“I need…” The blazeborn girl rose smoothly to her feet. Her hair slid up the boulder with her, but soon resumed oozing forth once more. “I need to grow. I can’t handle this… this intensity, in this form.”
“Oh.” Scorio didn’t know what to say. “You’re going to grow. I mean, you’re probably growing right now…”
Xandera bowed her head, closed her eyes, and then a wave of power washed out from her, staggering Scorio as if a silent explosion had just detonated. Her hair became bright yellow at her scalp, gradating down to orange at the tips, which cut off at her waist, the rest of the rivulets that had run down the boulder immediately hardening to black stone.
And she grew. Rose several inches in height, her skin lightening with a subtle purple richness, her large, wide-set eyes mellowing out to perfect yellow, her frame becoming that of a twelve-year-old, a dress of perfectly black stone forming around her.
“Wow.” Scorio felt grossly out of his depth. “That’s, yeah. Definitely growing.”
“Better.” Xandera closed her fists and then flexed her fingers, admiring the length of her arms, then smoothed her hand down her black dress. She glanced up at him through her locks of golden hair. “Why did I entrust you with myself?”
“It’s a long story.”
“I would hear it.”
“Yeah.” Scorio sat back down, mindful of the waves of dry heat that were baking off the slender young woman. “Sure. I first met you when I was being given a tour of the Fury Spires by a Great Soul called Bravurn, or the Iron Tyrant…”
Scorio recounted everything. Everything that Xandera had told him of the blazeborns’ past, their origin, their development of the Everqueen ideal, the internecine wars, Bravurn’s coming. How her spires had been conquered, her sister-selves killed, and she alone kept as a prisoner under Bravurn’s control. How he’d come to her and what they’d shared, how she’d agreed to let him delve under the spires, and in doing so revealed to him her evolved Titans. He’d honored this show of trust, and how she’d offered to help him when he dueled Plassus to the death. How her aid had provoked Bravurn to slay her, and how she’d entrusted her sole queen egg to a drudge that had delivered it to him, along with her dying words.
“So I bundled the egg—you—up in my pack and left. My kind has been fighting a True Fiend here in the Telurian Band. Everything went to hell though when he sent his fiends surging as one along the western flank of the Bone Plains to attack the war camp. We escaped, hunted him down, and he tried to kill me with Noumenon, which you absorbed. I ran away with you so that my kind wouldn’t take you and… I don’t know, destroy you, or enslave you. And here we are.”
Xandera had crouched down, arms wrapped around her shins, chin resting on her knees, her gaze unblinking as she watched him, her hair luminous, the air about her shimmering with heat.
For a long while she remained still, only her hair flowing turgidly down to its dips, darkening as it went, and there fading away into the air, or perhaps being reabsorbed into her essence. Finally, she blinked and sat up.
“Why have you helped me?”
“Because… it felt like the right thing to do.”
“So all your kind are wrong?”
“I mean, I think so. In this. Maybe it’s because I was punished when I was born for being a Red Lister.”
She raised a dark eyebrow, and Scorio sighed. “I’ll try to make this one quick.” And he sketched out his own birth, the Archspire, how he was thrown through the Final Door to die, his escape and rise to power.
“You were once treated badly, so now you don’t like to see others abused.”
Scorio scratched the back of his head. “I’d like to think my sense of right and wrong would still be part of me even if I’d been welcomed into the Academy. But seeing how you were kept like a pet by Bravurn, how he toyed with you…”
Scorio froze.
“What?” asked Xandera.
“The Blood Ox. He said I’d broken someone’s toy. That they’d asked him to ruin me. Do something especially nasty.”
“You think it was this Bravurn who asked?”
“I broke his toy. That’s how he would put it. How he’d blame me for ruining his control over you.” Anger and confusion, disgust and horror arose within him. “But that would mean he was in communication with the Blood Ox…”
And several mysteries revealed themselves. It would explain how the Blood Ox knew the attack was coming. Why he’d pull his forces from the eastern Wall and LastRock to hurl them against the war camp, even as he cut and ran with his Gold-tempered fiends, starved as they were…
“By the gods,” whispered Scorio. “His Gold mana. Bravurn’s accumulated a vault of it. I don’t even know how much. If he’s promised it to the Blood Ox…”
“It would explain why the True Fiend would help him,” said Xandera.
“And why he’d strike north at long last. That much Gold mana would revitalize his fiends, allow him to lead them into the Rascor Plains at full strength… but why?” Scorio raked his fingers through his hair. “Why would Bravurn give his Gold to the Blood Ox?”
“I don’t know,” said Xandera. “He sounds like a bad person.”
“No kidding.” Scorio rose and began to pace, his racing emotions forcing him into movement. “We’re, what, almost two days from the Fury Spires by whale ship. But they move much faster than people walk. That’s, well…” He tried to work out the math. How long it had taken them to ride the Manticore’s sloop to the Chasm from Bastion, the distance? “Perhaps eight days’ walk back to the Fury Spires? Say six if the fiends go fast.”
Xandera watched him, curious, silent.
“Should we go warn the Imperators?” Scorio stopped at the edge of the mesa and gazed out over the Telurian Band’s raw landscape. “Or do they already know? Are they chasing him, or did they give it up? That’d mean heading back to where we fought, but by now they’d have started heading to LastRock. Or we could head to the war camp. What’s left of it. Try to find someone who is in contact with Moira…?”
Irresolute he turned back to Xandera. The blazeborn queen had been listening, but now she rose sinuously to her feet, slender and girlish, but somehow with a latent presence that felt fell and imposing.
“I will not go with you to these places.” She said this without rancor. “I will travel to my hive.”
“Which is where the True Fiend is going.”
She shrugged one bare shoulder. “It’s where I belong. I can feel the pull. I am their queen. I want to see it before I decide whether to start anew.”
“We’re six days out. Even if we run, we’ll not get there before the Blood Ox and his army.” Scorio tried to fight down his frustration. “That’s not the kind of reception you want.”
Xandera smiled, delighted. “You think I would run there?”
Which caused Scorio to hesitate. “Can you… fly? I mean, I can, but I don’t think I could carry you. You’d cook me alive.”
Xandera stretched forth an arm again, turned it about as she admired herself. “I wouldn’t run. Blazeborns do not fly. We would swim there.”
Scorio bit back his immediate response. There were countless lakes stretching toward the horizon on the ground below, some connected, others isolated, a few just plain massive so that they reflected the tortured sky with near perfect clarity. “Swim?”
Xandera’s smile grew impish. “Through the veins of Acherzua.” She pointed. “Down there. Where the fireblood of hell flows.”
“Oh. Oh!” Scorio pressed his palm to his brow. “I see. You’d descend to the… there are lava rivers below us?”
“There are. I can sense them.” She extended her hand, palm downward, and the air beneath shimmered. “Deep below us. They flow north. We would descend into them, and swim home.”
“I mean, that’s a great plan. But I, ah, don’t swim in lava.”