"The world of Adamath is home to four continents, four great landmasses of diverse cultures and standings, of wonders and terror alike. None, however, boasts of brutality quite like the Bloodfire continent, home to the cult of the Heralds. Ruthless, powerful, terrible, and yet without them holding back the darkness that seeps endlessly from the wastelands, perhaps the beauty that is the Bloodfire continent would have long since ceased to exist." — Bashu, Regent of the Heralds

  Tunde woke with a splitting headache.

  He swallowed slowly, his parched throat burning with every movement, gritty with the taste of dirt and dried blood.

  He blinked, eyelids scraping against the grit lodged there, his entire body feeling as though it had been dragged across hard ground for miles, which, he recalled dimly, it had.

  Struggling to sit upright, he became aware of the jangling of chains before he felt their weight, a new pair of manacles binding his wrists together, heavier than the last.

  He stared at them for a moment, and then the memories came, slow and reluctant, like something surfacing from deep water.

  He let them come. Then he pressed his back against the cold black stone wall behind him and breathed.

  The cell was dark. The ground was scattered with brittle bones and old straw, the kind that had been there so long it had forgotten it was ever anything else. Visibility extended perhaps a few meters in any direction before the dark swallowed everything whole.

  "He wakes," said a voice from somewhere deeper in that darkness.

  It was a grave voice, heavy as old stone.

  Tunde turned toward it, squinting, and the motion sent a spike of pain driving through his chest and behind both eyes simultaneously, as though something inside him was still settling, still deciding whether to stay or go.

  He breathed through it, slow and deliberate, waiting until he could speak.

  "Hello?" he called, his voice coming out rougher than he intended.

  The grave voice did not answer. Another did.

  "Hello."

  It came from his right, soft and tired in equal measure, carrying the particular exhaustion of someone who had been awake far too long in a place far too dark.

  Before Tunde could respond to it, footsteps echoed through the corridor beyond the bars, accompanied by the approach of a dim, wavering light.

  "Pretend to sleep," the female voice urged, low and urgent.

  He did not know why he obeyed.

  Perhaps there was something in her voice that felt like a hand steadying him, something that reminded him, faintly, of warmth.

  Perhaps he simply had nothing left to lose and no reason to resist a small kindness. He let his body fall back against the ground, shut his eyes, and forced himself to breathe in short, quiet intervals as the footsteps slowed and came to a stop somewhere in front of him.

  The silence that followed stretched far longer than it had any right to. He felt the presence of whoever stood there like a pressure against the back of his eyelids, and he did not move, did not twitch, did not allow the hammering of his own heart to betray him.

  Then a grunt, low and disinterested, and the light steadied, and the footsteps began to recede. He kept his eyes shut regardless, long after the sound faded to nothing, not trusting the quiet.

  "They're gone," the female voice said softly.

  He opened his eyes.

  It took a moment for his sight to adjust to the light properly, a piece of wood burning with flames that danced restlessly around it without consuming it, the fire eating nothing and lasting regardless, casting a deep amber glow across the space.

  What it illuminated resolved itself slowly into the shape of his surroundings. Brown iron bars, or what he took to be iron, separated the cells from one another in a rough grid. His own hands were bound together.

  In the cell beside him, the woman who had spoken had her legs bound instead, thick chains of the same brown metal driven into the ground itself by iron pegs, holding her in place despite the lean lines of her frame.

  She was light brown-skinned, with golden hair that hung in messy, tattered curtains around a face marked by dark circles beneath eyes the color of polished silver.

  Metallic, and sharp, and tired in a way that went deeper than sleep. It took him longer than it should have to notice what was missing.

  One arm. A clean stump at the shoulder, the joint long healed over. He found his gaze pulling toward it and dragged it away.

  "You left," she said.

  He blinked at her, confused.

  "Your left," she said again, slower this time, as though testing how much he understood. "Water."

  He turned. A wooden pail sat to his left, close enough to reach.

  He crawled to it without hesitating, the pounding in his skull doing nothing to slow him, and dunked his head in without ceremony.

  The water had a bitter tang to it, something mineral and faintly sour, and he did not care at all. He drank until the rawness in his throat began to ease, until his body stopped screaming for it, and then he lifted his head and breathed.

  When he looked up, he saw the figure in the cell on his other side.

  He was not sure, at first, what he was looking at. The figure was chained with both arms fastened to the wall behind him, sitting with the stillness of something that had learned long ago how to conserve itself.

  His skin was a sickly green, laced through with black veins that spread across his frame like cracks across old stone.

  He was broad across the shoulders, dense with muscle beneath that unsettling complexion, and the overall impression he gave was of something that had survived things it probably should not have.

  As if aware of the scrutiny, the figure raised his head.

  Tunde nearly fell backward.

  The eyes that met his were without warmth, a flat, assessing gaze that took him in from top to bottom and rendered its verdict in silence. Then the figure dropped his head again, apparently satisfied or simply uninterested.

  The woman in the other cell made a sound that might have been a laugh under better circumstances.

  "Ignore him," she said. "He's the grumpy type."

  Tunde put a little more distance between himself and the green-skinned figure before turning back to her.

  "Hello," he said again, feeling immediately that it was insufficient.

  The grave voice from the other cell gave a short, humorless sound.

  "Slow as well."

  The woman rolled her eyes with the practiced ease of someone who had been doing it for a while.

  "I am Elyria. Who are you?"

  Tunde hesitated for just a moment.

  "Tunde. My name is Tunde."

  She gave a weak smile, the kind that acknowledged the pleasantry without having the energy to fully commit to it.

  "Well, Tunde, I wish the circumstances were better ones. They're not, seeing as we'll most likely be squeezed of our Ethra and eaten before long."

  He frowned.

  "Ethra?"

  Elyria paused. The look she gave him was one of genuine uncertainty, as though she had just reached for something she expected to be there and found empty space instead.

  "Where are you from?" she asked.

  He leaned back against the wall.

  "Far away. Across the seas."

  "That's," she began, then stopped.

  "That's near impossible. What direction?"

  He shrugged.

  "Simple slave. Know nothing."

  She went quiet after that. The silence sat between them for a moment, and then Tunde spoke again.

  "What is Ethra?"

  He heard her shift.

  "The lifeforce of the world we live in. Basic knowledge."

  "Lifeforce," he repeated.

  "It's what gives everyone affinities," the green-skinned man said from his wall, his voice carrying the flat tone of someone who had decided that explaining things was preferable to listening to ignorance continue.

  "Oh," Elyria said, with mild surprise.

  "You're talking."

  "His ignorance grates on my nerves," the man replied.

  Tunde glanced between the two of them, reading the particular rhythm of their exchanges, the kind of friction that develops between people who have been trapped together long enough to be both irritated by and reliant on each other.

  He turned back to what mattered.

  "Affinities?" he asked.

  "By the blessed regents," the man muttered, something sharp and exasperated bleeding through the restraint in his voice.

  "Do you know nothing?"

  If you discover this tale on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen. Please report the violation.

  "Where I come from," Tunde said evenly,

  "Only the great elder was permitted to know things. We simply obeyed."

  Elder Yomi. Dead. Slain at the hands of one of their captors while trying to bargain for their lives with nothing but dignity and words. Tunde pushed the memory down and kept his face still.

  Elyria studied him for a moment.

  "So you know nothing? Nothing at all?"

  Tunde glanced down at the new manacles, beneath which the old one still sat on his right wrist, its red and black lines lying dormant. He had no name for it and no explanation for what it had done, so he shook his head and said nothing of it.

  "Might as well do one good deed before dying," Elyria said, with a lightness that did not quite reach her silver eyes.

  "Lucky you," the man on the other side said, and sighed.

  Tunde was not sure what that meant. He waited.

  Elyria settled herself as best she could against the limits of her chains and began.

  "Ethra, as our cheerful neighbor over there mentioned, is the lifeforce of everything on this planet." She paused to make sure he was following.

  "It exists in everything. Living and dead, and before you ask about the dead part, the man chained to that wall is a better example than I could provide with words. It exists in the air, in the land, in the seas, in stone, in metal, in things that have never breathed and never will. Everything."

  Tunde glanced at the black stone wall beside him. It stared back, impassive.

  "You can't sense it yet," Elyria said.

  "You don't have an Ethra affinity to work with."

  "Ethra affinity?" he asked.

  "Everyone has one," she said.

  "Think of it as an inherent connection, something that grows naturally from who you are and what you do. A person who works with bricks their entire life might develop an Ethra affinity for the material itself, making the work easier, more instinctive. Eventually, they might learn to shape with pure Ethra rather than their hands at all. Or their affinity might drift toward clay, or mortar, or the earth beneath the brick. The possibilities are broad."

  Tunde thought about that.

  "So I might have one?"

  She shrugged with her one shoulder.

  "You said you were a slave. What did you do?"

  "We dug the earth," he said.

  "Found hidden things. Things others couldn't locate on their own. Our lords would release us onto a piece of land, and we would search it for whatever lay beneath."

  Some among them had been luckier than others, returning with exotic crystals or objects he had never been shown the names of, things that earned quiet nods from the overseers and nothing else. Elyria nodded slowly.

  "Probably a seeking affinity," she said.

  "Or earth. Maybe both, though that's rarer." She paused.

  "It does make one wonder why your masters never bothered to train you properly. You'd have been far more efficient."

  "Probably because they'd have found a way out," the man said, with something almost like dark amusement.

  Tunde glanced at him.

  "What's his Ethra?" he asked Elyria.

  "Being unkillable and deeply unpleasant, I imagine," she replied.

  The man did not dignify that with a response.

  Elyria pulled his attention back.

  "How did you find these hidden things? What did it feel like?"

  Tunde thought about it honestly for the first time.

  "We were just released on the land," he said.

  "And we found things. I don't know how to explain it better than that. It was like knowing where to look before I looked."

  Elyria blinked. Then she glanced toward the other cell.

  "I'm guessing your Ethra heart is still at the fundamental stage," she said, returning her silver eyes to him.

  "Ethra heart?" he asked.

  She sighed softly. Before she could speak, the man across from them did instead, as though the question had finally pushed him to the edge of his patience.

  "Your Ethra heart is where Ethra resides within you," he said.

  "It serves as both the source and the seat of your power, the place from which you draw Ethra when you use your affinity. It is also, in the most literal sense, your heart. Not a metaphor. The same organ keeping you alive. Understood?"

  Tunde nodded.

  "Good. For mortals without exceptional circumstances, the ceiling of advancement is the High Lord rank. Ten ranks in total. The upper four are rare. The upper two are nearly mythological. The lower two represent the kind of power that shapes kingdoms."

  "Won't bother about any of that for now," Elyria said, more gently.

  "Not like we'll be seeing sunlight again to worry over it."

  Tunde absorbed all of this slowly. He had hoped for death. Had prayed for it, in fact, at the bottom of that pit among the decaying bodies.

  He would have gotten it, cleanly and finally, had something within the darkness not intervened. Whatever had been placed inside him by that skeletal figure had overridden his prayer without asking permission. If he was going to die here, in this cell, stripped of everything, at least he would not die ignorant.

  He turned to Elyria.

  "Can I become one? An initiate?"

  She tilted her head.

  "That depends. Every Ethra user unlocks their heart differently, at least to a degree. I can't guarantee my method will work for you. His certainly wouldn't."

  "Probably not," the man agreed.

  Tunde felt the small flicker of hope sink a little. He looked down at the manacles and said quietly,

  "Thank you. For the knowledge."

  Elyria looked faintly surprised.

  "For what exactly?"

  "For giving it freely," he said.

  "Where I come from, knowledge was not given. It was rationed, and only to those who did not need it for anything dangerous." He paused.

  "There were a hundred of us who were brought across the sea. Rebels, they called us, those of us who had decided we wanted something better for our people than the life we had been handed. Our settlement was wiped out as punishment, and we, the survivors, were chained and loaded onto ships."

  Neither of them spoke. He continued.

  "Some died at sea. Creatures that came up from the water without warning and took them, swallowed them whole before disappearing back beneath the surface. We never knew what they were." He kept his voice level.

  "We landed on this dry land with nothing but the clothes on our backs and were forced to march, chained together, toward some destination we could not see and were not told about. One by one, they fell, and the chains would unclasp from the dead ones as though they had been designed to, leaving the rest of us to keep walking. In the end, it was only me and one other. I fell into the pit. I don't know what became of him."

  Silence settled over the cells. Elyria's face had gone still with something that sat between grief and anger.

  He did not look at the man in the other cell, not wanting to see what expression, or lack of one, was there.

  He heard movement.

  "Tunde," the man said.

  He looked reluctantly.

  The dark, assessing eyes regarded him without pity, but also without the sharpness they usually carried.

  "This pit. Where was it?"

  Tunde shrugged.

  "I was unconscious when I arrived. I woke up in it."

  The man nodded once, slowly, and went quiet again. Then, after a pause that carried more weight than it should have, he spoke again.

  "There is something of a way," he said.

  Tunde waited.

  "A method to temporarily channel whatever Ethra you have, to get a measure of what you're working with. It will leave you weakened, but it should tell us what we need to know and give us a starting point for unlocking your heart properly."

  "What do I have to lose?" Tunde asked.

  A thin, humorless smile crossed the man's face.

  "Nothing of consequence. Not like you'd enjoy the gift for long regardless."

  Tunde glanced at Elyria, who offered a small shrug. He turned back to the man and nodded.

  "The corner of your cell, far right," the man said.

  "There is a red orb. Small, glowing. Look for it."

  Tunde squinted into the dim amber light until he found it, a small thing tucked against the base of the wall, pulsing with a warmth he could feel even from a distance. He confirmed it with a nod.

  "Pick it up."

  He shuffled close and lifted it. It was warm to the touch, pleasantly so, the kind of warmth that felt deliberate rather than incidental.

  "That is an Ethra orb," the man said.

  "Used in various ways, depending on who's using it. In a place like this, it serves to store raw Ethra and keeps the cells from becoming uninhabitable in the cold. The fact that it exists here at all means someone among these people has a heat affinity."

  "Odd for a group of savage cannibals," Elyria remarked.

  "My thoughts exactly," the man agreed.

  Tunde opened his mouth to say something and stopped.

  The old manacle on his right wrist had begun to glow.

  The red and black lines traced themselves across the metal again, quiet at first and then with growing certainty, as though they had been waiting for something to respond to and had finally found it.

  The warmth from the orb in his hand began to pull away, not violently, but steadily, as though something was drawing it through his palm and into the cuff itself.

  "What is that?" Elyria said softly.

  Tunde had no words for it.

  He watched the orb dim in his hand, its glow fading, its warmth retreating, until what remained was a hollow shell of dull material, no different from a piece of discarded rubbish. A chill swept through the cell as the warmth vanished entirely.

  "A blessed relic," the man said, his voice dropping to something between awe and suspicion.

  "What cult are you from? I said you were lying."

  "I am not from any cult," Tunde said.

  "The treasure that's," the man began, and then stopped, because Tunde had stopped listening.

  A pressure had closed around his chest. Not pain, not exactly, more like something vast pressing inward from all sides, looking for a way in.

  He could hear his own heartbeat with sudden, impossible clarity, each pulse loud and deliberate in his ears. His eyes watered.

  His mouth opened and found no words. He went down to his knees without deciding to, one hand braced against the ground, and felt something inside him crack open like a door that had been sealed for a very long time.

  "He's unlocking his heart," Elyria whispered. The shock in her voice was genuine.

  He reached toward her without meaning to, hand outstretched, and saw the lines running beneath his own skin before the world went away entirely.

  ****

  When he woke, he was soaked through with sweat, his body burning from the inside out with a fever that broke even as he drew in his first conscious breath. He blinked slowly, and the world came back in color.

  Too much color. Lines he had not been able to see before ran across the ground like rivers viewed from above, intricate and purposeful, converging and branching in patterns that seemed to carry meaning he did not yet have the language for.

  The bars of the cells shimmered at their edges. The stones in the walls held a faint luminescence that had nothing to do with the burning wood nearby.

  "Tunde." Elyria's voice came quietly, with the urgent edge of someone who had been waiting and watching.

  He turned to look at her and lost his words entirely.

  She was surrounded by a haze of blue light, soft and steady, emanating from her skin like something she was not even aware of. He stared.

  "What is it?" she asked.

  "Light," he said.

  "Around you."

  "Light Ethra," the man's voice said from behind him, flat and dry.

  "Wonderful."

  Tunde turned to look at him and saw something different, red and green wisps curling through the air around the green-skinned figure, subtle but unmistakable. He felt a shudder move through him that had nothing to do with cold.

  He looked down at his own hands.

  The new manacles were gone.

  Not loosened, not broken cleanly, simply gone, the chain lying in pieces around him as though it had come apart from the inside. Only the original one remained on his right wrist, as it always did.

  "That happened while you were unconscious," Elyria said, watching him.

  "We thought at first it was a heat Ethra, given the orb."

  He shook his head slowly.

  "Something in the pit where they left me. Something was already there, in the dark among the dead. I don't know what it was, but it put something inside me." He paused, trying to arrange the memory into something coherent.

  "A small box. Black, with a red line on it. Inside was a pebble."

  "Your story continues to accumulate complications," the man said, though there was something different in his voice now, something that sounded less like dismissal and more like careful attention.

  "On the brighter side," Elyria said, "whatever it was, it appears to have given you an Ethra affinity. Light, from what I can see."

  "Do you feel different?" the man asked.

  Tunde considered.

  "Apart from the lines on the ground and the light around the two of you, not especially."

  A pause.

  "Lines," the man said slowly.

  "Red ones. Running across the floor and up toward the bars of the cells."

  Elyria glanced at the bars, then back at him.

  "Those aren't iron bars," she said. "They're bone."

  Tunde looked again and felt his stomach shift.

  "If they were any kind of standard metal, I would have found a way out already," she added simply.

  He looked at the chains still attached to his wrists, the remnants of the broken ones. She preempted his question.

  "Same material."

  "Cannibals with a bone Ethra affinity," the man said, with a kind of grim unsurprise.

  "Not shocking."

  Tunde rose slowly to his feet, steadying himself against the wall, and moved toward the bars. He reached out and touched them. Beneath his fingertips, the old manacle stirred, and then did something unexpected.

  It moved.

  It shifted against his skin, and then it came apart, not shattering but flowing, melting downward in a thin stream of dark metal that coiled around his fingers and drew itself into a shape.

  He looked down and found a blade in his hand, short and rough-edged, made of the same darkened metal as the cuff, still warm from the transformation.

  Silence.

  "Is it just me?" Elyria said, with the particular tone of someone who needed to say the thing out loud to confirm they were seeing it,

  "Or did he just display signs of a metal Ethra affinity?"

  Tunde stared at the blade. The blade stared back.

  "Not possible," the man said.

  "You can only hold one affinity. Unless." He stopped.

  "Relic," Elyria said, almost to herself.

  "That's a blessed relic."

  "Depends on the rank," the man said, turning practical.

  "And a relic of whatever rank won't do anything useful against those bars. The bone is reinforced. It also saps Ethra on contact. I would refrain from touching them for any extended period."

  Tunde pulled his hand back from the bars.

  He stood for a moment, looking at the bone keyhole built into the cell door, and then something shifted behind his eyes.

  Not painfully, just a deepening, as though a lens had been adjusted and everything around him had snapped slightly more into focus. The lines on the ground that he had been seeing since he woke moved with sudden clarity, all of them converging, flowing toward a single point.

  The keyhole.

  The blade in his hand began to vibrate.

  It was not violent, not urgent. It was patient, the way a compass needle is patient, pointing because that is simply what it does.

  Tunde followed its pull, moving closer, and when he brought the blade level with the keyhole and pressed it in, he did not feel himself doing it so much as allowing something else to complete a motion it had already decided on.

  The bone let out a sound. A tone, deep and resonant, and then the bars fell.

  Not crumbled. Not bent. Simply shattered, each segment dropping to the ground in a cascade of white fragments, clean and total, as though they had been waiting for permission.

  The wail that rose from the walls afterward was immediate, vast, and furious, as though the bones themselves had been connected to something living that had just been severed.

  "I told you it couldn't," the man said, from his place on the wall.

  He did not finish the sentence.

  His eyes were wide.