You Cannot Run From Destiny

The streets of Solard burned. Screams came from every direction, mixed with steel and with the sounds of things that had not been born in this world. Smoke carried embers high enough to stain the moonlight red.

I stood shoulder to shoulder with Kaelra and Talen in the wreckage of what had been a marketplace that morning. The cobblestones cracked under our boots. The air shimmered with mana as the three cloaked figures came out of the firelight, walking slowly, taking their time about it.

Everything we had fought through until then had been illusions and conjurations. These three had weight.

"They're not like the others,"

Kaelra said. Her daggers were already in her hands and her stance had dropped low. Her knuckles had gone white.

Talen cracked his neck. He was still sore from earlier and the grin was stubborn about it.

"Good. I was starting to think this whole night was smoke and mirrors."

Then one of the figures raised a hand and the air bent around it, and even Talen stopped talking.

The street exploded into black fire.

Kaelra went sideways with her blades crossed and the wave took her anyway, threw her across the rubble and into a broken wall. She made a sound on the impact that I had not heard from her before. Her daggers clattered onto the stone.

Talen roared. His fists ignited and he charged and slammed his knuckles into the ground at the figure's feet, detonating shards of debris upward in a cone.

For one heartbeat the figure staggered.

Then the second one snapped its hand forward and a lance of force caught Talen square in the chest and lifted him off his feet and put him down on the pavement coughing blood.

"No—"

My voice cracked on it.

Kaelra was dragging herself upright with one dagger clutched in a hand that would not hold steady. Talen spat red into the dirt and tried to get his arms under him and could not.

Something in me came apart.

Not gradually. All at once, the way a rope goes when the last fibre finally parts. Every restraint I had built and maintained and checked and rebuilt for a year, all of it, gone in the time it took to look at the two of them on the ground.

My mana came out like weather. Fire and light and shadow and raw energy bled into the night and twisted the air around me into something that had a shape.

The three figures faltered. Their cloaks whipped back from the pressure.

One of them tilted its head.

"So it awakens."

The voice was old and it was not entirely human.

"You won't touch them again,"

I said.

I stepped forward. The mana condensed into my palms and began weaving into something meant to remove whatever it hit from the world. The air burned. The stone cracked under my feet from the density of it alone.

And then there was a fourth figure behind me.

I did not hear him arrive. There was no sound to hear. Cold fingers came to rest on my shoulder and a voice spoke, calm, almost gentle.

"I am sorry to disappoint you, Marked One. This particular game was over some time ago."

I caught the shimmer of something in his other hand. A relic. An artifact, pulsing with a light that was wrong, its carvings whispering at the edge of where I could hear.

And then everything stopped.

Not slowed. Stopped. The storm collapsed inward. The fire and the light and the shadow all went out as though none of it had ever been there. My limbs gave and I hit the ground hard, and I clawed at the dirt and reached for even a spark of it and found nothing.

Nothing answered.

"What did you do?"

My voice came out hoarse. I could hear the disbelief in it and I could not do anything about that either.

Kaelra screamed my name and started crawling through the rubble toward me, dragging her dagger across the stone, her body clearly refusing most of what she was asking of it.

Talen coughed hard, blood on his chin, and forced himself upright anyway.

"Get away from him!"

His legs went out from under him on the second word.

The three original figures came closer. Their faces were hidden and their satisfaction was not.

The fourth knelt beside me. The artifact thrummed softly in his palm.

"Did you truly believe raw strength alone could refuse this?"

He said it quietly enough that only I heard it.

"You burn very brightly. And recklessly. Like a torch carried into a storm. But even the brightest flame goes out when the storm has been prepared in advance."

Chains of black fire came up out of the cobblestones and coiled around my wrists and my legs and my chest. They burned where they touched, which was not the problem. The problem was the emptiness underneath. My power had been sealed and every time I reached for it I found the seal instead.

I thrashed against them and the chains tightened in proportion.

The fourth figure leaned closer.

"You are the key. You have always been the key. The Scar of Veyren. The collapse of Usarita. The whispers of fate that everyone in this world has heard and no one has been able to place. All of it led here. To you. The heir of ruin. The seed of rebirth. The Marked One returned."

"I don't know what you're talking about."

My teeth were clenched hard enough to hurt.

"Don't you?"

A low chuckle came out of him.

"The beasts that hunt you. The way the world recoils from your touch. The fact that everything dangerous on this continent has known where to find you since the day you arrived. Do you truly believe that is chance?"

A pause.

"Or do you already know, and simply prefer not to say it out loud?"

My chest heaved. My mind went through it without being asked. Waking in the field in Usarita. Kaelra's face when we got out of the temple. The forbidden spell. The figure in the cave. A year of questions that had all pointed in one direction and that I had refused to follow.

The voice went on.

"You do not belong to Jorentu. You do not belong to Usarita. You do not belong to yourself. You are a blade forged for a purpose you have not been shown yet. And when the time comes, you will be used the way blades are used."

"No!"

Kaelra had dragged herself far enough forward that her hand was reaching toward me, blood coming down her cheek, and one of the other figures put its shadow across her and pinned her flat to the ground.

Talen roared. His fists glowed faintly, most of what he had left going into them, and he made his battered body stand.

"He belongs to no one but himself. Do you hear me?"

His legs shook. He stayed up.

The fourth figure tilted his head, studying the two of them with what looked like mild interest.

"Such loyalty. Such desperation. It is admirable and it changes nothing."

The artifact pulsed. My vision started going at the edges. The chains tightened and dragged me upright onto my knees.

The voice came into my ear like something slid between ribs.

"Do you see it now? Every bond you value is a chain holding you tighter to what is coming. They will break, one at a time, and only afterward will you understand what I have been telling you."

The spell pulled me into a cocoon of searing shadow.

The last thing I saw before it closed over me was Kaelra's hand stretched out across the stone, and Talen's eyes, which had fury in them and nothing at all he could do with it.

The figures turned to the two of them.

"You should feel honoured,"

one said.

"Very few people live to watch history start."

Another raised a hand and let shadow curl around the fingers without hurry.

"Understand this. The Marked One no longer belongs to you. Or to Jorentu."

The fourth, holding the artifact, spoke the way a priest closes a service.

"The chains of fate have him. Struggle. Resist. Bleed. None of it alters the outcome. He is ours."

And then they were gone, and what they left behind was fire and ruin.

Kaelra lay crumpled where the shadow had pinned her. Her body was shaking. Blood streaked her face and her vision had gone to water. Her dagger slipped out of her hand and hit the stone with a small dull sound.

Talen made it to his knees before his strength went. Blood came off his lip and onto the cobblestones. His fists still glowed faintly, which was somehow the worst detail of the whole thing.

"Damn it. Yuu."

The fires of Solard kept going around them.

For the two of them, the rest of it had already stopped mattering.

The screams had gone quiet.

Only the flames were left, working through shattered rooftops and splintered beams. The capital of Jorentu had been reduced to a shell in a single night. A blackened haze sat over the streets, and through it the groan of collapsing stone kept repeating at intervals, like something large still dying somewhere out of sight.

Kaelra stumbled forward with smoke burning her lungs, one arm around Talen's waist, hauling him down a street choked with rubble. He leaned on her heavily. The grin was gone. What was left was gritted teeth and a face gone pale under the blood.

Both of them carried wounds from the cloaked figures. Burns layered over cuts that had not finished bleeding.

None of it compared to the other thing.

Yuu was gone.

Taken in the last few seconds of it, and the taunts were still going in her head on a loop she could not switch off. She bit down on her lip hard enough to taste blood and made herself keep walking. If she stopped, Talen went down, and neither of them could afford that.

The street opened into a square that had been lively a day earlier.

Now it was a graveyard.

The fountain at its centre had come apart, the water hissing uselessly against the flames. Wardens lay across the stones in every direction, cloaks torn and scorched. Kaelra's chest went tight as she started recognising the crests. Azure Wardens. Crimson Blades. Obsidian Death Warriors. Onyx Sentinels.

All four branches. All of them on the ground.

Her knees came close to going.

Then light came through the smoke.

Silver, and a wave of steady mana behind it that swept the flames aside like they were candles. Kaelra put an arm up over her eyes. When she lowered it, a figure was standing in front of them with radiance rolling off him in slow waves.

His cloak was undamaged, which after the night this had been was almost obscene. On the back of it was the crest of Solard's guardians. His posture was absolute. Standing near him felt like standing at the base of something geological.

The Guardian of Peace.

Kaelra had heard about him since her first week with the wardens. Some people called him the continent's shield. Others called him the last wall. Standing in front of him, she understood the phrasing. Despair moved back from him the way the flames had.

His eyes went over the two of them, sharp, and then softened slightly at the state they were in. A flick of his wrist put radiant barriers around them and pushed the smoke out of their air. The shadow remnants still writhing nearby, the empty puppet-things the cloaked figures had left behind, collapsed into ash under his attention without any apparent effort on his part.

"You fought well,"

he said. His voice carried like tempered iron. Unyielding and not unkind.

"You should not have carried this alone."

Kaelra opened her mouth and nothing came out. Her throat had closed. She bit the inside of her cheek and forced the tears back down and the image of Yuu being dragged into the dark did not leave.

Talen coughed and spat blood onto the cobblestones. His eyes were still doing what his body could not.

"They took him."

Each word cost him something.

"Yuu. They—"

The Guardian's expression hardened. His voice stayed level.

"I know. His absence is already felt."

Kaelra blinked.

Felt.

She wanted to ask what that meant. The words would not assemble.

The square went silent except for the fire and the stone.

The Guardian of Peace lifted his head and looked out across Solard. His jaw tightened. His composure did not break, but it moved. He was seeing what she was seeing. Burned districts. Toppled spires. Streets with bodies laid along them in the positions they had fallen in.

The losses were beyond counting properly. The Obsidian Death Warriors had lost four of the Deadly Eight, warriors whose names had been spoken like their strength was a permanent feature of the world. Wardens from every branch were dead in numbers that would take weeks to total.

The civilians Kaelra did not let herself think about.

"Too many,"

the Guardian said, under his breath. His hand closed at his side.

"Too many in one night."

And then he turned, and his voice went out across the square with nothing broken in it at all.

"Rally the healers. Southern quarter first, there are survivors still trapped there. Clear the rubble from the main avenues before the fires reach the granary. Crimson Blades, form barriers and contain the market district. Move."

The surviving wardens moved. Even at the end of a night like that one, his voice did not leave anyone room to consider it.

Kaelra found herself staring. This was what it looked like. Order held in place by one person's will while everything around it came apart.

And even he had not been able to stop this.

Her heart turned over.

If he could not stop them, what chance did Yuu have on his own.

A ripple went through the air.

It was not sound and it was not light. It was pressure. It pushed against Kaelra's chest and took the breath out of her lungs and stopped the Guardian mid-sentence. Around the square, wardens froze where they stood as the atmosphere thickened with something none of them could place.

Kaelra's hand went to her dagger. Her body objected. She did it anyway.

Talen swayed beside her and nearly went down trying to straighten up.

The Guardian of Peace stood upright and his expression sharpened into something with an edge on it. His hand slid to the hilt at his hip.

"Someone comes."

And then he was there.

A figure walked out of the smoke and into the ruins. His cloak was torn and scorched along the edges. His steps were steady, and deliberate, and unhurried. His eyes went across the wreckage with an expression Kaelra could only describe as recognition, which was worse than shock would have been.

His presence rolled over the square like a tide coming in.

Veyren.

Gasps went through the wardens still standing. Some raised weapons on instinct. Others went pale and did not move at all.

Kaelra's blood went cold. That name was in every story about destruction she had heard growing up. The Scar of Veyren, they called it. The wound he had put into Usarita before he vanished fifteen years ago. She had never expected to hear it said aloud in her presence, let alone see the man attached to it standing thirty paces away.

The Guardian of Peace stepped forward and their auras met in the air between them. The ground vibrated. Cracks of light flickered across the stone where the two pressures overlapped.

"Who are you,"

the Guardian said, and his voice rang through the ruin like something struck,

"to walk into Solard amidst its ashes carrying that much unchecked force?"

Veyren's eyes met his. Calm. Not flinching.

For a long moment nobody said anything.

Then he spoke, and his voice was quiet enough that it should not have carried and carried anyway.

"I am the one they call Veyren. The one this world curses as its scar. I came to end what should never have been started."

The square went loud and then went silent again. Even the wardens who could barely stand knew that name. A ghost out of another continent. A weapon that had disappeared after leaving nothing behind but a wound in the land.

Kaelra's knees weakened.

Him. Here.

The Guardian of Peace did not flinch. His hand stayed on the blade. His eyes burned with something that had recognition in it and was not surprise.

"So the ghost of Usarita returns. And brings with him wounds I had hoped would stay closed."

Veyren's expression tightened. Bitterness moved across it and was gone.

"Those wounds never closed. And if you continue the way you are, this continent will drown in them a second time."

Kaelra's heart was going hard. Her grip on Talen's arm tightened without her deciding to.

The tension between the two of them was pressing the air out of the square.

Yuu was gone. Solard was in ruins.

And now, standing in the middle of the ashes, were two of the most dangerous people on the continent, facing each other.

Whatever came next was going to decide a great deal.