The rumbling had not stopped. Each second only made it grow, until the lanterns swung on their hooks and every child was screaming. I was moving forward before the third rumble hit -some ancient instinct pressing me forward.
The sky above Hamel split. It split with light -a searing column of gold and black flame that tore down from the clouds and struck just north of where we all were. The impact shook the ground hard enough to buckle my knees. Most of the villagers who stood simply fell over. The fire in the village square winked out. That blazing column folded in on itself, and from its centre, something rose.
It was a bird. That was the first thought. The last simple one I would have for some time.
The creature stood twice the height of the huts. Its wingspan, even half-folded, cast a shadow that swallowed the square whole. Feathers covered it in layers, and half of those feathers shone with a gold so pure it hurt my eyes to look upon. The other half were black -a rotting black that glistened wet. Droplets of that darkness fell to the ground below, and where they met the world, the world screamed.
Its body shifted between the two, between that gold and black, the two colors warring across its skin. Where the gold touched the black, the feathers curled and smoked. The creature had a curved beak, and three golden eyes on the left side of its skull, stacked in a column, each eye was a different size. There were two black eyes on the right.
It opened its beak and screeched and it was not the roar of a beast about to raze a village. It was the sad cry of something in pain. In agony I could not understand, and would never want to.
I had heard a Goddess weep once and it had sounded less broken than this. This was a Divine Beast of some kind, clearly. I could feel that much, even now, though I had never before seen this beasts’ like in my time.
The creature took one step and the earth cracked beneath its talons. Its head swept left, then right, all in jerky motions. The pupils in its many eyes contracted and expanded, none of them in sync with the other.
I felt my mana surge inside me on instinct -it answered me, thin and sluggish. The marks on my arms pulsed once and went still. Two of the village guards charged before anyone else moved. The only two guards this village had.
The first was a broad man. I had seen him patrolling the wall in the mornings. He had a sword and a yellow Spark that glowed faintly on his left forearm as he ran. He drove the blade into the creature's leg. The blade merely bounced off.
The creature did not look at him. Its wing moved casually, almost lazily. The man left the ground and did not come back down gently. He hit the wall of a hut and slid to the base of it. He did not rise.
The second guard was smarter, or perhaps more cowardly. She circled wide, shouting for the villagers to run. Her mark flared and a gust of wind from her outstretched hands struck the creature's flank. It ruffled some feathers. The creature's head turned and the guard ran.
"Get out!" she screamed, already sprinting toward the nearest cluster of villagers. "Move! Take the southern path! Fuck, move!"
The village broke at that cry. Mothers scooped children and old men hobbled to get away -Tom was pulling Martha by the arm. I realized that Sara’s hand was no longer in mine. I saw her running, moving towards the rushing throng. Good. She was smart.
The creature watched the people scatter before it. Its head tilted and the wail came again, softer this time, and somehow more pained.
Its feathers ignited -the gold ones caught first. The flame was white at the edges and something past white at the center. The black feathers followed, and their fire was darker. The two fires crawled across its body and met in the middle. I had seen Hellfire and Balefire- the two strongest flames the system had. I had commanded those flames. I had burned cities with flames hotter than the core of any mortal furnace.
This was not that. This was something that should not have existed at all.
Ash reached me before I reached the creature. She had her sword drawn. I did not know when she'd retrieved it. Her eyes were fixed on the beast, her body was low, her weight was shifted forward.
"It's a Divine Beast," she said. Her voice was steady but her hands were not.
"And more." I murmured. The corrupted Elk in the forest had been wrong. There was no word for what stood in front of us now.
The creature itself was a phoenix, or had been one -that was the closest name I had for it. Even in my time, they had been myth.
"Everyone’s running, but the crowd will slow them all down," Ash said. "We just buy them some time. That's all."
"That's all?" I bared my teeth. "I intend to kill the thing." I put all the bravado I did not feel into the words.
Ash did not argue -perhaps she knew it would be pointless. I ran forward.
Mana flooded my legs. Most of my reserves were the thin, weak mana of this world, but that was enough to carry me forward faster than any normal body could move. I closed the distance in a single stride.
The creature saw me and all five of its eyes fixed on me at once. I reached for its leg. My right hand found the joint where its talon met scale, and I pushed the Requiem into it. The mark responded. Sluggishly, but it responded. I felt something drain from me as the decay took hold. The scales beneath my fingers began to grey and the flesh softened. It was too slow.
The creature's leg ignited beneath my hand just as I pulled it back. The flame ate the decayed flesh before the rot could spread and replaced it with new growth in the same breath. In its place were fresh scales, brighter than the ones that had been there before.
The heat had not burned through my layer of mana, but only just. My fingers trembled.
I shifted to its other side and tried again, this time to the other leg. My hand pressed flat against its flank. The Requiem pulsed and decay spread an inch and the fire swallowed it whole. The creature's wing came down. I threw myself sideways. The wingtip caught my shoulder and spun me, making me hit the dirt and roll on the ground. From the ground, I saw Ash move.
Her sword caught the brilliant light as she closed in from the creature's blind side. Her swing did not glow crimson with sword aura -I knew she had none left. She pressed the blade's edge against the base of the creature's left wing and drew it across. I felt mana, and one of her marks flared.
The wing severed and fell. It separated from the body in silence. There was no resistance -one moment it was attached and the next, it lay on the ground, still burning and twitching like a severed limb. The creature wailed again. It stumbled as dark blood poured from the stump. For half a breath, I thought we had a chance.
The severed wing caught fire, and where it had been was now only ash. Then the ash moved. It rose from the ground in a spiral, drawn back toward the creature's body, struck the stump where the wing had been, and clung there. The wing reformed.
There were two wings now, from that one stump. Both were larger than what had just been. One was brilliant gold, the other that sickly black. The joint where they met the body was wrong, bending in a direction that simply made no sense.
Ash had moved even before the left wing had come back. She targeted the right this time. The wing fell cleanly. It barely even hit the ground before it started to burn. The smoke rose and returned. The creature that stood before us now had four wings instead of two, sprouted at jagged, unnatural angles.
"Lily." Ash's voice had changed and the steadiness was gone. It was shaking. "We can't do this."
I was on my feet. My shoulder ached where the wing had clipped me. "You strike it again and I'll hold longer this time."
"You're not listening!" Ash stepped back. Her sword hung at her side. "We are making this worse. It'll keep coming back."
"Then we kill all of it at once."
"With what?" She demanded. "With what?"
I did not have an answer. I knew there was none. I had my pride, but I was not a fool. I wanted to run. I wasn’t even in my battle dress, I was in rags, and the closest thing to a weapon I could get my hands on was a stick. There was no shame in running when the odds were impossible.
Truthfully, I did not understand how this thing hadn’t already killed us.
The creature had turned away from us now and its four wings were spread wide. The fires across its body flared, gold and black. It was looking south toward the fleeing villagers, who were practically stumbling over themselves now to flee.
"We can still run," Ash said. That was not what I would have expected from a Hero.
"We can't run," I said distantly. The words came from me before I even knew to voice them. I knew what this fool Hero was doing. She was going to ask me to run, and then give herself to some noble sacrifice. Heroes were ever in a rush to get themselves killed.
Ash stared at me, really stared. "Suppose we can't."
I was already moving again.
The evacuation had stalled at the southern edge of the village.
There were too many people and too few paths. Some of the older men were trying to funnel the crowd through a gap in the low wall, but the gap was narrow, and the crowd had crushed together. I could see Tom near the front, shoving people through. Martha was beside him.
The creature took a step toward them, then another. Its gait was wrong -a third leg had begun to sprout from its belly during the fight, half-formed. Its body lurched forward, and for a second I thought it might simply fall over. It did not.
I threw mana into my legs and ran past it. “Don’t you dare look away from me you vermin!” I screamed, loud enough that the surrounding forest must have heard too.
I did not know why the beast was ignoring us, did not understand why it hadn't killed everyone and everything already. I just knew that I had to get its attention. I had to-
I saw her. Sara.
She was not with the others. She was twenty paces from the gap in the wall, sitting on the ground. She was not running or moving. Her hands were over her ears and her eyes were shut.
The creature's head swung toward the crowd. Its eyes swept across the mass of bodies. Then one of its eyes -the smallest, lowest on its skull- found the girl sitting alone in the dirt.
It took a step toward her and let out a cry. I did not decide.
I did not weigh the options. I did not consider the odds of victory or defeat nor weigh my regal life on a scale against a single human girl. I did not consider that I was in rags, and not in my battle dress. There was a girl, and there was a creature walking toward her, and my body moved before my mind had any say in the matter. I was between them. The creature's beak opened and the fire gathered in its throat. I could see it building, gold and black flame twisting together.
"You fool! Run damn you!"
I planted my feet and spread my arms. I condensed as much of my true mana within me as I still held. The blast hit me in the chest.
The world became heat and nothing else. My feet left the ground. I spent no moment suspended in the air. In one instance, I was on my feet, and the next, I hit the earth on my back and skidded before coming to a stop.
Something was broken inside me. I could feel it. Not my mana core -not that, at least. Ribs, perhaps? The pain was a white, screaming thing that swallowed every thought. Without my ancient mana, without a demon's inherent resistance to fire, I would be dead. No, if I had been any other demon, I would have been dead all the same.
I lay there. Sara ran beside me. She was crying but she was alive. Why did she not run?
The creature stepped closer and I could feel the heat of it, see the shadow of it, even with my vision swimming. It was going to strike again. A figure ran in front of me, just as I had run in front of the girl. It was Ash.
She had placed herself between me and the creature. Her sword was raised, though what good it would do against something that fed on its own death, I could not say. "Get up," she said, voice ragged. "Lysanthia, get up."
I could not. My body would not answer me. The pain pinned me to the earth as surely as the creature's talon might have. Ash looked down at me. Then at the creature. Then back.
It fired at her, a smaller ball of flame she cut with her blade. Another, then another. Her blade was glowing crimson. It seemed she still had some of her sword aura left after all. Why the beast did not use its earlier attack, I did not know.
"Why?" she asked. Ash’s breathing was labored.
The word made no sense. Nothing made sense. The world was pain and the sound of a child crying beside me. I could not feel my legs. Distantly, I felt the hum of my Cradle. It did little for me now.
"Why did you do that?" Ash's eyes were wide as she looked back and not with the anger I had seen that night in the forest. "You should have run. You could have run. Why did you-"
"I don't know." The words came out broken -barely above a whisper.
"You don't-"
"I don't know." I said, coughing louder this time. It hurt to speak. I turned my head, just enough to see Sara beside me. Her eyes were open now, and wet. She was staring at me. It seemed she had stopped crying, and in its place was a wide eyed, soundless horror.
"She's a child," I whispered. "She has only just started. The world-" I coughed again, and this time there was blood. "-is big and…."
I tried to breathe. "My life is old."
I could not find the rest of the words, could barely understand the few I had forced out of me -had been forced out of me, by this moment. A life barely begun might be worth more than one that had run its long and bloody course. Even if it was mine. No, perhaps… especially if it was mine.
The creature screamed again. It had come closer now. Ash's stance shifted. She was going to fight it, alone, as Heroes often did. She would not win. She stood anyway.
I had little mana left. Thirty percent maybe, if I was generous. If I was hopeful. None of it was my own. None of it was from a time long past. I would never taste that power again. It did not matter. The marks sat on my arms, one warm, the other quiet and cold. None of them had done a thing. I reached for them anyway.
I did not reach with technique, nor with force. I simply reached.
I gave the marks everything -the last wellspring of mana that clung to the walls of my core. I pushed it all toward the two small Sparks on my arms and I did the one thing I had never done in all my centuries of living.
I asked. Not demanded.
Please. I do not wish for a fragile beginning to end.
The Cradle answered first.
It started as warmth. I knew warmth now. I had felt it when I healed a cut, when I mended a fence post, when I pressed life back into dead wood, when I had stared at a pathetic fire, when a girl had held my hand.
This was not that. It was a warmth that bloomed beneath my skin and raced outward from the mark. The dot on my left arm split, stretched and then thinned into a single Line, thin and bright. It stretched from the mark toward my elbow and stopped there.
Sara was staring at me. A girl who made vases from mud for a stranger she thought was pretty. A girl whose father had taught her to shape clay, and who had not shaped it again until I had come along. A life just started. One that deserved to run its natural course. The Cradle burned now.
The phoenix stood in front of me, and I wished to destroy it. Not for pride and not to gain something. Not to prove what I was or reclaim what I had been. I wanted to destroy it because something else deserved to live, and this abomination stood in the way of that.
Please.
It was, perhaps, the first time I had wanted to destroy something to protect another. Beneath the warmth, something else stirred. It felt cold.
The Requiem answered.
It had been still since the fight began. Every attempt I had made to use it had failed -the creature's rebirth outpaced my only weapon. Now it moved. The dot on my right arm cracked open and with it, came more cold.
I knew this cold well. It was the aftermath of a battlefield, now silent. It was the land of Ashia, drowned in forever darkness. It was the Dwarves, who would forge no more masterworks. It was the corpse of the great dragon Ozriel, whom I had swatted from the sky.
A line of black, seared down my forearm and stopped. Both marks pulsed together. Warmth spread through my left and cold spread through my right. My left pulsed brighter. Strength returned, some echo of it, at the very least.
I rose.