Tracking the fleeing Caelians was a piece of cake. A large percentage of their airborne knights had been eviscerated when I cut the summoning circle apart. Without my warning to run to the ground, they had been paralyzed with fear as the energy crushed their existence.

With few exits from the city and limited mobility, my new army collapsed on the remnants with swift and relative ease. As I predicted, most of them were heading toward the city’s southern entrance. I gathered Nida, Nasq, and Ethan with me and ordered each of them to mount something that flew.

While the duke’s army was not short of wyverns, there weren’t enough for everyone. Each wyvern was assigned to a specific knight, typically mid-level officers and above. The lower-ranked soldiers flew alongside their higher-ranked brethren atop creatures called “cockatrices.”

The first time I saw one of the giant, flying chickens, I laughed so hard I nearly forgot the ongoing war. When I calmed down, Ethan mounted one, and the sight of the giant berserker riding a winged chicken was so hilarious it took me another moment to collect myself.

My wyvern bristled underneath me, its lips curled back into a vicious snarl as we watched the duke’s soldiers descend upon the retreating Caelian soldiers with cruelty and malice in their hearts. “It’s amazing what one can do out of anger,” I murmured to no one in particular as airborne soldiers slaughtered the grounded ones.

Ethan grumbled something that sounded like agreement, but he wasn’t ready to speak to me yet after I laughed at him.

Nida snickered and jeered at him. “Big man sad his queen laughed at him?”

“You’re riding a giant chicken,” I said with another laugh. “Hard not to find that funny even if you weren’t a quarter its size.” In all honesty, that was completely true.

The cockatrice itself was nearly the size of a wyvern, perhaps only a few feet shorter than mine. But where a wyvern was a beautiful creature of sleek black and purple scales, the cockatrice was a grotesque amalgamation of different creatures. It had the body of a chicken, its feathers glistening with a sickly shimmer. Large, bat-like wings reminiscent of a wyvern’s extended from its sides, though it seemed to have little need to flap them. The cockatrices mainly coasted on gusts of wind and rarely changed trajectory, even at the command of their riders. Its head was the most terrifying aspect of the creature, featuring a sharp, cruel beak and eyes that burned with a piercing, malevolent intelligence, like an animal infected with rabies. Jagged feathers lined its head like a crown, giving it the look of a tyrant king, while its scaled, serpentine tail coiled and lashed as if with a life of its own.

It was certainly less regal than a wyvern, but infinitely more terrifying. I was surprised the beasts were so common. The stable hands treated the cockatrice like a horse or sheep. If one or ten died, it didn’t make much of a difference to their animal farm.

I took a second to look above the wholesale slaughter and out into the expansive desert that appeared to stretch infinitely beyond the horizon. I wondered what lay on the other side of all that sand. Since I arrived in Ordite, what felt like a year or so, perhaps a little more, I had very little agency. The universe and fate itself had been more inclined to toss me from here to there, over and over again. I knew next to nothing about this world. Nothing of the spirit and nature of the land. What secrets of power and untold horrors might it hold?

I wanted it all. Every last piece of it. And when I bent this world to my will, I would take it and march it to Graedon, and that world would drown in the blood of my great betrayers.

Still, I curled a strand of straight brown hair around my finger in thought, even as another wave of shrieks echoed from the dying Caelians below. I pulled out the Coin of House Alistar with my free hand and sent a message to Field Marshal Daenara Mavis, who was leading the search for Holy Knights. “Daenara, have you found them?”

“No, my lady. Not yet. My tracker says they split from the Caelians and are headed west,” she said after only a few seconds of silence.

“Is there an exit located there?” I asked.

The silence that followed was longer this time, but I waited patiently. “I do not believe so.” I could hear the hesitation in her voice despite the sound being transmitted directly to my mind.

“Do not mind the information and simply share it, Field Marshal. I am not so narrow-minded. Speak,” I commanded and sent a bolt of intention through the link.

Daenara replied instantly. “While it is an assumption, the Holy Kingdom was here for nearly an entire day before the Caelians set off the explosion. That would give them enough time to set up a portal of exchange.”

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I reflexively lifted an eyebrow but quickly realized the field marshal couldn’t see it and swiftly followed up. “What is a portal of exchange?”

“Apologies, Lady Lilliana. As you may know, teleportation over long distances is generally impossible. However, the Holy Kingdom created a type of summoning exchange spell circle a decade or so ago that allows those in the magic circle to trade places with those on a separate but linked magic circle, as long as the number of people is equal. This satisfies the law of equal exchange.”

I grimaced at her words. I didn't know much about magic, but the theory of equivalent exchange was certainly prominent on Ordite. I was more surprised people in Pularea knew about it enough to shape magic or energy around it. “You need to hurry, then. The law of equivalent exchange doesn’t work that way. Those that are sent away for the summoning will be dead, and you’ll lose your chance to gain information from prisoners. Hurry.”

I cut the connection with a thought as Daenara’s feelings of panic and dread flooded the channel. No need to experience those emotions. Once that was done, I pulled a strand of heart energy from my core and spread it out from me in an intangible wave. My senses sparked to a heightened state as that wave spread, and I took in the power of every living thing within Sealrite.

The mental load of information was heavy, immediately acting like someone had drilled a sword through my eye and causing me to flinch. I focused and got to work examining the life sources, trying to quickly sort through the mortals and lower core users that were irrelevant.

“You said she escaped during the initial impact in the black tower, Ethan?” I asked, and the berserker grunted with a sharp nod.

“She’s like a fox,” he grumbled. “Hard to catch.”

“I’m sure you would have caught up to her if you didn’t have massive amounts of building on your back,” Nasq said in an obvious attempt to comfort his fellow paragon. I still needed to ask them how they survived, but that would need to be set aside for a later date.

I tried to ignore them and focused on entering the trance state required for long-distance energy searching. In my mind’s eye, I examined heart after heart, pushing past the bronze and silver lights.

I found Marquess Sharma first. Although he did not have a heart core, his power was of a level that was hard to hide without the knowledge to consciously do so. Somehow he had been rescued by an individual with a magic core equal to a low-tier silver core, and he or she was running while carrying the Marquess. The person had been smart and split from the remaining Caelian forces and the Holy Knights. If I was sensing it correctly, the Marquess was being hidden in the slave dungeon tunnels.

The irony was not lost on me. My last act in Sealrite would be where my first had been. I chuckled at that, nearly jostling myself from my trance-like state.

I seethed at my negligence and redoubled the effort to focus. Where was the Cardinal? For whatever reason, no matter how long I looked, I couldn’t find any magic or energy source that matched what I remembered of her.

After nearly an hour had passed and the screaming of death below us had begun to wane, I turned to Ethan and scowled. I hadn’t meant to direct it at him, but Ethan winced back at the look as if I’d struck him.

“I can’t find her. You’ll need to track her down the old-fashioned way. For whatever reason, she isn’t emanating any heart or magic essence. Nasq, yes, you, help Ethan out. Nida, you stay with me,” I ordered, and the two men bowed deeply before taking off without another word. I half expected Nida to crack a joke or sarcasm as her brethren left. Instead, the woman stayed silent.

I absently wondered just how vicious my look of annoyance had seemed that all three were instantly mollified, if not completely frozen with fear. There hadn’t even been any bloodlust in that look. They would need to be exposed more to bloodlust, I concluded. If just that paralyzed them, what would happen when they faced a true Awakened?

“Alright, let’s go find the lost Marquess,” I said, yanking at my wyvern’s reins to point west, and Nida followed suit on her flying chicken. My wyvern pulled its wings tight against its body and dove west, only expanding them when we were close enough to the tallest building that I could jump to it if I desired. The city smoked in ruins under us, a testament to the damage Marquess Sharma had caused. That I had caused.

It was a beautiful sight, if slightly more than intended.

When the gladiator slave dungeon came into view, the sun was breaking the horizon. I went to land my wyvern inside the colosseum when a young woman of no more than thirty strode with clearly false confidence toward us, her hands raised in surrender.

“How did you find me?” she asked.

I ignored her question. “Fetch the Marquess. I care not for you, girl.”

“W-what?” the woman stumbled, her face going pale.

When Nida laughed, it was a sound starkly opposite to that of joy or humor normally associated with laughter. “You thought my Queen could not see through your pathetic deceptions?”

I just sighed when the woman’s body went completely white with apparent fear. “Do you remember where I said the Marquess is?” Nida nodded. “Good, go get him. I’ll stay here and have a… conversation with her.” I hadn’t believed it possible for someone to get whiter than the woman had been, but at my words, she paled to the point someone else might mistake her for a ghost.

“What are you going to do with my father?” the woman asked.

I raised an eyebrow at her question but turned my back to her in silence and began to walk a small circle around the inside of the colosseum’s battle arena. “You know,” I began, still twirling a strand of hair. “My first memories of Sealrite are in that dungeon.” I pointed beyond the darkness trapped by one of the colosseum’s steel doors that led to the slaves. “And in here.” I opened my arms and spun a circle as if basking in the glory of being a gladiator. “All those memories are thanks to your father choosing to treat me like a slave.” Finally, I turned toward the woman and cast the full, crushing pressure of my stare directly at her. She seemed to shrink under my killing intent as I poured vehemence at her very soul. “I believe it’s time to return that favor in kind.”