The Further Adventures of Will Gerevannin

Will Gerevannin works divination. Ice and wind swirl in the palm of his hand, just a delicate puddle of elemental ghosts that drifts into gentle wisps in the still air. Above them he holds a broad lens, etched with measuring overlays: rulers, protractors, and more arcane symbols. The geometry and extent of each swirl of the ice dust in his palm is taken into account, and he reaches a conclusion.

“The summer bock, please,” he says with a winning smile. The waitress nods breathlessly and hurries off.

“Showoff,” Rainstone chides. “They teach you that in Heaven? Toss a little magic around to impress the ladies? I choose the oatmeal stout with cool efficiency and how much giggling and flouncing comes my way? You make her wait for half a minute and you’re Mr. Smooth.”

Will drums his fingers on the table. “You don’t even like humans, champ. And you’re not exactly flashing the extreme style, you know. We’ve got, let’s compare here, one fit young fellow in full Arc Knight armor, complete with absurdly-broad shoulderplates and cape set to ‘full billow’—and we’ve got one dumpy old guy with a burlap tunic and egg in his beard.”

“Dumpy?” Rainstone mutters, brushing at his beard surreptitiously. ”...good?”

“A little lower. There, it’s gone. What I’m saying is, if you want respect, maybe you should pick a human form that’s a little more… magisterial?”

“Then people would expect me to rule them. I’ve put a lot of work into Emerick. Oldest free state in the Patchwork Kingdoms. I don’t want to foul up the democratic works by parading myself. I’m better off as everyone’s crazy uncle.”

“Well, that’s just as I thought. Who’s going to pay attention to the Elders when there’s a giant shimmering blue dragon looming around the place? I admire what you’re doing here, it’s a grand experiment. It must be hard to maintain your, what, secret identity? How would you put it?”

“Studied irrelevance,” Rainstone says wryly. “I fight for Emerick at Mount Agrias, I strafe any army that tries to live off our land, and otherwise I keep my claws off things. Well, everything except these drinks! Thank you, Ophelia.”

The waitress drops a curtsey. “Of course, Lord Protector. My lord Sir Will,” she adds, bobbing in Will’s direction as well. “Just wave if you need anything at all!”

“See?” Rainstone resumes as the waitress moves to the next table. “All you.”

Will shakes his head. “You’re the dragon. Not healthy to argue.”

“Well, case closed then. Now, about that meeting you had with the Council….”

“This really is very good,” Will says after a gulp of ale.

“They gave you the stone, didn’t they?”

“Not in the slightest,” Will replies with perfect nonchalance. “I’m going to be walking out of here empty-handed.”

“Without a care in the world? Nobody to answer to? No second thoughts? No ‘whoops I dropped my Arcblade, whoops I beheaded half the guards, hey this rock fell in my pocket by accident?’”

“You wound me,” Will says dryly. “The Council has spent a great deal of effort maintaining a positive diplomatic relationship with Andragar, to the point of being one of the only Patchworks to have a permanent ambassador in Gereval. Now why would I want to throw that relationship of hard-won trust and mutual respect out the window over,” Will gestures helplessly, “archaeology?”

Rainstone sets his tankard down with a decisive clack—just short of an angry gesture. “You expect me to believe that this little collections run you’re on has anything to do with pure research? Dragons get smarter, tougher, and cagier with age, son, not senile and brittle like you thinskins. I’m not in favor of rough play, but I’m not against it either.”

Will raises both hands in a placating gesture. “Peace, Ancient. I didn’t mean to imply that there’s no ulterior motive. Only a true innocent would believe that for a moment. But we both know—and I mean this as no insult, but simply plain speaking—that if the Granite Dynamo were absolutely essential to our efforts, we would be able to negotiate its peaceful release.”

“Through threat of violence,” Rainstone elaborates.

“Through a recognition of mutual interests,” Will counters. “There is much that Andragar can do for Emerick, as our long friendship shows.”

“So you’ve reached the limits of your bargaining authority, and we’re to expect an emissary more heavily equipped with carrots and sticks, is that what you’re saying?”

Will shakes his head curtly, waving the entire line of inquiry away briskly. “No, no, it’s not like that. Each of these stones has a different purpose, as far as anyone knows, and we’re trying to find one suited for a specific purpose. There’s a process of elimination. If we run out of luck with the rest of them, then yes, we might be back, but trust me, violence is always our last resort.”

“Tell that to the last three kingdoms you annexed.”

“We tried to, and they assumed they could be the first to beat us. Okay, second,” Will says, to forestall Rainstone’s retort. “I know your lack of megalomania makes you insane by dragon standards, but you understand how dragons are.”

Rainstone nods slowly. “Yes, of course once you’ve declared your intention to take over a dragon’s territory, he’s bound by nature to fight. But… why the declaration in the first place?”

Will shrugs, resin armor plates shifting smoothly. “My oath is to defend the best interests of Andragar. Not to second-guess national policy.”

“You dodge a lot, don’t you?”

“This armor is expensive,” the young Arc Knight replies lightly.

---

Earth and darkness radiate a rust-dark halo around Will Gerevannin’s head; his every footstep makes the earth tremble, and the grim reverberations of his tread fill the Green Earth Army with nameless unease. Their ranks shuffle backwards uneasily. “Captain, this wasn’t covered in drill….”

“He’s one man,” the commander says, but realizes as he does that he’s speaking out of habit, not faith. “Stand firm!” The mercenary band—“army” is a very generous self-description—seems ill-inclined to obey, and when Will Gerevannin’s voice booms out, they flinch in unison.

“I require the stone,” Will intones, black cape furling majestically in the wind, “and none shall stand in my path.” That his Arcblade remains firmly in its sheath is somehow more intimidating than if it were drawn.

“Wha—” the commander chokes on his own spit, coughs, then tries again. “What stone?”

Will stops, planting his feet with two last jolts. He pauses for a long moment. “Well,” he offers, voice still booming with the dreadful harmonics of the unholy forces he channels, “it’s fairly small, no more than a centimeter across, greenish, or maybe blue, I think the historian was color-blind. Diamond cut, lozenge-shaped facets… am I ringing a bell?”

As the last fatal tone of Will’s voice sinks into the rolling plains, the commander fishes a pendant out from under his shirt. “This…? This is my family heirloom!”

“I offer you twenty gold for it. Twenty gold… or your death!”

“Twenty gold… but the appraisers told me it was glass!”

“I mean… ten gold.” Will’s voice has shifted higher, toward his natural tenor, and he quickly renews his spells with a quick wiggle of leather-gloved fingers.

“What the devil is this?” the Green Earth commander snaps. “Are you an Arc Knight or a pawnbroker?”

“Just throw me the gem or I’ll come take it from your lifeless and quite possibly discontiguous fingers, you sub-chordate!” Will flings a small purse at the commander, bouncing it directly off his head; the purse flies heavenward in a small shower of gold. He finally finishes the casting he’s been delaying; the unholy earth aura forges itself into a nigrescent magma sword in his hand. The Arcblade rides casually at his hip.

“Okay, okay! Never let them say Green Earth can’t conclude matters through negotiation! We’re big enough, we’re confident enough, we don’t have to fight everyone, right men?” The Green Earth Army is only too eager to murmur its assent; ideally from a safe distance, as the commander finds himself at its head, rather than safely boxed in behind its vanguard. “Here, take it!” The commander tosses the pendant in a cautious underhand—bruised forehead or none, whipping screwballs at Arc Knights isn’t a recommendation for healthy living.

“Hey, thanks,” Will says, letting the unholy blade collapse into a line of dirt at his feet. “I’ll be sure not to mention you to Command.” And with a mock salute, he is on his way, kicking up dirt as he drops into a dead run, long strides eating up distance. Within moments, he has disappeared into the tall grasses of the Patchwork prairie.

---

Heaven’s Flight—through the slightest effort of ki, the body’s resources of endurance are extended so dramatically that a Heaven Knight can run for hours on end and barely get his blood up. It isn’t a unique skill: the barbaric tribesmen of the Jathwa learn to do it by instinct; the holy warriors of Michael receive it through prayer; the truly wise, Will reflects, just stay home. Cross-country travel is boring.

And so the inhabitants of a dozen dozen small farms and Patchwork hamlets are treated to a rare sight: a young Arc Knight, dressed in armor seemingly too large and stylized for any human frame, black cape flying straight back from his soaring shoulderplates, flitting from horizon to horizon at a dead sprint, showing not the slightest sign of fatigue… holding a paperbound book before his nose, muttering the words aloud to himself as he reads.

“Let us reason, then, from the principles we have thus far established: that mortals are inferior to dragons; that dragons desire nothing more than dominion over mortals; that dragons have improved the mortal lot, if only to make of them better servants; that the habit of mortal, as much as of dragon, is to chafe at servitude.” Will is watching the road ahead with his peripheral vision; he dashes past a farmer’s cart, sparing a wave for the farmer’s awed son.

“As mortals are inferior to dragons,” he continues, slurring his words to speak as quickly as he reads, “and dragons desire dominion, the current condition is favorable to dragons. But as dragons improve mortal capability, and mortals tend to rebel against tyranny, collective mortal power may become sufficient for such rebellion.”

The psychic honing he received from Dark Eternal has removed his need for such props—the days of mild dyslexia earning him glares from teachers, arm-punches from sisters, and worried looks from his father are long gone. But habits die hard, even as their necessity fades; though he thinks more quickly and deeply than ever before, he still lets his mouth trail along, putting words to Deira Schafthausen’s thoughts.

“Dragons, through Edict, Accord, and breath and claw, oppose the award of such power to the undeserving; but a day may come when mortals as a whole are deserving of it even by dragon standards. This paper will establish a philosophical framework acceptable to both races, wherein such an event may take place. The core of my thesis is simple: that for those mortals who cannot or will not take their place alongside their dragon competitors, dragon rule is both just and right; and that for those mortals who achieve the undreamable dream of Dragonrank, it is to dragons that they owe their greatest debt—and finally, that it is the duty of the mortal race, to dragons, someday to surpass them.”

Will stares at the page for a long moment, while his feet fly below him and scenery flows past like chips in a river. “Okay, that’s bold. I mean, Schafthausen got Dragonrank herself, I think she’s still alive even, so I guess nobody took too much offense, but—!!” Will is stopped dead in his tracks by a thunderous impact, and flies backwards into a long tumbling roll, book flying one direction, him in another.

Even as Will tries to arch his body into a flip to land on his feet, he experiences a moment of freefall, followed by a sudden fall to the ground. He scrabbles at the dirt, trying to get a good foothold on—what’s this?—a forty-five-degree slope! His surroundings haven’t changed, but the force of gravity itself has shifted, causing him to slide slowly back towards his attacker. Will stands cautiously and turns around, Heaven-trained muscles straining against the ever-increasing pull of gravity, Heaven-trained balance keeping him unsteadily erect as the immobile earth itself seems to tilt wildly under him. He forces his eyes to focus on the purple-robed figure ahead of him, but the tortured gravitational field between them causes a rippling like heat-haze. “I know it’s annoying when I read aloud,” he admits, “but you could always just ask me to quit… oof!”

The black orb of compressed gravitational force explodes under him, not harming him, but flipping him into the air, imparting torque and momentum quite beyond his ability for safe landings. Will hits the ground hard, padded resin armor absorbing most of the impact. Heaven training comes to the fore, and instead of gasping, he closes his eyes, focuses his ki, and takes a single deep deep breath. He is about to release it in a one-word spell of cancellation, when he realizes that he’s stopped sliding; the world has stopped shifting around him; and he hasn’t been hit again.

He opens his eyes and looks straight up into upside-down aquamarine eyes. ”..Will!?”

“The very same,” Will replies with a weak wave. “Hello, Amy. Didn’t know you were a Space Mage.”

“That’s Amistrea to you, Arc Knight. An afternoon’s idle pleasure on the slopes of Caravela earned you that familiarity; the seizure of my city’s greatest treasure wipes it out in a heartbeat! And if the marauder had matched your description, heartbeats would be a scarce commodity on this stretch of road, I assure you.” The young woman ill-advisedly kicks Will with a slippered foot, then scowls even more deeply to hide her grimace of pain.

“Sorry about your toe. Um, still, kicking someone in armor….”

“Silence!”

“Right, right. So, um, since you know I didn’t do it…?” Will starts to sit up, but realizes that he is pinned in place by a huge increase in inertia. If he manages to get one arm going through Herculean effort, it’ll keep going unless a similar effort stops it—even if that means ripping free of his body. “By the way, those are some really nice moves you have. I’m extremely impressed.”

“Is that a remark?” Amistrea asks archly, spinning away in a swirl of robes. “We’re done here. You can rot in place for all I care, Arc Knight Will Gerevannin. If you want to taste these lips again, you had better bring the Cosmos Engine as a betrothal gift.”

“So wait, I have to get back your artifact and marry you? What a world… wait! At least tell me what the thief did look like!”

Amistrea has conjured a circle of blue light around her, and as it rises up to envelop her, she calls out, “He was dressed… like you, Will! His hair was gray, but his face was young—convince your Arc Knights that armed robbery isn’t the key to international diplomacy!” And in a crackle of lightning, she is gone, folding space like origami to turn one location…

---

...into another. Will strolls along the ruined streets of Janfair, turning Amistrea’s last words over in his head. Another member of Heaven is collecting Dragon War power stones? “This could be bad,” Will mutters to himself as he plops down onto a hunk of intact masonry to rest.

“That’s as close to non-arrogant as I’ve heard a Heaven Knight get,” a confident voice says. “Maybe this one’s learned humility somewhere. Must have been extracurricular, I know they don’t have any of that at HQ.” A weathered soldier emerges from behind a half-shattered wall, hand hovering near his longsword.

Will jerks his head up. “Damn…” far too late, he extends his Heaven-trained senses to search for danger, and finds it all around him. “All right, gentlemen,” he says as he stands, “you have the drop on me, but that just means I get a little bit angry when I fight you. Maybe hurt you a little worse than usual. You with the bow—are you sure that interests you?”

The bowman startles, then his lip curls into a snarl as he draws his bow a little tighter. “Thought I was hidden,” he mutters, and sips a potion of endurance that makes his skin harden to aged leather.

“And what else do we have… I’m picking up a little holy power—too raw to be Church training, so in this harsh environment I’m going to guess Zadchiel. And I just saw a flash of polearm tip—you know that weapon’s not really good for stealth, right? And, hello, guy, you’re not even trying to hide, are you? Don’t play those drums, I’m going to assume you’re a spellsinger and hit you first.”

“I was trying,” the bard insists with frustration.

“I can see now that we only caught you unawares by chance,” the leader says ruefully. “Nonetheless, we’re here to enter a dialogue that’s all too likely to end in bloodshed. It starts with ‘give those magical artifacts back,’ and ends with…?”

“Ah,” Will’s face lights up with comprehension, “that conversation. You know, I’ve been having that one pretty frequently of late. That and ‘we’d rather not give you our magical artifact.’”

“I guess none of these conversations end well.”

“No, not really. It’s hard to find common ground. We share our concerns, I say ‘well, I want this,’ they say ‘well, it’s ours,’ and I say ‘well, I’ll pay for it,’ and they say ‘well, that’s insulting,’ and I say—” Will’s tone of voice doesn’t change, but his language does—the raw tongue of creation, or one of its countless variants, streams from his lips, and even as the hidden archer looses his arrow, it shatters against Will’s new shield of lightning.

His opponents swarm into action. The halberdier storms from his hiding place, weapon leveled for a charge; the bard strikes up his drums in a rousing tattoo, causing waves of ever-increasing heat to radiate from him; the priest stands, flail spinning in one hand, guardian angel arising from the other; and the warrior at the fore draws his longsword and yells, “Hold!” All action ceases, for a tense moment. “There’s no way we can convince you?”

“I’ve gone through too much to give up now!”

“Then it’s a fight after all,” the swordsman replies, and leads his men into battle.

The fight is closer than an impartial observer might first assume. Will Gerevannin is an Arc Knight, mentally and genetically perfected by his ancient dragon ruler, trained in the most deadly arts of knighthood and magecraft, but his opponents are seasoned Patchwork brawlers, who have fought against the best that troubled region can offer. Singly, together, and at the head of armies, they have risked their lives a hundred times over; one Arc Knight, they feel, is well within their ability.

Will realizes very quickly, as his hastily-summoned earth sword and lightning shield hold his enemies at bay, that such rare confidence could form the difference between victory and defeat. He is accustomed to fighting enemies who are demoralized from the start, by the merest glimpse of his armor—now, for the first time outside a Heaven training ring, he faces people who are not.

“Seems I’ll have to give that mythical 110%,” Will grunts as a mighty halberd blow staggers him, numbing his shield arm.

“Give it to the Pit,” the cleric of Zadchiel roars, swinging a flail whose weighted end burns with the vampiric flames of his rogue patron. Even as the flail bounces off the stress-resistant layers of Will’s resin armor, its impact sends him flying, and its divine powers leach at his soul, draining ki and magic power.

As Will twists into a safe landing, only superhuman instinct lets him raise his baleful magma blade to burn an arrow into ash. The archer had seen the cleric’s attack, and given his shot a lead based on Will’s trajectory… and Will suddenly realizes that not only do his attackers have superior morale, they have superior teamwork as well.

“Time to even the odds,” Will yells, and covers the distance to the sniper in three rapid bounds, his lightning shield disappearing as he drops his concentration. The archer curses and fumbles for his knife as Will rolls over a ridge into the sniper nest. Will’s off-hand now works enchantment, and an ever-shifting geometric aura surrounds the magma sword. Blade and magic work in concert—the hallmark of the Eternal Capital style—and Will’s elemental sword lashes through the archer’s defenses as though they were not present, “piercing” through them with metamagic intensity. With a scream, the archer twists and falls limp, cut and burned by the magical sword.

Will has summoned his “combat sight,” a limited version of the true magical sight used by full mages, and he can see that the archer’s elixir will revive him in thirty seconds. With luck, he calculates, the fight will be over by then. He turns, looking for his next target, in time to block a bolt of holy power with his unholy sword of earth. The two elements cancel out, leaving only the earth element, which decoheres into an explosion of dust. The priest leaps over the ridge, carried by his angel, with the halberdier and swordsman close behind.

“Glad you could all make it perhaps I can invite you for tea leaving so soon what a shame” Will hollers all in one breath, blasting all three attackers away with a shockwave of water vapor drawn from the air around him. He retreats further uphill, dodging behind one of the few buildings still standing, catching his breath in the suddenly arid breeze. “Who are these guys?” he wonders aloud. His right hand falls to rest on his Arcblade, trembles, then rises to form the gestures of another incantation. This time, a sword made of holy power and water ripples into place in his palm—he hopes it will be more resistant to the Zadchiel-priest’s prayers.

chaos

When he regains consciousness, he realizes he has only blacked out for a split-second; just long enough to miss the aftermatch of the building’s explosion. “The bard,” he mumbles thickly, staggering to his feet with burning masonry sliding off him. His water sword is still in his grip, though steam rises from it as specks of red-hot dust fall to the ground all around him. “Guess I let him play just a little too long.” The incendiary drumming fills his ears, he feels heat rippling all around him, building for another strike. If he were in a Rivalon dance club, he’d love it. The drumming, not the spontaneous combustion….

A Heaven Knight’s instincts only become more ferocious as the conscious mind recedes: Will pivots around the halberd’s path and strikes down its wielder with two fierce and ucky blows, then utters a prayer to clear his head and restore his fighting calm. “What the—that’s faerie magic!” the priest exclaims.

“Faerie?” the priest repeats, moving with his ally to attack Will from both sides. “Is Dark Eternal bargaining with Powers now?”

“Pure politics,” Will replies. “You go to church, you make a donation, you get preferential treatment.” His newly-summoned holy sword cuts the chain of the priest’s flail, sending the ball whizzing past the swordsman’s head. “Try it some time, outcast!” Will’s backhand slash is blocked by the guardian angel’s iron rod, but Will picks and rolls into a surprise headbutt that sends the priest falling back with a bloody nose and a dazed expression. The angel fades into uselessness as his summoner is knocked unconscious.

“Okay, smiley,” Will snaps, “it’s you and me now, unless your drummer friend wants to torch us both.” Considering the possibility, Will takes a quick drink of a fire-resistance potion; if the drummer changes his rhythm, Will can always drink another. “Want to at least tell me your name?”

“I am Coris Nightblade, and if I’m to die at your hands, I’ll at least die by that Arcblade you refuse to draw.”

“I am Will Gerevannin, and take this as a compliment—I only draw this sword in service of my own ideals.” Will edges forward, watching Coris for any sign of his own style. Up until now, Coris has shown only martial techniques any soldier might learn… but Will assumes the leader of a band as well-trained as this must certainly have something special at his disposal.

Coris attacks, orthodox forehand and backhand slashes, executed with perfect skill and harmony, but no match for the subtlety and might of Eternal Capital. Coris seems to know it, too—as Will beats him back, deflecting attack after attack, probing his defenses with knowing strikes, Coris gives every impression of accepting his certain defeat.

“So if you’re so certain of defeat, Master Nightblade—why are you fighting at all?” Will’s right hand whips the holy water blade in looping diagonals, spraying seafoam each time it collides with Coris’s. “You gents put up a good start, but if I can beat you before all those elixirs start to kick in…”

Coris continues to give ground, falling back… to stand just before the body of his fallen halberdier. The man isn’t dead; he still lies on the ground, one arm barely attached, life’s blood still oozing slowly from his chest. His condition seems to have stabilized; though barely able to move, he’s slowly, agonizingly, dragging the hand of his severed arm towards his mouth, struggling to get a healing potion to his lips.

“Can’t allow it,” Will says with frustration—killing honest warriors can be a barbaric pleasure in a fair fight, but finishing off the wounded is always hard for him. He strikes Coris’s guard, this time intentionally striking the blade to beat it aside, then continues his motion into a spin, casting as he goes to summon a temporary wall of howling wind. He ends his spin with a vicious kick which sends the wounded man’s maimed arm flopping at an obscene angle. “Forgive me,” Will says, and drives his sword into the man’s heart.

Coris was prepared for this. Even as he leans into the impenetrable wind, he stares at Lehron’s death, as he watched the fall of Sorel and Zachariah. He is the leader. Their lives are his responsibility. Their deaths only fuel his determination to succeed at any cost… and the irony fills his heart with cold yet again, that the very effect their deaths have on him leads him, from time to time, to sacrifice them.

If they knew, he wonders, would they still follow me? His inner power peaks. His anger achieves equilibrium with his fear. Gravin’s drumming, the burning of the building behind him, Lehron Sohya’s death rattle, Will’s curse as he bites back tears—all fade to insignificance. Earplugs, Aaron once told him, receiving only a teenager’s angry distrust at his wry koan. Coris came to understand… and understands now, as Will Gerevannin lets the windwall fade, that whenever it has been important, he hasn’t needed them.

“You have my respect,” Will says. “I deeply wish I had simply run away. You don’t deserve to die here. I hope your priest comes to and revives you.”

“I won’t die here,” Coris says. “Show me your best.”

Will nods, and with arcane glory blazing from his left hand to form a blinding matrix of energies around his sword, he attacks. “Eternal Capital Forbidden Tech: Limited Moon!” Elemental and space magic grants his blade the unstoppable inertia of a falling star, but as it sweeps inexorably toward Coris’s chest, Coris raises his best effort—the Fortress Defense of the Wrenfall style. Inflexible and mighty, the Fortress Defense rejects the slightest sacrifice of position, resulting in the user’s faultless victory… or in apt punishment for his hubris. At the same time, his feet and mind together assume the “Tiger-Killing Stance,” ready to pounce mercilessly upon the slightest opportunity for havoc.

Will’s titantic blow is turned aside by the tiniest possible margin, and as his holy water blade strikes the ground, it explodes from the strain of the technique, ripping a rent in the earth fifty meters long. Instantly, Coris uncoils into the opportunity he’s been granted: he unloads two combination attacks in a row, one granted by the Tiger-Killing Stance, one by his own momentum. This is Coris’s last chance, his Fate Duel if you will, and he’s prepared to battle down to the Critical Wire to win it.

A Sunday Punch rocks Will’s head back—extend—a Dust Attack dodges his reeling counter to bounce harshly off armor plates, a Dead Angle attack (carefully set up by the Dust Attack dodge) is seen just in time for Will to lean away from a peremptory beheading, and a Guard Crush sends Will sprawling, preventing him from dodging the next set of attacks….

A quick set of stabs disrupts Will’s attempt to summon a new sword, wasting his movements like the deadly embrace of quicksand—extend—another Dust Attack puts Coris between Will and Lehron, and forces Will to risk blocking with his armored bracers, and—X Marks the Spot!—draws blood from the embattled Arc Knight’s cheek, and a final Guard Crush… misses.

Will knows these attacks, knows their rhythms, and as he deflects the Guard Crush with one hand he spins and pivots into a technique more familiar than any of Eternal Capital, the Wrenfall Reverse… but before he can draw his Arcblade in a beheading strike, he stops, meets Coris’s eyes, and takes a deep breath. “I definitely can’t use the Arcblade now. Any man with Aaron’s trust has mine as well.”

Coris withdraws slowly into the Fortress Defense, not believing what he just saw—the lad took the best he had to offer and lived, that was expected, but… he did the steps of the Wrenfall Reverse. Even though he didn’t draw his blade… “I will agree as soon as you return what is not yours.”

Will’s cape is ragged and burned; he touches clips and lets it fall to the ground. It pools there like black oil. “If you trust Aaron, then trust I have good reason,” he says. “I will only fight you if forced. Don’t hunt me down again.” He turns and runs away, unsteady, but never looking back.

Coris stands at the ready for long moments before he can will his fingers to loose their deathgrip on his sword. “Emilia Eaglebourne… has a brother… in Heaven? One telegram from Aaron and the world’s gone mad!”

---

“The world’s gone mad,” Will mutters. “Aaron trusted this man enough to teach him Wrenfall… and we almost kill each other!” He doesn’t exaggerate. Coris’s final assault was so brutal and multifaceted that if not for that last Wrenfall Reverse, Will might have taken a meter of steel through his throat.

Though Will’s mind still reels, his footsteps are swift and steady, carrying him ever closer to his destination: Atlantis, City of Flowers.