Chapter 180: Know Your Place

Theon’s hand hung in the air.

It was an ordinary hand, thin and a little scarred, Now golden light gathered around it, and a pale, humming circle began to turn in front of his palm. The Flame Empress felt the air leave her lungs. She knew that kind of circle. It was not a spell that leaves scars. It was a spell that erased.

Target locked: Primordial Flame Empress.

Classification: primordial. Threat level: moderate. Elimination probability: ninety nine point nine percent.

The words ran silently through Theon’s mind, level and clean, and he felt nothing at all. He watched the woman in front of him, the flames curling around her shoulders, the tears she was not letting fall. She was one of the beings within the parameter.

Then, deep inside the Flame Empress, something small and desperate began to scream.

She felt it before she heard it. A tremor that began beneath her ribs and spread through her chest like a trapped bird beating against a window. It was not her own fear. It was another heart, a smaller heart, hammering against hers with a force that shook her whole body.

Lyra.

The little girl had been inside her since the morning, curled in some quiet, warm corner of her soul, and she had felt everything. The sword. The blood. The silence. She had felt her brother fall, and she had been trying to claw her way out ever since. Now she was pushing against the walls of the Flame Empress’s mind with everything she had, sobbing, begging, calling one name over and over again.

*Let me out. Please. Let me out. Let me talk to my brother. Please.*

The Flame Empress closed her eyes.

She could have held the door shut. She was strong enough to do so because she had held back Lyra’s hand before, in the fires of the battle, when it would have gotten the child killed. And the thing floating before her would not hesitate to burn a little girl to ash. That was what made her hand shake and hesitate.

But the little heart was breaking, and so was hers.

“Just once,” she whispered. “Only once, little one. Be quick.”

She let go.

The flames around her flickered and sank. The tall figure of the Primordial Flame Empress shrank in the glow, her shoulders narrowed, her edges softened, and for one trembling heartbeat a small girl stood in the burned corridor with her bare feet on the broken stone and her face wet with tears. She looked up at the glowing boy in the air above her, at the hand pointing straight at her heart.

“Big brother.”

It was barely more than a breath. It did not carry far. But it traveled across the broken hall like a stone dropped in a still pond, and the ripples spread out from it.

Theon’s head moved.

It was a tiny thing. A twitch. His head turned a few degrees to the left, then a few degrees to the right, in the slow, uncertain way of a man who has heard a sound in his sleep and cannot say what it was. The golden light around his hand wavered. The humming circle flickered. In the multicolored depths of his eyes, a faint, drifting shadow crossed, and for a moment something that was not a rule and not a verdict looked back out of them.

Warning. Subject experiencing emotional interference. Recommend suppression.

The shadow vanished and the circle steadied.

Lyra saw it. she saw the way his face smoothed itself over like water closing after a stone, and a sob tore out of her. She wanted to run to him. to throw her arms around his waist and bury her face in his coat the way she always did. But the hand was still raised, and the circle was still turning, and the Flame Empress’s voice rose in her head, hard and urgent. Back, Lyra. Back now. He cannot hear you.

With a cry, the little girl pulled back into the dark. The flames roared up again around the corridor, and the Flame Empress stood in her place, taller, harder, with tears still wet on her cheeks and her hands burning with new fire.

“I do not know what you are,” she said in a low, shaking voice. She wiped her face with the back of her hand. “But give me back my Theon.”

She leapt.

The Phoenix wings tore out of her back in a blaze of crimson and gold, and she shot upward through the broken ceiling in a single streak of flame. her wings spread wide. Fire poured off them in rivers. She rose above the shining boy, turned, and came down on him like a falling star, her fists blazing with every ounce of heat she had left, and her scream shook dust from the rafters.

“Give him back!”

Theon did not move. He lifted his eyes to her, calm and bright, and watched her fall.

“You may be a primordial,” he said, quietly, “but know your place.”

His right eye opened wider.

It burned. The shifting colors in it ran together in an instant, melting into a single blazing silver, and from his body a pressure erupted that made the one before it seem like a breath. It struck the Flame Empress in midair. Her wings crumpled. Her flames went out as if someone had snuffed a candle. She was hammered out of the sky and flung toward the floor like a thrown stone.

BOOM!

The impact shook the entire building. A huge crater opened in the floor, and rubble flew in every direction. For a moment there was only dust. Then the dust settled, and the Flame Empress lay in the center of the hole, her cloak burned to rags, her hair spread across the broken stone, one arm bent beneath her at an angle that made the Headmaster wince. Her chest rose and fell in shallow, painful breaths. She tried to push herself up but her arms would not hold.

“Enough,” the Headmaster whispered. He did not know when he had gotten to his feet.

He stumbled across the corridor, every step a battle against the weight in the air. He fell to his knees at the lip of the crater and dragged the Flame Empress out of it by her shoulders. She was lighter than he had expected. Her skin was hot enough to blister his palms, and her breath came out in thin, rattling gasps.

“Hold on,” he muttered. “You cannot die. That girl is inside you. You must hold on.”

Behind him, the boy in the air watched without a word, his hand still raised.

The Headmaster threw one frantic glance over his shoulder and hauled the Flame Empress toward the door of his chamber. The wood was scorched and cracked, but it still stood. He slammed his whole weight against it, and it swung open with a groan. He dragged her over the threshold and kicked it shut behind them.

Inside, the room was dim and quiet. Dust floated in the lamplight. The map he had made earlier still hung in the air, turning slowly, with its tiny red dot creeping toward the black stain at the edge of the world. He had no time to look at it. He laid the Flame Empress on the floor, spread both his hands wide, and began to speak words he had not used in thirty years.

“By the old seal and the first oath, close and hold. By the stone of the founders, close and hold. By the blood of every Ancient Elves who stood here before me, close and hold.”

The floor lit up beneath his feet. A vast array of silver lines raced out from the center of the room and ran up the walls, across the ceiling, along every window and doorframe, interlocking and spinning, a hundred circles within circles that sang with a deep, humming note. It was the last barrier of the academy, the one that had never been used, the one that had been built to hold back a force greater than any army. The Headmaster poured every drop of his remaining strength into it. His knees buckled. Blood dripped from his nose.

The array flared once, white and blinding, and settled into a steady glow.

Outside, in the corridor, Theon turned his head toward the chamber.

Barrier detected. Classification: founder grade. Hostile intent: none. Recommend: ignore.

But he did not ignore it. He looked at the door for a moment, studying it, and then, almost idly, he flicked out a finger.

A thin gold line shot from his fingertip and struck the chamber wall.

Thump.

That was all. A soft sound, like a knuckle against wood. The array shivered, and its lines flickered, and then they steadied and held. Not a crack appeared. Not a single stone fell.

Theon tilted his head.

“Oh,” he said, in a mild voice. “This array.”

He did not say anything else. There was no anger in him, and no curiosity. The array was not in the way, and he did not need what was inside it. It was no longer part of any rule. He simply turned away from the door as if it had never been there, and the golden hair slid over his shoulder as he looked down the long, broken corridor toward the academy grounds.

He went to the window at the far end. The glass had burst long ago, and a cool wind blew in, smelling of ash and rain. He drifted out through the frame and hung in the open air high above the academy. The grounds spread out beneath him like a map. The courtyards. The training fields. The orchard. The white spires of the Imperial dormitory, the dark ribbon of the Whispering Lake, and thousands of tiny moving figures scattered across the gravel, still fleeing toward the gates.

He looked at them one by one.

He did not move his head. Every person in the academy flickered into his awareness at once, each a small, faint light, like a candle flame seen from a mountaintop. Students. Instructors. Servants and guards and cooks. A dozen nobles in a carriage. A boy with a book under his arm. Not a single one of them burned bright enough to matter.

…..Scan complete. No target within the academy exceeds threat level negligible.

Not one of them was powerful enough to stand in his way. Not one was strong enough to be worth his attention.

His eyes lifted. They rose past the walls and the fields and the dark line, past the mountains and the rivers and the gray haze of the horizon, and they settled far away on a place where the sky grew black as a bruise. The Dark Abyss. The red trace of a traitor’s escape still burned in the air there, a thin ribbon of light that ran across the world like a scar.

Remnant signature located. Distance: four hundred and twelve kilometers. Estimated arrival time at current speed: seven minutes.

Recommend: increase speed.

Theon bent his knees.

The air cracked.

He launched. There was no warm up, no pause, no gathering of strength. One moment he hung above the academy in his white garment and golden light, and the next he was a streak of gold tearing across the sky with a sonic boom that shook every window in the academy and sent flocks of birds spiraling out of the trees. The clouds split around him. The wind roared. The ground blurred beneath his feet into a smear of green and gray. Behind him a long, glittering trail of golden dust stretched across the sky like the tail of a comet.

The mountains rushed up and fell away. Villages flashed past below. Rivers glinted and were gone. The world became a single line, drawn straight toward the black horizon, and he followed it without thought and without fear, with the rule burning bright in the center of his mind.

Every being within the parameter must die.

Minutes passed. The air grew thin and bitter. The sun dimmed behind a veil of cloud. And somewhere in the middle of that blind rush through the sky, a faint sensation touched the back of his awareness, thin and delicate and strange, like a thread brushing the nape of his neck.

Notice. Unidentified presence detected.

Distance: three hundred meters.

Bearing: directly behind.

Speed: Equal.