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  “We need to get closer,” Clara said.

  “What if it gives the impression we’re joining in?” Kael asked.

  “I don’t care. I must know.”

  She tilted her body parallel to the ocean and pushed her wings out of a hover and into a soar. Kael followed, and a glance over his shoulder showed that the other thirty Seraphs followed. They passed several more miles, Center filling their vision. Clara slowed back into a hover. Kael did the same, his throat locking tight and his eyes watering.

  The Seraphim weren’t chasing the knights because they were bombarding the many towns across Center’s edge. Fires spread throughout fields and homes. Docks shattered beneath concentrated blasts of lightning. Roof after roof smashed inward under the weight of ice and stone.

  “They’re daring the knights to come back and fight,” Clara said. Her voice was cold, passionless. It was as if she were so shocked, so numb she couldn’t afford emotions. “Either fight or watch their people die.”

  For ten long minutes, that was what they did. They watched people die. The knights grouped up in formations. They too watched. They too must have felt similar horror, for finally they charged back into the fray. The knights split back into three even groups, looking to equally engage the other islands’ Seraphim, but the far eastern group suddenly turned and cut west mere minutes before engaging with Sothren’s forces to join the fight against Candren. Their wings shone a brilliant gold, outracing their Sothren foes easily. The outer islands had grown too confident. They’d forgotten their wings were still the slower.

  While the knights had been heavily outnumbered for much of the battle, this time they had superior numbers to go with their superior skill. Candren’s Seraphim attempted to disengage when they saw Center’s reinforcements coming in, but they couldn’t break away. The knights bore the faster wings. Forced into a battle, the Candren Seraphim took the offensive, furiously blasting away with their elements. The knights kept close and defensive. Time was on their side. The Sothren forces would not catch up for another few minutes. Kael held his breath, eyes peeled as the two groups merged together, and the knights retook the offensive.

  Even from their distance, Kael could tell it was a slaughter. The Candren Seraphim took the best course of action, pushing through the reinforcements in a desperate bid to reach the Sothren forces still attempting to catch up. The battle turned into chaos, too much of a blur to follow accurately until the Candren and Sothren merged together. Even then their numbers were now only equal to the knights. It would be a losing battle, and they all knew it.

  They couldn’t hear the horn, but they saw the reactions when the call to retreat sounded. Both Candren and Sothren flew toward the edge, defensive walls flinging up behind them coupled with blind shots to fill the air and endanger their chasers. Sometimes a few would break off from the rest, sacrificing their lives to buy the others time. Kael winced with every shimmer of gold that blinked out of existence.

  With two islands in full retreat, a portion of knights split off from the chase to join the attack in the west. Elern had seen the crumbling of the other two and their Seraphim quickly pulled away while they still had the numbers advantage. Knights gave chase, but it seemed halfhearted.

  “Center held,” Clara said, breathing out a long sigh. “Just barely, but for good or ill, they held.”

  The three islands clustered together on their flight home, their numbers painfully diminished from their initial invasion. It seemed they purposely avoided any path that might fly them close to Weshern’s watching group.

  “What do you think it all means?” Kael asked.

  “I don’t know,” Clara said. “I pray this means we may finally restore peace among us, but …”

  She looked to the fleeing forces of the other islands.

  “But what?” Kael asked when she hesitated to continue.

  “But I fear we made enemies of our allies.”

  “It still wouldn’t have been worth it,” Kael said, shaking his head. “Imagine what would have happened if Center lost.”

  “Our war would be over,” Clara said.

  “Except it wouldn’t. Hundreds of Seraphim can conquer the skies, but what of the miles and miles of land below? Who will occupy the territory? Who would take out the thousands of ground troops? Center’s knights would retreat, lick their wounds, and prepare for another defense … and what do you think the Seraphim will do after what Center did to us here?”

  Clara’s face paled as she realized his point.

  “If our combined Seraphim can’t conquer and hold Center …”

  Kael looked to the distant capital island.

  “They’d bombard everything they can from the sky. If we’d joined in, we might have participated in slaughter on the grandest scale since Galen’s collapse. Your mother did the right thing. We did the right thing, Clara. You know that.”

  Clara gestured to the diminished number of Candren, Elern, and Sothren Seraphim flying back to their homes.

  “And if they don’t?”

  “Then I’m glad your mother is charge instead of me, because I haven’t the slightest idea.”

  CHAPTER

  28

  Liam walked the halls of Heavenstone, wishing they felt as comfortable to him now as they had been over the last five years. Other knights milled about, an alarming amount of them sporting fresh cuts and casts for broken bones earned in the battle the day before. Liam shook his head. The combined might of the minor islands had been terrifying to witness, and they’d held on by a razor’s edge. If Weshern had also joined in …

  If Weshern had joined in, then Center would have fallen, her people slaughtered, the Speaker executed. Liam tried to push away the thought of what that world would be, and how it would feel to no longer have the Speaker to command his life. Blasphemous thoughts. Weak desires for escape and ease over the righteous path. They didn’t represent his heart. His heart was pure. He was the blade of the angels. He was the flesh on their bones, the blood on their feathers.

  “Are you all right?” a servant asked Liam, stirring him from his thoughts. He started to rebuke the young man for disturbing him, then stopped. Liam hadn’t realized that he’d stopped walking. Instead, he stood unmoving before a bare wall. His left hand was balled into a fist, and his forehead rested against the cold stone.

  “Yes, I’m fine,” he said, stepping away from the wall. “Just needed a moment to think.”

  The servant didn’t look convinced, and that worried look pushed Liam even faster through the halls and up the stairs. His nerves were shot. His doubt was growing. Liam didn’t want to reveal this weakness to the Speaker, but there was someone else who might be able to answer his questions. Someone who might have a better answer than the deflection Marius gave him when asked.

  The third and highest floor of Heavenstone was also the quietest and most luxurious. Liam’s heavy footsteps were muted by the thick red carpet. The stone walls were hidden behind long curtains colored violet, with gaps left for a multitude of paintings. Their beauty was incredible, little glimpses of a long-vanished world of deep forests, sprawling mountains, and moon-frosted lakes. There was no crawling darkness in that world, no midnight fire. Just peace.

  The door Liam halted before lacked any obvious markings, but that didn’t mean there weren’t any. Liam pulled back one of the curtains, revealing a name lightly carved into the stone: Er’el Jaina Cenborn. He knocked twice, then released the curtain. Straightened his uniform. Waited.

  “Yes?” Jaina asked, her door cracking open and her head peeking out. “Oh. Hello, Liam. Is there something the matter?”

  Liam worked up every nerve in his body, needing the strength. He was already on tenuous ground, having been reprimanded multiple times for his lack of faith, but he felt he must challenge his past and demand the answers they’d avoided giving him for years.

  “My daughter wields flame within her blood,” Liam said. “And my son sprouted heavenly wings to save himself when falling to
his death. I want to know how, and why. The Speaker insists these powerful gifts are from the deceiver, but at risk of committing blasphemy, I refuse to accept that as an answer.”

  Despite the empty hallway, Jaina glanced in each direction and then sighed.

  “Very well,” she said. “It seems pointless to keep hiding it. Come in, Liam. We must discuss this in private.”

  She opened the door wider and stepped aside. Liam entered a posh room flooded with fanciful little decorations. He couldn’t help but notice a particularly violent bent to the many paintings on the walls. Like most that hung throughout Center, they were images of the world prior to Ascension, detailing ice-capped mountains, forests spanning hundreds of miles, and deep red rock carved with canyons. Most, however, also contained scenes of battle, be it with swords, spears, or bows and arrows. A few even showed lines of men slaughtering one another with primitive firearms. Others depicted graveyards, disease, or towns aflame. The largest painting was of a dark-skinned man with a noose around his neck hanging from a tree, a crowd of furious people holding torches and rifles above their heads as they hollered silent, permanent rage.

  “That’s a cheery one,” Liam said, nodding toward it.

  “Given Center’s heavy nostalgia for the pre-Ascension world, I like to remind myself humanity has always been cruel and sinful. It was true then, and it is true now.”

  “Then why did the angels pull us into the heavens instead of letting us die like we deserved?”

  “I don’t know,” Jaina said. “Perhaps even the angels have a nostalgic heart.”

  She settled into her leather chair beside a large bookshelf filled with faded tomes predating the Ascension.

  “Know that everything I tell you here is not to be repeated,” she said. “Not even to other knights or theotechs.”

  “Understood,” Liam said.

  Jaina rocked back in her chair, fingers tapping.

  “We were hoping to save ourselves,” she said, staring at him. “You need to understand that. All we did, right or wrong, we did with the best of intentions. Perhaps that won’t save us when we kneel before the creator, but I’d like to believe it so.”

  Liam crossed his arms and stood before her, impatiently waiting.

  “Go on.”

  Jaina smiled bitterly.

  “Er’el Tesdon championed the idea for much of his life, and sadly we only acquiesced in his final days. He swore that our reliance on demons for elements would be our eventual undoing, and that by keeping them enslaved we were repeating the failures of the past that led to the Ascension. Plenty disagreed with him, but we all knew our system wasn’t perfect. Worse, every demon that died attempting to escape was forever one less to bleed for prisms. Underneath the dome, we had no means of procuring more demons, and the demons themselves did not procreate. Something had to be done, for no matter how many centuries it took, our supply would eventually run out.”

  Jaina slumped further into her chair, her slender fingers rubbing her lips in thought.

  “Tesdon’s idea was simple: could humanity harness in their blood the same power of the demons?”

  Shivers spiked Liam’s spine.

  “Blasphemy,” he said in shock.

  “Perhaps,” Jaina said. “But there was a bit of groundwork already established. Men and women, seemingly at random, were born with varying degrees of affinity toward specific elements. That affinity allowed manipulation of the elemental prisms, albeit with mechanical aid. Tesdon insisted the next step in our own evolution was going beyond affinity into actual manipulation with human blood, removing the need for the demons. Once Marius gave approval we began selecting candidates from the populace for our implantation experiments.”

  Pieces started tumbling into place, not all of them, but enough to paint a picture that terrified Liam.

  “The Ghost Plague,” he said. “That wasn’t a real illness, was it? Our people were being taken for your experiments.”

  Jaina nodded.

  “We invented symptoms, declared us the only ones able to detect the disease early, and then moved in quickly before anyone knew what was going on. It’s easier than you might think, Liam. First you start with the poor and the homeless, the ones who are likely already ill or isolated. Once we took them, everyone feared catching our fraudulent plague. We weren’t proud of this, mind you, but the implantation process was frighteningly lethal, and due to the nature of our quest, and the need to keep the source of the prisms quiet, we had to explain the disappearances to the populace somehow. We tried inserting prisms of various sizes into subjects’ bloodstreams, grinding them into powder, sewing them into flesh within body parts, anything we could think of. It never mattered. The fever inevitably came to snuff out the subjects’ lives.”

  Ferrymen had taken dozens of Liam’s friends and neighbors across the sky to Center, fearful and seeking a desperate cure for the disease the theotechs claimed they’d contracted. But they hadn’t been cured, for there was nothing to cure. They’d been executed. Liam’s head swam, and he asked his next question while certain of the answer.

  “You experimented upon me as well, didn’t you?”

  “We did,” she said. “Does that bother you?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Jaina spun in her chair and opened a drawer. Among some papers and books was a broken piece of a fire elemental prism. She took it out and set it on the table before her.

  “This was half of the prism we shattered and inserted into your blood,” she said. “We’d reached the end of our trials. Nothing appeared to work. The best we’d concluded was that those with an affinity toward an element survived longer if implanted with that same element. You, among others, had a stronger affinity for your element than the rest of the populace.”

  “And so I survived,” Liam said. “Did that prove your theory?”

  Jaina smirked.

  “You were an outlier, Liam. Among the thirty we tested with incredibly strong affinity, two managed to survive the coming fever, and only then by us submerging them in ice water and forcing liquid into their veins when they could not eat or drink.”

  Two survivors. Liam knew the other. They’d discussed it before. A miracle, they’d called it. Their own little miracle, showing how God desired them to meet one another.

  “Cassandra was the other,” Liam said. “You experimented on her as well.”

  “We did,” she said. “And while you two survived, you were two of hundreds, a pitiful survival rate with no chance of replication among the general populace. Er’el Tesdon’s blood modification program was deemed a failure. Not long after, he himself passed away.”

  Liam tried to take it all in, to understand what this meant. Him and Cassandra, the only two survivors … and set up to meet on a blind date by friends.

  “You put us together,” he said, trying to keep control of his growing rage. “Why?”

  Jaina shrugged.

  “I took over what was left of Tesdon’s experiments after his passing. Even if the process couldn’t be replicated, I wondered at the meaning of yours and Cassandra’s survival. Perhaps your blood might be used in further transfusions instead of more prisms? And what of your survival? Did it mean you had inherited the powers we were hoping for? We tested this, of course, draining over a hundred vials of blood from each of you. Every experiment, a failure. No affinity. No elemental manipulation. Nothing.”

  Liam remembered being drained of blood. They’d told him they were seeking a cure for the Ghost Plague should it ever reemerge. But they weren’t seeking a cure. They were seeking a weapon, and they’d killed hundreds injecting demon blood into their bodies to achieve it.

  “And me and Cassandra?”

  “I was curious how further generations of children might be affected by your implantation, and I didn’t want to risk diluting the blood, hence your pairing. A mere final act of the experiment before we sealed away all results completely.”

  So clinical. So heartless. As if the time they’d
spent together, the love they’d felt between them, meant nothing at all. After Cassandra died in battle, they’d taken Liam to Center and anointed him a new knight in service of the Speaker. It had been a great honor, one that would require great sacrifice. His body bore the tattoos, each one chasing away the sin in his mind. His heart bore the greater scars, the separation from his two young children. Now Liam saw that separation, not as an honor, but just one more part of a damn cruel experiment.

  “My children,” he said. “They finally showed the promise you were looking for.”

  “At first it appeared nothing more than a slightly stronger affinity to an element,” Jaina said. “Kael’s was with light, but we pushed him into Weshern’s Seraphim Academy instead of becoming a ferryman. I thought his abilities would be better put to the test there. I kept an eye on their training status, not thinking much on them, to be honest. They showed peculiarities but little beyond that. Your daughter even lagged behind other members of her class when it came to elemental manipulation, a quirk that left me puzzled and disappointed. Just another dead end, like everything else involved with the implantation experiments. At least, until your daughter wielded fire on her swords in her battle against Galen.”

  Liam remembered that day. No one had told him directly, but too much conversation was filled with talk of the unusual skill shown by the Weshern Seraph. His heart had been filled with pride, and he’d asked Marius for a chance to meet with his children. The Speaker had chastised his weakness and warned that even then his children might be succumbing to the words of the heretic, Johan.

  “We attempted to take them in quietly,” Jaina continued, as if oblivious to the fury growing in Liam’s breast. “Sadly our attempt failed, and it was only after Galen’s fall that we apprehended one of them for renewed experimentation.” She sighed. “Such a shame Breanna escaped. Her blood was everything we had ever hoped for. If only the process were not so fatal, but even if it weren’t, I have a feeling the rest of the Erelim would not allow it to continue. The rebellion of the so-called Phoenix of Weshern is a vibrant warning as to what may happen when power is given freely to civilians of the minor islands instead of being tightly controlled.”