Shadows Over Solard

Morning light came into the training grounds at a low angle, catching the polished stone and the racks of weapons along the wall. Kaelra and I stood with Talen, who had been cleared that week and had been insufferable about it since. Corvin was in front of us with the other senior wardens.

He didn't waste time on preamble.

"There have been reports of unusual energy readings in the outskirts. Merchants and travelers attacked by creatures that have no business being in these lands. The three of you investigate, neutralize the threat, and report what you find."

Kaelra crossed her arms.

"Shadowy creatures again."

She looked at me when she said it.

"Our luck isn't improving."

I didn't answer. The readings weren't ordinary and I already knew that. They carried the same resonance as everything I'd been tracking since Ignits, and there was no version of that sentence I could say out loud in this courtyard.

Talen bounced on his heels.

"Finally. Something worth doing. I hope it's bigger than the last one."

Corvin's expression didn't change.

"Stay alert. This isn't about brute force. There are patterns in these attacks. Something is directing the beasts."

The forested stretch east of the city was quiet in a way that got heavier the further in we went. Not silent. There were birds somewhere higher up and the ordinary sounds of undergrowth. But the quality of it had changed by the time we were half an hour past the last farmhouse.

I felt the pull again as we walked. Faint but constant, the same thing that had been happening in one form or another since I woke up in that field with no idea where I was. Whatever I put out, something out there noticed it and turned toward it.

The spell from Ignits had helped. It hadn't solved it.

I nudged a few of the smaller creatures off our path with adjustments too small for anyone to register. It was easier than explaining why they kept turning toward me.

Talen cleared a fallen log with more flourish than necessary and almost turned his ankle on the landing.

"See? Fine. Completely fine. Slightly bruised, but fine."

"You're going to get yourself killed before we find anything,"

Kaelra said.

"That's a lot of confidence in whatever we find."

She didn't take the bait.

The estate had been abandoned long enough for the forest to start taking it back. The roof was gone in sections and what was left of it sagged inward. Vines had come through the window frames and pulled the shutters off their hinges years ago by the look of them.

The readings concentrated here. And the air had a weight to it that hadn't been in the trees behind us, the particular density that meant something had been done in a place recently enough to leave a mark on it.

Kaelra crouched by a section of wall and traced a faded glyph with two fingers.

"These look like the temple in Ignits."

I came over. She was right. Not identical. The surface characters were different, the strokes went in another direction. But the logic underneath was the same. Somebody had been writing in this language for a long time, in a lot of places, and every one of them had been somewhere bad.

"Same family,"

I said.

"Whoever's doing this is working through something. Practicing, maybe."

"Practicing for what?"

I didn't have an answer for that.

The beasts came out of the trees before either of us said anything else.

Talen

My heart was going and I couldn't stop grinning about it, which Kaelra would have had something to say about if she'd been looking.

"Finally."

I threw a fireball at the first one that came in range. It was more enthusiasm than aim and it landed close enough to count.

Then another one came at me from an angle I hadn't checked and I barely got out of the way, skidding across the dirt on my side.

Okay. Maybe not quite as fun as I'd been imagining.

They moved in coordination. That was the thing I noticed first and the thing I didn't say out loud. They weren't reacting to us the way animals react to an intrusion. They were already positioned before we came into the clearing, fanning out to cover angles we hadn't moved into yet, adjusting as we shifted.

Something had told them where to be.

I kept my outputs small and worked the field instead of the targets. Redirecting, opening lanes, pushing them into paths Talen and Kaelra were already covering. Wind mostly, because wind was the easiest thing to make look like nothing.

A little fire when the wind wasn't enough.

The beasts kept trying to orient toward me and I kept turning them off it, which took more out of me than fighting them directly would have. That was the arrangement. It had been for months.

Talen ducked a claw swipe.

"How are you doing that?"

"Watch your left."

He watched his left.

Kaelra took two down in quick succession without wasted movement. Talen's recklessness created enough noise in the pattern that the beasts couldn't settle into a rhythm against us. Between the three of us the wave came apart.

The last one dropped and the clearing went quiet.

We searched the site afterward. Fragments of a ritual circle burned into the flagstones, most of it broken up by weather and time and whatever had happened here since. Writing on the standing sections of wall, cramped and repetitive, the same handful of shapes recurring in a pattern that almost resolved into sense and then didn't.

One symbol near the center pulled at something in my chest in a way the others didn't. Not painfully. Just noticeably, the way a sound you recognize cuts through a room full of noise.

I looked at it for a while and didn't touch it. Whatever it was doing, I had learned by now that touching things like that first and thinking about them second was how people ended up in situations they couldn't reverse.

Kaelra was working through a smudged section further along.

"Whoever did this is methodical. This isn't someone experimenting. It's someone following a procedure."

Talen wandered over, still catching his breath.

"This is incredible. In a way I don't enjoy at all."

I made a note of what I'd report and what I wouldn't.

The walk back was easier. Talen talked most of it.

"So last time I miss everything, and this time I finally get to come and I spend the whole fight being the distraction."

"You weren't only the distraction,"

Kaelra said.

"That's the most encouragement I'm getting, isn't it."

"Yes."

I walked slightly behind them and thought about the beasts. They had found me through the concealment. Not perfectly. But enough that whoever was directing them had known where to send them.

That wasn't going to stop being true no matter how well the spell held.

Far away, Veyren watched the disturbance in the currents the way someone reads weather at sea. Not the specifics. The shape of it.

"He's stronger than they think,"

he said, to nobody in particular.

"That won't help him if he doesn't see it coming."

In a chamber somewhere far from any of this, the kneeling figures chanted the same lines they had been chanting for longer than most of them had been alive. Repetition had worn the meaning smooth. What was left was the rhythm, and the rhythm was the point.

"Blessed by the Marked, we wait. The time is nearly on us. The fate will fall and his purpose will be revealed."

The sound of it carried in a way that ordinary sound didn't, thin and insistent, reaching further than the chamber walls should have allowed.

Back in Solard, coming through the headquarters gate with the light already going, I felt the sigils before I saw them. It arrived as pressure behind the ears first, the way weather does before it turns.

They were in the sky above the outskirts we'd just cleared. Arcs of twisting light that most people wouldn't register at all. To anyone sensitive to mana they were impossible to look away from.

On a rooftop at the edge of the city a figure stood watching us go through the gate. Features hidden under the hood. Not moving at all, in the specific way that meant the stillness was deliberate rather than incidental.

The wind came across the city and carried something in it that got into my chest and stayed there.

Something was coming. I didn't need to say it out loud.

The figure on the rooftop had put the sigils there himself.

His hood concealed his face entirely. Underneath it his lips were moving in a language that hadn't been spoken in this age. Each word burned into the air and twisted until the shapes held, then let them dissolve.

He watched the three Azure Warden recruits until they were through the gate and out of sight.

"They pretend nothing has changed,"

he said.

"Everyone does, until it reaches them."

He extended one hand. A small orb of black flame hovered above the palm, showing fragments. Battlefields. Beasts. The face of a young man with dark hair and sharp eyes.

"Yuu."

The name sat there for a moment.

"The more you resist, the tighter it gets. That's not a threat. That's just how the thing works."

The orb pulsed and the image changed. Veyren, standing at the edge of a ruined cliffside, cloak moving in the wind, looking at something out past the horizon.

The figure made a sound that wasn't quite a laugh.

"You're still walking. Then this isn't finished."

He flicked his hand and the orb went out. He stepped off the roof and the street took him without a sound.

Inside the headquarters I couldn't settle. I paced the recruits' quarters and the sigils kept coming back, the pull in my chest when they appeared, the way the mana in them had resonated with something in me instead of just registering as external.

Kaelra sat across the room working a cloth along one of her daggers. She glanced up.

"You felt it too."

Not a question.

"It wasn't a ritual meant to frighten people. That was a message."

"For you."

"Yes."

Talen came in before she could follow that. His grin was in place. His eyes weren't quite matching it.

"So. Sigils. In the sky. Over the city. That was some serious magic. Please tell me that wasn't you."

"It wasn't."

"Good. That's good."

"But the energy is familiar. Same as the cloaked figures. Whatever they're building toward, that was part of it."

Kaelra set the dagger down.

"If they're that visible now they're confident. And the beasts finding you isn't random anymore. They're being pointed."

Talen let out a low whistle and dragged a hand through his hair.

"So the entire world thinks you're a magnet for everything dangerous. That's horrifying and also, and I mean this respectfully, a little impressive."

"It's not impressive."

"It's a little impressive."

I let that go.

"We need to work out what they're actually trying to do. Before they do it."

Kaelra stepped closer.

"We stay together. That's how this works. If they want to test you they come through the three of us."

Talen shoved my shoulder.

"And I would genuinely like to see you stop holding back. Once. Just to know what it looks like."

I looked at both of them for a moment.

"We have to be careful. We've seen what they can do. The sigils, the beasts, it's all one thing and we don't know the shape of it yet."

Kaelra nodded.

"Then we move carefully. Information first. Track the movement. Be ready when it comes to us, because it will."

Talen groaned but he was already agreeing.

"Fine. But when it does, I'm not standing behind anyone."

"Deal. Just stay out of my line."

Kaelra almost smiled.

"And try not to die."

He saluted with far more formality than the moment required and muttered something about being invincible that neither of us dignified.