Retribution, p.68
Retribution, page 68
Before she could respond, I pushed my hand into the shield and ripped it apart.
Or rather, I tried to, but it resisted me.
“Orlaeth still actively controls this mana,” Seris said, stepping closer to her side of the shield just across from me. “With it spread so thin and processed through relay after relay to reach the far corners of Sehz-Clar, his control over it was weakened. But here, so close”—she gestured at the comatose basilisk floating behind her—“I think you'll find it much more difficult to wrest control away from him.”
I lashed out with my mind and mana, bringing to bear the full might of my power. Mana crashed against mana, and the shield trembled. It did not, however, break. “Bring it down,” I ordered, focusing all my power into lashing out again.
Nico sent multi-elemental bullets and blood iron spikes into the shield on one side while Dragoth conjured a jagged black war hammer wreathed in void wind and smashed it again and again into the barrier.
Seris only gave us a solemn, demeaning smile for our efforts.
“For far too long, Alacrya has served as the playground of mad gods,” Seris said, loud enough to be heard over the concussive blast of so many spells, but not speaking to any one of us in particular. “They breed people like beasts, assign us purpose at birth based only on purity of blood, and cast off any who do not meet their needs. But the truth of our daily lives is so much worse than anyone knows.”
Beside me, Nico faltered as he looked around the room in confusion.
“Because all of this—our entire existence back to our bloods’ earliest known ancestors—was only to create a people strong enough that Agrona could step upon our backs as he reached toward his ultimate goal,” Seris continued, turning to her left, no longer even looking at us.
“Enough!” I barked again. “Back away,” I ordered Nico, Dragoth, and the one-horned boy.
Thrusting both hands forward, I pressed against the shield again. The laboratory went quiet except for the incessant droning of the equipment.
Instead of pushing outward toward the mana in an attempt to control it, I drew it into me.
A victorious grin spread across my face as the surface of the smoke-tinged shield swirled. Seris was right, I couldn’t break Orlaeth’s ironclad hold over his mana, the Sovereign was far too powerful, but I could absorb it as I had done with the phoenix and Sovereign Kiros.
Seris had paused to watch me begin, and sadness overtook her features as she realized in truth that she’d lost. “Agrona has started a war with Epheotus, the land of the gods. He doesn’t expect you to win the fight with him, nor his Vritra-bloods, his Scythes, or even his Wraiths. He will burn us all for fuel in the furnace of his ambition, because he doesn’t want to be Lord of the Lessers; he intends to be King of the Asuras.”
Mana poured into me. I opened myself to it entirely, absorbing until I swelled to bursting. Ghostly flames wreathed me, flickering from my skin as I burned the mana I couldn’t contain. “You’re wrong,” I growled through clenched teeth. “I will win his war for him, and then I’ll return home.”
“Cecilia…” Nico said, sounding uncomfortable as he took a step back from me.
Seris turned her head in my direction, brows raised slightly. “Oh, Lady Cecilia, Legacy born of another world. Forgive me, did you think I was speaking to you?” Her eyes widened slightly, then she resumed facing away from me.
At the same time, several projection crystals lit up around the laboratory.
I faltered as I saw the image reflected in several screens: Seris, seen through a dim gray haze, looking solemnly into the recording artifact, while beside her I sweated under an aura of colorless flames, struggling against her shield like a baby trying to take its first step. Then the picture changed, showing the stairway outside the lab, focusing on the discomforted expressions of my soldiers as they exchanged glances or backed away. Then again, this time on Sovereign Orlaeth’s mindless slack-jawed face.
“What is this?” I asked, feeling my face redden as I realized that Seris had sprung some kind of trap after all, but not yet understanding what it was.
“She’s projecting this,” Nico said, looking from panel to panel. “But to…oh, oh no.”
“Hear me, Alacrya,” Seris continued, projecting her voice as if giving a speech. “Do not believe the lies you’ve been told. Any time an Alacryan dares to voice opposition to this cruel regime, the narrative is always the same. But I do not fight to seize power or to increase the standing of Sehz-Clar, or even because I believe I alone can defeat Agrona. I fight to show you that it is possible. Our civilization may have been grown in the Vritra’s fetid soil, pruned by their lack of empathy and humanity, and watered in our own blood, but it is our civilization, not the asuras’. It is time to cast down our Sovereigns. You and only you can claim sovereignty over yourselves.”
Orlaeth began to squirm inside his tank, and I sensed a weakening of the shield. I redoubled my efforts, and the flames around me grew.
“Cecil, we should…”
The blood pounding in my ears drowned out whatever else Nico had to say, but I was almost there. In a moment, the shield would fall, and when it did, I would use Orlaeth’s captured mana to pull Seris apart cell by cell.
She must have sensed this as well, because she suddenly strode toward the tank in the center. A bolt of black energy shot from her hand, shattering the glass. Thick bluish liquid poured out, spilling across the floor and filling the laboratory with a preservative stench.
Orlaeth’s body ripped free from the cables stabbed into his flesh, flopping onto the floor like a corpse.
“For those of you who do not believe me,” Seris continued. A blade of dark mana manifested in her hand. “We can change the narrative of our lives. We can make the Sovereigns bleed!”
The sword flashed, and Orlaeth’s remaining head tumbled across the floor, coming to rest face up in the slime, sightless eyes staring at me.
The shield vanished.
The ghost-fire rushed to my hands, and I met Seris’s eye. She was resigned, but still she gathered her mana.
I thrust out with all that power, exalting in it.
Seris’s mana flared. And then, she was gone.
“No!” I screamed, feeling like time had wrenched to a sudden halt as I felt the tempus warp on which she’d been standing pull her away.
The flames flared out. Something broke inside of me.
“What?” Dragoth roared, lunging forward to where the tempus warp, embedded in the floor, was now exposed. He said something else, but his words were lost beneath the ringing in my ears.
Gravity seemed to be changing, listing slowly sideways like a leaking ship about to sink. Mana was flowing toward me, smothering me, and I felt like I was sinking below waves that grasped me and tried to pull me under.
But my core was worse. So much worse.
I was on the ground, although I didn’t remember falling. Hands were grabbing at me, gripping my face, forcing my head to turn, but the sharp, panicked features staring back at me didn’t line up properly. It should be Nico, I knew distantly in the back of my mind, but it wasn’t my Nico…
A spike of pain pulled my senses away from his pale, sweating face to my core again. It was throbbing, aching…cracking.
The core—my core—was covered in a spiderweb of microscopic fissures, but even that was wrong because, instead of the mana inside the core pushing outward, all this mana—from the slime covering the floor, the huge lightning-blue cylinders, the equipment—was seeping into my core, and the pressure was building and building and building and…
My core imploded.
In an instant that felt like a lifetime, the hard white shell of the magical organ dissolved as it was pulled inward, into the inferno of mana that now raged in my sternum.
I gasped, breathless, tears rushing down my cheeks. Something was happening outside of me, but I had only the vague sensation of movement, shouting, a bust of magic, then I was drawn inward again.
My core was gone.
And all that mana came rushing out in a white explosion. For a moment, I was floating at the center of a blank white universe, as if the blast had wiped the slate clean, leaving behind nothing but me.
Then the darkness rushed in, and everything went black.
425
AMENDS
ARTHUR LEYWIN
The dungeon grew darker and more labyrinthine as we continued. Mana beast corpses littered the halls, the detritus of their broken bodies evidence of the titan’s incredible strength. The corpses grew larger as we went deeper into the tunnels, and the dungeon became little more than broken walls full of their raw, dug-in nests.
As Avier led the way, I attempted to strike up a conversation with Evascir, but he only suggested I save my questions for one better equipped to answer them.
Our path took us through a second level of the dungeon. We passed through a chamber at least a hundred feet wide and half as high with dozens of dens clawed into the walls. A towering pile of mana beast corpses filled the center of the chamber, including one several times the size of the others. It was similar in shape, but with strange protruding ridges under its belly—some of which were broken off—and a smoldering heat trapped in its three horns, which glowed like coals.
“The emperor scourge,” Avier said, noting the direction of my gaze. “A mana beast worthy of hunting, even for an asura.”
Evascir grunted, but sounded pleased with himself when he said, “I’ve slain the emperor of this dungeon more times than I care to consider, but it is always a battle worth recounting.”
From this chamber, it was only a short way to our apparent destination: a second set of large doors, the black wood engraved with the image of a huge bird, its wings spread wide. The engraving was inset with some kind of metal that caught any small amount of light and flickered with a dim orange sheen. Vines crawled down from a crack in the ceiling to frame the door with orange leaves the color of autumn flame.
Evascir went ahead. A tall, reddish stone staff grew in his fist, which he knocked against the ground. The doors swung open, revealing a twenty-foot square chamber and another set of closed doors. His bestial companion took up position in an alcove at one side of the chamber while Evascir pushed open the inner doors.
“They will be waiting in the hall,” he said to Avier, who nodded appreciatively and went through.
I did the same, curious who “they” were and where this place was but withholding my questions. Evascir didn’t watch us walk away, but closed the door behind us and returned to whatever his duty was.
“Is this some kind of…asuran stronghold?” I asked quietly.
Avier’s tail swished in agitation. He paused, turning around to look at me. “Those doors have not been opened to a human, elf, or dwarf since they were carved from the first of the charwood to mature in the Beast Glades. Though you have been invited, it remains to be seen if your presence is welcomed. A king’s grace will suit you far better here than a dragon’s physique.”
Without waiting for a reply, he continued down the hallway.
Instead of the dark, rough stone of the dungeon, this interior passage was warm gray marble studded with silver sconces from which burned little orange flames. More vines grew along the walls and across the curved ceiling, adding a bucolic airiness and sweet autumn scent that made it easy to forget that we were far underground.
The short hallway opened onto a balcony that jutted out from the wall of an enormous room. I gaped down at a garden larger than that of any royal palace, a wild riot of color complete with soaring silver-barked trees covered in bright orange leaves. Several globes floated near the roof of the gardens, giving off a pleasant light that felt like mild summer sun on my skin.
“I thought the dwarves did a good job making their caves homey, but this…” Regis let out a muffled whistle. “It looks more like Epheotus than Dicathen.”
Avier’s head bobbed at the end of his long, reptilian neck. “Indeed. In some ways it is. The charwood trees, the plants, these people you see here, they are all remnants of Epheotus.”
A few people lounged or walked around the gardens, chatting or just sitting with their faces turned toward the lighting artifacts. Their matching shades of true-flame red or smoky black and gray hair and their vibrant orange eyes marked them as members of the phoenix race.
Those eyes began turning upward toward us as more and more of the phoenixes noticed our presence. Some only watched curiously, but others abandoned their leisure and quickly exited the garden.
‘Didn’t think I’d see birds less friendly than our tour guide owl here,’ Regis communicated mentally.
I cracked a smile.
“Retake your seat on my back,” Avier grunted, as if hearing my companion’s thoughts. “We will fly from here.”
My brows rose at the idea of flying through an underground dungeon, but I did as he suggested after Regis was tucked safely back within me.
Avier stepped lightly off the edge of the balcony, and we drifted out over the garden. The asuras still remaining there watched us go with an air of apprehensive curiosity.
We flew between two of the trees, then down into a yawning tunnel entrance. This tunnel was much more plain than what I’d seen previously, just bare marble that was covered in ashy black streaks like scorch marks. The tunnel split, and Avier banked right, then drifted back to the left, where our tunnel joined with another.
The passage ended abruptly, opening high up into another exceedingly large chamber. My first impression was of a theater with several levels of balconies looking down on a central platform.
Like the other chambers I’d seen, the stonework was predominantly gray marble, but columns of black wood held up the balconies, around which grew more of the vines fringed with colorful fall leaves.
A large circular table currently rested on the central platform, around which sat four people, two of whom I knew well and one I could already guess at, but the fourth was both a stranger and somewhat out of place.
Avier circled the space once, then landed gently. When I slid to the ground, he transformed back into an owl and fluttered up to a nearby balcony, perching on the railing and watching us with his overlarge eyes.
The four figures had stood up from their seats around the table, watching our approach. Aldir was closest to me. He’d abandoned his severe, military-style uniform for a relaxed tunic and light training pants, and his long white hair draped over one shoulder, but he otherwise seemed unchanged. The vivid purple eye in his forehead watched me emotionlessly, while his two regular eyes remained closed.
Wren Kain stood to his left, draped in a soot-stained white cloak and appearing distinctly out of place in the grand hall. Like Aldir, he looked the same as when I’d trained with him in Epheotus: dirty, tired, and almost purposefully unkempt. The only thing that stood out was a single bright-orange feather in his hair and the way his observant gaze seemed to burrow into my chest to my core.
But it was neither Aldir nor Wren who spoke first.
A tall man with an athletically graceful physique stepped past Aldir. He was dressed in a golden robe embroidered with stylized feathers and flames over a cream-colored silk tunic and dark pants. His hands were tucked into the robes, held together at the waistline by a dark belt. Markings like feather stems glowed like coals down the sides of his face, which had the same air of eternal youth as Kezess’s, but where Lord Indrath could only appear dispassionate and smug, this man’s sharp-lined face conveyed an undeniable sense of wisdom and curiosity.
He was smiling, but there was something complicated about the simple expression. Perhaps it was the way his eyes blazed like two captured suns.
“Arthur Leywin, son of Alice and Reynolds Leywin, bond of Sylvie Indrath, reincarnated soul of the Earth King, Grey.” The man dislodged one hand from his belt and ran his fingers through his untamed mane of orange hair. “I am Mordain, phoenix of the Asclepius clan. Welcome to the Hearth.”
I rolled my tongue against my teeth, considering my words. “Thank you for the kind welcome. I realize that allowing me to come here must have been a carefully weighed decision, but I have to ask…am I here at Aldir’s request or yours?”
“Admittedly, it took some convincing on Aldir and Wren’s part for me to invite you here,” Mordain answered without hesitation. “The truth is my eyes have been turned away from your world for a very long time. Except…” He paused, and some emotion I couldn’t identify passed over his features but receded just as quickly. “I found myself quite surprised, then, when they turned my head and showed me you. But I wasn’t immediately convinced that meeting with you face to face was worth the risk.”
Although the courtly thing to do would have been to exchange several rounds of probing pleasantries to inch closer to the conversation's true purpose, I didn’t think Mordain or I had the patience for or interest in such games. “Do you plan on helping us against the Vritra clan? Or even Epheotus, if it comes to that?”
“Straight to the point, and a valid question.” Mordain took a step back, gesturing to the table. “Please, join us. There is much to discuss.”
As Mordain returned to his seat, I met Aldir’s eye. He looked away as he eased into his own chair.
Moving around him, I took the seat next to Wren, who bit his lip as he eyed me speculatively, cast a sidelong glance at Mordain, then leaned toward me in barely concealed anticipation. “So? Where’s the weapon? I can sense the acclorite’s energy within you, but—”
Giving Regis a nudge, I forced him out of my body. Purple fire wreathed the edges of my shadow as Regis manifested, his jaw momentarily slack with surprise.
“A conscious manifestation…” Wren mumbled, leaning forward to get a better look. “And such a unique form. I’ll need to be told everything, of course, about your state of being when the weapon manifested, and inputs prior to manifestation. Personality traits are of primary interest when evaluating a conscious weapon, but acquired powers are essential too, of course…”
