by Thomas Green
Before more men came, Luna climbed by the wall to dodge the guards at the gate and returned to her cell. Once there, she drew a horrible-looking sketch of the symbol of Palai and lay into bed. She ignored the emptiness that seized her insides, closed her eyes, focused on the symbol and whispered, “for my battle ends at dawn, the last dawn of my soul, the dawn of the thousand suns.”
21
Lucas
Lucas glided through the infinite emptiness of Limbo. Like bubbles, soul chambers of the sleeping humans shone within the blackness. He found Luna’s and entered.
The house of her soul appeared as endless, icy plains while in its midst stood a frozen waterfall. In utter chaos, fragments of her memories lay scattered all around. Toys from her past, images of people she met, paintings of places she had visited, dreams she had dreamt, all were split into shimmering shards thrown randomly onto the snow.
By the waterfall rested a massive, black wolf, easily a hundred feet long. On its back, hidden within his thick fur, slept Luna, connected to the beast by a chain of ever-moving blood. The wolf huffed as Lucas approached, but did not move. He soulstepped to Luna and woke her up with a jolt of his aether.
She opened her eyes.
Lucas threw her an amused glance. “I suppose you got the map for me.”
She shook her head as she sat up. “You weren’t supposed to enter here without me letting you in.”
“Don’t worry. I didn’t break your defenses since I slipped by them.”
Her eyes widened. “Are they that bad?”
“No.” He smiled. “I am that good.”
“Yeah.” Luna sighed, gazing down at her feet. “Right. Anyway, I’ve got the map… as you have sure found from my memories by now.”
“I am not interested in those. Yes, here from your soul chamber, I could sift through your dreams, memories, imagination and everything else that had ever passed through your mind. But I haven’t, and I’m not planning to.”
“Why?”
“Let’s call it an etiquette. I use Limbo to speak to others more often than I would like to. That requires a certain set of rules, so people are willing to talk to me within it in the first place. One of them is that I never even glance at their memories.”
Luna smiled. “I didn’t think you would care.”
“I do. Back to business, I will pick up the map before the morning. As for your second mission in this city, I need Luis Lawland, the owner of the local mines, to meet his demise. In particular, he is to die tomorrow at about midnight. He will be within his mansion, and the signal for the start of the assassination shall be an outbreak of fire in the south-eastern district.”
She lay back onto the wolf. “To dream-walk was supposed to be difficult, but you speak of it as if it was nothing.”
He conjured a smile onto his face. “Two more people in the world can travel the Limbo like I do, so yes, it is difficult.”
“Okay. So this is your aether manifestation, right? The dream-walking, which you use for the teleportation that you called a soulstep.”
He smiled and sat down next to her. “Pretty much.”
She rubbed her chin. “But you also channeled your power into me after you brutally almost-murdered me, so that would be your second advanced manifestation. Most people can do zero or one. But you aren’t most people, are you?”
He frowned. “Where are you aiming with this?”
She smiled. “How did you learn the second manifestation? I know shifting since it’s what James drilled into me when I was young but other than that and basic strengthening, I can’t do anything else with my power.”
“I am older than I look.” Lucas made a jug appear in his hand and took a long swig. “And you shouldn’t focus on widening your strength but deepening it. Your shifting can be hastened, and your strengthening has space for improvement. You also need more aether reserve, because as far as I’ve observed, you can’t fully regenerate your body by using shifting more than twice. Did anyone ever teach you how to breathe properly?”
Luna reached out for the jug. “Yeah… but I haven’t been a good student since I never practiced much. I thought I was strong enough already. Now, I know better… fighting people wielding advanced manifestations of aether is different from facing everyone else.”
“Keep doing the breathing exercises, and you will be fine. The advantage of your shifting is that it doesn’t have any hole, at least for as long as you learn to do it quickly.”
She sighed. “I wish… it doesn’t work against poisons.”
“And? Don’t get hit when you see poison. It's not a big deal and learning the last few steps from strengthening will solve most of this problem, anyway.”
“It’s not so easy.” Luna shook her head. “No matter what I do, how I train or what I try, I am slow and weak.”
Lucas narrowed his eyes. “As if your control was slipping when you are using a lot of aether?”
“Yeah… maybe.” She scratched her nape. “I don’t know how to tell if something’s wrong since I don’t know how it should be right.”
He waved around in an all-encompassing gesture. “The memory fragments that are scattered around your soul chamber, did you put them there or have they always been like this?”
She shrugged. “Never different, why?”
Because her soul was a total mess. If he were to guess, she and the wolf were supposed to be separated within the soul chamber with the chain connecting them being the only link. Yet there was no separation, so when using aether, they needed to cooperate correctly else their control would wane. That required so much focus she would slip into the tunnel vision of her and her opponent, which would not have been noticeable for her, but crippling in any other fight than a duel. He closed his eyes, the sinking feeling of guilt creeping through his insides.
On the one hand, he has been keeping a dangerous monster, her, under control. However, from the other perspective, he was abusing a young girl who was being thrown around by things she could neither control nor understand. His lip curled in disgust at what he had done, at who he had become. He made a cigar appear in his hand, put it to his mouth and lit it. As he took a drag, he sat down next to her. “You need the bindings that connect you to the spirit redone or at least adjusted. The Order has a powerful spirit wielder, so I will arrange you a meeting with him in Xona. He will check your bindings and see what he can do.”
She stared at him with wide, surprised eyes for a long moment before she uttered, “how would that help?”
“With what I consider the proper bindings, the Wolf will be separated from you on the spiritual level, meaning you would use separate aether so your control would stop slipping.”
She stared at him as if he had destroyed the sky. “This separate aether, how would we replenish it?”
“You would keep breathing it in through the air, but the wolf would absorb aether from the Void, rather than from you.”
Tears shot to her eyes, her voice stuttering. “Do you mean that I wouldn’t have to eat people anymore? That I could be… normal?”
He nodded.
She closed her eyes, said “thank you” and collapsed onto the wolf.
Lucas rose to his feet. “I need to go.” He leapt off the wolf before he disappeared, soulstepping behind the frozen waterfall. From there, he ascended out of the soul chamber into the endlessness of Void that lay beyond.
Lucas floated through the Limbo, through its infinite darkness, until he reached his own soul chamber. From outside, it had the appearance of a massive sphere of pure blackness. He dove into the darkness and soon stood in a barren room with a door at its end. He didn’t bother going back to his bed but instead sagged by the wall, closed his eyes and focused.
He woke up in reality, sitting by the side of a storage room within the arena complex of Cinderwell. Without waiting for anything, he rose to his feet and headed to Luna’s cell. He slipped inside like a ghost, pried the map from the satchel that lay by her bed and left.
&
nbsp; ***
The city was well fortified, but it was not prepared for someone who could soulstep. Lucas passed through the districts, running over the rooftops while helping himself with a short soulstep where necessary. He soon left the city and sprinted to their military camp hidden within the forest half a dozen miles away from Cinderwell, whishing his soulstep’s range wasn’t limited to a few hundreds of feet.
The Palai army camp was but a village made of tents. His red-gold armored soldiers nodded as he passed through the makeshift gate. He headed straight toward the center where the largest tent, their field headquarters, stood. He entered the map-laden tent and leaned onto the table at its midst.
The rest of the Order’s leadership soon gathered. Merewen wore her spikes-covered armor while her auburn hair was drenched in sweat from the recent practice. Miranda wore her usual skin-tight black leathers, had her crimson hair flowing freely, and pierced him with a glare of her emerald eyes as soon as she entered. Despite how much they had both washed their gear, the unmistakable stench of shit oozed from them both, bringing a smile to Lucas’ face. The third one to enter was an old man in gloriously decorated, red-gold robes, the Archbishop Nashimaeal himself.
Lucas arched an eyebrow. “I suppose I can thank the battle of Grimdawn for your presence, Nash.”
“The massacre of Grimdawn,” the archbishop corrected him, “and yes, I have come in person to ensure it shall not repeat.”
“We will see.” Lucas smiled. “Miranda, give me the status.”
She walked to the maps-covered table. “In short, we are fucked. The slaver army is swarming through the city, has all entrances sealed, and checks everyone coming in. We have less than a hundred soldiers within the walls, all of whom being the original garrison of our local temple. We can’t get in more, and we cannot afford to lay siege since they hold the citizens as hostages.”
“Nothing we can’t overcome,” Lucas said with a smile.
“Without burning down the city?” Nashimaeal pitched in. Everyone else twitched uncomfortably as his words echoed through the air.
“We have too many followers in the region to burn it,” Lucas said, “but I have found a way in. We attack in two nights, and I will start by creating a distraction. Miranda, get your men ready, for you will need to pick off as many enemy officers as possible. Resistance is unknown, but you are prohibited from engaging Collward. If he appears, withdraw.
“Merewen, prepare your men to enter through the sewers. You will need to get through them before my distraction stops working to set a foothold within the city. Nash, please pack up and head to Xona. You won’t be able to make it to the mass in Cinderwell at this rate, and I am afraid I cannot guarantee your safety anywhere around it either.”
“Is it worth it? This sounds dangerous,” Nashimaeal challenged. “Also, why does the distraction sound like you starting a fire?”
Lucas laughed. “Because that’s exactly what it is. Don’t worry though, for I shall set ablaze only the storage district, which is vacant during the night, but important enough to make the slavers rush in to douse the flames.”
Merewen raised an eyebrow. “I suppose the mines are a no-go then?”
“Yeah.” Lucas put the map Luna stole for him onto the table to roll it out. “They have collapsed most side tunnels, creating a nightmare of a bottleneck here in the upper levels. I suspect the slavers will deploy most of their force there so we wouldn’t make it through even if we weren’t outnumbered.”
“With the bulk of their army stationed in the mines and the rest stopping the city fire, yeah, I can see this work,” Merewen said. “I will get my army ready.”
Archbishop Nashimaeal pierced Lucas with a cold glare. “You ignored my first question.”
“Yes, it is most likely worth the trouble.”
“Most likely is not enough to convince me.” The archbishop frowned. “But I suppose I will trust you on this. I shall depart for Xona and organize a mass in every city along the way. Hopefully, our followers will remember the ideals we fight for better than our military’s leadership does.”
Miranda, Merewen, and Lucas all looked into the ground as the archbishop left the tent.
Lucas turned toward Miranda once the tent’s opening closed behind Nashiemaeal’s back.
Miranda shrugged. “What? I did what I could to calm him down. You should have seen him when he heard the news of Grimdawn. He gave me a four-hour lecture on the value of human life, the principles of honor, the virtue of peace and all the other bullshit he likes to preach about.”
Merewen smirked. “On the plus side, we still have enough whale oil to burn down a smaller city.”
This is why these two are my second and third in command. Lucas grinned and made three jugs full of booze appear around him. “Drink?”
22
Luna
The time of their match had come. Luna and Raven donned their armor, double-checked their weapons and headed out. The second they stepped out of the cell, Raven’s face turned from ordinary to that of the unimaginable beauty. She ignored him as she tied her mud brown hair into a ponytail.
Within the preparation room, the Rapacious Reavers stood ready, their white-pink armor polished to perfection.
Raven greeted them with a nod. “What type of contest will the match be?”
Finubar shrugged. “The painting on the wall in Grimdawn portrayed a chest surrounded by keys. That’s all we know.”
“Not even Jonathan knows?”
“Sadly, I do not,” the voice of Prince Stallington echoed from the hallway behind Raven. “My relationship with Mr. Lawland is substandard at best. I am certain he shall rig the match against you in any way he can. To omit to relay us the actual format of the competition while making us fight first is merely the start.”
Raven smiled. “We will win anyway.”
Prince Stallington could not help himself but return the smile. “I know. I have come to wish you all good luck.”
Finubar bowed. “Thank you, your highness.”
The prince spun on his heel and left.
Finubar cleared his throat. “Well, our idea was that there would be a chest and a number of keys hidden within the contest area and we would have to find those keys to reach the stone marking the victory. I’m basing this upon a single painting, but it’s the best guess I have.”
Raven raised an eyebrow. “Got a role for us?”
“Yes. We are ten people in total, so if the competition area is made of former mines, we better split up to hasten the search. I was thinking of two groups of three and one of four, you and Luna would be leading each of the three-person groups.”
“Bad idea,” she blurted. “That came out wrong. I am horrible at fighting alongside people, so I should go alone.”
“Okay.” Finubar smiled. “We have no desire of ending as your snacks, so we can do three groups of three with you charging forward.”
Luna sighed. “Sorry.”
Finubar shook his head. “It’s alright.”
“Sorry, but how come you are so okay with… how I am?”
“You fit into the world perfectly. Within the wilderness roam thousands of wild monsters that eat everything living they can find, there are demons where you look, humans who are trying to turn other humans into demons, there are men who raise the dead, there are chimeras that are crazy mixtures of anything with anything. I apologize for being blunt, but you aren’t that special.”
That’s one of the cutest things anyone has ever told me. A soothing feeling of warmth spread through Luna. “Thank you,” she whispered. “Sorry to ask, but what’s with the bright-pink uniforms? They are atrocious.”
Finubar laughed. “But they are easy to remember. Our group has over sixty years of history, largely thanks to us being so memorable. Because of that, we get credit for everything we do, which nets us fame, and brings recruits and work opportunities. I know adventuring may not appear as a business, but it sort of is.”
The sharp ringing
of the bell announced the match was about to start. They all turned to walk up the ramp leading toward the arena.
A large cavern with four exits opened before them. In the middle of the dome was a wooden-tower, upon which stood the announcer. By the sides were the tribunes, filled to the brink with a cheering crowd. Before each tribune lay an oversized mirror pointed at other mirrors, which were stationed at platforms built by the walls of the tunnels. Workers manned the mirrors, ready to adjust them to reflect the image of whatever was happening within the competition area to the primary mirror the audience could see.
The chant of Raven’s name filled the air as soon as they entered the cave. The cavern’s echo amplified the sound three-fold, turning it thunderous.
Luna realized the announcer was speaking, yet she couldn’t hear a word. All her ears picked up were the deafening cheers. She turned to Raven, but his look of confusion was unmistakable. Finubar and the rest of the Rapacious Reavers were equally lost.
She would bet her claws they arranged for their starting position to be here in this cavern where they knew there was so much echo they wouldn’t hear anything. Bastards. Luna snarled and wondered if she shouldn't go eat the announcer straight atop his stupid wooden tower.
The announcer had finished talking and waved his hands.
Was that a signal to start the match? Luna glanced over her team. Everybody exchanged awkward stares. Raven stepped forward, heading toward the nearest tunnel.
She shrugged and dashed ahead. She chose the rightmost corridor and crossed the cavern within moments. The cheering faded behind her, but the mirrors at the walls followed her every move. Okay, I am not nearly smart enough to figure out what to do, so I will find the enemy team and kill everyone I can.
‘You underestimate yourself.’
I am realistic. Luna dashed through the tunnel, looking for any signs of movement. A thick demonic scent punched her nose. She grinned and followed its trail. The stench was so intense she didn’t even need to slow her run. A small cavern opened before her while a massive demon walked through its midst. The creature was thirty feet long, had a sinewy body covered by scales, six legs, thick tail, and a huge, lizard-like snout.
