Chapter 52: Two Flames
Chapter 52: Two Flames
Ethan stepped forward one pace, and reached out his hand.
Laira, tensed and ready to lunge in and incinerate the puppeteer before her, suddenly stopped short when she felt his hand. But instead of pulling her back, or giving an order, or anything she had expected, Ethan simply tapped the top of her head once.
Tap.
Very lightly. Almost a caress.
"That’s enough," he said, his voice level. "Who gave you permission to go around demanding to burn people to ash?"
The whole open ground fell dead silent.
The fierce flame around Laira, the fire that a moment ago had scorched the grass and set the wooden puppets smoking, immediately went out like a candle capped shut. The Crimson Dragon that just now had carried the aura of burning the whole sky, now blinked her red-orange eyes and looked up at Ethan with a strangely bewildered expression.
"But... he reached his claws into where you sleep," she muttered, her voice dropping small, like a child pleading her case. "I only..."
"I know." Ethan let out a breath. "But you don’t need to burn a whole person to death over that."
Laira pressed her lips together, clearly still thinking she was in the right, but under his gaze, she drooped, her wings, both the healthy one and the torn one, folding down faintly like a canopy of flame just gone out. She didn’t argue further. She only edged a little closer to him, stepping in behind his shoulder, silent.
Lěng Ruò Yān stood on the other side of the ground, watching that scene, and for the first time that night, the vigilance on her face flickered with a touch of confusion.
This Crimson Dragon, the thing that just now had set six of her puppets smoking with nothing but the heat it radiated, the thing she had silently filed away as the most dangerous she had ever encountered, was now obediently drawing itself in over a single tap on the head. Not out of fear. Not out of being controlled.
But out of deference.
Ruò Yān couldn’t comprehend that relationship. In all her memory of Awakened and Partner, there had never been anything like it.
Ethan turned to her.
And this time, on his face there was no more of the soft patience of the previous moment. His gaze cooled, went flat, looking straight at her through the moonlight.
"As for you," he said. "I made it clear back this afternoon. I didn’t come here to contest anything with you people. I don’t intend to stay. I don’t want anything of this village."
She started to open her mouth, but he continued, his voice not loud but halting her words dead.
"I understand why you hate Awakened. I don’t blame you. If you want to guard against me, go ahead and guard. If you want to watch me, go ahead and watch." He paused a beat. "But don’t test me again."
The moonlight poured down on his silver-gray armored arm, and the red veins on it faintly lit up, slowly, like a warning that didn’t need to be spoken aloud.
"Tonight I’ll let it go, because you have reason to doubt me, and because I don’t want to cause trouble on the first night of my stay. But the next time you send a puppet to ambush where I sleep..." His eyes locked onto her. "I won’t be as gentle as my dragon."
Those words weren’t loud or heavy-handed at all. There was no billowing killing intent. But it was precisely their levelness that made a chill run down Ruò Yān’s spine. She realized, in that moment, that this person wasn’t afraid of her seven puppets at all. He simply didn’t want to make a move.
And those were two entirely different things.
Ethan didn’t wait for her to answer. He turned, placed a hand on Laira’s back, and began walking back toward the village.
"Let’s go," he said to the dragon. "Back to sleep."
Laira followed obediently, but didn’t forget to glance back and shoot Lěng Ruò Yān a resentful glare, the glare of one who had just been forbidden from picking a fight and was very unhappy about it.
Left behind, Lěng Ruò Yān stood alone in the middle of the open ground, seven puppets hovering motionless around her. She watched the two backs fade into the darkness, her black eyes pensive.
She still didn’t trust him.
But for the first time, she was beginning to feel curious.
...
Very far from there, at the edge of another Safe Zone, Ryan Ashford staggered along through the darkness.
He didn’t know where he was going. The exit the thing wearing Gerald had opened for him had brought him outside the city walls, to the devastated wildland where the light of the protective field was nothing but a dim halo on the horizon behind him. His feet stepped unsteadily. His just-mended wrist still tingled. And in his chest, the purple-black flame smoldered, gnawing at something he couldn’t name, but felt clearly slipping away.
But he didn’t stop. Because there was a voice.
It didn’t ring out in his ears. It rang out somewhere deeper, right beneath his thoughts, a wordless whisper pointing him the way. Turn left. Cross the rocky crevice. Keep going forward. He didn’t understand why he trusted it, only knew that with each step following that voice, the flame in his chest eased a little, like a beast being soothed.
The voice was leading him to Ethan.
He clung to that thought. It was the only thing left in him.
He hadn’t gone far when laughter rang out in the darkness.
"Look what we’ve got here."
From behind the boulders, five or six figures stepped out, blocking Ryan’s path. They were people who lived on the outside, in the devastated belt around the edge of the safe zone, where the Council’s laws didn’t reach. Ragged clothes, crude weapons, the eyes of those who had grown used to taking what they wanted from the weaker.
The one in front, a large man with a scar running down his face, ran his eyes over Ryan from head to toe, sizing up the patient’s gown, the still-bandaged wrist, the staggering gait.
"A lost kid," he said, baring his teeth in a grin. "Get kicked out by the safe zone, did you? Got anything worth anything on you?"
Ryan didn’t answer. He only stopped, standing still in the middle of the encirclement, his head slightly bowed.
"You mute?" The scar-faced man stepped up, swinging out an arm to grab Ryan’s shoulder. "I’m asking you—"
His hand touched Ryan’s shoulder.
And Ryan lifted his head.
In his eyes, the purple-black flame was burning.
Afterward, if anyone had passed through this patch of ground, they wouldn’t have been able to comprehend what they saw.
Ryan didn’t step back. He didn’t beg. He showed no fear at all. He only raised his uninjured hand, and a flame burst from his palm.
But it wasn’t the brilliant red flame of the rank S ability he had once been proud of. This flame had two colors. The core was still red, the fire he had carried for two years. But surrounding it, coiling around it, eating into it, were the purple-black tongues of the Void.
The two flames merged into one, and what they created was no longer pure heat. It was something hungry.
The scar-faced man didn’t even have time to scream.
The thugs only recognized their mistake in the final instant, when the two-colored flame poured out of Ryan’s hand and swallowed them. No one escaped. The flame didn’t allow it. It reached each one in turn, wrapped around them, and the screams that rang out in the night didn’t last as long as they should have.
When it all ended, Ryan stood alone in the middle of the ground, and around him were six corpses.
He looked at them, and on his face there was no emotion at all. No triumph. No revulsion. Not even a flicker of regret.
Only the pain in his chest, the purple flame still gnawing at him from within, and an emptiness where his conscience should have been.
Then the voice whispered again.
’Don’t waste them.’
Ryan looked down at the six corpses. And a thought, not quite his, not quite the voice’s, but something born from where the two of them met, rose up in his head.
He held out his hand.
The two-colored flame blazed up again, but this time it didn’t incinerate. It reached out, like threads, touching the six corpses, and began to draw them together.
What happened next wasn’t fire burning. It was fire stitching.
The purple-black tongues threaded between the bodies, sewing them together in a way that obeyed no natural shape. An arm joined to another’s shoulder. A spine curved the wrong way. Sections of body that should never have been joined together were now welded to one another by Void fire, forming something that no living creature should have been allowed to exist as.
Ryan stood watching his creation rise up in the night, and his hand didn’t tremble at all.
When the last of the flame went out, the thing standing before him was no longer six thugs. It was a monster. Tall, misshapen, assembled from body parts that didn’t belong to one another, holding them stuck together only by cords of purple-black fire still smoldering along the seams. It didn’t have a face. It had many faces, all of them frozen in the final instant of terror.
The monster bowed its head before Ryan, in submission.
He looked at it, and for the first time since stepping out of the cell, the corner of his mouth curved up faintly. Not a smile. Just a twitch of the facial muscles, something close to it.
"Let’s go," he muttered, his voice raw. One hand still clutched his chest, where the flame was still eating into him, and the pain made him grind his teeth between each word. "I have to find him. I have to... find Ethan."
The monster stitched from human corpses stepped along behind him.
And the two dark figures, one a person and one a thing that was no longer a person, faded into the devastated wildland, following a voice only Ryan could hear, toward the place where his brother was.
Behind them, six pools of blood soaked slowly into the earth, and there was nothing left to prove that six human beings had ever existed here.