Chapter 17: Names.

By the following morning, I had returned to my spot by the low wall, right by the grass. This patch of earth now bore several holes from my earlier failures. It was my throne, such as it was.

I moved gingerly. My ribs still ached when I breathed too deeply, and my skin pulled in places where the new growth had not quite settled. None of this stopped me. I had trained through worse, though admittedly not in a very long time. The egg was inside the hut -on a secure shelf. I had checked on it before leaving. Only once, this time.

I raised both arms and examined them. The lines were there, no longer Sparks, each mark had stretched into a thin stroke along my forearm.The Requiem was black and sharp, like a cut in the skin that someone had filled with ink. The Cradle was white, with edges that seemed to glow faintly in the light.

I tested the Requiem first. I extended my right hand toward a large stone three paces away and pushed mana through the mark. The air shimmered. The hiss of black flame crossed the distance and struck the stone’s surface. Grey bloomed where it hit and cracks spidered outward. The decay spread across the stone’s face and ate into it, turning solid rock to powder. It took little time for that powder to become nothing at all. The impression came with it. The feeling of a thing that had been still for so very long, and had quite liked it, before I had erased it. I stared at my outstretched arm. I would not feel something for a stone.

I tried the attack on another stone, only stopping when the rock turned into powder. The result was no different.

This new attack was far, far stronger than when it had just been a Spark, and far more useful. I tested the range. It was three meters. By four, the black simply did not go further. It felt as if the space beyond held a resistance that did not yield to the Requiem. I tested the duration and the mana cost and the rate of decay against different materials. It was better in every conceivable way.

There was one problem. It was taking too much mana. Far more than it had before. I only had this world’s thin mana left inside me, and it drained like water through cupped hands. The Requiem drank twenty times the amount it had before. My mana core had been absurd in my time, and it might have been absurder still here, but there were still limits. It hadn’t even fully refilled yet -even that was slower now.

I turned my left hand toward a dead patch of grass nearby, pushing mana through the Cradle. Warmth left my palm -a blazing white that would, and did, make the sun look dim. It crossed the gap and settled onto brown stalks. There was nothing for three seconds, then, there was green -a small circle of it, spreading outward from where I had aimed. The dead grass straightened. Color returned to it in a wave, a little pale at the edges and deepening toward the center.

With this, came another impression. Of a thing that had been whole once, and had wanted to be whole once again. It had accepted its eventual death, and wasn’t sure what to do with its new life.

“Tsk,” I clicked my tongue. Was this how it was always going to be, whenever I used these powers?

I stared at the greenery. Then, I used the Cradle again, forming a second circle of green, adjacent to the first. Then I formed a third, then a fourth, and then a fifth, for no reason at all. The range was just as long as the Requiem, but the mana cost was higher. With this world’s mana, the cost was roughly twenty five times what it had been before the phoenix. Damn it.

Still, I could now project both of my marks beyond my hands. Some part of me had known this when the marks had grown. Only a fool didn’t confirm gut feelings.

The mana aside, I now had two new techniques and now I was at something of an impasse. In the old world, the System had named every ability. Every spell, every skill, every passive trait bore a title in brackets that told you exactly what it was and exactly what it was worth. There had been a certainty to that. It was one of the few things about the System I might have liked.

There were no labels now. There was no blue screen to tell me what I had earned. This would not do.

“Requiem’s Torch.”

I said the words aloud, testing them. The syllables sat well enough in my mouth. The Requiem was the mark’s name and torch described the function. It was accurate and functional. It was also deeply boring.

Every great power deserved a great name. This was not a matter of vanity. It was a matter of principle. When I had been Queen, every spell in my arsenal had carried a name that demanded respect. [Oblivion’s Decree]. [Balefire]. [The Ending Sky]. [Dirge For The Sun], [The Truth That Lies Beyond Death].

These were names that made armies break formation. These were names that made Gods flinch. ‘Requiem’s Torch’ made nothing flinch. A tavern keeper would not flinch at ‘Requiem’s Torch’, even if he understood what it meant. Also…I just simply did not like it.

I sat cross-legged in the grass and began to deliberate. “Black Ruin.” I tested the name and shook my head. It was too simple. Any brute could name their attack “Black Ruin.”

“The Unmaker’s Touch.” That was better, but it referenced touch, and I was no longer limited to contact. The entire point was the range, was it not?

“Entropy’s Lament.” I tilted my head. That one had a certain weight to it. A Lament implied sorrow, which implied depth, which implied that the power was not merely destruction but destruction with meaning–

I sighed deeply. It was pretentious. Even by my standards, and I had once named a military campaign “The Scouring of False Light.”

Enjoying this book? Seek out the original to ensure the author gets credit.

“The Requiem’s Reach.” That was functional and pedestrian. Surely the greatest Demon Queen in history could manage more than “Reach.”

“Void’s Verdict.” I paused on that one. “Verdict. In other words: judgement passed. My power decays doesn’t it? And is decay not a kind of judgement upon all things? There is a poetry to it that even Za-”

“Who are you talking to?” I froze and turned. Sara stood behind me, holding what appeared to be a bundle of wildflowers. She was staring at me with a very perplexed expression.

“I am naming my techniques,” I said, with as much dignity as the situation permitted. “It is a matter of some importance.”

Inwardly, I wished for the ground to open and swallow me whole. One did not get caught while naming their techniques. That somewhat defeated the purpose of the whole endeavor.

“Oh!” Sara sat down beside me without invitation. She placed the wildflowers in her lap and began to pull the petals from one. “What’s a tech-nique?”

“A…power. Something one does with mana.” I gestured at the broken stone ahead of me. “That. I did that. It was a great boulder once.”

Sara looked at the pebbles and then looked at me. “You broke it?”

“I decayed it. There is a significant difference.”

“It looks broken.”

My left eye twitched. I took a calming breath and returned to the matter at hand. “The point is that a technique requires a name. A worthy name. The System once provided them and it no longer exists. Therefore, I must name them myself.” There was little chance this child understood. Truthfully, I did not know why I had even bothered to explain myself in the first place. Just to show her, I showed off a wisp of black fire. The tiniest amount flicking at the air.

Sara pulled another petal. “What about ‘the black thing’?”

I paused. “Absolutely not.”

“The zappy thing?”