Thank you to my beta reader amd editor, GlassThreads!
Toren Daen
I jolted from the Sea of my Soul like a man tearing himself from a dream. I fought through waves of unending fury, the atmospheric pain thick like tar as it clung to my skin. My eyes jolted open, and I was barely aware enough to restrain my heartbeat from turning my hair back to its original color and diffusing every illusion of being a pantheon from my form.
The air was suffused with that agony, hammering heartbeats an unending assault on my eardrums. Intent fused with heartfire to create something higher, that rhythm of rage.
My eyes snapped down to the leviathan at my side, worried that she'd fallen into another bout of Seeker's Madness. After all, what I sensed now was practically identical to what she'd displayed then: but the young woman wasn't half-mad with fury. Instead, she was blinking madly, staring toward the exit of the cave as if a phantom howled outside.
And I could hear phantom howls, sense the trembling clash of mana and might beyond the borders of our little hovel. Chul was fighting something, the rippling aftershocks of his combat dislodging the stone.
"What is going on?!" I demanded, rising swiftly to my feet, mana swirling around my hands. Already, adrenaline was pumping through my veins, demanding I go toward the fight outside.
Chul's battling whatever's making that terrible sensation, I thought, restraining the urge to conjure a shrouded saber. I need to help him.
I'd hardly had time to continue my practice with Mordain, or consider the implications of others in Alacrya channeling my aetheric abilities before the familiar scream ripped through my Sea: another echo of the Second Dawn.
"Our friend's out hunting our dinner," Nerium said casually, the hamadryad lounging back on a few cushions of moss near the edge of the hovel. He was lazily chucking cards at the wall with one hand, each of them sinking into the stone with remarkable precision. His other hand conjured vines up from the ground, small fruits of different colors glowing there, before they dropped into a bowl of bark. "He said he'd be back pretty soon, so I'm setting up what vegetables and fruits that I can. The first part of building muscle is a balanced diet."
The dark-skinned man seemed utterly oblivious to the wrongness of what I sensed outside… But how would he be aware of it? He wouldn't be able to sense that heartfire, nor taste the intent. There was something else wrong outside: this wasn't just a hunt. Chul's intent—what I could sense that wasn't swallowed by the dust storm high above—was desperate and worried, his heartbeat a war drum.
He's in danger, I thought, already moving toward the exit. Mordain's soul still lingered near mine, and part of me regretted not asking more about Seeker's Madness and everything else, or getting to discuss everything else. But thoughts of that fled as the drive to protect those close to me took precedence. We'd have time later.
"Nerium, keep an eye on Ulysseiah," I said sternly, already calling a shrouded spirit about myself. The plates of white-gold mana clung to me like armor, enhancing every movement. "Something's gone wrong outside. Do not leave the safety of this place if you can avoid it."
The hamadryad abruptly stopped flicking his cards at the wall, looking at me with worry. "What do you mean, Yaksha?" he demanded, cards floating around him. "What does Arjuna face?"
For all that I was suspicious of this asura, the worry lining his face—like ridges in the bark of an ancient tree—was genuine. That soothed some of my anxieties about him. I got the sense that he could handle himself in a fight, but whether he was truly a warrior was another matter entirely.
I ground my teeth, ready to throw myself into the fray. The sandstorm rippled through the darkness outside, and flashes of light from Chul's fire were all I could see. It was practically pitch-black outside, from both the onset of night and the blanketing cloud of dust above. "I don't know," I responded, suppressing my fear. "Hold fast, and do not leave this place unless you're certain it's safe."
A hand wrapped around my shrouded spirit, the grip tight enough to crumple steel. "Yaksha," Ulysseiah said, her voice trembling. Her intent was alight like a live wire, fear resonating there like a terrible drum. "Watch yourself, please! What is out there… I can hear it. It scrapes and claws and—"
"I'll be okay," I reassured the nervous woman, gently unclasping her hand from my wrist. "I've faced worse than this."
Then I stepped outside, facing the maelstrom. A dozen shards of something peppered the canyon wall above me, a hundred impacts resounding like a Gatling gun as they trailed along the wall, nearly invisible in the low light. On instinct, I thrust out my hand and engaged my regalia, capturing the projectiles before they could graze my shroud. Long, bone-white needles hovered in the air, dripping with purple venom.
A monster roared, and Chul blurred past, outlined in burning fire. He was the only source of light in this entire cavern, a nimbus to follow. His teeth were clenched, his fists outstretched as he backpedaled. He had a few bruises, but he looked largely unhurt.
Then the thing that had been chasing him slithered past, writhing through the air. I caught flashes of it from Chul's flashes of light. It was at least fifty feet long, serpentine and sleek. It was covered in bright, green-blue scales, the veins beneath pulsing with low cyan light. Beady eyes stared out from an eel-like head, rows upon rows of teeth seeking to swallow Lady Dawn's son whole. A flare of those same needles ringed its throat like a mane. Its body was covered in a dozen wounds and burns that Chul had given it, but it simply ignored them, impervious to pain.
I growled, reoriented the barbs hovering in front of me, and let them blur through an accel path of corded telekinetic force. They screamed as they flew, punching a dozen coin-sized holes through the beast's side. Murky blood sprayed, trailing from the slimy hide like water from a punctured balloon.
It hardly seemed to notice the injury, too enwrapped in rage. Its heartbeat was a chorus of mismatched tones, all demanding blood. Drowning out all other sounds.
Okay, I thought, cognizant of Ulysseiah finally taking cover with Nerium, Let's do this.
My options were limited both by my cover as a pantheon warrior and this enclosed space: but I could make do. I darted after the beast as it tried to hem Chul in, unwilling to let it sink its jaws into my companion.
I reached the beast's tail easily enough. It wasn't even paying attention to me, too enthused with saturating the air with its malevolence. But when my shrouded hand gripped its tail, all five stories of slippery eel jolted to an abrupt halt.
My body wasn't innately as strong as a full asura's: but by nature of how Integration strengthened my body and the absurd strength-enhancing effects of my shrouded spirit, this mana beast would be hard-pressed to tell the difference.
"You should've focused on me, creature," I hissed, my blood igniting in my veins. Then—with half a dozen telekinetic pulls pressing into the stone of the canyon all around me to provide me support—I rotated on myself, intending to slam the whiplike mana beast like a flail against the earth.
The half-a-hundred-foot-long creature finally seemed to recognize I was a threat as it was whipped about like a lever. It convulsed slightly, and a whisper in its intent warned me of the danger.
Instead of cracking the mana beast against the canyon floor, I hurled it up into the howling vortex of the dust cloud above: just before the creature brightened with crackling, bioelectric lightning. Its strange hiss-roar was swallowed by the storm, before the attempted attack dimmed.
It's taking damage from the storm, at least, I thought, irritated that my prey had managed to escape my grasp. Yet I could sense it, high above as it turned about, ready to try and kill us again.
I bent my legs, preparing to follow. The dust storm would interfere with Sonar Pulse's ability to transmit information back to me, but I hardly needed it to sense the terrible heartbeats high above: and while I wore the mask of pantheon, the sky was my domain. Even with a raging sandblaster, my spirit would keep me protected.
But then Chul blurred back to me, his heartbeat alight and his eyes serious. He didn't say anything, just let his eyes flick back the way I'd come, his intent rising with desperate worry. On an instinct I could hardly name, my senses quested out where he'd directed.
And I heard it. A heartbeat—weak, sputtering, dying back the way we'd come. I hadn't been able to hear it over the rage of the mana beast, but now the unspoken message reached me. Protect. Chul had been deliberately leading this beast away from someone wounded.
I locked eyes with Chul, and something I hadn't known in a very long time threaded between us. My heartbeat's thunder seemed to match his, the lifeforce in his veins strengthening him alongside his mana.
Somewhere where I was still conscious, I remembered the talks I had been having with Mordain. What made a soul? The connections? The sense of self?
The love of a mother?
We moved as one.
I blurred ahead, taking advantage of my greater speed. I wove through the canyons with uncanny ease, graceful hawk turned to ravenous condor. I reached the dying heartfire first, arriving in a flicker of distorting space.
I hardly had a moment to recognize that I beheld a dying phoenix, their wings broken as they lay crumpled in a crater in the ground, before a bolt of bioluminescent lightning screamed from the sky, aiming to turn them into char.
I made a knife with my hand, before swinging it in a half-dozen blurs. Trembling arcs of sound mana carved upward, diverting the ionizing force into the mountainside: just in time for the mana beast to scream downward, gnashing teeth bared to swallow us whole. Its body was riddled with wounds, the gleam of its green-blue scales weathered away by the storm.
Chul had other plans. With a roar, he collided with the beast like a fiery comet from the side just by its midriff. It lurched sideways, crashing into the cavern wall and screeching as bones shattered. The Son of Dawn bellowed, slamming fist after fist into its ribs, pulping flesh with every blow.
The eel's intent flickered, but I was already there, blurring between Chul and the mane of purple spines. I threw up a barrier of white-gold telekinetic force, diverting a spray of venom-covered needles that would have caught the disguised phoenix unawares. Without even missing a beat, Chul was moving again. Inexorable, undeniable, unbreakable.
He flowed around me, while I moved backward. The mana beast's jaw—which was trying to rear its head to bite back at us—was abruptly grasped by Chul's meaty hands. It struggled, thrashing and squirming as it tried to escape his grip: but even as my companion in battle quickly lost his mana, his aetheric strength was greater than anything this creature had faced.
"Face oblivion, fell beast!" he boomed, his muscles rippling.
Before it could zap him with electricity, the son of Dawn roared, hurling the titanic eel back toward me. It tumbled about like a child's toy thrown by an unruly hand, dozens of tons of meat and muscle turned into a ragdoll. Yet even as it arced toward me, it was starting to adjust and reorient.
Not fast enough.
The beast hit a wave of redirecting force, the white-gold current sending it hurtling upward nearly back into the storm. As soon as it left my redirecting river of force, I twisted the spell, creating an accel path large enough for a man to slip into. I locked eyes with the rabid creature through the scintillating waves of white-gold, my muscles tensed and my heartbeat steady.
The eel seemed to finally have a moment of lucidity as it saw its doom. It was an utter mess of shattered scales, pulped bones, and charred flesh, and now the final killshot was lined up.
The creature exhaled cascading bolts of blue bioelectricity, the mana within hot enough to burn away any white core mage. I growled in annoyance as those tendrils sought me, responding with a dozen blurs of my arm. Blades of vibrating sound mana, ripples of telekinetic punches, and even a bit of rockslide debris I grabbed with my regalia all rose to match those volts.
For a microsecond, the beast had me pinned down, blocking any avenue to the accel path in front of me. It might have even thought it had saved itself doom for a heartbeat and a half.
"Your mistake," I whispered, a smirk curling at the edge of my lip. "That path was never for me."
Chul surged in, his fist alight with phoenix fire. Our eyes locked for a moment: and though both of us wore disguises that masked the truth of our features, I thought I was seeing him as he truly was for the very first time. Our hearts beat in perfect unison, the sound audible even over the scream of the dust storm and the terrible tumult of this raging mana beast.
And then he hurtled through the accel path with the sound of a thundercrack. He became little less than a streak of orange light, his fist going through the movements of a pulping uppercut. His knuckles collided with the jaw of the beast, then carried him entirely through its skull in a fiery explosion.
Chul barely halted himself before he would've been thrown into the arcing storm overhead. The corpse of the broken beast fell to the chasm floor with an impact that shook the stones, making my teeth tremble. But the phoenix—slightly winded, with sweat running down his faux-titan features—just stared up into the storm. Almost as if he was transfixed by some unknown secret, deep in the dark.
He turned about suddenly, staring down at me with wide eyes. I stared back, and I knew I must have been his mirror. That tremulous instinct, that instinctive understanding of where I needed to be, what I needed to do…
Even alone, that mana beast wouldn't have been a match for either Chul, nor me. But together, we'd… changed. Chul and I had said no words during the fight, simply moved as one. We were trained by the same woman, taught the same essence of combat, and pushed in the same way. That essence of perfect teamwork?
I hadn't known it since Norgan.
Then Chul blinked, and the moment was lost, gone with the howl above. "The phoenix!" he cried, his intent sharpening into fear. He blurred back the way we'd come, ignoring our fresh kill. "Come, brother! We must hurry!"
The moment snapped abruptly, memories of the dying woman Chul had been working to protect flashing to the forefront of my mind. "Damn it," I cursed, already flying after Chul at speed. A phoenix was dying nearby. "What happened, Arjuna? Where did that monster come from?!"
In the flurry of combat, I hadn't taken time to think. That mana beast didn't seem like it should have been from the Aborshan Wastes, and the first instinct to simply end the threat to Chul had overtaken the need to keep it alive. The utter rage emanating from its heart had ceased, and I hadn't gotten the chance to learn more about why.
"Our kinsman was being hunted!" Chul replied, his vambraces gleaming as he raced back to the crater in the cavern wall. "They were cast from the sky, bleeding and wounded, and that fell creature followed! I deigned to rescue her from certain doom!"
We rounded the corner as we traced after the dying heartbeat: just in time.
The bleeding phoenix looked like she had been shot through with a hundred porcupine quills. Shoots of venom-covered spines littered her once-graceful plumage, draining her feathers of their luster. Blood flowed from her like rain trailing a roof in a storm, her orange heartfire dissipating into the darkness. Only her eyes glowed slightly, hardly conscious.
And around her, the scavengers gathered, smelling death on the wind. Scuttling tunnel scorpions, looming, twin-headed vultures, and half a hundred more mana beasts that wanted nothing more than to devour. A strange doglike mana beast lapped hungrily at the blood, staying a ways away as it watched the monsters circle.
When it sensed us coming, though, it ran. It ran like hell, whimpering at the press of my intent. It proved to be the only wise beast among them.
I grabbed five of the small scorpions in telekinetic grips, yanking on their tails. They made a strange, hissing scream as they realized they'd been caught: but that was swallowed as I hurled them up into the sandstorm high above. The carapaced creatures became smears of red mist as the dust tore them apart.
Chul bellowed as he crashed into the ground, flaring his mana signature like dark wings. The rest of the scavengers ran, too cowardly to face their doom. I arrived immediately afterward, kneeling over the splayed-out form of the dying phoenix. It was so very dark here, lit only by the lingering fires of our conflict and the dying feathers of this asura.
"She's one of the Avignis escorts," I said quietly, remembering her mana signature. This woman had been one of Lady Naesia's escorts: the one with shorter hair who had looked at Chul with terrible suspicion.
She was chased here, I thought, stretching my hand out over her chest, rising and falling unevenly. Those venom-marked quills dripped with purple poison, seeping through her feathers, and I could sense that it had already reached her heart. If I heal her… If I heal her, our cover might well be blown.
My entire plan for the River Suda relied on the assumptions of the asura that might see us there. It relied on my pantheon disguise. But using heartfire would unequivocally ruin it, because that could only be the powers of a phoenix.
But then the woman's dimming ember eyes—struggling to focus—settled on me. They finally focused on me, though, and a spark reignited there. A surging desire to live, that inborn refusal that all phoenixes bore to simply let it all go.
The same drive that makes me deny Death itself, I thought, remembering my resolution to bring my mother back. What right have I to deny her?
I let out a breath, then called my heartfire to my hands. My hair—colored gray from restraining the flow of my lifeforce—flickered back to its deep, true red as I let go of my restraints. I pressed my hand to her chest, my lifeforce seeping into her chest as I sought her heart.
Behind me, I sensed as Wren leapt from Chul's chiton. "You better hope you know what you're doing," he said, his mink form darting through the chasm. "I'll give you cover, Spellsong."
A bare comfort, I thought irritably. Even if Ulysseiah and Nerium don't see through my disguise, this woman still will.
I forced those thoughts from my mind.
The young phoenix's beak creaked as she stared at the flow of energy, and I wondered if she was even aware of what was happening. I tried to call on her heart, to force it to beat and thunder against her many mortal wounds.
"My Lady," the asura said, her voice choked with wet blood. One of her lungs had been punctured by a venom-laced quill. "My Lady is—"
She coughed wetly, her heartbeat stuttering to answer my intent-laced call. Shit, I thought, struggling to maintain the state of surgery. Damn it, her heart is weakened too much. It's struggling to answer my call!
"Chul, I need you here," I ordered sharply. "Those barbs are covered in a poison that's deliberately weakening her heart. Makes her bleed out slower, but if I can't call to her heart, then she dies no matter what! Push them through. They're covered in barbs that are designed to catch on the flesh if we try and yank them out."
I hardly noticed that I'd used Chul's real name until he was there, eyes flicking between the spines. He said nothing, just gripped one with a massive, meaty hand, then began to slowly push it through the phoenix's flesh. She trembled slightly, blood spurting from the wound.
It was a rushed job, a desperate gamble. If I could get the quills free, she'd bleed more: but she'd have a chance with my healing. Without any intervention at all, she was destined to die.
Chul grunted as he pressed one free, ripping it from the phoenix's back. "Done, brother! What next?!"
"The one near her shoulder," I sad sharply, measuring my use of heartfire. "It's nicked an artery too close to the heart."
The phoenix coughed again as Chul and I worked in concert, the storm howling overhead. "Lady Naesia," she said, the words dribbling from her beak like drops of blood. "She's… in danger. Attacked by those beasts."
My attention sharpened as I continued my work. I needed to keep her talking, keep her focused. That would keep her heart strong: and from what she was saying… "What happened?" I asked, splitting my mind in a dozen directions. "You were attacked, then separated? Is that why you fled here?"
"Meeting with… Lithen," she wheezed, head lolling weakly to the side. Her avian eyes stared up toward the howling storm with longing and pain. "Welcoming him… back. Talking about what was… to be done."
I restrained my heart from an erratic pulse. Lithen. Roa's husband, who had been welcomed into the Asclepius Clan after marrying her. He'd been an Avignis before, hadn't he?
Chul pressed another barb from the woman's shoulder with a grunt, and she cried out in pain. "Another is free, brother!" he said sharply, breathing heavily. "Now?"
I directed Chul wordlessly to another barb near the woman's left flank. I did what I could, using mana and lifeforce both to soothe her body. It took so much more energy to heal her than I was used to: asuran bodies were durable, strong, and made in a way I struggled to understand. It was harder to seal over those wounds left behind, harder to banish the venom from her veins.
I've only ever healed humans, I thought irritably, balancing on the brink. But she's a phoenix. That makes it easier.
I was making progress, but any disruption in the healing process would see this woman dead. Her body was covered in damage from flying through the dust storm, her feathers tattered shreds and her mana channels poisoned with unpurified earth mana that constantly fought any attempts at healing. I wasn't just fighting against that mana beast's venom: I fought against mana poisoning from prolonged exposure to the storm, too, along with catastrophic blood loss.
"What did you need to talk with Lithen about?" I probed with gritted teeth, adjusting the glow of dawnlight from my hands. "The Asclepius Clan?"
If Lithen is out and about, what would it be for? Why isn't he captured and imprisoned with the rest of our clan?
I saw the stars of a hundred banished phoenix souls in my Sea, and for all of them that I'd checked, I hadn't been able to sense their exact location, even if I could reach out to their souls. My spatial sense flickered strangely whenever I tried: the only clue I had to their location. But I hadn't checked Lithen, had I?
The phoenix's eye sharpened on me for a moment, the delirium seeping away. She seemed to see me for the first time: my feather-red hair, my bright, starlit eyes, the avian runes that had begun to show on my arms as my masks fell.
Her beak opened, and I expected her to call me out for what I was, to finally put all the pieces together. Instead, a deep desperation coated her bedraggled voice. She trembled, her heart alight with fear. "They came for us. There were many, but… Lady Naesia fought them off above the storm. With Lithen. They were Sea, we the Sky. But they never stopped. Never stopped. Then the storm approached, and we took cover. But we needed to get help, because they didn't… They didn't—"
I leaned forward, tense as a bowstring ready to snap, listening for her words. They were feather-soft beneath the thunder of the storm, and I could barely hear her in the darkness.
Then Chul—who had been about to press another barb through our patient's chest—abruptly whirled, his intent flickering with surprise. At the same time, a familiar torrent of heartbeats slammed into my ears, obliterating my concentration utterly.
Except it was somehow even worse: each off-tune cymbal even louder and resonating with more fury than before.
A streak of bioluminescent blue slammed into Chul. He roared, skidding back several feet as his aetheric strength contended with the living freight train that had collided with him. A familiar creature.
The eel—the one we'd killed already—was somehow alive again: except no longer did it glow so brightly. It lustrous scales had darkened, becoming a deeper shade of sea-green. The hole that Chul had blown in its skull had mended over without even a scratch. Dark green lightning flickered along its teeth, each poised to try and sink into Chul's flesh.
"It is not possible!" Chul called, easily keeping the monster at bay with his impressive power. His disbelieving eyes searched the mindless beads of the eel, more shocked than afraid. "It yet lives again! Did we not grant this creature a hole fit for any man to slide through?!"
I didn't hear him. My heartfire wavered, the tremulous grasp I'd had on healing my patient falling through. Like water slipping through my fingers, I lost control: and all that I'd been holding back came crashing in at once. The mana poisoning, the bloodloss, the venom—each compounded on each other to a devastating tide.
The woman I'd been trying to save shuddered, ember-eyes darkening, before a breath of heartfire left her beak. Gone, her words lost on the wind. The hope I'd begun to feel at her words—that Lithen might be nearby, that he might know of our family—abruptly turned to ashes, compounded by the ever-present loss of a patient. Of not being enough.
I rose slowly, loose and graceful as Chul kept the monster at bay. Any moment now, it would try and electrify him, and then he'd be wounded too. My heartbeat was slow, still steady from my constant efforts to help another. I took a deep breath, feeling empty from my failure.
Then I slammed every ounce of my rage through my regalia, commanding the ambient mana to heed. A massive buildup of white-gold force wrapped around the creature like a fist: before imploding. Bone splintered, scale pulped, and electricity jumped across the vague cloud of my telekinetic pushes. The eel's hiss turned into a choked gurgle. Then I hurled it a hundred feet down the chasm for good measure. Murky, brackish blood splattered in its wake like gallons of swamp oil.
My Integrated magic was a function of my emotions: and my rage was potent as ever. I marched after the trail of blood, struggling to keep my aura in check. Struggling not to clench my fists. I needed to be calm: and if I lost control of myself now, then Ulysseiah and Nerium would know what I truly was.
I found the corpse of the beast in a pile of rubble, splayed out like a whip that had been snapped too many times. The remnants left behind made me think of a water battled that had been crumpled in a fist.
My baleful glare focused on the mana beast's body: and I could finally fill in the phoenix's words, what she'd been about to say on her last breath.
They won't die.
Chul marched up to me, steam rising from his muscles as his sweat evaporated. "What is this abomination?" he demanded, unnerved as he stared at the unmoving corpse. "It is against all that I know, that our foes should rise again after such a defeat. Must we kill this beast again, brother?"
Chul's arrival—and his continuing disguise as a titan—gave me an anchoring point for my anger and situation. I pulled the illusion of a pantheon back over like a heavy cloak, suppressing the rage that had managed to leak past my masks. My hair turned back to an ashen gray, the runes along my arm sputtering out.
"It's not dead," I whispered. "No, it's more like its… asleep."
The strange eel wasn't dead. No: on death, a being's heartfire slowly abandoned them, misting into the atmosphere. But despite the fact that—for all other appearances and senses, the creature lying in the rubble had found its match in the mortal coil—it's heart still pulsed.
I hadn't been able to notice it the first time, too focused on rushing back to heal the phoenix. But as I mastered my rage, I slowly felt more and more unease. It's heartfire—at one point a brilliant, electric green to my sight—was darkening toward something closer to shale. The creature's body was already starting to knit back together in a manner disturbingly similar to my own heartfire healing, the body transforming even more with every part that healed.
Where is it getting the lifeforce for such an act? I thought, disturbed by what I sensed. It shouldn't have enough lifespan for such fast and deliberate healing… But it's as if there's an unending supply.
Chul's brow furrowed with contempt, a mirror to my earlier anger. "If prey can bleed," he growled, marching toward the corpse of the beast, "prey can die."
He stood over toward a massive wound near the heart, took a breath, then thrust his hand deep inside up to his shoulder. The pulsing mass—closer to the surface due to the extreme amount of damage leveraged upon it—was easy to find.
Chul tore out its heart without another word. And even in his hand, the massive organ—partially turned from the healthy pink of normal flesh to a sickly, seaweed black—still beat. With a wave of fire over his hand, he turned it to ash.
I waited for a pregnant moment. Two. Three. The corpse didn't move, and no new heart began to grow.
"Whatever this creature was," I finally said, goosebumps rising along my skin, "it's not getting back up again."
"It's not supposed to be here, it is," a meek voice said from behind us. "It should be far away, in the Boundary Sea. A nimbus eel, this was. But wrong, twisted… It rose again, did it not? That's most wrong, that is."
I turned, inspecting Ulysseiah with hard eyes. The leviathan had left the hovel at some point, making her way here despite the danger outside and above us. She had a haunted expression on her pale face as she stared at the corpse of the mana beast. The young woman clutched at her bone lyre as if it might save her from whatever doom was coming: almost like a child holding to their stuffed toy.
How much did she see? I wondered, inspecting the asura. My disguise fell for a moment as I healed the phoenix, but Wren left to try and waylay any interference.
But the young woman's words caught me on another oddity: one I had lost in the flurry of combat. An eel, in the middle of an arid desert? With bright green patterns and an affinity for water and electric mana?
"A mana beast that's native to the sea," I said at last, "but it was hundreds of miles inland, attacking phoenixes on the wing… And there are more of them assaulting what's left of the Avignises."
That's what the dying phoenix had been trying to warn us about. Naesia Avignis, alongside Lithen, had fought more than one of these creatures, but they'd been overwhelmed, forced to hide in the storm. The hunters had become the hunted.
I thought of all that Ulysseiah had told me as I marched back to the body of the woman I'd failed to save. Visions of fire, blood, storms, and wings. And not long after, the Avignis woman died here. The how of it didn't matter now. How a beast of the sea had trekked so far inland. Why it had such a terrible rage boiling inside. Why Ulysseiah seemed to know more than she should.
What mattered was that Lithen, a member of our flock, was in danger.
Nerium was staring down at the dead phoenix, his dark face unreadable. I'd originally assumed he'd been trying to trace after the Avignises, too, for whatever reason. But he seemed strangely apathetic as he gazed down at the body of what should have been immortal.
I hadn't even learned her name.
"I don't think this is what Arjuna meant when he said he was hunting our dinner," he muttered in incredibly poor taste.
I gently closed the woman's eyes, then turned an iron glare toward the hamadryad. I wondered if I imbued myself with enough irritation, the illusory third eye on my forehead might just open and pin Nerium to the ground, too.
"Relax," he snapped, shuddering from the weight of my aura. His emerald eyes tightened as he took a nervous step backward. "It was a joke."
I let out a huff of steam, then forced my mind away from the hamadryad. I had learned long ago that I couldn't save everyone I sought to heal: but that never made the failures any easier. A heart open to help was just as open to hurt, too.
"I'm going to prepare a place to bury this woman with what respect I can give her," I said irritably. "We can't let scavengers get to her."
Chul stalked over to the body, staring at it with a gentle look that so deeply contrasted Nerium. He knelt, like a colossus bending down to earth, and started to gingerly remove what venom-spines still thrust from the fallen's plumage.
"I failed her once in life," he declared solemnly, his emotions a more open wound than mine. I didn't think he'd failed like this before, like I had so many times, and he struggled not to let tears fall. "Hear my words: we shall indeed see her honored in death."
I hesitated, then reached out a hand, laying it on Chul's back in a comforting gesture. The burly young man worked through the motions, pushing arrow shaft after arrow shaft from the fallen woman.
Ulysseiah finally caught up again, that haunted expression on her face. She looked at the body of the dead phoenix, swallowing mutely as she watched Chul continue his solemn work.
It was not often that an asura died.
The leviathan ran a hand over her lyre, seeming to take strength from the gesture. She took a deep breath in, eying me warily, and I once again worried at what she might have seen in the dark.
"The other phoenixes. They're in danger, they are. We must go after them," Ulysseiah said sharply, surprisingly firm. "It's the only way. It is."
I turned, staring side-eye at the leviathan, having slightly suspected this. It wasn't a prod against my identity, at least: and I could work with this.
"You want answers?" I asked, drumming my fingers across my thigh. "Yes, I think I wish for some too. This woman spoke of other creatures like this assaulting her clan: but we would need to go through the storm, Lady Ulysseiah."
The phoenix had said as much. Her clan was hiding within the confines of the dust storm, probably in a manner not too dissimilar to what we'd been doing here. But Ulysseiah was not strong enough on her own to brave the dust. It was another complication I hadn't anticipated.
"Ulysseiah, I'm sorry… But that's not wise," Nerium spoke out, putting to voice what we were all thinking. His green eyes flickered coldly, lingering on her lyre. "You can't fight, and you'll struggle to move through the dust at all. If it doesn't strip the flesh from your bones, then the mana will seep into your channels from sheer force, poisoning you. Just like this woman suffered from."
The young leviathan turned surprisingly hard eyes on the hamadryad, enough to make his brow raise. "You think I am weak," she accused sharply, her hands clenching into fists. "Yes, you do. And I am. But this is something I must do. I am here seeking answers to my affliction, so that I will not become as my father was. You said you knew him, did you not, Lord Nerium? You saw what he became! The madness took him!"
Nerium had the tact to look abashed, crossing his arms. Chul turned from his macabre work, staring at the young woman with a forlorn face. I felt like I was missing context somewhere… Something that had happened during the fight, when these two were alone?
As if on cue, something padded up to me, nearly unseen in the dark. Wren Kain IV, eminent craftsman of the titan asura, leapt onto my back, his emotions hard as he scurried for shelter. I could sense immediately that he wanted to say something, but he held his tongue.
Ulysseiah whirled on me, and I saw a different side of her than the meek, terrified girl I'd seen so far. "You can't do this without me, either. Can not. Seek though you might through this storm, you shall never find the Avignises. The dust shall blind you, and the ambient mana shall strip you of any other sense. Yet I am Navigator: such things do not hamper me."
Navigator. That word had come up a dozen times, yet I'd been hesitant to ask anything about what it meant because it seemed so commonplace. Using what clues I had, though… Could she track someone based on something other than mana?
"I'd need to protect you though, wouldn't I?" I thought, already considering what it would take to shelter not just Ulysseiah, but everyone else from the storm. "We'd need to move fast, too. Faster than you're used to if we want to be of any help."
But there was a possibility I could get Ulysseiah through the storm: one I hadn't considered before for how unpracticed it was. In my training with Mordain, he'd begun to teach me the foundational techniques of one specific ability: one designed to restrict and dominate the world around me.
It wasn't something I truly wanted: Ulysseiah would be in constant danger if she accompanied us. But she had a point about my lacking ability to track through the storm. Any blood or mana trails that the Avignis would have left would have been torn apart.
"I am the greatest Navigator this generation has seen," Ulysseiah said, her voice proud and will strong. "A storm shall not bar my sight."
Chul finally stood, done with his grim work. He looked at the blood on his hands, watching how it stretched up even to his brass vambraces. He said nothing, but a single look told me that he had my back in everything. He would fight that much harder to avenge this woman we'd failed to save.
Nerium's expression, though, was dark. Clearly unhappy: something that clashed deeply with what I'd expected of him. He truly didn't want to follow after the Avignises after all, did he? He smoothed his features over too quickly for me to catch any more.
"This still isn't the smartest thing to do," he said, though his tone was resigned. "Make that grave. I'll leave a marker that will ward away whatever tries to get to the body."
I walked away, clenching and unclenching my fists. "It won't take five minutes," I promised, even as Wren scampered up near to my ear to whisper something important. "We'll find these phoenixes."