Cillian whipped around.
The smile was gone. Every bit of the charming wolf persona was burned away in the wash of impossible heat.
Cal threw his weight onto his good leg and stumbled backward, dragging the ruined right knee behind him until something stopped him. Leaning against the nearest tree, he paused as he gasped for breath.
The heat rolled over him, drying the sweat on his face and pressing against his skin like an open kiln. He squinted through it and saw the clearing divided into two pillars of fire.
The larger inferno roared directly over the spot where Selara's body had fallen. The fire burned vertically, a column of white-gold fury that reached thirty feet into the air and turned the surrounding boulders into black glass. Branches far overhead caught, curled, and disintegrated without producing smoke. The air above the column distorted and warped, bending the grey sky and canopy into a funhouse mirror.
The second fire was smaller but equally intense. It crackled and spat in the shallow depression between the rocks where her head had rolled.
The smaller fire detached from the ground. It was pulled, as if seized by an invisible fist, drawn through the air in a streaming ribbon of volatile energy. It lashed across the clearing and plunged into the larger column. The instant it made contact, the roar redoubled and the heat became unbearable. Cal threw his arm across his face, feeling the hairs on his forearm singe as his skin burned.
The unified column seemed to inhale.
That was the only word for it. The fire drew inward with a concave rush: one enormous implosion that pulled at Cal's hair, collapsing from a thirty-foot pillar into a large sphere, condensing into a fist-sized ball and then further, finally stabilizing at the size of an acorn. Ash and embers spiraled in the air around it like celestial bodies orbiting a star.
Then it expanded into a familiar form.
Arms, legs, a torso, and head: each rendered in fire so hot it had gone translucent, with bones and tendons forming visibly as dark threads within the blaze.
It began at the extremities, the fingers solidifying first. Pale skin transmuted over the incandescent framework in an opaque layer, spreading to trap the light that was still glowing from within. Racing inward to cover wrists, forearms, and shoulders, the transformation left unblemished skin in its wake. It spread over her body and finished with her face. First with the features Cal knew: a strong jaw and oval shape condensed out of the dying fire as if sculpted by an invisible hand.
Her new hair fell past her shoulders in a cascade of blazing orange-red, random strands alight with their own copper-red energy, bright at the tips and deepening toward the roots.
Centered in the middle of her forehead appeared a layered pattern of interlocking runes, flaring sinister red. The lines were impossibly fine, each one articulated to a hair's breadth, and they pulsed once, twice, three times, each one brighter than the last. Then the glow subsided, sinking into her skin, fading until only a faint outline of scar tissue remained.
Her bare feet settled onto the stone, and Cal realized he'd been holding his breath.
Selara snapped her eyes open. They shone burnished-gold and radiated power. She swept the clearing in a moment, scanning left to right, assessing the assassin's bloody work.
She lingered on each body for a fraction of a second.
Then she directed her fury at Cillian.
He was already running, turning into a blur as he made for the dense copse of trees to Cal's right.
Selara moved without word or sound, the movement barely perceptible: a puff of displaced air marking where she had been, drifting ash tunneling in a vortex to her sword where she reappeared. Flamewright seemed to leap from the stone where it'd fallen into her hand.
Fire crawled over her body. Wrapping around her bare torso and legs, it curved down her arms to the blade, a bright yellow-orange charge that coated the sword she'd drawn back. The flames billowed as she charged, licking at the air while she left scorched footprints on the stone behind her.
Cillian reached the trees. Dark, shadowy energy poured from his back, spreading over his body and bleeding into the environment at the edges, diffusing as it went. It wrapped around his limbs, ate the color from his skin, and in the span of a heartbeat he became transparent, then invisible. The forest lost all trace of him.
Selara arrived at the spot where he'd vanished and swung.
A crescent wave of fire erupted from the blade and tore into the forest in a hundred-and-twenty-degree fan. Wide enough to engulf multiple buildings, the leading edge hit a tree and the old-growth hemlock detonated. For the length of a football field, trunks hundreds of years old burst apart in showers of superheated splinters, the moisture inside them flashing instantly to steam in concussive detonations.
Thirty yards into the destruction, a figure materialized.
Cillian spilled out of the smoke, his invisibility ruined. He rolled across the dirt, grey coat blazing, his neatly styled blond hair alight and burning black. He came to a stop against a fallen log, scrambled to his feet, and Cal caught his face.
The man stared wide-eyed, the whites large around his irises. Blisters rose along his jaw and forehead. He held his daggers in front of him in a guard that shook visibly. His composure, his performance: all of it immolated as thoroughly as the trees.
Then they both vanished.
Cal pushed himself upright, ears still ringing from the blast wave, and tried to track them.
The two combatants had become something beyond his ability to process. What he perceived were the consequences of their movement: a spruce thirty yards to the left suddenly cracked in half at chest height, its two halves toppling in opposite directions. Near the clearing, a spray of earth punched upward as something hit the ground hard enough to crater. Through the canopy, fiery arcs lashed in sweeping lines, each one bisecting trees and sending burning segments crashing to the forest floor. One arc carved through four trunks in a single pass, and Cal had to scramble out of the way to avoid a falling tree.
The sounds arrived separately from the visuals: hard, percussive cracks that split the air and snapped back to silence in staccato bursts. Deeper impacts that vibrated through his diaphragm and shook the ground beneath his feet.
He grasped desperately for a lifeline. [Combat Analysis] engaged automatically, the Skill attempting to do what it always did, but he couldn't parse anything useful from the flow of battle he perceived.
I can't do anything like this! He glanced back to the clearing and the flower that would heal him. If I can heal myself, maybe I can help! Pulling his spear off his back, Cal used it as a walking staff and started to make his way towards the Klyn'ora Blossom.
A figure materialized directly in front of him.
Clang!
The sound split the air a foot from his face. A throwing knife deflected off Flamewright and spun past his right ear, close enough that he felt the wind of it tug at his hair.
Selara stood between Cal and Cillian, her feet planted, sword still held out. Her body radiated heat and rage. The fiery aura flared brighter, hotter, and she growled, "That will be quite enough."
She vanished once more, and he forest erupted again. This time the exchange was brief. Two seconds. Maybe three. Cal heard a dozen of those whip-crack sounds in rapid succession, then a shriek of steel on steel that drove into his molars. Something spun through the air, tumbling end over end, trailing a thin line of smoke.
A hand. Cillian's right hand, severed cleanly at the wrist. The stump was cauterized black, sealed by the heat of the blade that took it. The fingers were still locked around the hilt of a dagger, clenched in a death-grip, and the whole assembly hit the dirt and rolled.
Then the left hand followed, sailing through the air from a different angle in a lazy spiral.
The blurs resolved. Cillian stood in a small clearing of Selara's making, a circle of devastation where trees had been felled and earth turned. Raised to chest height, the stumps of both arms held a futile posture of warding, as if he could still stop what was coming from the sword in his face. Steam and smoke curled from the blackened wrists. His coat was gone, burned to rags, shirt hung from his frame in charred strips, and blisters and burns covered every inch of exposed skin. His formerly handsome face was a ruin of soot and swelling.
Pure terror contorted his features. He worked his mouth, and when the words came, they were barren of any pretense. Every rehearsed charm, every syllable of the persona he'd constructed gave way to the desperate threat of a condemned man.
"If you kill me, Zarven will—"
Selara thrust Flamewright forward.
The blade entered Cillian's open mouth and stabbed through the back of his skull. Then it glowed white, and Cillian's head sublimated. Flesh, bone, brain, and teeth became a shower of ash and embers that scattered outward in a grey cloud, each particle still glowing orange as it drifted on the breeze. His headless body stood for a moment, arms still raised, stumps still smoking.
Then it folded and dropped.
Selara held the pose for a long moment. Her fiery hair stirred in the wind created by the surrounding fires while she stared at the ash drifting before her, as if daring it to reassemble. Perhaps wishing it would so she could kill him again.
The fire covering her body dimmed and faded, the yellow-orange glow draining from her extremities inward, sinking into her skin inch by inch and leaving unmarked flesh in its wake. The last of it gathered at her center, guttered once, and went out.
Selara lowered the sword. She took a deep, shuddering breath and dropped her shoulders. The iron-hard rigidity left her body, and what stood in its place was a woman, barefoot on scorched earth, surrounded by the dead.
Cal croaked out, "Selar—." He swallowed, tried again. "Selara! You're alive!"
She turned.
The blaze had gone out of her golden eyes. Exhaustion, relief, pain, and something desperate moved across her features in a complex sequence that she fought to suppress. Her lips parted, and for an instant Cal thought she might say something that would help make sense of it all.
Then she paused and looked down at herself, her entire body going rigid.
A blush vivid enough to match her hair flooded her cheeks, neck, and ears.
Cal, mind still shellshocked, abruptly reconnected with the mundane. His attention had followed hers downward on pure reflex before the higher functions caught up and slammed on the brakes.
Selara… needed to put on some clothes.
He looked away so fast that his neck cracked.
A particularly interesting patch of burnt moss on the boulder to his left became the most fascinating thing he'd ever seen. He stared at it without blinking, every part of his attention committed to that patch of moss and nothing beyond it, his own cheeks burning with a heat that had nothing to do with the ambient temperature of the devastated clearing.
"It's alright now."
Her voice came from the direction of the melted boulders where her body had originally fallen. Cal gave it a three-count for safety, then looked back.
She'd dressed. Simple traveler's clothes: a grey linen shirt, dark trousers. Boots. They'd appeared from nowhere, and Cal spotted the familiar glint of a silver band on her left ring finger. The ring she'd worn before. The ring that a few minutes ago was attached to a headless corpse that no longer existed. Cal fought down a shiver that tried to run through him.
She's alive, and that's all that matters.
Selara caught her reflection in Flamewright's blade, and her face fell. She shot her free hand to her forehead, fingers running over the faint pattern of scarring where the runic brand had calmed. She pressed her fingertips against the mark, then squeezed her eyes shut.
Tears leaked from beneath her lids. They tracked down her cheeks in thin lines, threading through the layer of ash that dusted her skin. She clenched her jaw and swallowed, fighting for composure.
Flinching, she sucked air through her teeth as the brand pulsed red once through her fingers. A brief flash, then dark again.
The brand wasn't entirely unfamiliar. He knew its cruder cousins - the brands on the foreheads of the Void-Bound at the Chancellery. Theirs were simple things compared to the elaborate glyph on her skin, but Cal feared what it meant.
"Selara... you were dead. I saw you die. Don't get me wrong, I can't express how relieved and glad I am to see you alive again, but what's going on?"
Her composure, which she'd fought so hard to rebuild, fractured. She pressed her eyes shut again, a fresh tear escaping to trace the path of the first. She drew a ragged breath before answering, the words sounding like they were forced out of her.
"My latent and last bloodline finally manifested," she whispered. "The odds were high, but I prayed it would not be this. And there was only one way to find out…"
Sheathing her sword, she turned to look at him. "My mother's most powerful and coveted bloodline, cultivated through generations of partnership with the now near-extinct Azh'tashi phoenixes. [From the Ashes]."
Cal could only stare, his brain reeling from the constant emotional whiplash and shocking revelations. A third bloodline? The fire affinity makes even more sense, but how was she that powerful and didn't have three already? And what the heck, fiery divine birds are real? Well, I guess that would make sense considering we have goblins, and elves, and dragons, and magic, and portals, and—
"Focus," she pulled him back, her tone leaving no room for argument. "I will explain what I can later. We have to move. Now."
She crossed the distance to him in a flash, and before Cal could process the movement, she'd scooped him up. One arm under his knees, one behind his back, lifting him as easily as he'd lift a child. A princess carry. Being princess-carried by a woman who'd just incinerated a D-tier assassin in the buff, his dignity lodged a formal complaint that went ignored by every other part of his brain.
She gently deposited Cal on the biggest boulder and spoke urgently.
"You need to eat it. All of it. Bite it off the stem in one go. Quickly!"
Without wasting another second, he hobbled closer, knelt down, opened his mouth, and shoved the entire blossom in, biting it off at the base of the stem.
The petals and the core dissolved the instant they touched his tongue. Sweet, sour, bitter, salty, savory: every taste landed at once, compressed into a moment of overwhelming sensation that flooded his sinuses and the back of his throat. Then it was gone, replaced by a rush of energy so pure and potent that it felt like the sunlight the Blossom had been bathing in was liquefied and poured directly into his veins.
The stasis elixir may as well have not been there.
Cal felt it happen: a brittle shell of enforced confinement clamped around his spirit simply dissolved. The energy from the blossom swept over the alchemical restrictions like a river over a sandcastle, and suddenly his channels were open, his Mana flowing, his Stamina surging painfully through every cell. He gasped at the sheer scale of its power.
The energy pressed deeper, finding the damage. Cal felt it reach the eroded meridians in his spirit, the micro-tears and leaks that had plagued him for weeks and recently been blown out. It sank into those wounds and filled them, healing every hole and abrasion until nothing remained untouched.
A torrent of soft chimes began to sound, and they were like music to his ears.
[Channel Erosion: -0.50%]
[Channel Erosion: -0.50%]
[Channel Erosion: -0.50%]
They went on and on as the treasure worked, and when the sounds finally stopped, Cal looked at his current status.
[Channel Erosion: 0.00%]
He stared at the number. The ever-present burn through his channels, the tax he'd been paying on every Ability since the tournament, was gone.
But the Blossom wasn't done, and it surged to his knee. It wrapped around the wound where the throwing knife was still embedded, and Cal gripped the handle and pulled. The blade slid free, and a warm sensation spread through the joint, bringing immediate relief as flesh knit and cartilage reformed and the ruined joint reassembled itself into something whole. He flexed the knee experimentally. It felt like new.
The energy found his right hand next, the hand Spinova had regrown, and that had never quite felt right since.
Something shifted inside the rebuilt tissue. Cal felt it as a series of tiny adjustments, each one resolving before the next began. Neural pathways that had been approximated by Spinova's healing were now being perfected, each one restrung to match the original. He spread his fingers wide, then curled them into a fist. The motion was smooth and completely natural.
He opened and closed his hand three more times, marveling at the simple miracle of fingers that did exactly what he told them to.
The energy faded, its last vestiges smoothing over bruises and minor aches before dissipating. A wholeness he hadn't felt in a long time settled into him.
Cal pushed himself to his feet on the boulder and jumped down, landing easily next to Selara, where he opened his mouth to speak.
"Sel—"
A circle of light carved into existence fifteen feet away, rotating open, and through its center Cal could see somewhere else: a dark room, stone walls.
Selara was between Cal and the portal before his next heartbeat, Flamewright in hand.
A figure stepped through.
Tall and lean, he wore formal robes of deep charcoal grey with silver edging at the collar and cuffs. The fabric was severe and unadorned, cut with a militant style that suggested function over fashion. Salt and pepper hair cropped short, angular face clean-shaven, he held himself rigidly, movements contained, not a degree of informality visible.
Cal's [Spiritual Perception] reached for the newcomer automatically, the sense extending outward in a reflexive scan now that the stasis elixir's chains were broken. He felt nothing.
It matched the disorienting blankness from Narbok during the clearing ambush… but was this externally aided concealment, or something else entirely?
The man briefly surveyed the clearing. He took in the scorched and shattered treeline. The bodies.
Finally, he turned to Selara.
"Your father sends his regards, Lady Azh'vail."
AUTHOR'S NOTE:
(Relevant context: the below was written Wednesday night, but this note is publishing Friday morning. Sorry for any confusion.)
Sheesh. This is a tough thing, y'all, and this note might be a bit more stream-of-consciousness and a little less concise than I normally try to be in the notes. Apologies. I'm writing this at 9:35 PM Wednesday night before bed so I can get some of it out of my head and off my chest, and after watching my phone blow up with notifications of comments all day, unsurprisingly, 5 people have canceled their subs. Some of the folks who have been with me consistently since Rising Stars. I'm sure it will be more by the time I wake up, and through Thursday. Two of them even left exit surveys to make it clear they're doing it because of the direction they believe the story is going. And to top it all off, I got a 0.5 star rating on RoyalRoad from someone (may or may not be related, but it all just piles on).
And I get it. Today's [Wednesday's] chapter was rough.
I couldn't even bring myself to get into the comments (have been abstaining for a few chapters now, honestly) because of the potential for psychic damage. I knew it was going to be contentious, and that's why I planned to drop the bonus chapter the next day and get us through today's chapter ASAP. There's still more to come before the volume wraps, but I wanted to try to move through this quickly for you.
Heck, what I really wanted to do was leave author's notes to the tune of "trust me!" or "just give it a few more chapters!" and "don't worry, it'll be worth!" - but I felt like that would cheapen the moment, and be a spoiler for many. So I did what to me was a hard thing, and didn't try to cushion the blow. Even though in my mind I told myself it might lose me readers (and it has). Even though I fear disappointing the fans of the story (and I have). Even though I desperately want this all to succeed (and, in my estimation, it's already blown past my wildest dreams).
Shifting gears for a second, it may interest you to know I'm what they call a plantser, and lean more heavily into the planning side of things, as opposed to the pantsing side. Book 1 and now Book 2, as well as the upcoming Book 3, all have their ends planned from the beginning. Heck, the end of the entire series is planned. And I like to have a lot of the major volume-arc solidified beforehand so that I know where I'm going. The discovery process for me happens in that initial blueprint, and then as I'm defining major beats A, B, C. Much of the middle gets left open to be creative, where A to B to C are connected. But this volume's theme and where it ends have been something I've been driving toward since the beginning.
I hope that if you look back at Book 1 you can see some of that in terms of how threads were connected and eventually closed out. You'll see it when we're done here too.
And that's... honestly something that's less common in the web novel space, in my experience. I was a reader here for many years before I tried to throw my hat into the ring. A lot of my contemporaries are pure pantsers, and do 100% discovery writing, just making it all up as they go, trying to connect the dots and keep things juggled along the way. And there's nothing wrong with that at all. I wish I could pull that off, but I work better with a more detailed plan.
I think that's why a lot of web novels that get ported to e-books/print will end a volume at a point where there's not as much resolution, because sometimes the arcs get too big for what should practically be printed. And - and this is a BIG "and" - they're incentivized to keep their readers engaged and paying, so that's going to affect the decision making. But I'm trying to do storytelling that's more akin to traditional publishing, each volume its own self-contained arc.
And therein lies the challenge we find ourselves with today. At least, I think so.
There are going to be highs and lows in any story. But the point that I'm driving at is... I want to take some bigger risks because I want to write a story that will work when people can flip the page to the next chapter. Not have to sit in the pain of a low moment and wait a day or two, or more, in order to see what happens next. Be stuck holding the bag and thinking the author just did 'em dirty.
And to that end, it's my fervent hope that people will give the entire arc a shot before DNF'ing the story. It's one thing when authors just wing it; however, there's intentionality in the decisions I'm making that I wish folks would stick it out for, even if they have to take a break and come back further down the road.
But... c'est la vie. I'll always be grateful that anyone decided to give it a try in the first place, and especially enjoyed it enough to hop on Patreon.
Anyway, I just needed to scream into the void a bit so that I could actually get to sleep tonight. We'll see how much of this I leave to actually get posted Friday, ha.
Cheers to those of you who are still here. I freakin' luv yuh.
Jon