“Fifty to a company. There are some thousand of us all told? Twenty companies?”
“That’ll be explained in camp.” Taron clapped Scorio on the shoulder as he pushed off the railing. “I just like to get to know my people before heading out for battle. I’ll be checking in on you. Let me know if anything comes up.”
“One last question.”
Taron leaned his hip against the railing and gave him an upnod. “Ask away.”
“Becoming a Pyre Lord.” Scorio felt almost embarrassed about asking. “I’ve never discussed it seriously with anyone. Never thought I’d reach Dread Blaze like I did. Can you share…?”
“What it takes?” Taron smirked. “I was hoping you’d ask. Nothing befits a Great Soul more than boundless ambition. Sure. What do you know so far?”
“That it involves a special mana manipulation technique, where you pour mana directly into your ignited Heart instead of into your reservoir. And that you need to integrate all your powers into your sense of self.” Scorio scratched the back of his head. “That’s all I’ve got, though.”
“You’ve got the right of it. But this is one of those challenges that’s easily described, and hard to effect. You know that the majority of Great Souls don’t pass beyond Dread Blaze?”
“Yes.”
“There are dozens of theories why, but I think it comes down to a lack of imagination. We manifest all our disparate powers, right? Some few are lucky, and they all are clearly interlinked. They form a seamless whole. Others, however, have what feels like a motley assortment. Whatever you manifest, however, you need to find the singular core to it all. You need to reimagine yourself as a new being. A being whose essence is revealed by their powers. It’s an epiphany you’re after. And alas, it’s not enough to just make guesses and hope they’ll stick.”
“I see. So I need to look at all my powers and figure out what they make me?”
“Figure out who the you is that blends them all into a seamless whole. Often there are clues in your previous trials. Sometimes instincts will pull you toward certain experiences that will make your true essence emerge. Some people might be drawn to heights, others to certain weapons, and so on. It varies. But when you have that epiphany, when everything slides home and you feel like you’re waking up for the first time, that’s when you need to activate that special channeling technique so as to empower your transition to Pyre Lord.”
Scorio nodded dubiously.
“The vast majority of Great Souls sprint to Dread Blaze within their first five years. Then they stall out, often for five, six, seven more years as they wrestle with who and what they are. So don’t give yourself a hard time if you haven’t figured it out within the next month, alright?”
“Sure,” smiled Scorio. “I’ll try not to.”
“Liar.” Taron grinned. “Let me know if you have any further questions. It’s all awfully vague advice, but it makes complete sense in hindsight.”
“Okay.” Scorio watched as Taron unclipped and walked away, the wind ruffling the man’s white hair. He could fight under that man, at least for a short while. Be part of a company of fifty. As one of the ten Dread Blazes, he’d be pivotal to the company’s success.
Scorio fought a sudden shiver. It was really happening. They were flying south to the Telurian Band, where their forces would be broken up and sent out into the Bone Plains to battle the enemy.
Scorio had seen plenty of violence since incarnating. Duels to the death, running battles against small groups, skirmishes aplenty.
But war?
He’d never seen anything on that scale.
And he’d be hard pressed to deny a frisson of excitement. What would the fiends be like? How did it work? How would the company blend its powers together? For how long would they fight before having to fall back?
With questions tumbling through his mind Scorio gazed sightlessly at the cliffs, then turned to study those on the deck.
A face caught his attention. Oval, so densely freckled that the marks became a smear across the bridge of her nose, her lips a small bow, her black hair falling into a ponytail whose length was trapped every few inches by a fresh band, so that it looked as if a series of black spheres ran down her back.
The woman walked with graceful poise past Scorio, not glancing at him as she went. Scorio felt a chill at her passage; nothing supernatural, just a physical reaction to a true predator moving past.
Where did he know her from? Why did she have such an effect on him?
He watched her back, nonplussed, and then the memory came to him: House Hydra’s Great Hall as he followed Druanna in for vengeance, Praximar expostulating as he rose to this feet, hundreds of Great Souls in attendance.
He’d caught sight of that woman before she shifted into a being so nightmarish she’d given the Nightmare Lady a run for horror: the Shadow Petal, armed with a blade that bypassed armor, and a second that cut through mana.
“Oh, damn,” he whispered, watching as the small woman descended below decks. Then it made sense: the Shadow Petal served House Kraken. Plassus had no doubt demanded that their best warriors all join this final war effort.
The Shadow Petal. The most feared warrior in all of Bastion. Here, on the Dread Majesty, going to war against the Blood Ox.
The thought should have cheered him, but he could still remember vividly how the Shadow Petal had rammed her blade through Nissa’s chest and lifted her from the ground like an impaled bug, her skull-like visage expressing no remorse, no hatred, nothing at all.
“Damn,” he whispered again, and couldn’t decide if he wanted her in Taron’s company or not.
* * *
The Dread Majesty clove the dusky airs and cut a path straight south. The next two days were quiet. Taron’s prediction proved correct: no fiend dared challenge the whale ship. Scorio spent as much time as he could wrestling with Taron’s words, trying to understand some new and revolutionary truth about himself, but it was more an exercise in frustration than anything else.
With three pilots on board, the Dread Majesty never ceased its southward sojourn, and it was late one afternoon when they finally reached the end of the Iron Weald.
The cliffs, their ubiquitous companions, ran tall and fearsome right up till the end, only to suddenly fall apart, as if giants had taken world-spanning hammers to their faces and demolished them without ceremony. Huge fissures gave way to great rents. Massive chunks of gray stone littered the valley floor, some as big as the Fiery Shoals citadel itself, and then the cliffs simply sank into the ground and were no more.
Beyond lay the Telurian Band.
Scorio, Naomi, and many others new to this layer of hell crowded the prow, eyes wide.
The skies broadened abruptly and developed a sense of vast scale that made Scorio want to shrink back. Clouds rose higher and higher, huge anvils of curdled majesty, an inverted world of crevasses and swirling mountains. The Telurian sun, refulgent, was perpetually hidden, but its brilliance lit up the heavens like a murder scene; the endless cloudscape burning umber and orange, burnished gold and virulent crimson.
Below it spread a hint of what was to come: endless chains of shallow lakes whose surfaces were broken by rocky outcroppings, interspersed between ridges and towering mesas whose striated flanks descended from bloody red through cadmium yellow to chalky white just where they met the shorelines. Every edge was razor sharp, every aspect of the land new-forged and harsh.
Leaning out over the railing, Scorio peered toward the horizon. Only half a mile south, a thick forest sprang up, endless ranks of gray, leafless trees that seemed to march rank upon rank toward infinity, cloaking the hillsides, swarming up alongside the lakes, choking the valleys.