- “The Shar’karak” Dictates of the Emperor of Thorns
I sit on the edge of my ship, feet dangling over the side. All kinds of ways to control this floating platform are available to me, including some kind of intelligent barrier that can block out the wind but nothing else. My legs dangling over the lip of the flying ship feel like they are submerged in a running stream, the whipping air pulling at them. A few weeks ago, sitting on the edge of a flying disc sailing through the sky, almost a mile of air between me and the ground, I might have felt afraid. Now, the air belongs to me as much as the land does, with or without my ship.
Jor’Mari sighs as he takes a seat next to me, tucking one leg under the other and dangling that one over the edge as well. “Was that the home coming you were looking for?”
“No.” Down, far below us, ripening fields cut little checkers in the land. “It’s about what I expected though.”
“How’s that?”
I shake my head. “I don’t know. Ever since Arabella offered me a kingdom’s ransom in essentia out of the blue, I’ve been waiting for the cow to kick. I keep wondering when people will realize that I don’t belong here.”
Jor’Mari laughs. “If you keep using folksy idioms, no one will have the time to make that mistake. Keep your mouth shut and that crown on your head shiny, and you blend right in.”
I turn to him, heat rising. “I am trying to be serious.”
“I don’t know why.” He ignores my scowl, looking down at the countryside stretching out beneath us. “Charlene, how many monsters have you killed?”
Galea is there, holding open a window with the answer.
“Four hundred and sixty-five,” I say. I admit that I take a bit of satisfaction in watching his mouth fall open at the number.
He laughs again, smiling and shaking his head. “I don’t doubt that you remember every single one.” He isn’t wrong; I do. Exeter help me, but my memory has sharpened so much over the last half year that I don’t find any difficulty in remembering a fight. “I hope you understand how incredible that number is.”
“Magicians kill monsters,” I say. “That is what we do.”
“I don’t know of anyone that kills them like you,” he says. “I think you belong in our little team as much as anyone, maybe more so. Dovik has the experience, the expertise in the magician’s craft, valuable tutoring that we cannot hope to match, an innate drive to lead–”
“Don’t forget that he is attractive and charismatic, if it’s just us girls talking.”
Jor’Mari snorts. “Just between us girls then. He is a leader and all, but you are the one with the drive, I think. Something pushes you to get stronger. Sure, there are those that have the treasures around when they first take essentia to pass into the second rank, there are those so genius in their understanding of the soul they do it unaided in an afternoon, but I have never heard of anyone so whole-heartedly committed to doing with dirty hands that they accomplish it in half a year.”
“You make me sound insane–and poor.”
“I believe you are. The insane part anyway.” He taps the surface of my golden flying ship. “I think you have left the poverty far behind.”
“I might have no more gold than this ship to my name anymore.”
Jor’Mari rolls his eyes. “One of your abilities is to create a vault. There is no point in doing so unless you have a fortune to guard or a hoard.”
I squint at him. “Dovik said something to you.”
“He feels really bad about it,” Jor’Mari says. “The man can’t hold a secret well. He feels so much pride guarding a lady’s secret that he can’t help but brag about it in subtle hints. The problem is, he isn’t quite so subtle as he thinks.”
“No,” I say, looking over my shoulder to where Dovik and Jess share some tea while they discuss the upcoming fight. She looks down at the papers spread out on the table between them, but he has difficulty keeping his eyes down and on the papers alone. “He really isn’t.”
“Everyone needs flaws,” Jor’Mari agrees. “Is one of yours that you carry the essentia of one of the greediest and conniving beasts on the surface of the planet?”
“Is that how you see dragons?”
He shrugs. “The stories you are told and the ones I was taught as a child are very different about the creatures. They are sources of chaos in the elven canon. The elves have a tendency to find threat in anything that can rival their lifespans.”
“It seems to me the elves find threat in everyone,” I say.
“I told you that you can’t trust them,” he says. “Is it true then, you have the Red Dragon Essentia?”
“No,” I say, shrugging. “Arabella told me that it was the best policy to keep my essentia from everyone, but lately I have been wondering if that is good advice. How are we supposed to be a proper team if we don’t understand what each other can do?”
“A fair point,” Jor’Mari says. “I have to admit that I don’t have the luxury.” An emotion that I don’t catch flashes over his face when I quirk and eyebrow at his remark. “Of course, you wouldn’t know. The Mari clan all bear the same essentia, it is a well-known thing. Most, when they find the proper essentia bring them directly to my family as we buy them up. It is a part of the lineage. To my eternal shame, adding more shame to what I carry, while my essentia were correct, my abilities came out…wrong. The Mari clan are great summoners and controllers of demons; it doesn’t bring much honor to become one.”
“The entire family controls demons?”
He nods. “Except me. I have no problem revealing my abilities to you, it makes sense to know everything our teammates can do. My essentia are the darkness, power, and blood, and my conflux is the Demon Conflux.”
I gape at him, disbelieving that he gave all of that to me so easily. “Well, I would be a bitch not to tell you mine.” He winces at that. Maybe there is a bit of the prissy nobleman still inside there somewhere. Strangely, I find myself wanting to tell him as soon as I set my mind to it. “My essentia are gold, magic, and dragon, giving me the Emperor Conflux.”
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His eyes bulge. “You have the Dragon Essentia?”
“What? You already knew that.”
“No.” He shakes his head. “I thought you had one of the dragon confluxes. It would make sense given all the fire you throw around. There are paths to the different dragon confluxes, they are rare, but people have them. The Dragon Essentia though, I don’t think that I have ever heard of anyone with that.” He scratches his chin. “Arabella had that? How rich is that woman?”
“Very, apparently.” I pat his thigh. “For what it’s worth, I am willing to bet that you could wipe the floor with any of the Mari magicians in our rank.”
He smiles. “A nice thought, but I told you that my family are expert at controlling demons. I would be the weakest among them. Maybe that too was why my father sent me away.” He shrugs. “I’ll get to ask him soon enough.”
“So,” I say, waving to him. “Dovik is the perfect, handsome, and well-educated princeling. What does Jor of the clan Mari bring to the team?”
“Me.” He puts his hand to his chest. “I will have you know that I am the handsome one, and the strongest, and the best drinker.”
I scoff. “You cannot outdrink me. If there is one thing that I have become adept at over the last few months, it is holding my liquor.”
“You just think that because I haven’t tried to outdrink you. If I gave it my concentrated effort, I would last longer by far.”
It is impossible not to roll my eyes at that but equally as impossible not to smile along with him. “Then me and Jess are the two lovely ladies to hang on with you young adventurers.”
“Lovely, of course, but you are more than that.” He arcs a thumb over his shoulder. “Jess can cook and is better with a blade than me and Dovik put together. She keeps things friendly and bulwarks us against the brooding that you or I might be prone to. And I don’t know if you have noticed this, but she doesn’t like to wear too much clothing.”
I punch him in the arm. He’s not wrong. I made certain before we left Grim that I purchased the woman a good wardrobe that wouldn’t make people stare as we walked down the street. Two racks worth of clothing cut specifically for her hang in my vault even now. But now, with a fight just ahead of us, she is back to her straps and clothing binding that leave very little to the imagination. I have caught Dovik looking more than once when he is able to pull his attention down from staring at her bright eyes.
“And you,” Jor’Mari goes on. “You bring the incredibly destructive fire magic and the folksy metaphors.”
Now it is my turn to snort. “I guess I can do that much.”
“Don’t underestimate yourself, those metaphors are powerful.”
I shake my head. The ship passes over a forest now, a copse of old and twisted trees that spread out toward the horizon, a twisted canopy of dark leaves obscuring everything from the air.
“Thanks,” I say.
“For what?”
“For being…someone that will actually talk to me.”
“Everyone needs someone to talk to.”
We lapse into silence for a moment, watching the forest pass us by. Galea has the heading, and the hints of color int he sea of green off to the west confirm our direction. “How do you feel about this job.”
“We can handle an orange,” he says, waving his hand.
One of the first thing that any adventurer learns is the coloring system that the league employs. Normally, teams are sorted into different ranks of power based on their members: iron, bronze, silver, gold, platinum, emerald, and diamond–iron obviously being the weakest. The vast majority of adventuring teams are either iron or bronze, as those are the ranks usually relegated to teams of rank one or two adventurers. Given that most never progress past the second rank, silver is the furthest ambition for most, gold even being rare for a rank two magician.
The league then uses these team rankings to determine difficulty of any given task; the easiest missions are green, the most difficult red, and the impossible black. This mission for the baron is rated as being orange for a silver team like ours, meaning that it will be incredibly dangerous.
More than just that, since Dovik didn’t have any of us undergo a proper evaluation when he bullied his way into having a silver team, I worry that we aren’t quite so strong as our silver badges say we are. Halford’s team was a bronze rank, and even he never took on an orange request for the league, yellow at the most dangerous.
“That isn’t what I was talking about,” I say. “You know what I mean.”
“Killing a magical beast,” he says, sighing. “I know.” He curls his fingers into a fist, releasing and clenching. “I’ll admit it, I don’t like the idea of it. Magical beasts aren’t monsters, they are animals, beautiful creatures that use magic to kill monsters just like us.”
“They are animals,” I agree, despite never having seen a magical beast before. I only know them from fairy stories, powerful creatures that employ magic like people. “When an animal goes mad and begins to hurt people, it is put down. Based on what the count said about that village, this Ghostfire sounds like it is responsible.”
“Maybe,” he agrees. “I just hate the idea of killing something like that.”
“I can do it for you then, if you need.” I pat his hand, the ship now incredibly close to the trees pointed out as our direction by the Baron's man. The copse in the forest is made of trees easily twice the height of the others, their branches decorated with leaves of all colors, the long limbs sticking into the air like colorful streamers. I stand on the edge of the ship, hearing Dovik walk up behind me as Jor’Mari climbs to his feet next to me.
“That looks like the place,” Dovik says, nodding to the trees.
“If what the baron told us was true, we will find–” I yelp as a hand roughly grabs my collar, throwing me to the ground.
“Behind!” Galea yells in my head in the same instant.
My back strikes the platform, driving the air from me, and I look up to see Jess standing over me, grabbing her weapon from her hip after hurling me to the ground. Fear and the stirrings of betrayal flash through me for a moment before I notice that her eyes are turned upward toward the sky. I haven’t even bounces off the hard metal of the platform by the time that a ball of swirling white magic collides with the edge of the platform, right where I had been standing a moment before.
The ship wobbles from the impact, my back leaves the ground again, and then I am falling out into open air. I spin, legs flipping over my head as I try to pull in a breath. The panic only lasts an instant before a glory of red wings spread out from my back, arresting my fall immediately. I feel the sky affix thrumming through the scales of my wings, seeming almost to vibrate with the very air, allowing me to hover in place without even needing to beat my great wingspan that has grown even wider at the infusion of magic. I look up, watching my ship sail toward the copse, running in a straight line, and then I see it. In the air above the ship is a pale wolf, its fur as white as winter snow, its body huge, greater than a horse in size.
Collimase of the Sky
That isn’t what we are after.
The great beast, Collimase, dodges aside as a spike of bone spirals up from the surface of the ship. The spike cuts through the air like a thrown spear, snatching fur from the wolf as it narrowly dodges the attack. On of my staves appears in my hand and I start channeling power into its head, looking to blow the beast out of the sky before it can get too distant.
“Beneath!” Galea screeches a warning.
I don’t think as I move, spinning in the air to the side like a dancer that has been at it her entire life. With these wings infused with the sky affix, I feel more at home here in the air than I ever could on the ground. Before I can even finish my evasion, a ball of concentrated fire sails up from below, narrowly missing me. A long howl tells out the culprit.
On the ground far below, another beast stands on a high rock that protrudes from the forest floor, red magic spiraling up from it as an arrow of fire condenses in front of its face. A cacophonous boom splits the air as the arrow is released. A whine shrieks on the wind as it sails upward, but I am not its target, the ship is. My staff is already in motion, releasing the stored mana that I have built over the last few seconds.
The two powers meet in the air just twenty feet beneath the bottom of the ship. An eruption that causes the ship to lurch and almost pitch over shakes the air, stabbing at my ears. I am already in motion, calling my second staff to my hand, pouring as much magic into them as I can as I scream down from the heavens.
Satrix of the Flaming Sphere
“You are mine!”
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