Taric and Vael hung in the air like two calamities.
Taric stood atop a golden blade with his hands behind his back, an oppressive wall of countless blades fanned out behind him. A few hundred steps ahead, Vael remained suspended in the air with nothing grand behind him, yet his aura was no less threatening.
Taric turned his gaze toward the ground below, blanketed in cloud. It had been years since he had used any of his techniques seriously. His eyes narrowed when they found a small dot moving through the mist. Someone was running.
He flicked a finger lazily.
A blade shook once, then shot forward with terrifying speed. For a moment the mist burst outward, leaving a clear pocket of air, then dirt and rock exploded upward from below.
Taric flicked another finger.
A second blade shot toward Vael with the same terrifying speed, driving straight through the immense downward pull before shattering the moment it touched Vael's uniform.
Vael raised an eyebrow and brushed a few gold flecks from his shoulder.
"You'll have to put in more effort than that."
Taric looked toward the horizon.
It was a beautiful evening, surprisingly spring-like for how early in the season it was. The sky was filled with blooming swells of white cloud, leaving only slim ribbons of blue between them.
"I know… Just checking to see if you've grown old enough to be caught off guard yet."
Vael said nothing. He simply nodded.
In an instant everything around Taric grew dozens of times heavier. The blades shook violently but held steady, every scrap of fabric that had been fluttering in the wind now pulled desperately downward.
"You'll have to put in more effort than that." Taric said, moving his gaze back to Vael. "By now you must have realised how disadvantaged Valthorne has become. Nearly forty percent of your Luminaires are dead, while none of mine have fallen. Your economy is close to unfixable. And a significant portion of your mortals have perished too. Even if you win this, you'll spend the rest of your life trying to restore Valthorne to what it was."
This was his last attempt to talk Vael out of it. The truth was he didn't necessarily want to fight him. Vael wasn't ordinary, that much was given by his rank alone. But beyond that he was gifted, and extremely so. Taric had always hated wasting potential. But Vael was stubborn. And prideful.
Vael shook his head.
"The truth is that Farkath falls under my rule if you were to lose. The situation isn't as unsalvageable as you think."
'Maybe in another life you would have been more reasonable…'
Taric sighed. There was no talking him out of it.
He turned his thoughts to the current state of things. Even he had been surprised by what Valthorne's Luminaires had become. The reason he had launched the surprise attack on the market was numbers. Valthorne had so many more Luminaires that a direct engagement would have been unfavorable. He knew it strayed far from what he believed in, but he'd had no real choice. Even so, he hadn't expected this. He hadn't expected Valthorne to already be so fractured before he had done anything at all.
The news had come day after day. First, that Vael's grandson and daughter in law had been killed in Eireindaile's name. Then that the people who sought justice for them had been hung from a library. Not long after, Eireindaile's reputation within Valthorne had begun to collapse at a rate that shouldn't have been naturally possible. And then, while a class studied the sacred grounds of the Smolten, they had been slaughtered. Every one of them, without explanation. Through all of it, irregular waves of Pale Ones had claimed lives across Valthorne, Luminaires and mortals alike, one after another.
None of it was his doing. But he could see it clearly. Maybe not for what it truly was, but the shape of it was unmistakable. Beneath all that chaos there was an order. And it wasn't his.
Taric raised his arm, then swung it down.
Half the wall of blades behind him shook in unison, then shot forward like a wave of gold.
Vael finally moved.
Two quick flicks of his arm.
The wall of blades turned sharply and drove downward without losing a trace of momentum. Like a rain of golden arrows they cut into the mortal district, turning another chunk of it to rubble and fractured stone.
Before the dust could settle Taric moved again.
The blades began rising from the ground, slowly at first, then all at once the image blurred. One moment they hovered a few meters above the dirt, the next a flash erupted and they were gone, launching upward at several times the speed they had come down.
Vael reached toward the ground and clenched his fist.
The blades compressed, squeezed so tightly together they resembled a single arrow more than the wall they had been. They whistled through the air past Vael in a pillar of light, and a heartbeat later were nothing but a distant dot.
Vael looked at Taric coldly as the district below began to rise. Chunks as large as houses lifted from the earth, first one, then another, until for hundreds of steps in every direction the ground was pulling itself loose and drifting toward Taric.
Vael crossed his arms and nodded.
The pieces blurred and shot forward. Then everything beyond them began to move as well. Trees tore free from their roots, windows cracked and caved inward, then the walls behind them followed.
When the endless mass was a hand's length from Taric, the blades returned from the sky. They struck it like lightning and drove it straight back down, then swept into a golden hurricane around him. Trees and rocks exploded into dust on contact.
For several heartbeats the mass kept coming, and eventually even the dust couldn't escape it, compressing behind the endless wall of debris that followed.
Vael watched in silence as it grew, until it resembled a small moon.
When it finally stopped, Taric looked like a celestial body suspended in the air.
Taric looked around calmly. The blades had carved out a hollow at the center, a pocket of stillness within the mass. Without the dim light they gave off he wouldn't have been able to see a thing.
'So this is Vael's burial technique… Quite fascinating.'
Taric raised a finger toward the mass, aimed just below where Vael would be standing on the other side. Then he whipped it upward.
A golden thread no thicker than a blade shot out and split the miniature planet clean in half.
Vael's eyes widened. Before he could react his instincts took over and he threw his entire body sideways. The thread blade whipped past with a hiss, close enough to feel.
Then it kept going.
Like an endless golden whip cracking across the sky it tore forward, splitting the ground open with a cut deep enough to swallow a mortal whole. The Luminaire district itself was divided in half as it passed. The library Kael had visited so many times folded and collapsed. Then the church. Then the black market, and still the blade continued, stretching further than the eye could follow.
Vael reached back and closed his fingers around something invisible, then hurled it forward.
A dozen blades shot toward it but wherever the orb passed they vanished, not even leaving gold dust behind.
Taric pointed his finger and a golden thread shot out. The moment it caught the orb a crack rang out and the thread whipped violently through the air, thrashing once before the orb swallowed it whole and disappeared.
Sensing it weaken, Taric snapped his hand out and clenched his fist around the invisible mass. The skin across his knuckles began to crack under the force bearing down on it. Then thousands of microscopic blades materialized around it, floating in silence. With a single thought they drove inward, piercing its core and strangling whatever Will Vael had left inside it.
Taric raised his gaze to Vael and shook his hand out gently, then turned it over. The wounds had already healed.
'A technique I haven't seen before.'
Even though the two of them had exchanged techniques powerful enough to wipe out every Luminaire in the cities combined, neither had moved more than a few steps.
This was how high level battles were often fought. At a certain point, without movement based motes, raw speed became irrelevant. The attacks outpaced the body so completely that by the time you registered what was coming, it had already passed through you. So most reduced their movement to almost nothing, shifting only when instinct demanded it.
"Shy with the mote arts?" Taric's voice reverberated.
Vael turned and settled into a stance built for close combat.
Mote arts. The simultaneous use of multiple lower ranked motes to produce something far beyond what any single one could achieve. Kael knew none, but the Lords were a different matter entirely. Any problem rooted in resources was completely and utterly beneath them.
"We both know that's not the reason." Vael replied.