"Take us to Lady Helyna's."
Macarious just stared at Selara, and for the first time since his arrival, genuine surprise registered on his angular face.
"You cannot be serious." He spluttered. "For this... this… backwoods nobody?"
Selara refused to back down, chin raised and face carved from stone.
"I am."
Macarious collected himself quickly and began to study her. After a few seconds he released a long, put-upon exhale from his nose as he shook his head.
"Very well. But you will owe me."
The man opened another portal, and through it, Cal caught a glimpse of impossibly high ceilings and the flash of gold.
Selara turned to him. "Cal, with me."
She stepped through, and he promptly followed.
His boots cracked against the floor as he looked around, each footstep ricocheting upward into a vast, cathedral-like space that nonetheless seemed to dampen the sound.
He stopped walking. Couldn't help it.
The ceiling arched dozens of feet above him, a vaulted masterpiece of gilded molding that depicted beautiful naturescapes across its surface. Glowing runic fixtures were embedded at precise intervals, casting a shadowless light. The walls were seamless taupe stone, disrupted only by priceless-looking art in frames that gleamed with gold leaf. The floor was an unbroken expanse of white marble veined with threads of silver, polished to a mirror finish that reflected the ceiling in perfect symmetry.
As he turned, the space ran for hundreds of yards in either direction, dwarfing anything in his combined memory. Caleb Foster had once attended a corporate gala in a renovated bank lobby in downtown Seattle, all brass fixtures and exposed brick, and he'd thought it was the height of architectural indulgence. That lobby could have fit inside a corner of this room with space left over for a gift shop.
Selara was already fifteen yards ahead. Cal forced his legs into motion and followed, his eyes flitting across the room's expanse at the sheer scale of the place.
A monolithic counter of polished marble dominated the center, its surface bare except for a recessed runic pad that housed multiple luminous symbols. Behind it stood a woman whose composure matched her surroundings. She was young, perhaps mid-twenties, with blond hair pulled into a flawless chignon and a burgundy uniform with gold trim that had been tailored immaculately. Her posture was impeccable; her smile, practiced. And she was gorgeous.
"Good morning. Welcome to Lady Helyna's. How may I be of service?"
Selara reached the counter and didn't waste a breath.
"I need an immediate F-tier foundation service."
A… what now?
The attendant continued smiling, clearly unfazed.
"Of course, my Lady. And who will be receiving the service?"
Selara glanced back at Cal, then returned her attention to the woman behind the counter.
"The apprentice of Lady Selara Azh'vail."
This time, the attendant's smile faltered.
It was brief, but her features froze for a fraction of a second. Then the professional facade seamlessly resumed, and the attendant continued conducting their business.
"Of course, Lady Azh'vail. Will you be paying by keystone?"
Selara held out her palm where a small stone rested. At first glance, it resembled a purple essence stone, but the resemblance ended at the color. Where an essence stone radiated its light outward in an ambient glow, this stone contained its light entirely within its own boundaries. Shifting colors swirled beneath its surface, pressing against the stone from within. And covering every inch of the stone's exterior were microscopic runes, thousands of them, packed with the same impossible density as the void rings.
The attendant accepted the keystone with both hands, handling it with reverence. She placed it on the recessed runic pad. New runes on the pad lit up, as the lights inside the keystone spun faster. The attendant's fingers tapped out a sequence of glyphs that caused holographic symbols he didn't recognize to appear in the air above the counter. The attendant gave Selara an expectant look, to which the lady nodded. After a final tap on the pad, the lights spooled down and the keystone was returned.
The attendant then dipped her hand beneath the counter's surface, pressing something hidden, and a soft chime rang through the lobby.
Seconds later, another identically dressed attendant stepped through a side door that swung open on silent hinges. Cal could have sworn the door's seams hadn't been there when he'd looked before.
Selara turned to him.
She put both hands on his shoulders and gripped him tightly, forcing him to meet her golden eyes. This close, he could clearly see the faint network of silver scar tissue on her forehead.
"I'm sorry this is so sudden, Cal." She spoke for his ears alone, her voice carrying a tremor she couldn't hide. "But trust me. This place is a service provider to the elite of the elite. You will be safe, and by the end of the day you will have a perfect F-tier foundation." She squeezed his shoulders again. "I wish I had more time to explain, but we must hurry. Please. Trust me. It's the best I can do for my first and only apprentice in the time we have left."
The earnest, almost pleading look in her eyes burned through every layer of confusion, disorientation, and accumulated trauma that the last few hours had piled on him. He'd witnessed this woman die and resurrect, then kill the man who murdered her. She had transformed from a forager into a noblewoman of a house powerful enough to make even the attendants of this place - whatever it was - flinch.
And through all of it, she'd shielded him. Even put herself between him and someone as terrifying as Macarious.
Yeah, it was the least he could do to show her a little trust.
"Of course, Selara."
Something in her face softened, and she gave him an unguarded smile. She released his shoulders, squeezed his arm once, and stepped back.
The second attendant gracefully gestured toward the open door.
"If you'll follow me, sir."
And so he did.
The corridor beyond descended in a slow spiral, and the stone and marble of the lobby gave way to something warmer. The walls became panels of rich mahogany, and brass fittings gleamed on the doors they passed, each one a work of functional art.
Along the curved inner wall hung a series of exquisitely rendered, life-sized portraits, each depicting the same woman. She was stunning. Milk chocolate skinned with dark hair and deep purple eyes, her features possessed a timeless beauty that transcended the changing fashions of each portrait. In one, she wore robes of lavender and held a crystalline vial to the light. In another, she stood before a window overlooking a cityscape Cal didn't recognize, dressed in the severe, high-collared style of a military bureaucrat. A third had her seated in a garden, looking contemplative, a book open in her lap.
Lady Helyna herself?
A question from the attendant interrupted his observations.
"Does Lady Azh'vail often take such a... direct involvement in the foundation of her apprentices?"
Cal considered his response, and he thought through what was unsaid, parsing the subtext: "This level of investment is abnormal. I want to know why you're special." He gave her the only honest answer he had, unable to discern a reason not to.
"I don't know of any others, so I couldn't say."
The attendant nodded noncommittally. Soon they arrived at an ornate door at the bottom of the spiral, its surface reinforced with bands of dark metal and inlaid with a dense runic array that sent Cal's senses tingling.
She pressed her palm to the door, and it swung open in silence.
The opulence of the corridor continued into an intimate chamber of comfort. Walls of sound-dampening velvet the color of red wine, framed by the same polished mahogany from the hall. A soothing white light radiated from a complex runic circle inscribed on the ceiling, suffusing the space and reflecting softly off the dark floorboards. In the room's exact center sat a single reclining chair, a throne of absolute comfort upholstered in black beast-hide that looked incredibly soft and luxurious. The only hint of the room's purpose hung behind the seat. Three metallic conduits extended from a golden wall bracket, each terminating in a crystalline seal.
"If you would remove your upper garments, sir."
Cal stripped off his Legion armor and the shirt beneath it, laying them on the floor beside the chair. The cool air raised gooseflesh across his chest and arms. The attendant directed him into the chair and the leather enveloped him, conforming to his back and shoulders with an almost organic responsiveness. As he sank into the divine furniture, even after all the stress, mental fatigue, and trauma, Cal couldn't stop himself from a moment of mundane appreciation. Oh, I have got to get me one of these. All I'm missing is a beer and some chips!
The attendant extended the conduits from the wall. The first seal attached to his stomach, settling directly over the center of his lower abdomen. Over his Mana font. The second and third found positions on either side of his chest, pressing against his pectorals. Each seal latched on with a faint hiss.
The sensation was strange, an invasive pressure that bypassed his skin and reached beneath it, gripping something fundamental. They connected to his spirit directly.
"The process is automated and will calibrate to your capacity." The attendant stepped back toward the door. "Please relax and allow the infusion to proceed, remembering to guide it. Do not resist the flow. I will return when the process is complete."
The door sealed behind her without a sound, and Cal was left with the recliner he never wanted to leave and the hum of the conduits.
It rose.
'Trust me,' Selara had said.
Gripping the arms of the chair tightly, he waited.
He felt them before he saw them: three streams of energy pouring down the conduits, each a distinct color visible through the crystal seals. Red, blue, and purple.
Cal gasped, and his eyes dilated.
It was like trying to drink from three hoses at once. A red stream blazed through his musculature, igniting every fiber with a searing warmth that spread from his chest outward to his extremities. The blue stream plunged into his Mana core, an icy torrent that wrenched the reservoir open. The purple stream spread through everything else, the cellular fabric of his entire body soaking in the pure life force.
There was no pain. But the raw force and velocity, the relentless, unceasing force of three rivers of spiritual energy converging on him was unsettling. He began shifting in his seat.
And then, gradually, the initial shock receded. The current continued, but he began to adjust. The sensation settled from a violent flood into a sustained pulse as power rushed into him.
But the energy was raw. Unaligned. Pure essence with no instructions on where to apply it.
Within one minute, a feeling of spiritual "bloat" swelled in his spirit. Recalling the attendant's instructions, he closed his eyes, drew a long breath, and sank into [Meditation].
The external world faded. The drone of the conduits and the feeling of the chair became distant signals. He turned his consciousness inward, into the vast interior landscape of his own spirit, and there he found chaos.
Raw essence swirled inside him: red, blue, and purple energy suffusing every inch. A plethora of pure potential with no direction. He extended his Intent and began to sort them into the proper attributes, feeling the incremental gains start to roll in.
The work consumed him, and he let it. Sorting was mechanical; the spiritual equivalent of filling spreadsheet cells, one after another, each deposit clicking satisfactorily into place.
Tasks are anchors. Keep working. Keep moving. Above all, don't think.
Hours passed. Or minutes. Time lost its meaning inside the meditative state, compressed and stretched by his progress.
The problem with repetitive work was that it freed the mind to wander. And the problem with [Perfect Memory] was that it didn't necessarily wander to comfortable places.
It started small. A sound surfacing between one pulse of sorted essence and the next: the specific cry Mira had made when Finn stabbed her in the back.
He pushed it aside. Reached for the next thread of red essence and guided it toward Strength.
But the image quickly followed the sound, delivered with the merciless fidelity his Impartment guaranteed. Mira lying in Leo's lap in the clearing. The look on both of their faces…
Sort. Focus. Red to Strength, blue to Intelligence, purple to—
Gavin, kneeling amidst the ferns, trying to staunch the flow of blood from his ruined throat. The big young man who couldn't stick a [Dash] landing to save his life, now robbed of the opportunity to ever try again.
The meditative stillness shook.
No. Sort. Keep sorting. Purple to—
Kamari's team. Taken apart while protecting him from the assassin he'd antagonized.
Meditation shattered.
His eyes snapped open. He sucked in air through clenched teeth, his spine rigid against the chair, both fists locked around the armrests in a death grip.
And with no task to hide behind, the grief fully arrived.
It started as a compression behind his sternum that radiated outward, filling his throat and the space behind his eyes with a pressure that had nothing to do with spiritual energy. His breathing turned ragged. He pressed the heels of his palms against his eyes and let it come. Let the faces cycle through in their perfect clarity.
Mira. Gavin. Kamari. Bryon. Jorik. Senna. Amina.
He couldn't blur them. Couldn't soften the edges the way a normal mind would over days and weeks and years, wearing trauma down to something manageable through the mercy of a normal mind. These images would be exactly this poignant in a decade. A century.
He didn't know how long he sat there. The unsorted essence continued to build, the spiritual bloat swelling toward something uncomfortable, a growing pressure that his body registered even through the sorrow. The conduits didn't care about his emotional state.
Eventually, the acute edge dulled. The grief didn't leave - it couldn't, not with his Impartment holding the door open - but the worst of the pain eased enough for him to breathe evenly. He wiped his face with the back of his forearm and stared at the ceiling, spent.
The bloat was becoming a problem. He could feel the unsorted essence pressing against the boundaries of his spirit like water filling a sealed room, and if he didn't resume the work soon he was worried it might ruin something. Him, in particular.
He drew a shuddering breath, closed his eyes, and sank back into [Meditation].
The serenity took longer to find this time, but the work was waiting, and he reached for it.
And in the quiet that rebuilt itself around him, with nowhere to hide and no will left to try, he let himself look at the wreckage honestly.
It began with Captain Hatch and the old soldier's revelation that laid out the Sovereign Path and the myth of the reward: that at the Peak one transcends, and reality itself becomes negotiable.
If reality were negotiable, then so was distance. So was time. That thread of possibility had wrapped itself around every decision Cal had made since, pulling tighter with each passing week. If he moved fast enough, pushed hard enough, climbed high enough, maybe he could see his family again. And even though maybe was all he had, it was enough, and he'd let it consume him.
His recklessness unspooled in chronological order, each memory wrought of unyielding clarity*.*
Narbok, pinned with his own dagger in the alleyway and Cal's harvesting knife against his femoral artery. Cal had scared the boy into fleeing and told himself it was tactical. The deeper truth: he still couldn't do it. Narbok was a boy, beaten and bleeding on the cobblestones, and some instinct from a more civilized life refused to let Cal deliver the final, necessary strike. He still hadn't surrendered to the brutal calculus of Veraxus - that mercy shown to a predator was a debt that would be collected with interest. The ambush a few days ago and the subsequent fallout had written this lesson in blood.
Then there were his first forays in the lab, draining his Mana pool and flooding it back with a D-tier potion until blood streamed from his nose. This is your limit, Aurelian had told him. Cal had sorted those words under obstacles to overcome instead of warnings to heed, taking it upon himself to go beyond the instructions of his mentor and use multiple Spells in parallel.
The Rootbound Depths. Alone in the dark, hunted by creatures that outclassed him, and Selara's emergency whistle sitting untouched around his neck. He feared losing his mentor's trust worse than the danger. You had another option, Cal, Selara had told him afterward, but you chose to foolishly do the dangerous thing.
And the crown jewel: cutting a deal with Jakob to sell potions behind everyone's backs, knowing it would break their truce with Zarven if he was caught, knowing what Zarven did to people who threatened his business. He'd done it anyway because the coin would accelerate his timeline.
Underneath it all, the timeline was everything. Cut any corner he could, take any risk, all to return home faster.
And the people he cared for had paid the price. All downstream of choices Cal had made while sprinting toward a door that might not even exist.
I treated every person around me as a supporting character in my personal mission.
The energy continued to pour in. Cal continued to sort. And in the deepest part of his meditation, with his spirit nearly full and his defenses scraped away, the truth he had been running from since Hatch explained the Path finally caught up to him.
The path takes centuries.
He'd had the knowledge, confirmed from multiple sources he trusted. But a chasm separated knowing from accepting, and he'd kept building bridges across it with fantasy and desperation. The Sovereign Path would take lifetimes. Even if reality-bending power waited at its summit - and no one had proven it did - his family would be long dead before he arrived. Evelynn would live her life. Katie and Jack would grow up, grow old, and pass on, all while their father climbed a mountain on another world that might never lead back to them.
And he kept destroying real lives in the present to chase a theoretical reunion in the impossibly distant future.
He let it hurt. The hope didn't die - couldn't die, not with his Impartment holding every beloved memory in permanent detail. But the white-knuckled grip that hope had on the steering wheel of his life began to loosen. He couldn't hold on to it the way he had before. Not after what happened.
I may never see my family again. But if I keep rushing, I'll lose the people standing right next to me here. They deserve better.
The desperate man who had been sprinting since the day Cillian opened his eyes didn't disappear. But the grief had burned through the worst of the recklessness, and what remained was something less frantic, and more deliberate. The beginning of patience. The first quiet acknowledgment that the Sovereign Path was a marathon, and a man who destroyed everything around him in the first mile wouldn't survive to see the rest.
AUTHOR'S NOTE:
Hey folks,
Hope you liked the chapter! Been driving to this moment for a long time, so it's satisfying to get here (for me). May it land for you, too.
If you missed it and want to chime in, please toss ideas into yesterday's post for Book 2's cover art.
And a small update for next week... might be turning into two chapters plus the epilogue. I'm having a hard time getting everything done that I want to. sdf probably going to call me out for doing a Peter Jackson/LOTR Book 3. So it goes.
Cheers,
Jon