Chapter 12: The Ennead Crucible

Nathan suddenly found it kind of funny. These two bloodborn were all ferocity and swagger—until push came to shove, and then it was all "my organization's bigger than yours." They didn't seem much like bloodborn; they were way more like trust-fund brats with connections, whose first thought in any scrape is the mighty family machine and the network behind them.

The fierce hulk and the sinister man in the old army-surplus jacket argued back a few lines, and Granny Rowan suddenly went off like a volcano, roaring: "What's with all the yapping? I told you to scram, so scram! Our Concord is the number-one bloodborn organization in the world—masters everywhere, power miles above the Raging Gale. You make trouble on my turf, and you can take it to court anywhere you like: I'm the one in the right."

A black vortex abruptly opened in the sky over Elderrow. A hideous crone's face flickered in and out of view within it. With one ka-ka-ka of a laugh, a monstrous hand reached out of the black vortex, snatched up the two bloodborn in one grab, and casually flung them away.

Nathan watched the two bloodborn who'd just been terrorizing the place, who'd looked seriously dangerous, get tossed out like rag dolls before you could blink, and the shock inside him was a full-on tidal wave. The vitae Granny Rowan had leaked just now was only a small fraction, but it was a hundred times stronger and then some than the two Raging Gale bloodborn. That's what a few thousand years of Art got you.

The strange sight over Elderrow passed in a heartbeat, and it was blue sky and white clouds again.

Nathan lowered his gaze, and the moment he turned around, there stood a short little old granny, gazing at him most kindly—that same ugly old face: Granny Rowan herself, the one who'd just driven off the two Raging Gale big shots.

"Young'un! Are you feeling pretty lost right now? Thinking what those two said actually made some sense?"

Nathan, heart still pounding, stared at the sky a moment, then shook his head firmly. "I don't yearn for the life they described, and I don't want to join the Raging Gale. I haven't gone and found out what the future should look like yet, but I'm positive I don't want to go off fighting and killing in some bloodborn legion."

Granny Rowan smiled slightly. "Young'un! You're right—it's not time for you to be thinking about the future yet. I can give you three pieces of advice. First: until you've gone out and seen plenty of the world, never decide lightly to stay in one place forever. Second: never, for any reason, give up the pursuit of power. I've seen far too many peace-loving bloodborn fooled by one false reason or another into abandoning that pursuit—only to be overtaken by those once beneath them and killed with greater power. And the last one: every organization has an ugly side, no matter how lofty its charter."

Granny Rowan's words landed somewhere between half and fully understood for Nathan, but that didn't stop him from bowing deeply to her and thanking the old granny for her advice—because he could clearly feel she actually cared about him, and never mind that she'd just saved his hide.

Granny Rowan gazed fondly at Nathan, her figure fading away bit by bit, until all that was left was one last ka-ka-ka cackle of that weird laugh.

Only after Granny Rowan had vanished did Nathan suddenly yell: "Oh no! I'm getting home so late Mom's gonna chew me out!"

He grabbed his book bag and took off for home. As he was passing out of Elderrow, he had a faint sensation—like someone was watching him—but Nathan didn't pay it any mind. He ran flat out and got home as fast as his legs would carry him.

To Nathan's surprise, his mom wasn't home yet. The getting-yelled-at-by-mom scenario never materialized.

This text was taken from NovelPhoenix. Help the author by reading the original version there.

That didn't relieve him, though. Mom usually got home early, and he was pretty worried, so he gave her a call. When the call went through, his mom sounded tired; she asked a couple of quick questions, said she was still working overtime but would be back soon, and told Nathan to make his own dinner.

Nathan wasn't really hungry, actually. Since turning into a bloodborn, his relationship with food had gotten weird—almost no feeling of hunger at all. But if he let himself go, he figured he could put away a scary amount of food, at least a dozen times his old appetite.

Nathan first blasted through that day's homework at top speed, then started reviewing everything that had happened to him that day—nothing but the bizarre and the unbelievable, front to back. He thought quietly: "What's so special about this Yggdrasil Line I awakened, that the Raging Gale people would strong-arm me into joining? They said the Concord wants to make me the Between keystone like Granny Rowan, to build Greyhaven's nineteenth bloodborn residential zone. Is that stuff true? The Concord doesn't exactly seem to care about me much either—nobody said a word to me the whole way through..."

Nathan chewed on it for ages, until his head literally felt swollen, and still couldn't untangle it, so he just flopped onto the bed. He'd had quite a day of it, honestly; groggy and heavy, he was asleep in no time.

...

A colossal war-mace rose sky-high. On its pitch-black haft, faint lines of Mystic-Gold mottling could just be made out, setting off the weapon's heavy, plain, archaic simplicity—a very ancient, far-off grandeur to it.

Get up close and look, and you'd find the mace had no physical body at all—it was made of countless runes, black but glimmering with faint golden light. Billions upon billions upon billions of Mystic-Gold runes formed this heaven-reaching black iron mace.

That great black iron mace, planted into the ground like a pillar of the world, radiated unmatched menace. Though it stood silent and unmoving, it was nothing like a dead thing—there was a heart-shaking power to it, carrying an endless, boundless will to fight, proud above all creation.

No telling how long—maybe ten million years, maybe an instant; time itself seemed to lose meaning—when the black iron mace suddenly collapsed. Countless runes died and burst; the Mystic-Gold runes that made up the mace dissolved layer by layer, until only a single Mystic-Gold thread of iron remained, fine as a hair, and yet linking heaven and earth!

Nathan jolted awake. The night was ink-black—it was already past two in the morning!

Just by focusing a little, Nathan "saw" his own body for the first time in his life—skin, muscle, tendon, blood, the five organs, bone... every mystery of the human body spread out before his eyes, a hundred times clearer than the most advanced medical imaging equipment, even showing him things no machine modern technology had built could see.

Like that Mystic-Gold iron thread between his brows!

That Mystic-Gold iron thread seized all of Nathan's awareness and dragged his entire attention to it, making him involuntarily ignore every other change.

It clearly couldn't be very long, and it was fine as a hair, and yet it gave off this uncanny feeling of linking heaven and earth—and an air of domineering force, of looking down on all creation without rival. It was the one thing that remained after the black iron rod's collapse in his dream.

At one turn of Nathan's thought, countless Mystic-Gold runes came flooding in, shaping themselves into a formula. Though he was certain he'd never studied these runic characters, he simply understood the intent within them, taking them to heart with the greatest ease. The feeling was mystical beyond mystical, strange beyond strange.

This set of Art formulas was called—the Ennead Crucible!