“Fire,” Karmion demanded, holding out a black crescent toward his prisoner. In the darkness of the Cardinal Arrant’s great cabin, Nathariel was just a shadow hanging like shrivelled fruit in the branches of the artificial Namola tree.
The branches twisted and stretched, holding Nathariel away and hoisting him up in the air. The true notch in the trunk, the intended slot for a prisoner, was still open. If possible, he’d trap the Mediator there, but if not…killing her would be a suitable alternative.
A pale blue glow emerged behind Nathariel. A bluecoat hoisted up a pail of Stream water and poured a single drop on Nathariel’s back. Even if he wanted to break out, he wouldn’t have enough mana for anything but a single burst of flame.
His single real eye glowed orange, then a burst of flame roared out his mouth, orange with a pure white core, and blazing hot. It seared across the black crescent, illuminating the writhing fibres.
They were shadowthorn extract, the substance of void, woven together into a gnarled handle. At first, they seemed almost formless, like Moulded Arcara—which Karmion had used to hold the strands together at first, but they’d long since burnt off, leaving only darkness behind.
Over the weeks, he had stretched it and elongated it, first into the handle of a blacksmith’s hammer, then the length of a sword’s blade, then the length of a spear’s haft.
Initially, he had planned to make a spear. Though he preferred to fight with his bare hands, a spear seemed perfectly suited for impaling with, severing the soul and spirit and locking the Mediator away from Phasoné. But the forging process formed a twisted, angled mess of a haft.
He’d changed plans, and it worked wonderfully with Kalawen’s plans.
She’d forged her shadowthorn, the most powerful of them all, into an enormous sickle shape.
Now, tonight, it was time to attach them.
Kalawen stood at the opposite end of the hall, holding out her end of the sickle, as if Karmion was going to attach the soul-severing head to the haft in the form of a glaive. He instead stepped around to her side and rammed the haft onto the side of the sickle blade. He could firm up the connection later, but for now, he allowed Nathariel’s fire to melt the two halves together, liquifying the Arcara itself.
“What are you doing?” Kalawen whispered.
“What better weapon for cutting down a Mediator than…a scythe?” Karmion pulled the combined components out of her hands and lugged them back to Nathariel. “More fire. Don’t need this falling apart when we use it, now, do we?”
Nathariel scowled. The bluecoat poured another dribble of water onto his back, and he breathed another bout of fire. Jerking the half-forged scythe up, Karmion caught the fire, then set it down on a makeshift anvil at the center of the great cabin.
“That’s a good dragon,” Karmion sneered, then picked up a hammer. He was no master smith, not by any stretch, but he could put together a void-scythe from the best ingredients available to him. “How does it feel to build the instrument of your disciples’ destruction, hm?”
Nathariel said nothing.
“Ah, well. It was worth a shot. Kalawen, you are dismissed.”
She dipped her head, then backed away to the doors of the great cabin and pushed them open, then stepped outside. “When this is all done, I will share in the glory, yes? Word will spread of how I helped bring down the Mediator?”
“Of course. I wouldn’t deny a fellow god’s ambitions, now, would I?”
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As soon as Glade’s fight finished—with him reigning victorious after only the second round—he and Vayra returned to their apartment in the contestants’ quarters. Myrrir, having remained in the Velaydian viewing tower, retreated to his own room for the evening after shortly acknowledging Glade and delivering a clipped apology.
The moment the door fell shut, Vayra summoned Adair from her corespace and shared what Phasoné had explained to her about the advancement to Grand Admiral, and in turn, Glade shared what Kalawen had told him.
A moment later, Phasoné appeared in her physical form, then said, “What falsehoods. By the Stream, I never liked Kalawen. But now I know she’s not just an arrogant bully, she's an outright fool as well. For both of you, your spirit beasts are…sapient. Trying to dominate them with your will will inevitably fail. When you establish an Arcara loop with them, you’ll probe their will, yes, but you need to work with each other. Since you’ve been feeding them, and sharing your adventures with them, hopefully your wills are mostly aligned, though it’s hard to say for sure.”
You might be reading a pirated copy. Look for the official release to support the author.
“But establishing the connection, creating a loop—and essentially using a Reach technique without manipulating a substance—will require some form of strength and willpower. To gain access to their Arcara systems, we will need to be strong.”
“But not dominating,” Vayra said.
“They aren’t intelligent enough to know how they might harm you,” said Phasoné. “If you aren’t strong-willed, they’ll accidentally overwhelm you. But if you try to dominate them, you’ll destroy them, and either fail the advancement or turn them into a weak spirit, like my own advancement.”
“Let’s just attempt the cycling loop for now,” Vayra said. She shut her eyes, and tried to manipulate her Arcara in a stable loop reminiscent of the one she used for the Starlight Palm. After all, a Reach technique guided the Arcara out of her body as its core function.
But the Starlight Palm was one of her first techniques, and as a Reach went, it was barely a part of the category. She switched to the pattern for guiding starlight through her pistol in a direct beam.
Wisps of invisible energy leaked out her hand and swirled into the air, which she tracked with her spiritual sight—and it was no longer invisible. It didn’t accumulate any starlight; she kept it far away from her scarf and the apartment’s window. She tried to guide it toward Adair. He was still present in her normal sight.
But it was like trying to push two of the same poles of a magnet together. Her Arcara just bent away.
She pulled her Arcara back before it broke off and dispersed—no sense in wasting it—and fell back to a kneeling position on the floor. Patiently, she waited for Glade to try. The swordwyrm chittered, and she tracked his Arcara with her spiritual sight, but he had the exact same problem. The swordwyrm didn’t even seem to register that something had come near it; it just swirled around the hilt of the giant sword and snapped up flakes of metal from the floor (which Glade had thrown down for it).
“Any…suggestions?” Vayra asked Phasoné.
“This is likely where Kalawen would have told us to push harder,” said Glade.
“But we established that we are only taking her advice at the surface level.”
“Adair and the swordwyrm should be projecting a spiritual presence now,” Phasoné said. “It’s weak, yes, but you’ll need to lock onto it. Remember Adair’s hairs? The filaments along his back? Try to direct the Arcara straight into those. The swordwyrm likely has its own point of…opening, you could say.”
Vayra turned away from Glade so she wouldn’t have to worry about his Arcara messing with her spiritual sight, then tried again. Adair pounced up onto the couch, only a few feet away from her now. She analyzed him with her spiritual senses until the Arcara-conducting filaments lit up along his back.
“Think of them like your own fingers,” Phasoné said. “It's easiest to conduct Arcara out the tips of your channels. When you fill a rune or a starsteel object, that is where you push the Arcara out. When you use a Reach technique, that is where it originates.”
Vayra angled her Arcara upward, imagining thin lines tracing from her fingers and out, then pushed it down in an arc. It reached straight for the filaments along Adair’s back.
And then Vayra asked. She couldn’t just force her way in. Sure, Adair had chosen to come along—somewhat. She had given him chances to leave, and he hadn’t. But he wasn’t a sapient being yet, and there was no way he knew what he was getting into. This would protect him, yes. It would also bind them together forever.
So if Adair willingly pushed her away, she wouldn’t keep forcing it.
For a few seconds, her Arcara hesitated, as if pushing against a sticky door, then flooded in through the filaments and tendrils along his back. It traced his channel system and circled around his core, then, given a slight bit of propulsion by his miniscule will, it circled around and flooded back to her, leaking across the distance between them and pushing back into her fingers.
Adair was pushing it back, and now she had to let him in. She opened the door, and the loop was complete.
Now, to make it constant.
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The next day, she and Glade stood at the edge of the viewing platform in King Tallerion’s tower, looking down over the arena. Varion, one of Karmion’s children, faced a young woman in flowing, silky robes. She manipulated the fabric with strands of Arcara, turning the sleeves of her robe into whips and forgings its tails into whirling blades.
The battle had already begun, and from the start, Vayra knew who the victor would be. Varion hacked through the fabric with heavy swipes of his axe, channeling ice and Arcara along the rune of its head. The blade glowed, and ice shards erupted from the impact point, shredding his opponent’s weapons.
“She is hardening her fabric with Wards, too,” Glade said. “He is still smashing through.”
“Is he…that much more powerful?” Vayra breathed.
“They are both Admirals, and both freshly advanced. Like us.”
“Then it's his weapon,” Vayra said. “How strong is it?”
‘Rated to Grand-Admiral or above.’
“If he hits my sword with his axe, he will destroy the blade, no matter how high-quality the sword is,” Glade said sullenly. “His ice will seep into the faintest crack in the steel and shatter it.”
Vayra shut her eyes. “He’s clearly the best contender. You’ll face him at some point. Can you win?”
“I…do not know,” said Glade. “He has likely centuries of training, and if not that, then his spirit is not damaged like mine. Innately, he is stronger. Whether I could get lucky or not would be the deciding factor.”
Vayra dropped her head. “How do we know how good he is?”
“Ma’am,” said King Tallerion’s aide, “if I may interject, the suffix -ion to a name is an indicator of Nobility. Karmion, or whoever named this Varion, did it precisely on purpose, because they knew how strong they were going to make him, how they were going to drive his ambition. It would be a grave mistake to underestimate him.”
“Then we have to even the field,” Vayra said. “They’ll try to pit him against me first, I guarantee it. I don’t have to win—I just have to destroy his axe.”