Ashes (Fire Within Series Book 3)

by Ella M. Lee

  I began to turn away, but not before noticing his somewhat nervous look. He’d been nervous before being promoted to commander in Water Clan too. Much like I had back then, I reminded myself that Daniel was young. He was so, so young to be creating new magic. He was too young to be involved in magic at all, but here he was. Life was strange that way, pulling you in the weirdest directions.

  I imagined Daniel had never considered magic before that night when his life was changed forever, but now there was nothing for him to do but move forward, guided by it.

  “Hey,” I said. “You’ve got this. One hundred percent.”

  “One hundred percent,” he echoed with a weak smile.

  I turned away, heading back to the group, who watched us impatiently.

  “Fi?” Daniel said. I turned to look at him. “I love you.”

  His tone automatically made me smile. I walked back to him, my eyes on his. I cupped his chin with both my hands and then mussed up his spiky hair with my fingers. “I love you too, Commander Darling.”

  I laced my fingers through his and dragged him with me to the center of the room.

  This was Daniel’s show—contrary to the usual, when it was Nicolas’s show—and everyone waited on his instructions. I twisted my bracelet, letting it give me a little bit of encouragement.

  “Teng, activate the wards,” Dan said.

  Teng did so, and they burned bright in my vision, shimmering like the sun on desert sand, stretched across the entire floor in complex patterns.

  “Cameron, wipe the borders,” Dan said.

  Cameron, whose skills with magical suppression let him dampen magic, took a minute to wipe chalk at the edges of the room with his hands. The chalk was meant to create a sort of vacuum space between our work and the warded walls, hopefully keeping in the lesser magic so that the wards only needed to deal with the larger bursts of magic.

  “Ryan, the sanctum wards?” Dan said, pointing.

  Ryan went to the sanctum and touched it, activating the transference wards, making it so that Daniel could push magic into it without worrying that it would escape again.

  “Nicolas, you ready?” Dan asked.

  Nicolas smiled. Nicolas was in charge of setting up and managing the shield around the sanctum and Daniel as he did his work. Once again, he would act as Daniel’s container. The rest of us would use our magic to reinforce the shield, which would likely eat up a lot of power in order to limit the magic during sanctum creation.

  “I am ready when you are, Ah-Ming,” Nicolas said, using Daniel’s Chinese nickname. He looked incredibly proud of his protégé, with something like amazement written all over his face.

  Dan walked to the sanctum and put his hand on it, caressing it for a moment. He smiled. “Okay, let’s do this.”

  Nicolas took out his knife. Much like when we had encountered Stephan, he cut a long gash down his arm. He walked the perimeter of his circle, drawing it in blood as he went, creating complex runic designs that completely enclosed Dan and the sanctum.

  “This shield will be made of two magics—mine and Dan’s,” Nicolas said. “His magic in the shield will serve to reflect his magic back to him and keep the power in. My magic in the shield will keep any interference out. Once the shield is complete and Dan has started inversion inside, we can’t drop the power levels until we’re done, or the sanctum could be damaged by instability. Or… we could be hurt, once the inversion is powerful enough.”

  Nicolas stood, finished with his work. The eleven of us ringed the circle around Daniel at even spacing, ready to feed power into it. Nicolas snapped his fingers, and the circle lit with his pale magic, forming up into a tall dome that completely enclosed the space inside. Daniel stepped forward and touched the shield, feeding his own magic into it. His dark-purple scatterings of lightning cut through Nicolas’s icy blue power, twining with it and reinforcing the shield.

  Once Dan had pushed enough magic into the shield, he turned back to the sanctum.

  “All right, one at a time, put your hands on the shield and start feeding it magic,” Nicolas said. I was on his right, but he nodded to Chandra, who was on his left. “You should be able to get a sense of the level I’m looking for. Follow the guiding runes and lines.”

  As we put our hands to the shield one by one, Daniel started feeding magic into the sanctum. As I had seen him do before, he spread his lacy lightning inside the orb, letting it creep across the surface, filling it. Nicolas knelt and closed his eyes. He needed to be in deep focus for this, blocking out as many distractions as possible.

  Ryan, standing to my right, put his hands on the shield.

  My turn.

  Hesitantly, I reached for the shield. I wasn’t used to doing group work like this, even with Nicolas guiding it. I held up both palms and brought them down to rest on the shield.

  I had expected them to hit the hard surface and connect with Nicolas’s magic.

  But no.

  They passed right through the shield as though it was nothing, and I stumbled into Dan’s workspace.

  Chapter 30

  Shit.

  I landed hard on one knee, steadying myself with a hand on the wooden floor. I looked around, confused. The shield was supposed to be solid. No one else’s hands had passed through, no one else had fallen into it.

  Ryan’s eyes were wide, but he held up a hand to the others and said something. The shield was so powerful and solid that I couldn’t hear him.

  I looked at Daniel. He was watching me with equally wide eyes. He had stopped feeding magic into the orb, but I could see his magic churning in the sanctum. Inversion. We’d begun clan creation.

  I scrambled up, about to back out of his space to the correct side of the shield. Fast as a whip, he lunged for me, grabbing my wrists.

  “No, Fi!” he said, pulling me close to him. “The power transfer is complete. You could die if you try to cross the barrier.”

  “Shit,” I said. “I’m so sorry… I don’t know… Oh, fuck.” I paused. “My transference did this. I didn’t properly dissociate. I thought… Because it was Nicolas’s magic… I forgot about your transmutation… Oh, fuck.”

  At least I hadn’t nearly died this time. Daniel’s magic had been focused on reflection inward. It hadn’t attached to me like my accident with the prototype, where it had been inverted and primed to flow outward.

  I looked around. “I could… I could shield myself to get back through?”

  Dan shook his head. “I don’t think either of us could make powerful enough shields for that.” Daniel’s lips were slightly pursed. “It’s okay. I guess you’ll just have to stay and help me. That’s not so bad, right?”

  “I’m sorry,” I said again.

  “Shush, Fi,” he said.

  He raised his hand to get Ryan’s attention. Dan rolled his wrist and fingers in a circle, indicating that they should keep going. Ryan nodded once and said something to the others.

  “Okay, let’s go,” Dan said. “Come over here. Be careful not to touch anything else until you dissociate properly. Do you understand?”

  He sounded so much like Nicolas that it was sort of scary. I nodded.

  “Take a seat,” he said.

  He sat down cross-legged next to the sanctum. I sat facing him, only a couple of feet away. He put a hand back on the sanctum and thrust more magic into it. He watched his work with an affectionate smile, his dark eyes reflecting the purple light.

  After a few minutes, the sanctum began to glow brighter, so bright that Dan’s eyes narrowed, and we both had to look away.

  “Okay, I think it’s ready,” he said.

  “Ready?” I echoed.

  “Yeah,” he said. “Time to go do some building. Want to come?”

  “Come where?”

  “Into the sanctum. We have a whole new clan to design.”

  I knew that was how he’d rebuilt his own sanctum, but it hadn’t occurred to me that he’d need to do it here as well. It sounded fascinating. I took a dee
p breath and nodded.

  Daniel reached out his free hand and took one of mine. “Dissociate. That’s really important. Once you’re ready, touch the sanctum.”

  I reached into myself, finding my center and tightening my magic the way I had learned while working with Ryan. Once I was sure I had it right, I reached out a hand. But I hesitated.

  I might be about to die. The amount of power in that sanctum would outright kill me, with no chance of Ryan and Irina saving me at the last second. I glanced at Daniel. His smile was encouraging.

  Daniel believes in you, I thought.

  Holding on to my dissociation as tightly as I could, I closed my eyes and placed my palm on the surface of the sanctum.

  Nothing happened.

  I let out the breath I’d been holding. Mon Dieu, as Nicolas would say.

  I smiled. “I did it!”

  “Great, Fi,” Daniel said. “Now for the fun part.”

  He squeezed my hand in his, and in an instant, I wasn’t sitting on the floor of the temple any longer. I blinked.

  I was standing at the edge of an ocean. My sneakers were sinking into wet sand, only a few feet from where gentle waves beat against the shore. The water was placid, stretching on in front of me into infinity. Behind me, white sand stretched forever. The sky above me was gray and churning, like clouds preparing for a storm.

  I spun. Dan stood a few feet away. There was a light wind here, and his black-and-blue hair was ruffled. He was staring around with an expression of wonder on his face.

  “This is our sanctum?” I asked. “Like how you have that city of lights? And Nicolas has…” I stopped myself. I wasn’t supposed to talk about Nicolas’s sanctum. “Nicolas has his place?”

  “Yeah, seems like it,” Dan said. “I guess this is what we start with.”

  “What does the end product look like?”

  “I don’t know yet. I just know we get to make some decisions here. The fun kind. Let’s get going. We don’t want to keep the others waiting.”

  He walked a little farther onto the beach, away from the water. The sand was crunchy and only slightly damp here, fine grained and cool to the touch.

  Dan spun around in a circle a couple of times, getting his bearings. I didn’t know what he was doing, exactly, but he seemed to have a better sense of this place than I did. He looked around as though he knew what he was seeing. I watched as he started writing Chinese characters in the sand.

  He wrote nine of them around himself in a circle, large and bold, like the face of a clock.

  “What is all of that?” I asked, walking around the outside perimeter.

  “It’s the name of each clan in Chinese,” he said. “Water, Fire, Wild, Smoke, Sky, Verdant, Meteor, Wind… and Lightning.”

  His gaze lingered on the last one. Mine did, too, taking in the lines of the pretty character. That was our new name, right there. It was all almost real now.

  “Look at how cool it is,” I said.

  “It’s a nice character,” he agreed. “The parts that make it up—the radicals—are cool. The top part means ‘rain,’ and the bottom part is an old way of writing ‘lightning.’ It’s supposed to look like a bolt cutting through a field. So the whole character is like rain pouring onto a field, with lightning striking it.”

  “That’s awesome.”

  He laughed. “Sure. Now let’s make the whole clan awesome.”

  He took a seat in the center of the circle, and I joined him, sitting down in the sand.

  “So what do we want?” he asked.

  “Everything,” I said. “We need to be the best clan ever, and magic is born from need, or so Ryan says.”

  “Everything…” Daniel mused. “Got it.”

  I laughed, taking his hands in mine. “Whatever you want, Commander Darling. It’s your clan.”

  “Well, it’s now your clan too. We’ll have created it together.”

  “We are absolutely the best parents a new clan could have. It’s going to grow up big and strong.”

  Daniel smiled weakly. His eyes were glassy. It occurred to me that we had both lost our parents sooner in life than anyone was supposed to, yet somehow we were being tasked with growing something to maturity. That was scary and daunting.

  But…

  I had grown trees, animals, gardens. I had grown my own Flame magic within myself during my trials. I could probably help grow a sanctum.

  How hard could it be? This place seemed beautiful and mutable, a pristine canvas, ready for us to begin. It seemed a lot like a living thing. The waves were like a heartbeat, and the wind was like soft breathing. Daniel had always referred to his magic as alive, and I understood what he meant now. I stroked my fingers across the soft sand, and it purred under my touch.

  It seemed to want us to care for it, to mold it to perfection.

  Daniel pressed his hands into the sand briefly, his expression euphoric, and said, “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth…”

  “Genesis? Are you calling yourself God?” I asked.

  He laughed and gave me an adoring look.

  “There is no God. God is just magic,” he said, “and we are about to create our own miracle.” He paused. “So… we need power, and lots of it.”

  His eyes were distant, seeing things in his mind far beyond the water and sand that currently made up our surroundings.

  “Yeah, lots of raw power,” I said, brushing my hands over the sand, “but I don’t think that’s a problem. This element is violent. So… power, but controllable power. Power with intention. A balance.”

  “A balance,” Daniel echoed.

  He held a hand out toward the distant endless beach. “Wait, no,” he said, and instead turned his hand toward the water. “Yes, better. Power and control like Water Clan has.”

  The vast ocean churned, and the waves went from gentle lapping to crashing, foamy peaks.

  Daniel sighed as though he was tired. “But with a little Flame for its offensive magic, and a little Wild.”

  “We need all the usual tricks, too,” I said. “Transference. Portals. Suppression. Healing. Detection. Transmutation, maybe? So let’s throw in a little subtlety.”

  “Yeah, okay,” Daniel said, taking a deep breath. “Smoke Clan has the most tricks of any of the clans. Let’s pull a little of that in.”

  His gaze was still blank, his mind clearly on something greater than what I was seeing, and whatever he was doing with his magic was actively changing the sanctum around us. He reached his arms above him, straight up toward the sky, and the clouds swirled.

  “We need stability,” Daniel said. “What is best for that?”

  “Sky,” I said. “The oldest clan. And maybe a little Verdant. They are new, but they have deep roots.”

  “Got it,” Daniel said.

  He was breathing quickly now, and the air around us was charged with power. I could feel electricity in the air, like a storm was about to start.

  “We need something to bind us together,” I said. “Something to strengthen the bond of our clan and make it easier to interact with others.”

  “Meteor,” Daniel said quietly. “Their emotion-based magic.”

  “And Wind,” I said. “They have strong empathy and understanding of others. That could help us. We need all the diplomacy we can get.”

  “Okay,” Daniel said.

  His shoulders were slumped now, and I could see he was pouring magic into this place. Daniel, whose transmutation was unique. Ryan had shown me Dan’s spectrometer reading ages ago. His transmutation had been inordinately high in every other clan’s magic, yet he couldn’t transmute to any of them.

  No, instead, he could transmute to lightning. And when it came to using his transmutation for this task, he could pull in all the important aspects of the other clans as needed. He could somehow build with their magic.

  Remarkable.

  “Fi?”

  “Yeah?” I asked.

  “Give me some of your transmuted fire,”
Dan said. “I think it will be perfect here, full of all the best parts of Water and Flame and a little Meteor. I think it will give us flexibility.”

  “I don’t know,” I said, hesitating. “We didn’t talk about that. It’s not in the rules we laid out.”

  “Rules?” he echoed hoarsely. He laughed. “There aren’t rules here. Not yet. I’m making them right now. Magic isn’t math, it’s poetry. Can’t you see?”

  I looked around at the majesty of this place. New. Just started. A blank canvas. If Nicolas were here, it would be orderly and precise. But Dan? Dan was much more of a dreamer, an artist. He had gone to school for math and been partially raised under Nicolas’s strict rules, but Dan was also the son of a poet, and he wanted this place to be poetry.

  So be it.

  I reached out to my body, my real body, the one still seated on the floor of the temple while I was here in the majesty of our new magic. Carefully, I engaged my transference’s associated state and pushed my magic into Daniel. I gasped, having pulled on far more than intended, suddenly light-headed. I quickly dissociated, scared that I would accidentally engage the sanctum’s magic.

  I let myself be drawn back to the beach.

  Daniel’s eyes were closed now, and his face was scrunched in concentration. The air around us was so electrified that my hair was lifting at its roots. The sand beneath me was practically vibrating, but in a good way, in a living way.

  “You okay, Dan?” I asked.

  “Yeah, I’m great. This seems to be going well. I think.”

  The landscape around us hadn’t changed, but I could feel shifting, deep and profound shifting. Dan’s magic was shaping up into something usable, something stable and whole.

  Dan was breathing faster now, his hands pressed into the sand, supporting himself. My chest was heaving from exerting my magic too. Pushing any more on it would risk overextending it. I was nervous that Dan would experience the same thing.

  “Dan?” I asked.

  “Yeah?” His voice was even hoarser now.

  “Are you sure you’re okay?”

  “Yeah. Almost done here.”