To Live

  For an entire day, he walked. Through the Lycean Plains, past Lake Lachesis. North, back onto the main path to the Township of Thaon, where he was questioned by a group of sorcerers but thankfully not apprehended. He had a small, quick meal and rested for barely half an hour before leaving and continuing east, down the same path that he had taken with his class and veering up to the north once a fork in the path presented itself.

  From there, taking the southern path bordering the Brightwoods, crossing the same place where the class had once been accosted, and continuing down the southern path instead of heading into the woods, he encountered a few groups of soldiers; he gave them all polite smiles as he passed, even asked them how they were doing. Not a single commoner suspected he was a sorcerer, or even a student. Just a kid passing by on his way to the beach.

  It was after he had passed the Brightwoods, with the water not too far out, that he could smell fire coming up from the north.

  He headed up the hill toward Ty’s home, ignoring the smoke and the booming sounds ahead of him. The flashes of lightning, the rumbling of the earth, the intermittent bouts of rain and snow. Grounded by the sunset to his right, which reminded him of what time he had left to reach his destiny. The thirteenth pin.

  * * *

  The battle was almost over when he arrived. He caught sight of Moriya first, standing in the center of the sandy path as Theo finally arrived at the peak of the slope. The pristine, sizeable cabin home no longer stood where he had once seen it—in its place was black, charred wood where the supporting beams once stood, the only thing coming from it fluttering pages at the mercy of the wind, scattering in all directions and littered all over the ground where he stood. Some half-burned pages of script could still be read, some damaged beyond all recognition.

  The trees leading up to the top were scorched, shattered, uprooted, and sliced. But it held no candle to the heart of the storm, where the forest ended and calamitous ruin began.

  Though the house had been near the peak of the hill, that was no longer the case as Theo finally arrived beside Moriya. The ground in front of the home had been completely leveled out, and the new summit was where they stood. Far, far north into the distance in front of them, were Death’s Upper Everglades, where Anasot’s sanctuary lay. To the right, violet skies and a burning sunset. To the left, a cliff that led to the path that ran under the hill upon which Ty’s home had sat.

  No greenery could be seen on the ground underneath them. No path, no track; no trees, no flowers. Only sand and stone within a burning crater, with three figures at its center.

  Joanie. The closest to them. Eyes and mouth wide open in shock, arms and legs splayed out with sharp branches of wood impaled on her hands, the bottom half of her legs completely severed from her body. Blood everywhere. Coming from her eyes, her mouth, her ears, her hands. Even the small, black journal with a white piece of paper sticking out from it that lay beside one of her hands had not been spared. A third of her face was burned beyond all recognition, the other two-thirds marred with cracks resembling thunder. A clean hole had been ripped straight through her chest, the source of the puddle of gore beneath her. In it was a small red mass. Still. Unbeating.

  At the center, Chelsi. Head bowed, with blood running down her face. Her long blond hair singed at its tips like Eslah, her physician’s dress ripped up, her bare arms teeming with cuts, and her left arm trembling and raw with burns. A single book was attached to a harness on her back as she held out an arm toward the struggling figure in front of her.

  The Headmistress. Zoi. Crawling on the floor, legs similarly severed from her body, hands outstretched in Nate’s direction with streaks of blood running down from half-open, empty eye sockets. Clawing through the rocks and the sand with her bloodied hands. Pink where her fingernails once were, mouth full of blood as she begged.

  “N-Nate. Nate, where are you? Help me. Please help me. I know you’re there.”

  The professor spoke, but not to her.

  “You’re here. I was beginning to worry.”

  “Worry? You?”

  “Heh.”

  “Nate? My dearest? Are you there? I hear you. Nate?”

  Nate did not move, not even when Chelsi turned to look in their direction. Eyes wide and bloodshot. Her open hand remained pointed toward the Headmistress, her mouth moving slowly, casting something in a language strangely similar to Ancient script.

  And then the Headmistress stopped. Her bloodied fingertips curled over the blood-soaked sand. She rested her head on the ground, her voice escalating from soft pleads to desperate cries as bloody tears streamed down her face. “Who took care of you when you were alone? Who gave you a home when you had none? Who saved your life the day you were going to jump off the lecture hall building?” A sob left her mouth, along with more blood. “I cared for you. I loved you like my son. I gave you a purpose, a reason to continue living. I gave you Chelsi. I gave you everything. So…please.” She extended a shaky hand forward, toward Nate. “Please, help me. One last time. Please help mom. I love you. Please, Nathaniel. I love you.”

  Theo turned to Moriya. His expression had changed. Not angry, not cold, not indifferent, but blank. Completely empty. He had been around him long enough to know what anything other than anger or indifference meant.

  The second the professor extended a hand forward, Theo returned the favor, speaking quietly, under his breath, “Nate.”

  His head spun toward Theo, expression shifting again. Instead of blankness, anger, or indifference, was surprise—a twinkling, childish innocence that oddly suited the young prodigy. “What did you call me?” he whispered back in awe.

  But that was the Headmistress’s last straw. Her sweet words mutated into howling screeches as she began clawing through the dirt again, dragging her own body through her own discharge. “You…you no-good piece of shit, you good-for-nothing! All you were to me was a means to an end—look at you now! Useless, useless, useless! You were born to be a weapon and raised to be one. It’s laughable how you think you can be a regular student and have friends, how you could never let go of Ty’s words from the First Circle. You know why? Because you know in your heart that this is your destiny—to kill. To kill, to fulfill my wishes, to die! To be a means to an end for the Earth Mother, like your parents were when they died like dogs for MATS!”

  This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

  Her clawing only got her so far as she reached the lip of the crater, a step away from Moriya but unable to pull herself up.

  “What?” the child professor breathed almost inaudibly, stiffly turning to the Headmistress at the mention of his parents. Mouth agape, face full of fear that Theo didn’t know he had. “What did…”

  But no one other than Theo could hear him.

  “L-Luci,” she gasped laboriously when she eventually gave up and laid her face on the cool ground once again. Her words were getting quieter, more delirious as she continued to cry. “Lucien, where is he? He was always here with me. He can fix this. He can save me if you don’t. He understood. He knew how important this was. He knows that I have to go. I have to find her. I promised her I would be there, at the promised land. I need to go. I need to go before it’s too late. I can’t be late. She promised that we’d be together. Happy under Ethy’s gaze. She promised that we would be happy. What…was this all for if I can’t be with her? If we can’t be together? If I can’t have her, if I don’t live to feel her embrace again? Hear her voice, see her smile? Why did I fight, why did I kill my Joanie, why did I live all these years only to have caused the deaths of the three people I have ever loved in this world?”

  “It’s ready, Nate.”

  Chel was floating in the air when Theo turned to her, enveloped in a brilliant white glow that shut out the sunset. No longer casting, her arm now raised to the sky.

  “It’s okay,” Moriya finally spoke while looking down at the Headmistress, the remnants of his fear chased away. In a quiet, soothing tone that made her freeze, hold in her panicked, staggered breaths. “You’ll be okay.”

  And then Chel, with a determined, ice-cold gaze, yelled words strong enough to shatter a piece of a puzzle that was never destined to be completed, end more than a hundred years’ worth of strife, and send the battlefield into silence.

  “Come, Ulgorhdir!”

  A beam of light erupted from her hand, piercing a large hole through the dark sky and clouds above. From it, a large, glowing sword emerged. Bigger than the size of the Academy, bigger than anything he had ever seen before. It descended from the heavens slowly at first, little by little to follow the motion of Eslah’s hand, blinding even the sun and replacing the sunset orange with a holy white, until finally her hand fell, pointing to its mark down on the mortal grounds below her.

  “Skypiercer!”

  In a black and white flash, the sword of the Ancient Ulgorhdir crossed thousands of feet in half a second to hit the earth, mercilessly felling its nemesis in one swift blow.

  And then there was silence.

  Moriya was the first to break it, voice solemn as he kneeled beside the Headmistress’s dead body. Chelsi crouched beside him, stroking his back. “The first Anchor has been severed.” There was a markedly melancholic smile on his face as he glided his hands over her cuts and wounds, healing them before rinsing any lingering blood on her skin. He closed her open mouth, pulled a cloth out of his pocket, and laid it over her slowly and meticulously.

  And then he stood up, knees wet with blood, and pointed right at Theo. He no longer wore a sad smile; indifference had replaced the temporary moment of vulnerability. “What are you still doing here? You need to go.”

  Not realizing at first why the professor was pointing at him, Theo looked down and noticed a small light coming from his chest.

  “But…where?”

  “I think you know better than I do.”

  * * *

  He slid down the hill and brushed past trees and debris, heading deeper and deeper into the Brightwoods, running until the orange skies turned into a deep, bloody red. But it didn’t matter to him, for as long as the light in his chest shone brightly in the darkness, he would move forward.

  Moriya was wrong—he didn’t know where he was going. He had no idea. There was no way for him to know, no way for him to possibly comprehend where he was heading, understand the weight behind choosing to walk to the left when he came to a fork right before a clearing instead of taking a right. Choosing to veer off the path and head up the small hill north because he realized this was the way back to Thaon, and heading up the hill would give him a better vantage point.

  The familiarity of the situation and the awful realization of how he had cemented his fate did not hit him until he finally left the forest and ended up on top of a cliff overlooking a large forest clearing. Too far to reach without plummeting to his death, yet close enough so he could discern the faces of those below illuminated by a blood-red sky. Surrounded by the forest for as far as his eyes could see.

  Like in his nightmare, there was a blazing bonfire in the center of the clearing. At least twenty Ancients surrounded a figure clothed in a red scarf and black tactician’s robe in front of it. Thirteen individuals stood in front of the tactician. They must be the elders for each sanctuary, he thought to himself as he scanned face after face, until his eyes stopped at one that he recognized.

  Queen Lanimede.

  As he scrutinized the Ancient royal and her unmistakable ashen hair and opal jewels, the inner individuals parted to allow through an Ancient from the outer circle.

  Darius. Theo fell to his knees at the edge of the cliff, staring at his friend. The Ancient was tall and thin, barely recognizable anymore as he stepped up in front of Ty and kneeled.

  Ty reciprocated the motion and kneeled in front of her brother, like he had seen her do in front of strangers. Her lips moved first, asking the same question she always asked.

  Darius nodded, like all the other Ancients before him.

  The Child of Hope steadied her sheathed blade beside her and asked one more question.

  The Ancient who was among the sinned nodded.

  Having fulfilled the traditional exchange, the child stood up and unsheathed her sword.

  But something was different. It was neither the original gold nor the color of the abyss—that suffocating darkness that he had expected it to be, that Darius had spoke of, that even Ty had dreamed of—but a shimmering aurora of colors, a blindingly bright rainbow that held no candle to Chelsi’s Skypiercer, that looked like a beacon in the night, illuminating all in its path.

  She steadied it to her side, pointed it at her brother, and then severed the soul from his body in one quick motion, watching as the Ancient fell to his side, eyes closed with a smile on his face.

  And then, as if his death had triggered the rite, two of the six in the center immediately closed in on Ty, arms outstretched toward her glimmering blade as the tactician stepped back and threw a familiar book onto the ground in front of her.

  With the elders frozen in their tracks, Ty began reciting words he had forgotten belonged to her now. Words he could not hear, but words that he had read once—they set the book in front of her alight and extinguished the bonfire, temporarily stripping the world of its magic. The Ancients of their power.

  The clearing returned to its blood-red color, Ty’s holy blade the only thing to pierce through the haze. Not a single soul moved.

  With no interruptions now, Ty spoke loudly with a shaky voice, tears running down her face as she held her sword with both hands on the hilt and stabbed it into the ground as deep as she could, creating a large circle with large fissures and cracks in the land as she fell to her knees. Her body turned into the unbelievably bright, iridescent hue of her blade, brighter than any of the other Graces as she watched the black fog erupt from every break in the land, ousted by her spreading light, the brilliant rainbow that spanned the entire clearing.

  “We’re going to take our lives back, our lives that are rightfully ours! Not as an instrument of Your designs, but as people, people who lived! Our lives to save countless others, to save a world we love, to save the people we love, to give the possibility of happiness, of hope to those who suffer, to those who cannot choose their destiny—we give you all freedom! Freedom from a hateful, unloving Earth Mother, a cruel, selfish god who values revenge above all else, more than Her own land, Her own children who continue to suffer to fulfill Her designs!”

  She paused, taking her last breath.

  “Because if we have to die, then so do you!”

  And with that, the rainbow auras burst into the sky and all around them, expelling the darkness sealed within the cracks of the world and enveloping everyone around her in a glow that slowly ate away at their sins and bodies, turning them into tiny, bright white lights that slowly drifted off and disintegrated into thin air. Returning to the Earth Mother anew.

  But Theo had no time to watch. He was already running.