15. Beauty in Resolve II

The monster leapt again, and this time Kal managed to use some of the debris to hide, but it wouldn’t last long. The manor was demolished on all sides.

He approached the tree that the creature leapt off from more than once. Its barks were torn off and its trunks were misshapen, creating a large gash. It could fall off any time.

Kal, with a bleeding arm, dripped it across the wooden boards and the broken utensils, trying to create an aspect that could move. He wasn’t a cultivator. He didn’t have their constitution nor their vitality, but he could make something.

He was, after all, a legate.

He ran toward the monster.

He created small pebbles from the iron, infused it with his blood, and threw it. The thing snapped as it flew away, being forced by his will to the monster. It could tear flesh and blood from a small distance, but it bounced off the monster’s hide.

Second plan then—the moment it leaps, it would catch him, but he could predict where it would land. “Come at me!”

It leapt. He saw the maw, the rows of teeth, and its throat, lunge at him. Kal tried to dodge, but it caught his leg as it slammed against the tree.

He coughed a laugh. “Got you.”

He had commanded his aspect to break down of the trees. The creature saw it fall and was prepared to jump when Kal pulled himself so close to its face and rammed his arm into its eye. There was a crash, and barks splintered off.

Silence befell them.

Kal looked around in silence. The shock he received had allowed him to move without so much pain. But it was only when he stood up did he realize he collapsed again. He looked at his leg.

“Oh.”

The trapdoor creaked open, and Kal found himself dizzly being taken down, until, in the darkness, Pria was looking at him.

“It’s not dead. I’m going to kill it,” she said.

So he did immobilize it. He had bought enough time, but losing this much blood meant he would die soon. He could, perhaps, go into his own soul and heal himself, and he reached into his heart.

He thought about it.

Considered it, and pulled his hand back. No—Kallarius Val Sorvenn had died with his nation. He was living on borrowed time. And he didn’t want to relive his past.

He breathed in, and out, leaning against the dead juvenile monkey dragon, pulling Reimallia close and trying to heal her soul as best as he could.

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PRIA SUMMERBORN

Pria scoured through her rooma nd found her bow under the pile of rubble. The monkey dragon had been trying to push its legs against the ground, and succeeding as it tried to pull off the tree.

She nocked, loosed, and struck true. Its eye was damaged, but it got free as well, and it didn’t take its time for a stance before it leapt at her. It was clumsy, but its strength made it dangerous. She jumped back down the trapdoor.

Outside, she heard it scream.

There was darkness inside. She tried to feel her way around, and found the two of them together. Kal had been trying to awaken Reimallia, who blearily got up.

“Lady Pria,” he said.

He looked at her as though he was about to walk into the gallows. He wasn’t smiling now, nor trying to be soft-faced. Who he was remained a mystery to her.

“You can still run. I am in no shape to fight, but I can will it. Take Lady Rei and run as far as you can while I distract the monster.” His voice was as a calm as a summer sea, without waves.

“Why?”

Cultivatores are greedy and selfish and proud and monsters who abuse their strengths to take unlawful justice and to step on individuals who wronged them or criticized them. They also saved her life, treated her kindly to the best of their abilities, and confronted the monster themselves.

She remembered her own words from what felt like a long time ago. We all bleed the same shade of red. She didn’t want to believe it then.

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She had seen it now for herself. A glimpse.

“You awakened,” Reimallia looked at her with jealousy.

“What?”

“No fledging cultivator can’t smell qi. You can.”

Wasn’t that normal? No. There was no time to think about all of this.

“I thought up a plan,” she said. Dust rained from the first floor. Wei Xiaodan drew back, rubbing her eyes. “But it’s risky. Reimallia, you’ll carry the most responsibility.”

“What do we have left to lose?” She smiled.

She explained to them that they could use the barrels of oil stocked here to throw at the limbs of the monster. Xuan and Wei possesed superior strength, so they would be able to do it. Losing its mobility, it wouldn’t be able to stand up and they’d be able to run.

“I can still do something here,” he said. He willed his blood across the floor, wrapping itself around the surface of the dead monkey dragon, the demon, the pillars and the walls. “I won’t make it out alive. But I can help. But we can’t carry them up,” he said. “It’ll take too long and the monster will be onto us then.”

Pria looked at both of them. They were both breathless and injured. She walked over to a support beam. “We won’t have to,” she said. “It’s going to cave in sooner or later. But it might wait us out. We can’t let that happen so you’ll have to do this now. Once the monkey dragon falls, throw as much barrels of oil into its limbs and then make a run for it. I’ll stay above ground and try to shoot an arrow through its eyes while it can’t move.”

The beams didn’t have to be broken completely, but cracked enough that the monkey dragon would fall under its own weight. Pria helped Reimallia roll the barrels near the center; they had to be quick about this. If the monster decided to wait them out, their plan would crumble. A backup plan would be more dangerous.

“You’d make a good tactician,” Lahrs Sarnasia commented. He looked at her with a strange, hungry gleam in his eyes as though he could crack open her skull and study her performance. It made her uncomfortable. He looked foreign—without the mask of the young master.

She waited by the trapdoor with bated breath. She was holding onto the bow slung around her tightly. There was a crack, and sunlight filtered through as the monster slammed.

A crash of dust and wood and spilled oil. The morning light bathed the basement in full brightness. Pria flinched away. “Let’s go!”

Reimallia didn’t move. The monster had slammed down, and Pria noticed it too.

“It’s not enough,” Reimallia said, and laughed. “The oil. I’ll have to—um. I’ll die here, won’t I?” She ran toward one of the oil barrels, while Lahrs manipulated his blood underneath the monster’s limbs.

As Pria climbed, she caught a glimpse of the monkey dragon sliding against the hardwood, able to move, but with difficulty.

She could escape now—leave the cultivators to their death. That was her original mission anyway. She had killed Lahrs Sarnasia. That was the truth of it all. And she was terrified then. Only, someone else had taken his place.

Why didn’t she kill him too?

Why, why, why?

Cultivators, mortals, whatever he was, they were just human. And that seemed to spark something inside her, and she felt strange with every breath. Within her was lightning trapped and beating.

She found herself running, not toward the trees to disappear, but around the gaping hole, as she stood over the edge and stared at the monster. It smelled of oil and fish and meat and blood.

The monster stopped, balanced itself, and dug its claws through the hardwood. Lahrs looked paler now, and red blood tried to encase the monkey dragon with the planks, but it was proving to be useless.

This entire plan was a failure from the start. She failed to take account the monkey dragon’s intelligence. It looked so monstrous, but it was smart all the way since the beginning.

Pria had unslung her bow and nocked the arrow on the string. Here she stood having taken her choice to save these stupid cultivators and their sorry arses. If she ran now, she could still take back what she did. But no—she knew, everything that she would be doing now, if she decided to take action, would change the trajectory of her future.

…the same shade of red…

She pulled the arrow back. Her lungs expanded and, filled with strange energy, swirled around her heart and electrified across her body. She smelled faintly of winter’s qi, though she never felt it.

I wonder what it would feel like to be a cultivator, and see that world for myself.

Pria felt it first. A strange, white line, almost transparent, traced around her fingers like an outline, extended straight to the arrowhead, colored with white feathers and pure, strained power.

What do cultivators see differently than mortals?

The wind boomed. Snow scattered in all directions. her robes flapped violently. The prone monkey dragon winced, with the second of its eye struck clean too deep. It dug its one good leg and jumped.

Blind, but able, it sniffed her out. Two limbs dug on the wood of the first floor, but it was difficult given the oil that covered it too much. Pria and the monkey dragon was at arms length, too close for both of their comforts.

But Pria already nocked the second arrow. As it tried to climb up, she ran to the center, and when it opened her maws, she found herself calmly jumping inside to the roof of its mouth.

“Got you.”

Pria, with the bow nocked and ready to release, ran straight toward the monster’s mouth. Her qi extended for the rest of the bow, her muscles, as the arrow glided toward the monster with an unblinking form.

The arrowhead pierced through the monkey dragon’s back. The explosion spilled its guts, then it lost all its expression, and then it went limp, crashing on the ground.

She was a cultivator now.

Regrettably.

Pria stepped back out of the mouth as the monkey dragon collapsed down the basement. She looked around, sniffed, and wiped her own sweat.

“That was highly entertaining,” a stranger in the distance said. The man was half-naked, covered in tattoos, and looked like a savage. “The first cultivator, born and baptised and blooded.”

Pria nocked her bow a second time, but she saw the man’s hand to her face, and her head suddenly hit the ground. If she were a mortal, she would’ve been killed.

“Cultivators are—what’s the word to describe them—“ he paused. “—ink that is difficult to scrape off. You just never die.”

He picked her up by the collar, and the last thing she saw was his hand striking her.

And then there was nothing at all.