Soren's eyes drifted away from the vial, peering even deeper into the wreckage, and there, tucked beneath the shattered seat of the wagon was a cylinder that looked to have been made out of heavy, black lead.
He knew what it was.
The Courier's Vault!
A leaden cylindrical vessel the size of an extra-large flask, used only for the most sensitive, "Oath-Bound" communications between the Shamans and the Chief, or more sensitive information from sources outside the tribe.
Only the Head Shaman could seal these. They carried the "Will of the Ignis."
The Grave-Stalker shifted, its bone-scythe limbs clicking against the frozen ground, snapping Soren out of his thoughts.
Soren knew he couldn't fight it. He was a seven-year-old boy whose muscles were held together by spite and toxins.
But he also knew he needed to move in now that it was distracted, intoxicated by the potent blood of the captain.
However, movement in the Wastelands was a language in of its own, and the Grave-Stalker was one, if not its most attentive listener.
He knew he needed a distraction, however the nearest thing he could use to cause one was about ten yards away.
Knowing this, Soren began to inch his way closer towards the edge of the clearing, moving with the silent, desperate fluidity of a shadow, and whenever the creature's milky eyes spun in their sockets, He became as still as stone.
Minutes felt like years before Soren finally reached the fringes of the clearing. He reached into the mud, his fingers closing around a heavy, jagged piece of flint.
He didn't throw it at the beast; he wasn't that stupid.
He threw it at the far side of the clearing, aiming for a cluster of dry, hollow reeds that grew near a stagnant pool.
CLACK.
The sound was sharp and unnatural.
Instantly, the Grave-Stalker's head snapped up, its spinning eyes fixing on the source of the noise.
With a speed that sounded like the firing of a massive crossbow, the creature launched itself across the clearing, covering the distance in a single, terrifying leap that left deep gouges in the earth.
Now!
Soren moved. He didn't run. He lunged in a low, gaunt slide, his belly scraping the dirt.
He used the "glass-floor" vision to find the path of least resistance, his body a blur of gray and pale violet.
He reached the captain's body, his fingers closing around the cool, smooth jade of the vial.
But he didn't stop there. He lunged for the wagon, his body disappearing into the wreckage.
Then while the Grave-Stalker was still occupied with its hunt for the source of the unnatural noise, Soren used his paring knife to delicately slice the wagon's leather strap holding the vault.
However, the moment it came free, Soren had swiftly caught the falling edge of the cylinder, but he had misjudged the weight of its content, and as such, the upper edge hit the limestone ground.
~Clack~
The response was instantaneous. The air seemed to freeze, as the Grave-Stalker turned. Its dozen eyes locked onto the small, wagon wreckage.
~Crrawww-klklklkl~
The Grave-Stalker realized the deception, and let out a piercing, ultrasonic shriek that made Soren's ears bleed.
It sounded like the cry of a crow and clicking of an arachnid, and with impossible agility, it hooked the curve of his two limbs and swirled like a stripper on a pole, changing direction, and lunging toward the child who was holding its prize.
As Soren gripped the Courier's Vault, his finger brushed a pool of leaked Ignis Fire-Oil; the chemical smell momentarily overpowering his senses, causing him to be too slow in his escape.
The creature returned, but Soren was now standing in the center of the Fire-Oil spill; one can is full, and the other half-empty.
Acting on a primal, suicidal impulse, he held the vial between his teeth as he struck his rusted paring knife against the bronze breastplate of the dead Captain.
SPARK.
And then;
Kaboom!
The Fire-Oil didn't just ignite; it erupted.
A wall of orange and blue flame roared into the air, fed by the high-grade chemical of the Inner Guard.
The Grave-Stalker, a creature of the absolute dark, let out a howl of pure agony as the heat seared its sensitive chitin and the blinding light burned its multiple eyes.
However, as an apex predator, its adaptability was logic-defying.
It shut its eyes instantly, switching to seismic tracking, as it lunged madly at the light tapping sound retreating speedily from it.
Soren didn't think. He threw the leaking flask of Fire-Oil into the still burning fuel of the previous explosion.
BOOM!
The world turned orange once again, this time the shockwave from the explosion slammed into Soren's chest, throwing him backward.
The Fire-Oil, designed for elite tribal warfare, roared into a wall of chemical flame that reached for the sky.
The Grave-Stalker shrieked—a high, glass-shattering sound—as the explosion disturbed its seismic echolocation and the heat singed its multi-jointed legs.
Soren didn't dare wait to see the result. He scrambled into the smoke, and dove into the thick ferns, his charcoal hide fluttering behind him like the wings of a scavenger.
He sprinted back toward the limestone ridge, not daring to look back, even as his lungs screamed and his breath felt like they were filled with hot sand.
Exhaustion blurred the violet lines of his vision into a smear of grey, yet he climbed the limestone ridge with a strength he didn't know he possessed, fueled by the "Golden Heat" that had flared in his blood at the sight of the fire.
Soren didn't walk back to the Hunter's Perch; he dragged himself. His small frame was a map of agony; every breath was a jagged blade in his lungs, and the Tranquil Poison—agitated by the life-or-death struggle—was no longer simmering; it was boiling.
He neither stopped nor looked back until he reached the mouth of his cave where he collapsed onto the grit, his chest heaving, his ash-gray hair matted with sweat and soot.
The stone floor of the cave was cold, but to his feverish skin, it felt like ice. He lay there for a long time, his vision swimming in shades of bruised purple and grey, his heart hammering against his ribs like a trapped bird.
He should have died.
By every law of the Ignis Tribe, a seven-year-old "Void Soul" with a failing heart had no business surviving a night in the Forgotten Forest, let alone a confrontation with a Gravestalker.
Yet, as he lay there, he felt a strange, stubborn heat radiating from his marrows. It was a silent, defiant pulse that refused to let the darkness take him.
His violet eyes were burning with a fever that was no longer just the poison.
He could tell that if he didn't rest them after the strenuous agitation he just put them through, then he might actually go blind; so, he shut them and tried to rest for a bit.
Minutes, or perhaps hours later, Soren forced his eyes open; on the surface, the burned like he hadn't slept in weeks, while the nerves attached to them felt more like a swollen muscle.
Nonetheless, his fingers, trembling with exhaustion, clawed at the dirt until they touched the cold, leaden surface of the cylinder he had scavenged from the carriage, and the vial beside it.
The jade vial of elixir was cool against his palm, and the possible secrets the lead cylinder may hold made it heavier that it appeared.
Outside, the wind howled through the limestone fissures, but inside the cave, the air was unnaturally still, and so, Soren crawled toward the back of the cave; the fire he had left earlier now nothing but a bed of red coals.
Dripping a drop of oil from the filled Fire-Oil can onto it;
~Whoosh~
The flame reignited and surged with a much milder explosion, its flame highlighting the sunken hollows of his cheeks and the ghostly, ash-gray strands of hair that clung to his damp forehead.
He was a seven-year-old boy sitting in a cave, yet the way he looked at the Courier's Vault was not with the curiosity of a child, but with the cold, calculating gaze of a scavenger who had found the throat of his enemy.
He crawled himself to a sit, the echo of the Grave-Stalker's shriek still ringing in his head. The Tranquil Poison in his veins was thrumming, a low-frequency vibration that made his teeth ache.
The encounter with the Grave-Stalker and the subsequent adrenaline surge had pushed the thirty venoms to a new level of agitation, and they were demanding a new "feast" to replace the fading essence of the Shadow-Cat.
Placing the lead cylinder on his lap, it felt like a dead weight; its surface etched with the Tribe's runes of Binding and Absolution.
Ignoring the tremors in his hands, Soren picked up his rusted paring knife, its blade was still stained with a mixture of his own black ichor and the charcoal soot of the fire-oil explosion.
~Chink. Chink. Chink~
He began to chip away at the violet wax seal; his eyes fixed on the weeping eye of the Head Shaman.
To the Tribe, that seal represented the voice of the Gods, but to Soren, it had always represented the source of his misery.
The wax was hard, tempered with spiritual energy, and it resisted the dull iron of the knife with a stubborn, silent strength.
With every strike, Soren felt a phantom pulse of resistance, a spiritual "ward" designed to alert the sender if the seal was broken.
It kept sending small shocks of energy up his arm, but the Tranquil Poison in his fingertips acted like an acid. It didn't just break the ward; it devoured it.
The lead gave way with a soft, pressurized hiss, as if the cylinder were exhaling a secret it had held for a thousand years.
Soren reached inside and pulled out two distinct scrolls of Soul-Bound Silk.
Their materials were cool to the touch, shimmering with a faint, iridescent light that didn't come from the fire.
This was a medium reserved for the highest echelons of the Tribe; it was silk harvested from spiders that dwelt in the ancestral tombs.
As Soren unrolled the first silk, his breath hitched.
He began to read, his eyes moving across the silk with a frantic, desperate speed.
The pale violet of his irises darkening gradually; his pupils constricting until they were nothing more than pinpricks of black glass.
The texts were written in the Head Shaman's jagged, arrogant script. It was a report addressed to a "Greater House" beyond the Tribe's borders, a certain Elder of the Eden Clan.
He read of the Night of the Gray Flame; the night he was born. In the public records, that night was a tragedy of omens. But the scroll told a different story.
It spoke of a "Transaction of Blood" made with an entity only known as the Withered Hand, and it read;
--------
"The Princess's life is extinguished, but the seal she placed upon the whelp remains a nuisance.
The first and second doses merged at age five, yet the boy's heart refuses to stop. We suspect is a genetic anomaly from an 'Unknown Factor' possibly from his paternal bloodline.
We provided the third dose to the Matron now and ensured the Tribe's Body Tempering Elixir is the carrier. Perhaps, this time, once the boy has consumed it, the seal will shatter from the inside out.
He is not a son of the Ignis; he is a 'Karmic Sinkhole' created by design to ensure your Patriarch's line ends with him.
-------
However, the next part of the scroll's contents, burned into Soren's mind like acid:
-------
"Nonetheless, the child remains the perfect filter. His constitution, though troublesome, is strong and adaptive enough to hold the concentrated filth of the Ancestral Toxins.
By seeding him with the Tranquil Poison we do not merely cast away the 'Karmic Sinkhole' of the tribe; we refine it.
As he survives each year, the poison matures, feeding on his life-force and transmuting into the Elixir of Longevity.
On the day of his final breath, we shall harvest the 'Purified Essence' from his marrow.
Your Lordship's reign shall be eternal, bought with the scrap-meat of a son who was never meant to grown into a man."
--------
Soren let the silk fall to the dirt. The "Void" in his chest; that cold, empty space that had defined his seven years of existence, suddenly ignited.
It wasn't the heat of the fire or the warmth of the meat. It was the white-hot roar of a furnace. A low, guttural growl escaped his throat, a sound that vibrated through the limestone floor.