“So,” Ash said, stepping over a root, “what exactly is the plan? I hope you have one.”
We had been walking for some time. The forest had thickened around us, and the canopy above filtered the light into scattered patches on the ground. Hamel was behind us now, and with it, the hut and the mother and the boy I had failed to heal. “The barrier around the boy’s mind is the System’s power. Its decision,” I said. “My Cradle cannot breach it and I have tried. This power only creates.”
“You only used the Cradle,” Ash said. She had been watching closely. “Why not try the other one then? The Requiem? That’s why we’re here, aren’t we?”
A fair question, if an obvious one. “If I had tried the Requiem as I am now, it would have killed him.”
Ash glanced at me. I did not return the look. The words needed no embellishment. The Requiem was not an ending. It was the ending. If I had turned it loose on that barrier, the decay would have spread past the barrier and into the boy’s mind, and whatever was left of Marin would have been unmade along with his cage.
“So you held back,” Ash said.
An odd way to frame it. “I held back, yes.”
Ash nodded slowly. “Should I applaud your restraint?”
“You should need no reason to applaud me.” I said. “My existence alone was enough, once.”
“Sometimes I wonder how you can even walk straight with a head that big.”
“With applause.” I said. Ash laughed, and the sound of it carried through the otherwise quiet forest. I found myself smirking, before I forced the treacherous expression away.
“So you’re here to…what? Practice until you can break that barrier? How can you be sure it’s even possible?” Ash asked when she’d settled down. “To use this power on him and not…do what you said it might. It seems like a risk, and a big one at that.”
I extended my right hand toward the nearest tree. A flicker of black fire left my fingers, crossed the short distance, and kissed the bark. The wood greyed where it struck, a patch no larger than my palm. The rest of the tree stood untouched. “Because I know what this power’s nature is,” I said simply. “In my time, the System would have classified it as a type of [Concept Magic]. That was the highest order of power for my Class. The Requiem does not merely decay matter, though I suppose some other fool with this power would have only used it so.”
Ash stared at the grey patch on the tree. “Concept Magic, huh.” she repeated.
“Yes. And before you ask why you have not heard of it, it is because you are a Hero. Heroes hit things with swords and aura. Anything else is lost on them. After all, there was no base intelligence requirement for the Class. Perhaps a Sage or a Saint might have known this already.”
Ash gave me a look that I had come to recognize. It was the one she used when she wanted to hit me and had decided not to.
We walked more, my eyes scanned the tree line. I had little doubt Ash was doing the same, and could grudgingly accept that the woman’s senses were likely keener than my own. It was some time before Ash spoke again, and when she did, it sounded like a question she had deliberated on for days.
“Answer me this then…you were the strongest Demon Queen we ever faced. I don’t think there’s much use denying that.” She chewed on something. “Why?”
That was not the question I had expected. I turned to her and raised an eyebrow. “Is that not obvious?”
“Your magic could destroy just about anything from all accounts,” Ash continued. “With it, you killed two of the Gods -Calithra and Calith. None of the Queens before you could have managed anything like that from everything I was taught. Why you and not them?”
I turned the question back to her. “Why do you think?”
Ash considered for a moment. “Because you must have had powers the ones before you didn’t. Maybe you found something or-”
“Wrong.” Ash blinked. “Every Demon Queen shared the same Class,” I said. “The same abilities were available to all of us. The same spells, and the same potential. If I unlocked more of those abilities than my predecessors, that does not mean they could not have. The ceiling and floor were both the same.”
We reached a clearing. I chose to stop there, and Ash followed a moment later. Ash sighed. “Alright. I don’t know the answer, so just tell me.”
She assumed I would then? Well, it wasn’t like the answer mattered now. “My Class’s magic responded to intent and will as much as raw power. Two people with the same spell, at the same level, could produce different results based on what they meant to do, and who they were.” I paused, if only to make sure she could follow where my words led. “The class of magic reads the caster. It always has.”
Ash stared at me. “Are you saying what I think you’re saying? That you’re….” She trailed off.
I found myself smirking. “I was not the strongest because I was Lysanthia,” I said. “I was Lysanthia because I was the strongest.”
There was a beat of silence. Ash closed her eyes. “Your ego grows bigger every day.”
“It is not ego if it is simply the truth. And it has not grown at all.”
“It’s ego.”
“Very well. Then my ego is also the truth, which makes it the finest ego in existence.”
Ash shook her head, and I thought I saw her lips twitch. “What’s the plan then?”
“Simple,” I said. “You will catch beasts and I will practice on them.”
The Hero’s expression went flat. “You want me to be your huntress.”
“I want you to do the thing you are good at so that I may do the thing I am good at. This is called delegation. I did it often, in my time.”
Ash stared at me for a long moment. Then she drew her sword and walked deeper into the trees without another word. I sat down, started drawing in all of the ambient mana I could. Experience told me this would be a near thing.
The first creature was one of those long eared vermin I now knew to call a rabbit. Ash brought it back in her hands, holding it by the scruff. It kicked and twisted, but the Hero’s grip was absolute. She set it on the ground and kept one hand on its back. “Whenever you’re ready,” she said.
I knelt and extended my right hand. I stared at the creature, and just for a moment, I hesitated. What are you doing, you fool?
I closed my eyes, channeled mana into the Black Line. The Requiem answered me at once and Ruin followed. I reached for restraint -trying not to feed the Requiem too much power. Wisps of black fire shot from my fingers.
The impression came. The thing was afraid. Deeply afraid. Yet, some part of it had known this day would always come. That did not make the acceptance any easier. I forced the impression away even as the rabbit turned to dust.
It simply ceased, as if it had never been. One moment there was a living thing beneath Ash’s hand, and the next there was grey powder drifting between her fingers. I suspected if I had used more mana, there would not have been dust left. Ash looked at the dust. She looked at me. She wiped her hand against her leg, slowly, as if the dust still clung.
“That,” I said, “was too much.”
“You think?”
I did not appreciate her tone. “Another.”
Ash sighed and went back into the trees. She returned shortly with a second rabbit. This one was larger, which I suspected she had chosen deliberately. I knelt again.
This time, I tried to hold the Requiem back further. I imagined closing a fist around the flow of power and letting only the smallest whisper through. Ruin left my hand, barely visible. The decay spread from the point of contact across the rabbit’s flank. It was slower this time -I could see it move, watch the fur grey and the skin beneath it wither. The rabbit convulsed. I tried to pull the power back, to tell it where to stop.
It did not stop. The effect was slower, but the Requiem did not stop. The decay crawled across the creature’s body. The rabbit went still. I stared at the body. Closer. I had been closer. The difference between the first attempt and this one was measurable, even if the result was identical.
“Another,” I said.
“Lysanthia.”
“Another.”
Ash went. She returned with a third rabbit. She set it down more gently than she had the others.
This time I tried to aim for a single point. Not the whole body -just the left leg. Just one leg. If I could contain the decay to a single limb, then I could contain it to a single structure inside a limb, and from there, to a barrier inside a mind. That was how training these types of powers always worked.
The Requiem hit the leg. The fur greyed. The skin beneath cracked and withered. I held the decay there, willing it not to spread, and for one breath, it obeyed. One breath. Then it crept past the joint and into the body, and the rabbit died, and I was kneeling in front of another dead thing.
I could feel the difference. Each attempt brought me closer to the control I needed. The issue was that the Requiem was a raging flame that wanted to spread. It wanted to consume. The Cradle was gentle in comparison, that made fine control almost easier than not.
That was the nature of destruction, and for a very long time, that had been my nature too. There had been one benefit to all of this. It was getting easier and easier to ignore the impressions that came with this power. One could ignore a thing one had come to so thoroughly expect. An unintended benefit, but I would accept it.
Ash next brought a creature I had not seen before. She called it a thorncat. It was a lean thing, with a ridge of short quills along its spine and sharp eyes that tracked every movement I made. It snarled when Ash set it down, and it snarled louder when I knelt beside it.
A creature with some fight in it. Good. A larger body meant more resistance. Perhaps that would help it against the decay.
I tried a different approach. I tried to use a thread of Ruin from my index finger rather than merely project it from my palm. A single line of black flame, thinner than anything I had attempted, aimed at a single quill on the creature's shoulder. The fur greyed beneath my touch. A small patch, no larger than my thumbnail. The thorncat flinched and twisted, but Ash held it firm. I watched the grey patch and held my breath.
The quill greyed beneath my touch. It sat exactly where I had placed it and went no further. The thorncat lived. It snarled and snapped its teeth at me, which I took as confirmation.
“Well…that’s progress,” Ash said.
“Insufficient progress,” I corrected. “Fur is external. The barrier isn’t just internal. It’s a concept. I need to reach inside a living thing, and then reach inside the inside itself.”
Ash released the thorncat and caught it again when it tried to bolt. She held it steady and looked at me. There was a question in her eyes. “Well? Do it,” she said instead of asking.
I reached again. This time, the thread went deeper. I could feel the creature’s life around the line of black. Muscle and sinew, blood and bone. Other things the creature was. Things the creature would be, given time. The Requiem wanted to consume all of it. Every fiber of this power strained outward, reaching for more, as a flame reaches for air.
I held it. My teeth clenched and my hand shook, but I held it. The flame found a bone -a small one, in the tail, nothing that would kill. I let the decay settle there and there alone. The bone cracked and the thorncat yelped. Ash's jaw tightened, though she did not loosen her grip. I pulled the Requiem back.
Ash checked. Her hands moved over the creature. The thorncat snapped at her fingers. She ignored it. “The tail is broken,” she said. “But it’s a clean enough break, everything else is fine.” She looked up at me. “Everything else is fine, Lysanthia.”
I stared at the thorncat. The thing was hurt and doubtless quite upset, but it was alive.
The Cradle pulsed on my left arm. It was a stupid choice, when I needed every drop of mana to spare. I extended my left hand. Wisps of white flame poured from my palm and into the creature. It was a gentle thing. The bone knit. the thorncat went still, then began to struggle again with renewed fury.
Ash released it. The thorncat bolted into the underbrush and was gone in seconds. Ash's shoulders dropped, just slightly. I assumed the creature had been difficult to hold.
I rose. My mana reserves were perhaps half of what they had been when we started, and I had already wasted much in my failed attempt with the boy. I flexed my hand. “Again,” I said.
We continued. Ash brought each creature more quietly than the last. I understood why now. The Hero did not want to be doing this. Did not want to subject more creatures to my power. Still, she did it anyway. Perhaps she wasn’t completely a fool.
The sun moved overhead, and the patches of light on the forest floor shifted from white to gold. My mana drained with each attempt but I was getting closer.
Ash brought one last creature. She called it a bristleback. It was dense, with a ridge of dark spines along its back, and it had bitten Ash twice before she had subdued it. The thing’s fur glistened wetly, and it had a scent to it that was simply…strange.
“This one has spirit,” I observed.
“Just do it before it tries to bite me again.”
I knelt. I reached into the bristleback with Ruin. It threaded past fur, past skin, past muscle, past every organ the beast had. I was not looking for anything physical. I was looking for something inside the inside. I had done this before, a thousand years ago. Though, never like this. Never with this precision. I almost didn’t find it.
The creature was afraid. I could feel it through the Requiem -a sharp thing, sitting somewhere that was not quite the body and not quite the mind. It was a concept. An idea the creature held about the world: that the world was dangerous, and that it was small.
Fear.
The Requiem touched it, and it decayed. The sharp edge of it dulled and then dissolved, and the creature in Ash's grip went still. It stopped snarling. Its muscles unclenched. It lay in Ash's hands and blinked, as if it had forgotten what it had been so upset about.
The body was whole, as was the mind. I had reached inside a living thing and unmade a single idea without touching anything around it.
I followed with the Cradle. A beast that did not know fear was rather unlikely to survive the night. Feeling it with the Cradle was much easier. It seemed this was the point of the impressions my powers gave me. It made it easier to touch far more than just the thing itself. The System had liked hints like that before too.
The creature was brave now, with its fear gone. It saw the world, and thought itself the greatest thing within it. Within that boldness, was a tiny seed of uncertainty. I poured the Cradle into that seed.
The bristleback's eyes sharpened. It tensed and started to thrash. Ash let it go, and it raced for the nearest line of trees. Ash watched it disappear. She watched it longer than she needed to.
"A rather charming creature," I said. This ‘bristleback’ would not have been out of place in the Demon Realm.
The sky was dark by the time we turned back. Stars had begun to press through above the canopy, faint points of light that I still had not grown used to. In the Demon Realm, the sky had been a permanent bruise of red and black.
Ash walked beside me in silence for a time. She straightened and looked at the sky. Then she sighed. “We’re too late,” she said quietly. “The Inker returns tomorrow.”
I did not break stride. “There is a reason I asked you to catch the creatures rather than doing it myself.”
Ash glanced at me. “And what would that be?”
I flexed my right hand. The Requiem sat cool and quiet beneath my skin. “By having you handle the hunting, I conserved precisely enough to heal the boy tonight.”
Ash stopped walking. I continued for two more steps before I turned. She was staring at me. Her eyes searched my face the way they had in the throne room, nine hundred and eighty four years ago. “You calculated that?” she asked. “You planned the entire day around conserving exactly enough mana to-”
I had not. I had hoped. That was all. I was sure I had enough power for what I planned to attempt, but only just enough. These Lines were draining an absurd amount of mana to do anything. It took all of my royal bearing to keep me from swaying on my feet. Ash did not need to know that.
I looked the Hero in the eye. “Yes,” I said.
Ash held my gaze for a long moment. “Let’s go heal him, then.”