Wintersteel (Cradle Book 8), page 47
“If my memory’s true, I’m supposed to get another grand prize,” Yerin said.
He spread his hands. “The Monarchs are bound by oath to give it to you, so they will, but that isn’t my role. Good luck. When things settle, you’ll get it.”
He vanished, and Yerin reappeared in the center of the arena.
Or the rubble where the arena had been. The audience towers and most of the surrounding towers were nothing but debris now.
“Could have put me down somewhere better,” she muttered.
Then again, she could be wherever she wanted.
She focused on Lindon, and the Moonlight Bridge flashed.
From a hundred miles away, Northstrider felt Seshethkunaaz die.
They had a long history, spanning centuries, complete with blood spilled and reluctant alliances aplenty. Northstrider had planned the dragon’s death dozens of times.
He had expected a simple death to be too good for someone like Sesh.
He was wrong. This was very satisfying.
Reigan Shen, from the heart of the mountain where he was planning an ambush, began to tear open a portal.
“Stay,” Northstrider commanded, and his will opposed the opening of the portal.
Shen wrestled it open, and combined with his mastery of space, he would surely win the contest.
An ice-blue arrow the size of a lighthouse crashed through the mountain and crushed the King of Lions.
Malice’s attack would be little more than an inconvenience for Reigan Shen, but it would slow him down. Northstrider had a chance.
But rather than pursuing the lion, Northstrider flew over to collect Seshethkunaaz’s body. The dragon hadn’t become a Remnant thanks to Penance, and the corpse of a Monarch was a valuable material. Especially to him.
With the dragon’s body tucked away, Northstrider was prepared to chase after Reigan Shen. The cat could run, but the more he depleted his arsenal now, the better.
But his Presence sounded an alert, and Northstrider stopped.
Finally, the battle around the Dreadgod had become too much. The Wandering Titan was waking early.
Northstrider felt Reigan Shen escape and allowed it. There was more important work to do.
He stepped into the Way, leaving Malice’s triumphant laughter to ring out over the countryside.
[Lindon…] Dross said. [You’re not an Overlord.]
A black hole swallowed the sky. Directly over Lindon’s head.
The void wasn’t dangerous. It was a reflection of Lindon, linked to him somehow. Or he was linked to it.
Lindon wasn’t exactly sure what he’d done. But he had his guess. Some things that were hidden before felt clearer now, as though his spiritual sense had evolved to another level.
He stood over a hopeless Sophara. In simulations, he had mostly beaten her by finding a chance to use The Dragon Descends, but now he didn’t want to obliterate her body. He was here to Consume her power…and besides, if he incinerated her void key, he couldn’t take it himself.
Sophara lifted her chin proudly and clutched her sword.
“Kill me,” she challenged, “like you killed my—”
Lindon blasted dragon’s breath through her chest, exactly like he’d killed Ekeri.
She sagged, but he was there to catch her…and to drain the remaining power from her body. The last thing he wanted was to fight her Remnant.
Sophara was even stronger than he’d expected. The madra he vented from the purification process melted the tiles and stones of the crumbling roof.
When her Remnant was in no danger of rising, Lindon plucked the void key from around her neck and slipped it into his pocket. Then he moved to the edge of the roof and jumped down.
He landed on half of another crumbled wall, then hopped inside.
Eithan lay on the floor, bleeding with his breathing ragged. “I’m fine,” he said as soon as Lindon showed himself. “No tears for me, please. I’ll be…” He coughed loudly. “…as good as new any sec…”
The word trailed off. He gave a clear death rattle.
Lindon stood over him. “What did I do?”
Eithan opened one eye. “You have to have some guess.”
“I want you to tell me.”
Eithan groaned as he sat up. The Blood Sage had obviously run off; Lindon felt a slowly healing tear in space nearby.
“I did tell you that our cycling technique had a long and fascinating history,” Eithan said pointedly.
Lindon gave a hollow laugh. “I thought you were trying not to keep secrets.”
“Honestly, I thought of this one as more of a surprise.”
A white glow filled the space, and then Yerin appeared. She looked over them both, and for a moment Lindon was as alarmed as he’d been before.
Her Goldsigns, her eyes, and a lock of her hair had turned crimson. Dross had overheard the report Fury received about Yerin becoming some kind of half-Herald, but he hadn’t known what to make of it. Who was this?
“Yerin or Ruby?” he asked warily.
She gave him a grin. “Take a guess.”
He let out a sigh of relief. “Glad to see you.”
“Same to you.” She looked up the stairs. “We need to get them to a healer two days ago. Eithan, you have that cloudship?”
“Better! I have Lindon.”
Lindon recognized a cue when he heard one. He focused on the older of the two spatial tears in the room, locking his spiritual perception on it and gathering his concentration.
It was just as hard as it had been earlier, and it took him an embarrassingly long amount of time. He was afraid sweat was starting to bead on his head before he finally managed to say, “Open.”
The portal opened.
Pride and Naru Saeya survived.
Barely.
Lindon and the others reappeared on the fortress, where Akura Justice defended the portal alone. They dove through together, emerging back in Ninecloud City.
Which didn’t look much better than the battlefield they’d just left, but at least it wasn’t an active warzone.
The entire Akura faction was a buzzing mess of people, but they found healers quickly. When Mercy really demanded something in the Akura clan, it got done.
Saeya and Pride received medical attention, but Pride would have died if not for the immediate treatment Lindon had given him. The healers were skeptical that either would ever recover completely.
So, in a way, his entire team was gone.
That wasn’t strictly true. The Maten sisters had avoided capture and were perfectly safe. When the Akura clan settled down, Lindon intended to find out how many contribution points the team had earned. Assuming the clan was still honoring points at all.
They wouldn’t go to him. The thought almost surprised him, but he felt the others needed more support than he did. The Maten twins and Naru Saeya, at the very least, could use all the help they could get.
Now Mercy was glued to her brother’s side, and Yerin was pinned in place by the Heart and Winter Sages.
While he had a moment to himself, Lindon managed to corner Eithan.
The Arelius Archlord had accepted quick bandaging and some elixirs before sneaking out to the docks, where crewmen were loading crates onto cloudships to head back to Akura territory.
Most of the crates contained what they’d taken from Sky’s Edge, either from the mine or from their enemies.
Eithan’s entire body was wrapped in bloody bandages, but he seemed content as he watched the packing process. He leaned back, elbows propped against the railing, as people passed him by.
Lindon joined him. “I’m glad you survived.”
“It was closer than you might think. I might remind you that I am not a Sage.”
“Am I?” Lindon asked. It was the question he had been afraid to ask Dross.
No matter how many times Dross had slipped in his own opinion.
“That is a matter for scholarly debate,” Eithan answered. “In the past, the concept of a Sage was much more…fluid…than it is today. When manifesting an Icon, it is very important to understand the significance of your madra and to sense it deeply. Equally important is some kind of technique to regularly train your willpower. For years. An exercise that pushes your focus and concentration ever further, and that most people would give up or abandon for easier trails.”
The Heaven and Earth Purification Wheel.
Eithan’s head was sweeping back and forth, though Lindon was certain he didn’t need to watch anything with his eyes, and Lindon followed Eithan’s bloodline power with his own spiritual sense. He was searching inside the chests that flowed by in the crowd.
“Now, the specific Icon you manifest depends not only on the nature of your madra currently, but on a concept that has always been core to your identity. Even in childhood. Ah, here we are.”
Eithan slipped into the crowd, had a quick exchange with a startled-looking woman who had a bird nesting on her shoulder, and then came back to Lindon with a box a little bigger than his hand.
Lindon was uncertain whether he had asked the woman for this box or distracted her and then stolen it.
The chest cracked and revealed that it was filled with a smooth, white, lumpy rock.
Wintersteel ore.
It flew into Eithan’s palm and began slowly melting.
“Some ancient cultures, as you are aware, had a custom of wearing badges with symbols carved into them. Originally, those symbols represented the Icon that the wearer aimed to embody.”
Lindon’s real fingers ran across the halfsilver hammer badge on his chest, his fingertips tingling at the touch of the madra-disrupting metal.
“In those days,” Eithan went on, “Sage was not considered its own rank, but rather a separate mark of distinction that some Lords and Ladies achieved. Different materials were used for different cultures, but often Heralds wore badges of red and Monarchs of blue.”
Lindon thought back to his collection of badges. At least that was one minor mystery solved.
“Later, when the concept of a Sage became popularized as a stage of advancement in its own right, they began to make badges from a material that could only be worked by will.”
He held up the ore, which he had finished molding.
It was now a round, palm-sized wintersteel badge. A duplicate of the one on Lindon’s chest, only with no hammer.
Lindon took the badge. “I manifested the Void Icon.”
Eithan nodded to him. “Ah, but what symbolizes nothingness? A blank badge looks the same as one with no Icon at all, so rather than a picture, the ancients chose to write one character.”
At Eithan’s will, lines appeared on the wintersteel badge, etching out one familiar word in the old language: Empty.
Or, as they would say in Sacred Valley: Unsouled.
With one foreleg, Orthos shoved a severed wooden beam out of his way.
A fragment of pale light madra shone on the ground, the remains of a broken Forger technique. It had mostly dissolved to essence in the hours that had passed since the battle here, but a piece no bigger than the tip of his teeth had survived.
The splinter of madra slithered toward him like a glowing white snake before it, too, melted into particles and disappeared.
Sometimes he thought that everyone here practiced a light Path. What a waste. Light was pathetic next to fire.
Only that morning, this building had been an outpost of the Wei clan. In its basement was a training ground for light and dream aura, which was why Orthos had been keeping an eye on it. It was the perfect place for Kelsa to advance.
He had been considering burning the place down himself to claim the basement, but in the end someone else had done it for him.
The outpost was reduced to a pile of kindling, leaving the basement undefended. Orthos had come as soon as he’d felt the battle, but by the time he’d arrived, the attackers had left.
He didn’t know who had attacked the Wei clan or why, but he had his guess.
It was one of the invaders.
Shortly before his arrival in Sacred Valley, two other outsiders had punched through the defenses of Heaven’s Glory and gone into hiding. They hid from the three clans and four schools, just as Orthos and Kelsa did, so he’d never met the invaders himself.
But he was starting to suspect he knew them.
This was the closest he’d ever come to them, and the feeling of this leftover madra stoked his suspicions. He couldn’t be certain, but this felt like Stellar Spear madra.
Someone from the Jai clan was here in Sacred Valley.
Before he could continue poking around the ruined building, he felt a new surge of power from underground. Orthos grunted in satisfaction. The Path of the White Fox had a new Jade.
It was about time. He had spent months helping Kelsa attain a real Iron body, which would have been infinitely easier if she hadn’t advanced to Iron already. Retraining was always harder than learning the right way the first time.
Compared to getting her the Skyhunter Iron body, pushing Kelsa to Jade had been easy.
The trap door to the basement slammed open, releasing a gust of dream and light aura that traced phantom images in the air.
Kelsa emerged from downstairs, wearing a fresh robe. Her black hair was soaking wet, plastered to her head and neck.
He had left her with spare clothes and several buckets of warm water. Advancing to Jade was usually a mess.
She radiated satisfaction as she reached the top of the stairs. “Apologies for the wait, Orthos. Now we can begin.”
Orthos hated waiting around for no reason, but he wondered if impatience ran in this family.
“You just earned your eyes, and now you want to stare into the sun.” Orthos chomped into the end of the fallen timber. It had a nice singe to it that gave it a pleasant charred flavor.
A shiver passed through his spirit as Kelsa clumsily scanned him with her newborn spiritual sense. “I’ll need to practice, of course, but now I won’t slow you down if it comes to a fight.”
No matter how many times Orthos explained the difference in sacred arts outside the Valley, Kelsa didn’t truly understand.
She couldn’t, really. Not until she left and saw for herself.
“That’s the first step,” Orthos grumbled. “We still need help.”
She looked to him with a stern expression. “I’ve left my mother to suffer for too long already.”
She really had been patient all these months, training under his direction and preparing herself to reach Jade. But now that she had, he would have to sit on her to stop her from running off to rescue her mother from Heaven’s Glory.
But she learned a few new techniques and advanced one stage and thought herself invincible. Orthos knew better; it would be easier to burn the Heaven’s Glory school to the ground than it would be to safely free a prisoner.
They needed help.
As they left the ruined outpost, they continued bickering. Kelsa’s father couldn’t help, and no one else in camp met Orthos’ standards. Almost no one in the Valley did.
As they walked, he kept his spiritual perception extended, hunting for the Jai clan invader. He would be nearby, most likely under a veil, but Orthos hoped to feel him slip. Kelsa did the same, though her perception was wobbly and inconsistent with her lack of experience.
If they couldn’t find help, Orthos was certain Kelsa would try to slip into the Heaven’s Glory school with or without him, which would end in disaster. Even if she could slip in unnoticed with her illusion techniques, it would be much harder to leave with her mother in tow. They didn’t even know where Wei Shi Seisha was being kept, or what condition she was in. The best they could tell was that the Soulsmith was alive.
Kelsa would be sneaking off to her death, which frustrated Orthos to no end. He couldn’t watch her all day, every day.
While he demanded that she listen to reason and she appealed to his sympathy, he felt something growing in the air.
It felt like a distant wave approaching from the west.
Then the ground started to shake, and he shouted to Kelsa. “Pull your spirit back!”
Though she didn’t understand, she had trained under him for a long time now. She obeyed immediately, reeling her perception back.
Just in time for the spiritual pressure of the Dreadgod to crash over the Valley.
The impression was weakened by the same curse that limited Orthos’ power, but still the air shook and the ground quaked. Earth aura brightened in golden veins beneath his feet, leaves fell from shaken trees, and startled birds took wing.
The symptoms passed quickly, but Orthos cycled his madra in panic, ready to defend Kelsa. He’d never sensed the Wandering Titan before, but it could be nothing else.
The Titan had awakened, and it was close.
Kelsa patted him on the neck. “It’s just an earthquake.”
Orthos didn’t have the words to explain how wrong she was. “We’re out of time. Anyone who can feel that is too close.”
Cautiously, he extended his spiritual perception, ready to withdraw it again if the power in the air was too strong.
And he felt someone else doing the same. Someone on a sword and light Path.
Kelsa asked him another question, but a black-and-red haze had already sprung up over his body as he used his Enforcer technique.
He’d found his prey.
The invader’s presence vanished as he put his veil back into place, but it was too late. Orthos had his location.
He blasted into the trees, leaving Kelsa behind. With her Skyhunter Iron body, she should be able to follow him with her eyes, but she would never catch up. His every step was a leap, and he even withdrew his head into his shell to crash through trees when he didn’t feel like dodging out of the way.
In less than a minute, he arrived at the last location where he’d sensed the Stellar Spear madra.
It was an unremarkable nook near a stream, nestled between some foothills behind a thicket of trees. If he hadn’t been drawn here, he would have passed it without thought.
Only when he scanned the ground thoroughly did he find the buried script-circle.
