The Nightmare Lady nodded in grudging agreement.
“Command aura is more powerful,” he said. “Wings are tougher but mostly the same.”
“Time for your Dread Blaze power. It can’t be just the armor plating and increased size.”
“Hmm.” Scorio stilled and focused in upon himself again. He searched for something new… there.
A new potential, the power yearned to be released.
“Here,” he said, “I’d better have some space.”
The Nightmare Lady leaped back to the caldera’s edge, and Scorio inhaled deeply, focused on the new potentiality, and summoned it.
Everything changed. His sense of self, his physicality, his being.
His massive scaled form became pure black flame.
Literal flame, so that for a moment he stood like a burning effigy of himself. Seven or eight feet of shimmering, incandescent black fire, humanoid in shape but otherwise a simple mass of leaping, twirling flames.
The mana draw was terrifying. His reservoir had already been low, and it quickly began to plummet. Scorio reflexively drew on the ambient Iron, sweeping great amounts directly into his Heart, and that slowed the draw but not by much.
But there was more. Scorio intuited a second phase, and released the flames. His body coalesced beneath them so that for a second he wore the black fire as a mantle, but this fled into his mouth, as if he were inhaling the black fire that wreathed him. A moment later and it was completely gone, trapped in the form of a dull knot of pressure just behind his sternum.
It felt like holding his breath. Something he could only maintain for a few moments. The pressure needed release. Wanted out.
Naomi stood against the far wall in her human form once more, steadying herself against the rock as if off-balance. “Scorio?!”
He couldn’t speak. The moment he opened his mouth the pressure would explode forth. Half-panicked, he turned about, then simply tilted his head back and blew the pent-up power forth.
A gout of black flame roared out of his scaled mouth, the first six or so feet a slender stream of virulent blue that then blossomed into fuligin black to billow into a great ball a good ten or so yards in the air above him, a roar that felt endless for as long as it lasted - which was perhaps a second or two.
The pressure beneath his sternum vanished, the last of the flames coursed up into the air, dissipated instantly into curlicues, then vanished, leaving wisps of smoke to emerge from his nostrils.
His throat felt heated but not unpleasantly so, his mouth suffused with a metallic tang, but breathing forth that flame hadn’t been painful, it had been ecstatic.
“Holy shit,” said Naomi numbly.
Scorio’s focus had been ruined, and his draw on the ambient mana lowered to just a trickle. His Heart was nearly guttered, so he focused on both catching his breath and refilling his reservoir as quickly as he could.
“Scorio?” Naomi was still propping herself against the caldera wall. “Did you… did you just blow fire into the air?”
All he could do was nod, his satisfaction savage and grim.
“And before that…” Carefully, almost experimentally, Naomi pushed away from the wall. “You disappeared. You became this… you turned into fire?”
“Felt like it.” He was just now catching his breath. “Felt like my body…” He tried to find the right words. “It felt like I stepped away, disappeared. But it was still me. I… was pure energy, burning…” His shoulders slumped. “It felt amazing.”
Naomi laughed tentatively. “You’ve clearly become no poet. Could you… move?”
“I don’t know. I was so shocked… I think I moved my arm. I’m not sure.”
“Well.” Her manner turned businesslike. “Time to find out.”
“It’s a huge draw on my mana. Much more even than my Shroud.”
“Makes sense. If you’re turning to living flame…” She approached, wonder replacing the shock. “That could be an incredible advantage. Let me know when you’re ready. We need to start experimenting.”
Some part of Scorio wanted to just sprawl out on the floor, to close his eyes and allow the emotions and shock and exhaustion to overwhelm him, but he beat that down beneath the power of his excitement and nodded. He focused on filling his reservoir once more, and realized as he did so that he’d made a dent in the sheer amount of mana here.
He looked up at the darkness with a frown. There were still huge clouds of Iron mana moving in a turgid vortex, but somehow he’d taken a bite out of that huge mass.
“What is it?” Naomi looked up and understood. “Oh. You weren’t kidding about the mana expenditure.”
“I’ll have to keep that in mind. I’m going to need to be really tactical about its use.”
“Or never leave these calderas. Ready?”
“Ready.” He rolled his huge shoulders, enjoying the pleasant constraint of his armor plating, and then exhaled. “Here I go.”
Engaging the Delightful Secret Marinating technique so that he was drawing as much as he could directly into his Heart, he summoned forth the flames once more.
And they were there, waiting for him, hidden deep in the essence of his very being. This time, he was able to analyze the way it felt, and realized the flames, as they came roaring forth, felt like him. Were him. As if they were his essence, something true and profound about his very being.
But then they consumed him once more, and he became pure fire. Black and shimmering, his body replaced by a dense inferno constrained to his shape, he stood and felt again that overwhelming rush of power, that heady sense of exaltation.
Naomi flowed up instantly into her Nightmare Lady form and slashed her tail blade through his chest.
The blade found no resistance. He felt it pass through him like one might feel a breeze upon his skin. The blade tore free, trailing fire, and the Nightmare Lady hissed in obvious pain.
But Scorio couldn’t hold the form for much longer. It was all he could do to remember to move, and in a panic, his mana drain already having sucked a third of his Heart’s reservoir, he leaped straight up. There were no muscles in play, but still he felt limited in some sense, incapable of just flying straight up. His fiery body soared, higher than he might normally manage, but still caught by the bonds of gravity.
At the peak of his leap he inhaled desperately, sucking the flames into his saurian mouth. They didn’t require swallowing; he became physical as they fled into him, so that their passage was more a consequence of his will, and then they streamed down his throat and into his chest to burn behind his sternum once more.
Scorio landed clumsily in a crouch and nearly toppled over. It felt like trying to balance a giant bucket filled to the brim with oil. It was all he could do to remain still, down on one knee, his left arm outflung for balance.
“Scorio?” The Nightmare Lady was backing away. “Hold it. See how long you can keep from blowing the flames out.”
Scorio nodded, but even that felt precarious. The pressure in his chest was growing, growing. He checked his Heart. At least the terrific mana draw had ceased. He’d encapsulated as much mana as he needed to summon the flames, and now that he had them within his chest, it was as if he had a second reservoir of sorts, but one that was screaming to be released.
He couldn’t hold the flames back any longer. Again he tilted his head back and gave vent to their livid fury, the first six or seven feet streaming up with wicked pressure in a slender beam of cerulean blue to then burst out into a raging mass of black flame some ten or so yards above him.
The flames had their own roar, as if they consumed the air with vengeful delight, and this time Scorio moved his head from side to side. The initial blue steam tracked with the movements of his head, but the black flames beyond lagged behind, so that the ebon river of fire curved and swayed back and forth in the air.