When Pirin wasn’t smoothing the ridges on the back panel of his leather cuirass or searching through the Memory Chain for a soul fortification technique, he whittled the branch from the Summer Throne into a smooth, slightly-curved bar with a hollow center. He took care not to damage the wood’s channels, but it had nothing in the core of the branch.

Out of curiosity, he fed it Essence. Maybe it wouldn’t differentiate between the peak of Blaze and Wildflame.

But it did nothing. His Essence filled the channels of the branch, but it wasn’t receptive to his power.

He grimaced, then kept whittling it away with the shards of his sword. To practice drawing objects into his inner world, he worked with the branch. It was conveniently on hand, and it had significant spiritual weight.

He inhaled, then drew on some hints he’d pulled from the past.

First off, to fortify the soul, one couldn’t focus on the core. They had to envision the soul, located at the top of the spine, find the little orb of gray mist, and concentrate on the thin white film around it. The wizards fortified the film, like they were turning their skin into armour, and used it to hold the soul tight.

But Pirin’s Fracturenet didn’t work like that.

When he tried, he sent pulses of Essence straight through the soul. Pain blasted through his mind and needles prickled the back of his neck, and he cut it off immediately. The Fracturenet thrived on instability, but it also put strain wherever he used it. The soul couldn’t be damaged like that.

He needed to enhance just the surrounding film, lock the soul, keep it from expanding and bursting apart with the slightest poke.

He kept practicing, making it more precise, until he could cover the entire bottom hemisphere of the film, but beyond that, he lost control.

Just practice, Gray reminded him. We still have time.

They had crossed over the Sirdian coast again, and were flying over farmland and abandoned villages back toward Northvel. The city was still a few days away, though. She was right.

In the meantime, Pirin tried coordinating the burgeoning soul-fortification with drawing the branch inside his inner world. He held it in his hand, then filled it with Essentia, ready to pull it in.

But he never drew it inside himself. Essentia filled its channels, and immediately, the branch resonated. It shook and shuddered in his hand, trying to conduct the bolstered, higher form of Essence.

The Wildflame form of Essence.

Pirin’s eyes widened. “Gray!” he exclaimed. “I…I think I have an idea.”

What is it? She pushed herself up and tilted her head, then looked directly at him. You’re alright?

“Yep. Look, look at the branch.” He held it up. He’d whittled away the outer bark, revealing a smooth white core, which he’d carved ridges into to aid his grip.

But now, green veins swirled through it, like he’d just sliced the branch off a living tree.

“It doesn’t take a Wildflame specifically,” he said. “It takes Essentia.”

So you can make the throne bloom right now?

“I suppose so…” Pirin kept pushing, trying to fill the branch’s channels with more Essentia. But it was porous, and it had more channels than he’d expected. He only filled half of it with Essentia before he ran out. Slowly, the power he’d poured in began leaking back into his body.

His chest deflated, but mostly from exhaustion. “We need more Essentia. I need to save it up, instead of just…using it to practice.”

Then save it, said Gray. How long until you think you could make the throne bloom?

He grinned. “I…I think I know when I’m going to do it.”

The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.

~ ~ ~

The Featherflight arrived at Northvel in the middle of the night. As soon as Pirin sensed the city and the Dominion army, he darted around the ship, darkening the lights. They’d blend into the cloudy sky, and the Dominion wouldn’t think to attack them—they wouldn’t even see the Featherflight.

So long as Pirin veiled himself, too. No need to alert them to the wizards or Lord Three.

Once he darkened the ship, he ran to the gondola, where Alyus and Nomad waited. Brealtod stood up on the ship’s axial catwalk, preparing to tighten the ballonets and drop them down.

In the meantime, Pirin had the perfect view of Northvel.

The city itself sat high up on the Sheercliff, a wall of rock that ran from the eastern side of the Elven Continent to the west, nearly five hundred feet high. Alone, it’d be an impenetrable wall.

The elves said an ancient beast had descended from the heavens and stomped the continent, driving the southern three-quarters down into the crust and cracking it like a sheet of ice. Pirin wasn’t sure if he believed that, and he definitely hadn’t in the past.

But he also hadn’t realized how powerful wizards could become.

The only way up the Sheercliff was an ancient trail—which Northvel, bastion of the winter elves, guarded.

Northvel perched on the brink of the cliff, its circular sandstone curtain wall nearly hanging over the edge of the cliff, and its concentric keeps rising progressively higher inward. Towers reached up to the sky, and smaller juts housed flak catapults and trebuchets. Torches lit every inch of the wall, and the city’s windows blazed with amber light. Smoke rose high above the snowy chimneys before merging with the clouds above.

A river ran through the city’s center, before pouring out a culvert at the edge of the wall and spilling down to the ground below. In the summer, it flowed freely, but now, it was in the middle of freezing solid. The edges turned into a sheet of layered ice clumps, but a trickle of water still flowed through its core.

Behind the waterfall was a winding walkway carved into the side of the cliff. A two-wagon-wide road of sandstone, with sharp railings and glowing torches, led all the way from the base of the cliff to a portcullis at the base of the city.

Hovels lined the walkway, carved into the wall centuries ago, but their windows were dark and their doors hung wide open. Hopefully, that meant the civilians had retreated inside the walled city.

But a new, makeshift wall had sprung up around the base of the frozen waterfall and the end of the winding walkway. Cobblestone in sections, wooden palisade in others. For the moment, the Sirdian defenders held their outer defense.

A vast plane of silver and green spread out along the field at the base of the Sheercliff. Dominion soldiers formed into neat squares, and they still arranged their siege weapons between them, but unless they had a five-hundred-foot-tall siege tower, they wouldn’t breach the main wall that way.

But, for the moment, the besieging army had a single target: the tiny wall at the base of the walkway. The siege must have only just started if the Dominon hadn’t breached it yet, but that was a good sign for Pirin.

“Good thing you took down all their birds at Dremfell,” Alyus remarked. “Or they’d be harassing us all the way down.”

“And bothering the city’s defenses, I reckon,” Nomad said.

“They aren’t using their trebuchets, regardless,” Pirin said. “Why not?” None of the trebuchets on the wall fired their payload, but there were hundreds of elven archers on the wall, lobbing arrows down at the army below.

“I’ve no idea.”

He narrowed his eyes. Whatever lords Ivescent left in charge of the city were up to something.

“Take me to the palace,” Pirin said, pointing at a cluster of towers and domes, of buttresses and glowing windows and columns, at the center of the city, within the tallest keep. “I think I need to have a talk with whoever’s trying to defend the city.”

“You think you could do a better job, elfy?” Alyus asked.

“I think they’re doing a bad job right now, and I think that needs to change. If they’re not listening to their marshals, then I’ll make sure they do.”

The Featherflight descended over the city. Soldiers pointed up at it, and a few turned their bows and launched arrows.

Pirin darted to the back of the gondola, then pushed open the door and leaned out onto the stern balcony. He used a Shattered Palm to knock the arrows away before they could puncture the envelope or gasbags. They probably thought it was a Dominion airship, and he couldn’t fault them for doing their jobs.

The walls passed by below, growing thinner and taller as he neared the center of the city. Buildings stacked atop buildings, and walkways ran between them. Torches blazed, refugees sheltered in tents, and civilians cowered in the deepest parts of the city.

They could flee north, still, and try to save themselves, but running out into the northern tundras without steady supplies was a surefire way to starve and freeze to death. Besides, if Northvel fell, the civilians would find themselves at the mercy of the Dominion soon enough, whether they fled or not.

They had to hold the city here.

Alyus spun the wheel, and the Featherflight circled around above a flat platform near the side of the palace. It’d probably once been a rooftop outlook, or a plaza for galas and parties, but those days were long gone. It was empty, there was no open fire nearby, and it was large enough to dock an airship.

As Nomad and Alyus threw down grappling hooks, Pirin jumped off the stern balcony of the gondola and landed on the open platform, then beckoned Gray down from the cargo hold. She jumped out and fluttered down, kicking up a wave of loose snow with her wingbeats.

Pirin had everything he needed. He still wore his armour, and he still kept the shards of his sword safely in his void pendant. He wouldn’t need them for the moment.

All he needed was the branch of the Throne and his stored-up Essentia.