by Gage Lee
The Flame rose from its chair and stopped me with a fine-boned female hand. A man’s rough and calloused fingers closed around my wounded arm and lifted it carefully back into position. A blinding snap and crunch shot through my body, accompanied by a blast of pain that ripped the air out of my lungs.
Just like that, I was healed.
“Certainly not you.” The Flame lifted my arm carefully, patted my shoulder, then nodded, satisfied with its work. “You couldn’t remake the Design even if I demanded it. But you can find someone who can. Or, maybe, some thing.”
The Flame wrapped a heavy arm around my shoulders and raised her other arm toward the ceiling. I tilted my head back to follow its gaze and watched the silver pattern shrink until it was little more than a pale disk of silver light against the darkness.
“The world is vast, Jace. The space beyond it is vaster still.” More spots of light appeared, a dozen, a hundred, a thousand. And every one of them held its own Design. “And somewhere out there, you will find another who can draft a new plan for this world. That’s the favor I ask of you, Jace Warin, Eclipse Warrior.”
My jaw dropped, and I turned to face the power next to me.
“What are you talking about?” I asked. “How can I replace you?”
“It won’t be easy,” the Flame said. “But you’re the one for this job. Everything about your life was drawn outside the lines of my Design, Jace. You were born as part of an experiment I never saw coming. You became an Eclipse Warrior, after I’d thought them all destroyed. And, now, you’ve bound yourself to something I could never have conceived of, much less predicted. You are the chaos core, Jace, the ticking bomb at the heart of this world. And, unless you find one cleverer than me, well...”
“What do I do?” I asked.
“When you left here last year, what did you tell your friends you were going to do?” the Flame asked.
I cast my thoughts back to that night on the beach, to my friends watching me bring life back to a piece of the world I’d destroyed.
“Change the world,” I said carefully.
“Yes,” the Flame said. “That’s it. You’ll change the world. It won’t be easy, but it will happen. Because if you don’t change it, the world will change itself. And that will be the end of all of us.”
“What do I tell them, about who won the challenge?” I asked.
“They’ll know,” the Flame said quietly. “When they ask, and I do not answer, they will know.”
“My mom,” I said. “Where is she?”
The pressure on my shoulder vanished.
I was all alone, with no idea what to do next.
And the Flame hadn’t even given me my prize.
The Betrayal
I LEFT THE CHAMBER of the Empyrean Flame and returned to the arena. The candles went out behind me, and darkness chased the light away with every step I took. The Grand Design above my head faded, and by the time I’d reached the arch that had led me to the strangest conversation of my life, nothing remained behind me.
There was something missing from inside me, too. I’d never really believed in the Empyrean Flame, but its absence left a small hole near my core. I wondered if others felt it, or if it was a side effect of what I’d made myself into.
The chaos core.
The instant I stepped through the arch, I returned to the sound and fury of a war zone.
The pillars were gone, and the arena’s floor had returned. The unconscious members of the Heron Blade Academy and Battle Hall of Atlantis teams lay in a heap in the center of the arena. I had no idea how they’d gotten there, or whether they were alive or dead.
The dragons, all five of them, and the horn-helmed students of the Bright Lodge ignored the fallen teams and menaced eight humans they’d backed into a corner on the far side of the room. My teammates had taken a savage beating, and the remaining four Jinsei Institute members were bloody and battered.
A cold ball of rage welled up inside me. This is what I’d been fighting against. I was sick to death of the powerful crushing the weak. It was horrible, and it was going to end.
Now.
I cycled my breathing as I crossed the arena at a dead run. My new core filled with jinsei and my aura absorbed aspects of anger, violence, fear, and pain from the air. With every step, my rage grew, and my strength along with it.
The dragons wanted a fight? Then I’d give them a fight.
My fusion blade appeared in my hand, crystal clear and pure, while my mechanical serpents unfolded from my aura like switchblades.
“The Gauntlet is over!” I shouted. I’d reached Trulissinangoth’s team. “Stop fighting!”
The dragon closest to me spun, the red scales on his face flushed with sacred energy. His aura sparked and crackled like a roaring fire. His fusion blade, more cleaver than sword with a chiseled tip for punching through armor, rose into a striking position.
My black eyes burned into his, and fear danced behind his pupils. His blade, with all the power of his adept core behind it, plunged toward my heart.
One of the six serpents that had extended from my aura slapped the blade away. The weapon flew out of the dragon’s grip and took two of his fingers with it. He collapsed to his knees, clutching his bleeding hand.
“You can’t defeat us all,” he screamed at me.
He opened his jaws wide to unleash a gout of red flame. I saw the flames churn in his throat like a burning thunderhead.
I reversed the grip on my weapon and smashed its hilt up into the dragon’s jaw. His mouth clicked shut and shards of splintered teeth burst from between his bloodied lips along with a puff of fire and smoke. The dragon’s eyes rolled up into their sockets, and he fell to the ground.
One down.
“Jace!” Hope danced in Clem’s eyes when she saw me striding toward her corner of the battlefield. My team and the remnants of Tochi’s force cheered, and new energy stiffened their spines. They lashed out at the Bright Lodge warriors nearest them, and the horned attackers backed away with their weapons in defensive postures.
“Kill him!” Trulissinangoth shouted at Aesgir. “My dragons will finish the rest.”
Four of the horn-helmed warriors immediately spun to face me, their spears forming a defensive hedge. Their team leader stood behind them with an enormous jinsei maul resting on his shoulder. He threw back his head and howled, unleashing streams of sacred energy that flowed around his allies. The spearmen answered his howl in eerie unison, and all five members of the Bright Lodge fixed me with electric blue stares. Aesgir’s technique had transformed his team. They were no longer individual warriors, but a pack bound to their leader.
Trulissinangoth sidled away from her people, forming the third point of a triangle between the Bright Lodge and me. She twirled her fusion blade lazily, dismissively. Her aura was alive with golden flames, and her scales had grown to cover most of her face and the bare skin of her arms and armored plates. Her core burned with sacred energy, and I sensed it would not be long before she advanced to disciple level.
“This is how you die, fool,” the dragon said. “Winning the Empyrean Gauntlet changes nothing. You will die here today, and no one will ever know what really happened. I’ll be crowned the champion by Elushinithoc, the Inquisition will agree, and dragons will once again rule this world while humans grovel at our feet.”
Though I hated to admit it, the dragon was probably right. The deal her people had made with the priests of the Inquisition all but assured dragons would be ascendant when this was all said and done. Calling the Gauntlet had been a formality, and they certainly would have liked to have the Flame’s blessing for their plans. Now that the unexpected had happened, and I had won, though, they’d just bury the truth under a mountain of lies. The dragons would still come out on top, and the Inquisition would still betray us all for their own selfish ends.
It made me wonder how much of the rest of our history was a convenient fiction made up to justify the whims of the powerful.
“No,” I said. “That isn’t going to happen. The lies end today.”
Trulissinangoth charged, a bestial roar exploding from her lungs. The fire that surrounded her took on a life of its own and tongues of flame stabbed from it like scorpions’ tails. It was a dazzling flood of attacks that nearly overwhelmed me with precise strikes that sought any weakness in my defenses.
An hour ago, that would have been enough to destroy me, despite the differences in our cores’ strengths.
At that moment, though, I was no longer wounded. I was at the peak of my strength, and the chaos core had given me abilities I was only beginning to understand.
Like the way my serpents clicked into position with mechanical precision. They intercepted the striking flames and turned them away from me in the blink of an eye. I activated my Thief’s Shield with a thought, and robbed the attacks of their fire aspects, which I fed back into my serpents to wreathe them in deadly flames.
Uncertainty flashed across Trulissinangoth’s eyes. She’d expected the fight to end when she’d unleashed her full power. But it hadn’t, and now she faced a foe she couldn’t fully comprehend.
The dragon roared again and drove her spear at my heart, fast as an arrow’s flight.
I was faster.
A single step moved me out of her attack’s path. As the fusion blade shot past me, I slammed my weapon into its haft. My powerful blow twisted Trulissinangoth off balance and knocked her weapon far out of position to defend. Before the dragon recovered, my serpents darted toward her exposed flank. They stopped a fraction of an inch away from her skin and filled her aura with a rush of pain and fear aspects that I’d harvested from the battlefield.
Trulissinangoth shouted in surprise and let the momentum of her missed thrust spin her around to face me. She’d abandoned her offense and twirled her blade in front of her like a blurred shield. She thought her defense was impenetrable.
She was wrong.
There was a flaw in Trulissinangoth’s technique that left a gap in her protection. A single, perfectly timed strike would slip through her defenses and pierce her heart.
Killing her would have taken no more than the blink of an eye. I hesitated to take the shot, though. She’d done what her elders had demanded. She’d even tried to warn me away from the competition to avoid this very moment.
The dragon didn’t deserve to die.
The Bright Lodge fighters howled from my right side, activating a deadly technique and giving me a split-second warning of their impending attack. I vaulted into the air to dodge a flurry of stabs from the spearmen. Their blades were thrust forward with perfect precision, a harrying quartet of strikes that would have left me stunned and defenseless if they’d landed.
Instead, my leap ended on their outstretched spears. Before they could withdraw, I danced from one haft to the next, driving the weapons to the stone floor. My serpents pierced my attackers’ auras in the same instant, sucking away their strength and draining the jinsei from their techniques. The stolen energy rushed into my core, and I forced it out into my channels to prepare myself for the attacks of more powerful foes.
I slammed the flat of my blade down on top of the skull of the nearest spearman, and he crumpled to the stone. The others backed away, fear stamped into their faces. They were no longer a threat to me.
Aesgir and Trulissinangoth circled me, coordinating their movements so I could only watch one of them at a time. The sounds of battle between the humans and the dragon team were nerve-wracking, but we couldn’t spare attention for anything but one another. The first one of us to lose concentration was likely to die.
“This is your chance to kill a dragon,” I taunted Aesgir. “Unless you’re more comfortable taking orders from one. I’m sure your ancestors would be proud to see you bending the knee to a wyrm.”
“Don’t listen to him,” Trulissinangoth snarled. “Your forebears were practical men and women. They would not fight the inevitable.”
“Shut your snout,” Aesgir snapped back. “I’ll finish this puny boy. Then I’ll have your head, dragon.”
The towering warrior hefted his maul and rushed at me. Streamers of black smoke billowed from his horns and left a churning trail behind him. Aesgir’s eyes glowed like a wolf’s under the moonlight, and a technique unfolded from his core to cover his enormous weapon with the shadows of wolves on the hunt. It was an unnerving, impressive sight.
Aesgir’s maul crashed down, a meteoric strike that would have pounded me into a greasy smear on the arena’s floor if it had landed.
But strength meant nothing against my speed. I sidestepped the attack, and it slammed down harmlessly next to me. Before the warrior could recover, I hammered my fusion blade directly into the maul’s shadowed head. Aesgir’s weapon shattered with a concussive explosion that threw him away from me like a rag doll in a windstorm while I stood my ground in the center of a cloud of stone shards.
Trulissinangoth charged through the shrapnel, accepting wounds from the flying stones to strike at me when she thought I’d least expect it. Golden fire boiled out of her mouth, a cone of destruction that she believed would finish the fight.
She was wrong.
My serpents plucked the fire aspects from her attack, and my Thief’s Shield technique drained its jinsei. All that remained of Trulissinangoth’s deadly assault was a cloud of smoke that hid my counterattack from her.
My hand shot out and caught Trulissinangoth by the throat. The instant our auras touched, the Thief’s Shield drained her strength aspects and leeched the sacred energy from her core.
The sudden rush of jinsei slammed into my new core like a falling star. The power flooded my channels and rushed out into my serpents. I was stronger than I’d ever been before, and a new power blossomed within me: the Vision of the Design.
Flickers of what was to come burst through my thoughts. Aesgir charging in on my blind side to bury his teeth in my throat. A dragon’s blade hacking through Clem’s face. Tochi consumed by a cloud of green fire.
No, that was only a future that might be.
I would decide what the future would be.
My newfound strength made Trulissinangoth light as a feather. I whipped her around at the end of my arm and slammed her body into Aesgir’s charge. The high-speed collision sent the horned warrior sailing into the last of the Bright Lodge’s members like a wrecking ball. Armored bodies scattered in every direction, helmets and weapons bouncing across the floor like thrown dice.
The dragon warriors had pushed in hard against the students from of the Jinsei Institute and the School of Swords and Serpents. Their fusion blades hummed with power, and they breathed blue, green, and white flames that forced my allies to cover their faces with their hands. My friends were defenseless, and I knew the dragons would unleash a flurry of attacks that would kill many of them.
With a roar, I hurled Trulissinangoth into the back of a white-scaled dragon youngling who was a split second away from cleaving through Clem’s skull. The two fighters crashed into Clem, and the trio collided with the green-scaled dragon in front of Tochi. The four of them went down together, and I let out a sigh of relief. I’d saved my friend and our potential ally.
Tochi took advantage of my surprise attack to sweep the legs out from under the blue-scaled dragon. The downed youngling tried to rise, but a savage kick from the Jinsei Institute’s team leader put his lights out.
Hagar had already seized the last standing dragon with her bloodweaver technique. My handler’s eyes were ringed by scarlet circles, and she licked her lips in anticipation of finishing her foe. The dragon hung limp in the coil of Hagar’s serpent, eyes rolled up to show their whites, breath shallow.
“No.” I shook my head. “No one else dies today.”
For a moment, I thought Hagar would finish the dragon despite what I’d said. Her eyes had gone bloodred and her mouth hung open to reveal the tips of a pair of glistening mandibles. Then, with a disgusted cry, she flung the hanging dragon away from her.
“This is over.” I forced jinsei into my words, and everyone in the arena froze. “I am not your enemy. The real threats are those who pitted all of us against one another.”
Aesgir glared at me. For a moment, I thought he’d summon his maul and come at me again.
Instead, he offered me a slow, grudging nod and raised both his hands.
I lowered Trulissinangoth to the ground and stared hard into her eyes.
The dragon clenched her claws and nodded.
“You have beaten us,” she said humbly. She bowed low and directed her next words to the floor. “I am shamed by my loss and accept your dominion over me and my people.”
Aesgir’s fusion blade reappeared in his hand mid-swing. He’d crossed the arena far faster than I’d thought possible and brought his weapon screaming down toward the exposed back of Trulissinangoth’s head.
If I did nothing, he’d become the dragon slayer he’d always wanted to be. Maybe that would earn me some points in his book.
But I’d never be able to live with myself.
Two of my serpents lashed out with a series of sharp snaps and clicks. The bladed tip of one sliced across the underside of Aesgir’s right forearm. The wound turned his hand into a useless lump of meat and sticks on the end of his arm, and he lost his grip on his hammer. My second attack struck him hard just above his left ear, a blunt blow delivered with the force of a sledgehammer. He crumpled and fell to the floor next to the dragon.
“My patience with fools is now officially exhausted,” I shouted. “Get away from one another. Line up with your schools against the walls.”
As the rest of the competitors did as they were told, Trulissinangoth straightened and looked at me with her head tilted to one side like a dog hearing a noise it couldn’t identify.
