Chapter 25: Naive.
Iskander
"Good, Being of Aether and Flesh."
The voice was a dry, rasping echo from above, a sound that had become the grating soundtrack to my personal hell. Al-Hazred's aetheric form shimmered against the perpetual, smoky twilight of the Crucible's sky, his violet glow a malevolent star.
He observed me as I pushed myself up from the smoldering rock, my body screaming in protest. Another near-miss. Another breath attack from Gawain that had sheared off a portion of the cliff face I'd been standing on, the concussive force throwing me like a leaf in a hurricane.
My ears were still ringing, my skin stinging from the heat and the shrapnel of pulverized stone.
"You are learning," the Djinn continued, his tone that of a master approving a dog's clumsy trick. "Your aetheric pathways are becoming more efficient. You waste less with each augmentation. The feedback is… promising."
I didn't answer. I couldn't. My breath came in ragged, ash-choked gasps. How long had it been? Hours? Days? Time had lost all meaning in this sulfurous nightmare, measured only in the intervals between near-death experiences and the frantic, golden healing that followed.
My world had shrunk to this: the scorching heat of the black rock under my boots, the coppery taste of my own blood constantly in my mouth, the blinding orange glow of lava flows below, and the colossal, obsidian-scale form of Gawain Indrath—a mindless engine of destruction whose sole purpose was my annihilation.
My existence was a frantic, desperate dance. A dance where the slightest misstep meant evisceration by an invisible breath attack I couldn't predict, only react to.
A dance where my partner was a dragon who could teleport, whose claws could shatter my hastily conjured aether shields, whose tail could send me flying into solid rock.
I was the main attraction in a grotesque circus, and Al-Hazred was the sole, silent audience, watching with detached fascination as the clown was repeatedly maimed and stitched back together for his delight.
'Child, you should stop…' Sylvia's voice was a whisper in my mind, frayed with exhaustion and saturated with a concern that felt like a physical ache.
I was on my feet again, pale gold aether flaring along the stump of my right arm, which was already regrowing, bone weaving itself from nothing, muscle and sinew knitting over it with a sensation like a thousand burning ants.
My skin, peeled away on my left side from a glancing blast, was reforming, a wave of intense itching and heat spreading across the raw flesh.
What? I retorted, the thought sharp, edged with a frustration that was starting to curdle into something darker.
The Djinn is giving us all the time in the world to heal! He never goes for the truly final blow. This is a golden opportunity! This is the experience I was missing!
The bitter truth, learned in the first few "hours" of this torment, was how utterly, pathetically unprepared I was. Power I had in spades. A body that could regenerate from almost anything. But skill? Finesse? I was a newborn in a titan's body.
My entire previous life had been spent in a hospital bed, my body a prison of decay. I knew pain intimately, but I knew nothing of combat. How to move, how to pivot, how to channel force through a punch rather than just throwing aether-fueled weight behind it. I was a child swinging a sledgehammer, all brute force and wild, wasteful arcs.
'Child.' Sylvia's tone shifted, cutting through my self-recrimination with a new, startling seriousness.
'This is not about learning. This is not healthy. You are doing exactly what he wants. He is not teaching you control; he is sanding down your edges. He is shaping you into a weapon that knows only forward momentum, that has forgotten the concept of self-preservation. A weapon that will not flinch, even at its own destruction.'
That's what we're making him think! I shot back, the mental shout defensive, almost angry. Don't you see, Sylvia? He's giving me the forge! I'm the one who will take the hammer from his hand when I'm done! Not this… this monster who turns graves into his personal armory!
'I didn't mean it as a strategy!' Her voice rose, a flare of genuine fear and maternal fury. 'I mean it as a warning! If you internalize this… this careless, reckless abandon, if you carry this attitude into future battles, you will not be the only one who pays the price! Those around you, those you fight beside, those you swear to protect—they will be caught in the blast! You will become the very danger you seek to fight!'
Her words hit me like a physical blow, more impactful than Gawain's tail. It was the first real, tactical advice she'd given me—not about how to fight, but about why to fight carefully. It wasn't about my survival; it was about the survival of others.
My mind reeled, about to form a response, to argue or perhaps to finally understand, when Al-Hazred's voice sliced through our connection like a blade.
"Cease your communion with the draconic remnant, Being of Aether and Flesh," he commanded, his voice cold, devoid of its earlier hint of approval. "Its influence is a poison to your superior intellect. A sentimental anchor dragging you into the mire of its own degenerative history."
His aetheric hand raised. A silent command.
Above, Gawain, who had been standing like a statue of living obsidian, stirred. The ground trembled as his massive wings unfurled, each beat stirring the ash-filled air into a choking storm.
He blocked out the sickly light, casting me into a sudden, terrifying shadow. My body went on high alert, every sense screaming. I dropped into a guard, my newly formed arm coming up, pale gold aether flickering around it.
I blinked.
The world shifted.
Not movement. Translation. One moment he was there, a hundred yards away. The next, he was here, directly above me, his entire colossal form hurtling down in a dive-bomb that defied physics. The air screamed in protest.
There was no time to run. No time to think. Instinct, honed by what seemed like an endless time of brutal repetition, took over. I crossed my arms in front of my face and chest, a pathetic guard against a meteor. I poured my will into Creation, not to form a weapon, but a defense.
A shell. A bubble of solid, pale gold aether encased my upper body. Simultaneously, I felt Sylvia's presence surge within my core, no longer just healing, but empowering, forcing a torrent of aether through my channels to reinforce the hastily made shield.
It wasn't enough.
Gawain's head, crowned with those terrible, curled horns, struck the bubble. The sound was a deafening SHATTER. The golden shield exploded into motes of light. The momentum didn't stop. The central, largest horn, sharper than any spear, punched through the dissipating energy and drove into my chest.
Not a clean impalement. A brutal, gouging impact. It tore through muscle, scraped against bone, and ripped outwards, taking a massive chunk of my right side with it in a spray of blood and viscera.
Agony, white-hot and absolute, blotted out everything. I was vaguely aware of vomiting a torrent of blood, my body convulsing. Sylvia's healing energy was a frantic, desperate fire, flooding the catastrophic wound, trying to stem the bleeding, to rebuild what was instantly gone.
But Gawain wasn't done. The aether around him flared. Another gut-wrenching spatial shift. He was behind me. I felt the air move a fraction of a second before his tail, a battering ram of scale and bone, connected with my back.
CRACK-THUD!
The impact lifted me off my feet and launched me across the plateau. I hit the steep slope of the volcano with bone-jarring force, tumbling down in a limp heap of broken parts, coming to rest against a jagged outcrop of rock.
I couldn't move. I could barely breathe.
Every inch of me was a universe of pain. Through a blurry, blood-filled vision, I saw Gawain land calmly, returning to his rest position, as if he'd simply swatted a fly.
Al-Hazred descended, his violet form hovering just above the smoldering ground. He looked down at the ruin of my body with that same detached curiosity.
"Good," he said again, and the word was a mockery. "If this level of damage had been inflicted a week ago, your core would have faltered. You would have died. The progress is measurable."
A… week? The concept was so alien, so disconnected from the endless, grinding now of the Crucible, that it barely registered. Then, the full implication slammed into my foggy brain.
"H—how much… time…?" I managed to rasp, the words bubbling with blood. Sylvia was working furiously, her light a contained supernova within me, prioritizing my lungs, my spine, my shattered pelvis.
I focused my own will, pushing past the agony. Creation. The thought was a weak spark. But it answered. Pale gold light enveloped the mangled ruin of my right side.
A new leg began to form from the severed stump at my hip, fibers of muscle weaving over newly crafted bone. The skinless, raw meat of my left flank began to seal over, new skin spreading like pale grey wax.
The blessing of Creation, my ultimate defiance against the God of Misfortune, was the only thing keeping me from being a stain on the rocks.
"In the external world? A week has passed since your arrival in the Crucible," Al-Hazred stated, as if reporting the weather. "Within this accelerated temporal frame? Three weeks. Your perception is a necessary casualty of the training regimen."
Three weeks. The number echoed in my shattered mind. I had lost three weeks of my life to this endless cycle of pain and regeneration. I had thought it was days, perhaps. The distortion was intentional. Another layer of control.
The Djinn's aetheric hand extended towards me, a gesture that might have been mistaken for help. I stared at it, then turned my head and spat a gob of bloody phlegm onto the scorched rock beside it. A feeble, pointless act of defiance.
A flicker of something—annoyance?—passed over his glowing rune-etched face.
"I see the recalcitrance persists. A stubborn flaw in the material. No matter. The forging has only just begun."
He ascended back to his observation post.
"Your naivety is a shield you cling to, Being of Aether and Flesh. It only harms you. I say this for your benefit. We are aligned. We share the same enemies. We will, in time, share the same glorious purpose."
"Oh?" I forced out, my voice strengthening as my throat healed. "And what is that? Petty revenge? That's your grand design?"
I kept Sylvia's will-o'-wisp clamped deep within my core, a prisoner in her own right. I was terrified that this creature, who saw her as a "poison," might find a way to rip her out, to use her against me. His claim that manipulation was beneath him was a lie. Trust was a luxury I couldn't afford.
Al-Hazred's form seemed to solidify, his glow intensifying. "No," he intoned, his voice gaining a resonant, zealous quality. "As I have told you, I am a seeker of justice. My armies of Drones will march forth from the Relictombs, and they will liberate the primitive peoples of both continents from the oppressive yoke of the Asuras. They will be freed from the gods who see them as insects."
He sounded like a villain from a cheap children's show, spouting grandiose, self-justifying nonsense. But the power behind the words was terrifyingly real.
"First," he declared, "will be the foolish Agrona Vritra. As… thanks for harboring my beloved daughter and for inadvertently delivering you unto me, I will grant him and his clan a swift, painless death. Then, I will offer him the ultimate honor: a place in my ranks. He will become a Drone, and he will have the privilege of aiding me in obtaining his own vengeance."
I felt Sylvia's presence within me tremble with a potent mix of rage and horror. However she felt about Agrona now—betrayed, hurt, angry—the thought of him being reduced to this… this hollow puppet, this thing like Gawain, was a desecration that sickened her to her core. I agreed.
There were fates worse than death, and this was one of them. The memory the Heart Relic had shown me—of King Grey's execution—flashed before my eyes.
If it was only up to me I would have preferred for him to be imprisoned for life. However I hadn't mourned his death, but still I didn't agree on the means of his execution.
And this… this was different, even worse than whatever I could have imagined on Earth. This was eternal slavery. A perversion of will.
"Then," Al-Hazred's voice rose, thrumming with ancient, bitter hatred, "will come Epheotus! Every man, woman, and child! Dragon, Pantheon, Basilisk, Phoenix, Titan, Hamadryad or Sylph—every last trace of their corrupt species will be scoured from existence! I will hunt them to the last, until their world is as silent and empty as they left mine! An eye for an eye! A genocide for a genocide!"
The sheer, unvarnished hypocrisy of it took my breath away. He sought to punish a genocide by committing an even greater one. He was trapped in the very spiral of hatred he claimed to be avenging. He and King Grey would have found much to agree on.
"And you think it will be that easy?" I coughed, pushing myself fully upright, my new leg feeling alien but strong. "You're optimistic, Brainiac. Delusional, even."
"Agrona Vritra is but one Asura," he dismissed with a wave of his hand. "A clever insect, but an insect nonetheless. Compared to your potential, Being of Aether and Flesh, he is an ant. You will eclipse him. You are the key."
"Oh, you flatter me," I said, the sarcasm a thin shield over a core of icy dread. He was utterly mad. Grief and a thirst for revenge had curdled his brilliant mind into this… this monstrous thing.
"You have rested enough," he stated, his voice returning to its cold, clinical tone. The brief glimpse into his fanatical vision was over. The lesson was resuming. "Gawain. Restart the Being of Aether and Flesh's training."
The command was absolute. The colossal dragon's head lifted, those vacant blue eyes locking onto me once more. The reprieve was over. The Crucible's fire awaited.
I settled into a stance, my body whole again but my spirit weary, the echoes of Sylvia's warning and the Djinn's horrifying prophecy ringing in my ears.