Aelir of the Above, look kindly upon us

Ye of the Beyond, go and return again

We shall not forget you

Grant us freedom, Ye of the Winds

And upon us, look kindly, Aelir of the Above

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Jair emerged from the burning chaos of his unexpected timefall on the southern wall of Astralla Institute, watching the eastern sky.

Raina stood beside him, wearing a full suit of iridescent blue-black armor formed of dozens of Veshin-specialty mana-imbued ceramic plates.

In the distance, a tiny dark speck could be mistaken for a distant bird or particularly large grain of sand thrown aloft by the wind.

It was neither.

Maelstrom was in his hand, and it burned with an inner heat that left Jair feeling weak in comparison. Or, no, he was simply weak in general. No magic, flimsy younger body.

He stared down at the sword.

The entire central runnel, from Maelstrom’s tip to the hilt, had turned black with the faintest shimmer of forest green. The slime-colored brobeg-influenced section was gone, the edges and point all brilliant silver. The golden light of his soulspell glowed from within its black center, intricate patterns more delicate than he could ever have carved.

For lack of a better term, it looked complete.

“Inspect.”

─ Maelstrom

─ Type: Integrated Soulsword (4th Form)

─ Rank: Legendary

─ Abilities: Darkflame, Integration, Temporal Reversion

Imbued with the pure energy of Mount Sanctum, the lifeblood and soul of its creator, and the fire of the Venix, this blade has transcended its humble origins and become an artifact of limitless potential.

Do not stand against us.

─ Bound to Jair Welburne

“Maelstrom.” Jair whispered, tears coming to his eyes as he ran a hand along the blade. Smooth and clean. The sapphires were in perfect alignment. The edges were sharp and unmarred. The serrated edge had clarified into smooth waves.

He laughed, turning the weapon over. The back was as flawless as the front. He inspected it again. There was no integrity percentage, no class requirements.

And 4th form. He hadn’t ever heard of such a thing. Then again, he’d never heard of a legendary soulsword either.

Everything about it was flawless and beautiful. He couldn’t stop staring.

“Wow. What happened? Your sword can shapeshift?”

Jair was still laughing, still crying. He could only shake his head. His heart kept thumping as desperately as if he were still fighting for his life.

“You alright?”

He took a deep breath, fighting the uncontrolled laughter. His mirth didn’t want to be controlled, and burst out of him again and again.

It took a few minutes before he could finally answer.

“I’ll be fine.”

“What happened?”

He glanced up at the distant dragon. It wouldn’t be here for nearly an hour. “I’m going to meditate. Inspect it if you want.”

Raina stiffened, eyes flicking between Jair and the sword. “You sure?”

“I trust you, Rai. If you want to kill me for it, go ahead.”

She recoiled. “I would never!”

Jair only smiled and shook his head. He closed his eyes and focused inward.

He saw the change immediately, even without going into the specifics of the soulmap.

His soulspell was gone. Where Temporal Reversion normally resided—a golden sun at his core, with Maelstrom a silver star tethered to its orbit—now he found only a single orb of black fire that flickered with flames of green and silver.

It burned him to look at it, even in soulsight, as though it were trying to consume him from within even now.

He had to force himself to look deeper, to spread out its fiery soulmap in all its intricacy.

Instead of Maelstrom’s soul being intimately entwined with his own, it had fully supplanted what used to be there. Or, more accurately, he had given it what used to be there.

Whatever it takes, he had said, and it had taken what it needed.

Maelstrom was no longer a part of him. It was him.

The intricate design of Temporal Reversion remained, patterned with Maelstrom’s curling filigree, familiar shapes turned to black fire that glinted with silver and green. There was no change in texture from one patch to another, no missing pieces or fluctuation.

Yet even now, he felt a pervasive hunger. It may be completed, but it wasn’t finished. It wanted something more.

Jair withdrew from his inner concentration and looked up at the distant speck that was Ryenzo Draconis. Maelstrom’s dark fire pulsed in his hand. Eager.

“Fourth… form…?” Raina sounded faint. Her eyes were fixed on Maelstrom. “How?”

Jair shrugged. “Isn’t it obvious? I fed it my soul.” He hefted the weapon, its balance so flawless it felt like weighted air. “Now, let’s see how well it handles Miss Draconis.”

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He felt light and afire at once, buoyed and unstoppable. He’d done the impossible. Twice now.

Time for number three.

If he’d had his spells, he’d have run over and thrown himself off the wall, flown to meet Ryenzo in the sky. As it was, he had to settle for the towertop.

And waiting.

So much waiting.

“How do you still have this much energy?” Raina asked, breathless. “Just walking in this armor makes me feel like I’m going to pass out. Let alone running up and down the tower.”

“I don’t know!” Jair laughed, light and free, and Maelstrom manifested in his hand as he pointed it at the dragon-shaped smudge in the sky. “Hear that, Ryenzo?”

“What has gotten into you?”

“Hope.”

He said it flippantly, but the moment it passed his lips he realized that it was the truth. He’d been fighting so long out of desperation, obsession, pride. He’d chased one impossible task after another to fight off the emptiness.

He’d always known what he was fighting for, but he’d lost sight of the reality amid the chaos and the fear and the relentless march of time and time again, over and over. The same patterns repeated, until living and dreaming felt almost alike and memory blurred to uselessness. And still he’d never stopped.

“I promised I’d find a way to save you,” he said, wonderingly. “And now I have.”

“Why do you sound surprised?” She narrowed her eyes at him.

Jair only shook his head. “I’ll explain everything in the morning.” And for the first time, he truly believed it. Not as a way to avoid ever answering, but a specific timeline.

The thought set him off laughing joyously all over again, and he ran up to the top of the tower without another word.

Ryenzo was closer. Not close enough.

Jair threw Maelstrom in her general direction anyway. The blade flickered and twisted in midair, its flat aligning so it cut through the air smoothly, lofted by the winds, seeming untroubled by gravity.

Jair stared after it, squinting against the sun, then laughed and reached out toward it.

Bladewalk.

Maelstrom flew through the sky, and Jair flew behind it with his hand outstretched.

There was no longer any need to understand his sword, to coerce it into ignoring the laws of the universe. Maelstrom had never obeyed the laws of the universe, and he understood the weapon more intimately than he’d ever imagined possible.

Jair didn’t need to convince it of anything. He just had to bring himself along for the ride.

“Jair?!” Raina’s voice echoed from behind, below.

He turned back to wave, grinning. “I’ll be back soon! I’ve got a dragon to slay.”

“Without me?” She ran over to the battlements, a tiny indignant shape as the academy receded behind him. “What happened to becoming dragonslayers together?”

“Next time! I promise!”

Then he was too far away, and any response she may have made was lost to the wind.

Maelstrom still flew before him without slowing or wavering in its path. Ryenzo came nearer and nearer.

Jair flew at the dragon. He was unpracticed, unimprinted, and alone.

Jair had Maelstrom. He didn’t need anything else.

Ryenzo saw him coming and shifted her flight to intercept. A tasty little snack, she must have thought. Just what she needed on the way to eat Raina Serin.

Jair’s flight slowed as he caught up to Maelstrom, the blade settling itself dramatically into his hand.

He immediately fell, almost losing his grip on the sword as he dangled from it by one hand.

“Right. No Lift to help.”

There followed a brief ungainly scramble as he pulled himself awkwardly up to crouch atop the flat of the unmoving blade.

Ryenzo paid his little accident no mind, nor did she seem troubled by the fact that a human with a sword was hovering in the middle of the desert.

She blasted him with a puff of poison gas, then ignited it as she flew past.

Luckily, Jair still wore his own anti-dragon armor suit. Not nearly as high-quality as Raina’s, but enough to protect him from the gas. The explosion he weathered by releasing Bladewalk and allowing himself to be shoved away by the air pressure.

That threw him off course and dropped him by several dragonlengths. By the time he stopped tumbling through the sky and reoriented himself, Ryenzo’s tail was whipping past into the poison cloud she’d left behind.

“Don’t tell me I need to chase you back to the Institute…”

But he underestimated Ryenzo’s hunger. While it was true that, given any true danger to herself, she would drop everything and go straight for Raina, she was still a dragon.

So she did the single stupidest thing of her entire existence. She looped back around to swallow Jair whole.

One moment he was figuring out how to keep Bladewalk active while upside-down, the next he was in warm wet darkness that sizzled against his armor as it began to eat away at the metal.

Maelstrom flicked to Jair’s hand, and he stabbed upward toward the spine. Maelstrom sliced through the thick layers of muscle and to the bone with such ease he almost didn’t want to bother with anything fancy.

But Ryenzo was still very large, and chopping her into little pieces—as satisfying as it would be—might not be enough to stop her.

Jair activated Darkflame.

It felt immediately different from any other time he’d used the ability. It didn’t draw on his mana, but flowed out effortlessly. Like a soulspell.

And it didn’t stop.

Black fire ignited around Maelstrom’s hilt, spreading through Ryenzo’s stomach. Her venomous acid hissed away to smoke, then even the smoke turned to nothing. Flickers of green and silver lit the area as her flesh began to burn away in a circle spreading out from Maelstrom.

Ryenzo shrieked in pain, twisted, and convulsed.

Jair was hurled out in a spray of shredded stomach, scattered into the air. The dragon swiped at him as she flew past, but her claw only gouged a small dent into his armor. She coughed and bellowed fire, trying to clear the obstruction.

Maelstrom would not be cleared. It remained where Jair had put it, stabbed deep into her spine from the inside, and it continued to burn.

Jair tumbled through the sky for a few disorienting moments, colors becoming a blur as he spun helplessly.

Then he recovered enough awareness to flip himself over and reactivate Bladewalk.

Ryenzo flew toward the Institute, wings beating madly, desperate to accomplish her last goal before the darkflame consumed her.

“You’re too far away!” Jair shouted, as he flew after her. “You’ll never reach her on time. It’s over!”

Ryenzo paid his words no heed. She flew like never before, poisonous green light suffusing her long scaled body as she used magic of her own to heal and hasten herself.

Jair couldn’t catch up. Bladewalk had its limitations. It was only a weapon ability, not a true flight spell, and not a soulspell. He could do nothing to overcharge or upcast it, and it wasn’t enough to keep up with Ryenzo’s speed.

Maelstrom, though, had no maximum range. Its darkflame continued to burn.

Jair fell further and further behind, but that only meant he had a magnificent view of the end.

Ryenzo’s flight faltered. One wing came detached and dissolved into ash. She lost control of her flight, spinning and tumbling to crash into the sand well away from the Institute.

Jair began to close the gap.

Below, the dragon clawed her way desperately forward, lone wing flapping to lighten the load as she still tried to crawl at the distant academy.

There was a huge section of her body missing, the whole right side torn open to the harsh desert wind. Even as he watched, her left rear leg was eaten away by the flickering darkflame.

It was a pitiable sight. If it‘d been anyone else, Jair might have been tempted to stop.

But this was Ryenzo. He’d already tried every possible combination of negotiation and reasoning with her. And in the end, she’d chosen the wrong person to eat.

Her tail and lower body dissipated into ash, leaving only her head, neck, and single claw. Still she lurched drunkenly toward the academy.

The glow of her manabody trying to keep her functional fought with the darkness growing out from where Maelstrom remained lodged in her spine.

Then Maelstrom flashed one final time and fell to the sand amid a cloud of ash. Ryenzo’s insane vendetta came to a very permanent end as the last of her body burned away.

Or… it should have.

Before Jair could so much as begin to descend, the dragon reappeared, fully uninjured.

There was no time to process what was happening. Her long neck whipped around, green eyes narrowing as she glared up at him.

Settling back on her haunches, one claw pressing Maelstrom into the sand, she let out a deep, soft rumble.

“Very well, human. You have my attention.”

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