Ardan was slowly, painfully, coming back to his senses. His ears rang, and the world in front of him shimred as if he were staring at a lake’s depths on a windy day. Worse yet, his nose caught a dreadful sll. Burnt flesh. Human flesh.
He jerked his head, barely stifling a groan of pain, and opened his eyes. Lying right on top of him, charred to the bone, with flaking bits of its scorched skin landing on his face, was a body burnt beyond recognition. Only the charred remnants of leather boots fused to the bone and a few lted ornants embedded in the vertebrae hinted that this corpse had once been the mother of that girl.
The girl...
Just as he had back then, in the prairie, digging himself out of the ashes — not only wooden ones this ti, but also human ashes — Ardan tried to stand, but even as he clenched his teeth, he nearly collapsed back down.
His left leg was covered in horrendous blisters, his left hand could barely close its scorched fingers, and half his torso was a blistered mass of raw skin and seared fabric.
Unable to hold back his moan of pain, Ardan felt a wave of agony wash over him, the initial shock beginning to fade. His left side felt as if it had been subrged in boiling water, his skin bubbling and the muscles burning beneath. He had an overwhelming urge to scrape off the unending fire, but he fought down that impulse, gritting his teeth.
It was only then that he noticed his right hand was still gripping his staff, which was remarkably untouched by even the slightest hint of scorch marks.
And around him…
Bodies lay scattered everywhere, twisted into unnatural poses, their limbs distorted, so parts of their bodies scorched through and mixing with the molten stone that sizzled like lava beneath his feet. The glass had lted out of the burnt window fras, and the walls were blanketed in thick soot and char.
The wooden counter had vanished, and only the tal cash registers, sared with sothing lted, lay toppled on the charred floor. Beyond, the blackened skeletons of clerks, their skulls grotesquely resembling duck heads thanks to the lted visors of their work uniforms, remained welded to their chairs.
Behind him, naturally, no wall remained — only smoldering embers that were once humans, walls and desks. Even in the ceiling far above, there were holes, hissing and sparking, through which glimpses of snowfall could be seen, though the snow could barely touch the building before vanishing in a haze of steam.
Leaning heavily on his staff, hobbling and dragging his smoldering, unresponsive leg behind him, Ardan took a few steps toward the spot where the little girl had been standing, hoping to see a miracle.
Only two faint, child-sized black footprints remained, a dark echo of her presence.
"Oh... You managed better than I thought you would."
With great difficulty, Ardan turned around. Standing atop a spreading pool of slag where the stairs leading down to the vaults had been, was the sa elf from before. Whole. Unscathed. Looking like he hadn’t been at the epicenter of a fiery storm. And, oddly, his hands were empty. He held no bags of exes, no gold ingots, no jewels — nothing.
"You…" Ardan struggled to speak.
"The Dandy will pay for this lead," the elf cut his attempts off, stepping over scattered bodies and crunching their brittle bones underfoot. "And what am I supposed to tell my client now? That I burned down the Imperial Bank for nothing? A grand show, wasn’t it? Though…" He let his gaze drift to the bank’s charred, smoldering entrance and the street beyond. "It lacks grandeur. Fanatics would’ve aid for sothing more impactful..."
The elf smirked, and it was a mad, crazed grin. Ardan looked back to see a crowd of bystanders gradually approaching the building. So carried buckets, others wrestled with fire hydrants, while still more tried to clear the few abandoned cars out of the way.
Ardan couldn’t even rasp. The air, for a brief mont, felt scorched, and he realized he was suffocating. The elf, without moving his lips, extended a hand and summoned not a True Na, but a shard of it. A shard so potent and anchored in his will that it was enough.
Enough to ignite the crowd. Dozens of people transford into living torches in an instant. The road jumped like a startled cat, the asphalt lting into viscous streams. Cars were thrown skyward and wrapped in flas, crashing back down as blazing cots.
The heat surged down the street, shattering windows and turning snow into ltwater, then steam, which vanished among the smoke. Soot-blackened buildings lost their winter veils, and the snowfall shifted into a prickly rain, while ashes rose like birds into the graying sky.
No one even had ti to scream. They froze in place, a macabre puppet theater, each of them an effigy of a burning, blackened, collapsing skeleton.
"Better," the elf nodded to himself, stepping past the mother’s corpse and toward Ardan. "Farewell, half-blood."
And, as if nothing had happened — as if he hadn’t just killed over a hundred people — the elf strode out of the bank and down the street. Ardan could only watch his retreat, his eyes fixed on the red cloak flapping in the dry, hot wind, and flanked by burning cars.
Cracks spread through the cobblestones, and when the water settled in puddles and streams, a crater nearly a ter in diater and a hand’s breadth deep marked where the elf had stood.
The Second Chancery’s mage stepped up and peered into it.
"Dead," he stated flatly. "A pity… I would’ve loved to interrogate you, fanatic... The Angels would’ve wept at how rciful I’d have been."
Ardan blacked out again, and when he ca to, a tingling warmth was spreading through his body — the sensation of healing Star Magic.
"You’ll have a lot to tell us," said a blurry face, and soft darkness once again enveloped the young man.
***
Ardan lay on a rough straw mattress thrown over a stone slab, staring at a drawing in his grimoire. A lamp burned with a flickering yellow light generated by wick and oil. At least they changed it every morning.
That was how Ardan tracked the days, for there was no other way to keep ti in this stone cell where he couldn’t even stand fully upright, and where lying down ant pressing his shoulders against the wall.
For the past… Ardan checked the folded edge on the first page… four days, he had been held in the custody of the Second Chancery. From the limited information he had, he figured he was sowhere near the Niewa, as, during those rare monts when the small hatch at the bottom of the heavy, iron-bound door (the sole exit from this tight stone cage) opened, his sharp Matabar ears had caught the sound of waves. This suggested that, despite being held in a dungeon, he was probably not underground.
As for food, a tal tray with a tin bowl, tin spoon, and cup was shoved through the hatch once a day. They’d fed him sothing that was a cross between soup and porridge, which had tasted faintly of roots and pine cones. But Ardan wasn’t one to be picky in situations like these. Back when Ergar had been training him, there were days when the young hunter was neither quick nor lucky, and he’d had to settle for far worse...
They had taken everything from him — his clothing and all his other possessions — except his staff, his grimoire, and, strangely, his mother’s letters, which were returned to him after an hour; they had been tucked into the inner pocket of his jacket.
As for why a Star Mage like him had been allowed to keep his grimoire and staff? The answer was as complicated as it was simple. In four days, Ardan hadn’t managed to recover a single ray, and when he’d tried to use his Aean’Hane vision, all he had been able to see was darkness — denser and more indifferent than even the gloom and damp that perated his windowless cell.
He relieved himself through a small hole in the wall opposite the door. The stench built up occasionally, but soon it would vanish — apparently, the hole didn’t connect to any sewage system, but led to a refuse bin that was periodically emptied.
The most peculiar thing was that it had been two days since Poplar was supposed to visit him.
But neither the cat nor his loud red boots had appeared. That was how Ardan knew for sure that the stone from which the chipped and scratched walls had been built was far from sothing that could be found in the streets of the tropolis.
Not to ntion that, on his first day of confinent, he had endured quite the unpleasant experience: nausea, dizziness, sporadic nosebleeds, and a persistent ringing in his ears, as if a church bell had been tolling in there. This hadn’t happened because he had still been suffering from the injuries he’d sustained in his fight against the Aean’Hane elf. No, no. His wounds, he knew, had been tended to before he’d arrived in this dungeon.
As for the cause of his current weakened state and forr nausea and worse, Ardan could only guess. He’d speculated that it might be due to the absence of Ley energy. Since it influenced the planet’s magnetic fields, perhaps this small cell, which was devoid of that energy, was having an adverse effect on him?
But these were thoughts for another day.
His hand looked healthy, and his leg and side, though bandaged and slathered in so foul-slling ointnt, no longer hurt. This treatnt — the healing of his injuries, the return of his letters, grimoire, and staff — had put Ardan at relative ease about his situation. If they’d intended to do to him what rumors usually claid happened to prisoners of the Second Chancery, they wouldn’t have gone to such lengths.
And so here he lay on the prickly mattress, its fabric worn in spots to the point that the straw beneath was tinged with mold. He lay and stared at his own drawing, a seal he’d designed using elents from both the Universal and Basic Shields.
It was a simple two-layered seal with a fixed array of runes. A redirecting type of shield.
He had even nad it in the style of the Stranger, the creator whose work had inspired his own inventions.
"Water Shroud"
[Star: Red
Rays: 2
School: Defensive/Elental
Elent: Water
Max rune combinations: fixed array]
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