From the day he was born, his father had warned him about something like this. You’ll be hunted. One day, they’ll find out who you are. One day, you’ll understand that you should hide, just like the rest of us. And the Watchmen will give you the strength to hide.

  He, like every one of his firstborn ancestors since the last King of Artanor failed to Light the Stars, had become a Watchman. It gave them training. It gave them everything they needed to survive. When they grew beyond apprenticeship, they left, returning to hiding and slaying darklings for the rest of their miserable lives.

  Ash sprinted through the hallways of the battleship until he reached the hangar, then climbed into a docked shuttle.

  “Thorn!” Rubal bellowed from the hangar’s doorway. “Don’t run from the future. His Plan will come to pass, and it is not your place to deny it!”

  Ash triggered a card, forging a wall of light behind him, and a stream of darkness from Rubal’s hand crashed against it. It shattered it, but it gave Ash just enough time to climb the shuttle’s boarding ramp.

  “Sir! Please!” Ash reached for the lever to close the boarding ramp, but his fingers hesitated. “Why? This letter promised you a reward, not…fixing anything!”

  “Rewards are manipulations for the weaker minded, but that is not for men like me. There is only one way forward. Light-aspect wielders will get in the way.”

  Ash heaved down on the lever, sealing the boarding ramp with a puff of steam. The shuttle’s stoker kyborg didn’t know what was happening until Ash commanded it to keep the engines running. He ran to the cockpit and launched the ship forward without even bothering to raise the landing gear, sending it skidding out of the hangar.

  Ash bolted upright, coughing black mist out his mouth and blinking. He rubbed his forehead. Perril and Lady Fairynor leaned over him, but they leapt back when he rose up.

  “How long was I out?” Ash gasped.

  “Only a few minutes,” Perril replied. “You inhaled most of the Nightmare’s Aes. I only had a brief glimpse of a vision, and Lady Fairynor didn’t get anything.”

  “What did you see?” Lady Fairynor demanded.

  “Memories,” Ash grunted, sitting upright.

  “Which ones?”

  “I’d rather not say.”

  “You can trust us, aye?” Perril asked. “Ash, what’s wrong?”

  “I was supposed to finish my Watchman training. I didn’t. I’m no warrior, and certainly not a king. I’ve only gotten what I have because of Lady Fairynor’s string-pulling.” He winced. “The story I told Jace and Lessa was a lie. My master didn’t save me, and he didn’t help me or Lady Fairynor’s sister. I only met her afterward.” He shook his head. “I’m a liar from a line of failures. I couldn’t even bring myself to admit that my master turned on me and tried to kill me.”

  “It wasn’t your fault,” Lady Fairynor said, placing a hand on Ash’s shoulder.

  “What did happen, then?” Perril asked.

  “I escaped. I found my way onto a different battleship from the expeditionary force, which happened to have Lady Fairynor aboard. I told her what happened, and she smuggled me back through the wall, then helped me change my aspect. I rejoined the Watchmen with some clever paperwork and a few facial readjustments, only so I could serve as her agent. As for Rubal, I don’t know what ever became of him. He never returned from that mission.”

  Perril winced, then knelt down. “I wish you’d told the truth, but…aye, that’s rough.”

  Ash and Lady Fairynor were silent.

  “Sorry. I don’t know what else to say,” Perril muttered.

  “Let’s just get moving,” Ash grumbled. “We have more floors to get through, and we don’t have time for this.”

  40

  CRACKING THE SPEAR

  When Jace, Lessa, and the others had finished their preparations for cracking the Halcyon Spear open, they dragged it out into the middle of a nearby field. It was slightly overcast, but it wasn’t snowing yet. It was just windy.

  They rigged up a small contraption that would finish piercing the Sentinel cores in unison and feed the immense energy into the resin shell surrounding the spear. Hopefully, it would be enough to crack it. While Lessa had carved runes onto a sheet of particle board, Jace and the others had worked on a device that would drop at once, driving a nail into each of the cores and splitting them.

  Then there came the problem of actually splitting open the cores and using their energy. While they were tough, they certainly weren’t immune to the fancy drills Mr. Calder lent them. The Sentinel cores were meant to be used. They’d drilled a hole until they were almost through the outer layer, then hot-glued the cores to the particle board, facing upward.

  Hot glue, duct tape, and particle board. The best crafting ingredients known to the universe.

  Once Lessa was satisfied with the contraption, she wheeled a spool of twine over to the ditch where everyone else was hiding. She passed the twine to Jace and said, “On your mark. Give it a good tug, and drop the nails all together.”

  “You don’t want to do it?”

  “No, ‘cause then if it doesn’t work, I can blame you.”

  He chuckled, then glanced at the others. No one else wanted to hold the spool of rope.

  “Gee, thanks.” He gave them a grin. “Ready?”

  “Are you sure this ditch is deep enough?” Lena asked.

  “Keep your heads down.”

  They were far enough from the house and the barn that it wouldn’t cause too much lasting damage if there was a massive explosion, but he wasn’t sure exactly how much power the spear itself contained.

  Finally, Jace tugged on the rope. There was a thud, and then nothing.

  Jace cautiously peered over the ridge of snow, squinting. Percy lifted his head up too. “Get down!” Jace hissed, waving with his hand.

  “Did it do anything?” Tim asked.

  “It…didn’t pierce the cores. We didn’t drop it⁠—”

  Before Jace could finish, the four nails on a frame sank down into the cores, piercing through the final layer and cracking them open. They each popped with a minor explosion, then leaked their essences out into the runes Lessa carved.

  The particle board blazed with light. Most of the runes burned, and the edge of the sheet lit on fire. There was a magenta channel, a blue channel, a green channel, and a golden channel, and they flowed to the central spear.

  If it had been meant for more than a single use, it wouldn’t have worked, but it was just enough. The energy leaked into the spear and created cracks of light all throughout the resin splinter of the Halcyon Spear.

  It trembled, vibrating and whistling like a teakettle, before finally blasting apart. Jace ducked down behind the ridge as quickly as he could, wincing as chunks of wood raced overhead. Lessa grinned, and Tim yelped.

  After the blast, Jace climbed back up over the ridge. Something had melted most of the snowy slope, and if they hadn’t been hiding, they would’ve probably melted themselves. Lessa ran through the wreckage, her feet splashing through puddles of muddy snow and dead winter grass that had been revealed, until she reached the center.

  There was a shimmering coil of technique card material just laying there in the grass. Everything else was gone.

  Lessa passed it to Jace and said, “What does it do?”

  “You can’t tell?”

  “It’s way too strong. Something about it is messing with my candlefolk-i-ness.”

  He took the coiled up card. It was more like a ribbon than anything, or like a DNA helix. He assessed it with the Split.

  [Technique Card: Third Pillar]

  Grade: BEYOND

  Type: Attack

  Compatible Classification: All

  Compatible Aspects: All

  [Removes a target from existence on a fundamental level, isolating it from the Split. This ability scales with the user’s total attributes, and is not effective against a target with higher attributes unless all three Pillars act in unison. When used on the Split, it is capable of temporarily shattering and fragmenting its form. This card cannot be triggered by a Wielder, and must be a component in a weapon, otherwise it will immediately be destroyed. This card has no cooldown.]

  Jace gulped. “Yeah, that’s not pretty.”

  “I mean, does it do anything that we didn’t think it could do?” Lessa asked.

  “No, but with the three Pillars all together, it’s capable of erasing pretty much anything from existence.”

  “Does that include the Enemy? Because then I’d assume we can just use it on the Enemy with all pillars together, and this would be over.”

  He shook his head. “I wish. It’s still only capable of fracturing and cutting the Split, not annihilating the laws of reality.”

  “Do you think we can get the Hand to work with us, then? I mean, maybe he doesn’t want to work with the Enemy?”

  “It’s possible. But I think it’s more likely that he’s been infected with a dark aspect, and it’ll prevent him from seeing a solution even if it’s presented to him.” Jace shook his head. “I’m starting to understand, I think. There are some things which you can’t erase, but some things that you just can’t run from. And trying to is only going to cause more problems.”

  “Hey!” Percy shouted. “Did it work?”

  “It worked!” Jace called back. “Now, we have to turn this into something usable.”

  Ash and the others climbed as quickly as they could. After the first five floors, progress was much faster. There was a Nightmare every five floors, but he did his very best to hold his breath, not drawing in any of the dark Aes, keeping it locked out and shut down.

  Those memories had to stay in the past. He just had to leave them behind.

  He plowed through more and more darklings, cutting down crowds of little monsters or slicing through the largest of the darklings with technique cards. He took risks, and he took hits, and without Perril to heal him, he would’ve died long ago from a thousand cuts. Her caged giant-silverfish had been drained into nothing but a gray powder—it didn’t even shimmer—and she had resorted to drawing Vitality from enemies and feeding it into Ash instead.

  When they reached the fiftieth floor, there was nothing. It was completely empty, save for a central pillar. Ash approached it.

  He was expecting guardian gargoyles. There was no simulated landscape, nothing.

  When he got closer to the pillar, he could make out a few etchings on the side. At the bottom, someone had chiselled a small name: Lefred.

  Eafrem the Great. The first king of Artanor and founder of the Realm. He’d lived thousands of years ago, taking power after the Luminians sealed away the Enemy—his domain was granted to him because of his exceptional service in the first war against the Enemy.

  There were hundreds of other names etched into the white marble of the pillar. Finally, Ash located the name Thralm—the second last king, and the last to have successfully Lit the Stars. And right beside it was the name Thralm II. The last king, and the boy who’d never made it to the top of the tower.

  Ash sighed. He took a step away, but Lady Fairynor said, “Ash. Wait.”

  “What?”

  “Your name. Leave it here.”

  “But—”

  “You still don’t think you’ll ascend?”

  “Thralm II didn’t. He still carved his name prematurely.”

  “You’re not him.”

  With a reluctant shrug, he turned back to the pillar and etched his name into the marble with the tip of the Whistling Blade. It created a glowing signature: Thorn. “Fine. There.”

  “You still don’t believe, aye?” Perril asked.

  “Believe what?”

  “That you can make it to the top?”

  He turned, glancing around the chamber. It was the only room with windows to the outside. They were slats, and from the outside, they weren’t visible, but some sort of invisible stone allowed a view of the outside. He tilted his head up, glancing past the layers of the city. Fifty floors of the tower was about equivalent to three hundred layers of the capital’s. They were above most of the bustle.

  And it granted him a view out the shield gate. Starships duelled in orbit, blasting each other with heavy cannons and sending their debris crashing against the massive energy shield encircling the world. Most of the fleet, however, waited below, and only fired up when they had a chance to temporarily open a section of the shield.

  A battering ram ship hovered above the gate, slamming pulses of force into the opening, threatening to burst it. In time, they’d get through.

  “What choice do I have?” Ash asked. “I’ll do what I can.”

  From the looks on Perril and Lady Fairynor’s faces, they weren’t entirely convinced.

  Kinfild and Ken hung on the outside of a dome city. While Ken practiced using flame-based technique cards to perform repairs on the outside of the dome, Kinfild opened a holopad on the outside of his vac-suit.

  The siege of Kinath-Aertes had begun, but there was no sign of Ash, no indication that he’d reached the top of the Citadel Tower. And everyone would know if a king had Lit the Stars.

  “What’s wrong?” Ken asked as he dragged his fingertip along the side of a metal sheet and fed a coil of wire into it for welding material. His voice crackled through the transmitters in their vac-suit helmets. “You look concerned. Did I do something wrong?”

  “No, no,” Kinfild said. He put on a fake smile, visible through his helmet’s shiny glass. “Everything is fine. Keep working.”

  But if no help came to Kinath-Aertes, the planet would fall before Jace and Lessa returned. The Hand would reach the Wall before they were back, and whatever he was planning could commence—with no one to stop him.

  In theory, the Hand controlled the Watchmen. But he had lured in the Watchmen with promises that they were making a difference. They wouldn’t just let him open the wall to whatever. The Shadowclaws implanted in their necks, which had once been a method of controlling them and ensuring they all turned on the light-aspect Wielders, were flagging. They were losing their potency.

  Most of them wouldn’t just let the Enemy’s forces in, not without a fight.

  Everything depended on holding Kinath-Aertes just a little longer. Everything depended on Jace and Lessa returning in time to finish the job.

  41

  A FLICKER OF HOPE

  Jace and Lessa laid out the stolen plasma rifle on a table in the middle of the barn, sheltered from the cold winter winds. She’d gotten the others working on preparations for the components, and menial tasks which didn’t require fine precision. Meanwhile, Jace had gathered the plans they’d drafted.

  “In theory, the modification should turn this into an automatic rifle,” she said. “Clamp your finger down on the trigger, and it’ll keep firing. Now, we’ll need to find some drum magazines, but I’d bet the Outcast has a few of those somewhere.”

  “If it’s that easy to make an automatic plasma rifle, then why aren’t they more common?” Jace asked.

  “It’s way too expensive to give one to every random soldier,” she replied. “And if we don’t modify the barrel, it’s going to overheat in a few shots. Plus, the accuracy is going to be terrible on this. You’re just going to spray and pray.”

  “That’s probably for the best,” Jace replied. “I haven’t had any time to practice aiming.”

  Over the next two days, they worked on the mechanical components—taking apart the Alliance rifle, adding a bulky mechanism atop it to automatically use the recoil of the previous blast to pull back the bolt, and adding a wide external muzzle on the barrel to help with cooling.

  The Halcyon Spear’s technique card slotted into a chamber around the barrel, the sole purpose to enhance the initial blasts with the spear’s destructive ability. However, Lessa also added a mechanism for Jace to feed it hyperspace-aspect Aes, like they could with the Luna Wrath’s turret. It would allow the shots to bypass almost any shield.

  At the end of the second day, it was almost finished. The mechanism would be finicky, but from their initial tests, it worked. It emptied a regular magazine of plasma shells in a single finger pull.

  The harder part was actually fuelling the spear’s card. It hadn’t activated.

  “It needs Aes powering it,” Lessa said. “The dungeon had filled the spear with power, giving it a residual effect—much like your Whistling Blade, initially. But just the average plasma discharge of this rifle isn’t going to be enough to trigger it.”

  “I have to actually fuel the card, then,” Jace said. He laid his hand on the side of the rifle. There was a channel of runes that ran directly to the barrel, where his mana would travel and mix with the shots. “What if we added another line that fed it in much earlier?”

  “That might work,” she agreed. “But we’d have to be cautious. Too much, and we could dilute any destructive effect the plasma has.”

  They worked late into the evening, tweaking the runes until they had something workable. Jace couldn’t exactly moderate his flow, not in the peak of combat, so they had to use runes to vent it.

  At midnight, the barn doors swung open. Everyone else had gone to sleep—everyone but Mrs. Calder. She said, “You two are still up?”

  “We’re almost done,” Jace said.

  “I don’t know what you two are up to,” she said. “And I don’t think I could ever grasp it properly. But I know that you won’t perform as well if you’re hungry and tired.”

  “Thanks for the thought,” Lessa said.

  Jace nodded. “I can go for a while without sleep or food.”

  “Your body can, but can your mind?” She sighed. “Tomorrow is Christmas Eve, Jace. And Christmas the day after. You remember our gatherings, don’t you?”

  He smiled. “I remember your stuffing. It was very good, ma’am.” In truth, he hadn’t even remembered the date. It being so late in the season hadn’t even crossed his mind.