Pirin, Myraden, and the Familiars ran to the top of a hill. The Aremir family palace glimmered in the distance, perching atop a butte. Golden torchlight glowed in its windows and braziers, turning the great hall gold in the fading light of the day.

But Pirin couldn’t help but look west, back toward the tent village of celebration guests. People ran along the packed mud paths, streaming away from the tents and trying to get as far from it as they could.

At the center of the village, two Wildflames fought.

Powerful techniques clashed in the center of the village. A wireframe outline of a bat, constructed entirely out of emerald green blood, smashed into pulses of wind and air. They struck with enough force to blast away the surrounding tents, shredding the tarps into dust and cracking the wooden supports and frames.

There were two man-shaped forms. Pirin wouldn’t have been able to make out their details before enhancing his body, but now his eyes could see perfectly—with or without his glasses. Lord One wore leather armour and the white-and-green fabrics of his family. His horse stood beside him. It didn’t take a genius to identify him.

A different man stood across from him. This man wore tattered, dark pants and nothing else. Long brown hair streamed down his back, and a bat perched on his shoulder. He stomped his foot down and unleashed a wave of the green blood-like substance. This time, it had no form—only an uncontained blast of pure destruction. It tore through the dirt, carving a deep trench before blasting into a distant hill and shredding it.

He activated his spiritual sight. The green substance looked like Essence, but something else wrapped it. It was twisting and combining two elements of the natural world.

“Who’s that?” Pirin whispered.

Myraden tugged him down the hill further, pulling him out of sight of the duelling masters. “The man with the horse is Lord One. I do not know who the bat-wizard is.”

Pirin pressed his hands down on the ground. They trembled with anticipation.

You want that strength, don’t you? Gray asked.

“Of course I do,” Pirin whispered back.

And he knew exactly what to do to get it. He turned toward the palace. As he watched, a chunk of dirt and stone blasted off across the sky, whipping into the palace and smashing through the roof of one of the outer wings.

“If they destroy that place, we’re never getting the Ichor-ink,” Pirin said. Already, Aremir wizards scurried around it like ants protecting an anthill. Some ran across the fields, trying to contain the damage, and some climbed up to the roof to protect it from debris.

“Go fast,” Myraden said. “The palace guards are distracted. Now is our chance!”

They sprinted down the side of the slope and raced toward the palace. As they ran, Pirin swung up onto Gray’s saddle. It was dark enough that Gray wouldn’t stand out against the sky, but even if she did, he doubted any of the guards were paying attention to that now. “I’ll meet you at the top of the causeway!” he yelled.

Gray took flight. She and Pirin stayed low, fluttering over the fields and rising up to avoid the hills. Wind buffeted Pirin from the side, but it wasn’t a technique as far as he could tell. Just a gust of wind.

They shot through the air toward the causeway. Another distant technique scoured a hill clean of mud and sent a spattering of boulders through the air. Pirin and Gray swerved right, then pulled down.

An Aremir wizard shot a blast of air up, almost like Pirin’s Winged Fist, but he was aiming at a boulder, not Pirin. The blast of air struck the boulder hard enough to make it crack. Another wizard blasted it with a condensed column of air. Glowing manes appeared on their arms for a brief moment before fading away as vented Essence.

The boulder shattered into a thousand pieces. Pirin, with his mask on and his Reyad still active, pushed out a wave of wind in front of them to shield them from the gravel shrapnel. The gust of wind blew the stones off-course.

Gray, with her enhanced body, was almost twice as fast as she had been without it. They reached the causeway of the Aremir palace in a half-minute, and Pirin dismounted immediately. Two Aremir guards stood on the causeway, sitting atop their horses. They were both Flares (at least, they radiated the same strength as Pirin’s core), but they didn’t have any visible enhancement marks from a Flare enhancement. He concentrated, applying his spiritual sight, and looked into their cores. He couldn’t see them as well as he could perceive his own, but they both had four or five Timbers.

They obviously weren’t the most powerful members of the clan.

Pirin dipped his head to them. “Sorry, sirs, but I must enter. Please step aside.”

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The two guards laughed. Pirin dipped his head. Another boom resounded in the distance as the two Wildflames clashed. A green flash lit up the sky.

Pirin nudged his mask higher up on his face, and Gray spread her wings behind him.

They could take these two wizards.

One charged, urging his horse forward with a click of his tongue. Pirin conjured his wind cloak over himself and slipped between them, bolstering his speed and pushing him faster in whichever direction he needed to. He slipped around the first rider and blasted a Winged Fist into the horse’s leg. Bone snapped, and the horse reared. Pirin reached up and swatted the rider off with his sword, then spun around to defend a jab from the other guard.

He and Gray worked together, spinning and slashing and striking the guards without taking a single hit themselves. Gray fluttered her wings, creating gales, or striking one of the guards, and Pirin ducked into the openings she created. He knocked one horse and rider pair off the edge of the causeway, sending them falling a hundred feet to the ground. They’d live, but they wouldn’t make it back up any time soon.

Before they could finish off the other guard, an arc of crimson bloodhorn Essence shot toward the second guard, launching him back into the wall—and hard. He collapsed, unmoving.

Myraden and Kythen trotted up the causeway. Myraden held her spear off to the side, and the haft glowed red with bloodhorn Essence.

The gates locked from the inside, but when Myraden pushed on the thick wooden doors and Pirin hacked through the center beam with a swipe of his sword, the doors swung open.

“Could’ve had a stronger door,” Pirin muttered.

“This was not always Lord One’s home,” Myraden said, dismounting from Kythen marching into the foyer. They stepped into an open hall with hanging chandeliers and a flagstone floor. Wooden pillars lined the edges, and hay lay scattered across the floor. A few mortal workers shuffled Aremir family banners away to safety, but none of them paid attention to Pirin or Myraden—or were brave enough to stand in their way.

“What was it, then?” Pirin asked. He kept his sword out, but he took off his mask. If someone ambushed them in the halls of the palace, he wanted to be ready to unleash a powerful attack.

As they walked down the center of the hall, Myraden said, “It was once the hall of a mortal Plainsparan lord. The Aremir family only took over this palace when the Dominion invaded.”

“Plainspar was one of the Eight Kingdoms, right?” Pirin asked.

“Yes.”

“And the Eight Kingdoms all had a wizard-king before the Dominion took them over?”

“Yes. This isn’t the old palace of the Plainsparan wizard-king. That is further inland, and it belongs to a mortal governor-king now.”

“I see…” If this was what a palace of a minor lord would have looked like, he couldn’t help but wonder what a prairie king’s palace would look like.

But they had bigger concerns.

“Any idea where the Ichor-ink would be?” Pirin asked. They reached the end of the hall, where a smaller corridor led into the rest of the palace. There were no windows, only sparsely-lit candle sconces. It branched, with some stairways leading up and some down, and some hallways just paving straight ahead.

“If this was once the palace of a mortal lord, it would have a cellar,” Myraden said. “That would be the most logical place to keep something as valuable as Ichor-ink.”

When they reached the next stairway, they turned and ran down. If it was anywhere, it would be deep.

“It’s valuable because of its ability to raise up wizards, yeah?” Pirin said. “Then why not just use it all when they get it? Or make it. Whatever they’re doing.”

“The Emperor maintains strict control over all Ichor-ink,” Myraden said. “All Ichor supplies in general. His imperial house has kept refineries hidden away from the Unbound Lords for centuries. Why would you use something so valuable, so rare, on a wizard who has not shown much promise?”

Pirin nodded. It made enough sense. He led the way down the staircase, holding his sword ahead of him.

At the bottom of the stairway, they found a Flare-stage guard, so they must have been getting close. The stairs were too tight to fit two people side-by-side, so Pirin was alone against the wizard, but it didn’t matter. This wizard hadn’t even enhanced his body yet. Pirin used a couple fast Shattered Palms to stun him, blocked a sword swipe, then delivered another Shattered Palm to launch him back into the opposite wall.

Myraden restrained him, and Pirin used the Whisper Hitch to view his memories. He slid his mask onto his face to stabilize his Essence and activate the technique first try.

Pirin wished he had brought Göttrur with him to help him parcel out the memories and search for what he needed easier, but even without it, there was no need to be subtle. He demanded of the guard: Where is the cellar? Where are you keeping the Ichor-ink?

The guard’s eyes widened and the gray orb of his mind wobbled, trying to destabilize, wrenching itself out of Pirin’s grip. But Pirin braced it with a wave of pure Essence and held it steady.

Whether he wanted to or not, the guard started thinking about the storage vault. It was at the end of the hall, two turns down. There were usually two Blazes guarding it, but right now, there were only Flares—the Blazes had been called up to defend the palace.

Pirin struck the guard on the top of the head with the pommel of his sword. He and Myraden ran to the end of the hall, holding their weapons in front of them, then took the two turns that the guard’s memory had described.

Here, the corridors were just tall enough for a horse to trot through, and wide enough for two people to walk side-by-side. When they reached the two Flare-stage guards, they each attacked one. In ten seconds, Pirin’s target slumped down to the ground, and Myraden’s fell a few seconds later. Their horses collapsed beside them.

The vault door waited just in front of them, ready to open and ready to use. It was a dish of steel with a carved wooden cover. A complex ring of runes ran through the center, and that had to be the locking mechanism.

At the center of the circle was a large rune—a test of power.

“We need to be Blazes to open it,” Myraden stated. “Or know the correct rune code.”

Pirin shrugged. “Think we can exert the power of a Blaze if we work together? I think we can try.”