Ember didn’t remember what happened immediately following the explosion; the world simply went black. She jerked awake—presumably not more than a minute later—lying in a crater, with a bone fragment the size of her body pinning her to the ground. It had impaled her through the stomach, piercing her armor like it had been made from parchment and not a product of the finest blacksmithing in the world.
She stared down at herself for a moment, too disoriented from the impact and the magical backlash to comprehend what she was seeing. Agonizing heat spread through her abdomen as the pain of the injury made itself known. Her eyes flicked up next, into the sky above her, and the image there slowly restored her memories.
The Twilight Celebrant, as she had expected, had salvaged the ritual.
Even with one of the foundational pillars shattered, the madman had—unfathomably, even if his doing so had been her gamble from the start—kept the magic from falling apart and killing him, Ember, and the rest of the city.
He was alive. The ritual continued. But no doubt at enormous personal cost.
Finishing sorting through the past minutes before her unconsciousness, she jolted as she remembered that a powerful revenant had been pursuing her—then gasped at the pain the movement brought, hand shooting to her stomach. Still pinned, she searched around for the spectral beast and thankfully found nothing.
Killed by the explosion? She had already almost dispatched the spirit herself, but if it had lived and pursued her while she’d been knocked senseless, things would have ended badly. One stroke of luck in a sea of misfortune.
She looked back down at her injury and gritted her teeth; she’d already wasted too much time lying around. Bracing herself, she dug her fingers into the projectile and hauled upward. Pain was hardly unfamiliar to her, but the experience set a new standard. She somehow managed to stifle the whimper that tried to rip from her throat.
Fumbling a healing potion from her inventory next, she staggered to her feet and downed the emergency liquid. Her wounds knitted over, though slower than they should’ve. Despite that, she checked herself over and was somewhat incredulous to find that she hadn’t been crippled in one way or another.
Which wasn’t to say she had much fight left in her. Since she’d been the one who’d disrupted the ritual, those rampant energies had targeted her in particular, second only to the ritualist himself. The bone shard through the stomach hadn’t been a stroke of bad luck. It had no doubt tracked her down.
With her personal situation sorted, she refocused on the more important matter: the Twilight Celebrant and his ritual. Taking to the air with a flap of her wings required far more effort than it should have, warning her that she still might be overestimating her condition.
Nevertheless, she ascended with several powerful gusts of air, closing the distance to the mad ritualist.
I can’t believe he actually did it.
Ember hadn’t taken such an absurd gambit—destabilized an ongoing ritual of this magnitude—with nothing besides wild hope guiding her. Indeed, this exact sequence of events had been what she’d aimed for. The Twilight Celebrant exhausting himself in an attempt to salvage the ritual, to even the playing field she had no right standing as an equal on.
But it astounded her that he had managed the feat. Rituals, when sabotaged, weren’t the easiest things to bend back into working order. In the way digging up a mountain wasn’t easy.
This is a member of the Selrath-Kyn, a man Father himself encountered centuries ago and warned me of. She had formed a gambit based on her opponent’s competence, and succeeded. The idea rankled. She didn’t want to acknowledge the madman’s skill. Could even Solfirus have done what he just did?
“I despise dragons your age,” the Twilight Celebrant rasped as Ember arrived on the outskirts of the eight—or rather, seven—bone pillars surrounding him. Despite everything that had happened, he sounded calm. “All of your kind’s reckless arrogance, none of the temperance gained through millennia. What you did was insanity, child. I weep for how you are rewarded for it.”
Before, the gray wisps of energy siphoning up from the city of Prismarche had come in smooth, steady streams. Those lines pulsed erratically now, and indeed the air all around them throbbed with an irregularity that set her on edge. The core of the ritual remained, but it certainly was not what it had been before. It would shatter the moment the Twilight Celebrant let go.
And indeed, though his voice was steady, the man had lost his composure elsewhere. His lips were pulled back in a grimace, a clammy sheen covered his skin, and his bony arms were outstretched to either side, trembling, as if he were holding the ritual together like physical stone columns threatening to crush inward and flatten him.
“Whatever it is you think I aim for,” he continued, “you nearly called down a far worse fate.”
“Worse than the eradication of a city?”
“The dead, at least, may rest. You foolish child.”
Ember scowled. Little as she wanted to cede any point to the man, big or small, she could hardly disagree. When it came to rampaging magic, much less rampaging ritualistic magic fueled by unwilling victims, death could be one of the kindest outcomes.
Even though she’d executed her plan explicitly hoping for the mad genius to salvage the ritual and thus exert himself, the insult of ‘reckless’ still applied. Not even she could deny that.
She raised her sword and pointed it at him. “Cease this madness.” Her words didn’t project as powerfully as she wanted them to. Her skull pounded, and despite the healing potion, her stomach burned with a nearly crippling level of pain. The bone shard that had impaled her had left its mark. As, she supposed, a ritual-infused fragment of the Colossus would. What exactly had it done to her, and how long would the injury linger?
Worries for later.
“Attack me or the ritual again, and everyone dies,” the Twilight Celebrant said simply. “I hold us together by bleeding fingernails.”
Ember gathered dragonfire along the length of her blade and raised it. The process was excruciating, though she didn’t show it outwardly. Definitely hurt worse than I thought. But her sword did begin to glow gray and orange, and she pulled back her weapon as if she truly intended to release the attack.
The sheer recklessness of her earlier actions had apparently set the precedent it needed to. What should have been an obvious bluff somehow worked on the man.
“Stop,” the Twilight Celebrant commanded.
She hovered with her weapon raised.
“We will compromise,” the mage hissed, annoyance finally plain in the dry scratch of his voice.
“End the ritual.”
“No.”
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She lifted her sword an inch higher.
“No. The Work must be completed. She will come for me, and my only escape is beyond. If I must die either way, then you will follow.”
She focused on the first part of the statement. “…beyond?” Her gaze lifted to the center of the shattered sky, and her tone turned incredulous. “You’re fleeing past the world’s horizon? Because you’re scared of—the Sorceress?” She could only assume that was the woman he had referenced twice now.
His only response was a sneer.
Ember stared at the man and thought through her options. On consideration, she believed him—escape might be one of his goals. But he clearly had more. He could have lain low and hidden from even the Sorceress’s search; no matter how strong the Party of Heroes’s mage had gotten, even that woman couldn’t summon information from thin air.
So yes—he had other goals here besides self-preservation, and perhaps greater ones. She knew very little about what lay beyond the dimensional wall, and indeed had only known of its existence in abstract terms to begin with. Solfirus had studied the topic, briefly, and rambled to her as he did about many things.
Does he really think he’ll survive that trip, though?
Then again, he’d done something near-impossible just a moment before. The Selrath-Kyn were every ounce as skilled as they were despicable. Did she have an obligation to prevent him from achieving those greater goals?
It didn’t matter. Her bluff could only carry her so far. He had offered a compromise, and that meant partial victory for both, full victory for neither. She had gambled with fates worse than death for an entire city already, just to attain what she had. All of it hinged on the man agreeing. And that was only possible if she ceded in the aspects he refused to yield on.
“I won’t let you kill anyone,” she finally said, lowering her sword—though keeping it bathed in dragonfire. “What is your offer?”
“I complete the Work. That is it.” His lip pulled up in annoyance or disgust. “But I will need the power I’ve already claimed.”
Her eyes flicked to the gray wisps, then down at the city of Prismarche. “What have you done to them?”
“Nothing the Sorceress cannot repair,” the disdainful response came.
The answer unsettled her. A perhaps naive part of her had hoped the Twilight Celebrant had been stealing vital energies, or something of similar ilk—she had hoped the townsfolk could recover naturally given enough time. But the nefarious spellwork ran deeper than that. If Ember had to guess, something soul-related. That seemed to be this man’s specialty, though most mages of this caliber didn’t have talents in a single field.
And could the Sorceress heal soul damage for an entire city? Would she? Ember knew of that woman only through stories. She had the vaguest memory of seeing the Party of Heroes from afar, but she’d all but forgotten after a hundred years. They had caused a not small amount of trouble for her family, though Ember herself hadn’t been present for those events.
Also, even if the Sorceress were capable and willing, Ember couldn’t trust anything the Twilight Celebrant said. A man willing to drain tens of thousands of lives wouldn’t balk at a lie. Maybe what he’d done was irreparable, beyond even the Sorceress’s ability to fix.
Ember grew agitated the longer she hovered there and worked through the dilemma. In the end, she came to the conclusion she had earlier: there were points the Twilight Celebrant wouldn’t compromise on, the same as she. And should either of them refuse, and their conflict begin anew, the Twilight Celebrant would lose control of the ritual he had miraculously salvaged. Everyone would die.
Partial victory for both, or total defeat for both. It wasn’t a difficult choice, no matter how poorly the idea sat with her.
“Nobody dies,” she said stiffly. “You can accomplish what you came for, without that?”
The man relaxed a fraction. “You show some wisdom. Yes. I have means of closing the deficit.”
Her eyes narrowed. “If so, why not use them before?”
“Why would I be so wasteful with precious resources, hatchling?”
It took a lot of restraint not to hurl her sword at the beastkin. She was hardly under any delusion that the ritualist possessed a shred of decency, but the knowledge that—from the start—he could have accomplished his goal without sacrificing a city was sickening. She had met plenty of men and women she wouldn’t share a drink with, but such an unabashed lack of morality was rare even among those she considered wicked.
She really, really didn’t want to compromise with this monster. For a long moment, she racked her brain for any alternative. But she had already clawed this half-victory out of thin air.
“Do it,” she growled.
If the Twilight Celebrant noticed or cared about the venom dripping from the command, he didn’t show it. Slowly, he lowered his spread arms, and the magic in the air wobbled—and held. Ember tensed for an attack, but none came. The mage’s trembling arms, and the sweat slicking his skin, hadn’t been feigned. He had strained himself to a breaking point.
He pulled out a jar. A hand’s width, with a gray cap, it seemed rather unassuming. Green cracks spread across the glass until the entire container was covered in the crisscrossing marks. Rather than the jar exploding, though, as she half expected, the Twilight Celebrant pulled the cap off.
A silvery-white… essence… slunk out as he overturned the vessel. The fluid drooped over the edge and bled downward into the air, pooling in a limp puddle at his feet. Ember had no idea what she was looking at, but every inch of her body crawled, worse even than when she’d first looked up and seen the broken sky. Her instincts warned her to flee. She only barely stood her ground.
With a crooked, bony finger, the ritualist took control of whatever blasphemous material he’d released. He guided it into the center of the seven pillars where the rest of the energy gathered. The gray wisps coming from the city cut off. Given the lack of apparent attack, the supplementation of the ritual’s energies—though Ember felt nauseated thinking about what that supplement might be, and how it’d been harvested—and how he’d stopped the original siphoning, it truly seemed as if the mad ritualist was holding up his end of the bargain.
The Twilight Celebrant floated several paces back, robes and long black hair fluttering in the wind, and began to mold the immense powers he’d fused together. Where the gathered energy had looked like a swirling ball before, now it hardened into a long and sharp shape. Akin to a spear.
Or a breaching missile, she thought grimly.
When at last it seemed the ritualist had completed his current task, he turned blindfolded eyes down from the shattered sky at her.
“This would have been more elegant,” he said. “The Work has suffered for your involvement. That, above all else, I will remember.”
“As will I,” she replied coldly.
His gaze turned upward. “I learned much with the first experiment. I didn’t intend to leave a gateway; I wished to leave silently. The consequences that follow are yours.”
Ember hesitated. The words were more than slightly foreboding. “Explain yourself,” she demanded.
But, expectedly, he did not. He gestured upward and, before she could so much as twitch a finger in response, the world exploded around her. Her vision went black, and she briefly lost consciousness for the second time that fight.
She came to seconds later, twisting around and flapping her wings to stabilize her rapid descent.
Ember had heard plenty of stories of the otherworldly invasion that had come to Prismarche, only to be halted without a chance to wreak havoc. Back then, a portal many times the size of the town square had torn through the open air, and otherworldly beasts, some the size of buildings mortared together, had slithered out by the hundreds. Or tried to—they had been blocked by a magical barrier that either the gods or the Sorceress had constructed, depending on who one asked.
The rip in the air that Ember laid eyes on now wasn’t nearly as intimidating as that, however much primordial fear doused her simply gazing into the aperture. The portal was only as large as her wingspan, and carved in a perfect circle. Not a hammer taken to a glass pane, but the sharpest steel carving into delicate material with great care.
Nevertheless, a breach. Which meant voidbeasts. She had doubted from the start that the creatures were as powerful as alleged, but realized only now that she didn’t want to find out. Not in her current state.
The Twilight Celebrant floated upward toward the portal, still facing her. Merely entertaining the idea of flying into that gate made Ember’s throat close up. Yet he clearly intended to do just that. It was somehow the strongest indicator of his insanity so far.
“Give the Sorceress my greetings,” the ritualist croaked. “When I return, even she will see the value in my Work.”
The words snapped her out of her morbid trance. She snarled and—as she’d wanted to from the start—swung her sword to release the dragonfire she’d wreathed her blade in. The orange and gray flame hurtled upward, but to her infuriating disappointment, washed across a green bubble of mana as impotently as the first time.
Not spent, even now? It had been worth a try.
The Twilight Celebrant returned no parting attack of his own. He stared disdainfully down at her and, without word or gesture, floated backward into the portal of his own creation.
He dissolved, as if sinking into acid. And was gone from the world.
Silence reigned for only a moment, broken intermittently by Ember’s panting. Heavy as her limbs were, and with how drained she was in all aspects, unleashing even that small attack had winded her. She watched the portal, hoping against hope that the event was over. Perhaps the cleanness of the breach meant no invaders would come?
But then a snout covered in black and purple carapace poked through, followed by two clawed hands. And finally a sleek body like none she had ever seen before.
Ember took a deep breath.
Not quite finished, she thought. What’s one more round?
