Lines of script connected them to a circle in the center. It shone with a column of liquid blue-white power.
Pure madra.
This whole device was for madra purification, and it was meant for Little Blue. It was the last step to prepare her to advance to Herald.
After that, it would be down to Lindon to push her the rest of the way.
She opened Lindon’s void key, which was stored nearby, and took out some of the Archlord natural treasures. There weren’t many left. She let the quicksilver fire bathe her, which was only a sort of warm, shivery feeling at this point. Nothing like the dramatic transformation she’d felt the first time.
But she wanted to be as stable as possible when she went in.
“You should wait,” Orthos advised her. “If I don’t cycle this power now, it will leave my control and injure me. If you enter now, I won’t be able to help you.”
She gave him a laugh. How could he help her anyway? Maybe if Lindon were here, he could save her if something went wrong, but there was too much power involved in this transformation for Orthos to handle.
Orthos snorted smoke. “You don’t really want to do this alone, do you?”
She hesitated. He wasn’t wrong. Even if he couldn’t help, it would be an encouragement for her to have someone with her.
But she firmed her resolve. This was a test of her will. To see if she could make it to the next level.
A voice echoed out from elsewhere on the island. “Alone?” Noroloth’s Remnant flew closer, peeking his overly large head into the cavern entrance. “It sounds like you could use the assistance of a powerful dragon.”
He hesitated before adding, “You will tell your master that I helped, won’t you?”
Orthos glared at him.
Blue gave him a reassuring pat on the foot, let out a chime of confidence, and strode into the column of blue-white light. Soon, all this power would be hers.
Instantly, she was buried in the conflicting wills of six Remnants, all more powerful than her. They were weakened by the scripts and devices, otherwise their wills would crush her directly, but together their attention was heavy.
Noroloth lightened the weight more, but not too much. The pressure was the point.
The bound Remnants screamed at her, and Blue screamed back. Not in fear. She matched them for intensity.
They should hurry up and give her their power.
She had somewhere to be.
The sixth page of the Book of Eternal Night wasn’t as large as the nightmare labyrinth buried in the fifth page. It was only one room, though it had two purposes: to prepare Mercy for Archlord and to teach her a technique.
She sat in the center of a six-sided room. Each of the walls was a black-tinged mirror, and each one reflected herself in a different scene.
When Mercy focused on one, she was drawn inside, and she took over another body. Another her.
This time, she hovered above a jungle on a dark cloud condensed from aura. She was an Archlady, but there was gray in her hair, and the weight of a lifetime hung behind her.
She couldn’t access specific memories—not unless the vision allowed her to—but she could feel them there. It felt like she really had lived a long life, and that the world outside was the illusion.
Mercy raised Suu, her old companion. She pulled a string back and Forged an arrow onto the center. She wove the techniques together deftly, with the skill of long practice. One, two, three, four, five…six.
A green dragon erupted from the forest beneath, where he had thought himself concealed. Garrylondryth, the Rootfather. Once the right hand of the Dragon King, but now a leader barely holding his flock together.
The green dragon Herald unleashed a breath of bright emerald energy that flowed over her in a river, but Mercy focused madra on her feet and stepped through shadow.
Shadestep. The technique on the sixth page of the Book of Eternal Night, and a technique that Malice had only learned to imitate when she became a Sage. For one step, Mercy borrowed the intangibility of shadow and slipped through space itself, reappearing nearby.
The Herald had plenty of combat experience, and this battle would be a long one, but the first strike was hers. Mercy released her arrow, which flew like a falling star.
Garrylondryth swept his tail at the arrow, carrying his mighty will, but the arrow had the Shadestep technique applied to it as well. It ceased to exist for just an instant, then rematerialized and continued its path uninterrupted.
The missile crashed into green scales and the dragon roared in pain.
Mercy held onto the vision longer, absorbing herself into the feeling of controlling an Archlady’s spirit. Her sense of purpose was strong and comforting, like a warm blanket of reassurance. She was confident in what she wanted and who she was.
And in the family behind her.
She could only hold the vision so long before it faded, and the memory of her faith in the Akura clan stabbed her in the gut. It was the trust Malice wanted her to have. So did Mercy herself. She would love to trust her family that much.
But she didn’t.
She meditated on everything she had learned in the vision for a moment. How it felt to control so much madra so effortlessly, and the advantages of a body thrice reforged in soulfire.
Then she faced a second mirror.
In this one, she was only a few years older than her current self. She found herself in an arena that reminded her of the Uncrowned King tournament, and she faced down an Archlord on a sword Path.
She danced around him. Her armor was more solid than it had ever been, her arrows stronger, and she could feel a mysterious authority working through her with every shot she took with her bow. The Bow Icon, which slowly grew closer as she fought.
In the back of her mind, Mercy felt herself grow through the battle, and she tried to get a sense of her Archlord revelation.
The mind she had in this dream reality rejected the idea. Forcing advancement? It was a foolish road.
Time and experience would give her the self-insight she needed to determine her future. The Archlord revelation was as much about choosing the path she would walk for the rest of her life as it was identifying the path she was on. If she rushed her decision, she would regret it. At worst, a poorly chosen revelation might even cap her future potential.
When the vision ended, Mercy felt her other self’s disapproval recede. There were six visions here. Six different versions of herself, all fighting for her family in different ways and with subtly different abilities. Sometimes she was closer to Sage than Herald, and other times she took her advancement more slowly as an Archlady to focus on governing territory.
All of them agreed that she should take things one step at a time. Her family would be best served if she steadied her advancement.
Mercy sat in the center of the mirrors and chewed on the visions. The world began to shake around her; the page was rejecting her. She had stayed long enough, and the Book wanted her to leave and consolidate what she learned.
She pitted her will against the Book of Eternal Night and remained exactly where she was.
I am not Malice, she thought. I am Mercy. Her Overlord revelation.
Where did she go from there? What would it look like in the future for her to be herself?
The trembling of the Book didn’t get softer. It intensified by the second until she couldn’t hold it anymore. When her consciousness was kicked out of the sixth page, back to the pocket world, she found herself sitting in a cycling position on bare stone.
Ziel sat across from her, eyes closed, meditating among the fading spatial cracks where the portal had once stood. Silver runes and green ones spun around him in intricate loops.
When she saw him, she was ashamed. She had said she was going to advance and borrow her mother’s power as though it were simple, as though she could do whatever she wished. She’d talked like she was Yerin, or Lindon, who could just push their way through advancement realms with sheer stubbornness.