Chapter 11

With the assistance of her Presence, Suriel watched her target location from a thousand kilometers away. The fated arrival point was an empty stretch of forest in the territory of a local clan, one marked by images of a white five-tailed fox. [The Wei clan,] her Presence informed her, spooling out lines of explanatory text in her vision. She willed the explanations away, scanning the area.

There was some sort of festival nearby, where children from various clans engaged in combat games. She watched the matches idly for a while, waiting for the spatial violation destined to occur nearby.

One boy in particular caught her attention—tall, broad-shouldered, with a wooden badge and a rough face. He was the oldest of the group, and he won as easily as someone of his size should defeat younger children. The crowd treated him with disdain, but he seemed to carry himself with pride, as though pushing nine-year-olds out of bounds was an achievement.

She looked a little deeper, examining his soul.

She spotted his flaw immediately. He'd been born with a madra deficiency; that could be corrected, given time, but primitive clans like these often ostracized or marginalized the weak. Only the strong could contribute to the greater good.

She ordered her Presence to pull up the boy’s story, digesting it in an instant. It was as she’d expected. He was born with nothing, less than nothing, and others increased his burden because of it. Yet today, he still fought. She could admire that.

His fate unspooled in front of her, a series of images stringing from one to another. She would have seen clearer images, even branching paths, had she left her eyes functional, but in her current disguised state this was the best she could do.

The boy fights against a relative of his, a young man with long black hair and an iron badge. The boy cheats, releases emerald hornets, ekes out a technical victory.

With a bulky brown pack on his back, he bends his head over a scroll, studying a Path by candlelight in someone else’s home.

The same boy, years later, weeping as he earns his copper badge.

As a man with gray in his hair, he and his wife and their children gather around before a ceremony that sees him promoted to Iron.

He dies in a Dreadgod attack that claims a quarter of the valley, decades hence.

Suriel willed the fate away, wiping aside the pathetic collection of images. These would be his dominant fate, the most likely path for the boy's life, and a thousand little things could change it. But left to his own devices, he would overcome his handicap to live a happy and satisfying life, dying a little early.

That was all.

Her interest waned, shifting as the Presence chirped in her mind. [Spatial violation imminent]. The spot in the empty forest flared red, glowing brighter and brighter.

Suriel launched herself from the ledge on which she'd been standing, shattering the air in an explosion as she moved faster than sound. She was late.

Predicting events based on fate was an art more than a science, and not her specialty. She had chosen to stay a few thousand kilometers away for safety, to avoid undue interference. She'd known it was a risk, but now the event was upon her, and she couldn't arrive in time without tearing the atmosphere apart. She could bend space to transport directly in, but her target might sense the distortion and flee to another world. Even so, she wasn't unduly concerned.

Anything this trespasser could do, she could undo.

He descended from a class six spatial rift, little more than a slit in the Way that was repaired immediately. She watched as he gathered some followers around him—he must have been communicating with this world for some time, which would add to his sentence—and decapitate a couple of observers. The spines were severed cleanly, but she would reverse causality rather than attempt a manual reattachment. No sense taking a risk.

As she reduced speed for her arrival, the trespasser fully unveiled his spirit, darkening the sky with storm aura and smashing nearby pillars to frighten the locals. He was going for full dramatic effect.

“Is this it, then?” the black-and-white striped trespasser taunted his enemies. The audio quality had improved now that she was within two dozen kilometers. “Don't hold back, come up. I won't begin until you are ready.”

Suriel prepared to descend when she noticed a detail that the winged man had overlooked. That boy, fifteen and clad in white, was sneaking around to the front of the trespasser. He gathered his meager madra together, terror and resolve and muted self-loathing radiating in a psychic wave.

With the same move he'd used on the children earlier, the boy drove his palm into the Gold practitioner's core.

Suriel winced even before the trespasser tore the boy in half, sending his torso flipping up and out of the arena. The boy had to have known it was useless.

[He knew,] her Presence confirmed.

And he tried anyway, Suriel thought. This was the sort of person the Abidan were created to save: the weak who stood against the strong. The sort of person the Phoenix was meant to save. The sort of person who might, with a little outside help, even reach beyond their fate.

His life guttered out, visible to her eyes, but that meant nothing before Suriel. He was only dead.

She changed her plan. She had meant to freeze time, retrieve the trespasser, revert the damage he'd done, and leave. With a delicate adjustment of memory, the locals would never notice their day had been interrupted.

Now, she had a new goal. Makiel wouldn't be pleased, but this event now fell officially under her purview. She could handle it as she saw fit.

And she saw fit to make the trespasser sweat.

***

Death looked surprisingly like the last moments of his life, Lindon found.

His vision had fuzzed away for a second in a haze of gray, but now it returned, and he found that everything looked exactly the same. Markuth had his hands raised above his white-striped hair, madra gathered in balls of force and wings spread. The Jade experts of two clans ran at him with weapons and foxfire ready, resignation in their wrinkled faces. Blood splattered the arena, and his legs lay next to his mother's head.

When Lindon was a child, he had once nudged a table carrying a ceramic vase, an heirloom from previous generations of the Shi family. The table shook, and he looked up to see the vase teetering on the edge. That moment had seemed to stretch, a single image imprinted on time so that it seemed to last forever before the vase at last began to fall.

At first, he thought that was happening now. The world seemed frozen around him, as though time had stretched once again. He noticed it, and waited for the battle to resume.

But it didn't.

A few breaths of time later—though Lindon wasn't breathing, and felt no urge to—the tableau before him remained exactly the same. He wondered if this was what death was, a single instant lasting for eternity. He hoped not. Boredom seemed like a worse fate than otherworldly torment.

Then something changed. The sky, masked by the dark clouds summoned by the Li Clan's Grand Patriarch, began to glow blue. Azure light lit the underside of the clouds as though a blue sun rose, spilling its light over the entire arena.

And in that light, pieces of the world began to move.

Though Li Markuth remained locked in his pose of triumph, the Jade combatants still frozen before him, blood slithered along the floor around his feet. The severed heads tumbled across the arena, gathering blood as they rolled, bouncing off the stone and rolling away toward the forest.

His own legs slid across the stone, as though his blood had become a rope pulling his body together. Panic tightened his chest, and he tried to struggle, but he couldn't even widen his eyes. No part of him responded to his control, and he had to wait and watch as his flesh pulled itself together. It wasn't painful, but he could feel it, an uncomfortable squirming below his ribs as muscle and bone reassembled themselves.

All the while, the sky grew brighter and brighter.

Markuth slowly moved his head on his neck, thawing gradually, first looking around him at the frozen world and then at the brightening sky.

He stumbled backward in shock, flapping his wings like a panicked bird to keep from falling over.

“No!” he screamed, hurling the balls of his madra into the sky. “Wait, please! I belong here! This is my homeland!”

The clouds parted, revealing the source of the blue light. It blazed like a sapphire sun for an instant, sending a painful lance through Lindon's eyes and making him wish he could close them.

The light dimmed somewhat, revealing its source: two sweeps of blue fire, like a pair of wings formed from iridescent flames and big enough to cover a third of the sky. It gave the impression of a blue phoenix, or perhaps a phoenix Remnant, descending from the heavens in glory.

Markuth roared at the phoenix, drawing the sword from his belt. It was shaped like a straight, simple sword, but it fuzzed and flickered, buzzing oddly as though it weren't quite real.

The phoenix faded further as it descended, until its flames no longer hurt Lindon’s eyes. When he could see again, he made out a person at the phoenix’s heart: a woman, drifting down toward them and bearing flaming blue wings.

Beautiful she was, but it wasn't the word that occurred to Lindon first. The first thing he thought was, Perfect. It was as though someone had taken a real person and perfected her, smoothing every blemish in her pale skin, arranging her cloud of dark hair so that nothing was out of place. Neither too short nor too tall, too thick nor too thin, she looked like the template from which every other human being was wrought. She was so flawless that she couldn't be real, reminding Lindon forcibly that he was dead now. Maybe she was a messenger from the heavens, here to usher him into the netherworld. That would explain the burning wings.

Though, aside from her inhuman perfection, she didn't look like he would have imagined. Her body was sheathed in white, liquid armor that moved effortlessly with her. Gray ribbons of hazy smoke started at the fingertips of her right hand, winding up her arm and terminating in her neck. Her hair looked brown at first glance, but upon further reflection, he would call it a deep green. And her eyes, large and human, were undoubtedly purple.

The heavens must be a strange place to produce people like her. But with her here, he found that he could relax. Maybe when she brought him to the next life, he would be more than Unsouled.

Markuth stood with his chest heaving and a sword in his right hand, but he didn't attack. “I have not violated the Pact, nor upset the balance of this world, nor defied the Abidan. I demand a trial before—”

An invisible rope grabbed Li Markuth around one ankle, pulling him off-balance and dragging him to a point just behind the woman. He flapped his wings, kicking up a powerful wind, straining against his unseen bonds, but to no avail.

[Li Markuth,] said an impassive voice in Lindon's mind. [You have been sentenced to trial for spatial violation and attempted domination of local inhabitants. You will be imprisoned until the Court of Seven determine a date and location of your trial.]

A black spot appeared behind the green-haired woman, a point of absolute darkness. It widened so that Lindon could see a few spots of color within, like a distant cloud of rainbow-colored fireflies. Markuth continued being dragged backwards, as though that spot called him inexorably toward it.

As the Gold came closer to the woman, he roared and spread his wings wide, raising his strangely twisting sword. With both hands, he slammed the blade down on her unprotected head, and the force of his madra was such that it pressed against Lindon even across the arena. The stones beneath her cracked, and wind blew away from the impact. The air rang with a sound like steel on stone.

And the woman continued drifting over the ground, undisturbed. Not a single strand of her hair moved out of place, and she never looked in Markuth's direction.

He screamed like a child as the darkness swallowed him, slurping up the tip of his sword last. The black hole in the world closed.

The woman continued toward him, having never acknowledged the Grand Patriarch of the Li Clan for an instant. From the beginning of her descent, her eyes had remained locked on Lindon.

She reached the ground just before she reached him, her smooth white boots tapping down on the stone. The blue-fire wings vanished at the same moment. She regarded him first, then motioned for him to stand.

“Stand,” she said. “Do not be afraid.” The words sounded strange, as though she were trying a different accent with every syllable, but they were completely understandable. He was surprised enough that she'd spoken directly to him, instead of using the dispassionate impersonal voice that had sentenced Li Markuth. Her real voice sounded so different that he wondered if they had even come from the same person. Maybe the words earlier were straight from heaven.

When he realized he hadn't immediately obeyed this celestial messenger, he scrambled to his feet, only an instant later remembering that he should be in agony.

He wasn't. In fact, he felt better than he had before the tournament, his spirit restored to full capacity and his body clean and well-rested.

Lindon considered dropping to his knees, but she had just ordered him to stand, so he bent in half at the waist. “This one thanks you for the attention, honored immortal. Please, how may this one serve you?”

An afterlife in the service of a celestial immortal was infinitely better than his mortal existence. If there was any truth in the myths, he could still practice the sacred arts now that he'd left his physical body behind, so this might be an unimaginable opportunity.

Death could well be the best thing that had ever happened to him.

He couldn't see her face, but she considered for a few seconds before speaking again, her expression as pleasant and unyielding as a mask. “This one would not require so much of you.”

This one? He wondered if she was mocking him, or if he had somehow offended her. “Please, honored immortal, do not speak to this one so humbly.”

“Humbly? Ah.”

She considered a moment longer before clearing her throat. This time, she sounded as though she’d spent her entire life in Sacred Valley. “Raise your head and speak freely. I have no patience for the manners of this world.”

He straightened, taking the chance to look her in the eyes. It was technically rude of him, but she said she didn't mind, and he was willing to take her at her word. Besides, this might be the only time he ever met her, and he was determined to commit her faultless face to memory.

But there was one answer he needed. “May I ask, if you don’t mind…am I dead?”

A smile tugged at one corner of her mouth, a crack in the mask. “Do you not feel alive?”

He thought he did, but then, who could say what death felt like?

“If you've brought me to life, then...” he hesitated, looking around at the frozen world. The Jade elders were stuck rushing forward to oppose an enemy that no longer existed.

Purple eyes surveyed the scene, her face pleasant and impassive once again. She might as well have been looking over a field of flowers. “Li Markuth was not permitted to return to this world. His attack was a deviation from fate, which I have reversed. When I depart, it will be as though your festival continued uninterrupted.”

“What about me?” Lindon asked immediately. “You restored me to life. Will I forget this kindness as well?”

“Yes.” This didn’t appear to disturb her in the least.

“You don’t think you could…leave my memory? So that I could be properly grateful?” He was the only one to receive special treatment from the heavens; he couldn’t allow himself to walk away as though nothing had happened.

She reached over with her left hand, stroking the lines of gray smoke on her right as though tenderly playing an instrument. “Temporal reversion is not memory modification. When I’m done here, nothing Li Markuth did will have happened. Your festival will have continued without cease. To spare you, I would have to temporarily withdraw you from the flow of fate.”

“Thank you for your consideration, honored messenger,” he said, as though her words were a promise. “I am ready.”

Her lips twitched, and he suspected she was using her neutral expression to suppress a smile. “It’s not a complex process for me. I can draw you out of fate with a thought.”

“Fate. So then, if you’re not offended by this one’s humble questions…can you see the future?”

“Fate is not the future. What is destined to occur does not always occur.”

He bowed before her three times. “That is enough for me, thank you. Would you tell me my destiny?”

This time she did laugh, and he was almost surprised that it sounded so human. “I’m pleased to have descended personally, Wei Shi Lindon.” A thrill rolled through him. The celestial messenger knew his name. “I can show you some limited details of your fate, if you are willing to see them.”

“This one would be honored.” He tried to hide the eagerness in his voice. Even the most trivial knowledge of the future could be used to great advantage.

The tips of two white-plated fingers met his forehead, like cool eggshells. “Then see.”

The frozen world was wiped out, replaced with another. He was still standing on the stone of the arena stage, but the clouds Li Markuth summoned had never appeared, and the sun beat down out of a clear sky. Wei Jin Amon faced him, and though he resisted longer than anyone expected, he still lost.

That night, he nursed his wounds alone when the First Elder barged in without knocking. The old man slapped a book down on his table: Path of the White Fox.

Lindon’s eyes shone at this vision. He had succeeded after all. He expected the immortal to return him to reality, but the future flowed on, coming in faster and faster images.

He watched a version of himself, years older, receive a copper badge with tears in his eyes. The First Elder smiled in pride.

His sister led Wei clansmen to fight around a carriage, while armored members of the Kazan fought. She wreathed one man’s face with foxfire, then drove her sword through a second man’s gut and left it there. Kelsa wrenched the door to the carriage open, revealing a finely wrought box. Her expression lifted.

More years passed, and Kelsa was personally awarded a jade badge by Patriarch Sairus himself. She didn’t even look thirty. Lindon and his family cheered for her from the crowd, though his father looked as though he’d bitten something sour.

An unknown time later, Jaran slipped out of his house in the middle of the night while his wife slept. He hobbled on a cane, but he took an overcoat and a sword with him.

Lindon’s stomach dropped.

The three remaining members of the Shi family, wearing white funeral robes, clustered around an iron tablet with Wei Shi Jaran’s name on it. Seisha lit the candle herself.

More years silently slid by, and Lindon saw himself sitting on the edge of a roof under the stars, side-by-side with a girl he’d never met. She had a wide, open smile. He passed her a bottle, and she drank.

Now they stood together in the Hall of Elders, both wearing red, with a white ribbon tying their clasped hands together. The First Elder said something and everyone laughed, but the vision-Lindon gazed only at his new wife.

The Lindon of the present felt his eyes burn and hurriedly wiped them away. He shouldn’t show tears to a heavenly immortal, but…Unsouled weren’t allowed to marry.

Time moved on in the blink of an eye, and he saw himself cycling in a meditative position next to his son. Applauding his daughter as she conjured foxfire for the first time. Pouring tea for his wife.

Fate, it seemed, was good to him. Was this why a messenger had descended from heaven? To show him the rewards for a young life spent suffering? If so, he welcomed it.

He saw himself grow older, his children grow tall.

Then Sacred Valley collapsed.

The image passed so quickly he almost didn’t catch it. A monstrous creature that towered into the clouds waded through the mountains like a man through waves, washing over the valley and burying it in earth. Everything was wiped out in an instant.

And Lindon returned to reality, standing before the white-armored woman. Her green hair drifted behind her, and the ghostly lines leading from her fingertips to her skull flickered with light like swallowed stars. She watched him with that same mask of an expression, though now he saw a tinge of pity in her eyes.

His cheeks were wet with tears, and he felt as though his chest had been hollowed out. “I…my future, I…”

“Not your future,” she said. “Fate is only a direction. That is the direction your life would have gone, like a river flowing downhill, had Li Markuth not intervened. That is how your story is fated to continue, and how it is destined to end.”

“And now, you’ve…undone what he did. Is that still what will happen to me?”

Her smile was sympathetic, and the pity in her eyes deepened. Her compassion scared him almost as much as the visions, because that meant she knew. “It is a good fate. You only die after a full, rich life.”

“When my home is destroyed!” He’d never considered Sacred Valley his home before. Sacred Valley was the entire world.

“Not every thread is cut. A few survive, and they will go on to join greater powers in the world.” She reached over for her lines of gray smoke. “This is why I take the memories, Wei Shi Lindon. Fate is not considerate.”

“How do I fix it?” Lindon asked.

Her fingers froze on the lines.

Taking that as encouragement, Lindon continued. “There has to be some way to fix it. If it’s a direction, then direction can be changed. There has to be some… sacred arts, or some weapon, or…” Lindon still felt the countless tons of cold earth, pressing down on his family. “If I were strong like you are, I could change things. This one begs you. Please.”

Purple eyes watched him, weighed him. Her hand withdrew from the smoky strings, and she paced a half-circle around him as though to consider him from a new angle.

The immortal glanced to her left shoulder. He could glean nothing from her face, which remained somehow pleasant and impassive both. “Suriel requesting clearance for unbound transportation within Iteration One-one-zero. Verbal response, please.”

A woman spun itself into existence on her shoulder, like a doll made of gray smoke. That didn’t surprise him much; Forgers of the White Fox created illusions more solid than this one every day. The ghost spoke with the all-surrounding neutral voice he’d heard earlier. [Acknowledged. Consulting Sector Control.]

Silence reigned as the ghost waited for a response, but Lindon was caught by another detail: the celestial messenger had called herself Suriel. He’d never heard the name before, but he filed it away like a scroll in the clan archives.

[Clearance granted.]

“I would like a tour,” Suriel said, with a glance at Lindon.

[For what purpose?]

“I’m looking for combatants.”

[Acknowledged.]

Suriel reached up to rest an armored hand on top of Lindon’s head. “Steel yourself,” she said. “Do not be afraid.”

She’d told him that already, but before he could ask what he was supposed to be afraid of, they vanished. An intense pattern of blue light washed over him, devouring every other sight. It was like being covered in a blanket woven with millions of threads, and each thread was a distinct shade of blue light. His ears rushed with overwhelming noise…but only for an instant.

Then the blanket fell away, and they stood in the middle of a royal court such as he had never imagined. Lanterns held glowing, golden jewels a hundred yards overhead, and the room stretched so far that it vanished in any direction. Lindon was next to Suriel, the both of them standing in the middle of a vast crowd of old men and women in intricate formal robes. Each of the elders wore a fortune’s worth of jade, gold, and exotic metals that Lindon couldn’t identify. Some had sacred beasts with them—a red serpent coiling around an arm here, a two-headed tiger curled up there. He could feel their wealth and authority hanging in the air; these were people that could have Lindon executed with a gesture.

He dropped to his knees even as the smoky ghost said, [The Ninecloud Court.]

Suriel flicked her fingers, and he found himself gently pulled to his feet though nothing touched him. “They cannot see us unless I allow them to.” She herself stood with hands clasped at her waist, gazing straight ahead as though none of the opulence could attract her interest for a second.

Lindon glanced around, prepared to fall back to his knees at any second. Indeed, none of the crowd so much as glanced at them.

This is the power of an immortal. With even a small piece of that power, he could do anything.

A hatch in the ceiling opened up, and a rainbow-glistening cloud descended. As it drifted down toward the floor, he saw that someone was riding on the cloud: a girl perhaps ten or eleven years old, wrapped entirely in glistening peacock feathers. Her hair was an impossible, fiery red, and she surveyed her elders as though looking down on her subjects.

[Luminous Queen Sha Miara,] the ghost said. [Path of Celestial Radiance.]

The girl reached out a hand and Forged a sword of blinding rainbow light. “Kneel,” she said, and the sea of people knelt. Lindon had to focus to keep standing. The blade radiated power and authority, such that it seemed to affect his soul directly.

Suriel nodded to the girl. “Sha Miara inherited her madra from a noble lineage stretching back to the birth of this world. In three days, she will use that sword to sink a fleet of cloudships, saving her capital city from attack by air. If you had her power, you could save Sacred Valley.”

Lindon stared at the redheaded girl and her rainbow sword. He’d never heard of this “Ninecloud Court,” and of course no one had left Sacred Valley for a hundred generations. It was a desolate landscape beyond the mountains, a nightmare from the lowest hells. All the books said so.

“Where is she?” Lindon asked. He might be able to recruit her, or beg her for help, if he couldn’t learn the secrets of her training.

Suriel gave him a sidelong glance around the curtain of her dark green hair. “If you walked the length of Sacred Valley end-to-end, you’d have to do it more than a hundred times—”

[One hundred and fourteen times,] the ghost said.

“—one hundred and fourteen times to reach the outer border of her country. The Ninecloud Court is in the Ninecloud Country, for which it was named, and that country is four hundred times—”

[Three hundred and ninety-four times,] the ghost said.

“Verbal response not required for calculation corrections. Three hundred and ninety-four times bigger than Sacred Valley. You would never get there. Here, your fate is an absolute certainty. If you tried one million times to go to the Ninecloud Court from where you are at this moment, you would die before you reached her one million times.”

He started to ask for advice when the blue flash came again, and then they were standing in midair over an endless ocean. When Lindon saw the slate-gray waves tossing under his feet, his breath left him. He hurled himself onto Suriel’s armored shoulders before he fell.

She stood with perfect equanimity, every hair in place, as an invisible force peeled him off her shoulders and placed him next to her. His feet were firmly planted on air. On air. He couldn’t trust it. His gut was certain that he would be dropped at any second.

“Do not be afraid,” she reminded him for a third time.

[The Trackless Sea,] the ghost announced.

And then they dropped.

Stomach lurched, and he plummeted into the ocean. He panicked as water closed over him, flailing his arms even as he squeezed his eyes shut, holding his breath. He’d learned to swim in the Dragon River, as any Wei child did, but it rarely ran deeper than his shoulders.

“Breathe,” Suriel commanded, and he realized he was still dry. He cracked his eyes open, but almost shut them again. Aside from a bubble of air surrounding him, the immortal, and her pet ghost, water stretched infinitely in every direction. Light glimmered above them, increasingly distant, but they plunged lower and lower. Into the darkness.

He finally caught his balance, forcing himself to breathe normally and not to cling to the white-armored woman as though to a raft. She seemed to be treating this as nothing out of the ordinary, so he took his queue from her. But he did stand very, very close. Not only was he trusting her to save him, she was the only other person in this world of black water.

As they fell, Lindon saw that they weren’t alone after all. Someone else dropped alongside them, a man sinking through the water like his bones were weighted with lead. The stranger was a mass of muscle, his eyes glowed golden, and he had his arms folded as though impatiently waiting to reach the ocean floor. As they fell into darkness together, the ghost spoke again. [Northstrider. Path of the Hungry Deep.]

The absolute black beneath them shifted, and Lindon slid closer to Suriel. A dragon’s head emerged from the dark, followed by a serpent’s body that coiled endlessly. It must have been miles long, and its jaws gaped open into a pink tunnel lined with teeth.

Northstrider unfolded his arms, revealing hands gloved in pitch-black scales. With one hand he seized a fang longer than he was tall, but the monster’s momentum carried him past Lindon. A wall of scales rushed past him, blocking out everything else.

“Northstrider consumes sacred beasts in the deepest places of the world,” Suriel said. “He takes their power with him to the surface. He could level Sacred Valley on his own…and you could save it, if you had skills and powers like his.”

She’d said that already, but she had withheld the most important part. “Honored immortal, how? I am Unsouled. Where could I possibly learn his skills?” He hoped she would answer him, but feared she would call it impossible.

She smiled at him as though she knew his thoughts, and another blue flash took them away.

Inside an ordinary inn hewn from rough logs, eight people in intricate golden armor laughed and clinked glasses together. A woman tossed a gold shield down, saying something with raised eyebrows. A man pulled his helmet off, revealing a red eye in the center of his forehead.

[Western Chi Ning City. The Eight-Man Empire. Path of the Eightfold Spear.]

“These eight call themselves an empire because they conquer wherever they roam,” Suriel said, striding through the room. She let her hand drift behind her, as though she meant to run white-plated fingers over the local men and women, but she never touched a thing. “So far, they have not been defeated. They could easily save Sacred Valley, as could you, if you earned a place with them. Their armor is a cross between a Remnant and a construct, and when one of them dies, they pass it on to a successor.”

“Are they all Gold?” Lindon asked. He hadn’t seen anyone outside the valley wearing badges, but he supposed the armor might serve a similar purpose.

Suriel stopped with her palm hovering over one member of the Eight-Man Empire, a woman with yellow hair who lay facedown on a table, snoring. “Larian was raised in a noble household. Her father wouldn’t let her play with the other children until she reached the level you know as Gold. When she was six years old, she did. Today, an army of ten thousand Gold-ranked sacred artists couldn’t scratch her armor.”

Larian grunted in her sleep.

The blue blanket fell again, but this time it lingered. He and Suriel drifted in a blinding sapphire void. She stood in the same position as in the inn—arm outstretched as though to deliver a blessing, her visage all the more inhuman for her green hair and seamless white armor. Without turning around, she spoke. “You have twenty, maybe thirty years before disaster strikes.”

[An average of twenty-eight years, seven months, four days,] the ghost put in.

“Verbal response not required.” She turned to face him, arm still raised. “I have showed you some of the most powerful sacred artists in the world, on three very different Paths. What do they have in common?”

“They’re incredibly strong,” he said. He hadn’t seen much from the girl in the court or the eight in the tavern, but the man fighting a sea dragon bare-handed had definitely caught his attention.

Suriel’s expression told him nothing, but she flipped her hand palm-up. “They have nothing in common, save their commitment. They each have different motivations, different goals, different levels of talent, but all of them pursue the sacred arts with absolute dedication.”

Lindon met her gaze with resolve, drawing himself up to his full height. He was taller than she was, he realized, though it made him feel somehow wrong. “I am dedicated.”

“Are you?” Her purple eyes were cold and unflinching, her lips still as a carving. “Each of those sacred artists risked their lives, gave up their pride, endured beatings and public humiliation. They sacrificed comfort for lives of brutality and pain. And none of them built their power from nothing in a mere thirty years.”

“I will do it.”

“Not even I had reached their level in thirty years.”

Now he wasn’t so confident.

“Your first step, if you wish to take it, begins today. You have to abandon your family and leave Sacred Valley as quickly as possible. There is nothing here for you.”

“I can do that,” he said without hesitation. He’d been prepared for that requirement ever since she’d shown him the girl in the Ninecloud Court. It would hurt, but his family would actually encourage him if they knew he was journeying to practice the sacred arts.

“No, you can’t. Not without help.” The blue light vanished, leaving them floating thousands of feet in the air. Four mountains surrounded them: one crowned in light, one robed in purple trees, one made of red stone, and one wreathed in a rushing river.

This was his home, but he had never seen Sacred Valley from this perspective before. It looked so…small.

Suriel surveyed the land like a judge. “By the standards of the outside world, anyone below Gold is considered powerless. Unworthy of being called a sacred artist at all. Your only chance, and it’s a distant chance, is to leave this place where Jade is the greatest height.”

“If I do leave, then can I…” He was afraid to ask the question, afraid the answer would be no. “…can I become a Gold?”

“You’ll have to,” she said, eyes still on the landscape. “That is where you must start.”

Abandoning his home was a sad thought, and he couldn’t deny a rush of fear at the idea. But more than that, his soul lifted. She might as well have told him he could become a celestial immortal and live in the heavens. He was capable of reaching not just Jade, but a level beyond Gold. It was such a bright, tender dream that he almost didn’t dare to touch it.

He wouldn’t even have dared to dream such a bold dream…but Suriel’s words were those of fate itself.

Lindon couldn’t drop to his knees in the air, but he bowed at the waist. “Honored immortal, this one begs one more answer from you. How should I leave the valley?”

Suriel waved a hand, and four green lights shone like beacons in Lindon’s vision. One on each of the holy peaks, burning like emerald bonfires. “There is an exit on each of the peaks, guarded by one of the Schools.” She hesitated a moment as though searching for a specific memory. “But leaving will be very difficult. If there is a way…”

She glanced at the ghost on her shoulder, which responded almost instantly. [Nine-point-eight kilometers northwest.] A smaller point of green light appeared on the slopes of Mount Samara.

The invisible bubble containing them rushed forward, and Lindon’s body shuddered with the instinct to protect itself, but Suriel spoke as though reciting a poem. “There are a million Paths in this world, Lindon, but any sage will tell you they can all be reduced to one. Improve yourself.”

Lindon was still somewhat worried about offending this visitor from another world, but he dared to say, “That doesn’t sound like enough.”

The mountain rushed closer as they descended into its shadow. “It’s been my path for longer than you would believe. Do you think anyone dares to attack my homeland?”

Near the peak of the mountain, where patches of snow still lingered despite the summer heat, and where the enormous halo of light seemed close enough to touch, there was a deep chasm. Without hesitation, Suriel directed them down into the darkness.

At the bottom of the chasm, there stood a girl with the lean, ragged look of a wandering warrior. She was perhaps his age, with the look of Sacred Valley about her: the pale skin, black hair, and dark eyes that characterized virtually every clan.

But the sacred artist’s robes she wore were black, which fit no clan or school he knew, and she carried a sword on her hip…but no badge. Her hair was cut absolutely straight, as though sliced with a razor, and she wore a coil of thick, bright red rope wrapped around her waist like a belt. She had obviously been treated roughly: her robes were torn and stained, her hair frayed and matted, every inch of her skin covered in layer after layer of razor-thin scars. Most of those scars had to be years old, but some were obviously pink and fresh. She stared death down the chasm, sword gripped tightly in both hands.

At first, Lindon thought she was glaring at him. But a glance behind him told him the truth.

She was cornered by her enemies.

The Heaven’s Glory School of Mount Samara wore white and gold, and each of these young men and women had badges of iron around their necks. There were eight of them—two with spears, two with swords, two who carried weighted nets, and two whose hands glowed with light.

[Mount Samara,] the ghost announced. [Yerin, Disciple of the Sword Sage. Path of the Endless Sword.]

Suriel’s boots crunched in the snow as she walked forward, though she left no footprints. “She might not have the skill to save Sacred Valley, but she can help you leave it. With her guidance, you may both leave this valley alive. She, too, has a fate that needs changing.”

The girl stepped forward to fight.

Blue flashed, and an instant later they were standing amid the arena of the Seven-Year Festival, but Lindon fixed the image of the black-clad girl in his mind. Yerin, Disciple of the Sword Sage. She was his path forward. The Heaven’s Glory School would never allow him access to the mountain, which only meant that he had to find another way in.

Suriel lifted into the air again, surveying the frozen sacred artists beneath her with that same pleasant mask of an expression. She spoke to Lindon without looking at him. “If I let you keep these memories, it will change your fate. Your life will be harder, and most likely shorter. You have one last chance. Would you forget, or remember?”

He should spend longer considering such an important decision, but he’d already made up his mind. “I would never choose to forget you, honored immortal,” Lindon said with a bow. “You restored my life.”

She smiled at his words, though she still examined the still tableau beneath her. White-armored fingers strummed the smoky cords on her right hand. “Then watch closely. This is a rare sight.”

Blue flashed, covering everything, and time ran backwards.

The Jade elders who rushed up on the stage now reversed themselves, returning to their seats. The sky overhead cleared up. The pillars crumbled upward, rebuilding themselves from rubble until the illusions of Elder Whisper danced on them once again. Only those she had already repaired were excepted: the Patriarch, his body rebuilt, stood on the side until she pointed to him. As though carried by invisible strings, he drifted up and onto the stage, assuming a pose with his hands in the air. She’d already cleaned up the severed heads, for which Lindon was grateful. If she had returned him to life, surely she had resurrected his mother as well.

Soon, the world was as he’d left it. Before reality had gone mad, and ancient Golds descended from the sky followed by celestial messengers. She had undone everything. Given them a fresh start.

He bowed again, with no other way to express his gratitude. If he lived for a thousand years, he would never be able to repay such a debt. “This one thanks you a hundred times for the guidance, honored immortal. Will this one ever have the chance to return some small measure of your kindness?”

Around him, the day still crawled in reverse as Suriel’s hands danced in accordance with some sacred art. She still spoke to him while regarding her handiwork. “I will give you a token so that I may find you easily, wherever and whoever you are. When the time comes, I will return for you. If you’re lucky, you might be able to ascend to a higher world.”

“Do you mean the heavens?” Lindon asked. “With you?”

Suriel turned to face him, green hair falling to frame her pale face, and finally the world was still again. This time, everything was as it had been only a handful of hours before: the Patriarch of the Wei clan stood in the arena, disapproval on his face. The crowd shouted in the stands. Wei Jin Amon crouched with his spear, ready to do battle. Even the sun had reversed its course, shining golden in the late afternoon. Among it all, the celestial messenger stood out, her purple eyes growing brighter.

“My organization has a name for this world, Wei Shi Lindon. We call it ‘Cradle.’ It’s where we keep the infants.”

She reached out and dropped something into his hand: a glass bead, slightly bigger than his thumbnail, with one blue candle-flame trapped inside. The flame burned evenly as he turned it in his hands.

“This is my token. You cannot use it to contact me, but I can sense it across worlds and beyond time.”

“Apologies, honored immortal, but...what if it breaks?” It was glass, after all.

She favored him with a little laugh. “It can’t break, and it cannot be lost, as it is tied to you with strings of fate. Move forward, stay alive, and I will come retrieve you when you’ve grown.” Behind her, a gateway opened on a layered field of solid blue, as though it opened underneath the surface of a shining sea. “Go with the Way, Lindon.”

In a flash, she vanished.

Sound returned in a rush, and even the crowd’s hushed whispers—they had softened themselves out of respect for the Patriarch—sounded like thunder in his ears.

Wei Jin Sairus lowered his arms, which had been raised to settle the audience. “Young Lindon, there is no dishonor if you remove yourself from the stage. Rather, we would respect your wisdom in deferring to your betters.”

Only recently, Lindon had wondered if he was trapped in a dream.

Now the same sensation returned in full force, as everything his senses told him suggested he had never left. His mother paced the arena, her eyes locked on him. His father glowered from the stands, angered that the Patriarch had put his son in such a position. Kelsa sat next to him, anger plain in the way she perched on the edge of her seat.

Between his fingers, he rolled a warm marble. He looked down to see a ball of glass surrounding a single blue candle-flame.

If this was a dream, it was one sent by the heavens.

He turned from the Patriarch and bowed to the representatives of the four Schools.