Chapter 13

Lindon hefted the crystal ball in his palm, Blackflame madra swirling around his body, and the crystal flared with a dark, bloody light. He faced the thick forest of stone pillars as scripts ignited all through the ground.

Dark gray shapes started condensing in the shadows, like gravel pulled together by an unseen force to slowly build a larger figure. They gained definition as they formed, until they looked like statues of ancient soldiers: bulky, clad in layered armor, and carrying thick shields and swords or spears.

Three of them were almost finished forming, but there were other half-assembled shapes in the darkness behind them.

Yerin raised her sword.

Lindon bolted for the pillars.

Whether these were constructs or impossibly solid Remnants, his task remained the same. He had to keep the Burning Cloak up in order to keep the crystal active, and his Blackflame core was already on the verge of emptying itself again.

But these soldiers were taking their time to form, so what would happen if he just…skipped them?

He leaped over the first rank of soldiers, pain lancing through his ankles and calves, and the power of his jump almost carried him face-first into a pillar. He stumbled to an awkward landing but kept running, ducking around columns whenever he would run into a half-formed soldier.

It was working. The soldiers at the front formed faster than the ones behind, so he could outrun the Trial.

Even with the enhancement of the Burning Cloak, it took him five or six slow breaths to reach the end of the columns. When he did get past them, they vanished abruptly, leaving him standing in the sunlight again.

Another arch stood before him. It was a twin to the original entrance, with two exceptions.

First, the air between wasn’t clear. It was opaque and smoky, so he couldn’t see what waited beyond. Second, the paint on the support said, ‘Trial Two’ instead of ‘Trial One.’

A sense of warning shook his soul as he considered that gray area in the center of the arch, which he took as an alarm from his new Jade senses. He slowed, examining the smoke more closely. It was dense aura that sent a shiver through his rib cage.

He didn’t know what aspect of aura that was, but he could be sure of one thing: he wasn’t touching it.

Lindon scooped up a handful of gritty dirt and tossed it at the barrier between the arch. The dirt sizzled and disappeared.

He turned back to hear Yerin’s shout, the sounds of metal clashing against stone, and a roar like rocky plates grating against one another.

Forged gray madra started to gather itself in front of the arch. If the cores of the others had been pebbles, this one was a boulder, and in seconds it had formed into a towering stone giant with a horned helmet and a pair of tridents, one in each hand.

It planted its feet firmly on the ground, and behind it, the aura barrier in the arch flickered and disappeared.

Lindon had a fingernail-thin grip on his remaining madra, and the crystal in his hand was starting to dim. Nonetheless, when the giant struck at him with its trident, he had to do something.

Roots of Blackflame madra slid through his channels, then they all exploded, igniting a shot of blazing hot power. The Burning Cloak flared higher, the air around his body crackling black and red, and he slapped the trident away with the back of his fist.

The repelled trident dug a ten-foot groove in the ground, sending black dirt spraying everywhere, but he barely felt the impact—the strain on his elbow and wrist from moving his arm so quickly was far more painful than the little slap of the weapon.

Lindon was in love. This was it—a power so great it required his Iron body to withstand. His elbow blazed with pain as though he’d torn it, but it was already healing.

But he couldn’t exult in his power—he had a test to pass. The barrier had opened, which meant he could finish the Trial.

Then he kicked the ground to move forward, and his Blackflame core guttered out.

The crystal ball in his hand went dark. The aura barrier flared to life again in the arch. His legs collapsed, but he switched to drawing madra from his pure core before he buckled to the ground.

And the giant soldier dissolved. Gray madra faded to essence and blew away, half-visible sparks on the wind.

A brassy gong sounded from somewhere, its sound echoing through the canyon, and Lindon had to assume it meant defeat.

Lindon spent a moment regretting that he hadn’t passed on the first try, but the promise of Blackflame was like a sun that burned all disappointment away. He turned back to the columns, whistling and tossing the crystal ball in one hand.

He’d already started cataloguing everything he needed to improve the Burning Cloak. It was good for explosive bursts of movement—punching, jumping, kicking—anything where a sudden burst of force would help. But for steady strength, for lifting or carrying or running long distances, he would need a different technique.

To optimize the Burning Cloak, he wanted pills to refine his Blackflame madra base so that he could activate the technique more easily, practice keeping it active longer, and training to answer specific questions: how fast could he move? How much strain could his body withstand? Could he channel the technique through only a single part of his body at a time?

This could be exactly the tool he’d needed to keep up with Yerin. He just needed to master it.

As soon as he had the thought, he realized that he could still hear a battle: shouts, stone on metal, and heavy crashes.

Lindon picked up the pace, jogging through the columns. The back ranks of stone soldiers had started to dissolve, and ignored him, but the ones closer to Yerin weren’t banished yet. She was still fighting.

Then he saw her.

He hadn’t even reached Copper when he’d watched her fight the Remnant of her master back in Sacred Valley. He had lacked the senses to truly appreciate the fight.

Now, he lost track of his surroundings as he watched in awe.

She fought an army. Two soldiers whipped their swords at her with blurring speed, one fell toward her at the end of a leaping strike, and two pushed at her with shields in one hand and spears in the other. Javelins rained down at her from soldiers in the distance. Stone hands reached up from the ground beneath her, snatching at her ankles.

All at the same time.

Yerin turned them all.

Invisible blades shredded the hands at her feet, churning the earth. Her Goldsign met one of the swords, her free hand the other, and her sword skewered the falling soldier and slammed him down like a hammer on the head of his comrade. He hadn’t seen her use her Striker technique at all, but silver slashes of sword-light struck the javelins from the air, and a pair of kicks caught two enemies on their shields and launched them through the air to shatter on pillars.

How long would it be before he could fight like that?

An attack he hadn’t seen slammed into his skull in a burst of pain and white light. His Bloodforged Iron body drained power, and he rolled to his feet in an instant, pulling the halfsilver dagger from his pocket.

He could feel the presence of the gray soldier even as it dipped behind a nearby column. He would feel its attack coming, but whether his reflexes could keep up was another matter.

And what he felt of the construct was even more interesting. In a way he couldn’t entirely articulate, the soldier felt…mindless. He sensed no life within it. It was simply a mass of madra, acting according to direction.

But not even the most complex construct ever designed could fight as a living creature without someone controlling it. At least, not as he understood constructs.

The soldier ducked out, avoided his slash with the halfsilver dagger, and struck him a heavy blow on the shoulder with the butt of its sword. His madra drained again to his Iron body, until even his pure core darkened.

The spiritual exhaustion was like a gaping hole inside him, leaving him limp and twitching on the floor. He wanted to squeeze his eyes shut, but instead he kept them wide, watching for the next blow that would land on his helpless body.

Instead, the soldier withdrew. It joined the others in attacking Yerin.

He couldn’t see the fight except for an occasional flash of black or silver, but after a few minutes Yerin let out a pained shout and hit the ground with an audible thud.

The soldiers retreated, ignoring them both, and dissolved in the shadows of the stone forest. The script beneath them powered down.

Lindon spoke into the dirt. He didn’t have the strength to move, and he knew Yerin would hear him. “At least they didn’t kill us.”

Yerin groaned.

***

“In that case,” Eithan said, “I didn’t have to do much. I could have directed more of the soldiers to stop Lindon, but there was no need.”

“Maybe you should have sent more against Yerin,” Cassias said, wishing he had a dream tablet handy to record the memory while it was fresh. As a sword artist himself, he was left in awe at the level of skill and control she’d already displayed at the Lowgold stage. He bitterly regretted that he couldn’t meet her master.

“She could reach Highgold any day now, if she could let go of that death-grip she’s got on her Remnant,” Eithan said with a sigh. “She might out-rank you fairly soon.”

Cassias watched the girl in the tattered robe as she sprawled out on the dirt, each breath rough and heavy. “Considering what it’s costing us to run these Trials, I’d be disappointed if she didn’t at least take my place in the rankings.”

Eithan gently pushed him into the chair in front of the control array. “The course only runs while the sun is up. Tonight, you can go back to your family. If you’d like to retire early, then by all means…push them until they break.”

Cassias gave him a wry look, but his spiritual perception was already moving over the console. If he was going to run these Trials, he needed to know the controls like his own sword.

***

The crab meat tasted like ash and scorched oil. Yerin almost spat it out, but she’d choked down worse food out of necessity. She separated herself from the taste to chew and swallow out of pure discipline.

Lindon did spit it out, making a retching noise. “That…that cannot be food,” he said.

“It’s the fire that’s rotten,” Yerin said, ripping off another piece of vile meat with her teeth.

It had taken Lindon until well into the night to start the tiny campfire that now smoldered outside their caves. He’d used Blackflame madra to ignite the tinder, and now that power lingered; the aura wasn’t the healthy red-and-orange of a natural blaze, but was tinted with bloody scarlet and corrosive black. The flames gave off too little light, too much smoke, and a taste like burnt death.

But Yerin had experienced the consequences of eating raw meat in the wild. Even a corrupted flame like this one was better than nothing—there was no telling what sort of diseases or parasites these wild creatures carried.

Lindon popped another one of those red-veined black berries into his mouth, wincing as he chewed. Yerin had found them even less tolerable than the meat. They burned her tongue, leaving it unable to taste anything…although that might be an advantage, considering the crab.

She was sure the berries must be low-grade spirit-fruits that would burn away impurities in madra, but she didn’t have the energy to put up with a burned tongue on top of everything else.

Lindon set aside his cracked crab claw, staring into the flames. “I’m sure we weren’t meant to succeed on our first try,” he said.

Yerin’s grip tightened around her own segment of crab. The shell cracked. “You’d contend so, huh? You think a real enemy would be soft enough to give you a second shot?”

His eyes widened at her tone, but she wasn’t feeling charitable enough to apologize. It wasn’t fair to him, likely—he may not have grown up on the battlefield, but he’d faced plenty of real enemies just in the few months they’d known each other.

“We’d have some information about a real enemy,” he said reasonably. “That’s all we were doing—gathering information. We have to know how that construct works if we want to defeat it.”

She shoved another strip of revolting crab meat into her mouth, tossing the empty shell in the fire. “Not a construct,” she said, around the mouthful of food.

He leaned forward, interested. “A Remnant, then? Compelled by the script?”

“You’re Jade now. Did that feel like a Remnant to you?”

“Then that exhausts the possibilities I’m aware of, though my experience pales next to yours. If it’s not a Remnant, and it’s not a construct…”

Yerin gulped water from a hollowed-out crab shell she’d filled at the waterfall earlier, trying to rinse the taste out of her mouth. She spat to one side of the fire. “It’s a Forger technique.”

“A technique?”

“Sure. Probably stole the binding out of some advanced Remnant, strapped it into a script circle, and tied it to that crystal.”

Lindon pulled out a brush, dipped it in ink, and began taking notes. What was he even writing down? This was the basic of basics.

“Jai Long does it,” she said. “Fought him for a breath or two in the Ruins, and his moves looked like snakes.”

He nodded along with her words, still writing. “How can a technique have a mind of its own?” He stopped, brush poised, waiting for her answer.

“Plenty of the really powerful sacred artists can Forge something that looks like it’s alive. Carries a piece of their Remnant with it, or so they say, but I can’t speak to the details of it. My master could Forge a sword that would fly around and chase an enemy until they died or broke the technique.”

Lindon’s brush dashed over the page. “So all we have to do is break the technique.”

“All we have to do,” Yerin muttered. “Listen. Whoever left that binding behind was at least as powerful as Eithan. Better, more than likely. And it’s meant to test your Enforcer technique, meaning you’re intended to tear through it. That’s a tall order when I’ve got to fight by myself.”

She slammed the shell full of water down next to her so that it sloshed up and over her wrist.

He blinked, eyes wide and innocent as a child’s. “You were amazing today; I’ve never seen anything like it. I would only have gotten in the way.”

That was the attitude that scraped her nerves. You couldn’t always fight when you had a plan or a secret weapon. Nobody ever waited for you to sleep a full night, have a hot meal, and cycle your madra before they attacked you. No, you were more than likely to fight half-asleep, with a bleeding arm and a gut full of poison.

When she’d fought Jai Long herself, she’d just cut her way through a pyramid filled with dreadbeasts and crazed Remnants. Did he do her the favor of waiting until she was in her best condition? No, and neither would anybody else.

“If I waited to fight until I was ready,” Yerin said, “my bones would be rotting in Sacred Valley right now. You have to dive in there, or you might as well scamper back home.”

Well, at least he had the grace to look embarrassed. “I didn’t expect we would fight right away.”

“Yeah, you thought the Blackflame Trials might be testing your foot speed?”

“I was hoping to gather information. If we could just run past it, we might have been able to walk through to the next Trial. Wouldn’t Eithan be amazed if we left here only a day after we started?”

Yerin gaped at him. “You think Eithan wants us to run out of here quick? You don’t think he’d drop us right back at the entrance if we didn’t learn the lesson?”

Lindon flushed, examining his inkwell as though it held the deepest wisdom of the sacred arts. “No, of course, but surely there’s not just one way to solve a problem. If we come up with a solution on our own, then…”

Yerin stood up, brushing herself off. “I’m going to cycle,” she said abruptly, cutting him off.

She walked off, storming past the swords thrust into the ground in front of her cave. The vital aura had finally started to gather around them, generating enough sword aura for her to harvest.

Yerin knelt just inside, calming her breathing to cycle the aura steadily. It had the effect of calming her down as well, leaving her alone with her thoughts.

Lindon hadn’t lost the fight for her.

Sure, it would have been nice to have a second person fighting alongside her, if only to split the enemies. As it was, she had been on the defensive the entire time, battling as hard as she could just to survive for a while longer. That was no way to win a match, and she knew it.

But she’d had no choice. Her madra was squirming out of her control.

Not due to her uninvited guest—it was quiet and placid for the moment, content without straining against the Sword Sage’s knot.

No, it was the Sword Sage himself who was causing this problem.

She had to force her Goldsign to defend her when all it wanted was to strike at the enemy. Her master had left her a second, buried set of instincts inside her that kept trying to teach her how to attack. Her master had been a predator for most of his life. It wasn’t in his nature to stand back and protect himself in front of an enemy. Ever since she’d absorbed his Remnant, she’d only felt fully in control when she was attacking all-out.

Eithan might be right that cracking open her master’s Remnant was the fastest way to Highgold, but that meant there were other ways. Slower ones. As long as she worked hard enough, she could stay a step ahead of her unwelcome guest and keep her master’s voice around at the same time.

Her master was trying to teach her a lesson. And he was going to keep his hand on her sword, pulling her his way, until she learned what he wanted to teach.

This was her last chance to learn from the Sword Sage. She couldn’t waste that opportunity just because Eithan told her to.

Besides….she wouldn’t admit this out loud, but if she tapped into her master’s Remnant, his voice would go away. It would just be her and her unwelcome guest in her head. Alone again.

Yerin continued cycling, focusing on her breath to calm her frustration. She still had plenty of time to reach Highgold. This impatience could only hurt her progress.

Besides, she’d get another crack at the Trial tomorrow.

***

Iteration 217: Harrow

Suriel landed on hard-packed sand next to a lake-sized plate of chrome. In Limit, this had been a piece of a giant machine. In Harrow, a desert.

When Limit lost its grip on the Way and slammed into Harrow, the two worlds merged together and split the difference.

On the horizon, mountains flickered in and out of existence, as they tried to stabilize in one Iteration or the other. Here, Suriel’s presence was stability itself. Her connection to the Way anchored the world around her to order.

For the most part.

A fractal distortion in space unfolded into a field of impossible shapes before blooming into a two-story creature of dark glass. It had the legs of an origami centipede and the body of a black mirage, and it strained her human senses just by its proximity.

The creature of corruption reared over an upturned iron wagon, which had been half-buried in the sand. A woman crouched beneath it, filthy and ragged, having sheltered there for the better part of two weeks as reality crumbled around her.

Drawn to her sentience, the monster would have devoured her to remove her connection to the Way and to extend its own existence in the material world.

Suriel drew her Razor, now a meter-long rectangular shaft of blue metal, and blasted the creature apart. It dispersed into hissing shards of chaos that were difficult to perceive—they looked like burning nightmares.

Suriel activated one of the many functions in her Razor and the armored wagon dissolved, leaving a terrified woman huddled in the sand, surrounded by what looked like a nest of garbage.

Something hissed at the edge of Suriel’s awareness, trying to get her attention, but she ignored it.

[Mu Bak Ti Yan,] Suriel’s Presence said, and the woman’s head jerked up at the sound of her name. [You have been chosen to live. You will begin on a new world, where you will work to settle a wilderness. Do you accept this task?]

Mu Bak Ti Yan stared at the Presence, a gray figure of smoke on Suriel’s shoulder. Then she stared at Suriel.

In her original world, Suriel had been a pale, scrawny woman with hair like seaweed and eyes that took up half her face. That woman was still there, only…perfected.

Her hair was the color of sunlit emeralds, her skin ivory, her eyes a bright violet etched with vivid runes of Fate. Her childhood friends would have said she had the body of an immortal—flawless and statuesque—which was only appropriate, since they had died of old age more than four thousand years before.

She wore the armor of the Abidan, smooth and absolutely white, as though it had been poured into place. Her correlation lines looked like smoke trailing from the fingertips of her left hand up to the back of her neck, though they functioned more like an instrument’s strings. And, of course, she had just used the meter of blue metal clipped to her hip to blast apart an incomprehensible creature of madness.

In Limit, there were beings called Terava, which looked like perfect human men and women but possessed godlike power. The Teravan were natural energy projections that only took human form to feed, but Limit had never learned that.

Mu Bak Ti Yan, born in the dead world of Limit, must have thought she looked like a Terava.

Suriel raised one gauntleted hand in a gesture of peace, but the woman spooked and ran. She kicked up sand and fell to her hands and knees, still trying to crawl.

For the past two weeks, Suriel had been trying to track the human living in this desert. Most of the planet was clear already—its population dead or rescued—and this was the only inhabited planet in this universe.

As the sentient population fell, the power of chaos grew stronger. And the Way more distant.

Which made precisely pinpointing anyone’s location almost impossible, at least for an Abidan. She had relied on her old powers, following the trail of Mu Bak Ti Yan’s life-force, but the corruption of reality interfered with that as well.

Hunting one elusive prey through twenty thousand square kilometers of madness was more difficult than she remembered. Maybe she relied on the power of the Way too much; she was growing rusty.

Suriel waved her hand, and a blue-edged portal flared into being just in front of Mu Bak Ti Yan. It showed a grassland on the newly formed world of Pioneer 8089, where clusters of crude huts surrounded a great silver bird.

The woman stumbled through the portal, and the silver bird crowed, alerting the rest of the population. A tiny orange moon shone alone in the night sky; none of the stars had formed yet.

That was normal. Iterations started from clustered world fragments and grew outward, like seeds.

Suriel cut off the portal, and the door through the Way vanished, leaving Mu Bak Ti Yan trapped in a world far from her own. She had never gotten verbal agreement for the relocation, which was against Abidan protocol, but people usually only refused resettlement until they realized that staying meant horrifying death or mutation.

Of the two-point-one million survivors that had remained human through the merge and corruption of Limit and Harrow, she had saved one-point-four million in the half of a standard year since she’d been working here. The others had either died or evaded her notice long enough that she had no hope of finding them before the end.

On the first day, she’d sent half a million people to Pioneer 8089. They’d had to form orderly lines through the portal. By now, she was lucky to find one a week.

And this world didn’t have a week left.

She could feel it: the Way was losing its grip on this Iteration. Before she could locate anyone else, Harrow and Limit would accompany one another into the void.

Suriel lifted herself into the atmosphere, the land below her shifting from continent-sized machine to desert and back again. The atmosphere was even more chaotic than the surface, twisting like six hurricanes at war with one another, but she felt nothing inside the bubble of her isolation shell. She dove into stars under its protection; wind was not a worthy opponent.

From above, the world was a rapidly shifting mass of images and impressions, like a nonsense puzzle with pieces that randomly rearranged themselves. It was straining at the Way, ready to break.

And Suriel finally turned her attention to the hissing that had tried to grab her earlier. It sounded like a whisper just at the edge of hearing, like someone trying to call her name from a dream.

[Further contact established,] her Presence reported. [Transmission location still unknown.]

“Best guess,” Suriel said. She liked talking to her Presence, and had chosen its form for that reason: it almost looked like a person. She enjoyed conversation, and that simple psychological trick was enough to cut away the pressure from the isolation of her job.

Usually.

[The most recent transmission raises estimate accuracy to fifty-four percent.]

It was better than the last three times she’d tried to find the source of the transmission. It sounded like an Abidan beacon, as though someone had left a call for help, but Sector Twenty-One Control would have heard about it before she arrived. And it should have been as clear as a voice in her head.

It was quiet and hidden behind static, which meant that either it was not an Abidan beacon, or it had been broken during the violence of the merge.

Suriel blasted through the atmosphere toward the coordinates her Presence indicated, not bothering to keep herself subsonic. No one would notice, and this world no longer had a connection to Fate that could be disturbed by legends of a flying goddess.

She could have bent space and arrived directly there, but direct spatial travel was imprecise, better suited for very short travel—like range of sight—or very long travel where precision mattered little.

Besides, the beacon had persisted for months in the most chaotic environment possible. It would last a few more seconds before she arrived.

The flight brought her to an ocean. It had been an ocean in both worlds, so it was still an ocean, even if the chaos meant that it sloshed like a cup of water on a flying dragon’s back.

The whisper did seem a little louder here, though no more clear, so she dropped into the water.

As soon as she did, a signal reached her Razor. This beacon triggered in response to her weapon, then, though she could choose if she allowed the Razor to respond.

Curious, she let it transmit back, and a green light appeared in her vision. Coordinates a few hundred kilometers away, still within the ocean. Though her Presence warned her that finding something specifically keyed to her on the surface of a random dying world was dangerously suspicious, she followed it.

There was only one person who would leave her a message here. This might even be Ozriel’s hiding place.

That would be just like him: predict where she would end up, and then hide there, waiting for her. Waiting on a dying world would just add style, as he saw it.

She tore through the water, but was forced to stop in less than a second. A spatial crack the size of a finger stretched vertically for hundreds of meters, its edges sputtering with chaos, and its heart looking into the void. Water gushed through it in an endless waterfall, but that wasn’t what concerned her.

Cracks like these were often left behind after an Abidan’s battle.

Extending her senses as far as she could, she found other cracks, getting wider and wider as they drifted into the sky. With the chaotic interference, she couldn’t detect anything further than about a kilometer, but they might very well keep going. If this had been a battle between Judges, the spatial cracks could have gotten wide enough to swallow suns.

There was no testing that now. This Iteration’s stars had already vanished—there had only been one inhabited planet in each universe, so it was the last to disappear before the world fragmented.

She flew on, dodging other spatial cracks. If not for the chaos of the merged worlds and Limit’s corruption, she would have sensed these the second she landed in this reality.

Finally, beneath a storm of spatial cracks, she found the location of the beacon.

It waited for her beneath a city-sized dome of stone.

There was Abidan technology here, because the dome remained stable and unaffected despite the chaos of the water above and the world outside. She slipped lower, but as she got closer, a hole opened in the stone.

[It would be wiser to alert Sector Control,] her Presence said.

If it really was Ozriel down there, and she turned him in before hearing what he had to say, he would never forgive her. She drifted in through the hole.

The inside of the dome was very simple. It was all a single room, its structure reinforced by the Way to add stability, and big enough to swallow a city.

But there were no streets or buildings inside.

Only pods.

Transparent, organic pods in rows for hundreds of kilometers. All filled with people, sleeping and drifting in liquid.

The pods had been arranged in grids with space between them, so the people emerging could leave and walk away, but there were no other facilities. No shelters, no water, no plants. Each pod gave off a slight radiance, but that was the only light.

[Twelve million, four hundred forty-five thousand, six hundred thirty-two people,] her Presence reported. [And some shipping crates containing culturally significant icons.]

“Point of origin?”

[Iteration Two-one-six: Limit.]

Of course. The Abidan had evacuated the elite of Harrow, and she herself had saved a million and a half survivors of the combined world, but no one had saved the population of Limit. Their world was destined to end, so the Abidan had allowed it.

Except for Ozriel. He’d saved enough to preserve the unique genetics and cultures of a doomed world.

But there was one more feature of the space inside the dome: spatial cracks, which buzzed like a storm in the air. The structure of the building and the pods were still intact, but Ozriel must have protected them. Otherwise, the void would have swallowed them by now.

Even so, the chaotic interference was so strong here that the air crackled with it, and Suriel had to move carefully around each crack. Not that they would threaten her, but she might stick to them like iron to a magnet.

The cracks were thickest surrounding a door at the far end of the compound…a door marked with the image of a scythe.

Well, that was simple enough.

With one hand, she shoved the heavy stone door aside, and the chaos hit her like a stench. The room on the other side of the door was only as large as a one-room office, and positively black with spatial cracks, so that it looked like the weapons of two Judges had clashed in here.

Except that a conflict like that would have destroyed this shelter and most everyone else in Limit.

She couldn’t see much in the room past the nest of hissing cracks in reality, but half of a desk remained in the center. A fist-sized ball glowed blue on that table: a beacon, though all the chaos in here must have degraded it. And on the far wall, a spray of ancient blood and flesh, as though a man had exploded right before the door was sealed for a century.

[Impossible to identify remains,] her Presence reported. [Chaos and time have destroyed them beyond the point of analysis.]

The beacon was still resonating with her Razor, indicating that it held a message. She reached out to accept it, but hesitated.

Not out of reason, or to buy herself a moment to think. She was scared.

Ozriel had come here to prepare for Limit’s death. He had left this message here for her after a battle…or had he prepared the message before the battle began, stretching out past the planet?

Either way, it wasn’t good news. This message was not about to tell her that Ozriel was safe, happy, and ready to return to work.

She was afraid for herself, afraid for the Abidan, and afraid for the man she’d known even before she’d joined the Abidan Court. He had always been Ozriel to her, but there had been a time before she was Suriel, the Phoenix. They had been friends.

She accepted the message, and her senses were consumed in endless white.

This was a perfectly ordinary way to send a message in Sanctum, headquarters of the Abidan. Sharing senses and experiences was common, and crafting an experience like this would have taken Ozriel seconds. But the world of this message crackled, tarnished by damage and chaos. The world of white was speckled with imperfection, as though she watched it through grainy film, and interference was a constant hiss in her ears.

At least she wasn’t alone.

Ozriel stood before her in his polished black armor, the Mantle of Ozriel streaming behind him like a boiling cape of shadow, and the white hair running down his back. But it was all fuzzy, like a half-forgotten dream. His face blurred, though she could fill in the gaps from memory: cold and distant and grim.

In person, he had more of a sense of humor than any other Abidan she’d ever met, but he always wore an expression like a man bracing himself for terrible news.

“Sur…looking lovely…get to the point, because…murdered.” He was speaking, speaking to her, because he’d known she would find this. Of course he had. But whatever he’d predicted, it hadn’t included a battle in this room ruining his message.

The scene congealed for a moment, until she could almost believe he was really standing in front of her. “…didn’t abandon you. I’ve identified the sixteen worlds…a facility like this one…” She could make out his lips moving now, but it was as though she’d gone deaf.

“…sure you’ll…quarantine. I sh—…actually kills me.”

His expression darkened, and he looked over her shoulder. The Scythe appeared in his hand: a long, curved blade like an obsidian scimitar. At least, that was how it presented itself.

She was sure this was the heart of the message, but she heard nothing but a whisper of static. Finally, his voice faded back in, just on the edge of her hearing.

“…if I didn’t act, it would all stay the same. I don’t—“

The dream world squealed with feedback, and colors twisted in her eyes as the message’s recording was violently cut off.

That wasn’t interference. He’d been attacked while speaking, ending the message.

So the battle had started here, but continued off into the world. Or had he recorded it elsewhere and the beacon survived the battle?

…survived a battle that he, perhaps, had not.

“Presence,” Suriel ordered verbally. “Reconstruct the probable content of Ozriel’s message. Authorization Suriel zero-zero-six.” The Presence was more than capable of simple predictions, but interactions between Judges usually required verbal confirmation. Sanctum wanted any jurisdictional overlap to be well documented.

[Incomplete information supplemented with standard Ozriel prediction model. Best recreation follows.]

The message was audio-only, but it was as though Ozriel was speaking right into her ear. The voice of her friend, full of weary humor.

“Suriel. You’re looking lovely today, I’m sure. I’ll get to the point, because I have an unexpected visitor who needs murdered: I did not abandon you. I have identified the sixteen worlds that will be corrupted while I’m gone, and I’ve prepared a facility like this one in each. I’m sure Makiel will send Gadrael, and then you’ll volunteer. If I’m still gone, chaotic interference makes it impossible to predict beyond sixteen, so go ahead and initiate quarantine. I shouldn’t take much longer, unless this actually kills me.”

His voice turned serious. “We have to change, Suriel. If I didn’t act, it would all stay the same. I don’t—”

The sound cut off.

Of their own accord, her eyes slid back to the blood on the walls. He’d seen her standing here. From hundreds of years ago, he’d seen her.

He was still watching out for her, if not for himself.

Her heart hammered in her ears, her respiration sped up a fraction, and her adrenal glands squeezed hormones into her bloodstream. She chose not to cut off the physical responses.

Let her feel fear for her friend.