I Am The Tempest: Part 1

“Brendan,” Mana said, unamused, “a ragged T-shirt and baggy shorts isn’t really what you came to fight in, is it?” She looked down, comparing the folds in her dress and glimmering heels she’d taken off for ease of movement to Brendan’s tattered clothes and worn tennis shoes. “I understand that hard work makes the man or whatever, but this really isn’t the time or place for…” She stopped. “What are you wearing?”

“Damn… Not even so much as a ‘hello’ after what seems like forever apart?” Brendan replied jokingly, though a touch hurt. “I’m open to suggestions, you know, Miss Fashionista.”

Mana smiled warmly. “It’s good to see you again, really. Lacia already filled me in on the little switcheroo. The idea is to finish off the lower ranks before we all join forces against Ahzef.” She wove a hand over Brendan, tipping her hand at the end. “Now, since you were so kind as to “compliment” me, I’ve decided help you fix your outfit. What do you think? I like this look more than I like those rags you were wearing.” She made a gagging motion with her tongue.

Brendan turned to see what kind of battle-ready fashion Mana had concocted, using the reflection provided by the windows behind him, but he decided to address Lucifero first. He hadn’t come to play dress-up, but he definitely didn’t mind knocking Lucifero down a few pegs and looking good while he did it, either.

“Look, pal. I don’t like the way you’re staring at me. Your eyes have been glued to me since I popped in, like you’re tracking an animal on a hunt.” He combed his hand through his hair, pushing it out of his face. “If I’m gonna kick your ass, it’s gonna be in style, ‘ight? I’m aware of the hell you put Lacia through, but you fucked with more than just Lacia—you fucked with Aria, too.”

Lucifero crossed his arms over his chest. “I must say, I always enjoy getting to meet new members of your little entourage, Miss Lhumin,” he said, ignoring Brendan. “Why do you choose to stay here, in this nightmare that isn’t even your own?”

“Ignore me, then. That’s cool,” Brendan quipped. “Let me check myself out real quick, then. When I’m done, then I’ll come kick your ass,” he said, adjusting the fit of an open-collar linen shirt. “Man, Rei is going to hate me when I pull up on Ahzef looking this snatched.”

A wine-colored frock coat complimented the linen shirt, adding an outer layer that authored a level of authority—authority that commanded the attention of the room’s occupants. It was slightly weathered, just enough to pay tribute to the experiences of the last several years: Rei and Millee in the antiques shop in Seria, the sudden involvement in Lacia’s life, the reunion with Aria, life with Mana in Chiipha—its worn nature was a subtle reminder of everything he had been through. Moreover, the sharply cut, charcoal-colored trousers allowed for more practical movements while a leather sash around the waist kept them from falling mid-fight.

“Even the leather on these combat boots is slightly worn but still in great condition,” he said, nodding at his reflection. “You cooked, Mana. But why do I get the impression you have pirate movies on the brain?”

“I can make you fight naked if you don’t like the mariner style,” she snuffed. “Though, it sounds to me like it’s more enjoyable than those torn street clothes you had on.” She turned her head, just enough to catch his eyes in the reflection; the head tilt was her way of saying she was serious about making him fight unclothed.

“Yo, devil man— Lucifero,” Brendan called, still standing in front of the windows, “you ready for these hands? I’ve got plenty of magic in reserve, so don’t expect me to hold back! If I’m being honest, though, I think you should be more afraid of her.” He smiled wickedly, turning his thumb toward Mana.

Lucifero snickered in reply, his voice bouncing off the walls and windows. Brendan felt like he was seated in the middle of a movie theater, and he couldn’t get a read on Lucifero’s location at all. He hadn’t taken his eyes off of him, even through the window’s reflection. In the literal blink of an eye, Lucifero had both vanished and somehow reaffirmed his presence.

Something made Brendan’s ears pop. The atmospheric pressure was changing but not because the volume of air was increasing—there was suddenly less air than what they’d started with, as if he’d climbed a miles-high mountain in literal minutes. The air in the room had thinned, the sudden absence of a large volume of oxygen creating a vacuum in space.

“So his plan is to end the fight early himself? It feels like the air was pulled straight from my lungs… Like he managed to compress the actual space we’re standing in.”

The window in front of him filled with spiderweb cracks, obscuring both his reflection and the faux mirror he was using to watch his back. He leapt back moments before the glass spewed inward, thousands of tiny shards like misshapen daggers now airborne. It was only for a second; he had to let his guard down to shield his face from the glass, but it was that very second Lucifero used to his advantage.

Countless tiny shards of glass littered the floor, most blending in with the color of the tile, invisible to the naked eye as they lay in wait. The soft tinkling of glass met Brendan’s ears first, followed by a strange whistling sound, like something was flying towards him at high-speed—an audible early warning. His thoughts moved faster than his feet could move his body. He took a haphazard step to the left, trying to avoid a dagger-like shard of glass riding the air—and it was aimed at his heart.

The way it lodged itself into his right shoulder was strange, but even stranger was the way it seemed to grow, unnaturally, the closer it got to him. He’d barely moved six inches by the time it buried itself into his flesh—and it kept digging, even after the initial impact, for several seconds before it came to rest deep in his shoulder. It was unnatural, unexplainable… until he thought about it for a moment. The vector at which the glass dagger had been aimed at him hadn’t changed, even after he’d attempted to sidestep it. There would have been, albeit subtle, variability in its trajectory if it had truly been guided by air currents.

Either way, it was a lucky miss. Judging by the force at which it had been jammed into his shoulder, Lucifero was going for the kill early, leaving him with little time to react. He grit his teeth as he wrapped his fingers around the jagged edges of the glass-made blade, pulling it from his flesh with a gut-wrenching squelch and noisy splattering of blood at his feet. He could still feel the glass slicing his flesh as he slowly began to pull it from his shoulder. His muscles screamed at him to stop, the white-hot sensation of pain sending his thoughts into a flurry, but the pain gave him a few moments to think.

Blood dripped from both his shoulder and his hand: drip… drip… drip. The thundering of his heart in his ears and steady, rhythmic dripping of blood refocused his mind; he had been consumed by the provoking comments and haughty ego he’d walked into the fight with, hoping to bruise Lucifero’s own ego. He realized now that underestimating the devils, in any capacity, was reckless—he’d known they were powerful. Lucifero, however, was different, and he was still figuring out how exactly his powers worked.

Ahzef had stood there in the Chiiphan desert, when he was with Aria, and took his fist straight to the face without retaliation. It was his way of getting vengeance for Aria, for forcing her into years of psychological servitude that ended with her own realization that the only thing she’d wanted could never be. Lucifero retaliated, albeit after several of his taunts, but the biggest difference was the move to end the fight in a single attack—something Ahzef hadn’t done. The two devils’ personalities seemed to be polar opposites of each other.

“That. Fucking. Hurt,” Brendan said through gritted teeth. “But that was your biggest mistake. You missed my vitals!” He emphasized the last word as he sent an uppercut into Lucifero’s chin, sending the devil neck-deep into the ceiling tile. He’d moved so fast there wasn’t even time for a new drop of blood to fall from his hand. “Some bullshit ability there, too.”

“Brendan,” Mana shouted, “don’t lose control of your senses! You could have sent him into the snow, outside where we have more space to fight.”

“I know what I’m doing.” Anger filled his voice as he finally threw the dagger to the floor. The pain had been replaced by a momentary, adrenaline-fueled rage. “That uppercut was with my left hand. Get your ass over here, Lucifero, so I can show you what my right fist does.”

He’d sent the devil into the ceiling at an angle, purposefully creating distance between them before jamming him into the linoleum of the second floor from below. He needed a chance to think, a chance to figure out how to counter something he had no idea how to fight. The glass dagger wasn’t something he’d magically glued together or reformed—deconstruction then reconstruction. No. Once he’d forced the devil back and pulled the dagger from his shoulder, it began to lose its shape. Once it hit the floor, it dissolved into the same-sized glass shards it had been forced together with. Lucifero’s abilities only had so much spatial influence, but how much?

“Lucifero is fast,” he said, directing his comments at Mana. “You’re still human and don’t have full mastery over Ethera’s powers yet. If he attacks you, he will go for a killing blow.” He shook his hand in the air, flinging excess blood onto the floor. “You cannot waste a single second in this fight. That glass dagger he stabbed me with was made by manipulating the gravity around the glass which pulled the shards together, forming that dagger shape.”

Mana’s eyes grew wide. “Understood. I’ll keep up. Just give me the word when you’re ready.”

“Not a moment too soon, either…” Brendan deflected a shadowy tentacle with his mana, creating a makeshift barrier around himself as it recoiled. He watched as the impact sent ripples through the barrier like ripples on the surface of a pond. “Normally, I’d say those ripples were made from the force of the impact itself, but you were stupid enough to reveal how your abilities work.”

Another shadowy tentacle struck the air inches in front of Brendan where Lucifero appeared a millisecond later—faster than anyone could blink. His grin was full of white teeth that stretched from ear to ear as he ruthlessly attacked the mana barrier, each strike generating a plume of soot-like particles that blackened whatever it struck. The clash of competing energies sent alternating waves of distortion through the room, incongruently stretching and compressing anything and everything in their path—even mana.

Brendan waited. Carefully analyzing Lucifero’s unrelenting strikes and body language. The uncoordinated attacks, vector-like shadows, and ecstatic grin on his face revealed three things: one, Lucifero was also angry, but his anger was contributing to the lack of concentrated and strategic attack patterns; two, he was easy to manipulate with taunts and bluffs which could destabilize his already fragile psyche; three, and most importantly, everything pointed towards gravity manipulation, altering the density of the air. That just left the radius of his attacks and what their reach was.

The room warped like a gravitational tug of war. Some areas stretched, others compressed. Luciero’s attacks produced gravity waves, a byproduct of his primary abilities but not the main feature. The twisted dimensions even altered the temperature of the air, creating inconsistent pockets of warm and cold air that felt more like a temperature sandwich than a climate-controlled environment. Cold air rushed toward the ceiling whereas pockets of warmer air seemed to fall, stretch and, eventually, dissipate—a hot sandwich that was still cold everywhere but the center.

While the barrier that Brendan had engulfed himself in, of which Mana had replicated for her own safety, protected him from the warping effects of the gravity waves, the barrier wasn’t perfect. It, too, warped and compressed in random places that he couldn’t predict.

He gave Lucifero his own devilish grin, further destabilizing the devil’s already uncoordinated attacks. “Pathetic effort,” he whispered loudly, sarcasm oozing from his voice. “Hope I’m not pushing your buttons too hard!”

The mana barrier was useful, but it only blocked attacks—an ultimate defense so long as the caster could continue to funnel their mana into it. Brendan knew he wouldn’t be able to land a hit on Lucifero so long as he kept the barrier up, but the gravity waves created occasional weak points just large enough to allow for quick, methodical strikes. He took advantage of the momentary openings, knowing he was risking a random hit to himself in the process.

Conveniently, a new weak spot began to form as the effect of the gravity waves continued to warp random points in the barrier. He began to thread a small red string-like filament through a finger-sized hole near his left arm, allowing it to snake onto Lucifero undetected. It wasn’t much, but this attack was meant to be subtle—fated in some ways. The gravity waves caused the weaking to compress and restrengthen seconds later. He carefully guided the filament with his eyes, loosely wrapping it around the devil’s upper right arm and onto the shoulder where it began to ignite into ruby flames.

Lucifero’s attacks grew even more unpredictable, lessening more-focused effects of the gravity waves; this provided the window Brendan was waiting for to put his Destiny Bow to good use. The room slowly began to stabilize a minute later, albeit it still looked like it was made of Jello the way the windows and walls were warped into oblong shapes. Warped or not, he’d cast something he’d been thinking of a name for for some time—the Flames of Fate. Using the heat generated by the attacks, he’d created a string of flame. By using it against Lucifero, it allowed him to alter hyper-specific moments of the devil’s future.

“Flames of Fate has a nice ring to it.” He made a mental note of the name as he watched the small flame burn. “Destiny Bow, Flames of Fate… Maybe they’re just a little cliché, though…” He gave Mana a nod and held up two fingers.

“That must mean I have two minutes to do whatever he needs me to do,” she said internally. She smirked. “Hope you don’t mind getting beat by a girl… Devil. We’ve let you run amok for way too long now and, tonight, it all ends here—starting with you.”

Thunder shook the air with a deafening chorus; the vibrations in the air were so strong the remaining windows along the back wall shattered. Not even the tiniest shard remained in its frame. They lay buried under the falling snow and scattered across the floor, hidden away and forgotten about. It was a risky move—the effectiveness of the window’s reflections was an untried, yet surprisingly effective, tool in the fight. To lose them was more of a hindrance than a help, but access to an open-air space would allow them to fight better, more constructively, together.

“You think you’re scary. You thought you had the advantage, your abilities stronger inside of a nightmare, but you forgot how the Grandeur’s abilities work… But you didn’t know Ethera handed the title off, did you?” A whip fell at her side, cloaked in an electric-white glow. Tiny branches of lightning arced from the braid, crackling. “Heaven has no rage like love turned to hate but, most importantly for you, hell hath no fury like a woman scorned.”

“I love how dramatic you humans are! I wonder what playwriter you’ll quote when I roast you alive and peel the flesh from your bones once I kill you!”

Mana’s electricity-laced whip arced through the air, striking Lucifero square in the chest with the amplified power of a thousand lightning bolts; the floor heaved before buckling and collapsing inward, charred remains of vinyl, ceramic, and linoleum tile joining the window glass in the snow; the walls and ceiling crumbled, the smell of ozone lingering in the freshly snow-filled air. Frigid air rushed into the blistering remains of the building, incessantly nipping at her exposed skin. She stole a quick glance at Brendan who seemed perfectly content.

“Good,” she thought. “We’re on the same page. You’re not the only one with “hidden” abilities, Lucifero.”

The thunder from her whip’s strikes rolled through the open air, filling what had been a quiescent winter night into a roaring thundersnow storm—cold, dry wind whipped around her, exacerbating the static electricity she generated. The air crackled with every step she took. Slow at first, methodical. She just needed a single moment, an opening where he dropped his guard enough to get chatty… and he did.

“What an ego.” She rolled her eyes.

“Ooh that was such a good try!” he said coercively. “But what made you think that would work against me, a—”

She struck him again and, this time, she cranked the voltage up. Her ears rang like the roar of cicadas in the summer, just shriller and far more obnoxious. The first attack was meant to get everyone outside, but she would welcome the reprieve if she’d killed him right then and there, though she knew that was a big ask. The more light she could keep on him, however, the better. Gravity manipulation was one thing—lightning-fast, dagger-like shadows were another… and much harder to block.

“Need to keep him from generating more shadows…”

She could just make out his silhouette in the flash, body twisting and contorting as millions of volts of electricity raced through his body. His arms flailed about uncontrollably; his body violently arced upwards, so much so she wondered if his spine might break in two. Several spasmic flops and contortions later, Lucifero was back on his feet, arms and legs still flailing about every few seconds. As the flash began to fade, she noticed how the light itself seemed to arc around his shadows rather than remove them. The refraction was odd. As she looked closer, she realized he was manipulating the gravity around them, forcing the light to go up and over his body and, thus, his shadows.

“Well… That’s inconvenient.”

Still, her attacks had been powerful, and they had left their mark, but they weren’t enough, not enough to overcome the strength of gravity itself. The electricity would leave his body, and he’d be back to normal soon after… whatever normal was for a devil. But she knew it was important to remember that her attacks were effective—she just had to tweak the method. If she increased their voltage even more, she might be able to end the fight early—if she could hit him. Her time with Aria, during her fight with Kuria, taught her that the devils adapted quickly; Lucifero would do everything in his power to ensure she didn’t hit him again.

Her eyebrows shot up, suddenly realizing something wet had been dripping from her ears. She moved a couple fingers and dabbed them in the outer canals—blood. The crack of lightning had been so extreme that she’d ruptured her own eardrums. An unfortunate casualty of the fight, but she didn’t need her hearing to bring the battle to a tempestuous climax. In fact, she’d held back, trying not to rupture her eardrums. “Oh well.” She rolled her eyes before settling them on Lucifero, approximately fifty yards from where the former center of the gymnasium-turned-ballroom he’d been standing was—and he wasn’t wasting a moment to take advantage of her temporary disorientation.

She leapt back, parrying Lucifero’s sharpened shadows with the static from her fingertips. Each hit sparked new bursts of painful static that caused him to momentarily draw back. Half a second later, he was already back on the offensive, forcing her deeper into the snow as it buried her feet. There wasn’t enough dry ground to anchor her footing, and she could feel herself being pushed back. The exchange formed beads of sweat on her forehead, heat from the electricity and physical effort wearing her down faster than she’d originally accounted for.

There was an uncontrolled smile on his face, lost in the thrill of battle and uncapped strength. The fighting kicked up cloud after cloud of snow, obscuring Mana’s view of him and his strikes. More importantly, however, her two minutes were dwindling fast, and she hadn’t found the opening she was looking for yet, much less had Brendan told her what he was trying to do.

“You sure are persistent,” she frowned, “for having lost the use of an arm and a couple missing fingers on the other hand. You sure you don’t want me to sear the other arm off with another lightning strike?” She pulled her right arm around to her side, allowing the braid of her whip to coil around her hand. Her left hand remained busy with the parries. “Or—”

Her left foot slipped in the snow, already red and raw from the cold; regardless of whether she’d kept her shoes on or not, the open foot design would have allowed the snow in anyways. Her stockings weren’t much help, either, only absorbing the cold and locking it closer to her feet, but they also lessened the friction between her foot and the ground, making for even more treacherous footing.

“Shit. Bad time for a wardrobe malfunction!”

She felt herself fall back, feet leaving the ground… and Lucifero took advantage of the opportunity. A shadowy tentacle wrapped itself around her neck, sending an icy shock down her spine and through her toes as it temporarily broke her fall, pulling her forward by the neck. She yelped in pain as her breath caught in her throat causing her to bite her tongue.

Lucifero didn’t waste a moment. More tentacles moved to pin her to the ground. One tore through her right side; another tore into her left shoulder; a third shadow pierced her lower left thigh. She felt the air leave her lungs as she fell onto her right arm, an audible pop emanating from her right shoulder; she landed on the arm with her full weight—it would be surprising if it was anything less than dislocated. Her free hand trembled, unable to stem the wave of fear that washed over her. Was she seriously about to die? All because of a wardrobe malfunction?

“Does it matter who the Grandeur is if she doesn’t even understand the extent of her own abilities?” Lucifero mused with unnatural glee. “So much confidence! And your boyfriend abandoned you! Ohh, which part of you should I carve up first?”

She didn’t know how she summoned the strength to speak, but whatever it was she said, it changed the look on Lucifero’s face faster than the blood that poured from her wounds—a strange mixture of elation and wrath. This made her aware of two things: it was still possible to, secretly, unpin the arm behind her—Lucifero he was unaware the whip was still coiled around her hand; the second thing… Brendan hadn’t left her—a small ember still smoldered on the back of the devil’s neck. Lucifero’s ego was huge, blindingly so, painting him as unobservant and uncalculated. This worked in her favor.

“I don’t know what you’re saying,” she said with shaky breath, “but I don’t care.” She took a deep breath, lifting her back off the ground just enough to free her pinned arm as she hid it beneath the snow. She’d kept her eyes locked in Lucifero’s, hoping she could force him to tunnel his vision… and it worked. “Now get the fuck off of me!”

She diverted the mana from her reserves and pooled it into her fist as she struck him in the jaw with a snow-covered, and electricity-wrapped, fist. The impact sent shockwaves through her arm all the way through the base of her neck as she recoiled in pain, momentarily unable to lift her arm.

“Dammit! This feels exactly like when I hold the hair dryer over my head for too long. Muscles can’t hold the arm’s weight… too worn out.”

Time seemed to do more than crawl as her first went into his jaw—it stood still. The snow stopped falling, suspended in midair; the throbbing pain in her limbs was confined to micro moments; the contact point between her first and Lucifero’s jaw had generated ripples in his flesh—even those were frozen in the moment of impact. An ominous screech filled Mana’s ears despite her ruptured eardrums. It was like someone had taken metal claws and dragged them across a stone floor. The mental pain was excruciating—she bit down on her lower lip so hard blood dripped down her chin; she winced, turning her head away from the sound’s origin. And then… it stopped—as Lucifero rocketed through the earth, into the brick wall of a small shop in the town behind him, and out the other side.

Not a literal second later, a shadow appeared from under the snow, piercing her chest through her upper back. For a moment, she thought was seeing butterflies, like maybe her brain was flooding with chemicals, sending her into a deadly trip as she died. But she wasn’t dead—she wasn’t even in pain. She was, in fact, seeing butterflies, golden-orange wings fluttering in the air before her: chaos butterflies.

They lingered in the air where Lucifero had been seconds earlier. She’d heard about chaos butterflies before, the way they could result in large-scale changes in the future from simple effects in the past, but she thought they were just theoretical. To see them, fluttering in the air before her… Was the universe really something bound by set rules, or was there a chance to defy those rules and drive her own fate?

This created room for improvisation. Perhaps, in some untold way, the chaos butterflies were already part of the new fate she was writing. Before she’d sent Lucifero flying, she’d shrouded the whip, masking it against the backdrop of the snow; it had traveled with him as he flew, unraveling until he’d finally stopped. It was unorthodox—the idea wasn’t to slip and get caught. Rather, the initial plan was to ease him in. With each parry, she’d allowed him to inch closer, but when she slipped, she knew the initial plan was shot. She’d wanted to use the attached coil to drag him back in, where she’d hit him again, harder, using his own momentum to compound the effects of her next attack. But something was wrong—she couldn’t pull him back in nearly as fast as she should have been.

“Lecture me about it later,” she said weakly, addressing Brendan’s flurry of snow-crunching footsteps. “Ever heard of improvising?”

He ran up next to her, having watched her fight from a safer distance. “Don’t get smart with me. That was stupid, and you’re going to get yourself killed before I can do anything help you again!” Brendan stared her in the face: dark circles had rapidly formed under her eyes; her skin had grown ghostly in comparison with the snow; blood continued to seep from her wounds unabated. “I know I’m one to talk, but that was too risky.”

She tried to pick herself up off the ground, but she couldn’t even make it to her knees. “I’m evening the odds, Brendan. Back off.”

“And who becomes Grandeur if you die, huh? The Elysian Fields can’t remain unguard—”

“Lacia. Lacia’s fight will void the need for it if she wins… if she remembers who she is.”

Brendan’s eyes darted to the shifting rubble where Lucifero had plowed into the building. “This conversation cost us fifteen seconds of the now sixty you still have left. You don’t have to get yourself killed for this, Mana. The Flames of Fate don’t force you to finish the fight in two minutes—they give you two minutes to manipulate your enemy’s openings the flames reveal. Exploit these micro-moments to weaken him.”

She wasn’t listening; she was drawing the whip in, Lucifero wrapped around the other end. “Not every story ends happily, Brendan. If these are the moments your flames revealed, shouldn’t you be happy or something?”

“No. What? I’m lost.” He shook his head, snowflakes falling from his hair. “Fifty-five seconds, Mana. Just buy yourself those seconds. You’ve done more than enough—”

She turned to look him in the eyes… and then he understood. “…”

She wasn’t fighting to end the battle early—she was fighting to release her frustrations. Her eyes held her true feelings, locked behind glassy cages that could never be allowed to escape and become words. But they also screamed confusion, for help, for something to rope her back in. They’d spent more than two years at each other’s side—foraging for food together in Chiipha, laughing at each other’s stupid jokes to fall asleep at night, sitting at the table in the RV contemplating a reality where they lost the fight against Ahzef and his entourage, trying to convince the other that things would work out… just give it time.

Then, when Aria reentered Brendan’s life, she’d watched as everything she’d worked so hard to build, the courage she spent two years mustering, crumble away. Fate had strange ways of making things work out, hence her encounter with Brendan that day in the school cafeteria with Lacia—and as a member of the Lhumin family and him the Greyriter family, no less. If the chaos butterflies really were a sign of an unbound universe, if she could change her fate with him, could she? …Should she?

She pretended to be happy for him when they all finally reunited with each other—with Millee, Aria, Rei, Lacia and, of course, herself and Brendan. But Millee’s feelings for Rei were immovable and Aria’s for Brendan ran deeper than the shadow-like knives that Lucifero had driven into her flesh, tearing through muscle, tissue, and bone alike.

With the inheritance of Grandeur, by her own mother who she’d never have imagined would have such a crazy origin story—and would throw her under the Love Bus—she’d also inherited the knowledge of every prior Grandeur. Just as she was coming to terms with her feelings, she realized romantic feelings were a first for any Grandeur.

To compare her romantic life to Aria’s or Millee’s felt wrong, but that just made her wonder about Lacia. What identity would she choose when all was said and done? Lacia? Elyra? What would that mean for her love life? Romance wasn’t really ever her thing, at least not how she knew her as Lacia. Did that mean she didn’t somehow deserve someone, too? Was it ok to be alone? But she wanted to feel loved by someone. It wasn’t fair to drag Lacia into her own love affairs… Was it?

It didn’t really matter, though. To Mana’s knowledge, Lacia had never set her sights on a boy. At least, not that she knew of, not like she had Brendan. To watch everyone else fall in love at the end of the world was something she’d always wanted to do, and it hurt—it hurt so much she couldn’t breathe. She felt numb. Maybe it was the static in her fingers. Maybe it was the blood loss. Maybe the shadows had damaged her nerves.

“Maybe I’m just delusional. Now, of all times, I’m afraid of never finding out what love is like.” She scoffed at herself. “What a mess. Both mind and body.”

To make matters worse, the Elysian Fields wouldn’t be needed if Lacia was victorious in her battles… and if everyone else won their fights, too, which meant there would be no occupying her mind with the duties of Grandeur, something to take her mind off her romantic musings—if her mind ever gave the chance. Of course she knew there would be life after the war ended. That wasn’t the issue…

Her body had taken serious damage from Lucifero’s attacks—torn muscles, punctured arteries, possible spinal damage in her neck—and the new metallic taste in her mouth told her she’d been poisoned.

“The poison is messing with my brain… Ugh. Must have been imbued in that moron devil’s shadows. Guess that makes me the fool, huh?”

It was thorough, already working against her, and there was no way to expel it as it ate away at her muscles, soft tissues, and forced her heart to beat erratically faster; it was a cruel and purposeful concoction. The faster her heart beat, the faster it pumped blood through her veins which carried the poison… The numbness crept up her fingers into her arms; her heart seemed to skip beats as it pounded harder, insisting it beat even faster. A fiery cold spread through her veins as the poison used them like mini highways for easier travel. She’d already convinced herself nobody was coming to save her, at least not anyone that could readily dispel the poison. She couldn’t. Brendan couldn’t.

“I’m sorry. I really don’t know why it took me until now to tell you… Though, the look on your face tells me you finally figured it out.” She turned away. She wouldn’t reveal the poisoning and her body’s inability to repair itself. Neither of them used healing magic and even if they did, it wouldn’t be enough. “In some other life, maybe things would have worked out. Maybe I wouldn’t have waited to tell you that I loved you, but that’s pretty normal for a girl who spent the most volatile period of her life with the one guy who kept her sane.”

“Twenty-five more seconds, huh?” Brendan muttered under his breath. “Why are you talking like this…?”

He looked down, noticing the discoloration of the snow at Mana’s feet, more than just the red stains from her blood. They were small, but black splotches also littered the snow—decaying clumps of red blood cells. Under normal conditions, her mana would keep her body from shutting down, but it would also prevent her mana from being used in combative situations; it was a failsafe meant to protect the body’s vital functions. That failsafe had been disabled, and it was forcing her body into overdrive, into complete disregard of its built-in instructions for moments like these.

“Oh… You figured that part out too, huh?” She continued to reel Lucifero in weakly, slowly, but she could see the shock on Brendan’s face out of the corner of her eyes. “Why do you have to make this harder than it has to be?” Her breathing had grown labored and short.

“You can still divert your mana to the places it’s needed most. You don’t have to… Don’t do this. I need you to see the world we saved when this is all over! You and Aria are important to me—there isn’t a world where one or both of you is gone! Losing you, someone who grew to be my best friend…” His vision pulsed for a moment as panic began to set in. “There’s a world where… where you live through this.” His voice was shaky. “Mana, you are the one who turned this boy into a man.”

She sniffled. “I’m happy I became so important to you.”

“So sit back and let me handle the rest! Please.”

“And what would Aria say if I’d let you die here instead? You don’t want to deal with that,” she snapped. “Girls are impossible to predict, especially when we lose someone we love. I wouldn’t be able to live with myself either if something happened to you.” She wasn’t sure if she was saying that out of love or because she genuinely cared about him. “Look higher than the floor, Brendan.”

“Just tell me what to do, then! You assumed the title of Grandeur. Surely there’s some facet of knowledge in all of that that can help!”

“Oh, yeah. There totally is. It’s, uh, there.”

“Seriously? Then tell me what I can—”

She shook her head, whisps of hair falling into her face. “I’m sorry. I just can’t lie to you. I’m really not very good at lying, but I’m even worse at goodbyes.”

Brendan stood in stunned silence. Her lie had given him a brief moment of hope, that he could save her after all. But he felt his strength leave him the moment she started apologizing. His mind searched for the words he wanted to say, for words he could say, but nothing came. There were no words to describe what he was feeling. Was it hollowness? Heartbreak? Despair? A mixture of every melancholic and frustrating emotion he could think of? He whispered her name under his breath without even realizing it. His anchor. His foundation. She was the door that had opened up, leading him to trials and adventures so wild he’d never felt more alive in his life.