The infirmary was as I had left it. Edda still slept. Two beds down, the boy Tobias still faced the wall. I felt Sol through the bond, she was still curled asleep in the beast hall. She was asleep. She had been asleep when I checked on the way over, and she had been asleep when I checked again two corners later.
Ren and Corin had not moved from Edda’s bedside. Ren rose the moment I stepped through the door. “That trollop challenged you to a duel?”
I stared at her. I had not expected the girl to know the word trollop. It seemed her command of language sharpened considerably whenever that language was foul. I looked from her to Ash. How did they already know? The first thing I had planned to do was tell her.
Ash held up her wooden slab. The engraved letters glowed faintly across its surface. “It just came up on this,” she said, answering a question I’d just been about to ask. I hadn’t had a reason to check mine.
This meant that everyone in this Academy must know then. If Edda’s contest had drawn the crowd and attention it had, I wondered what mine might bring. “Yes,” I said. “That girl Lena has challenged me. I have accepted.”
Corin stared at me. His new Spark glowed green against his forearm, and his mouth opened twice before any sound came out of it. “Pardon me, I know it's decided but… you accepted? Why? How?” He glanced at Ren, then back at me. “You aren’t in the normal rankings. So what could she even have to wager against you?”
I supposed those small slabs did not have everything. “It is simple,” I said. “If, in some miraculous turn of events, I lose, then I will be removed from this Academy. Never to return.” I folded my arms. “And when I win-“
“WHAT?!” Ren’s voice filled the room.
The healer’s door opened a crack. A single sharp glare emerged, found Ren, and the rest of the woman followed. We were moved outside not long after.
This training yard was quiet in the late light. We had been removed from the infirmary for what the healer had called a disruption, which I found rather unjust, given that I had not been the one disrupting. I had said nothing. I had merely been in the vicinity of someone who had. The distinction had not seemed to interest the woman.
I sat on the grass. Ash sat beside me, closer than the sitting required. Ren paced in front of us, and Corin stood a little apart.
“So- I have the same question,” Ash said. Her voice was low, which meant she was only asking me. “Why did you agree to this?” Her voice had weight to it. She was asking more than what the words said.
I looked at her. I had sworn to come to her first, before I did something that would hurt me. Did that apply to this? If it did, then that would imply that this Lena could hurt me, which I found exceedingly unlikely. Still, Heroes could be fools. They might not see sense even when it was plain in front of them. Besides, it wasn’t like I could have come to her first.
“There was no choice in the matter,” I said. “I suspect I had to agree in that moment, in that room. I-” The rest was beneath me. For Ash, I forced it out anyway. “I apologize for not asking you first, but there was no time. I’ll explain the rest to you, later.”
Ash studied my face for a breath. Then she nodded, slowly. “I understand,” she said. “Later then. I do want to know exactly what happened.” Her voice was sharp. It was not a blade aimed at me, I was sure.
“Of course.”
Ren had stopped her pacing. Now, she was twitching in place, practically vibrating. I would have preferred the pacing. “Hello?” she said, gaze fixed on me. “What the hell are you doing being so confident? You know you actually have to fight her now, right? And beat her? Or else you’ll get kicked out? Come on, don’t tell me you forgot already.”
“I am aware,” I said. I chose to ignore the petty insult in her words. “And I will defeat her. If winning is all that is required, then it is simple.”
Ren stared at me. “You’ll beat her will you? How? She’s a Sigil. Not a weak Sigil, either. She might have advanced slower than me but she isn’t exactly weak.” Ren said this last part through clenched teeth.
“I will win,” I said, “by being the stronger. That is how contests are, girl.”
“That’s not an answer! I mean-”
Corin spoke then. He did so gently, to the point where Ren had to stop midsentence lest she eat his words whole. “Is it possible,” he said, and he spoke very carefully, “that you don’t understand the difference between a Sigil and a Line?”
My knowledge of this world was lacking. It was true that I did not know the exact steps of this new balance of power. “No,” I said. “But I suspect it is one of power. Some minor ability, perhaps. These Lines let me project my power forward, nothing else.”
Corin and Ren looked at each other. It was a look I was beginning to find familiar. The one you used when you wanted to explain something to one you considered a child. “You should show her,” Corin said.
Ren sighed. She looked at me, and there was none of her usual bluster in it. “It’s not just a little power. Or some cool trick. Or some ‘minor ability’. A Spark could beat a Line, maybe. Hell, a Sigil could beat a Crest too, if they weren’t at the peak of Crest. A Line beating a Sigil is technically possible too.” She paused. “But it’s basically impossible, though.”
Impossible. It was a grand word, one that was made less grand by the people who used it. I had tested the word impossible many times, and I had always found it wanting.
“And why is that?” Ash asked before I said something cutting. Perhaps she had sensed the words on my lips.
Ren pointed at me. “Do that black light thing you did in your room.”
“It is not a black light,” I said. My eyebrows furrowed. “The ability is called Ruin. You may refer to it as a black flame, if that's all your simple mind can understand.”
Ren stared. “Huh. You even named it. At least it’s a normal name.” I did not mention that Ash had named hers. “Whatever, just do it.”
I raised an eyebrow and lifted my right hand toward the sky. A small trail of black fire poured from my palm and unraveled into the air above us. The grass beneath did not so much as wilt. I had been careful.
Ren nodded. “Okay, you can stop.” I let the Ruin go. She raised her own marked arm, and yellow flame spilled from her Sigil. She lowered it again. Then she looked at me. “Now make the black fire come out of your left hand.”
I stared at her. “What? My left?”
I looked down at my left forearm. At the green Line that sat there, and at the Cradle hidden beneath it. I raised the hand. I forced Essence through the mark and reached for Ruin, for the black flame I had loosed dozens of times-
White fire poured from my palm. I dropped it at once. “That isn’t possible,” I said. Even as I said it, I had the faintest inkling of what the girl was going to do next.
Sure enough, Ren raised her own left hand. The one with no mark at all. Flame poured from it as readily as it had from the other. “This,” she said, “is the first and most obvious difference between a Line and a Sigil.” She turned the bare hand over. “Like… if someone cut off my arm, it wouldn’t matter that much. Well…besides not having an arm. The mark’s part of my whole body now. If someone cut off yours, you’d be useless.”
She shrugged. “And there are a couple other things. I have way more range as a Sigil than I did as a Line. And everything I could do at Line takes less Essence at Sigil.”
Ash and I looked at each other. I recalled, unbidden, the man at the inn. The thief, whose arm Ash had taken at the elbow behind a building in the rain. What mark had he carried? I could not remember, but I doubted it was a Sigil. Ash’s revenge had been more thorough than either of us had guessed.
“It is a disadvantage,” I conceded. “But not an insurmountable one. So this Lena will be able to use her power more freely than I can. It will matter little.”
Ren shook her head. “That’s not all. Every stage makes a mark stronger. Everything you can do with it gets more powerful.”
“It’s like,” Corin said, “if Ren and I had the exact same mark, and we attacked each other, hers would just overpower mine. Every time. To fight above your mark stage, you need something special. A really strange mark. A really good matchup.” He hesitated. “Or a stupid amount of Essence.”
I considered this. It did not trouble me as it perhaps should have. A strange mark? I had two, the Beginning and the Ending, carved into a single core that should not exist. If one needed a ‘strange mark’, then I doubted deeply there was anyone in all the world that had marks stranger than my own.
A good matchup. I did not know the human word, but I understood the shape of the thing, and I suspected I held one. The girl’s power had been what? Lightning had crackled across her fingers, so that must have been her power. Petty lightning against Ruin and Bloom. How simple. And an absurd amount of Essence? I had shattered their Arbiter itself. And I had tried not to.
A strange mark. A good matchup. A stupid amount of Essence. I had all three, and more of all three than either of these children knew. I could not fault them for their concern -as needless as it was. They did not know. “If that is your only concern,” I said, “then you need not bother. I will be fine.”
Ren and Corin looked at each other again. “She’s always like this,” Ash said. There was exasperation in it, and something warmer beneath the exasperation. She leaned closer to me. “If there’s something more, you should tell us. If there’s something really important, just say that. That’s the only way you’ll get through to her.”
Ren sighed. “Fine. But don’t blame me if I burn this whole yard down.”
I blinked. She took a few steps back. Then there was only light.
I threw a hand across my eyes. The light almost made the darkness behind my closed eyes bright, and the heat found my skin a moment later. I lowered the hand slowly. It took a few seconds before my eyes adjusted to the light.
Ren stood wreathed in flame from her feet to her shoulders. Only her hair and her face remained. In that moment, she was a person in the shape of flames. Ren was not screaming. She was, in fact, looking around at the grass, which had not caught, and at the yard, which had not burned.
“Woooo!” she said. “Holy shit, I didn’t burn anything this time! Guess I’m getting better at this! You seeing this Corin?!”
Corin nodded. The boy let out a deep breath, as if he had expected her to burn down everything.
“What is this?” Ash asked.
“Awesome, right?” Ren grinned through the fire. “I bet I look cool, right?”
Corin sighed. “She’s… like that sometimes,” he said. “Just say yes.”
“You look adequate,” I said. Ren deflated by a visible degree. “Now explain this strange power.” I said, sharply. “This is from your mark, clearly. How?”
Ren gathered herself. Some of the grin remained, but it had quieted. “This is the Tenet,” she said. “Everyone’s is different, but this is what people with our type of powers usually have. It’s what you get at the peak of Sigil. It’s when your mark really becomes part of your body. Usually it gives you a few neat tricks too, on top of everything else. I have a cool one.” She took a breath, and then she launched herself into the air on two gouts of flame that erupted from her legs.
I watched her hang there, perhaps two men’s height off the ground, fire pouring from her legs. She wobbled. She yelped. She swayed, nearly tipped, and came down in a heap.
She was breathing harder than she had any right to be. The flames clinging to her had thinned, guttering at the edges like a candle near its end.
"It eats through you," Corin said quietly. "The Tenet, I mean. It eats through your Essence. Most Sigils can't keep it up for more than a minute or two before they're spent. And the higher the class of mark, the more it drains you." He glanced at Ren, who had not bothered to rise. "Ren can manage longer than most."
“Uh,” she said, from the grass. “Haven’t had much time to practice that one. At least I lasted a little longer.”
“Stand right there,” I said.
She stared at me, then shrugged and got to her feet. I raised my right hand and fired Ruin.
The black flame met her flames and the black flame ate them, and there was always more of her flames beneath. I poured more Essence, until the mark would take no more. There was more black flame, more void in the world. I almost held back so as to not harm the girl, only to realize that…I could not breach her.
The Ruin broke and scattered and broke again, and beneath it the girl stood untouched. But the fire wrapped around her had begun to thin, and Ren's breathing had gone ragged. I knew this sensation now. Or rather, I had felt one similar to this. I had felt it with Isabelle. She’d had a defense with the concept -no, the Tenet- of Reflection. It was a defense my power alone could not pass. Just like it could not pass Ren’s tenet of flame.
With my Ember Core, perhaps I could outlast it. But only if she stood still and let me, and she would not.
I had been pouring Essence through the Requiem without pause, and the Ember Core chose that moment to remind me of itself. A flare of pain -sharper than the familiar hum- ran up through my chest and into my arm. My hand trembled. The Ruin guttered. I lowered it before anyone could see why. "Can this Lena do as you do?" I asked.
Ren nodded. “Yep. Only learned it pretty recently, though. Think she just learned it a few days ago. She took a while to make Sigil, but it usually takes a lot longer to get a usable Tenet. Don’t know how she did that. Don’t even know if hers is like mine. I've just heard she has one but any Tenet is bad news.”
A few days ago. The girl in the mess hall, who had looked at me with hate, yes, but a hate that had grown in fear. That girl would not have challenged me as she was then. Days later, that same girl had stood in the Archon’s study and thrown a challenge at my feet. I could not be sure, but I suspected she had learned the Tenet for me. She believed it made her untouchable.
Ash had severed a defense like this Tenet. Her Parting had made a gap in Isabelle’s armor, one that I had sunk Ruin through. Ruin had eaten the woman’s Tenet, but only because Ash had made a ledge for it to find purchase. Ren did not know if this girl’s Tenet worked like hers, but I would be a fool to assume it did not.
A duel is fought alone. There would be no Ash to help me this time. I did not look at Ash. It took effort not to. “This,” I acknowledged, “might be a problem.”
Ren sighed. “You think?”