The Beginning After The End novel Chapter 355

Chapter 355: Just His Name

TESSIA ERALITH

Lifting my hand, I reveled in the response of the mana. The red particles jumped and danced, full of energy. The yellow hovered low to the ground, rolling and tumbling like tiny stones. The blue mana washed over me like the incoming tide and clung to my skin like dew. The green ones were my favorite, though. They had a cutting quality, like a sharp blade, whipping and snapping like the wind they represented, but there was also something cool and clean about them. The wind mana was both hard and soft at the same time.

I was standing on a nameless plateau, high in the Basilisk Fang Mountains. Not far from Taegrin Caelum. There was nothing around for miles that I could accidentally destroy…but I wasn’t out here because Agrona feared I might lose control. Rather, he knew the extent of my power, and he wanted me to let loose.

Reaching into the sky, I focused on the mana, pulling it to a specific point high above. Water and wind condensed, smashing into each other to build into a huge, black storm cloud that darkened the mountains for miles all around us.

My small audience watched in silence. Nico was there, of course, along with three of the other Scythes. Draneeve, Nico’s attendant and a few other ranking figures from the fortress had come as well. Agrona hadn’t, but I’d never seen him leave the castle before.

Fire mana drifted up from the sun-warm stones and fused into white, hot bolts of lightning that crashed back down to shatter boulders and cast shrapnel across my training ground. Water condensed into ice, which began to fall like catapult stones to smash craters into the hard mountain soil.

Even at the height of my strength on Earth, I’d never been able to do anything like this with ki.

My memories had been much more stable in the weeks since Agrona promised I could leave his fortress. He said that I would begin to feel more like myself the longer I was in this body. The runes covering my flesh helped hold me together, helped keep the other voice quiet.

Wind mana coalesced into wide, cutting streams that wove around me like a dragon, separating me from the others. Wind, both soft and hard…

My life—my previous life—had required me to harden myself to endure the constant and torturous training I had received. But there had always been a piece of myself that I kept in my heart, that piece where I had felt loving warmth for the first time in my life, and it was that warmth that maintained me until…

I refocused on the mana, recoiling from the shattered remnants of those memories. I still couldn’t remember my death, and Nico had only said I would learn about it in time.

Nico…

I glanced at where he stood, watching me cast spells, his dark hair lashing his face. I couldn’t help but notice how he stood well away from the others. Poor Nico, an outsider even here.

Draneeve clapped his hands and shouted into the wind, his mask giving his voice a grating quality that I found uncomfortable to listen to. Nico motioned for Draneeve’s silence, and the masked man stopped shouting, though he continued with a slow, inconsistent applause. _{frёewebnoѵel.ƈo๓}

Reaching out, I tugged at the corners of the huge storm and drew it inward and downward until it hovered just above me, hardly the size of an apple tree. The creation, moments ago a deadly manifestation of raw power, was now something entirely different. Tiny winged creatures made of air wheeled within the clouds, while little watery dolphins jumped and splashed below them.

It was beautiful. Mana was beautiful. Ki had been energy, capable of being gathered and unleashed but never really formed, not in the same way mana could take shape. This was real magic.

My attention twitched nervously over to the three who stood apart from the rest: the Scythes. Technically, Nico was one of them, but they held him apart, or he kept his distance. Or both.

Their varying shades of gray skin, black horns, and red eyes all served to define them as something firmly other. Their gazes held both curiosity and unease, like an audience watching a lion tamer at a circus. It made me believe what Nico kept telling me: they knew I’d be stronger than them eventually.

“Very, very well done!” Draneeve piped up in his purposefully grating voice. “You’ve grown so much more quickly than Lord Nico. Barely weeks in the skinny elf girl’s body and you’re—”

There was a loud crack.

Draneeve straightened his mask—a plain white thing with small holes for eyes and a crudely drawn smile—and rubbed the side of his head where Nico had backhanded him. I frowned at Nico, who had the good grace to at least look embarrassed. He hated Draneeve, I knew, but he wouldn’t tell me why.

Cadell and Dragoth were watching Nico.

Dragoth was enormous, as large as any man I’d ever seen, but he was otherwise cut from a familiar cloth. When I was rising through the ranks in the King’s Crown tournament, there were many like him. Cocky, self-absorbed warriors. Quick to laugh at their own jokes, and quick to fight at any perceived insult.

Cadell was stranger, scarier. He had a cold and cruel face, like the sharp side of an axe, but was businesslike in his manners. I didn’t like him.

But it was the third Scythe who I found most interesting. I’d only met her once before, and that was brief. Although she looked young—twenty at the most—there was a deep, curious wisdom in her eyes, and a worldly intelligence. I felt like she was dissecting me with her dark eyes, both then and now. Unlike her counterparts, she was still watching me. Not my spell, with it’s silly wind-gulls and water-dolphins, but me.

Looking into her eyes, it was almost like I could see the gears behind them turning, trying to figure me out. Did she see me as a threat? A tool? I wasn’t sure.

“Nico,” Cadell said, his tone full of frost and fire, “be nice to your pet. After all, it is Draneeve who returned you from that awful continent.” Draneeve fidgeted, his attitude unreadable behind his ugly mask… “He’d be a general now, perhaps even a retainer, if he hadn’t retreated from Dicathen to save your ungrateful hide.”

My spell faded away, the cloud dissolving to mist and then to nothing as I waited for Nico to respond. He clenched his fists and took a step away from Draneeve. “Don’t speak to me like I’m your lesser, Cadell. I’m a Scythe too, remember?”

Dragoth grinned, his teeth shining white as moonlight through his beard. “You are right, little Nico. You are a Scythe. And the name Scythe meant a little less the day we counted you among our number.” He laughed loudly at his own joke, but didn’t stop there. “Perhaps Bivrae should be a Scythe, or even Draneeve!” he said, practically shouting, his grin turning predatory.

Nico sneered. “And where was the mighty Dragoth during the war? Tell me, Titan of Vechor, why was it your retainer went to Dicathen and died while you stayed safe and—”

“Be careful what you say next,” Dragoth growled, his smile dropping quickly. He took a step toward Nico, his huge muscles bulging.

The ground swelled as a twisting, thorn-covered vine erupted between them, quickly expanding into a wicked briar fence. I hadn’t meant to cast a spell at all, but I was agitated by their fighting. My defensive instinct always veered toward plant magic, even when other elements would make more sense.

Dragoth leaned forward, resting both arms on the thorn-covered vines. “You are young and little, yet already at the peak of your power, reincarnate.”

Nico’s head tilted to the side. His eyes were cold as dead coals. “Everyone who might hope to challenge me is already here,” he said softly before turning to me. “It’s clear that you are ready to go. We’ve waited long enough—at Lord Agrona’s insistence, of course,” he added quickly, shooting a sour look at Cadell.

“Your ability to mold mana is impressive,” Scythe Seris said, her razorblade gaze cutting me apart bit by bit, “but don’t be clouded by what's in front of you. Keep your eyes and ears open and do not reach beyond your grasp.”

“She is the Legacy,” Nico countered darkly. “The stars themselves are not beyond her grasp.”

***

My first experience of this world was the forest homeland of the elven people. Its strangeness was lost on me. I was too confused and astonished by my own reincarnation to pay much attention to their enchanted forest. Even the appearance of the three-eyed giant—an asura, I reminded myself—had failed to impress upon me the otherworldliness of my new home.

It was in Taegrin Caelum when I began to understand how different this place really was from Earth. But there, everything I learned was filtered by Agrona. It wasn’t until Nico led me into the Relictombs that I appreciated the full depth of the strange and wonderful differences between the two worlds.

Agrona’s private portal could connect to any other in Alacrya, allowing us to teleport much too close to our destination. I would have liked to explore, to spend time taking it all in as we meandered across the second level of the Relictombs. The sky alone nearly took my breath away as I gazed up into the vast blue expanse. I thought my storm had been an impressive piece of magic, but this…

I knew logically that the sky itself was a magical construct, but I couldn’t understand it. It seemed incomprehensible that anyone could create such a thing. When I shared this thought with Nico, he ignored me, focused instead on bullying his way through the crowds of armored men and women around us.

“Are you entirely immune to the wonders of this world?” I asked, keeping pace beside him. “You might’ve gotten accustomed to all of this, but I’ve only recently arrived here.”

“We have someplace to be,” he snapped. He must have seen me frown from the corner of his eye, because he slowed down a little. “I’m sorry, Cecil. I’m…a bit agitated. Lord Agrona hinted that what we’ll find here might be important to me, but he’s left out any sort of details and…” He trailed off, wincing. “I’m sorry, it’s not your fault. I’m just impatient to speak to these judges.”

“No, I’m sorry,” I said, feeling immediately guilty for my choice of words. He’d told me at length about his lives, both what it was like for him after my involuntary induction into the King’s Crown tournament and his divided life here. “I didn’t mean to make light of what you’ve been through.”

“I know,” was all he said.

I followed along silently as Nico led us straight as an arrow toward a large, intimidating building of dark stone and black spines. It looked a little like a huge porcupine with an army of gargoyles clinging to its back.

A woman with a head of hair like a beacon fire was waiting for us in front of the building. She was wrapped in dark robes embroidered with a golden sword and scales. Her eyes stayed on her shoes as we approached, and even when she began to speak, she did not look up.

“It is a great honor to welcome a representative of the High Sovereign.” Her tone was authoritative, even when she tried to be subservient. “Although, I must admit, we expected you sooner.”

Nico marched past her, and she spun around to follow, keeping just slightly farther back from him than I was. “The High Sovereign has little time for such trifling things as a few corrupt judges. I’m still not sure why a Scythe was needed at all,” Nico said briskly.

I wanted to look around, but we were walking too quickly for me to really take the place in. I nearly laughed when I saw a giant fresco of a man I assumed was supposed to be Agrona. It seemed like the artists had never even seen him, but I realized quickly that was a possibility. Then we were past it, with neither Nico nor the red-haired woman taking any notice.

Nico stopped at a black iron door, tapping his fingers impatiently while waiting for the high justice to open it. Waving her mana-swathed hand in front of the door, she motioned us toward a dimly lit stairway made of dark stone and gray tiles. Nico took the lead again, descending the stairs rapidly. By the time we reached the bottom, he was marching at an uncomfortable speed, forcing the high justice and I to practically jog to keep up with him.

A maze of narrow tunnels opened up to our left and right, lined with barred cell doors. In the closest cell to the stairs, a raggedy woman leaned forward into the torchlight, saw Nico, and immediately ducked back into the shadows, her face twisting as if she’d just seen a demon.

Nico ignored the branching tunnels as he led us straight down the middle path.

Then, something clicked.

His standoffishness, the way he was practically ignoring me after spending the last three weeks working tirelessly to prove to Agrona that I was ready, his ill temper…Nico was anxious about this interrogation.

It was hardly a stretch to say that my once-fiance was always anxious, but he had gone rigid, every movement stiff and awkward, and he wouldn’t even look at me. He wasn’t merely anxious; he was dreading whatever was to come.

The hallway ended in a pair of wide iron doors, black as night and entirely covered in silvered runes. They looked like they could keep a rampaging rhinoceros inside. Despite their size, though, they swung open all by themselves as the high justice approached, revealing a large, circular room on the other side.