As soon as Vayra turned around, she began breathing deeply. She pushed her Arcara around, letting it cycle through the channels. She imagined it pushing out into her body, through invisible little filaments.

She felt nothing. The magmaspawn charged closer, its club ready to pound her straight into the ground.

Before the creature collided with her, she slipped to the side, pressing her back against the wall. The magmaspawn charged past, the spiky tip of its club swishing past her face and narrowly missing. One of the obsidian spikes severed a strand of her hair.

‘Try again,’ Phasoné ordered. ‘Or we both die.’

Vayra stepped back into the center of the hallway, and held out her seer-core. She’d gotten used to the idea that her techniques relied on starlight. It would be impossible to rewrite her mind in such a short time, but she had an orb of starlight-soaked Arcara right in front of her. Why couldn’t she use it?

The magmaspawn stopped, and turned around to face her. It was ready to charge again.

‘Just like the other techniques, but there’s a lot more starlight there than Arcara,’ Phasoné warned. ‘You’ll damage your channels…’

Vayra didn’t have time to question it. It was a choice between living and dying. She inhaled, pulling the seer-core’s light in through her fingers like she was drawing in a puff of smoke.

It flooded into her hand, and the Arcara channels in her fingers.

‘Push it outwards!’ Phasoné exclaimed. ‘Imagine little tiny filaments reaching into your body, like the roots of a great tree! Almost like your shield!’

As soon as the light entered her channels, Vayra felt a burning, hot pain in her channels. It wasn’t a physical pain, but something deeper. She clenched her teeth, trying to disperse the feeling. It was starlight, her element. Like guiding the energy for the Starlight Palm, she pulled it back, then pushed it into her muscles. A blazing white light shone through her skin, as if her arm was burning up from the inside.

But at the same time, her hand felt incredibly, incredibly strong.

The magmaspawn swung its club at her. She reached up and caught it, reaching between the obsidian spikes.

She clenched her hand, and the tip of the club shattered.

Before the magmaspawn could back away, she lunged forwards and threw a punch. Her hand blasted straight through the creature’s chest.

It collapsed into a pile of ash, and Vayra fell right beside it, panting. The white light faded from her arm, leaving only a tingling, painful sensation.

‘That’s what it feels like to be burned,’ Phasoné said.

“I…hate it…” Vayra panted, shaking her arm. She slumped against the wall behind, trying to wrestle her breathing under control. “I’ll just…wait here…for a little while…”

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Scritch, scritch, scritch.

The flint scratched and scratched, dropping sparks into the chute of a pipe. Finally, it caught the dry flakes of tobacco in the bottom of the pipe, and the substance began to smoulder.

Nathariel could set anything within his sight aflame with a thought. A self-respecting God-heir with his magic shouldn’t have needed a tinderbox to light a pipe, but he wasn’t much for self-respect.

He leapt down from the high summit he stood on and fell a few hundred feet. Upon landing, he heard his ankles pop, and though his enhanced body absorbed most of the impact, there was certainly damage. It would heal before the end of the day, without so much as a scar to show for it.

When he landed, he stood at the brink of a deep valley. A river of magma rolled along its floor, spewed from a recent eruption. They weren’t close enough to the equator to keep the magma flowing in rivers, though, and the wind would cool it eventually.

From this vantage, Nathariel extended his perception across the mountain range.

His visitors had split up, and the half-phoenix had entered the Chambers. Good.

The other waited by the doorway. The Mediator might have had the most raw power, but her companion was not without his strengths. For a boy with only Fair-Spirit Potential, he was doing well for his age. With proper resources—not the swill the Order of Balance called elixirs—he might truly earn some footing in the galaxy.

This story is posted elsewhere by the author. Help them out by reading the authentic version.

Nathariel turned his attention back to the Mediator. “Ah, finally,” he said to himself, walking to the edge of the ledge. “Dealt with that one magmaspawn.” He stroked his chin, running his fingers through his beard.

She was certainly enough to…intrigue him. Her abilities had reached a block. He knew exactly what it was; he had been following her and watching from a distance ever since he’d sensed her arrive on the planet. He’d felt a faint tingle in the back of his neck when she’d entered the star system.

This was a good first step, that was undeniable. She was used to Phasoné’s abilities—the Starlight Palm, from the Goddess’ own Path of the Astral Hammer—which always mixed the starlight it drew in with enough Arcara to dilute it and protect the body’s channels. The Mediator Form? He wasn’t sure if she’d managed to use it yet, though even if she had, it still used starlight Arcara…

His thoughts were running away from him, as usual. He chuckled, then jumped down to another ledge with carefree abandon. She and her companion could be the only chance to pass on his techniques.

He couldn’t fail this time.

But, no matter what, he wouldn’t know if she truly had potential unless she emerged from the other end of the Chambers in one piece.

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Glade sat outside the Chambers’ entrance all day, watching the trail that approached it. He could only watch this one entrance, but since (as far as he could tell from the map) it was closest to the north, it would be the first entrance an invader of the Chamber would try.

After the first few hours, he relaxed. He moved to the center of the ledge and sat cross-legged. Elder Miin would have wanted him to continue his exercises. Not just with his sword, but with his Arcara.

He didn’t have much, but no one really did until they could cycle. They might absorb a little mana from eating Stream-borne fish, or a little might enter their body through contact with Stream. To purify it was a hard ask, but occasionally, tiny dregs of mana would purify into Arcara.

He shut his eyes, and tried to imagine the little sliver of life energy slithering through his body.

These were Elder Miin’s mandated exercises, yet he couldn’t help but hear the voice of his old master, Elder Eman-Fa. The Stream is life, boy. It connects every planet, it waters the soils with spiritual energy, and it bleeds mana into all the galaxy’s planets. Yes, without the Stream, there would be no God-heirs or Mediators or magical beings that we have no business crossing blades with, but there would also be less…life.

Glade relished in the darkness of his mind. He began an exercise that he had practised since he was a boy—pushing his consciousness down towards his stomach and envisioning his core.

He was lucky to have a clear image of his core in his mind, ever since he was a young teen. It was a little marble of gray light, and it barely glowed, but it was there.

He drew his Arcara out of the marble, dimming it down to a tiny gray snowflake, and extracting a snake of spiritual energy. It was his Arcara, pushed along by mana.

Individuals like him, people with Fair Spirit Potential, they didn’t have a well-defined set of Arcara channels. Not like Vayra, who…randomly, one day, had been gifted everything she needed to challenge even the Gods.

Before the feeling could rise up and become envy, he quashed it. She had plenty of extra concerns that came along with being the Mediator.

He would continue as he always had. He set his jaw, clenched his teeth, and tightened his fists. His duty was to help, and if needed, to protect. If he didn’t get more powerful, then he wasn’t doing his duty.

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After three days, Pels found his first catch. They approached the Elderworld galleon from the veil of a fogbank—or, an ashbank would be more appropriate—and approached it from the stern. The Harmony was faster, much faster, and the Elderworld ship clearly hadn’t been expecting that it would need to run.

By the time the ship’s crew had set their sails, Pels had already secured the catch.

His crew knew what to do. When the Harmony’s bow passed the enemy galleon’s stern, they fired the first battery, shredding the enemy ship’s stern and disabling its Streamrunning fins. Not that either of them were close enough to the Stream to run, but he wanted to be certain.

Then, he ordered the crew to heave the sails into the wind. The Harmony fired two more volleys—enough to be certain the Elderworld galleon’s rudder chain was disabled.

Pels let the enemy ship slip past. The desperate crew thought they could escape, but truly, they were only presenting a target for Pels’s next phase. He ordered a hard turn to starboard, and now that the galleon had presented its stern, he prepared to rake them with the full force of his main guns.

He had never witnessed the Harmony’s full firepower before. Every cannon boomed one after another, spewing smoke into the air and throwing hundreds of pounds of cannonballs at the foe.

The Elderworld galleon’s stern erupted into splinters. The window of its great cabin shattered, and his barrage wreaked havoc all across the gun deck—from this angle, his shots could fire straight down the ship’s gun deck, tearing it to pieces.

The enemy’s gun crews were all comprised of bluecoats, and he felt little remorse for destroying them. They were created by Karmion himself, an artificial army. From birth, they were indoctrinated and trained.

The rest of the crew, the sapient officers and experienced seamen, he felt more pain for. He’d spare them, and let Perron decide their fate.

But first, he had to take the ship.

“Bring us hard to larboard, Mr. Sorron,” Pels told the coxswain. He marched to the front railing of the quarterdeck and shouted, “Grapples!”

The Harmony caught their wounded prey less than a minute later. Pels’s crew knew what to do; as soon as they could, they cast their grapples over to the railing of the enemy ship.

The two Redmarines assigned to the quarterdeck, Kertogg and Tressdott, both looked horrified by what they were witnessing. “Piracy?” the elf demanded. “You were released, Pels, on your promise to abstain from piracy!”

Pels put his hand on the elf’s shoulder. “Call it privateering. On the Mediator’s orders, and part of our bargain with the Resistance. They’ll get more ships to fight with, and we’ll get some gold.” He glanced at the dwarf, who, through his beard, was smiling. “Admit it. You’re enjoying it.”

As Pels spoke, the Elderworld galleon ran up a white flag.

“First catch,” Pels said. He couldn’t see any more ships at the moment, but there would be many more on a planet like this.