Jenna and her little brother. Chase, Sun-Set, and their son. Siren refused. Several more miners followed and some people who noticed what Tristan was doing. He had packed them all into the rooms deep below the Lake Caldera. It would be standing room only, but Tristan tried to cram everyone he knew down there.
Vulcan’s insistence on fleeing grew more and more urgent, but Tristan ignored it. The Caldera was now his home. He had always known he would eventually leave, but he wanted it to be there when he returned. As it was, he could only hope that a hundred or so would survive. Looking around he saw one last person, Drew the smith.
“Drew! We need to go!” Tristan yelled.
The young man looked shell shocked, “Did you see that? That was where the Calderas were.”
“Yes.” Tristan grabbed him by the forearm and started dragging him away.
Something cracked in the sky. The sound was like rocks breaking, and Tristan could not see it. What he felt was the temperature rise twenty degrees and the lighting shift. It was like a sun had been born overhead.
“VULCAN!” A deep male voice yelled from above.
Vulcan was a lamp post in the primordial realm. He would not have been able to answer even if he wanted to. The terror Tristan felt made him sure that he didn’t. Tristan’s body felt odd, bloated almost. The ambient essence had spiked, metal essence filled the air, invisible to his eyes, but blinding his metal sense. It overfilled his kern, causing his veins to ache.
While he could not feel it, he could see a similar effect on Drew’s face. His cheeks flushed and he paled at the same time. Drew’s temperature spiked to a level dangerous for anyone without a fire kern.
“VULCAN, GET OUT HERE!” The man yelled.
Tristan dragged Drew towards the Temple, though he was currently having an unsettling realization. If the man was after Vulcan, then he couldn’t use the underground sanctuary. Vulcan had been right, he needed to run. Drew first, flee second.
His path was blocked by an unexpected person. Tristan skidded to a stop as Siren blocked his path, “Did you know this was coming?!”
Tristan had never seen Siren this furious. He had told him who Vulcan was and in hindsight that might have been foolish. Siren had also been on the list of people he had wanted to evacuate.
“No, not until the Forest Caldera was attacked,” Tristan said.
“Why not just hand the weapon over?” Siren narrowed his eyes, “It's not worth the lives of everyone in the Caldera.”
Tristan had not even considered that. It was a question worth asking though. He sent the question to Vulcan and immediately got an image of a man with black skin, red hair, and silver eyes. He was standing with a burning city behind him. He would not spare them regardless of what they did.
“He would not spare us even if we did,” Tristan said.
“You don’t know that,” Siren clenched his fists, “Hand it over or I will take it.”
“No,” Tristan said.
Black carapace armor started forming around Siren’s body. It was a solid and somehow also a gas, removing any need for joints. The carapace gave Siren a mildly golem appearance.
“Very well, I do not…” Siren’s words were cut off when it started snowing.
It was localized, over the party. Thankfully they were no longer at this party. The white flakes would have been pretty if they had been ice. No, they radiated an enormous amount of heat. The gossamer thin pieces of metal burned straight through anything they touched as they lazily drifted to the ground. Any liquid was immediately converted to gas, dirt was melted, and tables caught fire.
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The people, they tried to run. The molten metal fell like a cage, any person who ran into the flakes would have a small hole burned through their body. Soon after they would catch fire and and thrash around, hitting even more specks of death. Tristan had to look away, he had no doubt, that this was what Hell looked like.
He looked up into the sky, then back to Siren. Tristan took the chance to rush past Siren, if he was the target, being within the Lake Caldera was the worst possible option. There was a good chance that the man was unaware of where Vulcan was, but Tristan was not going to stick around and ask.
Siren reached out and grabbed onto them as Tristan ran past. Unfortunately, he caught Tristan by his shirt and Dane by his wrist. Tristan released Dane and sacrificed his shirt. He took off as fast as he could, Tristan contemplated abandoning his backpack as well, but some sentimental part of himself couldn’t bear losing his only possessions. The excess materials for coloring fire would not slow him down too much.
“Tristan!” Siren yelled.
He did not stop, and he did not feel that it was cowardly to run. Most of the people he cared about were as safe as they could be. He felt no obligation to anyone else. Not that he was thinking through these facts logically. He was panicking, running at full speed, he had seen this power in visions and thought it could prepare him for the real thing.
Visions did not have the pressure exerted by the man above. They did not turn essence to sludge within his veins. Essence was not solid, it was a combination of laws that affected tangible objects. That is what Tristan had believed until now. He also knew that this was only a fraction of what the attacker could accomplish.
So he ran, adrenaline pushed him faster than he had ever run. Vulcan’s panic stopped him from looking back. Tristan half expected to be stopped by the man in the sky, but the heat on his back never intensified. The screams from spreading flames were still audible after a minute.
Two minutes in, a little under two miles away, the screaming was finally gone. He didn’t stop for nearly ten minutes. Gasping for breath, he looked back. The whole of the Lake Caldera was a bonfire. Tristan was glad that Merrick had been given Blacklake’s ice artifact, otherwise that bunker would be an oven. Luke would be able to supply them with fresh air.
Despite the ten mile distance, Tristan could still feel the aura of metal and flame pressing down on the world. It was almost as if whatever was at the center was more real than anything else and it was exerting its will to change the world to one of flame and steel. Tristan knew in his head that he was just a man, but the only word that seemed applicable to one who warped reality was, god.
“Keep running!” Vulcan prompted.
Tristan was not about to deny the demand again. He had started to turn when the storm of essence over the Lake Caldera shuddered and vanished. Vanished was wrong, supplanted might have been better as there was still an oppressive amount of essence, but it wasn’t metal. That was as close to identifying it as he was able to get.
He did not plan to stick around to find out what attack was being charged. It was a good thing as well. Less than thirty seconds later, there was a pulse of fire and metal, and something heavy hit Tristan’s back. At first, he thought he was being targeted until he saw a pine tree get cracked in half.
He saw that while upside down after getting launched into the air. The pressure wave from whatever happened was ten times greater than what had happened in the Forest Caldera. It scraped over the land, tearing up trees and buildings in an expanding ring and throwing them outward like leaves in the wind.
Tristan was just one piece of flotsam in the storm. He tumbled end over end, he was stunned by the initial impact, and it took him getting hit by a chunk of granite to realize he should reinforce himself. Reaching for his kern he started to harden his skin.
Something shut his kern down. Tristan waved his hands frantically, trying to find something to hold onto, to stop his tumbling. Why was his kern not responding? He followed the feeling back to find that Vulcan had stopped him from using his kern. Gritting his teeth Tristan tried again, only for the soul tool to shut it down again.
Tristan wanted to scream, but a rafter from a barn slammed into him, knocking the wind out of him. He couldn’t tell how long he had been flying, but it felt like it had been at least a few minutes. His metal kern naturally made him more durable, and the congested kern only amplified how dense his body was. It was the only reason he did not get cut in half when a door hit him in the ribs, edge first.
Then he hit a tree. His body was harder than its crown, so he ended up smashing through it. The strike spun him around in the air. Only when he hit the next tree did he realize that these ones were anchored firmly into the ground. The blast’s power was exhausted, but that did not mean Tristan wouldn’t bounce off a few trees on the way to the ground.
He hit the pine needle covered forest floor and rolled before getting stopped by a tree trunk. Tristan curled into the fetal position as everything that had been in the air started falling all around him. He hurt, something in his guts was ruptured, two ribs were broken, several fingers and toes, and he was sure one of his forearm bones was broken.
He clawed his way over to where the contents of his bag were strewn. They made a messy line from the last tree to where he was now. He was focused on one item in particular. When he reached the amulet, he placed it to his gut and activated it. Hopefully, the essence he had been able to store in the last two days would be enough.