Lindon squeezed his fury down, trying not to even think of Blackflame. The prosthetic eyes he had worked on for days now rolled across the floor, motes of essence slowly drifting up from them.
“Do what you want.” He summoned another box out of his void key and shoved it into his father’s chest. “There’s a pill in there that’ll take you to Jade in ten minutes.”
Jaran gripped the box harder. “What was that sound? Did you break something?”
“I can sponsor you through Truegold. That’s as far as you’ll go. I’ll come back when you’ve finished with the pill.”
“Did your sect leader give you this?” Jaran opened the box and smelled the pill inside. “Is this what they used on you?”
“No,” Lindon said. “I found this on an Underlord after I killed him and devoured his spirit. He was planning on throwing it away because it was defective.”
“You want me to take a defective pill?”
“Any pill that only advances you to Jade is a defect. If you don’t want it, throw it away. Now, pardon me, but the Emperor is coming to see me and I have to prepare.”
Outside his house, as Lindon was taking deep breaths to steady his spirit, he was unsurprised to sense his mother approach.
She had a bag over one shoulder, which was filled with Forged toys and tools that must have been the work of Gold Soulsmiths in town. Her brown hair was tied behind her, and for once she wasn’t followed by the floating fish drudge that she had used since he was a child. It must have run out of energy when she used it while shopping.
Wei Shi Seisha came up behind her son, but he turned to greet her before she called out to him. “Apologies,” he said. “I was…catching my breath for a moment.”
“Hmm. It was my understanding that Overlord bodies didn’t have such weaknesses.”
“It’s not a physical weakness so much as a mental one.”
She slipped the bag from her shoulder and leaned it against the wall of the house; lights of every color shone from inside. “Your father can be a demanding opponent.”
Lindon gave her a brief version of the conversation, and she listened without a word until he finished.
“He won’t take that pill now,” she said with certainty. “You’ve wounded his pride. I’ll be impressed if he hasn’t thrown it away already.”
Lindon sighed. “That’s all right. It’s not expensive.”
“Don’t be wasteful. I’ll use it myself, once I’m ready.”
Seisha had decided to correct her study of the Path of the White Fox before she advanced any further, to prevent any possibility of problems later. Technically she was right to do so, Lindon knew, but it wouldn’t matter much so long as she fixed her Path before Lowgold.
“Pardon,” Lindon said, “but one scale from me could hire a refiner to make these pills for the next ten years.”
That might have been an exaggeration, but not by much.
“Oh.” For a moment Seisha wilted, overwhelmed by the scope. Lindon had seen her react that way many times over the last several days, and at last she shook it off and smiled again. “Amazing. I still have much more to learn.”
“Can you talk him into taking the eyes?”
“I’ll do what I can, but he’s…” She hesitated. “If you’re right, then he’s been living a lie his entire life. It’s hard for him. For both of us.”
Lindon thought he understood, but at the same time, he wasn’t sure he did.
When he found out there was more to the world, he had been astonished, but he had also been delighted. He had been glad to learn that the ceiling he’d lived under his entire life was only an illusion.
“I dropped the eyes on the floor, if you could take care of them. I really do have to go prepare. The Emperor’s coming.”
“The Emperor of the…Blackflame Empire? And where is he?”
Lindon pointed to the east.
His mother squinted in that direction. “You can sense him from here?”
“I can see him,” Lindon said quietly.
That was a slight overstatement. He could see the cloudship, and knew Naru Huan was aboard, but the Emperor was actually below deck.
Dross would have corrected him.
Seisha missed a breath. “I…I see.” She braced herself. “I’ll talk to him, but this is a new world for us. Please be patient.”
Lindon promised to try.
Lindon paced on the edge of Windfall, wearing the best clothes he owned: the black-and-red sacred artist’s robes that Eithan had prepared for him long ago. A red turtle emblem blazed on his back, and he had hoped the real Orthos would be with him as well, but the turtle’s spirit was still weak.
“You really are too worked up,” Eithan pointed out. The Archlord was lounging on the corner of Lindon’s roof, a book in one hand and a drink in the other. “It’s not like you haven’t met Huan before. You should take Yerin’s example.”
Yerin wore her normal black robes and was playing a game of darts with sharpened blades of grass. She kept reinforcing them with a spark of soulfire and then hurling the blades far off the side of the cloud.
“He’s the one who ought to shake meeting me,” Yerin said, closing one eye to take aim. She let the grass loose.
“What are you aiming at?” Lindon asked. He had looked down into the forest, but he couldn’t even tell where her makeshift darts were landing.
“I’m trying to draw a little face with knocked-over trees. Hard to do, though. The grass drives right through ‘em.”
She put more power into the next throw, and Lindon saw this one land. It exploded as it hit the trunk and sent half a tree flying into the air.
For the tenth time that minute, Lindon glanced east at the Emperor’s approaching fleet. He could hear the musicians playing a march as they approached, and madra filled the skies like a rainbow-colored sunrise to herald the Emperor’s approach.
“Best thank the heavens they don’t pull the Titan back with that much noise,” Yerin muttered.
Eithan waved his drink dismissively. “If this much would attract the attention of the Dreadgods, we’d all be dead. And they are, of course, taking the current location of the Titan and the Phoenix into account.”
“Do you not like this?” Lindon asked Yerin. He had grown up in the Wei clan, and he respected the showmanship.
Yerin brushed her hands clean and stood next to him. “Don’t like it when they break their spines to impress me. The flashier the right hand is, the more I look for a dagger in the left.”
“I’m surprised you’re entertained, Lindon,” Eithan said. “They can’t hold a candle to the Ninecloud Court.”
Yes, even the most casual display of the Ninecloud Court was brighter and more impressive than the best the Blackflame Empire could do. Lindon had been honored in front of the entire Akura clan as well, and the scale there was a thousand times greater than this. By comparison, it was almost like watching children imitate their parents.
Lindon still found himself drawn in as waves of color and sound emanated from the Emperor’s cloudship. “That’s what I enjoy about it. It was easy for the Ninecloud Court, but the Empire has to do this with Golds.”