burst from his spear. It rose into the newborn stars and exploded, bathing Serpent’s Grave in white.

All over the city, Stellar Spear madra flared to life.

17

When the white light rose like a full moon over the city, Eithan knew where it had come from. He saw the man who had launched the technique, with white metal hair down to his waist, and the young man at his side with the red-wrapped face.

And he heard the screams beginning all over the city as the Jai clan began to systematically hunt anyone wearing a black crescent. They were following a script that had been laid out for them months ago, while his eye was turned elsewhere.

Eithan was on the roof of an Arelius family tower, and he clenched his teeth to stop from crushing the broom in his hands.

He had only returned to the city at all because of Cassias’ message about Orthos, and had immediately seen that Lindon and Yerin had the situation in hand. He would give the turtle a few more Underlord scales to keep his burning spirit under control until Lindon was ready to advance to Lowgold and take on a greater burden. It had all been going so well.

He felt so blind.

The Jai clan had played him perfectly: they had continued to work against the Arelius family, even when they knew he was watching. If they had pretended to cooperate while he was in the city, he would have known they were biding their time. But they had been forced to back off because of Jai Long…and because of his own actions against them, subtle though they had been.

Eithan had been sure he was winning the game, right up until his opponents swept the cards off the table and stabbed him.

An unfamiliar fear flooded him. If they had hidden this from him, what else had he missed? What unseen threats lurked beyond his sight?

With that fear came anger, cold and bright.

He leaped away from his half-swept rooftop garden, broom still in hand. His madra spun the Hollow Armor through his whole body—it wasn’t the best Enforcer technique, his not being the best Enforcer Path, but combined with an Underlord’s body, the fall wouldn’t hurt him.

It would shatter the street, though, so instead he grabbed a windowsill for an instant as he passed, then kicked off the wall, slowed himself for a second on the edge of a nearby roof, snagged a tree branch, and landed without breaking anything. A few loose leaves fluttered to the ground behind him, and he swept his sleeve so that the wind carried them into a nearby trash box.

Servant One-Thirteen sat on a bench nearby, a girl leaning against his shoulder. He wasn’t wearing his Arelius robes tonight; instead, he was dressed in a layered red coat that must have been the best he owned. She wore pearl silk, with matching jewelry pinning up her hair. Minutes ago, they’d been having a lovely evening.

Now, they both had daggers in their hands, but seemed too afraid to move; a Jai Highgold was sweeping down the street with spear in hand. Screams haunted the distance.

All three of them froze on seeing Eithan.

He strode up to the unfamiliar woman on One-Thirteen’s arm. “You look lovely tonight, madam. The Arelius family will reimburse you for this.” Then he pulled a pin from her hair and hurled it over his shoulder.

The dagger would have been sharper, but he didn’t want to leave her defenseless. Besides, the pin drove through the Highgold’s throat easily enough.

One-Thirteen and his date stared behind Eithan as the Jai’s spear went one way and his bleeding body the other.

“One-Thirteen,” Eithan said, “emergency drill number one. Ring the bells.” He pulled another pin from the woman’s hair.

The servant rose and saluted, grabbing his date by the hand and pulling her with him as he ran to sound the alarm. Loose strands of hair fluttered behind her.

Eithan waited another instant for the spiked Stellar Spear Remnant to rise before he sent a wisp of madra flowing into the hairpin and threw it. It blasted through the spirit like a ballista bolt.

He was off again, leaping whole buildings with the power of Hollow Armor. He watched every servant of the Arelius die, heard their pleas for help. They tore his heart.

Eithan was halfway up the mountain when he felt the boundary formation spring into place.

He had leaped up from one cliff to another, ignoring the roads, and he’d just landed on a bare plateau when all the aura around him froze. In his Copper sight, it was like he was caught in an upturned bowl of swirling color, blocking him from the outside world.

It didn’t stop the power of his bloodline legacy. His detection web still swept the city, carrying every death to stab him in the gut. And now they’d trapped him here, where he couldn’t save anyone.

The six Jai clan Truegold elders who had placed the formation flags waited for him, just on the other side of the barrier. He’d felt them pacing him, but he had expected them to provide backup for Jai Daishou in the fight between Underlords.

Now, he realized, they were meant to keep him in one place until their Patriarch came to join them.

Half a dozen old men were feeling very proud of themselves right now, but they watched him from beyond the boundary formation like mice watching a trapped hawk.

Eithan stood on a shelf of black rock, the white-robed elders surrounding him. He gripped his broom in one hand as the icy wind blew his hair and his robes around him.

He tried to pull up a smile, but it wouldn’t come.

“Gentlemen,” the Underlord said, “this is a mistake.”

* * *

As the daylight died, Cassias cycled his madra and waited for Lindon and Yerin to attempt the Ruler Trial. They were inspecting the instructional tablet already, and he knew from watching them that they would try the course immediately afterward.

He felt like Eithan as he grinned in anticipation, staring at them through the scripted window. He would take it easy on them this time, since they’d only be able to run through one time before the sun set completely. They would feel like they had a chance.

And then, tomorrow, he’d pour everything he had into the Trial. He felt like he was the one competing, though it was just a break in the routine he wanted. He couldn’t admit he was excited about pushing a Jade and a Lowgold to their limits, but he looked forward to seeing—

One of his strands of awareness, stretched out behind him, caught a white light flaring high in the air. Curious, he stretched his perception back into the city.

As the sun fell, Stellar Spear madra took its place.

A whisper of fear threaded its way through him. The clan was probably just confronting Jai Long and his forces, but he focused the entire web of his Arelius bloodline on the city.

Shining white, a spearhead pierced a blue-and-black outer robe, driving a bloody hole through a crescent moon symbol.

“I’m not Arelius, I don’t work for them, please!” a woman begged.

A door shattered as a Jai Truegold blasted his way into an Arelius facility, and the crowd’s murmurs of uncertainty rose to shouts and panic.

…a coordinated attack. All throughout the city.

And these were only the first seconds.

His breathing came so hard that it threatened to throw off his cycling technique. His son was three years old. His wife was a member of the imperial Naru clan and a powerful Highgold, but if a Jai elder was feeling particularly cruel or clever…

Cassias launched himself from the temple so fast he blasted his wicker chair to pieces. The paperwork swirled in a whirlwind behind him, but he didn’t spare a glance back.

He needed to get home.

The Silver Step was an Enforcer technique with Striker elements, meant to help mobility in a short-range fight. It was the only movement technique he knew, and all but useless over long distances…but he used it anyway, kicking off the ground and leaving a silver ripple behind. The technique launched him forward with speed that pushed the limits of what a Highgold should be capable of, but it was only one step. His madra might burn out before he reached his home, leaving him helpless.

He stretched his web out toward the bone tower in the distance, trying to get a glimpse of his family, but it was like trying to find someone by running house to house and peeking in keyholes.

His wife was strong, even on an imperial scale. Stronger than he was. Jing would survive.

But there was always someone stronger…

His Silver Steps carried him down into the streets, which were already choked with combat. He rushed past Arelius servants defending themselves with swords and spears, with claws of ice and arrows of fire. He ignored whips of blood and slipped around toxic mists.

It wasn’t just Arelius family members dying tonight. The Jai clan were reclaiming their territory with ruthless efficiency. They targeted those in Arelius colors, but anyone who got in their way, or resisted, or looked like the slightest threat…they were blasted apart by regimented ranks wielding white light.

Only the Redflower family was untouched, as expected: a pair of Jai clansmen escorted a group with flowers on their chests away from the chaos of the battle. The Redflowers grew food for the Empire, and if one of them died, the Skysworn would come down on the Jai clan like a hammer.

His wife’s family should be exempt too. If a Naru were caught in this crossfire, the Emperor would make the Jai clan pay for it.

But he could see the Redflowers, safe and escorted away by the Jai warriors. He couldn’t see anyone with the green wings of the Naru family’s Path of Grasping Sky.

Until he saw Jing, he couldn’t relax.

He looked up at the tower through a haze of smoke, and something slammed into his forehead with the power of a kicking horse. He flipped backward, his own momentum turned against him, and only years of training let him stumble to his feet.

Blood was in his eyes.

He gripped his sword, though he didn’t remember drawing it.

The tower of yellow bone filled his vision, closer now, but still so far away.

Three Highgolds from the Jai clan closed in on him, spears wet, faces tense. Six more were spearing a Truegold Remnant to death nearby; that explained why so many of the Jai clan’s mid-level fighters were together.

That couldn’t have been an Arelius Remnant; none of their Truegolds were in the city. Someone had tried to intervene.

There were nine enemy Highgolds, most of them with spirits as strong as his own. Nine.

Head still ringing from the blow, thoughts fluttering like a cloud of butterflies, Cassias took one staggering step forward.

A white light crashed into him, but somehow his sword had knocked it away, filled with enough madra to break the technique. A flash of silver and white exploded.

“Highgold,” one of them said. “Yellow hair. Arelius?”

“Could be dyed,” someone else said. Blearily, Cassias focused on her face.

He recognized her. He knew most of the famous people in the Jai clan. Jai Yu, that was her name. The two hundred and sixty-fifth strongest Highgold in the Empire.

Out of the hundreds of thousands of Highgolds, she was considered to be among the top three hundred. Strong. A strong opponent.

Cassias focused his awareness on the bone tower, desperately sweeping for a glimpse of his wife’s face.

A man poked him in the arm. Cassias couldn’t get his silver bracer, his Goldsign, up in time to block, and blood spurted. He didn’t feel the pain, but his arm gave a spasm and his sword clattered to the bricks.

“There are only two bloodline Arelius in the city,” Jai Yu said, “and our Truegolds have them both. If he’s an unregistered blood relative, we’ll turn him in for the bounty.”

“No crescent,” the man said, inspecting his clothes.

A crash came from two streets over, and Jai Yu muttered something under her breath. “Forget it. I’m not carrying him around.”

Light gathered on her spearhead, and Cassias’ breathing sped up, because he still hadn’t found his wife. The ringing in his head had sharpened to a scream. He poured all his madra into his detection web, scanning the tower from top to bottom, racing to see that his family was safe.

Then…he saw her.

She wasn’t in their rooms, but at the base of the tower, on her way to a shelter with more Arelius family employees. Black hair streamed behind her, and her left eye was dark and furious. Her right was an orange globe of madra, a construct to replace one she’d lost in battle years ago. Her wings spread—one the natural emerald Goldsign of her Path, and the other a matrix of sunset-colored energy. Her second prosthetic.

She was safe. They were both safe.

That was all he needed to know.

…before his mind cleared and the ringing in his ears faded. He thrust his palm into Jai Yu’s spear, sending up a pulse of sword madra and slicing it in half.

He opened his eyes afterward, letting the spearhead fly over his shoulder. “Jai Yu. I’m disappointed you didn’t recognize me.”

Her face paled.

White lines began creeping over her skin as she prepared her Flowing Starlight technique. “We…I’m sorry, we didn’t…we thought you were…” She swallowed, and then yelled, “Run! Everyone run!”

Two of them took her advice, but one of the more distant Jai fighters gripped his spear as though ready to join the fight. “What is it?”

Jai Yu shouted back while fleeing. “It’s Ca—”

Silver Step.

The technique rang like a bell under his foot, launching him behind Jai Yu. He drove his hand into her back, and silver light pierced her heart.

Another Silver Step, and he stood beside the Jai clan Highgold who had asked the question. Cassias hadn’t bothered picking up his sword.

The spearhead pointed in his direction quivered. “Number…two…”

Cassias placed a palm on the man’s head, and sword madra blasted through his skull and into his brain. He died silently.

Nine Highgolds would have been too much of an opponent, even for him. If they had cooperated. But splitting up and coming at him one at a time…

There was only one Highgold in the Blackflame Empire who could fight with him face-to-face, and she was carrying their child into a shelter.

Naru Cassias Arelius, former heir to the Arelius family, had been allowed to marry into the Naru clan for three reasons. First, the recommendation of his family Underlord. Second, the personal feelings of Naru Jing, star of the clan’s young generation.

And third, his personal strength.

Another Silver Step, and he sent a head spinning onto the street, its metal hair striking sparks against the stone. Six more Steps later, he was out of madra, and there were six more bloodstains on the streets.

Of all the Highgolds who had tried to ambush the second-ranked Highgold in the Empire, none remained.

* * *

“This is what you get, trying to see new places at your age,” Fisher Gesha mumbled. A Lowgold Remnant sank into the flagstones in front of her, and she sheared its head off as she moved. She wanted to collect its eyes and check it for bindings, but her drudge was currently carrying her along the flagstones, and she certainly wasn’t going to run on her own two feet.

“Came to get a taste of the Empire, didn’t you? Came to teach a promising student. And where is he, hm? Tucked away in a mountain, isn’t he, not even thinking of Soulsmithing.”

A swarm of spider-constructs scuttled over the street around her, escorting her through the screaming city and up to a hatch in the ground.

She pressed a scripted key against the aura lock and used her madra to pull on a catch on the other side. This was a Soulsmith’s underground storehouse, meant to hold volatile substances, but it was the most secure location she knew of outside the Arelius shelters. Forget the shelters; a bunch of victims packed inside like weeds waiting to be plucked.

Gesha hopped down into the cellar, pulling the heavy doors shut behind her with strands of purple madra. She locked them, and then sealed them with layers of invisible threads. Then she Forged a few purple wires and physically tied it shut, positioning half a dozen spider constructs at the entrance.

Finally, she ran to the back of the storehouse and webbed herself to the ceiling.

“Wasting my time,” she muttered. “Risking my life. Too old for this.”

Withdrawing all her madra, she cycled power in a shell around her core, veiling her power.

Then she waited for the noise to end.

* * *

Jai Long and Gokren hiked over to Shiryu Mountain’s second peak, a handful of Sandvipers in tow.

Gokren ran a hand over his gray hair, slicking it back. “We’ll take the strong disciple together, then move on to the Iron.”

This was their task, entrusted to them by the Jai Underlord. Eithan’s pair of students would soon sense the uproar in the city, and would emerge from their training. Rather than gamble everything on a duel in the fall, eliminate the Arelius family’s new recruits here, in the spring.

Jai Daishou’s pride would take a hit if this plan became public knowledge, but Jai Long had to respect the decision. It may not have been the most honorable course of action, but the Patriarch certainly wasn’t underestimating his enemies.

Jai Long leaped from one outcropping to another. “Not together. I’ll kill the Lowgold, you handle Wei Shi Lindon.” The sword artist could live, but he didn’t want Lindon sneaking off.

Besides, she had traded blows with him before, even a full stage behind him. Her advancement could not have kept pace with his; he wanted to see how much stronger he’d become in the past half a year.

They landed by what Jai Daishou had described as the exit for the Blackflame Trials. An aura barrier covered the opening.

Gokren itched to break through—he had a short spear in each hand and was pacing back and forth, barking at his men for being too slow as they arrived.

On Jai Long’s orders, they all backed higher up the slope, so they could watch from a vantage point. Gokren had to pull himself away from the entrance, but he ultimately obeyed. Once everyone had spread out enough to cover any possible exit—even if they dashed out of the cave—Jai Long sat on a rock and began to cycle aura.

He could wait.

* * *

The sun’s last rays were drifting up the canyon as Lindon and Yerin knelt before the Ruler Trial’s tablet.

“Blackflame madra burned the body and the…mind, I’d say, although it could be spirit. Or dreams.” He tapped a picture of a screaming person grasping at his own head. “The point seems clear. Using Blackflame slowly ruins you, building up damage and eroding the soul, destroying your advancement, your sanity, and your lifespan.” He tried not to feel the Blackflame raging inside him, deadly and explosive, instead returning his focus to the ancient symbols.

“That is the price you pay for the…largest hammer? Ah, ‘greatest weapon.’ Blackflames rule by…one man on the battlefield?” He traced his finger between the symbol and a nearby picture of a man standing alone with flames in each of his hands.

“Last man standing,” Yerin said quietly.

Lindon shivered. That was impressively reliable, but somewhat grim for his taste. They ruled by virtue of having killed all their opponents. And this was core enough to their philosophy that they engraved it in their basic training course.

Well, he’d chosen this Path for its ability to win duels, not for its outstanding moral values. And he’d want the biggest weapon he could find if he had to fight the creature destined to attack Sacred Valley.

The next phrase was in more modern language:

The dragon conquers.

He said it aloud, and Yerin nodded along. “Ruler techniques conquer. Fits like a good boot.”

The dragon advances.

The dragon destroys.

The dragon conquers.

Orthos’ core was unsteady and had been for days, but the words resonated with his spirit. He was a sword rather than a shield, a force of destruction, and a jealous king.

That wasn’t a comfortable personality to share a soul with, but it described a weapon that Lindon could use.

Yerin nodded to the rest of the Ruler Trial. “Rather than that…these guys tickle your memory at all?”

Lindon had been trying not to look out at the field of opponents arranged for him in the final Blackflame Trial. There were ninety-nine dark, humanoid figures in the field, each clutching different weapons, and he sensed different madra from each of them. Ninety-nine mannequins with faceless heads.

Ninety-nine dummies, arranged in a circle.

The activation crystal was on a pedestal in the center, and Lindon had to use his Ruler technique to some degree before he could power the course. He wasn’t looking forward to it. The Striker Trial had only taken them ten days to pass, but based on how long it had taken him to fight eighteen dummies, almost a hundred would take…

…very probably the rest of his short life.

Lindon moved on to the technique section. “Dance of the Dragon of Emptiness,” he said.

“Not ‘Fierce’?” Yerin asked. “Nothing fierce about this one?”

Lindon shook his head, trying to remember a story that Orthos had told him months ago.

“Then I like it. Dance of the Dragon of Emptiness…what about Dance of Emptiness? Plain and stable. Doesn’t look like you have to do any dancing, though.”

He searched the characters, trying to figure out how else they could be read, before the memory clicked. “Void Dragon’s Dance.”

Yerin slapped him on the back. “There’s the winner. That’s a name you’d be proud to put in a manual.”

White light flashed in the darkening sky overhead, and they both looked up.

Lindon extended his Jade perception, and was sure Yerin had done the same. He had the brief sense that the light felt cool and sharp, but that was all before it faded.

“A celebration?” he asked. The Wei clan had shone colored lights into the night sky at every festival and most holidays.

Yerin’s face went from distracted and curious to deadly serious in the space of a blink. “Get your pack, bring it here. We should put our backs to an exit.”

Lindon strained his perception, but he didn’t even get a vague sense of the city. “What’s happening?”

“Nothing’s sure yet,” Yerin said, “but it’s not a party.”

He turned to run back to the cave, but stopped before he’d taken a step. To his surprise, he did sense something. Something a lot closer than the city.

Orthos’ core quivered like a bomb on the edge of exploding.

His shock and outrage echoed inside Lindon—he must have felt the same things Yerin did. Whatever that was, it hit the turtle like a gong. His spirit shivered, teetering off balance for an instant.

Then it fell into rage.

“I’ll go back later,” Lindon said, worrying for the Riverseed. “Right now, we need to—”

A roar shook their little valley. Dirt trembled, and the walls shivered.

Yerin’s sword was in her hand, and her Goldsign buzzed with sword aura. “That’s your turtle?”

“Not at the moment,” Lindon said. Blackflame madra swirled within him in furious, explosive bursts, ready to be used.

A deafening series of crashes filled the canyon, and gray smoke rose between them and the Enforcer Trial. The stone pillars were collapsing as Orthos got closer.

He was crashing straight through the forest of columns on his way to them.

“Yerin,” Lindon asked, his voice surprisingly calm. “Where would you put Orthos’ strength, if you had to rate him?”

She leaned on the balls of her feet, ready to dash into battle. “Hard to weigh sacred beasts, but I’d call him Truegold.”

“That’s what I thought.” He swallowed. “Gratitude, Yerin. I would never have made it out of Sacred Valley if not for you.”

Her spirit flared, and silver aura condensed around her like a shell. “Wouldn’t make it out of this valley without me, either. Talk when the fight’s over. Eyes up.”

Lindon had never taken his gaze away from the approaching sacred beast, but he still almost missed it when the huge black bulk hurled itself through the arch of their Trial, body blazing with the Burning Cloak, red eyes shining with madness. If Lindon had been any less than fully focused, he wouldn’t have made it in time.

But a Burning Cloak of his own sprung up around him, and he dashed off to the side, kicking up a spray of dirt, everything from his ankles to knees screaming at the strain. His Bloodforged Iron body kicked in instantly, stealing more of his madra and sending it to his legs.

Yerin ducked so low she looked like she’d plastered herself against the ground, slashing up with her Goldsign and her white sword both.

Orthos kicked out, and both of her attacks met burning claws.

Then the turtle’s momentum carried him over her body, and he slammed into the earth, roaring and turning in an instant. Yerin was back on him, slamming an aura-assisted blade at his neck.

They traded six blows while Lindon took stock of his options.

He could go back to the cave and get the Sylvan Riverseed to try and cleanse Orthos. It might not work, but he’d intended to try whenever Orthos showed up sane again. But the pack was all the way back in the cave, and by the time he returned, Yerin could be dead.

He could try to lure Orthos out the exit. He could probably get the turtle to follow him, and then Yerin could knock him through the aura barrier to the outside. If he was trapped, he’d be harmless until Lindon could bring the Riverseed to heal him.

Of course, that was assuming he couldn’t just drill a hole with Blackflame straight through the stone and come right back inside.

Or…Lindon patted his belt, feeling the weight there. He’d brought his halfsilver dagger along to the unknown Trial. He gripped the hilt in a sweaty hand, flared his Burning Cloak, and dashed into battle.

One cut. If he could stab Orthos at all, the halfsilver would disperse his madra, and Yerin would have an instant to stop him. It might even be enough to relieve the pressure on his spirit and make him sane again.

When Yerin rolled in the air over his shell and came down behind him, Orthos turned to face her.

And Lindon leaped in, striking at the turtle’s tail. He could cut anywhere, with a halfsilver blade, and it would work just as well. The important part was that the metal contacted the madra.

He stabbed Orthos in the tail, and his blade snapped in half.

Halfsilver was a brittle metal, and the turtle’s skin was thick as leather armor. He should have seen it coming.

Lindon cursed himself as he tumbled backwards, having been sent flying by Orthos’ tail. He eventually rolled to a stop, but hopped straight up to his feet—he’d been hurt worse than that in the Enforcer Trial.

If Orthos was in full command of his powers, they would both have been dead by now. Lindon could feel that in the power echoing through their contract. But fueled entirely by blind rage, the turtle could hardly string two thoughts together.

That was their only chance.

Clutching that possibility, Lindon dashed back into the fight.

18

In Yerin’s view, you never got used to the fear of death, but you could ignore it. It didn’t go away, but when you’d spent more nights in swordfights than in soft beds, you learned to shove the fear into the dark corner where it belonged.

But facing the hulking, burning, armored beast that loomed over her and struck with a fury that singed her skin, that fear was creeping out of its corner and showing its ugly face.

Orthos was overwhelming her with the sheer power of his madra. He would smash down with an Enforced paw that cracked the ground, cough up a tongue of abyssal flames, and rush forward to crush her with his body weight, all in the space of a breath. She dodged what she could, but some attacks had to be turned, and it took everything she had to shove one of his blows to the side.

Her master’s voice was finally starting to scrape her nerves. She’d learned so much from the instincts bubbling up from his Remnant that she couldn’t believe Eithan had ever told her to get rid of him, but now he was starting to feel like a burden. Her Goldsign twitched like her master wanted her to cut the turtle in half; well, that would be just fine, if it weren’t a turtle. There was a big mound of shell in the way.

The Sword Sage didn’t see the problem. That was a stable enough move if it were him in the flesh; he could cut a mountain in half without a sword in his hand. But she was still a Gold, ten leagues and two oceans behind his stage of advancement. She couldn’t cut through that shell if Orthos stood quietly and let her…but her Goldsign was still pulling her to try it.

If not for Lindon, she’d be dead already; when she saw him catch a gap in Orthos’ defense and rush in to hammer it, she was prouder than a hen with six eggs. Good thing he was there, because he could take hits from Blackflame madra without dissolving like salt in water.

Orthos hadn’t gathered himself for a big show like that Striker technique that had pierced the clouds—and a good thing too, or he’d bring the canyon walls down—because he didn’t have the presence of mind for it. Best he could manage was belching a few black flames, which Lindon could swat away with his own madra and keep fighting. She had to meet each of those techniques with her sword, or risk losing an arm.

But every time Lindon did that, his power dimmed like a dying light. He was faltering, that was plain to see.

If she didn’t win this fight in the next two breaths, he wouldn’t get a third.

Smoke and red-tinged light rose from Orthos’ shell as he stomped around, swiveling his head to point at Lindon. The turtle’s jaw gaped, and his eyes blazed with what she’d call hatred.

There was a mountain of shell between her and Lindon, but there was one last thing she could try.

With all the strength of her Steelborn Iron body, Yerin hurled the sword between Orthos’ legs. It stuck into the earth beneath the turtle, buried up to the hilt, and Orthos didn’t notice.

Dead on target.

Yerin gathered all the sword aura she could pull onto her Goldsign, and even the edge of her fingernails. Sword aura showed its power in motion; when she swung them all forward, she struck with the Endless Sword technique.

Her Goldsign rang like a bell. Her fingernails echoed, tiny chimes, as they popped and sprayed blood into the air.

All the sword aura resonated in a twenty-foot radius around her, the technique spreading out in a wave and looking for other swords. When it hit her master’s blade, the ringing sounded like the gong that announced victory or failure in the Blackflame Trials.

Sword aura burst out of the buried weapon, a wave of dirt spraying everywhere, and blasted the turtle’s underbelly. She had been hoping to split Orthos from bottom to top, but she could feel when the aura didn’t bite. It slammed into his belly, lifting him six inches off the ground and making him roar…but it barely cut him. She’d gotten worse from sharp twigs.

In that half-second while all four paws were off the ground, she saw one more chance, but she didn’t have the strength to follow up on it. If she had her sword, sure. But she was unarmed, bleeding from all ten fingernails, and low on madra to top it off.

She opened her mouth to shout, hoping Lindon would catch this chance before it passed.

Before a sound left her lips, Lindon moved.

The months of training together finally showed their worth. Lindon, heavens bless him, saw the opportunity. He slid closer to Orthos and reached down, fist flaring with the black-and-red light of the Burning Cloak.

His uppercut caught the turtle on the edge of his shell, sending Orthos flipping upside-down.

The sacred beast slammed into the earth a moment later, spraying Blackflame madra from its mouth and roaring. Yerin clambered closer, snatching the hilt of her sword away—only luck had stopped him from landing right on the blade.

Another benefit of working with Lindon: she knew exactly where he’d be without looking.

She tossed the white sword into the air over Orthos, and Lindon—already at the height of a jump—snatched it out of the air.

His thoughts were the same as hers, she knew. They didn’t want to kill Orthos, because they’d have to fight his Remnant, but heaven strike her down if she could see a better way. Besides, Lindon could adopt the Remnant; he might not have been instructed through that process, and he may not have been quite ready for it, but that would be better than another fight to the death.

Lindon landed on Orthos’ belly, swaying like a man on the deck of a ship. He reversed the sword, raised it in both hands…

…and he switched cores.

His presence went from a fiercely burning fire to a calm, almost invisible lake. He was a Jade on a different Path.

And before he killed the sacred beast, something caught her attention.

When did he have full strength in both his cores?

She’d never noticed much of a difference, since he’d grown so slowly, and he only switched to his Twin Stars madra once in a blue moon. But he used to feel like half a Jade. Now, she’d never know he had a split core without scanning his spirit closely.

His core still wasn’t the deepest, but compared to how he was before, the difference was like heaven and earth. Just the core he was showing now wouldn’t embarrass a Jade back in Sacred Valley, and she’d eat her sword if his Blackflame core wasn’t a notch wider.

His cycling technique. Eithan taught it to him.

Lindon had never made a secret of that, but Yerin hadn’t given it two thoughts before. It was just a cycling technique; every Path had one. Lindon had complained about how difficult his Heavenly Whatever Wheel was, but he was new to the sacred arts. Everything was difficult to him.

She’d been jealous of the personal attention Eithan had paid him, but if she was honest, he needed it more than she did. But Yerin had never thought Eithan was teaching him anything great because—to cut right down to the bone—Eithan wasn’t treating them like real disciples. He hadn’t even told them the name of his Path.

But…what if he did think of Lindon as a disciple? What if he was actually passing along his sacred arts to Lindon?

Because if that cycling technique had made up for his lack of madra, it wasn’t some half-baked technique that Lindon had found in an old scroll. It was on the same stage as the cycling technique her master had passed to her.

She expected a fresh surge of envy, but what passed through her instead was relief. A large slice of a sacred artist’s future could be told from the quality of their Path.

You could get to Truegold without a perfect Iron body, but then your flesh wouldn’t survive the advancement to Underlord. Same story for spirits: without a solid Jade cycling technique, your soul would get shakier and shakier at each stage until you couldn’t advance any further.

The more solid your foundation, the further you could go.

When Eithan told them he wanted to take them all the way to the end, he hadn’t just been spitting in the wind.

Of course, they wouldn’t take one step out of the valley if Orthos’ Remnant killed them both. The fight wasn’t over.

Lindon pulled his free hand back for a strike and drove an Empty Palm down into the turtle’s midsection, and Yerin could feel the creature’s madra going wild. It screamed like an earthquake, so loud she had to cycle madra to her ears to stop her eardrums from bursting. It bucked like a ship in a storm, trying to shake Lindon off.

But it couldn’t Enforce its body anymore. Orthos’ quick, graceful movements were gone, and he was just a big turtle.

Lindon raised the Sword Sage’s blade and threw it to one side.

Yerin gaped at him. Every rosy thing she’d thought about him flew away and died.

Lindon’s knees almost buckled when he hopped off the turtle and hit the ground, and he braced himself against the side of Orthos’ shell for balance. “Forgiveness, but he doesn’t deserve to die here. And the Sylvan might help him.”

For once, the three voices in her head were all in agreement. Her unwelcome guest, her master’s Remnant, and Yerin all told her to kill the enemy before this idiot could ruin everything.

“I’m not saying to gut him for the thrill of it. You kill enemies, you hear me? If you don’t, they come up behind you and stab you in the back.”

Lindon looked ashamed, but he didn’t pick the sword back up. “I have to go get my pack.”

Yerin marched over and snatched her master’s weapon from the dirt as Orthos squirmed to right himself. Her bloody fingernails sent sharp pain up her arms, but nothing she couldn’t ignore. “If you were making this mistake alone, I’d let you. But you’re not.” She leaped over the turtle, landing next to its head, and raised her blade. Her madra flowed into it, gathering along its edge, gathering aura.

The target’s black-and-red eyes rolled in their sockets, searching. Not furious any longer.

Lost.

They stared at her as though begging for an answer. A low groan rumbled in the turtle’s throat.

“Do…what…you…must…” the sacred beast said, in a voice both ancient and heavy.

Yerin paused with her white blade against the black, leathery throat. Everything in her told her to split the turtle’s neck.

She sheathed her sword and jogged back to Lindon. He started running for his pack, and she joined him.

“Not even an enemy, really, is he?” she muttered, as they ran side by side.

“I’ve never thought so, no.”

“The Path makes him crazy?”

“His mind can’t compete with the feelings in his spirit.” He gave a sheepish smile. “That’s the impression I get.”

“Well, if it happens to you, I will cut your head off.”

The Sword Sage taught her not to show mercy to her enemies, but he also taught her to act in a way she wouldn’t regret. Well, if his bloodthirsty Remnant and her blood madra parasite agreed on something, she could bet she’d regret it sooner or later.

They spent more than a minute chasing Little Blue around the cave and scooping her back into the tank. Otherwise, packing up was easy as a breath; Lindon kept his stuff so organized it would make a librarian jealous, and Yerin didn’t have anything. Everything she owned, she kept on her body.

They returned to the Ruler Trial, Lindon cupping a quivering Sylvan in his hands. He was certain the Riverseed’s power could calm Orthos’ spirit, but Yerin kept a grip on her sword.

She didn’t want to kill someone she’d just spared, but Lindon could be too trusting.

When they returned and found Orthos gone, he tucked the Sylvan away as though he’d expected as much, and she breathed a sigh of relief.

“Nothing left for us here,” she said, grabbing him by a shoulder and dragging him toward the exit. When he didn’t move fast enough to suit her, she pulled him into a run.

“I doubt we can clear the Ruler Trial now,” Lindon said as they ran, looking like a turtle himself with the pack bouncing on his back.

“I’m feeling a little doubt myself,” Yerin said, voice dry. A chunk of the ninety-nine dummies had been ravaged by the aftermath of their battle, either destroyed by Blackflame or shredded by the Endless Sword. Good thing for them that the course hadn’t activated, or the mannequins might have joined in.

“You think Eithan will understand us leaving early?” He sounded anxious.

Yerin was still picking up flares of chaos from the city. They’d been driven out of the Trials by a wild sacred beast while Serpent’s Grave was breaking into a war zone. Eithan was cracked in the head if he expected them to stay where they were.

The exit arch was black, not red, but its script flared at the touch of Lindon’s Blackflame madra. It took him visible effort to activate the circle, and his core felt like the spark at the end of a fizzling incense stick.

Not that she was in much better shape herself. Madra sloshed in her core like the last drops at the bottom of a bottle, and her fingers throbbed like she’d run over her hands with a wagon.

They emerged onto a cliff overlooking Serpent’s Grave. A path cut into the rock sloped steadily downward.

But they both froze at what they saw. And what they felt.

As she’d expected, war had come to the city.

Streaks of deadly white light tore through homes. The dragon bone held up, but even at this distance, they could see holes in everything else: wood, plaster, and paint showed smoking gaps where they’d been torn apart by the sacred arts.

Gouts of stone, blasts of wind, and flares of color marked sacred artists fighting all through the streets. The ceaseless ringing of bells reached them even up on the cliff, along with the occasional drifting scream. Smoke hung over everything, and the vital aura of blood, fire, and destruction spread through the city like red and black ink seeping into a painting. Here and there, Remnants crawled over and through buildings.

Lindon looked horrified, clutching the jade badge hanging from his neck as though for comfort. Yerin loosened her own grip on her sword, because she was squeezing blood from her fingertips.

“Eithan’s not in the city,” she said.

“How can you be sure?”

“This wouldn’t be happening. There’d be heaps of dead Jai clansmen piled up all over the city.”

“We can go back through the Trials,” Lindon said, voice low and determined. “Circle around. We’ll come out in the back of Arelius territory. Eithan or Cassias will find us first, we can be sure of that.”

Yerin patted her pockets, making sure she still had a flask of water, a wrapped packet of dry food, her knife, and the gold badge her master had left her. Those, her robes, and her sword were the only belongings she needed.

“We should get started for the capital,” she said. “Never been to Blackflame City, but I’ve been everywhere else, and a couple of sacred artists with no name, no clan, and decent Paths can find work anywhere.”

“Eithan wouldn’t be too happy about that, I’m sure,” Lindon said carefully.

That was something to chew on. If anyone could track them down in the mass of a big city, Eithan could.

“That’s sharp thinking, but he couldn’t blame us for striking out on our own after…this.” She swept her arm to encompass the ruined city. “Somebody wants to fight with me and mine, you know I’ll draw swords. But the Arelius family hasn’t given us so much that I’d want to die on their account. Nobody there would shed a tear if they saw my Remnant.”

For most of her life, the only one who would remember her at all would have been her master. Now…Lindon would cry for her when she was gone. He’d remember her name.

Even more reason not to go down there.

“We should go back to the Trials,” Lindon said at last, though he didn’t sound too happy about it.

“Big turtle’s somewhere back there,” she pointed out. “If it goes crazy on us again, we’re—”

Her spirit warned her, and she shoved Lindon back against the rocks.

Two sacred artists landed in front of her, their backs to the cliff, but there were more up above who hadn’t shown themselves. One was a man about her height, packed tight like a coiled spring, draped in black fur. His gray hair was slicked back with grease, a pair of spear butts poked up over his shoulders, and he glared at Lindon in a way that reminded her of a snake baring fangs.

Next to him, a head taller and wrapped in red, stood Jai Long. Last time she’d seen him, his spirit felt deadly but contained, like a sheathed sword. Now the sheath had been removed—not only was he Truegold as well, with power that pressed against her senses, he felt dangerous. Like he’d cut her just by standing near.

The strips of red cloth covered his face, each bandage filled with flowing script. Dark eyes glittered in the center of the mask.

This time, he carried no spear.

Two Truegolds. ‘Show me a fair fight,’ her master used to say, ‘and I’ll show you an opponent who has lost his mind.’ Even so, there were rigged games, and then there was suicide.

The old Sandviper snarled and swept his hand through the air. A handful of finger-length needles, Forged of acid-green madra, flew out in a spray.

Circulating the Rippling Sword technique, Yerin stepped forward to meet him.

Her core might have been filled with hopes and wishes and nothing else, but she squeezed out every drop of power she could get. The needles crashed against her arching sword like a wave against stone, but that wasn’t the end of her technique.

Her madra flashed out, a crescent-shaped slash of colorless power sheathed in silver aura. For a moment, shock flashed across the Sandviper Truegold’s face, and he pulled spears into his hands with blurring speed.

Then Jai Long was there, his hand glowing white and crashing into her technique. The Rippling Sword broke like a bubble, sword aura dispersing into the air.

“Yerin Arelius,” Jai Long said evenly. “Disciple of the Sword Sage. The Underlord told me who you were. If you’d told me last time, I would never have drawn weapons, out of respect for your master.”

“The ‘Arelius’ part is still all shiny and new,” Yerin said, still channeling the dregs of her madra into her sword. “Guess you might say I was adopted. If you wanted to use words instead of weapons this time, I could show mercy and let you.”

The Sandviper lifted a spear, eyes glued to Lindon, and Jai Long started cycling madra. In that blink where they weren’t focused on her, Yerin spun.

She kicked Lindon in the chest, sending him back into the tunnel and closer to the Trial. A Sandviper technique shattered into green light on bare rock where Lindon had been standing, and the gray-haired man was dashing past her, a frustrated growl turning into a shout as he ran.

Above her, the other nearby Sandvipers grew closer.

She turned back, and Jai Long had already charged.

Yerin had a clear obstacle. She had a fight. Now, she just had to do as her master taught her…and cut right through it.

In the dark shadows of her mind, the fear of death reared its head again.

* * *

Jai Daishou, Patriarch of the Jai clan, stared through the bubble of aura at the blurred figure with yellow hair and blurred robes.

Ordinarily, sound would not travel well through this boundary formation, but Eithan would be able to see him and hear him. He raised the spear of his honored ancestor, displaying it before the enemy.

Then he shook his head, showing sadness on his face to mask the triumph in his heart. “Your path of recklessness led us here, Eleven. You have done as you wished, acting on the whims of youth without respect or consideration. This is a harvest you have planted.”

The elders around him nodded along. They’d gathered close to the Underlord, like children gathering around their father.

Well, let them. This was Jai Daishou’s moment of victory, and the more people who witnessed it, the better.

Eithan’s face was unreadable through the haze of the aura. He held his broom out to one side; it was hard to make out details, but it didn’t seem to be a weapon or a construct. Just a broom.

Jai Daishou’s grip on his spear tightened as he grew irritated. “You could hear me if I were on the other side of the mountain, Eleven. Speak like a grown man, for once in your life, and perhaps we can come to an accord.”

Eithan spun the broom in a lazy circle, like a staff, and still didn’t speak.

Finally, Jai Daishou’s self-restraint broke. For the past six years, since he came from the other end of the world, Eithan Arelius had been a walking disaster. He’d disrespected the Jai clan, ignored the words of his betters, and insulted Jai Daishou to his face. In front of the Emperor once, and the honored Emperor had said not a word.

A man could tolerate only so much before patience reached its end.

Jai Daishou leveled the Ancestor’s Spear, shifting his stance and letting madra flow freely into his limbs. “Then you’ll forgive me for testing the skills of the youngest Underlord in the Empire.”

This formation had been designed with Eithan in mind. No one knew what Path he used, but there were no reports of his ever using a Striker technique. Most reports agreed that he used a Path focused on Enforcement, probably focused on the force aspect. He might have even trained with the Cloud Hammer School, though he lacked their Goldsign.

Eithan’s hair blew behind him in the wind generated by the force of the boundary formation. He faced Jai Daishou squarely, until the Jai Patriarch was sure they were locking gazes. The Arelius held the broom in one hand, pointing it toward one of the Jai elders.

No, not to the elder. To the boundary flag.

“Whose idea was the boundary?” Eithan asked, and though the words sounded distorted, Jai Daishou could hear them clearly.

“I knew I would need something to prevent you from running for your life,” he said. The truth was, this barrier would allow the passage of madra. He intended to skewer Eithan with Striker techniques while the Underlord couldn’t fight back.

Jai Daishou had spent most of his life building up a reputation of honor and respect that anyone in the Empire would envy, but as death approached, he found that saving face in the eyes of his peers had less and less appeal.

What could their ridicule do to him? Ruin his clan? His clan would fall apart the moment he was buried. Now, only results mattered.

The Jai Patriarch’s spearhead blazed like a white sun as he prepared a Star Lance. The other elders spread out around the dome, doing the same.

Eithan nodded. “Thank you,” he said. “Now there are no witnesses.”

A dull gray spark passed from the middle of the broom where Eithan gripped it, washing along to both ends. Soulfire: the signature of an Underlord. Where the blaze passed, the broom’s color darkened, remade in the fires of condensed vital aura. It would conduct energy almost perfectly now, and would be tougher than steel. All the best weapons were imbued with a Lord’s soulfire.

That was all within Jai Daishou’s calculations. And it was still just a broom.

Jai Daishou hesitated before launching his Striker technique. Maybe Eithan Arelius really was arrogant to the point of madness. The young Underlord had always seemed brash with the overconfidence of youth, combined with pride in his admittedly high natural gifts, but now…

No Truegold was a match for an Underlord, certainly. Soulfire itself, and the process of weaving it from vital aura, gave Lords powers that no Gold could access.

But it wasn’t as though a Truegold could do nothing. Where a lone wolf was only prey, a pack of wolves could bring down a tiger. Skilled as they were, these six Truegold elders working together could bring Eithan down on their own. With Jai Daishou added in, the Arelius Underlord was already dead.

He was just speaking out of pride, that was all.

Just pride.

* * *

As Lindon stumbled back through the Trial gate, slapping his hand against the script to reactivate the aura barrier, he tried to remember how many times Yerin had knocked him out of danger.

It had to be at least six by now, he was sure. It wounded his dignity, being kicked away like a wild dog, but if he had to choose between wounded dignity and a spear through the chest, he knew which he’d pick.

All those times, and what could he do when she was in danger? Nothing. Just run.

Hating himself, Lindon ran back into the Ruler Trial. His first hope was dashed when he realized Orthos wasn’t there; he was still nearby, but he could be anywhere in the Trial grounds or back in the tunnels.

A green flash of light shattered the aura barrier and the gray-haired Sandviper crashed through, a short spear in each hand. Endless Sword madra still flickered outside, so Yerin was fighting, and at least she didn’t have to face two Truegold opponents at once.

Lindon ran for the Trial entrance. If he could make it back to the Enforcer course, he could hide in the rubble of the columns that Orthos had left behind. Then—

A nail drove through his calf, and he went down. He caught himself with both hands and rolled before hitting the ground, so the green Forged nail intended to go through his other leg hit the dirt instead.

His Blackflame core was hopelessly empty, and his Bloodforged Iron body was draining pure madra to his calf like a bucket with a hole in it. He pinched the needle with two fingers—the Sandviper madra stung his skin like acid—and pulled it out.

Then he let his pack slide to the ground, turning to face his pursuer.

“My name is Wei Shi Lindon, honored Truegold,” Lindon said, spreading his hands. “As you can see, I’m only a Jade, and surely I have nothing to interest an elder of your caliber.”

“Sandviper Gokren,” he growled. “Kral’s father.”

When the spear came in, Lindon instinctively tried to form the Burning Cloak. Of course, nothing happened—he was cycling pure madra, and it had to be handled differently. But he clumsily Enforced his arms anyway, managing to knock the thrust off course.

The second spear followed instantly, and he had to step back to stop it. Which meant putting weight on his bleeding calf.

He tried to stop the scream, but when he faltered and took a spearhead to the shoulder, he screamed all the same.

Lindon covered his face with his hands as another technique came in, but the spray of needles covered him from head to hips. At first, he trusted in the power of his Iron body and his Enforcer technique to save him, but the strength of a Truegold overwhelmed him. Every wound burned with poison, and his body leaked madra trying to counteract the Sandviper venom.

His lungs locked up. He couldn’t get a breath. His madra channels flickered and went dark, the pain overwhelming him as his Enforcer technique broke.

Gokren was shouting something, face purple with rage, but Lindon didn’t hear a word of it. He was drifting away, his flesh distant, as darkness crept into the corners of his vision.

Orthos hit Gokren like a landslide.

The turtle’s roar shook the canyon. Foreign anger echoed in Lindon’s soul, and Blackflame power flared against acid-green light. Rocks cracked, men shouted, and fire crackled.

The fight continued, but all the other details faded with Lindon’s consciousness.

Time passed in a haze of pain as the ground shook beneath him. He came back to himself choking on a mouthful of dirt and ash. He was riddled with holes, blood still seeping out of him, and he was starting to shiver. But the Bloodforged Iron body had done its job; at least venom no longer crawled through his veins.

He spat out bloody mud and rolled his eyes in his sockets, craning for a sight of Sandviper Gokren.

Twilight had passed, the stars bright pinpricks against the dark.

He could see no one. He strained his spiritual perception, and sensed…

Nothing.

He tried again, taking deep breaths despite the pain, quieting his spirit as best he could. The world remained dead around him. He opened his eyes, staring beyond what he could see, looking to open his Copper sight and catch a glimpse of aura.

No color. The world was gray and lifeless, and his limbs now trembled with creeping cold.

Calming his panic, he focused on his madra. His core was drained, but he could fix that by cycling. He braced himself for the pain as he tried to push himself up on his elbows.

In the dirt, he saw his arms twitch. He felt nothing.

Panic rose into his throat again, throwing off his breathing, and he tried to picture the heavy stone wheel in his core. He didn’t feel anything; not a spark.

His Bloodforged Iron body had drained everything.

Though the pain made his vision swim, and fear weighed him down, he managed to shimmy closer to his pack. It had fallen close to him, and there might be a Four Corners Rotation Pill or some scales inside. At least he could see what he had available, take stock.

He inched closer, seizing the corner of the pack with his teeth. Through pure will, he managed to slide his hand to the hook at the top. The hook held only a loop of cloth; all he had to do was slide that loop off, and the pack was open. He edged his thumb into the gap.

It didn’t take.

He tried again and again, despair growing like mold in his chest, until finally he caught the loop. With a limp finger, he pulled it open.

The pack tipped.

Its contents tumbled onto the ground, pelting his face and hand with junk. The pack must have been jostled around during the fight, because even some things that should have been secured in inside pockets had come free: his Path of Twin Stars manual, his Soulsmith primer, a sealed inkwell, a handful of halfsilver chips. It all spilled around him like trash.

In his hazy awareness, Lindon could only latch onto one thought: he had to put everything back where it was supposed to go. He pushed his hand, trying to keep his precious Path manual out of the dirt. Without madra, his arm might as well have been a dishrag.

He was empty.

The canyon had always been dark, allowing only a strip of light in from the sky, but at night the darkness surrounded him.

So when the light came, it hurt his eyes.

The blue light seemed blinding at first, even with his eyes closed, but when he swiped muddy tears from his eyelids and squinted into the shadows, his eyes quickly adjusted.

He stared into an azure candle flame, burning steadily at the heart of a glass marble. The flame was smooth and bright, the glass flawless.

As Lindon bled into the dirt, he stared at the ball of glass and fire. Just stared.

In the visions Suriel had shown him, he had died…but not here. Not alone in the dark.

He had a long way to go yet.

Lindon slapped one hand down on the marble, feeling its warmth. He hadn’t been able to cycle before, but given that he wasn’t dead yet, he had to think there was some power left in his soul. If he bled to death, he’d do it while cycling.

If that didn’t work…well, he’d climbed his way up from powerless before. He could do it again.

Lindon tried to draw on his Blackflame core, though it was like trying to inhale wood. There was nothing there. But if he could reclaim some shred of power, Blackflame was what he wanted. Pure madra wouldn’t do him much good if Gokren came back.

The thought made him shiver with fear, but he steadied his breath again and started cycling according to the Heaven and Earth Purification Wheel. The pain in his lungs almost made him return to his earlier, simpler Foundation technique, but he persevered. Eithan had told him to practice this cycling technique, and at least no one could say he’d given up.

Breath after agonizing breath passed, each one feeling like it hadn’t delivered enough air, but he kept going until he started to feel something. An approaching flame, a slight red light, and a tingling feeling on his skin.

His eyes snapped open to find that he was staring straight into black eyes with irises the color of shining blood.

Orthos.

19

Yerin dashed up the black slope, headed for the other peak, but Jai Long followed her.

He was playing with her, she could see that clear as glass. Maybe he wanted to hammer out a new technique, and maybe he thought she wasn’t worth his best. Whatever the truth, it stung.

She had clawed the last drop of madra from her core, and was running on prayers. But there was a mass of silver power left in her spirit, and she begged it for more power.

Her master’s instincts told her to attack.

I can’t, she thought. Give me something, and I’ll use it.

The Remnant had no other advice for her. Just a few wispy memories of running straight at an enemy, weapon and techniques primed and ready.

Someone else had a word for her, though.

Her long-time guest, unwelcome and uninvited, sat there in her core in a knot of deadly power. If she unleashed it, it could save her. If she released it, she could save herself.

As always, she reminded herself what would happen if she released her guest. Unless Eithan popped out of the ground, her guest would destroy everything. And everyone, probably including her. Unless it hollowed her out and used her as a husk, which was worse.

No, she didn’t need that parasite’s help. She needed her master to step up.

A twisting snake shot out from Jai Long’s palm, and she met it with the edge of her master’s sword. Only the sheer quality of the weapon saved her, because she had no madra left to pour into it. Her bloody fingernails drummed with pain to the beat of her heart.

Show me what to do, Yerin begged.

The Remnant still urged her to attack. The unwelcome guest still pleaded for freedom.

And Yerin’s heart bled, because she finally accepted the truth: this wasn’t her master. Breaking him open wouldn’t be a betrayal, it wouldn’t mean abandoning him. If she dug into the Remnant and sucked its power dry, she wouldn’t be losing her master’s voice.

She’d lost that almost a year ago, in Sacred Valley.

So, as Jai Long kicked her body down the mountain with a bored sigh, Yerin reached inside herself. Her master’s Remnant was just a mass of silver power in her core, but she visualized it as it had appeared when she adopted it: a ghost of silver chrome, armed with six bladed limbs.

She reached for that ghost and crushed it with the power of her will.

As though she’d lit a beacon, the aura around her ignited. Silver light blazed into the sky, a column of razor-sharp power that turned all the vital aura in the area to sword aura.

Beneath her feet, a thousand invisible blades slashed at the stone, pebbles whipping up to sting her skin. Even the air whistled by her ears as it was cut, the wind lashing at her hair and her robe.

As the power of the sword raged within and without, she was devoured by a memory.

The girl stood before the Sword Sage amidst the wreckage of what had once been a prosperous family.

Her power blazed in his spiritual sense, half of it raw and unshaped, half bloody and murderous. She was only seven or eight and scrawny, and she looked like she’d missed more than her share of meals. Ragged hair hung into her eyes.

She hauled on a rope of blood madra that stretched from her stomach as though the far end was tied to a runaway horse. Her bare feet were planted, her teeth gritted, arms straining against the power of the parasite.

Which stretched out, its end forming into a blade, trying to cut him. She had managed to halt it while the blade was still an inch from his throat.

The world came back into focus as Yerin found herself scraped and bloody and surrounded by a furious storm of silver light. Even the droplets of blood running from her wounds splashed up, sliced by aura, covering her with a scarlet mist.

A column of light rose into the air from her body, like she was a falling silver star.

She grasped at the Sword Sage’s memory like the fading edges of a dream; her master remembered that moment more vividly than she did. That moment: their first meeting. When she’d tried to save him from the power of her unwelcome guest.

Jai Long stood over her, and she found enough energy to stare defiantly back. He was far enough back that the sword energy didn’t cut him, but he was a sword artist himself—he could fight through the violent storm of her advancement to continue the fight while she was vulnerable.

But he merely crossed his arms and waited.

He could defend himself from this weapon, this seed of a true Blood Shadow, with only a fraction of his madra. He was in no danger.

But she didn’t know that. And she forced her body to its limit, muscles straining, blood running from the lip she was biting to keep the parasite from stretching any closer to him.

He was a stranger to her. The Blood Shadow had already consumed everyone she knew. All the others he’d seen in her position had given up—they had lost all reason to live, and thus all reason to fight. Their parasites thrived in such situations, filling their bodies like husks, stealing their power to bring it away.

And here, a little girl fought with all her body, mind, and spirit. She held on, her eyes furious and determined, resisting to the end.

And the fragment of a Dreadgod was no easy foe.

Yerin climbed to her feet, madra filling her, seeping into her weapon. Sword aura was so thick in the air, bright silver even to the naked eye, that it had started gathering on the edges of her blade. With half the effort it normally took, she executed her weapon Enforcer technique: the Flowing Sword. The technique collected aura with every slash and thrust, making the weapon stronger as it moved.

Everything in the Path of the Endless Sword revolved around vital aura. Most sword Paths could be used without a sword—their madra itself was sharp enough to cut old oak, so who needed the weapon itself? You could Forge whatever you needed for a fight.

On her Path, every technique was half a Ruler technique. Made her more powerful, gave her techniques extra heft…so long as she held a sword. If she didn’t have a weapon with a sharp edge, she was worth less than any other sacred artist.

That’s what her Goldsign was for.

Looking down on her, Jai Long must have felt the power building to a crescendo. He stood just beyond the silver light that poured as a torrent into the sky, and debris scattered by aura blades crashed against his chest.

Still he waited, arms crossed. Obviously, he expected more.

He had come to kill her, but here was a child who stood against a Dreadgod’s madra. She had power of her own—otherwise, the parasite would have chosen someone older—and enough resolve to keep on fighting even when the battle was lost, when she had no one left, when there was no hope of victory and nothing to fight for.

She was perfect.

Her master’s memories and attitudes soaked into her, washing over her with a palpable sense of his presence. He had chosen her because she fought to the last breath. Because, when backed into a corner and given no path to victory, she would still attack.

The Path of the Endless Sword had no defense. Sword aura could not shield her, it could only cut.

Whether she fought to escape, to kill her opponent, to protect herself, or to save someone else, she had to do so by attacking. That was the one weapon in her arsenal, the one road forward.

She’d studied the Path of the Endless Sword for years, and she knew exactly what it could do, but now she felt it. Bone-deep.

The silver light around her faded from a blaze to a halo and then died. Pebbles and droplets of blood, held aloft by the force of her spirit, scattered on the ground. The vital aura had carved out a smooth crater in the stone beneath her, and many of the rock pieces now drifted in the air as a fine dust.

“Congratulations,” Jai Long said, in his flat voice.

Yerin stretched her second bladed arm, which loomed over her other shoulder. With the pair of them, she looked like she’d glued a couple of steel fishing rods to her back and strapped knives to the end.

“Highgold,” she said, feeling the new resonance of her spirit. “Well, that’s got a kick to it.” She pressed her fists together, a sacred artist’s salute, and noticed her fingernails had stopped bleeding—Lowgold to Highgold wasn’t a big advancement, but advancing always did the body good. “Thanks for waiting.”

“I need an opponent,” he said softly. “Not a victim.”

Madra flooded through her flesh and into her skin, fueling her Steelborn Iron body, sinking into her muscles like water into thirsty soil.

She kicked off, and the leap took her over Jai Long’s head. He lashed out with a hand glowing like a star, but her Goldsign blurred and met his technique. They clashed with a sound like steel on steel.

Her second Goldsign whipped out, and he had to turn it with his other hand. When she followed up with a hit from her white sword, he took a step back.

Aura flashed out from her sword, slashing one of the strips of cloth from around his face, and he backed up again.

This time, he thrust a palm forward, and a Forged snake flashed through the air to bare fangs of light in her face.

He was following up with more snakes, defense and offense in one, and his spirit still hummed against her senses. She was far from being able to compete with him in raw power.

At least, as far as madra went.

While she was suffering through the birth of her Steelborn Iron body, her master had painted a rosy picture of its future. ‘It grows with you,’ he’d said. ‘Our body Enforcement techniques aren’t worth a chip of rust, see. So you need a body that Enforces itself.’ She’d seen him bend a steel door in half and crush a rock to powder. ‘You won’t notice at first, but it’ll be sharper every stage.’

For the first time, Yerin could feel the gift her master had left for her.

* * *

Something had changed for Yerin at Highgold, and it wasn’t her spirit. Jai Long had fought dozens if not hundreds of Highgolds, and it wasn’t that her spirit was so much stronger than usual.

Her techniques became sharper, like she’d spent a month practicing, but Jai Long could understand that. Highgold was a journey through the skills and experiences embedded in the Gold Remnant, so she’d have inherited some insight from her master.

It was her sheer physical strength that baffled him as she crushed his serpents, shoved his attacks aside, and matched his movements even through Flowing Starlight.

She drove his Enforced punches apart with her twin Goldsigns, which now moved as quick as her hands. He ducked her sword stroke, which she’d telegraphed by shifting her weight…but then she caught him in the side with a kick.

The force of it strained his Iron body and sent him rolling; he gathered himself and vaulted over from one peak to another. Now he was on the slopes of Shiryu Mountain’s main peak, beneath the Jai family palaces.

When she saw how far she’d kicked him, she looked more stunned than he was.

Jai Long’s whole purpose in allowing her to reach Highgold had been to measure himself against her. He was still ahead. The power of his techniques, his precision and timing, his speed: these were all beyond her.

But they should be. He was Truegold.

He shouldn’t feel any pressure from her attacks, but he did. He should be so much faster with his Flowing Starlight that she couldn’t keep up, and yet she did. She shouldn’t be able to threaten him except with her weapon, but that kick had nearly broken his ribs.

There was less of a distance between them now than there had been six months ago. He’d used the Ancestor’s Spear to gain power faster than any other sacred artist could, and she was still closing the gap.

Fear crawled up his spine, and for the first time, he focused his full power. He had to kill her now.

If he didn’t, then the next time they met, she would kill him.

He gathered points of light on the tips of his hands, forming Star’s Edge techniques. It would have been more effective with a weapon, but he worked with what he had.

Yerin leaped over to the slope with him, slashing out in a Striker technique. He broke it with one Star’s Edge, sending a Serpent’s Shadow at her to cover her movement as he leaped up the slope.

She followed, of course. Only when he reached the cliff and stood beneath the Jai clan homes did he turn and wait for her.

When she landed on the cliff, tattered black robes fluttering in the breeze, she sheathed her sword.

“You’ll need that,” he warned her.

She shrugged. “Still better armed than you are.”

A hand-sized Striker technique shot out from one of her Goldsigns, and though he crushed the madra immediately, she’d closed the gap.

He drove a Star’s Edge at her throat.

They exchanged a dozen blows in an instant, his Enforcer techniques crashing against her Goldsigns. His core had finally started to weaken, dimming from a bright moon to a fading star, and hers couldn’t have been much better. Her breaths were still in a cycling rhythm, but they were ragged.

She flicked her eyes to his hands, watching for his next attack, and he took the opening. He squeezed one last burst of speed out of Flowing Starlight, dashing behind her.

This was his chance. He didn’t have the power for a prolonged battle with her, certainly not without a weapon. She wasn’t even a priority target; if he’d known she would grow so fast, he would have taken Gokren’s suggestion and crushed her with the full power of their numbers.

He had one chance to end the threat she represented, and this was it.

Her back was open and unprotected. In one invisible motion, he slashed a razor-sharp Enforced palm at the back of her neck to sever her spine.

As he moved, his spirit cried a warning. He leaped back as the air rippled, and sword aura tore the space where he had just been standing

Yerin’s Goldsign had twisted behind her, launching a Ruler technique in her blind spot.

She spun, face red with anger—at herself for letting him get behind her or at him for trying to stab her in the back, he wasn’t sure—and sent another rippling slash at him. With his Star’s Edge, he broke that technique, and the next one, but she seemed to be trying to empty her core in one breath. The Striker techniques kept coming.

His Star’s Edge shattered too early.

There was still a rippling silver-edged distortion in the air, heading right at his face. He needed a moment to call his Enforcer technique back, but he didn’t have time.

Before he had time to think, he acted on instinct.

Jai Long used his Goldsign.

His jaw unhinged like a snake’s, tearing the red bandages away from his face. He bared a mouth full of glowing white fangs: his inheritance from the serpentine Remnant that had nearly taken his sister’s life. They twisted his face, reshaping his jaw, and anytime he opened his mouth he looked like a nightmare.

He opened his mouth wide and bit down on the rippling slash of energy, his teeth shattering the technique like glass. The shards of madra slashed at his cheeks, tearing the rest of his mask away, and he glared at Yerin with open hatred.

She kept her eyes on his, hand on her sword. Her spirit’s power was fading, but she was the picture of resolve, prepared to keep fighting.

Jai Long cast his perception back over the city. The tide was turning against them, he could feel it in the ebb of Stellar Spear madra throughout Serpent’s Grave.

Shame overcame him in a moment. The Jai clan had lost a battle in their own city.

But as much as it pained him, he was part of the clan again. His oath tugged at him, pulling him to do the responsible thing, to preserve himself for the family’s sake. He was wasting too much time on an uncertain battle, and fair fights were a fool’s game.

As soon as the clan regrouped, Jai Long intended to suggest that Jai Daishou kill Yerin personally.

Because Jai Long wasn’t sure he was up to the task.

With one last glance at the Sword Sage’s apprentice, he leaped off the cliff to regroup with his family.

* * *

Even with her core emptied for the second time that evening, and both her spirit and body aching with exhaustion, Yerin tried to follow Jai Long.

“Get back…here, you…” Her voice was mumbled, and she wasn’t even sure the sounds that came out were real words.

She staggered after the enemy until her knees buckled, and then she sank to the rock, panting. The energy that came to her from her master’s Remnant would return, but for now, it was tapped out. Her brief burst of clarity and insight was already fading away like a dream. There was more to gain from the Remnant, but that sense of his presence had gone.

Leaving only a memory.

She was exhausted in body, mind, and spirit, and saying goodbye to the Sword Sage a second time struck her like a physical wound. His absence tore through her.

And there on the mountain, she wept again for her master’s death.

* * *

Orthos was wounded. His skin oozed dark blood, and Lindon could feel the pain of venom working its way through the turtle’s blood and spirit. His spirit was in chaos, and Lindon couldn’t sense whether Orthos’ mind was in control or not.

A massive black paw, the size of Lindon’s entire torso, smashed down onto his stomach, slamming his back against the ground.

Lindon tried to scream, but it came out as a rush of air. He clawed at the leathery leg, but he might as well have been slapping a tree.

The great turtle stretched out his neck, looking Lindon in the eye. He growled and choked into Lindon’s face, as though trying to speak, but no words came. The sacred beast gave a great scream of frustration that tore Lindon’s face.

He squeezed his eyes shut. Some deaths had to be faced with eyes open, but this was not one of them.

His core flared with a dark, bloody light.

Blackflame raced through his madra channels, scouring him from the inside out, making him gasp.

Is this what it’s like to leave a Remnant? he wondered. He’d always imagined it as a sensation of the spirit tearing itself away from the body, which was exactly what this felt like.

His spirit burned hotter and hotter, Blackflame racing along his channels, until he could bear it no longer. He screamed, and Orthos screamed with him, dark fire racing from the turtle’s mouth and scorching stone.

Lindon cycled furiously, trying to digest some of the power—not Eithan’s Purification Wheel, but the simplest, fastest breathing technique he could. He ignited the Burning Cloak, which raged around him, giving him the strength to lift Orthos’ paw and throw it off him.

But Orthos roared in response. A red-and-black corona flared around him, and suddenly the leg was pressed back down like a mountain collapsing, claws digging into Lindon’s chest.

Lindon built up power in his hands, pushing rivers of Blackflame out through both of his palms. The Burning Cloak raged, and he could feel red and black aura flaring all around him.

The power was too much for him, he could feel it; his channels and his core were stretched to the point of bursting. He hadn’t reached the end of Jade—his spirit wasn’t mature yet.

So he clawed at his pack, searching for the one thing that might help him: the Sylvan Riverseed.

He tore at his pile of belongings like a man on fire looking for a bucket of water. Tongues of Blackflame licked at the fabric of his pack, scorching away chunks, but he couldn’t care.

The glass case tumbled out and the Riverseed rubbed her head, as though she’d knocked a skull she didn’t have. Lindon didn’t wait to get her attention and draw her in; he felt as though his spirit was shriveling and blackening.

Instead, Blackflame burned through the side of the glass. It didn’t melt; it hissed and blew away in a cloud of grit like fine dust.

Lindon stretched out trembling fingers, and the Sylvan Riverseed cocked her head to look at him. For a second, she seemed uncertain, like she didn’t recognize him.

Then, firmly, she seized his middle finger in both hands.

A surge of liquid blue flowed through his madra channels, quieting the flow of dark madra and soothing his channels like cool water on a burn. Blackflame madra kept coming, and Lindon kept cycling, but the Riverseed poured all she had into him.

Finally, the flow of fire slackened. Orthos pulled his paw from Lindon’s core and staggered away, unspeakably weary.

The Sylvan Riverseed sprawled on her back, chittering like a frustrated wind chime. She had lightened to the blue of a robin’s egg, and after a moment she squirmed back into his pack and started digging around for scales.

And Lindon lay there panting, spirit and body aching. Much of Orthos’ madra had been diverted into his Bloodforged Iron body, so Lindon’s smallest wounds had closed and the venom in his veins had been burned away, but he still hurt like he’d been beaten all over with hammers.

Then Gokren stumbled back through the exit, hair wild and furs burned off. He stared wildly around, fixing his gaze on Orthos, and leveled his spear.

Four Sandvipers entered behind him, moving to flank the turtle.

Lindon’s spirits fell like a sack of bricks. It just wasn’t fair. Suriel was playing a trick on him—surely every mortal’s trials had to end sometime.

“The dragon advances,” Orthos declared, eyeing Gokren. Lindon could feel the turtle’s spirit, strained to its limits, but he still roared and lumbered toward the Sandviper.

Lindon started to gather Blackflame madra between his palms, but he froze. His pure core was still empty.

He couldn’t make a shell around the Striker technique.

Orthos took a hit from the side and screamed, while Lindon hunkered behind the stone tablet explaining the Ruler technique, trying to condense Blackflame madra.

The Riverseed whined, shaking his knee with both her hands and pointing to Orthos, trying to get him to help.

Lindon tuned out Orthos’ screams and the Riverseed’s pleas, focused on the black fire flickering between his hands. This was a dragon’s technique. He needed to think about it like a dragon.

He poured more power into the ball, and when he felt himself about to lose control, he forced it into place. A dragon wouldn’t try to bend or shape its power; a dragon would make the power submit.

The dragon conquers.

When he finally succeeded, he almost didn’t realize it, dripping sweat over a fireball twice as big as his fist. He stumbled out from the shelter of the stone tablet, watching Orthos withdrawing all his limbs into his shell.

Sandviper madra crashed on the outside without leaving a mark, but Lindon knew the fight was over. Orthos would never have hidden unless he was prepared to die. His spirit was a mournful song, an aching wound of injured pride.

There was nothing in Lindon’s mind except his desire to push the enemy away from his partner. He shoved both hands forward, releasing the madra he’d stored up into a Striker technique.

If he could knock Gokren off-balance, even a weakened Orthos might be able to kill him. Maybe they could escape. But that assumed that Lindon’s pitiful Jade technique could even wound a Truegold.

An arm-thick bar of Blackflame madra streamed toward Sandviper Gokren, the technique dense and liquid smooth. The Truegold condensed a green spear out of madra, slamming his Forged weapon against the spike. Truegold Sandviper madra met Lindon’s Blackflame.

The dark fire washed over Gokren’s defense, taking his hand off at the wrist.

He stumbled back, eyes wide as he stared at the place where his hand used to be. Lindon stared, just as stunned. He had put everything he had into that Striker technique, to the degree that he was feeling dizzy from the strain on his spirit, but he had only hoped to take some pressure from Orthos. Even the Lowgold Sandvipers stepped back, turning their focus from the turtle to Lindon.

Orthos poked his head out of his shell. In the stunned, frozen moment after Lindon’s Striker technique, he extended the remainder of his madra. Lindon sensed what he was doing through their contract, but he didn’t comprehend it until he opened his Copper sight.

The red-and-black aura was rising like a tide, spreading to encompass all the Sandvipers.

The Sandvipers came to their senses, running from Orthos’ ruler technique, but Gokren bared his teeth and swung the spear in his remaining hand down. It glowed green, shining with toxic madra.

Lindon shouted, spraying Blackflame madra in his direction. It didn’t even come close to reaching—he hadn’t taken the time to concentrate the technique and keep it under control. But Gokren, who had just lost a hand to Lindon’s deadly Path, flinched. His spear wavered.

And Orthos activated his Ruler technique.

Five roses of fire bloomed out of nowhere, centered on each of the remaining Sandvipers. The golden-orange flames flared, spotted with inky black and bloody red, devouring five bodies in an instant.

Not one of them managed to scream as the Void Dragon’s Dance consumed them.

The fight was over almost too quickly.

Five minutes later, Lindon still didn’t believe his own memories. First, the madra had obeyed him more easily than it ever had before. Then, his technique had worked on someone at the peak of Gold. Based on everything Lindon knew, the force of Gokren’s madra alone should have been enough to block anything a Jade could do.

Orthos dragged his massive body over to Lindon, chewing on a mouthful of bones as he went. “You’re not a Jade,” he announced. “I gave you more of my power than a Jade could handle.”

Lindon looked at the turtle, then down at his jade badge, then scanned his own spirit. “I’m stronger, certainly, but I don’t feel so different. Nothing like when I advanced to Iron or Jade.” The stone wheel at the center of his Blackflame core might have spun a little faster, and his spirit cycled with the force of a raging river instead of a trickling stream.

But Iron had come with a new body, and Jade with a new soul. Compared to those changes, this felt too simple. Maybe if he had adopted a Remnant, instead of taking in power through a contract, he would have seen a real difference.

Orthos gingerly stretched out a leg, wincing at the pain. “Humans make every stage into a legend. A Lowgold is just a Jade with teeth. The only difference between Jade and Gold is a mountain of power.” He gave Lindon a look that radiated smug pride. “Now you see the real glory of Blackflame.”

Lindon was still dazed, but he couldn’t argue with reality. Sandviper Gokren’s legs—the largest remaining parts of him—lay a few dozen yards away. His skull was sliding down Orthos’ gullet.

Lindon was Lowgold now. A real Gold.

This was the power of Gold.

But Orthos’ soul still pained him—if his condition went untended, he would lose himself again. That was a problem Lindon thought he could solve.

He placed the Riverseed on Orthos’ head and, after a moment of panic, the spirit placed both hands on the turtle’s skin. Blue light flowed into a Blackflame spirit, smoothing and calming as it went.

Orthos shouted like a man doused in icy water. The Riverseed gave a terrified peep, scuttling back up Lindon’s arm. She stumbled at his shoulder, her skin pale, and collapsed on his head to curl up in his hair. “Forgiveness,” Lindon said, bobbing a bow. “I didn’t think to warn you.”

“The insect stung me!” Orthos said, gnashing his jaws. The Sylvan trembled against Lindon’s scalp. He swept his perception through her and confirmed what he’d suspected: the tiny spirit was exhausted.

Orthos’ madra already flowed more smoothly, even weak as it was, and his madra channels didn’t pain him as badly as before. It looked as though it had calmed his soul without diluting his madra, and allowed his channels to repair themselves.

The damage would have returned in days, if he hadn’t shared his power with Lindon. Combined with their contract, the Sylvan’s attention might be able to—over time—make some real improvement in the turtle’s soul.

“You should feel a little better at least,” Lindon said, knowing he did.

“I have survived three hundred winters and the fall of the Blackflames,” Orthos grumbled. “I would have survived this.”

On his behalf, Lindon patted the Sylvan on the head with one finger.

Lindon extended his perception, and it unspooled much more easily than before, his perception floating over the mountain. He caught a trail of sensations that felt like Yerin, as though her voice still echoed behind her, but not her.

“While you were out there…”

Orthos finished the thought. “I felt her in battle on the main peak. Not now, but her spirit is likely weak.” Laughter rumbled out of his chest like aftershocks. “There is another familiar soul in that direction as well.”

Lindon let his perception float, and he sensed exactly what the turtle meant: Eithan was no longer bothering to veil his power, and the full force of an Underlord shone like a signal-fire only a short distance away.

As Orthos insisted he could walk, Lindon slid his pack on and headed in that direction. Where Eithan was, and where they’d last seen Yerin.

The Sylvan Riverseed rode on his head.

20

Jai Daishou was living a nightmare.

He and his Truegold elders launched their Striker attacks together, streams of white light that should have pierced the enemy from seven different angles.

Then, to his eyes and senses both, Eithan vanished.

One moment he was standing there on the other side of a distorted aura barrier, holding a broom in his hands, and the next…

…the next an elder’s skull was crushed like an eggshell outside the boundary formation. His body toppled as Eithan stood over him, broom bloodstained. Jai Daishou reacted before any of the elders could, blasting a Star Lance in Eithan’s direction, but he slipped back into the formation like a fish into water.

That was impossible. The boundary stopped everything physical from passing. Pushing through it like that was like pushing through a burning wall. Even if his body was so monstrously strong that he could do it, the formation should have crumbled. Only madra could pass.

Eithan’s upper body popped out of a different side of the bubble, seizing another elder and dragging him back inside. There came a crunch and a scream, and a spray of blood was stopped by the aura.

Only one possibility made sense: he could be covering his body in a shell of madra to pass through the formation. But it would be easier to Forge a human-sized ball and roll through: the amount of power it would take to slip in and out while covering every inch of his body would beggar even an Underlord. Jai Daishou himself might have been able to do it once, if he could control his madra precisely enough, but he wouldn’t be fit to fight on the other end.

Either this was a trick, or an illusion, or Eithan had madra reserves that the Jai Patriarch could only describe as monstrous. Maybe he had stolen a ward key, somehow.

Jai Daishou ordered his remaining four men back, adjusting his tactics. If Eithan was using speed and mobility against them, he could compete with raw power.

He had no use for this mountainside anyway.

His spear thrummed with power, a fan of Forged spears hovering in the air above him. Each weapon held the full power of his madra and blazed with sword aura; they would hit like bombs, and even if they missed by three feet, the aura alone could peel meat from bone.

But that wasn’t enough. He tapped into the soulfire he’d stockpiled over the past decades, channeling the faded flames into each spear. The power sunk into them until the air around them shook.

These were seven deadly attacks capable of drilling through steel plate, spread out to cover every angle of escape. Each technique launched with a split-second difference in timing, to cover any openings and preventing the enemy from grasping the timing.

Eithan would meet a wall of unstoppable spears, burning heat, and slashing blades. He may as well have been nailed to a board.

The cliff shone with white light like a dawning star, invisible gouges appeared in the dirt from the force of his sword aura, and his spiritual sense trembled with the power of his seven spears. Jai Daishou used this technique to level fortress walls, not to kill individual enemies.

This was the culmination of all the individual spear arts passed down among the Jai for generations. Jai Daishou called it the Fall of Seven Stars.

He thrust his spear forward, unleashing a stream of deadly white madra and six Forged missiles that screamed as they blasted through the air. The pale, deadly lights washed over the cliffside like a shining wave, the air between each light churning with sword aura that chewed up pebbles and spat dust.

Utter devastation scoured the cliff, shredding the boundary flags and dispersing the formation, churning the fallen bodies of the two elders into bloody mist. The technique plowed through stone and soil, and when the cloud of dust cleared, the entire half of the outcropping where Eithan once stood was completely gone. A chunk had been gouged out of the mountain, and a chunk of night sky replaced what had been rock a moment before.

Jai Daishou took a deep breath of satisfaction and let his madra begin to cycle. He had strained his spirit too much for this, but at least—

His spirit shouted at him, and he spun, leaping in the air and readying the Ancestor’s Spear in both hands.

With his broom, Eithan had swept a Truegold’s ankles out from under him. While the old man was still in the air, the broom’s handle crashed down on his back.

There was a crack as the man’s spine snapped.

The wooden broom stayed intact.

Eithan hadn’t escaped the Fall of Seven Stars unscathed: blood trickled down into one eye, which was stuck closed, there was a bloody slash across his left shoulder, and his fine blue robe was half-shredded. But he had escaped, and that was frightening enough.

Jai Daishou shouted to draw Eithan’s attention, and to give his three remaining elders time to run. He whipped Stellar Spear madra in a line—the Star Lance was the simplest Striker technique possible, but also the fastest. No matter how quickly Eithan could move, he couldn’t dodge this. It was practically instantaneous.

A technique of this degree couldn’t kill an Underlord, but it could pin him down, keep him from chasing the remaining Truegolds and butchering them one by one.

Eithan raised his hand like a man blocking out the light of the sun.

And when the Stellar Spear madra came within a foot of his hand, the madra dispersed. It dissolved. It vanished, as though the Underlord were simply wiping out his technique.

Jai Daishou landed, his metal hair flogging his back like chains, and began channeling Flowing Starlight. He needed to devote everything he had to speed if he wanted to keep up.

Though if he couldn’t figure out Eithan’s Path, speed might not matter. The man could eat his techniques.

Eithan blurred and moved again, but with the Flowing Starlight running through him, Jai Daishou tracked his movements. He kicked madra behind him and launched, intercepting Eithan’s broom with his spear before the man could crush a fourth elder’s ribs.

They strained against each other for an instant that lasted three full breaths, the world around them crawling. Even the fastest Truegold elder seemed as though he was moving through water as he dashed madly away, the white lines of Flowing Starlight sliding over his limbs.

Jai Daishou had the full force of his body and his Enforcer technique pushing Eithan’s broomstick back, but the blond Underlord pushed against him just as heavily.

Eithan’s jaw was set, his one open eye blazing with fury, sweat trickling down his jaw. He trembled with the effort.

But Jai Daishou was using a legendary weapon forged by his ancestor. Eithan was using a broom.

He may have imbued it with soulfire, but every significant artifact had that treatment. The Ancestor’s Spear would have been tempered in soulfire many times.

Despite the difference in their weapons, Eithan was still holding him off.

His body is younger, but my spirit is stronger. He channeled a Forger technique, and a fan of needles longer than his forearm condensed over his head. One by one, they launched themselves at Eithan to break the deadlock.

A pulse of madra flooded out of the Arelius Patriarch’s entire body. Jai Daishou felt nothing on his skin, but his Forged needles melted like ice in the summer sun.

Finally, he got a good sense of Eithan’s power.

Jai Daishou shoved, pushing his opponent away, and spoke in confusion. “Pure madra? Who uses pure madra?”

“It has…its uses,” Eithan panted, leaning heavily on his broom and flashing a smile.

Now Jai Daishou had to make it out alive. He’d read a dozen theories about the mysterious Eithan Arelius’ Path, and all of them were wrong. Bringing this information back to the clan was the only way to bring the Arelius family down.

Worse, none of the Truegolds would have heard him. They were too far away.

Even so, despite what his perception told him, he still wondered if it was some kind of trick, maybe a Soulsmith’s device hidden on Eithan’s body. Eithan had Enforced an ordinary broom—even one washed in soulfire—to survive contact with the spear of an ancient Jai Matriarch. He had suspected madra of earth or force, to be so effective at hardening a weapon.

To do that with pure madra…it would be the least efficient technique possible. He must be gushing madra into that broom just to keep it from exploding.

All his senses told him Eithan was ordinary, if any Underlord could be considered ordinary. He was ranked eleventh, putting him near the bottom of all the active Lords in the Empire.

His only two extraordinary aspects were his senses—as expected of an Arelius—and, apparently, the depth of his madra.

That shouldn’t be enough.

Sudden fear tickled his spine and trembled in his gut. Fear that he hadn’t faced since he transcended Gold: fear of an unknown opponent. Fear for his own survival.

He stiffened his spine and burned that fear for anger.

He was the Patriarch of the ancient Jai clan. He would bow to no man. Not even in his own mind.

Even if it crippled him, he had to win tonight. Jai Daishou unleashed his full power, his core blazing, his Flowing Starlight technique shining in blinding lines on his skin. Even Eithan seemed to crawl now, and the young man’s blue eye widened in surprise.

Like every aspect, pure madra had its strengths and weaknesses. It was second to none for attacking and defending the spirit, but it had no ability to interact with the physical world.

Eithan had no power over the forces of nature. So he was helpless before the techniques of a Ruler.

There were no Ruler techniques on the Path of the Stellar Spear, but the decades Jai Daishou had spent perfecting his own sacred arts were not wasted. Stellar Spear madra was a blend of the sword and light aspects, so he focused on his spear, staring into the white-and-silver aura braided along its edge.

He seized that silver power, spreading the aura into a blade the width of an axe. He activated the aura, and it shone silver.

Like this, he could slice through a tree with no more effort than cutting tofu. And there was nothing Eithan could do about it: he had no authority over sword madra, and no way to stop a blade.

The Jai Patriarch had burned through too much of his madra too quickly, but this would end it. He thrust his spear with all his strength, though the aura-empowered blade would slice through Eithan’s body even if a child pushed it.

Eithan dropped the broom, which fell so slowly it seemed to hang in the air, and reached into the pocket of his outer robe.

Jai Daishou watched everything as though it played out for him at half speed: the silver blade of aura sliced through strands of yellow hair, piercing the silk threads of Eithan’s robe. The Arelius Underlord was leaning back, away from the strike, but not fast enough.

His hand emerged from the pocket. The silver blade drew blood from Eithan’s cheek, spilling red droplets that drifted lazily up.

Eithan sliced open the back of his hand as he slid it in front of his face, holding what he’d drawn from his pocket as though it were a talisman that could ward off the spear’s approach.

As Eithan held it into the path of the silver blade, Jai Daishou saw what it was: a pair of black scissors.

Ordinary scissors with long blades, of the sort a tailor might use to cut fabric. He sensed nothing unusual about them whatsoever—they weren’t even made of goldsteel. Just, as far as he could tell, iron.

He had to assume they had been washed in soulfire, which would make them stronger and allow them to conduct madra and aura more efficiently, but there was only so much an Underlord’s blessing could do to mundane materials.

The aura crashed into the scissors and, instead of slicing them in half, split like a wave running against the rocks.

Jai Daishou was so committed to his attack that he could only watch in horror as the blade of silver light split around the scissors, dispersing, spraying immaterial aura light to either side of Eithan’s face. A few more blond hairs fell to the ground, but no more blood spilled.

The spearhead reached the black blade, and Eithan gripped his scissors in both hands, shoving Jai Daishou’s full-power strike to one side.

As the Jai Patriarch staggered, the Arelius bent over, breathing heavily, scooping up his broom. “Close one,” he said, between ragged breaths.

He straightened with a tailor’s scissors in one hand and a janitor’s broom in the other, standing over the lord of a warrior clan whose spear had failed.

Jai Daishou wondered when someone would wake him from this nightmare. Even using soulfire, it was impossible to Enforce ordinary iron to that degree using pure madra. Impossible. It would empty Jai Daishou’s core three times over.

“Tell me how,” he demanded, looking up at his rival.

Then black scissors met his throat, and the pain blasted away his Enforcer technique. Time staggered back into focus.

Eithan considered a moment. “I’ll tell your Remnant,” he said.

* * *

Lindon found Eithan sprawled out on his back at the edge of a cliff. Yellow hair fanned out behind him, his blue robe looked like he’d fed it to a gang of dogs, and he was bleeding from half a dozen wounds that Lindon could see. Just out of reach of his outstretched hands lay a broom and a pair of scissors.

“Are you hurt?” Lindon asked, sliding his pack down to pull out the bandages. It almost slipped out of his grip—one of the straps had been burned halfway through by a tongue of Blackflame.

Eithan cracked one eye, though he might have tried to open both; one was gummed shut by a mass of blood. “I am taking a break and enjoying the brisk night air. You look like you were beaten with clubs while climbing through an erupting volcano.”

Orthos was still picking his way through the debris between the two cliffs, his frustration echoing through the contract, but neither he nor Eithan seemed to expect another attack.

Lindon extended his perception and felt a handful of very alarming spirits on the slopes above him. “They aren’t going to attack us, are they?” he asked.

Eithan barked out a laugh, then winced. “Oh, that’s…that’s tender. No, after the show I gave them, they wouldn’t come near me if I had a spear through my chest and was begging for death. Couldn’t say if any Skysworn were watching us, but I suspect my ranking among Underlords is about to be adjusted.”

A feather’s weight lifted from Lindon’s head, and the Sylvan Riverseed hopped to his shoulder, sliding down his arm, ocean-blue hair drifting behind her. She jumped off his hand, landing on Eithan’s chest.

The Underlord raised an eyebrow. “Why, hello there.”

She walked up to kneel on his forehead, looking down curiously. Then she rubbed his head with one hand, whistling like a flute in a way that Lindon suspected was meant to be comforting.

“Your power can’t help me,” Eithan said, flinching as he sat up. The Riverseed scurried up to sit on top of his head, still making a sympathetic face. “Madra doesn’t get any more pure or gentle than mine.” He looked to Lindon as though something had just occurred to him. “Speaking of which, I see you’re making good use of my cycling technique. Reliable, isn’t it? No fun to practice, but there are always tradeoffs.”

“Yes,” Lindon agreed immediately, “I couldn’t be more grateful. Without…” The implications of Eithan’s statement caught up to him a second later. “…ah, pardon, but when you say ‘your’ cycling technique…”

“I mean mine,” Eithan said cheerily. “The one I’m using right now. It was in the family library, but everybody else can supplement their cores by cycling aura. Focusing on capacity is inefficient, unless—as you’ve experienced—you can’t add to your power with vital aura. Pure madra Paths aren’t as rare as everyone seems to think they are.”

“You…” Lindon began to express suspicion, but there was a more polite way to confirm. He extended his perception, scanning Eithan’s spirit. This time, the fog that usually covered Eithan’s core was lifted.

And he felt a pool of pure blue-white power, just like his own.

“I didn’t pick you up because of your impeccable fashion sense,” Eithan said, touching two fingers to the corner of his blood-stuck eye. “Hm. I think this is swelling. Anyway, a pure core is one of two ways in which we are similar, so I thought I might be able to provide you with some unique guidance. And that you might help me as well, in the long run.”

Lindon was sure he was supposed to ask, but he played his role anyway. “What’s the second way?”

“You left it back in the Trials after you advanced to Gold,” Eithan said. “It happens. Advancement can play havoc with the memory, especially when the process is traumatic. It should be lying in the dirt, but it followed you. Now it’s in your right pocket.”

Lindon reached into his pocket, knowing what he would find, and withdrew Suriel’s marble. The ball of pure glass sat on his palm, its sapphire flame steady, casting blue light over him.

“Do you know what this is?” Lindon asked, and he wasn’t sure if he was afraid or excited.

“I wasn’t sure at first,” Eithan said, reaching into his own pocket. “Not everything that blocks my senses is from the heavens.” He pulled out his own glass marble the size of a thumbnail. “And yours looks somewhat different from mine.”

Inside the hollow shell was a ball of perfectly round darkness. It looked endlessly deep, like a bottomless hole suspended in glass.

Eithan held it up to one eye, inspecting it. “Maybe they’re like coins,” he mused. “This could be the celestial equivalent of tossing a scale to a servant.”

Lindon had so many questions that they all tried to exit his mouth at once. They came out together, so they sounded like, “Bluh.”

Eithan nodded as though that was exactly the question he’d expected. “Yes. Precisely. Well, let’s trade stories while we’re not surrounded by hostile strangers.” He slipped his black marble into his pocket and pulled something else out: a gold plate slightly bigger than his palm, set with white, dark blue, and a black crescent in the center.

“This is the authority of the Arelius clan’s Patriarch,” he said, tossing it to Lindon. “You’ll need that to run a quick errand for me.”

Lindon cradled the ornate emblem in both hands. “It would be an honor,” he said, still trying to catch up to the rest of the conversation.

“Above us, you’ll find the homes of the Jai family. One of the homes has a decorative tower on the grounds, a tree with pink leaves, and the statue of a crane and a dragon locked in combat. Break into that house and search for a girl named Jai Chen.”

“Should I bring her back here?”

Eithan’s grin widened. “That’s Jai Long’s sister, held captive by the Underlord to ensure his cooperation. In all the confusion, I’m afraid she’s been left alone.”

“Really,” Lindon said, and Blackflame surged in him.

Eithan snapped and pointed to him. “That! When you are stopped by Jai clan members, show them the emblem, look them straight in the eyes, and do that. If they don’t listen to you then, I’ll come kill them.”

“I’m…sorry, look them in the eye and do what?” Lindon asked. He’d done nothing but cycle.

“You don’t need a Remnant to have a Goldsign,” Eithan said, then lifted the Sylvan Riverseed on his palm. She hopped back over to Lindon, who settled her on his shoulder. “Now, go. Go!”

When Orthos felt that Lindon had changed direction, his spirit surged with irritation, and he reluctantly turned to follow.

* * *

Jai Chen was trapped in a room nicer than any she’d seen since she was a child. The Patriarch had locked her here, but he hadn’t bothered to tie her—there was no need. She lay in bed as though a great weight pressed down on her limbs, focusing the full force of her spirit just to breathe. As always.

She’d considered killing herself. Jai Daishou had to be using her against her brother, or she wouldn’t be here, and killing herself would burn one of the cards in his hand.

But it wouldn’t change anything. Jai Daishou was an Underlord; he would get what he wanted with or without a hostage.

Instead, she focused on cycling. Some of the medical experts who had examined her over the years had suggested that she might eventually regain partial function in her spirit if she diligently exercised, so she spent most of her day attempting to cycle. It was like jogging on broken legs, but she persevered, shoving madra through shattered channels.

If the cracked madra paths were the only problems, she would have been thankful. But her power squirmed away from her direction, fighting every cycling technique, slithering against her will. The same power that brought her brother’s techniques to life polluted her spirit, keeping her core out of her control.

She tried anyway.

A wave of heat washed against her face, and her eyes snapped open in time to catch the door to her room dissolving.

Jai Chen pulled sheets up to her chin as though they could protect her from enemies, rooting under her pillow with a half-asleep hand. She only found the knife when she cut her finger on its edge.

She held out the weapon with both hands as dark fire consumed her door. It dissolved the painted wood like black acid, sending a cloud of dust and ash billowing over her.

A massive black shadow blackened the area past the door, its eyes burning circles of red. She let out a squeak, arms trembling as she held out the knife.

The shadow passed, moving away from her door, and she almost let out a breath of relief.

But it had left someone behind.

A man stood in her room, and he had eyes like a death Remnant. They were black all around, with rings of blood red shining in the center. With those eyes, he could be nothing but a monster, come to kill her…and black fire still played around his fingers.

Her arms were too heavy to keep holding in the air, and it was taking all her focus to gasp in enough air to breathe. All she could see were his eyes.

The man bowed at the waist. “Forgiveness, please, I thought you were deeper in the house.”

The fire faded from his hands, and the darkness from his eyes bled away like paint in water. They were perfectly normal eyes now, staring at her intently.

Now that he didn’t have the gaze of a soul-eating monster, she got a look at the rest of him. He was a tall young man, about her age, broad-shouldered and wearing a bulky pack that must weigh more than she did. His outer robe was smudged and stained with mud, ash, and probably blood, until she couldn’t make out its original color. A jade medallion hung on his chest from a dark silk ribbon, etched with the image of a hammer.

He seemed like a perfectly normal sacred artist, though he stared at her like he never intended to blink. With his other eyes, the look would have given her nightmares.

But her bed shook, and a growl echoed around the hallway. There was something else in the house, not just him: something with the silhouette of a giant beast and another pair of evil eyes.

“I’m so sorry I frightened you, that was not my intention. I’m here to take you out of here.”

Jai Chen’s breath was finally catching up with her fright, but she still couldn’t respond.

“I assume the Jai clan is keeping you hostage so your brother will cooperate,” he went on, looking a little pleased with himself. “I can take you away.”

“Eyes,” she said at last. “Your…eyes.”

After a moment of confusion, he picked up a nearby hand-mirror. “My eyes?” He glanced into the mirror, saw they were normal, and turned his gaze back on her.

She didn’t take the time to explain. Maybe it was just his Goldsign.

Jai Chen shook her head to signal a change in topic. “Can’t…leave. They…will…kill…him.” Not that she would go with this stranger and his demonic beast anyway.

He seemed stumped by this response, but sighed and moved toward her anyway. “I know you don’t know me, but you’re in more danger if you stay. Excuse me for my rudeness, please.”

Before he could grab her, she slid out of the bed—embarrassed for an instant, as she realized that she was wearing only her bedclothes—and stood on her own shaky feet. With both hands, she drove the dagger into his chest.

It pierced his outer robe and then fell, bloodless, to the ground.

That was all the strength she could muster. Another instant and her knees gave out, though he grabbed her under the shoulders before she could collapse.

Instead of throwing her over his shoulder, as she had expected, he gently lowered her to the floor. His gaze was still wide and intense, but now he looked concerned.

An instant later, as she was trying to gather enough madra to stand, she felt a shiver in her spirit as his scan passed through her.

“Pardon my curiosity, but what happened to your spirit?”

21

She took a few heavy breaths before answering. She considered refusing, but it wasn’t a secret. “Remnant…fed on…my spirit.” A few more gulps of air. “Brother…killed him…halfway.”

He nodded, chin in his hand, frowning like she’d given him a riddle. “You had to have seen healers. What did they try?”

Was he some kind of…traveling spirit-healer? With eyes that could turn black, and a beast rattling around in the other room?

Or was he trying to get to know her so that she would agree to leave?

She debated for a long moment, but eventually told him. If he meant her any harm, he could have killed her without lifting a hand. “Channels…core, need…repaired. Expensive…elixir. Then…pure madra…for core.”

Jai Long usually gave her longer breaks between sentences, and he and Sandviper Kral were the only ones who ever talked to her. She cycled madra to her lungs as best she could, though the energy tried to squirm out of her grip.

He knelt in front of her, pulling his pack off and setting it down. This close, she could see black scorch-marks on the canvas.

In a low, crooning voice she couldn’t hear, he murmured to something inside the pack. Was there an animal in there? She flinched back against the bed, imagining the sandvipers from the Desolate Wilds. They would crawl into packs sometimes. Or boots. Or beds.

A moment later, a girl the size of a hand popped out of the pack. She looked like a Remnant of water madra, blue the color of a sunlit lake, but far more solid and detailed. Her head bobbed as sapphire eyes scanned Jai Chen from head to toe.

Cute. For a moment, she wondered if this man would let him pet the little Remnant.

“What do you think?” he murmured, and it took Jai Chen a breath to realize he was talking to the spirit. The miniature woman pulled herself entirely out of the pack, her legs flaring into an azure dress—Jai Chen wasn’t sure if she was wearing a dress, or if her bottom half just fluttered out.

The spirit considered her for a second, then jogged up to Jai Chen. They locked eyes for a moment, and she lowered a hand to pat the little woman on the head.

The Remnant hopped onto her palm and scurried up her arm. Jai Chen barely had time to gasp before the spirit slapped her on the cheek. It was like being slapped by a raindrop.

But the real surprise came from her spirit. A deep blue power rolled through the madra channels in her head, sliding through her like mercury. Her madra tried to squirm away, but it couldn’t escape: the blue power slid through it…

…and where the tiny spirit’s azure power passed, she regained control of her madra. She must have jerked like a spooked horse, because the man looked concerned, but she couldn’t explain. Her power still moved, it still slithered in a way that normal madra didn’t, but it was hers again.

Then the liquid blue spark ran into a broken madra channel, and Jai Chen slammed against the floor. Her consciousness dimmed, and a sharp pain rang through her spirit. The foreign light faded as it tried to push through her broken channel, like it expended something of itself to drill through.

Her limbs started twitching, but she was afraid the blue light would stop. Go, she urged it. Break through.

“I need another one,” the man said distantly, and there came a sound like muffled bells. “I know you’re tired, and I’m sorry. I’ll feed you scales until you explode.”

Jai Chen cracked an eye to see the spirit returning to her, tiny blue fingers extended. She looked more pale than earlier, like a winter sky.

A second sapphire light joined the first, then a third. They drilled through her channels, shaking her limbs until he had to hold her down, but they were doing it. They were drilling new connections through her madra channels. Where they passed, the loops of light were connected again, healthy and free.

The first light was soon extinguished, but when the second and third converged on the core, she blacked out.

…only for an instant, it seemed, because she woke up to the same situation and a man’s voice saying, “Forgiveness. I only know how to do this as an attack.”

She braced herself before a hand struck her in the stomach.

The blow itself was light, but a rush of madra flooded into her, scattering her core, forking like lightning through her channels in reverse. Her madra was scattered, her circulation broken, and even her living madra seemed stunned.

But more madra came in behind it, like a tide. The first pulse had broken the damage, and now his energy filled her, settling into her new channels. It filled her, stretching her core, soaking into her spirit. This must be pure madra, because her soul accepted it gladly, even her serpentine power not resisting at all.

As a test, she cycled madra to her lungs, trying to Enforce herself as she usually did to breathe.

Opening her mouth, she took her first full breath in years.

Her spirit was weak, her core tiny and dim, and her madra channels felt tender as burned skin. Her entire soul ached, and spiritual pain was deeper than physical.

But she could cycle now. Madra ran from her core in loops, flooding her body, bringing life, and returning to the core unobstructed. She lifted her hand, and it didn’t feel like trying to lift a brick with a willow switch. She could move.

The blue spirit curled up on the man’s shoulder like an exhausted dog. She was shivering and almost white, and the broken door was visible through her body.

The man rose, standing over Jai Chen. He scanned her again, letting out a breath of relief. “My name is Wei Shi Lindon. I can leave you behind, if you tell your brother what happened tonight. Will you do that?” She was focused on breathing. How much sheer joy could be packed into a single breath?

“Lindon,” he repeated. “Will you remember that? Do you want me to write it down?”

“Wei Shi Lindon,” she said, and she didn’t have to pause to gulp down air between each word. “Yes. I will remember, and I’ll tell him, I…”

She trailed off as she realized her hair was a mess, her bedclothes were askew, and she was huddling on the floor in front of him. They were back in the real Empire now—appearances would matter to this young man.

Jai Chen straightened, hurriedly smoothing out her clothes, but her legs were still unsteady. She caught herself on the edge of a desk, and avoided his gaze; she didn’t want to see him judging her. “My name is Jai Chen. I’ve never hosted a guest, so I’m not sure what I can…but I don’t want to be rude to…”

Lindon held up both hands to stop her. “No, please. I can’t stay long anyway; I told the old men outside I was on Arelius family business, but they could come in here with spears at any time.”

But he didn’t leave. He paused awkwardly, as though he meant to say something else. Her spirit shivered again.

Jai Chen risked a glance up at his face and realized he was staring intently, almost glaring, at her stomach. Which was only covered by a thin layer of silk.

She didn’t want to be rude, but…Slowly, she moved her hands to cover her stomach.

His head jerked up. “What? Ah, excuse me.” His eyes climbed away from her until he was staring at the ceiling. “I was looking at your core. This might be a rude question, but is your madra alive?”

Her madra was still as animated as before, but this time it was on her side. Her spirit didn’t fight her anymore; it was almost as though it fought for her, slithering along according to her cycling technique.

“It used to fight me,” she told him. “I think your Remnant brought it under my control. Thank her for me, if you would.”

He returned to looking at her stomach, realized what he was doing, and jerked his eyes to the side. “Her madra cleanses and restores, I think. She helped me too.” He patted the sleeping spirit on his shoulder.

“Ah, I have to go. Please tell your brother: I’m Wei Shi Lindon, and I’d be much happier if we didn’t have to fight.”

She felt dazed, wondering if this was somehow a trick and her spirit would collapse into wreckage again. If she didn’t, then she owed him a debt she didn’t know how to repay.

Because she didn’t know how else to express that, she bowed. “Thank you,” she said at last.

Lindon was staring at her again, but at least it was at her face this time. “This may sound terrible, but have we met before? If I’ve forgotten you, I apologize, but you seem familiar to me.”

Jai Chen had heard about him from her brother, but she’d never seen him in her life. “Maybe I look like…” She cut herself off before realizing what she’d been about to say.

“No, I’ve never seen his face,” Lindon said. He shook his head. “Anyway, if you’ll excuse me.” He gave a little smile, bobbed his head, and started to walk out.

Without knowing why, Jai Chen spoke to his retreating back. “Um…did you kill young master Kral?”

He stopped, hitching up his pack. The heavy monster in the other room growled again.

“It was a pleasure to meet you, Jai Chen,” Lindon said, without turning around. “If I’ve done anything wrong, or if you need her help again…” He patted the sleeping woman on his shoulder. “…then you can find me at the Arelius family. I’m sorry for disturbing your night.”

He walked out, pausing briefly in the dusty wreckage of what once had been the door to her room. A moment later, he opened the front door, and she got a glimpse of the outside world through the hole in her bedroom wall.

A Jai clan warrior in blue held a spear at Lindon’s chest, while an elder to the left looked nervous.

Lindon turned his head, meeting the elder’s eyes, and the old man flinched visibly. Jai Chen could understand; if his eyes had turned black and red again, the elder could be forgiven for thinking he was a death Remnant in human skin.

Then Lindon dipped into a bow, his pack bobbing behind him. “Thank you for your patience,” he said, and walked away.

A giant turtle followed him, big as a horse, munching on a chair as it left—a couple of painted legs disappeared into its lips as it rounded a corner. The doorway was already damaged where the sacred beast passed through earlier, and the frame shattered further this time.

Smoke rose from the giant turtle’s shell, and the cracks between the plates smoldered red. The sacred beast growled in Lindon’s wake, snorting black fire at the elder on the outside. The old man yelped and hopped back in time to avoid burning his toes.

After a moment of debate, the Jai clan members shut the remainder of the front door without asking her a word.

Jai Chen sat down on the edge of her bed, stunned. So much had happened in such a short time that she felt like she’d been slapped in the face. Now that she thought of it, she had been slapped in the face.

But she could move again.

Ordinarily, she had to be careful when she opened her wardrobe, so she didn’t strain herself. Now, she opened and closed the door. Open and closed. Open and closed.

Her brother found her half an hour later, standing on her own two feet and opening and closing her wardrobe.

His mask had torn, exposing the lower half of his face. His skin was pale and tinged with blue, his jaw swollen and misshapen, and light leaked from between his lips as he spoke. “What did they do to you?”

He sounded ready to find someone to murder.

Jai Long was standing in the ashes of what had once been her doorway. She must have looked insane, standing in her bedclothes with her wardrobe door in one hand.

And tears were running down her cheeks. Her eyes were swollen, her nose stuffed, and she’d been sobbing. When had she started crying?

Jai Long walked over to her, gently guiding her closer to bed, but she pushed back against him. He noticed her strength and his eyes widened between the remaining strips of his mask. “Tell me what happened,” he demanded, and her spirit shivered at the touch of his scan.

Her voice was quivering, and she was still uncertain about many of the details.

But she told him.

* * *

Jai Daishou woke on a crumbling, icy cliff inside a pile of moon-white Remnant parts. They were already dissolving in streams of essence, so he must look like he was bathed in stars.

Which was no comfort to a man who had just died.

His limbs trembled as he hauled his way to his feet, his joints screaming like he’d packed them with broken glass. Every breath was agony, and his vision blurred.

He pushed the palm of his hand against his aching head, trying to shake loose his memory.

An image snapped into place: Eithan Arelius, standing over him with face bloody, hair blowing in the wind, scissors held against Jai Daishou’s throat.

Snip.

Pain, blood, absolute exhaustion…and something breaking in his soul.

He ran a thumb over the fresh, tender scar on his throat and shivered despite decades of self-control. Without his good fortune years ago, he would have lost his life tonight.

The Underlord plunged his awareness into his spirit, looking for a black-and-red ornate box that usually floated above his core. The Heartguard Chest was a spiritual object, a treasure he’d plundered from an ancient clan of Soulsmiths, but it had an invaluable function.

It contained enough blood and life madra to save you from death once. And only once. He’d thought it might prolong his lifespan for a few months, when time eventually claimed its due.

Sure enough, the box was open, and the Chest itself melting away to nothing. Jai Daishou had spent months filling it with a decoy Remnant, one convincing enough to fool—it seemed—even Eithan Arelius himself.

He coughed heavily into his hand, the force rattling his bones, and he was surprised when he didn’t find blood in his palm. Even with the healing of the Heartguard Chest, his body was finished. He was held together by little more than hope and wishes.

If he lived out the year, it would be because the heavens smiled on him.

He cycled what little madra remained, his channels burning, his core throbbing like a bruised muscle. He needed his remaining elders to find him alive.

Before Eithan Arelius did.

Because Jai Daishou was the only one in the Empire to know the truth about the Arelius family Underlord. Pure madra. He’d always thought of Eithan as nothing but an overgrown child, and he was more right than he could have known.

He wouldn’t die until he could plant that knowledge like a dagger in Eithan’s heart.

* * *

Iteration 216: Limit

Iteration 217 Harrow

TERMINATED

As Harrow and Limit dissolved and crumbled away into the void, Suriel witnessed once again the death of an Iteration.

The endless darkness of empty space had pared away first, like black wallpaper peeling away…only to reveal an even deeper hole beneath. The void surrounded them, infinite nothing dotted with swirling balls of color, like a rainbow of distant fireflies dancing in the night.

The planet itself faded away like a ghost, leaving fragments: pieces of the world with a strong enough identity to hold together even in the chaos of the void. There, a disc of earth holding a forest spun into the distance, its trees frozen in a wind that no longer blew.

Time worked strangely in the void. Fragments tended to either live the same moments in a loop or to freeze entirely, waiting to join back into an Iteration. Fragments with inhabitants crawled along, their time drifting slowly forward, but the inhabitants tended not to fare well.

She had sent Ozriel’s population shelter straight to Pioneer 8089. With a population of over thirteen million, they had good odds of surviving until their world stabilized into a true Iteration.

Of course, if the Abidan didn’t survive Ozriel’s absence, it wouldn’t matter.

Iterations were like fruits, and the Way was the vine. So long as the worlds were healthy and connected to the Way, they enjoyed luxuries like causality and existence. As a world’s population shriveled, that strained its connection to the Way, which invited infection.

Whenever a corrupted world—like Limit and Harrow—broke into fragments, those pieces still contained some of their corruption. Corrupted fragments were like parasites, drifting up and down the vine, looking for healthy fruits to infest. When that world was corrupted, it broke into diseased fragments as well, and the corruption spread exponentially.

A few thousand standard years ago, the Abidan could only care for two hundred and fifty Iterations. That was as far as they could stretch their forces, because they had to protect each world from the chaos-tainted fragments that hunted the edges of the Way.

When Ozriel appeared, someone who could dispose of a corrupted world without breaking it into toxic pieces, the Abidan went through a period of explosive growth. They stitched healthy fragments together into new Iterations, spinning out new universes that they could protect.

Without infected world fragments flying around, they could expand without worry. And they did.

Suriel and her predecessor had known the danger of putting the weight of their entire system on a single component—Ozriel—but they were saving lives. Every Iteration under Abidan protection was another reality not left to the ravages of chaos or the Vroshir.

And everyone agreed: they would replace Ozriel as soon as they found another candidate.

The problem was, they had never found one. And they’d kept expanding.

They held ten thousand worlds now, with only enough Abidan to secure two and a half percent of that number. If any of the other Judges had gone missing, they could have found someone else to fill their function, but not Ozriel. He was irreplaceable.

And now, in all likelihood, dead.

[The probability of Ozriel’s death is unknown,] her Presence said, its voice robotic and cool. [If he is capable of hiding from the Court of Seven, he is capable of faking his own death.]

He had left a fractured message behind with just enough information to allow her to reconstruct its contents. And a body’s worth of unidentifiable blood and decay staining the walls. And evidence of a battle that had conveniently not spilled over into the room where the rescued inhabitants of Limit lay sleeping.

But there was no reason to fake his death. Makiel wouldn’t believe it, so Suriel couldn’t call off the search. And if he were pretending to be dead, he wouldn’t have left her instructions on what to do in his absence.

He had most likely been attacked while preparing to disappear, and either been killed or driven deeper into hiding.

She had to assume he was dead. If he was still alive and hiding even from her, she’d never find him until he wanted her to. The only logical step was to proceed as though he had been killed here.

His death was another weight on her soul. She had known everything: the pressure they put on him, his desire to change the restrictive rules of the Abidan, Makiel’s refusal to listen. She could have joined him, lobbied for change.

Another chunk of the planet crumbled to nothing, leaving a loose collection of fragments drifting in an ocean of nothing. A slice of city spun away, all but frozen in time. A great machine of springs and copper gears kept pumping away as it tumbled into the distance, and a hundred-kilometer mass of flesh and limbs drifted away.

Everything else, everything too insignificant to persist as a fragment, dissolved into nonexistence.

Ozriel had finally taken matters into his own hands, as he always did. He’d manipulated Fate so that no one could see his departure coming—if anyone could twist the future to such a degree, Ozriel could. He’d prepared to minimize the damage of his absence, though he’d been caught in the middle of that work.

But who had caught him?

[Entities confirmed capable of killing Ozriel, while he is fully armed and aware: NOT FOUND.]

Well, that was telling.

[Entities possibly capable, though not confirmed:]

The possibilities spooled out in Suriel’s consciousness, a mix of images, text, and memory.

Information requested: Judge Killers

Beginning report…

Vroshir:

Our information on Vroshir worlds is limited, so the capabilities of the Vroshir themselves are largely unknown. Only a handful are projected to possess combat power that rivals a Judge.

The Silverlords gather armies from the worlds they conquer. Between them, they may have found a combination of specialists and assassins capable of catching Ozriel unaware.

The Horseman rides from world to world, gathering energy systems and replicating their effects. He has demonstrated capabilities from at least thirteen dead worlds, and under certain conditions, he could have bypassed Ozriel’s protection.

The Mad King hosts an entity that has killed Judges before, but the Court would have been notified if he had left his Iteration. If he has found a way to cross the Way without alerting Sector Control, then he represents a Class One threat.

The Angler has stolen six weapons from Abidan Iterations, and she remains at large. Her confirmed arsenal holds nothing that could threaten the Reaper, but she certainly possesses other weapons beyond the knowledge of the Court.

Fiends of Chaos:

True Fiends defy classification by nature, and the only individuals known capable of threatening Judges remain imprisoned in Asylum. Also, no Fiend has ever demonstrated the ability to pass into existence without disturbing the Way, and the Spider Division has reported no such violation near Harrow or Limit prior to Limit’s expiration.

If a Fiend capable of doing battle with Ozriel has passed through the Way undetected, current quarantine levels are insufficient. Contact the other Judges to prepare for system collapse.

Abidan:

For security reasons, each Judge’s combat potential is not available for access. However, inferences can be made from publicly available data.

Razael, the Wolf, has expressed a personal grudge against Ozriel since the creation of the Reaper’s office. She was capable of depopulating an Iteration even before her first conscious contact with the Way, and Razael’s Sword was designed for the execution of Judges and Class One threats. The Wolf Division contains many destructive powers that are not public record, and Ozriel may have underestimated them.

Makiel, the Hound. As the Judge of Fate, he is the only individual whose prediction skills rival Ozriel’s. In combat power alone, he was once considered capable of assuming the role of Razael, though he declined the mantle. He has attempted to replace Ozriel many times, fought to deny Ozriel the rank of Judge, and led the opposition to all Ozriel’s proposed modifications to the Eledari Pact. With the Reaper gone, he will propose an imperfect replacement within the standard year, and unofficial reports suggest he has been developing his own Scythe.

Due to the personal biases involved, an encounter between Makiel and Ozriel is virtually guaranteed to end in conflict.

Report complete.

As the report faded away, so did Harrow. Suriel drifted in a black nothingness like the darkness of space, with swirling balls of color instead of stars. They were world fragments—one of the closer spots carried the fractured black tower from Harrow. Another fragment was a shining blue bubble with an island floating inside; water streamed down from the island and hit the bubble, looping up the inside to fall as rain.

The power of the Way was weak here, where chaos thrived. Each fragment was a little pocket of order and energy, which could someday be combined once again into a new Iteration.

With Gadrael’s isolation gone, her information requests arrived from Cradle one after the other:

Lindon and Yerin, together, left Sacred Valley and went into the Desolate Wilds.

He was trained by a local Soulsmith in the very basics of the art.

They encountered the Transcendent Ruins, where they were the first to retrieve the treasure at the top.

Lindon killed a Highgold, initiating a rivalry with a young man named Jai Long. Good. Pressure would help him grow. Jai Long’s sister was more interesting: she would have met Lindon in a few more years, if not for Suriel’s interference.

The exact nature of their relationship would have changed depending on several factors, but the destiny between them must have been quite strong to survive Lindon’s divergence.

A minor point of interest, nothing alarming. Fate adjusted for such small variations as a matter of course.

After a few moments of reviewing her Presence’s predicted future for Lindon and Jai Long, Suriel noticed a handful of gaps. She reviewed the data, pulling up extra information, comparing the reports.

Finally, she found what her automated requests had overlooked.

The Arelius family.

A young Underlord had found Lindon and Yerin, adopting them, and taken them back into the Blackflame Empire for training.

Suriel frowned. That could be a problem. She was familiar with the Arelius family—or rather, their ancestors—and they hadn’t come anywhere near Lindon in any of her projections. Why would they? He was a weak child from nowhere.

She tore open a blue hole in the void, stepping into the Way: the power of order washed over her, soothing and empowering, soaking her body and mind in comfort.

Here, she was close to every Iteration of reality. She could get some answers.

Through her Presence, she reached out to Cradle, requesting information on Wei Shi Lindon.

[Significant deviations detected,] her Presence announced. [Entity Wei Shi Lindon has deviated from primary course. Any analysis of current conditions or projections of future activity will have a low degree of accuracy.]

She’d made a mistake somewhere, but a quick review of her actions found nothing to account for this degree of change. She’d altered his future, true, but she should still be able to call up information about his current status.

If her Presence couldn’t even connect to the fate of Cradle, then something was badly off-course. None of her assumptions were reliable any longer.

And all of her predictions were wrong.

Irritation growing, she requested general information about the status of Iteration One-one-zero.

[Iteration One-one-zero has deviated from primary course. Any relevant information will have a low degree of accuracy. Direct contact with Iteration is recommended to ensure precision.]

Suriel cut off her physical reactions before she could feel irritation, anger, and uncertainty.

Abidan were allowed a certain degree of autonomy when responding to a spatial or temporal violation, especially Judges. She was permitted to alter the course of many individual lives, so long as the fate of the world remained intact.

Nothing she’d done should have violated those restrictions. Even if Wei Shi Lindon defied all odds and transcended Cradle, it would only mean one more potential Abidan recruit. On a cosmic scale, that was virtually irrelevant. Cradle wouldn’t notice when he was gone.

Something else had changed.

The Hound Division would have seen this. She had to go back to Cradle and determine the origin of this deviation before—

An eyeball the size of her head popped into being in front of her. A human eye, in appearance: pure white sclera, black pupil, purple iris ringed with symbols like a Cradle script-circle.

It looked very much like one of her eyes, in fact, only larger.

[Judge designation zero-zero-six, Suriel,] Makiel’s Presence said, by way of greeting. [Please travel to the following coordinates. Judge designation zero-zero-one, Makiel, requests a meeting.]

22

Years ago, when Renfei had first earned her way into the Skysworn, her instructor had congratulated her with these words:

“You’ll stop rebels, rivals, and runaway killers all over the empire, and you’ll do great service to the emperor. But somewhere, someday, you’ll run across somebody trying to revive the Path of Black Flame.” He’d chewed on a straw as he spoke, tapping the burned half of his face. “When the Blackflame returns, that’s when you’ll really stretch your oath. Can’t help but wonder if you’ll fight, or if you’ll leave your honor behind.”

The challenge had hovered over her, unanswered, for twelve years. She had fought with the Kotai clan against walking sharks on the beaches of the Trackless Sea, executed exiled criminals trying to sneak in across the eastern border, and returned runaways to the Stonedeep Mines. But, though she had kept her spirit open in special vigilance, she had never encountered a Blackflame.

Until a week ago.

She and her partner had been patrolling near Serpent’s Grave, keeping an eye on the battle in the city with their spiritual perception. They wouldn’t interfere in the battle; a clan was well within their rights to pass judgment on citizens in their territory. But conflicts led to crimes, so they remained vigilant wherever swords were drawn.

Of the many things they sensed that night, one in particular had drawn them to Serpent’s Grave like flies to rotting flesh: the power of Blackflame.

The Arelius turtle, Orthos, was known to them. His madra had flared during the battle, which was to be expected, but what they hadn’t anticipated was a second source of the Path of Black Flame.

As they had for the past seven days, Renfei drifted next to Bai Rou over the dragon-bone city, dodging horned skulls and yellow ribs that clawed the sky. They flew on emerald green Thousand-Mile Clouds: the symbols of the Skysworn.

Over this week, they’d sensed occasional flares of Blackflame through the city, but not much they could track.

“South-southeast?” Bai Rou asked, his voice coming from the shadow beneath his broad bamboo hat. His great bulk was shrouded by a huge, heavy coat that covered him from shoulders to toes, and his eyes—his Goldsign—shone yellow from within the shadows over his face.

She extended her own perception and checked. Not a Blackflame, just a fire artist practicing. “No. Two more days, and then we confront the Jai Underlord.”

Renfei had come to her own conclusion: their mysterious source wasn’t a sacred artist at all. Rather, it must be a Blackflame weapon that one of the two Serpent’s Grave Underlords had unearthed for their battle. The hints they’d gotten since then were only the weapon being transported throughout the city.

They had planned to confront both Underlords once they had evidence of the weapon’s existence, but thus far, they’d found none. And the Arelius Patriarch had fled the city before the Skysworn arrived. That suggested a guilty conscience to Renfei, but she needed more than suspicions to pursue claims against a Lord.

So if they found no more trace of the weapon soon, they would take Jai Daishou’s testimony anyway.

Bai Rou wordlessly agreed—he was only twenty-eighth among the Skysworn Truegolds, while she was rank thirteen and a disciple of the prestigious Cloud Hammer School. While they were assigned together, her opinion would override his.

Deadly heat flashed in the direction of the great black mountain that loomed over the city, and she started to call its position to Bai Rou.

Then flames blasted into the sky from Mount Shiryu’s peak.

The fire was streaked with red and black, and Blackflame aura gushed into the sky. All over the city, scripts flared to life, as sacred artists scrambled to defend themselves from another attack.

Renfei and Bai Rou streaked toward the dark peak, their clouds leaving green trails behind them.

“Testing,” Bai Rou said, voice hollow.

She agreed. Someone had decided to test the weapon; it must be based around a Ruler binding, based on the vital aura and flame that erupted from the mountain.

As part of standard procedure, the Skysworn each veiled their spirits, suppressing their power so they wouldn’t be detected as they approached. An Arelius would see through it, but Naru Cassias Arelius was with his family at the moment, and Eithan Arelius was gone.

They hovered over the mountain until they looked down into a canyon. The same narrow canyon that contained the Black Dragon Trials.

Renfei had checked this location as soon as they had arrived, finding no extra lingering Blackflame power, but obviously someone had managed to hide the weapon from her. It was their own foolishness that they had revealed it so soon.

She and Bai Rou flew over a circle of ninety-nine black, scripted dummies. The Ruler Trial. No better place to test out a Blackflame Ruler weapon than the course that taught them to use their Ruler technique.

Warm air still gushed from the canyon, buffeting their clouds, but it only took a minor expenditure of madra to stay steady.

There were two people inside the canyon, neither of whom Renfei had seen before. One, a shrunken old woman with gray hair in a bun crawling around on spider’s legs. She had a goldsteel bladed hook on her back, and she was tinkering with one of the dummies, exposing the construct inside. A Soulsmith, then, in charge of the course’s operation.

The other must be the one using the weapon, but his hands were empty. He was tall and looked stern despite his age, and a very careful scan of his spirit didn’t pick up anything of his madra.

She couldn’t check him more thoroughly without alerting him to their presence, but he must be very skilled to have veiled his spirit from even a cursory scan. His madra almost felt pure, which was a testament to the power of his veil.

Currently, he was sitting in a cycling position, a tiny blue Remnant on his lap.

“The weapon?” Bai Rou asked, but she shook her head. There was no way to make Blackflame madra look so much like pure water. If she had to guess, she’d say that was a natural spirit. Maybe it helped activate the weapon.

“We’ll wait until they draw it again,” she said, as the young man stood up. “It shouldn’t be too—”

The young man’s spirit changed.

His veil must have dropped, because his soul suddenly burned like a hungry flame. His eyes turned black with shining blood-red irises—that wasn’t the Goldsign from the Path of Black Flame she remembered, but otherwise his power felt just like a black dragon’s.

“A Blackflame in the wild,” she muttered.

Bai Rou’s yellow eyes flared. “Who would be this stupid?”

Aura gathered like clay, wrapped around the activation crystal for the course, and then flared to black-and-red light. The Ruler Trial began.

One dummy came to life, drawing an orange bow and firing a blast of light at the young Blackflame. A lance of sword energy followed, and then a fireball, then a crystal of dark ice stabbed up from the earth beneath his feet.

The course was designed to keep its participants on the defensive, pressuring them so they couldn’t hold on to their Ruler technique. When the Blackflames had taken these Trials, their guardians had countered the techniques while the one on the Path of the Black Flame readied the Void Dragon’s Dance.

But this boy…

Black-and-red madra covered him like blazing fog, and he dodged the arrow of light, took a cut from the sword energy, shattered the fireball on his fist—which must have left burns on his hand—and broke the ice with a kick.

All the while, his madra was still gathering vital aura, scooping it up like piles of gold. He took control of all the Blackflame aura he could, building a mountain over the dummies.

He fought as the attacks continued, dodging with his Enforcer technique active, blasting projectiles from the air with short bursts of dark fire, and taking cuts to the body that should have stopped him in his tracks. He was a bloody mess, and his core should have gone dry in seconds—he only felt like a Lowgold, and not a strong one.

But he kept going. In Renfei’s Copper sight, the canyon looked like a seething mass of red-tinged darkness.

Finally, long after she thought he should have collapsed, he ignited that pile of aura.

The entire top of the mountain rose in a column of black-spotted fire.

Renfei had never considered taking shelter. Her Cloud Hammer madra spread into a haze around her, shielding her from the heat and the impact.

The shock hit her harder: this was a real Lowgold on the Path of Black Flame. One of the living weapons that had carved out an empire using sheer power. Even though he wasn’t much yet, the Schools and sects and clans would fight to control his future.

The firestorm had died almost as quickly as it was born, but for a moment, it had looked as though Mount Shiryu were transformed into a volcano.

Even this wasn’t enough to pass the Ruler Trial. A true Void Dragon’s Dance should have devoured the dummies and nothing else; the tower of flame rising into the air was just wasted energy.

But he was sitting on the ground with his legs crossed, and his spirit was veiled again. She sensed madra flowing to his flesh, his wounds drinking it up…and closing. Visibly healing before her eyes, no life madra required.

“Someone,” Bai Rou said, “is making a monster.”

Renfei released her aura and flew down into the canyon, her partner flying with her. A raincloud hovered over her head: the Goldsign of the Cloud Hammers. Her actual hammer rested at her side, and if the Blackflame boy showed the slightest intention to resist, she’d draw it.

The old woman scurried up to the young man, and they both looked up in shock. The boy’s eyes weren’t dark anymore, Renfei noticed. They were ordinary, human eyes.

A clever deception.

The two in the canyon were bowing and sweating by the time the Skysworn landed. That showed wisdom, but Renfei still considered striking the Lowgold Blackflame dead.

It would certainly simplify matters in the future.

But in the end, her honor won out: Truegolds did not strike down Lowgolds to make their lives easier.

“Name, sect, and rank,” she demanded.

“I am Gesha of the Fishers,” the old woman said. “A guest of the honored Arelius family. As for my rank, I—”

“Not you,” Bai Rou said, his burning yellow eyes on the boy.

Sweat dripped from the young man’s forehead, and he didn’t dare to glance up at the two Skysworn. “This one is Wei Shi Lindon, an adopted disciple of the Arelius family. This one apologizes, but he can’t be sure of his rank. Among the outer disciples, this one believes he is ranked second, but he is only aware of two in total.”

“The Arelius family has thousands of outer family disciples,” Renfei said, her voice dry. If he was trying to deceive her by saying he didn’t know his rank, he wasn’t working hard enough. “Who is your master?”

“This one is honored to be the disciple of Eithan Arelius, though regrettably, this one’s master is not in the city at the moment. He has gone to the capital. This one would be honored to lead you to—”

She interrupted him. “Wei Shi Lindon Arelius, in the name of the Emperor, the Skysworn are taking you into custody. You will not be tried or punished until a representative of your clan can be found to speak for you.” That was the end of what she was required to say, but she added, “Eithan Arelius has no authority in this matter—we speak with the voice of the Emperor himself. A Blackflame cannot be allowed to run wild.”

Lindon looked distinctly uncomfortable, like a child caught in a lie, and only then did Renfei remember how young he was. Not even eighteen, she was sure.

Which made him all the more dangerous.

“Excuse me if this one misled you, but this one has only recently begun learning the Path of Black Flame, with the guidance of the Patriarch. This one is not a member of the Blackflame family.”

“You might as well be,” Bai Rou muttered.

They shackled his spirit, reducing his power. He was more cooperative than most of Renfei’s prisoners, though he did repeatedly insist that they tell his family what happened to him.

He might as well not have bothered; the Arelius family never needed to be informed about anything. Renfei’s only report would go straight to the Emperor.

The Blackflames had returned.

* * *

Emperor Naru Huan spread his wings as he walked through an ornate doorway. He had a fifteen-foot wingspan, but all the doors in the palace were made to accommodate the Goldsign of the Path of Grasping Sky. Etiquette dictated that he brush both sides of the frame with his outer feathers, demonstrating that anyone else would have to give way. When two members of the Naru clan met in a doorway, the lower-ranked had to defer.

No one had walked past Naru Huan in almost twenty years.

Servants closed the door behind him as he entered his home, a luxurious complex of black wood, red paint, and golden dragon statues. He had three joined towers within the imperial palace, all for himself, his wives, and his servants. Palaces within palaces.

He still remembered a time when it had been his job to scrub these floors.

Naru Huan paused on the inside of the doorway. Ordinarily, three servants were stationed here to take his robes of office, his slippers, and the heavy circlet woven into his hair in lieu of the imperial crown.

He opened his Copper sight, which was tuned to wind after his long years on his Path. The entire complex was a placid lake of pale green.

The air was still. No one moved inside.

Madra spun within him, faster and faster. He had no need to call his guards; anyone who could sneak into his home was a greater opponent than they could handle.

Green swirled as the wind stirred. He raised a hand.

A man walked around the corner, where he’d been seated and still a moment before. Long, yellow hair streamed behind him, and his outer robe was threaded in intricate patterns of blue silk. He was fifteen years younger than the Emperor, though they both looked about thirty: Overlords aged even more slowly than Underlords.

Eithan Arelius grinned and plucked a grape from a bunch that he must have stolen from Naru Huan’s table. He popped it into his mouth.

“Welcome home,” Eithan mumbled through a mouthful of grape.

Naru Huan glared at him. “Where are Our loyal servants?”

He usually had people to ask questions for him—Emperors were never supposed to demonstrate a lack of knowledge.

“Someone altered the schedule last night,” Eithan said, shaking his head. “It seems everyone believes it is someone else’s shift.”

The Emperor had never expected his security to hold up to Eithan Arelius; it had been a joke for generations that if the Arelius family wanted the throne, they would have it. Their bloodline gifts were so dangerous that, if they hadn’t shown such a complete lack of ambition, one of the Blackflame Emperors would have exterminated them centuries ago. Total awareness combined with access to the Empire’s maintenance facilities gave them the keys to all secrets on the continent.

But the Emperor should never be left unattended because of a shift change. He’d have to order some adjustments to security.

“We are not pleased at the disrespect you have shown,” Naru Huan announced, his tone a dire pronouncement. “Our office is nothing—”

“No one’s listening,” Eithan assured him, eating another grape.

Naru Huan’s eyes flicked to the nearest bedroom, where he still saw no movement in the air. Which meant anyone inside was either unconscious or dead.

His calculated anger started to turn real, and the air of the hallway began to thicken.

Eithan held up his hands, the bunch of grapes dangling from one thumb. “Wait, wait, wait! She’s shopping, you hear me? Shopping! She’s with your sister, who owed me a favor.”

Naru Huan let out a breath, finally relaxing. He tugged the replacement crown out of his hair, tossing it onto a nearby table that existed solely for that purpose. “You could have warned me, Eithan. You can’t just pop up anywhere you want to.”

“It’s better when I don’t explain how I do it,” Eithan said, sighing around another grape. “Explanations ruin my all-knowing mystique.”

“If anyone knew you had entered the palace without my permission, I would have to take action against your family. When a Patriarch acts recklessly, he is not the only one to pay the price.”

“If I thought an official message would get me an invitation in a timely fashion, I would have sent you a message,” Eithan pointed out.

Every message the Emperor received became common knowledge in Blackflame City within a day. Every message he responded to became a political talking-point. “Inviting the Arelius Underlord to the palace would be a rebuke against the Jai clan,” Naru Huan said, struggling out of his heavy robes of office—never easy, thanks to the wings. “For now, we still need them to hold the west.”

“As long as you don’t need them to have an Underlord,” Eithan said, pulling a grape off with his teeth. “He initiated an open attack against me in Serpent’s Grave, and I was forced to take out the broom.”

“I’ve never heard that expression. I assume you mean an actual broom.”

“Of course I do. What better weapon is there for an Arelius Patriarch?” He squinted into the distance, thinking. “Maybe I could have the Soulsmiths make me a better one…”

“Well, if you had to fight him, you should have killed him,” Naru Huan said, sliding out of his slippers and walking around Eithan to get to the dining room. “I could have assigned you as the temporary guardian of the western territories while the Jai dissolved to infighting.” He stopped as he realized Eithan hadn’t followed him, turning on his heel to see what had happened. “What is it?”

The bunch of grapes hung forgotten from Eithan’s fingers. His smile was gone, and he stared at the Emperor as though ready to do battle on the spot.

Which would result in nothing more than a dead Underlord, so Naru Huan folded his arms and waited.

“I did kill him,” Eithan said.

The Emperor raised both eyebrows. “I have a dream tablet from him that arrived yesterday, demanding I punish you for your insolent actions in Serpent’s Grave, and requesting imperial assistance in establishing his authority over the city.”

Eithan looked like he’d accidentally killed his own mother. He paled, braced himself against the wall, his eyes distant and unfocused.

“Am I to understand that I just received accurate information before the Arelius Underlord? Let me just…” Naru Huan took a deep breath. “…breathe it in. This is a good day.”

He continued walking to the dining room, where a table was laden with fruit and delicacies. Eithan staggered after him like an animated corpse. “I killed him, Huan. I killed him myself.”

“You left an enemy alive,” the Emperor said in disbelief, pouring himself a glass of wine. “Do you know how to tell whether someone is dead? Would you like me to teach you?”

Eithan dropped the grapes, snatched the pitcher of wine away from Naru Huan, and started pouring it into his mouth. He only stopped to come up for air.

“I haven’t made a mistake like that in…no, it’s never happened. Well, I’m going to need a new plan now.”

That reminded Naru Huan of another matter—one he had planned to visit the Arelius family to address personally. His mood instantly soured.

“What part of that plan involves reviving the Path of Black Flame?” the Emperor asked, his tone dark.

Eithan waved a hand. “Oh, that.”

“That? I need an explanation, if only to know what you could possibly have thought you were doing. You had to realize I would take him from you immediately.”

“Teaching someone the Path is not illegal.”

“Neither is hanging yourself, but that doesn’t make it wise. He’s going to be isolated both for his own safety and to stop him from causing a panic, Eithan.” Naru Huan slammed his glass down, remembering at the last second to cushion it in wind madra so it didn’t shatter.

Eithan sighed and replaced the pitcher on the table. “That does bring us around to the reason I’m here. I have a request.”

That was about as surprising as the sun rising in the east: no one ever came to see the Emperor without a request. “The Skysworn already have him in custody. I can’t let a Blackflame go, Eithan. He’ll cause a riot.”

“Let him go? No, no, not at all.” His smile returned. “I want you to make sure he still has to fight.”

THE END

Cradle: Volume Three

Blackflame

About the Author

Will Wight lives in Florida, among the citrus fruits and slithering sea creatures. He’s the author of the Amazon best-selling Traveler’s Gate Trilogy, The Elder Empire (which cleverly offers twice the fun and twice the work), and his series of mythical martial arts magic: Cradle.

He graduated from the University of Central Florida in 2013, earning a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing and a flute of dragon’s bone. He is also, apparently, invisible to cameras.

He also claims that WillWight.com is the best source for book updates, new stories, fresh coriander, and miracle cures for all your aches and pains!

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Also by Will Wight

Cradle

Unsouled

Soulsmith

Blackflame

Skysworn

Ghostwater

Underlord

Uncrowned

Wintersteel

Cradle: Foundation

Cradle: Path of Gold

The Traveler’s Gate Trilogy

House of Blades

The Crimson Vault

City of Light

The Traveler’s Gate Chronicles

The Elder Empire

Of Sea & Shadow

Of Dawn & Darkness

Of Kings & Killers

Of Shadow & Sea

Of Darkness & Dawn

Of Killers & Kings

For the most up-to-date bibliography, please visit WillWight.com