“I will fulfill my obligation to Eithan, and then I will go my own way. Don’t rely on me for help.”
Lindon’s gaze dropped. “I didn’t mean to cause you any inconvenience. If we find anything to bring back, would you mind taking a look from here?”
Ziel shrugged. “Sure. As long as it isn’t too much effort.”
Lindon’s unhealthy obsession with advancement had paid dividends, and he was far stronger than anyone his age had any right to be, but he was still young. He needed to find a life to live before it was too late, and Ziel hoped this would remind him that there were people in the world who didn’t care about the sacred arts to the exclusion of all else.
Then Lindon looked back up, and Ziel felt a chill. Lindon’s eyes changed color often, and this was nothing so overt.
But something had changed nonetheless.
“One more thing, if you don’t mind. You say you’re not part of our team. I say you’re the only one who thinks that.”
“You’re not even really a team,” Ziel said dismissively. “You’re not a sect, and two of you are only part of the Arelius clan in name. Mercy’s going to go back to her mother the second she calls, and if you think Eithan cares more about you than about what he can get of you…well. You’re not that naïve.”
That might have been going a little too far, Ziel reflected, but it was best that Lindon hear it early.
Somehow, though, the chill Ziel felt from the depths of Lindon’s black eyes had deepened.
“Anyone who fights a Dreadgod by my side is on my team,” Lindon said quietly.
Ziel didn’t have much to say to that.
“You can call us what you want,” Lindon went on. “But whether or not you consider yourself my ally, I am yours. You have only to call on me.”
That was hardly fair. It turned out that Ziel had more than just a drop of pity left, because now some guilt was seeping out of his long-dry heart.
Lindon stood to leave, but before Ziel could say anything, Lindon spoke again.
“I know you have far more experience than I do, so I apologize if I’m overstepping my bounds. But I think you’ve seen what you can do on your own. We’re going farther. And I want you to join us.”
Finally, Ziel realized where that chill was coming from. He wasn’t talking to Lindon anymore.
That was the Void Sage.
The door shut before Ziel found his voice again, and then he took a deep breath. The pressure he’d felt in that moment was difficult for him to even process.
Ziel flopped back down on his bed.
“I knew I shouldn’t have opened the door,” he muttered.
4
Only days after Eithan had predicted it, a fleet of cloudships arrived from the Blackflame Empire. Lindon sensed them coming before he saw them, and he flew as high as he could on his own personal cloud to get a better vantage point.
Past the rolling hills and blighted forests of the Desolate Wilds, Lindon could see in the distance the desert that took up most of the western Blackflame Empire. Patches of the sand were red for miles, and Lindon wondered if that was some natural phenomenon created by aura or if those were marks left by the Bleeding Phoenix.
Above that sand, dozens of ships traveled on clouds of every color, growing closer by the moment.
Lindon’s perception met another Overlord’s extended toward him, one on a Path he recognized. That gave him a shock.
Naru Huan, Emperor of the Blackflame Empire, had come in person.
His relatives, Naru Gwei and Naru Saeya, were aboard the same cloudship. They stood out as presences of powerful wind madra among the mostly Gold crew.
The aura here was thin, and their cloudships were relatively weak, so Lindon estimated they were about a day out. He considered spreading the word, but Eithan had certainly felt them coming and taken action before Lindon.
So Lindon focused on preparing his own household.
There was plenty of room on Windfall for his family, so he set them up in a wing of his own house. His mother spent most of the day out with the people of Refuge, his sister trained with Jai Long or Jai Chen, and his father…well, his father was the problem.
Lindon sat across a table from Wei Shi Jaran and, for at least the fifth time, tried to explain the procedure.
“I’m not replacing your eyes,” Lindon said.
He could do that, but that would be as much a surgical procedure as a spiritual one, so he would need to find an accomplished healer.
“I am going to layer a pair of construct eyes over your own. These will allow you to see as Remnants do, but I selected the Remnants carefully. It will be very similar to ordinary sight. You will rarely notice a difference.”
Jaran folded his arms. “I’ve known warriors with Remnant eyes. It’s even odds that you go mad, and the others are little better than blind.”
“That’s because they did it wrong,” Lindon explained again.
“Your mother performed some of those procedures herself.”
“I’m…sure she did the best she could. She was working under very difficult conditions.”
“So you think you could do better?”
“Yes!”
“Just get me to Jade, if you can do so much. That’ll fix my eyes.”
“It will, but you’ll never see as well as you would if we addressed the problem first.”
“My spiritual senses will make up for it.”
Lindon immediately suppressed his desire to tie Jaran with constructs and perform the procedure anyway. They had run this topic around in circles, and they couldn’t get over one fundamental problem: Lindon’s father didn’t trust him.
“Perception is very useful,” Lindon allowed, “but you can’t sense anything that doesn’t have spiritual power.”
“It’s better than I could do now.” Jaran gestured with his cane as though he’d just scored a winning point, though Lindon couldn’t see how that was a victory from any perspective.
Lindon brought out a scripted wooden box and a small pair of goldsteel tongs. “I have the tools in front of me. Your Path made the compatibility issue easy to solve. With your cooperation, we could be done in an hour, and it will be completely painless.”
“Painless?”
Lindon had been away from home too long. He only realized he had made a mistake when he saw the stubborn clench of his father’s jaw.
“You think I’m afraid of a little pain?” Jaran rolled up his sleeve and pointed to a scar that ran the length of his forearm. “This is where a Kazan spearman ran me through, and I didn’t make a sound.” He pulled his collar down and showed a small burn scar. “Acid burn from the Li clan.” He gestured to his leg. “I’m in agony with every step. I know you’ve seen the world now, and you think you know everything, but enduring pain? That’s real experience.”
Lindon’s fist slammed down on the table.
The table didn’t break so much as it disintegrated. A deafening explosion filled the room as splinters sprayed across the floor. Jaran yelped and leaped backwards, toppling over in his chair.
He would have fallen—and with his Iron body, he would have been entirely unharmed—but Lindon caught him with a cushion of wind aura anyway.