Cradle ascension box set, p.96
Cradle: Ascension: Box Set, page 96
While she was here. In a classroom. With a mute nightmare skeleton who wouldn’t stop tapping the word ‘desire.’
Yerin wished she could trade places with Lindon. He would enjoy this.
But she couldn’t trade places with him; she couldn’t fight on the same level. Which was why she needed to be here in the first place.
That cycle of frustration kept her thoughts moving in a circle until she wanted to pick up her sword and go to battle with the Blood Sage just for a change of pace. And because she still thought he deserved it.
The Remnant spat out air again, then used a cloth to wipe a small corner of the board clean. Quickly, he wrote out ‘I killed your family.’
Yerin’s breath almost stopped.
He erased that and replaced it. ‘I planted that Blood Shadow.’
“What is this? Trying to unload guilt after you’re dead? You wanted me to bury you, all you had to do was ask.”
‘All to find someone like you.’
He was trying to goad a reaction out of her, but she couldn’t imagine what he was expecting other than a sword through the chest. Which he was about to get.
‘I would kill your family a thousand times again.’
Yerin’s sword stabbed through his hand, the chalkboard, and the stone behind it. A severed chunk of Remnant hand fell to the floor.
“Whatever you’re after, you’ve got a breath left to get there,” Yerin said, an inch away from his face.
The Remnant didn’t seem to care about his loss of a limb. Remnants usually felt pain, but he wasn’t showing any. Still with the same amount of irritation as before, the Sage’s Remnant reached up with his one remaining hand and tapped the most common symbol on the board.
It meant ‘cycle.’
Yerin spared him another glare, but she dropped into a cycling position and began weaving all the elements together. Her Path of the Endless Sword cycling technique, modified to incorporate blood aura. Then the hunger technique they’d cobbled together from the Blood Sage, from Redmoon the Herald, and from Northstrider’s Consume.
She was in the process of juggling everything when she heard more tapping and briefly opened an eye.
The Remnant was re-absorbing his severed hand, but in the meantime, he tapped the sentence she’d split in half. ‘I would kill your family a thousand times again.’
Her spirit flared with anger and a desire to kill him.
And the technique clicked into place.
Suddenly it was like every separate piece had been designed to work together from the very beginning. It all fell into step like a regiment of trained soldiers, and a faint reddish haze appeared all over Yerin’s body. Like crimson moonlight drifting into her skin.
The Remnant jabbed a finger in her direction.
Her cycling technique wasn’t stable yet, it fell apart quickly, but she finally understood what he had meant all along. Her attitude was the key piece.
The more she wanted to kill her opponent, the easier it would be to steal their power. And if she wanted to keep this up all the time, she’d have to do more than draw blood. She’d have to get to a place where she wanted to draw blood.
Yerin didn’t like that. But she did admit that the Remnant had been guiding her in the right direction.
“Thanks,” she muttered.
The crimson skeleton threw its hands—well, its hand and its slowly regenerating stump—into the air with exasperation. Then it wiped away its taunts.
She jerked her chin at the sentence. “How much did you mean it?”
The Sage’s spirit scoffed again in a hiss of escaping steam. It scribbled two more sentences.
‘I don’t keep track of every Blood Shadow’ was the first one.
And the second: ‘I didn’t care about you.’
“Now that,” Yerin said, “I can believe.”
She wanted to show Lindon her new hunger technique—now that she had her own version of Consume, she could catch up.
But he was fighting Monarchs.
Worry itched at her, but she shoved it down and went into the sparring hall. The wide, open building had been reinforced by rare metals and scripts laid by Lindon and Ziel until the place could handle even her Final Sword without collapsing.
As long as she didn’t hit the wall directly.
As Yerin entered, she threw open her void key and tossed out a couple of Underlord Remnants. Lindon had kept them in storage for training, and knowing him, he’d make them into constructs eventually.
The two spirits—a blue one that looked like a half-liquid lobster and a sort of squat mechanical squirrel—trembled at the feel of her spirit, but she gave them no attention. Yerin closed her eyes, aligning her breathing to the pattern of her new technique.
It took her a breath and a half longer than she wanted, but she got her madra moving. It still felt clunky, like trying to walk in a pair of shoes made for someone Lindon’s size. Until she focused on her heart.
She wanted to kill them.
The technique lined up, but not perfectly. Not as it had with Red Faith. She focused harder.
It was the Monarchs she really wanted to kill. They were responsible for the Bleeding Phoenix staying alive at all.
That was a little better. She began to hear a sound, not like the distant sensation of an Icon, but like the song of a nearby Remnant. It was coming from her, but she didn’t inspect it closer.
Eyes still shut, she pushed further.
She remembered Reigan Shen’s face as he looked down on them in the labyrinth. When he hovered over Redmoon Hall and mocked her. She pictured Malice, treating Yerin like a worm on a hook. And doing worse to Mercy.
The sound burst into full song, and Yerin opened her eyes.
Soft red moonlight drifted off her in a subtle aura, and a sound that reminded her of the Bleeding Phoenix’s song drifted around her. Now, at last, this was more than just a cycling technique. She’d finally pushed it into the shape she wanted.
The spirit Enforcer technique filled her, preparing her soul.
With one motion, Yerin cut the two Remnants in half. They weren’t the ones she really wanted to kill, but this was a necessary step.
When she slashed them to pieces, she braced herself. She thought she knew what to expect, having watched Lindon Consume more than his share of Remnants, dreadbeasts, and living sacred artists.
Instead, the places where she’d cut the Remnants turned red. Silver-red light burst from the wounds like chains, wrapping them all over and binding them in place.
Suddenly, Yerin could feel them. They were connected to her, resonating with the hunger madra technique that flowed through her. Physical and mental strength flowed into her, as well as pieces of lifeline—only trickles, considering that they were Underlords and Remnants, but better than nothing—and Yerin was hit by a handful of faint memories and a splash of weak willpower.
Breaking that willpower was easier than wrestling an earthworm, but Yerin felt confusion dilute her desire to kill. She hadn’t gotten any madra.
And the Remnants were still there.
The chains of her madra had pulled them back together, stitching them into the forms they had before she tore them up. They were weaker than before, having lost much of their strength to Yerin, and they looked like a couple of puppet-constructs bound together crudely with her madra.
She could feel them.
Experimentally, she ordered them, “Hop up and down.”
They started to do it. Awkwardly, in the case of the blue lobster, which splashed every time it hit the ground.
Yerin stared. “Dross, give me the ten-word story of what I just did.”
Dross materialized next to her, looking faint. The original had left this limited copy weeks ago, from her perspective at least, and it was running out of power.
[First, let me remind you that you’re the one who helped design the technique, and the original version of me has much greater—]
“Ten words, Dross.”
One of the Remnants crumbled to nothing. She got an even smaller burst of energy, but most of its madra started to dissolve to essence.
Dross squinted his single eye as though counting words. [You take what you can, and the rest is captured.]
Yerin let her technique fade, thinking. She had based this on the Phoenix madra’s ability to create bloodspawn, but she had been picturing something different. She’d imagined draining power from the people she stabbed like they were bloodspawn delivering power to the Phoenix.
Red Faith had seized on that concept and added his own designs to it, but it was still rare for a technique to work so differently to the user’s imagination. As Yerin herself had once taught Lindon, the intentions behind a technique were one of the most important parts.
Dross floated up in front of her. [Would you like ten more words?]
“Nah, I’m stable. You can take a rest. And thanks.” Now that she had an idea of how the technique was supposed to work, it would only get better from here. She could actually practice.
The second Remnant fell to pieces.
[Oh! You thanked me! That feels good, you should do that more often.]
She frowned at him. “I know how to thank people.”
[You didn’t thank Eithan when he went up to the heavens,] Dross pointed out.
Yerin considered and tossed aside several responses. Her instinct was to hit back, but Lindon was gone, and everyone was working harder than they ever had. She needed someone to really talk to.
“Didn’t know what to say, did I?” she muttered at last. “Gone over that in my head a thousand and one times. Got a whole pack of things I could have said, should have said.”
Dross’ eye widened, and he stared at her from an inch in front of her nose.
“…You trying to see into my brain?”
[That’s more than I’ve heard you open up to anyone but Lindon. This Phoenix Song technique has warped your thoughts. Not to be rude, but you should keep using it.]
Yerin took a step back herself, since Dross didn’t seem like he was going to. “Phoenix Song?”
[Makes sense, right? You sound all musical while you’re using it, like your skin is singing. Hm. I don’t like that description, for some reason.]
“Phoenix Song.” She ran it through her head and nodded. “I like it.”
[Are you sure? I could call the others! It’s been a while since we’ve voted on a name.]
“No, that’s all locked up. Thanks.”
Dross threw up his tendrils. [Twice! I’ve been thanked twice! My original won’t even believe my memories.]
For a few more hours, Yerin practiced the Phoenix Song. As she’d expected, it was much easier to control once she had the proper mental image, but she needed to try it on real opponents. Weak Remnants didn’t give her much benefit and only lasted for a snap before they crumbled to pieces.
Then she went about the routine she’d followed daily, while Lindon was gone: checking on the others.
Ziel was, as usual, sitting in front of the Paths of Heaven. He was seated in a cycling position on the ground, his green horns glowing and eyes shut, but he wasn’t cycling. The fourth display was lit, the one that swirled with unreadable letters.
She found it the most confusing one, but Ziel said it helped him steer his Grand Oath Array.
A loop of Forged silver runes spun around him, so complicated they made her eyes hurt just looking at them. More symbols hovered in the air above him, though they were only arranged in a circle by the loosest definition. Those runes flipped, shifted, and transported between one another like a Sage was juggling them through space.
Yerin entered quietly and waited until she was sure he sensed her presence before she spoke. “You ready for today’s test?”
“I don’t need to test it so often,” Ziel responded without opening his eyes. “But yes.”
She’d brought a fruit for exactly this purpose, which had been grown in a small garden sustained by life aura. It resembled a pink-skinned apple, and she took a bite from it before she tossed it into the center of the network of spinning silver runes.
It froze in the middle like an invisible hand had caught the apple, but there were no flows of vital aura around it. Ziel’s eyebrows wrinkled as he concentrated, and the fruit began to rot in seconds. It had just turned into mush when the script flickered, and the half-rotten mass of apple hit the ground with a splat.
Ziel gave a heavy sigh. “It’s supposed to stay there until it’s dust.”
“That’s a stretch more than you could do yesterday,” Yerin pointed out. “And with you not being a Sage. That calls for cheers if you ask me.”
Yerin thought she wouldn’t get much more than a sigh out of him, or maybe a glum comment, but Ziel opened his eyes and gave her a firm nod.
“Almost,” he said. “I am getting used to it. Soon, I think, I’ll have something to really be proud of.”
That was worth a smile, Yerin thought. “Now you sound like a Sage.”
“The Monarch who invented this technique was killed by the Dreadgods,” Ziel went on, “so obviously I’ll still have further to go.”
Yerin’s smile withered. “If you were happy about something, you think it might kill you?”
“I am happy,” Ziel said. He sounded confused, so Yerin turned away from him and activated one of the Paths of Heaven that didn’t hurt her head so bad.
The last one.
Ziel flinched as the dark cave appeared, its darkness somehow thicker and deeper even than Mercy’s shadow cycling room.
“I don’t know how you even get close to that,” he said.
Yerin walked up to the darkness, standing at the twilight edge. Absolute silence came from within, and she was certain that a single touch would mean her death.
The sensation was comforting, somehow. Not the thought of dying; Yerin meant to live forever. The familiar feeling.
On the verge of death was how she’d lived her life.
She had meditated here, by the cave Eithan had created thousands of years ago, while trying to learn his sword strike. She continued because something in the silence spoke to her. In a way, it harmonized with her Phoenix Song technique.
There was something there. Something she could use. A bridge between herself, her two new techniques, and the Path she’d been following since she was a girl. Something…
Her thoughts snapped back to reality when she felt Ziel grab her wrist.
“I know it’s just an illusion,” he said, “but I wouldn’t go in there.”
Yerin had been leaning forward, ready to step into the black hole left behind by the embodiment of Death.
She shuddered and backed up. “That was about a mile too close.” Then, because Dross had put it into her brain, she added, “Thanks.”
His eyebrows shot up in surprise. “Oh. You’re welcome.”
Yerin resolved to thank people more often.
Next up was Orthos, whose training Yerin could hear from anywhere in Ghostwind Hall. Since Yerin had been using the sparring hall, he’d moved down to one of the bigger empty caverns within the island of pale stone.
When she arrived, she saw Orthos surrounding himself with the Burning Cloak and crashing against the Herald dragon Remnant.
The two slammed their heads together with a crash like an exploding boulder. Orthos’ scalp split open, leaking blood.
“Again!” Orthos shouted.
The Remnant hesitated, and Orthos pounced on that hesitation immediately. His eyes shone a bright orange-red and he leaped up and over the spirit. He unleashed a flow of dragon’s breath down on Noroloth’s back.
The serpentine spirit twisted around and matched the Striker technique with dragon’s breath of his own, but then Orthos slashed down with his right foreleg.
Blackflame madra Forged quickly, forming claws, and Orthos slammed The Dragon Descends down.
If Noroloth hadn’t been the Remnant of a Herald, the technique’s explosion would have destroyed the cavern. Instead, he controlled the force and kept it from erupting into the walls.
He didn’t stop the fire from washing over Yerin, so she did it herself.
“Good!” the Remnant shouted. “Soon, you will be an Archlord, and you will be worthy of my line!”
Orthos roared, and a void key opened nearby. Noroloth seized a struggling black-and-red dragon Remnant, hurling it toward Orthos.
From Orthos’ soulspace, he summoned a hunger construct over his jaws so that his mouth was filled with gray-white fangs of Forged hunger. Then he bit down.
Power flowed from the Remnant up the teeth and into Orthos, lighting up scripts etched into the fangs. Orthos devoured the entire Overlord spirit in moments, pulling it to pieces and eating each one at a time.
Yerin had seen plenty of animals feeding on one another. Some of them were sacred beasts and others ordinary predators. But seeing Orthos do it was still a little revolting. She much preferred the look of Lindon’s Consume technique.
It was cleaner. More…elegant. At least, that’s how Eithan would put it.
Orthos shuddered as he fought against the flood of willpower and memories remaining in the Remnant. Without Lindon and Dross to filter them, he took the full brunt of their impact, though Yerin was sure the set of construct-teeth weren’t as efficient as Lindon’s arm.
Even so, her own experience with hunger madra told her it would be a struggle, but Orthos only shuddered a little as he worked his way through the Remnant.
“Is it that time already?” he asked Yerin in between bites.
“You’d have a better feel for the time if you had been sleeping.”
“It is not the time for rest.”
“Eh, that’s a little shaky. Depends. You looking to swallow down all those memories, or you looking to lose your mind again?” Yerin faced him down evenly, arms folded. She well remembered fighting a half-mad Orthos back when a Truegold posed a threat to her.
Orthos didn’t show her the embarrassment or understanding she would have expected from dredging up his past. He lifted his chin and looked to her with dignity. “If I can be consumed from within by these lesser shades, then I was not strong enough to begin with.”
The cavern shook as Noroloth laughed. He slithered over Orthos and glared down at Yerin. “You see, human? This is the attitude of a true dragon. My own blood. You would be wise not to doubt us.”
