Mael watched the black wings fold behind Torin's back.
She unbuttoned her coat and tossed it onto a nearby branch. She had just finished stitching a hole in it. Watching a new one appear was low on her list of priorities.
Countless silver threads emerged from her arm as she extended it toward him.
'Ranks this, ranks that... They're all the same.'
It wasn't a dismissal exactly. Ranks mattered in combat, that much was undeniable. But they weren't everything.
From rank one to three, what was the real difference?
She thought back to her lectures.
The three fundamental aspects grew stronger with each rank. Thought reserves expanded, Will current deepened, soul grew brighter. That was the mechanical truth of it. A rank two had gone from two hundred and fifty thousand Thoughts to three hundred thousand. A rank three from three hundred thousand to four hundred thousand. Natural Thought production increased with each step too, of course.
But so what?
How different was a rank one from a rank two if the former had resources? Mindstones could eliminate the Thought gap entirely. The right motes could cover every weakness a lower rank left exposed. Strip away the numbers and what remained was a person, their pathway, their motes, and how well they understood all three.
However… Torin was a rank four Luminaire.
From everything she had been taught, the advancement from rank three to four wasn't called the Burden of Dreams for nothing. Not only had the enlightenment required to advance spiked into something close to a vertical incline, but upon awakening came a quality change across all three fundamental aspects. She wasn't entirely sure what that meant in practice, but supposedly every mote drawn from their Will carried a more powerful output because of it.
She straightened and met Torin's eyes with cold ones of her own. And on top of her chances already being close to none against someone rank four, Torin was different. He was of Eireindaile blood, so the resource advantage she had mentioned was practically negligible.
Just as Torin raised his arm, he froze.
Mael flinched and hunched lower.
Torin turned his gaze from her toward the trees, as if looking at something too far for Mael to see. His body followed the direction of his eyes, and with a single flap of his wings he was gone.
Snow exploded outward. Nothing but a black streak disappearing behind the trees.
Mael's eyes widened.
"Eh?"
She had faced him with the full intention of an all-out fight. No way she had scared him off. Right? Right??
The snow settled completely before she walked over to her coat and wrapped it around herself.
"Strange…"
The only real reason she had been willing to push her limits was knowing her father wasn't far. The only way she would have died was if Torin had launched something that killed her instantly, and while she wasn't confident in winning against him, she was confident she could defend herself well enough that it wouldn't come to that. She started toward the Claymore estate when six more shadows caught her attention.
"More rank ones? Are they courting death?"
Mael summoned silver threads and changed direction toward them.
—
Taric ran his finger absently along the scar over his eye, unfazed by Vael's presence.
"Tell me… What do you know about this Luminaire named Kael?"
"Kael? Why does he matter now?" Vael crossed his arms and looked at him coldly. "He's talented without reason for his age. Much different from my son."
Taric's eyes sharpened. Vael actually handing out praise to someone?
"With the pace he advanced I thought he must have had resources from the Eireindaile, but now… knowing he reached that stage through his own effort, I'm even more surprised. He's not too different from us when it comes to talent, Taric."
Taric couldn't tell if Vael was actually about to lose it, comparing a rank three to them. But then again. He was walking evidence of his own words, just like Syleena.
"However." Vael paused. "His mindset is dangerous."
"How?" Taric asked, interest piqued.
Vael sighed and brushed his arm.
"If we were to place him somewhere between a righteous Luminaire and a Demonic one, he would fall in the latter without question
The idea of Righteous and Demonic Luminaires was as old as Luminaires themselves. When a Luminaire awakened, they were expected to be a functional member of society. Reading newspapers, working, following the ideologies of what an ideal society looked like. They were meant to help the people around them, pay respect to the nobles above them.
But Demonic Luminaires were not such. What made them Demonic wasn't that they ran around murdering people left and right. No, in fact a Demonic Luminaire could walk their entire life without killing a single soul and still be called Demonic. It was the rejection of everything that made society that made them so.
"Kael has no sense of right or wrong from what I can tell. He kills, steals, and uses people for his own advantage. I'm sure he wouldn't hesitate to drive his hand through either of our hearts given the chance."
Taric's eyes shone. Not with hate or disgust, but something else.
"Why haven't you killed him?" Taric asked.
"I'd like to blame it all on the assumption that we thought he was working under you, but that's not the whole truth. The truth is he played his cards well…" Vael crossed his arms again. "He never crossed the line where killing him made sense. He knew the situation with my grandson when he killed him, he knew Aven's mindset. And he knew how the public would react when he hung those four from the library. Not to mention he used Syleena, or perhaps they used each other, but either way they managed to turn public opinion against us."
Taric stood in silence, listening.
"And while he has killed high ranked Luminaires, all of them were already in bad favor with me. Lucian had gone against my will, bribed by Aven to attack Kael. And the so called Hidden Guardian had always been unstable, loving her brother more than Valthorne."
Taric's eyes narrowed.
Vael would never say it, but Taric knew him well enough to sense what was being left unsaid. Vael was fond of Kael.
"Mmm…" Taric hummed.
"You're low on capable Luminaires."
Vael scoffed.
"I'm still having a hard time understanding how you could be so bold as to launch a surprise attack, Taric. You were once the most righteous Luminaire I had ever met."
"Do you really have any right to say that, after slaughtering the peace convoy I sent here?"
Vael's jaw tightened.
To this day they hadn't been able to find who was responsible for those murders. It had reached the point where they accepted it as fact that it was all part of Eireindaile's scheming, a move to remove any possibility of peace between them and make the war inevitable.
—
Almost thirty Luminaires stood around a freshly dug pit. From its center it would take more than thirty steps to reach either side, and its depth was enough that a man could jump in and not reach the edge with his fingertips.
One of the Luminaires grabbed a female body and tossed it onto the pile inside.
"I don't understand… Why are we burying them in such a dishonorable way?" a woman said.
Someone tossed in another body and let out a soft, humorless laugh.
"Don't be ridiculous. We're in the middle of a war, there's no way we have time to bury each one properly. We'll do that when things settle down."
The mass grave was already more than half full, and more bodies were coming in by the second.
"Another one from the black market." someone sighed.
The Luminaires of Valthorne hadn't managed to attack Eireindaile even once, yet the bodies they were gathering had already surpassed what a serious battle would have produced.
"Help me with this one." a woman said, struggling to drag another body.
Noticing, a man walked over and grabbed the dead woman's legs, and they tossed her in together.
Maria reached out desperately toward the cracks in her inner realm.
"No! Please stop!" She screamed, tears running down her cheeks.
She had no idea what was happening. One moment she had been standing in the market square, nervous enough to faint. The next she was inside her inner realm, unable to return her consciousness to her physical body.
And now… she sat watching the cracks floating around her grow wider.
She clutched her heart and sobbed.
Soul damage was by far the most icy pain she had ever felt.
"Please stop." She barely managed to whisper.
Maria no longer knew where she was. All she knew was that massive black cracks floated through this empty space, held together by thin threads. But the threads were disappearing. And with each one that vanished, her entire body felt like it was being torn apart.
Her eyes moved to one of many. The threads supposedly holding it together moved on their own, like a snake through water. They slithered away from the crack and into her Will.
All around her, black cracks widened and drifted like countless small black holes eating away at her soul.
"Please…"
She collapsed forward.
She was no longer able to produce thoughts. All that remained was a living host, and something parasitic consuming her Will.
A rank two Luminaire beside the pit, adjusting his coat, stilled.
"Do you feel that?" he said, turning to a nearby Luminaire.
They just looked at him with a confused expression.
He returned to his coat and murmured, "Ah… This war must be getting to me."
But just as the words left his lips, something changed.
Inside the pit, a woman's body began to shine, casting light across everything dark around it.
None of the Luminaires managed to react before it erupted.
Countless threads, woven close together into something resembling a wave, exploded outward. From it, braids of thread shot out with deadly precision toward every living and dead body in the area.
They clamped onto faces, forcing their way through every orifice, then driving themselves under eyelids. They slithered deeper and deeper, and just when it seemed they couldn't go any further, they went further still.
A chorus of screams echoed through the space, then went silent.
The threads began to retract, pulling taut around every body they had touched. A sharp crack rang out as they drew even tighter, breaking every bone in the mass of Luminaires. They were pulled together until they resembled a single ball of flesh and cloth, dotted with white where bones poked through, large enough to dwarf a small house.
Blood welled as a mouth formed across its front, and an arm of flesh stretched outward from the mass. It dragged itself away, leaving behind an empty pit and a trail of dark crimson.