130 – Salvage

Ember didn’t remember what happened immediately following the explosion; the world simply went black. She jerked awake—presumably not more than a minute later—lying in a crater, with a bone fragment the size of her body pinning her to the ground. It had impaled her through the stomach, piercing her armor like it had been made from parchment and not a product of the finest blacksmithing in the world.

She stared down at herself for a moment, too disoriented from the impact and the magical backlash to comprehend what she was seeing. Agonizing heat spread through her abdomen as the pain of the injury made itself known. Her eyes flicked up next, into the sky above her, and the image there slowly restored her memories.

The Twilight Celebrant, as she had expected, had salvaged the ritual.

Even with one of the foundational pillars shattered, the madman had—unfathomably, even if his doing so had been her gamble from the start—kept the magic from falling apart and killing him, Ember, and the rest of the city.

He was alive. The ritual continued. But no doubt at enormous personal cost.

Finishing sorting through the past minutes before her unconsciousness, she jolted as she remembered that a powerful revenant had been pursuing her—then gasped at the pain the movement brought, hand shooting to her stomach. Still pinned, she searched around for the spectral beast and thankfully found nothing.

Killed by the explosion? She had already almost dispatched the spirit herself, but if it had lived and pursued her while she’d been knocked senseless, things would have ended badly. One stroke of luck in a sea of misfortune.

She looked back down at her injury and gritted her teeth; she’d already wasted too much time lying around. Bracing herself, she dug her fingers into the projectile and hauled upward. Pain was hardly unfamiliar to her, but the experience set a new standard. She somehow managed to stifle the whimper that tried to rip from her throat.

Fumbling a healing potion from her inventory next, she staggered to her feet and downed the emergency liquid. Her wounds knitted over, though slower than they should’ve. Despite that, she checked herself over and was somewhat incredulous to find that she hadn’t been crippled in one way or another.

Which wasn’t to say she had much fight left in her. Since she’d been the one who’d disrupted the ritual, those rampant energies had targeted her in particular, second only to the ritualist himself. The bone shard through the stomach hadn’t been a stroke of bad luck. It had no doubt tracked her down.

With her personal situation sorted, she refocused on the more important matter: the Twilight Celebrant and his ritual. Taking to the air with a flap of her wings required far more effort than it should have, warning her that she still might be overestimating her condition.

Nevertheless, she ascended with several powerful gusts of air, closing the distance to the mad ritualist.

I can’t believe he actually did it.

Ember hadn’t taken such an absurd gambit—destabilized an ongoing ritual of this magnitude—with nothing besides wild hope guiding her. Indeed, this exact sequence of events had been what she’d aimed for. The Twilight Celebrant exhausting himself in an attempt to salvage the ritual, to even the playing field she had no right standing as an equal on.

But it astounded her that he had managed the feat. Rituals, when sabotaged, weren’t the easiest things to bend back into working order. In the way digging up a mountain wasn’t easy.

This is a member of the Selrath-Kyn, a man Father himself encountered centuries ago and warned me of. She had formed a gambit based on her opponent’s competence, and succeeded. The idea rankled. She didn’t want to acknowledge the madman’s skill. Could even Solfirus have done what he just did?

“I despise dragons your age,” the Twilight Celebrant rasped as Ember arrived on the outskirts of the eight—or rather, seven—bone pillars surrounding him. Despite everything that had happened, he sounded calm. “All of your kind’s reckless arrogance, none of the temperance gained through millennia. What you did was insanity, child. I weep for how you are rewarded for it.”

Before, the gray wisps of energy siphoning up from the city of Prismarche had come in smooth, steady streams. Those lines pulsed erratically now, and indeed the air all around them throbbed with an irregularity that set her on edge. The core of the ritual remained, but it certainly was not what it had been before. It would shatter the moment the Twilight Celebrant let go.

And indeed, though his voice was steady, the man had lost his composure elsewhere. His lips were pulled back in a grimace, a clammy sheen covered his skin, and his bony arms were outstretched to either side, trembling, as if he were holding the ritual together like physical stone columns threatening to crush inward and flatten him.

“Whatever it is you think I aim for,” he continued, “you nearly called down a far worse fate.”

“Worse than the eradication of a city?”

“The dead, at least, may rest. You foolish child.”

Ember scowled. Little as she wanted to cede any point to the man, big or small, she could hardly disagree. When it came to rampaging magic, much less rampaging ritualistic magic fueled by unwilling victims, death could be one of the kindest outcomes.

Even though she’d executed her plan explicitly hoping for the mad genius to salvage the ritual and thus exert himself, the insult of ‘reckless’ still applied. Not even she could deny that.

She raised her sword and pointed it at him. “Cease this madness.” Her words didn’t project as powerfully as she wanted them to. Her skull pounded, and despite the healing potion, her stomach burned with a nearly crippling level of pain. The bone shard that had impaled her had left its mark. As, she supposed, a ritual-infused fragment of the Colossus would. What exactly had it done to her, and how long would the injury linger?

Worries for later.

“Attack me or the ritual again, and everyone dies,” the Twilight Celebrant said simply. “I hold us together by bleeding fingernails.”

Ember gathered dragonfire along the length of her blade and raised it. The process was excruciating, though she didn’t show it outwardly. Definitely hurt worse than I thought. But her sword did begin to glow gray and orange, and she pulled back her weapon as if she truly intended to release the attack.

The sheer recklessness of her earlier actions had apparently set the precedent it needed to. What should have been an obvious bluff somehow worked on the man.

“Stop,” the Twilight Celebrant commanded.

She hovered with her weapon raised.

“We will compromise,” the mage hissed, annoyance finally plain in the dry scratch of his voice.

“End the ritual.”

“No.”

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She lifted her sword an inch higher.

“No. The Work must be completed. She will come for me, and my only escape is beyond. If I must die either way, then you will follow.”

She focused on the first part of the statement. “…beyond?” Her gaze lifted to the center of the shattered sky, and her tone turned incredulous. “You’re fleeing past the world’s horizon? Because you’re scared of—the Sorceress?” She could only assume that was the woman he had referenced twice now.

His only response was a sneer.

Ember stared at the man and thought through her options. On consideration, she believed him—escape might be one of his goals. But he clearly had more. He could have lain low and hidden from even the Sorceress’s search; no matter how strong the Party of Heroes’s mage had gotten, even that woman couldn’t summon information from thin air.

So yes—he had other goals here besides self-preservation, and perhaps greater ones. She knew very little about what lay beyond the dimensional wall, and indeed had only known of its existence in abstract terms to begin with. Solfirus had studied the topic, briefly, and rambled to her as he did about many things.

Does he really think he’ll survive that trip, though?

Then again, he’d done something near-impossible just a moment before. The Selrath-Kyn were every ounce as skilled as they were despicable. Did she have an obligation to prevent him from achieving those greater goals?