Location: The Shattered Valley in Ettinsmoor, The Wild Lands of the North | Year: 8003 A.A.
It is a strange and terrible thing, the first time you see a friend become something else. Not change, the way people change when they grow older or sadder or wiser—but become, the way a candle becomes a fire, the way a spark becomes an inferno. The world returned to Iltaz in fragments, and each fragment was worse than the last.
First came the pain. A piercing, insistent throbbing behind his eyes that seemed to beat in time with his heart. Then came the sounds: the crackle of something burning that was not wood, the distant rumble of stone collapsing under its own weight, the high keening of wind through a landscape that no longer resembled anything natural—or anything that wanted to be natural.
He opened his eyes slowly, blinking against the haze of dust and smoke that filled the air like a second weather. The sky above him was visible through great rents torn in the grey fabric of cloud, and through those rents he could see stars. Stars in the afternoon. Stars that had no business being visible and yet blazed down with a cold, indifferent light, as if they had been waiting for the clouds to part and were not particularly surprised that they had.
'Where…'
He tried to sit up, and his muscles protested with the shrill, insistent voices of things that had been asked to do too much. His head swam. The last thing he remembered was the seal—the blue light, the compulsion that had seized his mind like a hand closing around a bird, the amber flash of Trevor's spell that had knocked him into darkness.
'Trevor.'
His eyes found the source of the light. And stopped.
I must tell you that Iltaz had seen many things in his young life. He had been raised in the Shadow's fortress, had trained under the Golgev, had fought a Grand Lord in a dim corridor and walked away alive. But what he saw now was unlike anything he had ever witnessed.
The explosion of mana that erupted from Trevor Maymum's body was not controlled. It was not shaped or directed or aimed. It was simply power. Raw. Unfiltered. Absolute. The shockwave that burst from the ape's crouched form was laced with a heat that Iltaz felt in his soul before he felt it on his skin, a fire unlike any flame he had ever sensed or imagined. His very soul felt scourged simply by being near it, the way a man's eyes feel scourged by looking at the sun.
The shockwave of fire expanded outward in a ring of devastation, and Iltaz watched—helpless, horrified, transfixed—as Verliss's protective wards shattered like glass. The serpent tracient stared at her hands, and her face was the face of someone who has just discovered that everything she believed about herself was wrong. Her scales were cracked and blackened, curling at the edges like old parchment. The necklace with the Filtisi smoked and sparked and burned out against her throat, and black veins spread across her scales like cracks in ice, reaching for her collarbone and her jaw and her wide, staring eyes.
Thagros was blown back through a cliff wall. The massive elephant was hurled through solid stone as if it were parchment, as if it were mist, as if it were nothing at all. His trunk and his body and his thick, granite-colored hide sizzled with the residue of that impossible fire, and even with the dense reinforcement of mana that coated his form like armor, his eyes were wide with a shock that went beyond pain and into something older.
The seal was burning. Iltaz watched—and this, perhaps, was the strangest thing of all—as the blue-glowing lines that had pinned Adam to the earth flickered and smoked and dissolved, the way frost dissolves when the sun finally rises. The clock face at its center, that terrible instrument that had been counting down to the end of the Kurt line, shattered into motes of fading light that drifted upward through the torn clouds and were gone.
And in the center of the storm, where the fire was thickest and the power most concentrated, Trevor Maymum knelt. But it was not the Trevor that Iltaz had faced in the corridor of Aethelburg. It was not the Trevor who had defeated him with a smile and a staff and a gentle, mocking word. This creature's fur was red now—not tinted red or shaded red, but red. The color of blood fresh from the vein. The color of fire at its hottest core, the fire that burns at the heart of a forge and never goes out.
The white of his eyes had turned to black—not the black of shadow, but the black of the void between stars, the black of a darkness that has never known light. His irises burned a deep, molten yellow, like the hearts of the stars that were now visible through the shattered sky. And his pupils were the same blood red as his fur, three colors in a face that was no longer a face but a mask of something older and stranger.
He was beautiful. The thought came to Iltaz unbidden and unwelcome and undeniably true. There was a terrible beauty in that transformation, the beauty of a forest fire that sweeps through a dry valley, the beauty of a volcanic eruption that paints the sky in shades of orange and black. It was the beauty of something that could not be stopped and could not be reasoned with and did not care whether you thought it was beautiful or not.
The shockwave kept pushing outward and growing stronger, the entire valley trembling under its onslaught the way a beaten drum trembles under the drummer's hands. The ground beneath Iltaz cracked and split. The air itself seemed to scream—not the scream of a living thing, but the scream of a world that was being asked to endure more than it could bear.
Then came a familiar distortion. Jarik's rune blazed into existence beneath Thagros and Verliss, that ugly and efficient purple sigil that tore holes in the world rather than bothering with doors. The rabbit must have been watching from somewhere safe—somewhere far away, somewhere the fire could not reach. The rune flared once and twice, and the two Golgev vanished, ripped from the valley before the flames could scourge them further, before the thing that Trevor had become could turn its full attention upon them.
Iltaz was alone. Alone with the fire. Alone with the thing that had once been Trevor Maymum and was now something else entirely. And he was afraid, and he was not ashamed to admit it.
Adam started moving. You must picture this carefully, for it is the most important part. The blindfold was gone—burned away by the shockwave and the heat and the sheer proximity to a power that unmade everything it touched. His eyes, the eyes of mana, the eyes that could see the truth of all things, were open and fixed on the kneeling figure before him. His cloak burned away as he walked, the ocean-blue fabric curling and blackening and falling from his shoulders in strips of ash that drifted upward on the thermals of that impossible heat. His fur singed at the edges, the blue darkening to black at the tips. Any other Tracient who was not a Grand Lord would have been vaporized in that proximity, reduced to atoms and scattered on the wind.
He did not stop.
Trevor looked up as Adam approached. A snarl tore from his throat—not a human sound, not a monkey sound, but something older than either, animal and warning and full of a fury that had been buried for centuries. It was a sound that should have sent any sane creature fleeing, and Adam did not flee. He kept walking, one step at a time, his bare feet pressing into the glassed and smoking stone, until he stood before the inferno that had once been his best friend.
Then he knelt. The heat was supposed to be unbearable—was designed to be unbearable, was fueled by a rage that could have melted mountains. But Adam ignored it. He reached out with his blue-furred hands, and he placed them on Trevor's cheeks, and the red fur was hot beneath his palms. Hot enough to hurt. Hot enough to burn. But Adam did not pull away. He held Trevor's face in his hands the way you might hold a wounded bird, gently and firmly and without any trace of fear, and he looked into those terrible, beautiful eyes—the black, the yellow, the red—and he saw.
"It is okay, Trevor," he said, and his voice was soft, the sort of soft that is louder than any shout. "It is okay."
Trevor trembled. The red fur rippled like the surface of a lake when a stone is dropped into it. The flames that had been roaring around him flickered and guttered and dimmed, the way a candle dims when someone cups a hand around it.
"I see you," Adam continued, and his thumbs traced gentle circles on Trevor's cheekbones, tracing patterns in the fur that was still hot enough to scorch. "I finally see you."
Trevor tried to shake his head—a jerky, desperate motion, as if he were fighting something inside himself that was stronger than he was. When he spoke, his voice was not his own. It was layered and resonant. "We... hurt..." The words came out in fragments, broken and jagged. "Hurt... you... Adam... hurt by... Us..."
"No." Adam's voice was firm and absolute and brooked no argument. "You can never hurt me. Not really. Not where it matters." He leaned closer, and his forehead touched Trevor's—blue fur against red, cool against hot, calm against fury. "All you have ever done has been for your friends. For your family. For me. Every risk, every sacrifice, every moment of pain—you took it so that others would not have to."
Tears traced down Trevor's transformed face. They were tears of fire and tears of molten light, and they left trails of steam on his red cheeks that rose into the torn sky like prayers. "I am so sorry," Adam whispered, and his voice cracked on the words, "that you had to reach this edge because of me." He paused, and the silence was full of things that could not be said. "But I see you now, Trevor. I see all of you. And I am not afraid."
The shockwave stopped. It did not fade or diminish or retreat—it simply ceased, as if the energy that had been powering it had found a different purpose, as if the rage that had driven it had been offered something it wanted more than destruction.
Trevor's fur faded from red to brown, the way the sky fades from sunset to dusk. The flames sank back into his skin, and his eyes shifted from that terrible trinity of black and yellow and red to the warm, familiar amber that Adam had known for a thousand years. He lowered his head, and his shoulders shook, and the sound that came from him was a sob. Adam pulled him into an embrace, holding him close against his chest, feeling the tremors that ran through his friend's body like aftershocks from an earthquake. After a long while—a very long while, though neither of them was counting—Trevor looked up. His eyes met Adam's, and they were red-rimmed and raw and full of a vulnerability that he had never allowed anyone to see.
"I am sorry," he said, and his voice was hoarse and broken. "I should have tried harder to control it."
Adam smiled. It was a gentle smile and an understanding smile, and it held no judgment and no fear and no pity. "You have nothing to apologize for." He brushed a strand of singed hair from Trevor's forehead, and the gesture was impossibly tender. "You are beautiful the way you are."
Trevor closed his eyes. And kissed him. Adam's eyes widened—just for a moment, just a flicker of surprise that was there and gone—and then he softened into the kiss, his hand moving to cup the back of Trevor's head and hold him close, the way you hold something precious that you have almost lost and will not lose again. The world around them—the shattered valley and the smoking stone and the stars that blazed through the torn clouds—faded into insignificance, the way the background of a painting fades when you look at the faces in the foreground. There was only this. Only them.
Iltaz, watching from a safe distance with his back against a broken boulder, simply smiled. It was a small smile and a tired smile, but it was genuine, and it carried with it something that he had not felt in a very long time. It was hope—the quiet, stubborn, unreasonable hope that the world might be worth saving after all.
***
Location: The Shadow's Fortress, The Wild Lands of the North | An Hour Later
The chamber was dark. Not the ordinary darkness of a room with the candles snuffed out, nor the temporary darkness of a cloud passing over the moon. This was the kind of darkness that pressed against the walls, that filled the corners like old dust, that seemed to breathe with its own slow and patient rhythm—the darkness of a place that had forgotten what light looked like and had stopped caring.
Thagros lay sprawled on the cold stone floor, and his massive form trembled with the aftershocks of his ordeal the way a mountain trembles after an earthquake has passed. His trunk, still sizzling in places where Trevor's fire had kissed it, lay limp against the ground like a rope that had been dropped by the hand that held it. His eyes were open and staring at the ceiling, but they did not truly see the ceiling. They saw the fire. They saw the seal breaking. They saw the red-furred thing that had risen from the crater and unmade everything around it.
Beside him, Verliss was in no better state. Her serpentine form was curled tight as a fern before it unfurls, and her scales were cracked and weeping a thin, clear fluid that might have been lymph or might have been something else entirely. Her silks had been reduced to charred tatters that clung to her body like the memory of clothes, and the black veins that had spread from the Filtisi jewel had reached her jaw and her cheekbones and the corner of her mouth, tracing patterns on her face that looked like a map of some dark and troubled country.
"What were you two even thinking?!"
Movark's voice cut through the chamber like a blade, and it was not the sardonic, drawling voice he usually employed. That voice would have been unsettling enough. This one was raw and sharp and full of something that might, in another context and another creature, have been called panic. He was beside Verliss now, his slender, clawed hands holding hers with a gentleness that seemed entirely at odds with his form.
"Please." Verliss's voice was a thin whisper, the sort of whisper that costs more than a shout. "It was my idea. Thagros was only helping me."
Movark's grip tightened. Not painfully, but with a desperate urgency that made his claws dimple the skin of her hands. "You should have asked me for help, Verliss." His red eyes were bright with something that might have been fear, or might have been anger, or might have been the terrible realization that he had almost lost something he had not known he valued. "You are a Golgev, yes, but your strength lies in support. In being the mind behind the blade, not the blade itself." He touched her cheek, and she winced at the contact—the black veins were tender, it seemed, and the touch of a claw was more than they could bear. "Why did you have to stick your neck out like this?"
Tigerra stood a few feet away, her silver and black fur bristling, her arms crossed over her chest. The scowl etched onto her mechanical faceplate was deeper than usual, carved there by a mixture of contempt and something that looked, from a certain angle, like grudging concern. "What exactly did this to you?" she demanded, and her voice was the cold, flat voice of someone who has already calculated seventeen different ways the conversation could go and is prepared for all of them. "Adam broke out of a celestial trap and burned you both in doing so?"
Thagros stirred. His massive head turned toward the mechanical predator with a slowness that spoke of pain carefully managed, of a body that had been pushed far beyond its limits and was only continuing by the grace of sheer, stubborn will. "This was not done by the Blue Wolf."
Tigerra's green-yellow eyes narrowed, the irises contracting to pinpoints. "Then who?"
"Let me guess."
Jarik's voice cut through the tension the way a knife cuts through a knot. The pink-furred rabbit stood near the Shadow's throne, his charcoal-grey suit immaculate despite the chaos of the day—he must have changed, or perhaps he simply refused to allow the chaos to touch him—and his ever-present smile was fixed firmly in place. It was not quite his usual smile. There was something tighter about it, something more watchful.
"The monkey turned wild," he said, ticking off points on his fingers with the air of a lecturer reviewing a particularly interesting case study. "Red as lava, I presume? Explosions everywhere? A general sense of 'oh no, we have made a terrible mistake'?"
Everyone turned to face him. The silence that followed was the sort of silence that confirms everything.
"We have all had our own curious experiences with the primate," Jarik continued, and his smile widened by a fraction—the smile of someone who has just had a theory confirmed and is not entirely happy about it. "It seems he is not what we think he is. Not merely a Grand Lord. Something older, perhaps. Something that has been sleeping for a very long time and has only just begun to stir."
A growl reverberated through the room. It was low and deep and resonant, the kind of sound that made the stones themselves tremble in their settings, the kind of sound that you felt in your chest before you heard it with your ears. Everyone shut up. The growl came from Zuberi. The great dragon stood at the head of the chamber, his crimson scales gleaming dully in the dim light, his jade whiskers swaying with each slow and measured breath like seaweed in a deep current. His amethyst eyes—those ancient, sorrowful eyes that had seen the world born and would see it die—were fixed on the Shadow with an intensity that was almost physical.
And the Shadow... I must tell you that the Shadow was not at his best. He sprawled in his throne like a puppet whose strings had been cut, his grey hooded cape draped over the armrest like shed skin. His face was pale beneath the white fur—paler than usual, paler than healthy—and his breathing was shallow and rapid, the breathing of someone who has run a very long race and is not yet sure he has finished it. He coughed, and the sound was wet and rattling, and when he lowered his hand from his mouth there was blood on his lips. Dark blood, the color of old wine.
"The Grand Lords," he said, and his voice was weak but still carried that edge of cold authority, "are a greater threat than I anticipated. It seems every one of them has been touched by celestial interference." He coughed again, and the blood on his lips was joined by fresh drops. "For Maymum, however... it appears to run deeper. Much deeper."
Jarik rushed to his side, steadying him with a hand on his shoulder. The rabbit's usual smirk had been replaced by something that looked, startlingly, like genuine concern. "Master. You should rest. The more you engage in battles, the greater the toll on your body. The Kavram form—even incomplete—extracts a price that cannot be paid indefinitely. You know this. We have discussed this."
"Listen to your pets, Vulpine."
The voice came from the far end of the room—from the deepest shadows, where even the chamber's dim light did not reach, where the darkness seemed to gather and thicken like old blood. "You are in no shape to be handling affairs of state."
The Golgev turned as one toward the sound. Two prongs of light emerged from the darkness first—the tines of a trident, a golden trident, its core crystal pulsing with a blood-red light that seemed to beat like a second heart. The weapon was massive, easily as tall as a man, and the figure that held it was silhouetted behind it, shrouded in shadow and suggestion and the promise of violence.
"It appears your escapades with the Aryas and the Aktil rune have left you in a pickle," the voice continued, and a deep, rumbling chuckle underlay each word like a bass note under a melody. "And your scheme to keep the big, hairy lion out of the world might be crumbling. Crumbling, Vulpine. After all these years. After all that careful planning."
The trident's wielder stepped forward—just enough for the light to catch the edge of a massive shoulder, the sharp curve of a shark's fin, the glint of an eye that held no pupil, only reflection, only the flat and pitiless surface of a mirror that had seen too much to be surprised by anything.
"From now on," the figure said, and the words were not a suggestion, "you focus on actually stopping the big guy's intervention. That is your purpose. That is your only purpose. You were given power for a reason, Vulpine. It is time you remembered what that reason was." The trident swung through the air, pointing toward the Golgev like an accusing finger, and the blood-red light at its core blazed brighter. "And I will deal with the Narn Lords."
The beast chuckled—a low, rolling sound that seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere at once, from the walls and the floor and the darkness between the stars. "Is that fine with you, little fox?"
The Shadow's eyes fixed on the figure in the darkness. His jaw tightened, the muscles working beneath the white fur. His hands curled into fists on the armrests of his throne, the knuckles going pale, the claws digging grooves in the ancient stone. But he did not speak. He did not dare.
The beast chuckled again, and the sound followed the Golgev as they filed from the chamber—Movark supporting Verliss with an arm around her waist, Tigerra stalking ahead with her mechanical limbs whirring softly, Jarik lingering for just a moment to glance back at his master with an expression that was very difficult to read. They carried their wounded and nursed their pride and wondered, each in their own way, what manner of creature the Shadow had unleashed upon the world, and whether they would live to regret the day they had first heard that low and rumbling chuckle in the dark.