There was no end to the Gold.
If he split the stream he’d Ignite and fill his Heart, compacting the Gold in his reservoir without the gel’s ameliorating effect. It would expand his reservoir till it ruptured, then his Heart would shatter and he’d die.
If he could even control it without the gel’s help.
Nox, where are you when I need you most?
Nox failed to appear.
Scorio watched the Gold tunnel its way ever closer.
There had to be a solution. A variation on the Marinating Technique. What had Ydrielle said? That it was an advanced technique Tomb Sparks shouldn’t know about. She used it herself to fly The Sloop, siphoning enough to Ignite and then diverting the rest into the compression tanks…
Scorio stilled once more. What if he did the same? Instead of pouring Gold into his Heart, what if he poured it into something else?
It could be done.
He’d watched Ydrielle do it for days on end.
But into what? There were no compression tanks around.
What else could drink of the Gold?
The rocks around him glowed with power; they were utterly saturated. No room there.
Then?
Scorio’s gaze was locked straight ahead.
On the saurians.
Each drank of the Gold, rested, expended the mana, then dove back into the lava.
They were compression tanks.
Living tanks.
Scorio wanted to whoop.
Could he direct the mana that far? Up to the ledges?
Probably not. His control would be rough, fevered, limited by the very power of the Gold.
Perhaps a saurian would swim by just in time?
No, that hope was true madness.
Then?
Scorio didn’t know.
His mind wrestled with the idea, replayed Ydrielle’s technique over and over. The tanks were right below her feet. She just diverted the stream straight down. And she was a Dread Blaze of uncommon talent at mana manipulation.
How was he, a Tomb Spark with a near-ruined Heart, going to duplicate that feat on a vastly bigger scale?
The Gold tunneled closer.
Pressed against the final membrane that separated Scorio from the coffin proper.
Desperate, Scorio tried to think, to plan, but his thoughts fell apart before his panic.
Nothing. He had no idea.
No real plan on how to handle that limitation.
The Gold burned through the membrane, and opened a tiny hole, and a needle-jet of Gold mana blasted directly into his core.
Scorio couldn’t even scream.
The Gold seared his Heart. Desperate, he sought to engage the Secret Delightful Marinating Technique.
But this time he had no guidance from the Imperial gel. He shaped and sculpted that line of fire and guided it into his Heart instead of letting it cut it apart.
There was no time to hesitate. He Ignited and his Heart nearly burst apart. It pulsed like a living organ, coruscating golden light shafting forth from every crack, every fissure, every pitted hole. The inside began to melt.
And more Gold kept coming.
Scorio vibrated within the coffin’s confines.
The Gold was coming in at a rapid rate, the pinhole widening by the moment.
Death. Here it was. The word reverberated through Scorio’s mind, over and over and over: Death!
But no. He couldn’t clench his jaw, couldn’t brace against the pain, but now that he was here, on life’s very edge, he found that he couldn’t let go. Couldn’t go down without a fight.
With a soul scream he split the Gold. It was like swinging a blade at the sun-wire. He slashed it in twain, a sliver going to fuel his Ignition, the rest coiling within his reservoir.
His Heart was fracturing even further.
Scorio was frantic, his mind a moth fluttering desperately within cupped hands, his body thrumming with more power than he’d ever experienced, yet he couldn’t expend it, couldn’t burn it off, couldn’t rise into his scaled form even, and by the gods, by the ten hells, more Gold kept coming, there was no end to it—
Scorio reached forth in utter desperation with his Heart’s straining sense and found them augmented by the Gold, clear beyond all belief even as he died upon the richest funeral pyre in all of the Rascor Plains.
There.
The very hole that allowed the Gold in allowed his power out.
Raging, thrashing like a blinded bull, he flung his aura through that hole and out into the cavern.
COME.
His command was freakish in its power, its desperate, bloody authority. COME TO ME.
His Heart was lost in the smoke of its own immolation. His reservoir was already straining, pushed to bursting like a pig’s bladder.
Scorio strained, writhed, burned.
COME.
His mind flailed in the space outside the coffin. His command was an indiscriminate whip, lashing in every direction.
Then.
A presence. Dumb, ponderous as a menhir, massive as the inside of a sun.
A Gold-fiend.
The saurian breached the magma’s surface. Had it been compelled, or come because it was merely curious?
Didn’t matter.
Scorio switched techniques. Adapted Nox’s Secret Marinating approach and stumbled rough-shod into Ydrielle’s splitting.
The mana that fell into his Heart became his own; his to command even if he couldn’t burn it off in time, couldn’t store it, even if it killed him.
But he could direct it.
And he sent it streaming back out the pinhole, coughing, drowning, thrusting it against the flow of impersonal ambient Gold and back out into the world.
He couldn’t simply spill it out into the air. The mana needed a target.
The saurian sufficed.
The Gold mana speared into the fiend which slowed and hissed with pleasure.
Scorio’s mind skated over a sheen of icy control wrapped around a conflagration of panic and pain.
The Gold mana poured into the saurian, slowing but not emptying out his Heart.
Stasis. He shared the pinhole with the incoming stream so that the same amount poured in as went out.
The saurian was all but wriggling in pleasure, thrashing its tail as it filled up on refined Gold.
For a second Scorio reeled, felt a pang of relief. Was it enough?
No.
His Heart was still collapsing. If it had been ruined before, it was all but shattered now; only the power that the Gold’s own Ignition allowed him to hold it together.
But his reservoir was strained to the utmost.
Any second now it was all going to explode.
Scorio couldn’t scream. Couldn’t do anything but muster the wherewithal to splice the mana stream into three.
A third went into his Heart, incandescing it and filling his with furious, riotous power. The remaining two thirds went against the incoming flow and then split while still within the prism.
The strain was terrible. To cycle those two thirds through his Heart felt like swallowing an endless string of live coals.
But as soon as that mana entered the prism he split it in twain, sent half out to the Saurian and curled the other half around to loop back toward himself.
He couldn’t direct mana outward through the membrane. But Gold could burn its way back in.
He needed a second exit.
His Heart was ashing. Chunks fell off. Scorio had never been so grateful for its ability to vent mana unused. The more abused it became, the more it poured right back out.
The pain was so deep, so terrible, that it existed in his mind like a constant lightning strike of white, numbing agony.
His needle of Gold burned its way through the coffin’s substance. It cored through much faster, directed now by his will, and just as Scorio began to black out, his grip loosening, his focus growing dim, it burned through.
Scorio fumbled, nearly lost all control so that the Gold would have simply blasted him apart, but instead changed his pattern.
A sliver for his Heart.
Half the remaining mana against the natural incoming flow of the Gold.
The rest out through the new hole, burning a path toward the coffin’s surface.