Tunde watched Thorne hit the gate a second time, and this time it gave.

  Not gradually, not in the way of something worn down, but all at once, the bone structure simply deciding it had no further business being a gate and collapsing inward in a cascade of white fragments.

  The vibrations traveled through the ground and up through the soles of Tunde's feet, and he steadied himself against them as the dust rolled outward.

  Elyria was already moving.

  Her metal hand flicked in a short, precise arc, and one of the floating blades she kept orbiting her detached and screamed upward, a silver streak that crossed the distance to the battlements above and removed the top of a savage's skull before the creature had finished drawing back its bone spear.

  The spear clattered down the outside of the wall rather than into Thorne's back.

  Tunde stared.

  Elyria turned to him with the expression of someone who had already moved on from what she had just done.

  "Stay here," she said.

  He looked at the open gate. He looked at the wall. He looked at the space around him, empty and exposed, the kind of space that invited things to come and fill it.

  He wondered briefly where exactly she thought he was going to go.

  She was already gone, her metal hand extending toward the blade still lodged in the stonework, and the force that answered her pulled her to the wall at a speed that made the motion look like falling in a direction walls were not supposed to be.

  She landed on the battlements and was immediately set upon by four savages, two of them leading with bone spears while the others flanked. None of them seemed to notice that she only had one arm, a misapprehension she began correcting with efficiency.

  Tunde looked at the gate.

  He ran through it.

  The scene beyond was not what he had expected, though he was not sure what he had expected exactly.

  Thorne stood in the center of a courtyard, and around him was a horde. Not the scattered initiates from the tunnels, but a concentrated mass of savages, each one burning brighter in Tunde's altered sight than the ones before, moving with the coordinated purpose of a trained force rather than an angry mob.

  Thorne's aura had changed; the red and green wisps he usually carried replaced by something more defined and deliberate, the light wrapping tighter around him as he moved through the press of bodies.

  Each blow he landed removed something from the equation permanently.

  Tunde kept to the edges, pressing close to the debris of the shattered gate, his mind working quickly.

  How had these people ever captured Thorne and Elyria to begin with? He filed the question away. It was not useful right now.

  What was useful was the savage he spotted crouched behind a ridge of bone rubble near the far wall, pulling back a bone bow with steady, practiced patience, the tip of the arrow aimed not at the mass of bodies but at the specific point in it where Thorne's back would be in approximately three seconds.

  Tunde watched the red lines in the archer's body pulse with focus. An Initiate, or close to it, the Ethra moving through the frame in concentrated threads rather than the scattered motes of someone barely awakened. Deliberate.

  Skilled. Entirely unaware of the person watching it.

  He moved along the wall, low and without urgency, the way he had once moved through the tunnels underground at home, feeling for the hidden things.

  His footsteps made little sound on the bone-dusted ground.

  The savage murmured something in its guttural tongue as it tracked Thorne's position, the bowstring drawn to its ear, the calculation behind its eyes visible even from where Tunde closed the distance.

  He had one chance. He accepted that clearly and without drama.

  His sight narrowed and brightened, the light sharpening around two points on the savage's skull, marking them with the certainty it always carried. He did not think about what he was about to do.

  He simply did it, covering the last distance in a lunge and driving the blade through both marked points simultaneously, through the eyes and into the skull behind them, the full force of his body behind the strike.

  The bow released. The arrow skipped off the ground five feet to Thorne's left, unnoticed.

  The savage was heavy.

  It came down on top of him, and the glancing blow it managed in its last moment of reflex caught him across the ribs with enough force to make the world white at the edges.

  He bit through the sound that wanted to come out of him, pressed his face against the ground, and breathed in short, measured pulls until the white receded.

  His body was doing something he noticed more clearly this time. A warmth, slow and purposeful, moving through his chest and outward into the damage.

  Not healing it, not the way water fills a vessel, but working at it, like a careful hand pressing a wound closed. It was slow. It was not enough to make the pain irrelevant. But it was there, and it was his, and the knowledge of it helped.

  "I told you to stay still."

  He opened his eyes.

  Elyria stood over him, her expression combining irritation and something that was trying not to be concerned. She looked at his side, where the glancing blow had landed, and her lips pressed together.

  "Had that connected fully," she said, "you would be considerably less intact than you currently are."

  "I know," he said.

  "Then why," she began.

  "He was about to put an arrow through Thorne's back," Tunde said.

  A pause.

  Elyria looked at the body of the savage, at the bow still loosely gripped in its dead hand, at the arrow on the ground nearby. She looked back at Tunde without changing her expression, but something in it shifted slightly.

  She helped him to his feet without commenting further.

  Across the courtyard, Thorne was finishing.

  The last of the horde went down under a strike that left no ambiguity about the outcome, and the man straightened, two bone blades in his hands now, both of them pulsing with a pale green light that was threaded through with black and red veins.

  The power moving through Thorne had coated them, changed them into extensions of whatever he was rather than weapons he had simply picked up.

  Tunde watched the bodies around him begin their slow dissolution, the matter flowing inward, and felt his own presence in the courtyard become something he was acutely conscious of. He took several steps back. Elyria did the same, jaw set.

  "He's going to bring the whole settlement down around himself," she said quietly, more to herself than to him.

  "He seems," Tunde started, searching for the word.

  "Focused," she said.

  "When someone like Thorne gets focused like that, the best thing you can do is stay out of the way and make sure nothing interrupts him."

  Tunde nodded. He looked at her.

  "What is he, exactly?"

  She was quiet for a moment.

  "Something I've heard of but never seen before today. And I would very much prefer not to discuss it while he's in earshot."

  Thorne turned. His black eyes found them across the courtyard, the red pinprick at their center steady and present. His voice, when he spoke, was perfectly level.

  "More reinforcements inbound. The building ahead is where their leader operates from."

  He swung one of the bone blades in a short, conversational arc.

  It released a dark green light that traveled the distance to the building ahead and struck it with the particular quality of something made to break things that were built to last.

  The impact was felt rather than just heard, a pressure that moved through the air and pushed against Tunde's chest.

  A red light answered it. Not from the building. From the thing that came through the building.

  Tunde did not have a proper frame of reference for what he was seeing. He had seen large men. He had seen men who carried themselves with the particular weight of people accustomed to having other people move out of their way.

  He had seen Thorne. None of these had prepared him for the figure that stepped through the wreckage of the bone wall as though the wall had simply chosen to yield.

  It was human in the rough sense that it stood upright and had a head and the expected number of limbs.

  This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

  Beyond that, every proportion was wrong in the way of something that had been built rather than born, or had rebuilt itself over time into something that prioritized function over form.

  It wore armor of bleached bone plate, fitted precisely, and on its head sat the skull of something that had been very large and very dead for a long time, the eye sockets of the beast skull housing the red glow of the man's own eyes beneath.

  Red veins mapped its entire visible frame. The weapon it carried was massive, a bone construction that pulsed with red Ethra in slow, arterial rhythms.

  Its presence arrived before it did. Tunde felt it as a pressure against his blood, a physical sensation, as though something outside his skin was pushing at the fluid inside it, agitating it, trying to pull it into a new arrangement.

  His legs wanted to step backward. His pulse was doing something irregular and unpleasant.

  Elyria's hand closed on his arm.

  "Breathe," she said tightly.

  "Steady your blood. Don't let it respond to his Ethra. Concentrate on the feeling in your chest and hold it."

  He did not fully understand the instruction, but he followed it, pulling his attention inward, finding the warmth that had settled in his chest since the manacle had opened his heart, and holding onto it the way one holds a rope in a current.

  The pressure against his blood did not stop, but it became something he could stand next to rather than something that owned him.

  Thorne looked up at the figure.

  "Remember me?" he said.

  His voice had changed. Not in volume, not in tone, but in the quality of it, the way it moved through the air had changed, as though it carried more weight than sound should reasonably carry.

  The chief looked down at him. Something moved behind the red glow of its eyes, recognition perhaps, or amusement, it was hard to tell through the skull it wore.

  It raised its weapon, and the air around it thickened with red Ethra, so dense that even Tunde could see it without trying, a visible pressure building around the creature like water rising in a sealed room.

  Then it came down.

  Elyria moved without being asked, snatching Tunde off the ground and covering distance backward at a speed his legs couldn't have managed, landing them twenty meters from the point of impact as the clash between the two forces sent a pressure wave rolling outward that flattened dust and scattered bone fragments across the entire courtyard.

  Tunde's ears rang. His vision doubled briefly and then corrected itself.

  He looked at Elyria. She was breathing through her nose, her silver eyes fixed on the battle with the expression of someone doing precise mathematics in real time. Her hand had not released his arm.

  "Is Thorne an Adept?" Tunde asked.

  "At minimum," she said.

  "Don't ask me anything more specific than that."

  The battle moved the way battles between people of that order moved, in sudden violent exchanges separated by instants of repositioning that happened too fast to follow properly. Tunde could track Thorne's aura.

  He could track the chief's red mass. The actual bodies within those lights were something he caught in impressions rather than sequences.

  An impact that shook the remaining bone structures. A roar that vibrated in his back teeth. A counter that drove one party thirty feet backward through a wall that ceased to be a wall and then partially ceased to be rubble.

  Elyria watched all of this with careful, professional attention.

  Tunde felt the manacle pulse.

  It was not the subtle hum of absorption it usually produced.

  This was something more deliberate, more inward, a pressure that moved from the cuff into his wrist and up his arm and into his chest, where it met the warmth already residing there and began to interact with it. He felt his heartbeat change.

  Not in speed but in quality, each beat more purposeful than the last, as though it had been performing the function incorrectly before and was now being corrected.

  The black lines came next, the same ones he had seen moving beneath his skin in the cell when his heart had first opened.

  They traced themselves from the manacle inward, slower this time, more deliberate, and what they left behind was not pain so much as an extreme and comprehensive pressure that built and built and built until he felt as though his skin was the only thing maintaining the distinction between himself and everything outside him.

  Elyria's eyes dropped to him. Then went wide.

  "Not now," she said, in the tone of someone whose objection is completely irrelevant to the situation.

  "Absolutely not now."

  His heart contracted. Then pushed.

  Then did both at once, a stuttering surge that felt like something trying to break out of a room that was too small for it, and Tunde folded forward with a sound he had not intended to make, one knee hitting the ground as his vision went entirely dark at the edges and entirely bright at the center.

  Then it exhaled.

  The release moved through him from the inside outward, a wave of warmth and clarity that reached his fingertips and the top of his skull simultaneously.

  His vision returned, and it returned different. The colors he had been seeing since his heart opened were still there, but they had deepened, each one more distinct, more specific.

  The lines on the ground did not just show him where Ethra was running, they showed him how it was running, in which direction, at what speed, toward what purpose. The world had become more legible.

  He also became aware, without knowing how, that he was covered in something foul.

  A black, tar-like substance had pushed itself out through his skin in the manner of something expelled rather than leaked, and the smell it carried was the concentrated essence of every impurity his body had apparently been storing for the entirety of his existence.

  He sat in it and understood, distantly, that this was not something other people would want to be near.

  Elyria had taken three precise steps backward. Her expression was the most complex thing he had seen on her face so far.

  "You are advancing to Initiate," she said.

  "Right now. In the middle of all of this." A pause.

  "How."

  He blinked at her. His body felt like it had been emptied and filled with something cleaner. His legs, when he tested them, responded with a speed and certainty that was new, the signals between his intention and his movement arriving without the usual delay.

  He stood.

  A roar came from the direction of the battle. He turned in time to see the massive bone weapon leave the chief's hand, not thrown but forced free, Thorne's blades buried to their grips in the creature's chest.

  The chief dropped to its knees with the slow, massive quality of something very large running out of the ability to remain upright. It tried to speak.

  What came out was black and viscous, the same shade as what Tunde had just expelled, and the sight of it produced in him a feeling he did not quite have a name for.

  "You just ejected decades worth of physical impurity in one purge," Elyria said, keeping her distance with scientific precision.

  "Your body has been carrying that since birth. Every Initiating ranker goes through it, usually somewhere private and preferably near a water source."

  "I didn't choose the timing," Tunde said.

  "No one ever does," she replied, and there was something almost sympathetic in it.

  Tunde blinked. The colors of his vision disappeared, and then, after a breath, came back, this time richer and more varied, bathing everything in a depth of hue he had not seen before. The sand at his feet had a faint luminescence to it.

  The lines of Ethra that ran through the ground spread in every direction further than he could track, each one distinct in color and character.

  He looked at Elyria and saw her blue glow with a clarity that made the previous version of it seem like a sketch compared to the finished thing.

  He looked at Thorne and saw two lights, burning separately within the same frame, and the sight produced a feeling he could not yet fully articulate.

  He moved toward Thorne, his legs covering the ground at a pace that surprised him, the distance shrinking faster than he was accustomed to.

  Thorne turned before he arrived, a reflex rather than a decision, and then went very still and took a significant step backward.

  "You smell like a tannery that caught fire," Thorne said.

  "I'm sorry," Tunde said.

  Thorne looked at him. The surprise on his face was genuine, which was notable, because surprise had not previously been an expression Thorne's face seemed to have in its available range.

  "You advanced. How did you reach Initiate without a light Ethra resource?"

  Tunde raised the manacle.

  "It came from here," he said.

  Thorne studied the cuff for a long moment without touching it. His expression moved through several things quickly and settled on something careful and contained.

  He let the two bone blades he was holding drop and turned toward the ruins of the bone building without further comment.

  Elyria appeared beside Tunde as she had a habit of doing, arriving without announcement. She looked at the desiccating body of the savage chief, which was already collapsing inward, the imposing mass of it reducing with an unsettling efficiency.

  She watched it for a moment.

  "Can we leave now?" she asked.

  "We didn't arrive together," Thorne said, without slowing.

  "You can leave whenever you choose. I'm going in. There are things in this settlement worth taking, and I intend to find them."

  Elyria closed her eyes briefly in the manner of someone requesting patience from a source that was not responding.

  "What could flesh-eating savages in a wasteland possibly have that is worth anything to an Adept?"

  Thorne did not answer. He paused at the threshold of the destroyed building and turned to look at Tunde.

  "Keep up. Stay at a distance until we can address the situation with your body."

  Tunde nodded.

  He fell into step behind them, feeling the newness of his body with every stride, the way it responded to him with a precision and readiness that was unfamiliar and welcome at once.

  He was faster.

  He was stronger, not dramatically so, nothing like what Thorne and Elyria were capable of, but the difference between what he had been before and what he was now was the difference between being carried by a current and learning to swim in it.

  He was not deluded about what that meant. Initiate was the second lowest rank in a system that climbed much, much higher, and he had just barely stepped through its door. The size of the distance in front of him was not lost on him.

  But it was his distance now. That was different.

  Elyria drifted alongside him as they moved through the tunnel entrance of the building, the walls torchlit and covered in the accumulated evidence of what this settlement had been. She kept her distance, though she had stopped making it as pointed.

  "Thorne isn't typically in the business of adopting strays," she said quietly.

  "I didn't ask him to adopt me," Tunde said.

  "No," she agreed, studying him sideways.

  "That might be exactly why he hasn't told you to leave yet."

  The interior opened into corridors that showed the marks of Thorne's earlier passage without softening, debris, and other evidence of the thorough nature of the man's work.

  They followed the sound of movement deeper in until the corridor widened into a large room that had clearly served as the chief's personal space, the bone chair at its center enormous and draped in cured animal skin, surrounded by the accumulated plunder of a settlement that had been operating undisturbed for long enough to collect things.

  Large sacks were piled against the walls.

  Thorne was already working through them, removing items and setting most aside with the efficiency of someone who knew what they were looking for and recognized quickly what was not it.

  Tunde let his sight run over the room without trying to direct it.

  The Ethra here was dense. Some of it was the residual power of the room's former occupant, the red-tinged heaviness of blood Ethra that still hung in the air.

  But other things glowed with their own light entirely, clean and untainted, objects that had been stored here because their value was recognized even by those who could not use them properly. Several pulsed a healthy, steady green.

  Others showed in colors he was only beginning to develop vocabulary for.

  Thorne appeared in front of him, holding a large fruit, globed and dense, its surface smooth and the color of old wood.

  His sight showed it as vibrantly, luminously green, and his body knew before his mind did, leaning slightly toward it.

  "Eat it," Thorne said, with the brevity of someone issuing a practical instruction.

  Tunde took it. The moment it was in his hand, his chest responded, warmth moving toward his palm as though drawn to it. He bit into it.

  The taste was secondary to what followed it.

  A current moved through him from the point of contact outward, his heart receiving it with something like relief, the way a dry thing receives water, and he felt himself settle into his Initiate rank in a way he had not quite managed yet, the newness of it becoming something that fit.

  He shuddered once, pleasantly, and finished the fruit in several large bites, his hunger surfacing now that his body had reminded itself it existed.

  He opened his eyes to find Elyria and Thorne both going through the sacks with the focused attention of professionals, occasionally holding something up to assess it before either pocketing it or setting it aside.

  Thorne straightened, looked at Tunde, and tossed a piece of cloth that caught him in the chest.

  "Find water," Thorne said.

  "Clean yourself. You're an Initiate and a ranker now. Carry yourself accordingly."

  Tunde caught the cloth. He looked down at himself, at the dried impurities still coating his skin, and felt a sudden acute awareness of the state he was in.

  He looked at the cloth. He looked at Thorne. He looked at the room around him, this absurd room in this absurd settlement at the edge of a wasteland on a continent he had never intended to reach, standing in the body of a person he was only beginning to understand was his.

  He smiled.

  It was the first one in a very long time that did not cost him anything.

  "There's a water source through the left passage," Elyria said, without looking up.

  "The savages had to drink something. Probably cleaner than you'd expect."

  Tunde pocketed the cloth, took a last look around the room, let his sight linger on the objects still glowing quietly in the sacks, and went to find it.

  Behind him, he heard Thorne say, to no one in particular,

  "Relic of that caliber, advancing him without a resource." A pause.

  "Interesting."

  Elyria said nothing in response. But he heard her moving closer to look.