Kaz closed his eyes, a thousand memories flashing through his mind. The looks of pitying disdain on the faces of other kobolds whenever they met his tribe. The respect and even affection with which the males of the Copperstrikers, Sharpjaws, and Redmanes regarded their females, particularly their chiefs. His father, saying, “Never question a female’s decisions, especially your mother.”
And his mother, Oda, over and over and over again. Things he had overlooked because she was his mother, and his chief, but there was no denying the foam at the corner of her mouth when she spoke of returning to their ‘rightful place’, or the wild look in her eyes when she ranted about the next luegat, and how it would be the one that would allow them to begin their descent.
His mother hadn’t just been arrogant. She hadn’t just been foolish, or deluded. She had been mad, and in her madness, she had nearly led his entire tribe to disgrace and death. She had systematically crushed Kaz himself beneath her paw, destroying any sense of self-worth or independence except what he found when he was forced to sneak away in order to hide his rising power. What part of what he thought he knew about his own people was true, and what part had been his mother manipulating the tribe for her own ends?
Perhaps even more importantly, why had his Aunt Rega allowed it to happen? He had always believed that she must be weaker than Oda, but not by much. Once his own power began to show itself, he never allowed himself to use it to view either her or Oda, but given what Rega had done when she covered the scent of the entire tribe as they fled from the core-hunter, Kaz wondered what he might have seen if he had dared to look.
If she had been able to challenge and defeat Oda, or if she had done what Litz did, and incited the rest of the tribe against their chief, especially soon after they left the Deep, when there were still females to incite, surely together they could have brought Oda down. And how would things have been different, for the Broken Knives in general, and him in particular, if Rega was chief? She was firm but kind, fair to everyone, and she had loved Kaz as if he was her own pup.
There were things he didn’t understand. Things about his own tribe, his history, and his family that were hidden from him. He thought he had left them all behind when he asked Lianhua if he could follow her from the mountain; thought that whatever secrets Oda and Rega had had, they could lie forgotten with them and the ancestors.
But with one sentence, one compassionate look, Eld had destroyed the fragile peace Kaz had found in running away. “If that’s what your tribe was like.”
Which meant that other tribes weren’t like that. Even the notoriously aggressive Bronzearms weren’t like that, though Nogz had admitted that it was their chief who had led them to their destruction. Kaz had assumed that meant she was like Oda, but Eld’s response had clearly shown him that was an error.
A mental nudge pulled him from his whirling thoughts as a worried dragon tried to get his attention. Li had been woken by Kaz’s inner turmoil, had watched the scenes from his memory play out, and now she was concerned for him. She sent an image of herself, small for once, wrapping her long body into place around his throat, which was bare of either collar or necklace. The dragon herself was all the adornment, all the symbol of status, that he needed.
He smiled at that imperious little feeling, and reached up, as if he could stroke her cool, smooth scales. Instead, his fingers touched the collar that lay around his neck, and sudden fury filled him. The necklace Oda had never allowed him to earn was a shackle as certainly as the collar, and he wanted this symbol of control off. Distantly, he felt Li’s worry spike, but he was already closing his fingers around the metal loop that bound him.
Drawing in a breath, he pushed on his core, pressing in on it more than he had dared since he woke and found that it had been returned to some semblance of its original shape. Every time he thought about truly pushing it, he remembered the agony of his core breaking, not once, but twice, after he foolishly took one chance too many. What if he tried too hard, and broke it yet again, this time without either luck or a mysterious being to save him?
But he was done holding back. He had chosen freedom when he told Lianhua he wanted to go with her, and yet the mosui had dared to bind him again? And this time with something far more physical than the chains of love and tradition Oda had used.
Physical bonds, he could break.
Ki rose through his body as he released the breath he had taken in. The only thing he could compare it to was the moment he had forced his power out through his flesh to destroy the attacking woshi spawn, but this time he would control it. It was his power, not just an unwanted thing that lurked inside his skin. No, his ki was what would allow him to do and be whatever he wanted, and nothing would take that away again.
He closed his eyes, thinking about everything he’d seen and learned since the humans entered the mountain. Kobolds and other creatures had cores, and those cores produced ki, which the kobolds then used to produce results that would otherwise be impossible. Raff and the other humans did the same by drawing foggy clouds of ‘mana’ from the very air around them, but Kaz could only see mana when it was already being gathered or refined.
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Yet the mosui, husede, and even Raff worked with mana instead of ki. The process seemed to be less efficient than using ki, but much faster, since they didn’t have to refine it first. It seemed clear to Kaz that mana was ki, and ki was mana. He could see sparks of red ki inside Raff when the male sent power to his weapon, and there were even faint clouds of mana inside some of the weakest kobold females.
What if mana was like niu fur? It was rough and unrefined, but once it was combed, twisted, and dyed, it could be woven into cloth. That cloth might not be as fine as the human’s fuulong silk, but it served its purpose well.
So, if ki was like the threads that made up power, and mana was the finished cloth, couldn’t he weave it together? Perhaps ki was the original, generated in ‘beast’ cores, and it became mana only when the creature who had produced it died or released unused ki back into the air, to merge with a thousand other broken ends of thread that already waited there. Kaz had thought about this a few times before, and yet again, he reminded himself to ask Lianhua, or perhaps Raff, exactly what humans did with the cores they removed from the creatures they killed.
Turning his vision in, Kaz focused on his ki. He couldn’t see the mana around him, but he knew it had to be there. He couldn’t gather the invisible mana and refine it, but he had managed to produce some fragile semblance of mana at least twice, each time under duress, and each time when he was doing what Lianhua called ‘compressing’ his core, though the first time he hadn’t even had a word to describe it. He had just been trying to hold his shattering core together, pressing on it like he would a wound spouting blood.
Instead of letting his ki run wild, or just shunting it into whichever part of his body he needed to enhance, Kaz forced the ki to flow through his channels, building up and spinning through his central dantian. As it left, it took much of the ki he had been storing there, filling his channels full and beyond full, with swirling colors of ki so intense he could barely look at it.
It rose, reached his upper dantian, and began to rotate ever faster as he examined it, twisted it together, binding golden strands with glimmering sapphire thread, turning obsidian and moonstone and fiery ruby into the brilliant dyes and pigments his father had used to create works of art on the walls of caverns so distant Kaz’s mother would never, ever see them.
Yellow and blue flowed into green, a color of ki he had never seen before. He poured in the red, making a muddy brown, then pressed black and white into it, soaking up all of the other colors until they became one whole piece of deep gray cloth consisting entirely of lambent power. Because mana was ki, and ki was mana, and while the humans used their dantians to refine certain colors of ki from the undifferentiated mana that surrounded them, Kaz needed to bind all the colors of ki that already existed in his core into one… singular… whole.
Kaz barely felt his knees hit the stone floor as he released the mana he had woven and dyed in the image controlled within his upper meridian. It flowed out through his palms, flooding the metal of the collar with more power than any of the mosui or husede in the city had hidden inside them. With a quiet, anticlimactic click, the collar opened, falling into his hands, then crumbled to glittering dust that trickled through his fingers as he held them out in front of him.
Silently, Kaz crouched, staring as the fragments of the collar that had bound him leaked between his fingers and formed a pile on the ground. So little remained of something that controlled so many, and he turned to look back at the light illuminating the end of the tunnel. He had used so much ki, but he felt invigorated, not exhausted. He almost thought that if he stretched out his arms, he could fly, exactly like he did in the dreams he shared with Li. He could free Eld and Nogz, at least, and they could either go with him or flee this place, seeking the den they had lost.
Then sharp agony lanced through his head, and he clapped his hands to it as images pounded into his mind. Red, all around. Red and stillness, alone and lonely, and then… movement. He was picked up, shaken roughly, bouncing against the tight confines of the space in which he rested. For a moment, weightlessness, almost flight, then a hard impact, twisting his forelimb backwards and bending his wing painfully.
No. Not him, but Li. Li’s box was being moved again, and this time it hadn’t been someone carefully transporting it, but rather dropping or even throwing it. Another impact, and Li rolled, tucking her throbbing paw and wing tightly against her body so they couldn’t twist. Her shoulder hurt where it banged against the side of the box, and the lid burst open, spilling her out onto the cold ground in a curled ball that rolled over twice, then came to rest against something much larger than herself.
There was a sound, a high-pitched shriek entirely unlike either a kobold’s howl or a mosui’s shrill screech. Li uncurled, shaking slightly as she looked around, trying to figure out what was happening. A spill of white hair and cloth shuddered on the ground beside her, and a slim, pale hand pushed her hard, shoving her away. Lianhua’s back arched, and she screamed again.
Li took in the room, filled with scattered furniture and a fallen mosui, clutching a large red crystal in its broad hand as it stared at Lianhua with fiery red eyes. A husede stood beside it, crouched to help it rise, and Li herself had rolled partially underneath the small table on which her box had been placed. Looking in the direction Lianhua had pushed her, the dragon saw that the door to the room was open, and as Lianhua’s voice rose for a third time, Li ran from the room.