There’s nothing like prospect of imminent violence to motivate people to move quickly. Thanks to the warning Yael and I gave our side, we were ready when the first attacks hit the building we were hiding in. Opal and Master Hanq gathered us into the main living room of the apartment and had an anima shield projected around us before I knew what was happening.

    “What will they start with?” Taisen asked. We were all back to back to be able to see the attack from whichever direction it came.

    “Depends on how many of them there are and whether they want us alive for questioning.” Master Hanq responded.

    “I see three, no, four transports landing.” Yael said. Her eyes were glowing with a silver light.

    “Surrounding us?” Opal asked.

    “Yes. There’s an opening on the north side of the building though. They don’t have anyone with line of sight on the door there.” Yael said.

    “That’s the trap then.” Opal said.

    “If they want us dead won’t they just setup off a spellbomb to kill us?” I asked.

    “Good thing that we have you here then right?” Taisen tried to make a joke of it but his voice was too strained to convey any humor.

    “They won’t use spellbombs. Their own troops are too close and they can’t be sure the bombs would work.” Opal said.

    “If they want us alive, they’ll destroy the building to flush us out into the open. Easier to deploy snare spells there.” Master Hanq said.

    “They’re sending teams in. At least six. The others are hanging back.” Yael said.

    “So much for taking us alive then.” Master Hanq said.

    “Most of us anyways.” Opal said, looking at me.

    “I am not going to let them capture me.” I said. “Whatever it takes.”

    The idea of losing control to the Void anima in me was terrifying but the idea of Akell’s people getting their hands on me was worse.

    “Just for the record, if they capture me, I expect to be rescued before I miss my next meal.” Taisen said. There was more humor in his voice, but I couldn’t tell if that was because he had more hope or less.

    I didn’t have long to think about that though. I was just about to ask Master Hanq what they were going to hit us with when the south facing wall of the apartment building exploded inwards.

    Whoever owned the apartment had a sparse decorator. That helped since it meant there was less debris that slammed into the anima shield which covered us. Between Opal and Master Hanq’s skill, we felt none of that blast though I could see it had demolished the room from the shattered bits that lay around the edge of the shield’s dome. I tensed for the next explosion but the smoke outside the anima shield was thick enough there was no chance I was going to see it coming. I didn’t need to be able to see however to hear the crack of anima bolts being fired at us.

    “Their commander’s a novice.” Opal said.

    “I always enjoy educating the young.” Master Hanq.

    I glanced around to see what he was talking about and noticed that the our shield was holding the anima bolts that the casters had fired at us suspended in midair. Master Hanq drew his arms into his chest and then shot both palms outwards toward our unseen enemy. The bolts that had been caught by the shield flared back in the direction they came. I heard screams from the distance and the continuous hail of bolt caster fire ended.

    “It’s unwise to use projected anima attacks against a sufficiently skilled caster.” Opal said, sounding like she’d donned her teaching hat for a moment.

    “Guess Akell hadn’t mentioned us when he called back to base.” Master Hanq said.

    “Yes. He probably only mentioned that Mel was here and that they should come pick her up. The poor foolish boy, he’s digging himself in so much deeper.” Opal said with a pleased smile. She might not have explicitly planned for that but things were clearly moving the way she’d hoped they would.

    “What will they do next?” Yael asked.

    “If they’re smart they’ll send in their best casters and have them equipped for close in work.” Master Hanq said. He began affixing a new gem to his right hand, while Opal took over both sides of the anima shield. She had just raised her hands to support the glowing sphere when an impossibly loud explosion detonated against the shield.

    I felt myself lifted into the air and flung against Taisen. The edge of the anima shield bashed into me and the whole group of us tumbled end over end. I spun back to my feet as soon as we stopped moving and felt a wave of dizziness pass over me. It was a familiar feeling. I’d felt that way lots of times when I took a hard hit to the head. The only difference this time was that that the loopyness faded quicker than usual. I mentally blamed that bit of good fortune on Taisen, and assumed he was radiating a mending aura or something else “healery” like that.

    I looked around to get my bearings and found that we had been blasted out of the apartment entirely. None of us seemed to be damaged but the anima shield was fizzling out as I watched.

    “Or they’ll do that.” Master Hanq said, picking himself up.

    “Hellbreacher missiles. I didn’t know Karr Khan had acquired enough of them to let his regular troops use them. That’s an unfortunate turn of events.” Opal said.

    “We need to go on the offensive. They’ll blast up to pieces if we try to turtle up.” Master Hanq said.

    “Agreed. Yael, watch after Healer Taisen and Ms. Wardsward.” Opal said as she drew her own anima blade. Unlike Yael’s and the soldier’s, Opal’s blade didn’t glow with the red light of Physical anima. Instead it shone with the blue aura of Mind anima. That meant even a small scratch could disable or stun her foes. A serious blow would leave their bodies alive but their minds would be extinguished. Anima blades are universally serious weapons, but Mind Anima struck me as particularly nasty to fight with. Given our current foes, that didn’t bother me too much though.

    The last of the anima shield faded and Karr Khan’s forces swarmed onto us.

    In retrospect, I wish I’d been able to watch that battle from a safe distance. Like orbit perhaps. It would have been an amazing learning experience to see people like Opal and Master Hanq in a real fight, if I wasn’t in real danger myself at the same time.

    The troops that assaulted us wore the same elite guard uniforms that Akell’s squad had. There were, however, a lot more of them. That meant neither Master Hanq, nor Opal were holding back much. The troops were aware of that too though. For all their aggressiveness, they were covering each others openings and presenting a solid front to our two best fighters. Master Hanq and Opal had to be careful as well, though that was less for themselves and more to make sure that only a few of the troopers could engage with Yael at a time.

    Watching Yael was a bit of an eye opener too. I’d been right that she would probably had mopped the floors with me if we’d come to blows. She moved as fast as the elites did, but with tighter and more precise motions. I could follow what she was doing, but on my best day it would have been hard to match the complex dance that she stepped through as she dodged, parried and struck at the soldiers to keep them off of Taisen and me.

    Fights, even well managed ones, are the definition of chaos. Despite our best efforts we were separated within a couple mins. Master Hanq, Opal and Yael were handling the direct fighting, so I should have been able to observe the battle, follow its flow and call out the openings that would let us get back together. That would have worked fine if the soldiers hadn’t held a portion of their number back to act as snipers. They’d learned not to shoot at us randomly, but their commander was also smart enough to figure out that not everyone on our side could reflect their anima bolts back at them.

    I caught sight of the commander standing on top of one of the nearby buildings. She was wearing the same kind of robes as Akell had been, which would have made her rank clear even if she hadn’t been calling order to the troops near her.

    I yanked Taisen around the corner of the building that was a few steps away from us in time to hear a trio of bolt casters fire and the brickwork we’d hidden behind shatter. Yael followed us, holding back two of the soldiers were were pressing her fiercely.

    “Taisen, how fast you can heal me if I get hurt?” I asked. It was a terrible idea, but I figured if he could mend my wounds quickly enough, I could take Yael’s place in holding the soldiers off. That would free her up to deal with the real threat. It would also mean that I’d get to experience pain in a way no one ever naturally could. As terrible ideas went, it deserved an award, probably one labeled “Gross Stupidity”, with the accent on both parts of the title.

    “With your Void anima? I can’t.” he said.

    “What do you mean, your last spell worked like a champ.” I told him.

    “My last spell? Mel, the mending spell I cast on you shattered the instant I cast it. I don’t know if you can be healed with anima magics at all!” he said.

     I tried to put that together with the healing I’d felt after I left the clinic. My thoughts were interrupted by a soldier’s scream as Yael speared him to the wall with her anima blade. That left her open to his companion but with a flick of her wrist she cast a bit of silver anima into his face and stepped easily out of the path of his attack. The soldier shook his head to clear his vision and then proceeded to attack thin air. He made a dozen slashing strikes and single thrust before rolling backwards. Yael would have sliced him in half but two other soldiers broke away from their fight with Opal to shield their companion.

    It was a nice bit of work on the soldiers’ part. Too nice. The coordination they were showing was too smooth given the chaos of the battle. Even practiced fighters couldn’t keep an entire battlefield in their minds eyes, or be aware the instant that one of their number needed assistance. I looked up and saw the commander had moved to another building’s roof to keep us in sight. Her snipers were leaping over to join her as well. She was doing more than shouting orders. She was coordinating the battle on a deeper level than that.

    “Yael. Commander across the street and up. She’s isolating us. You’ve got to take her out.” I yelled.

    “If I leave, you’ll die.” she said.

    “So it’s win-win, right?” I didn’t mean to make the joke, but I couldn’t help myself, especially since I figured there was a good chance I was going to die either way. Yael didn’t respond but I could almost hear her scowl. On the other hand though, she didn’t leave which said something.

    Probably that she thought Taisen was cute too, and didn’t want to risk him getting skewered when my crazy plan fell apart.

    I felt the chill of danger and looked up to see that the snipers on the rooftop had gotten into a firing position again. The three soldiers on the ground that were attacking Yael had her completely on the defensive. Master Hanq and Opal were both cut off from us by the squads of soldiers they were fighting. In short, our options for where to go and who we could defend against were being steadily whittled down.

    Taisen stepped in front of me and raised an anima shield but the chill kept growing. He was last anima caster that we had and he was locked in place defending against the snipers. It was the only thing he could do, but I knew as he did it that it was a fatal mistake.

    My breath stopped. One of us was going to die. It wasn’t a suspicion. I was certain of it. I blinked and my vision clicked over to the weird, darkened view of the world once more as time slowed before me.

    Taisen wasn’t cute anymore. He was gorgeous. A boundless flame of physical anima. Any image I’d ever had of what an angel should look like was replaced by the being of radiant life that stood before me. It was hard to see the others, but Yael stood out due to her proximity. Her flame wasn’t as singular and awe-inspiring as Taisen’s was. Hers was a rich medley of different colors with red and silver in predominance. Compared to her, the soldiers that she fought were candle flames before a bonfire.

    Around the two of them were spun threads of silver that lead back to the soldier’s commander. In fact there were threads around all of the flames I could see. It was like the commander was a puppeteer and everyone on the ground was dancing under her fingertips. It was another type of anima. Aetherial anima, though I’d never seen it before or heard it described like that. Watching the commander move though, I couldn’t imagine she was doing anything other than casting a spell. It wasn’t one that directly controlled people though, it just seemed to limit them and push them into certain paths.

    The threads around Yael, slowed her if she attacked and hedged her into the path of the blows the soldiers threw at her. The one’s around the soldiers did the reverse. Other threads manipulated the environment in the same way, placing a rock under Yael’s feel or smoothing the path for one of the soldiers.

    As she fought, Yael was weaving silver threads of her own, but with three enemies pressing hard against her, she didn’t have the freedom to create as complex a series of patterns as the commander did.

    I watched the commander, trying to understand what it was she was doing. I followed the thickest thread that she held, the one that she was placing the most energy into. It flew high in the air and lead to the building we were next to. I looked up and saw a single flame waiting there. On a purely visceral level I knew I had to cut that thread. That was the attack the commander was the most focused on lining up. That was the one that meant death for us.

    My vision snapped back to normal and I dragged in a shocked breath. I was still looking up, still looking at the sniper who was sighting in on Taisen. The healer had cast his anima shield as a wall to give it a prayer of stopping the sniper fire from across the street. That meant it wasn’t providing any shelter from the sniper above us though.

    I tried to call out to Yael but the first three soldiers had been reinforced by three more and there were a pair of casters on the rooftop supporting them as well. Opal and Master Hanq being swarmed by the soldiers but were giving out far more damage than they were taking. Despite that though, they were still cut off from us.

    No one could stop the sniper. No one except me.

    I’m don’t know why I started climbing the wall to reach the roof. Climbing three stories should have taken me roughly a million times too long in terms of reaching the sniper before he shot. Maybe I was thinking that I could attract his attention that way? Maybe I had some subconscious inkling of what I was capable of? Either was possible, but the most likely reason was that I was desperate and lacked any better options.

    I didn’t literally fly up the wall, and I didn’t rip it to pieces. It just felt like that. Between the time when the sniper peered out over the edge and was able to line up his shot, I somehow threw myself up three stories and knocked him back from the edge.

    Finding myself on top of the wall was almost as big a surprise for me as it was for him. I had the distinct sense of the silver anima thread I’d seen, the one that spelled our deaths, shattering like glass as I leapt on the sniper and began pummeling his face in. I wasn’t worried about his bolt caster. That had gone flying out of his hand when I first hit him. No kept hitting him as hard as I could because I was terrified that he’d get his anima knife out.

    I’d hit him about a thousand times when I felt another chill of danger and rolled away from the shots of the commander’s snipers. By habit more than anything, I came back up to my feet in a hand-to-hand defensive stance. As though that would help me against snipers.

    I was slightly shocked therefor when the next set of shots froze in the air before my outstretched left hand. The one with the ribbons of dark smoke playing around it. As the light in the shots dimmed and flickered out, I felt myself grow slightly warmer as their power drained into me.

    I tried to will the Void anima away before it took me over again, but all I succeeded in doing was to push more of it into my left side. The snipers looked at me and then at their commander. At her nod, they leapt from the roof they were on, across the thirty foot divide to land on the same roof as me.

    I hadn’t expected that, but for as bad as going hand-to-hand with three elite soldiers was, it didn’t seem like instant suicide. At least until they twisted their bolt casters into anima blades. Then I knew I was in trouble.

    I’d never met the Crystal Empress but I’d always had the impression that she was more of a cosmic force than an actual person. It had only been a little over twenty years since the battles that ended the Feuding Warlords era. Twenty years since almost half the galaxy had united under one banner and cast off a millenia of tyranny and barbarism. By the standards of the galaxy, twenty years was less than a blink, but for me it was my entire and life and then some.

    “What could anyone find here that would threaten the Celestial Empress?” I asked, getting to my feet as Yael entered the room behind Opal.

    “You don’t need to know that.” Yael said. She didn’t look ready to reach for her anima sword, but that didn’t mean there were any traces of friendliness on her face.

    “Yael, you don’t need to treat…” Opal began to say, but Yael cut her off.

    “I’m not treating her like the enemy. She hasn’t had any training in resisting mind magics. Anything she knows, Karr Khan’s forces will be able to pull out of her in an instant if she’s captured.” Yael explained.

    “We already have reason to make sure she is not captured by them.” Opal said.

    “You’ve told me to pay attention to the subtle premonitions I get though. I can feel so many futures  where she leaves this world with them. Can we really take chances with something like this?” Yael asked.

    “You are right to be cautious.” Opal sighed.

    I could hear a curtain closing with that sigh. They weren’t going to say anything else. I was being cut out. Not important enough, or strong enough, or good enough, or whatever, to be worth treating like a real person.

    “They’re afraid Karr Khan’s going to find one of the Jewels of Endless Night.” Master Hanq said without concern. Opal and Yael both froze in place, their eyes going wide at him revealing their secret.

    “How do you know about that?” Opal asked, her voice quiet and calm and ever so dangerous.

    “Hung around too many bad people for too many bad years.” Master Hanq replied.

    “What are the ‘Jewels of Endless Night’?” I asked. Yael’s hand twitched towards her anima sword but I forced myself to ignore it. As long as it was sheathed, I could pretend it wasn’t there.

    “Anima weapons. Left overs from the Silent Aeons.” Master Hanq said.

    I wasn’t a great student, but I’d picked up the basics of galactic history. Before the Crystal Empress there was a thousand years of strife and warfare among the stars. Warlords carved out fiefdoms of planets and systems and constantly fought to expand their fragile, short lived, little empires. The more enlightened ones tried to recreate the Pan-galactic Congress that had ruled the galaxy for millennia before it fell apart, but no one before the Crystal Empress had the power, charisma and support to pull it off.

    Before the era of the Pan-galactic Congress though, there had been another time of unending warfare. The Silent Aeons. The Pan-galactic Congress had brought the worlds of the galaxy together and allowed for communication and commerce between the sapients who lived under its rule.

    Before that, in the Silent Aeons, there was no universal way of communicating across the stars. Races would discover one another only by chance and more often than not, one would destroy the other. There aren’t any records that can tell us how many civilizations were destroyed or how many destroyed themselves, but with how often ‘newly discovered worlds’ turn out to have all sorts of ruins hidden on them, the number is probably a pretty large one.

    “They’re more than anima weapons.” Opal said. “They allow their bearer to summon powers well beyond anything an anima caster can manifest.”

    “Is that why you’re here? You want to get them for the Crystal Empress before the Khan guy can lay his hands on them?” I asked.

    “No. We’re here to destroy the Jewel, if there’s one hidden here.” Opal said.

    “I didn’t think that was possible.” Master Hanq said.

    “Why would you destroy it?” I asked. “If they’re that powerful why not use it to wipe Khan and his people out of the sky?”

    “Many reasons, but primarily because the Jewels can’t be controlled. The bearer can invoke them but its the Jewels that choose how they will act. The bearer’s will becomes subsumed by the power they hold.” Opal explained.

    That brought back my memories of killing the soldiers. Of being completely out of control.

    “How do you stop someone like that?” I asked.

    “You don’t. Once someone invokes one of the Jewels, they become nothing more than vessel for the Jewel’s will. ” Opal said.

    I looked over at Yael. She was still looking at me like we were ten seconds away from getting into a knockdown brawl. Or like I’d been left as nothing more than a vessel for something else’s will. It bothered me that I couldn’t know if she was right or not.

    “Why do they think one of the Jewels is here?” I asked.

    “They call to each other.” Yael said. She was watching me through narrowed eyes, judging each twitch and reaction I made. I almost paid more attention to that than the implication of what she said. The meaning behind Yael’s words hit me a sec later though.

    “Wait they’ve already got one of these things?” I asked.

    “We believe so. It’s likely how they managed to open their own portal to travel here.” Opal said.

    “That’s how powerful these things are?” I asked.

    “That’s one ability of one of the Jewels. It’s called the Traveler. The same Jewel was probably responsible for the spellbombs breaching your planetary shield.” Opal said.

    “That’s insane! They could wipe out any planet they wanted then!” I objected.

    “The worlds that are under the Empresses protection have better shielding that you had here, but yes, they could cause considerable damage to many worlds.” Opal said.

    “Why would they need another one of these things then?” I asked.

    Opal and Yael both went silent. They exchanged a glance and seemed to come to a consensus but it was Master Hanq who broke the silence.

    “It’s the Ravager isn’t it? Or the Assassin?” he asked.

    “What are those?” I asked.

    “There’s a lot of mythology around the Jewels. Some are even famous if you’re into the kind of thing. The two that I’ve heard of people searching for are the Ravager and the Assassin.” Master Hanq said.

    “I’m guessing the Assassin kills people. What does the Ravager do?” I asked.

    “The Assassin doesn’t just kill people. It can kill anyone, anywhere. Tell the Jewel who you want dead and they die, no matter where in the galaxy they are. Simple as that. The Ravager is for when you’re not in the mood to discriminate. It doesn’t have the Assassin’s range but it will kill everyone on a planet.” Master Hanq said. “Or at least those are the stories people tell.”

    “So if they get the Assassin, they send it to kill the Empress directly, and if they get the Ravager they portal over to her homeworld and just kill her and everyone else there.” I said.

    “Maybe. Except I heard the Empress bound a couple of the Jewels, so I don’t know if they’ll actually work against her.” Master Hanq.

    “They’re all bound.” Yael said.

    “Yes, each one is wrapped in powerful obscuring spells. Its why they can’t find each other precisely and instantly.” Opal said.

    “A planet’s a big place to search. They’ve got to have a way to hone in on it right?” I asked.

    “Karr Khan’s forces contain some of the most gifted Void anima casters in the galaxy.” Yael said. Just below her words, I could hear anger and fear warring with each other.

    “How does that help them?” I asked.

    “There are Void anima spells that can see through the anima of illusions and obscuring spells. It’s difficult, but if the Void caster has the time and focus they can eventually pierce any magically created concealment.” Opal explained.

    “Why hide them at all? Why not just drop them into a star or something?” I asked.

    “It’s been tried. Even the Jewels other than the Traveler can move themselves though.” Yael said.

    “Can you see through the illusions then?” I asked.

    “No, that’s why we need Akell.” Opal said.

    “Why would he help you though?” I asked.

    “As you have observed, I am a mentalist.” Opal said.

    I guessed that meant that what Akell “wanted” wasn’t going to be an issue for much longer. He probably had all sorts of mental training, but given that she had as much time to work on him as she needed, I suspected Opal wasn’t going to have any difficulty with that. The prospect of seeing someone have their will ripped away from them was kind of horrible, but then Akell was the kind of horrible person that I didn’t mind seeing bad things happen to, so I found it hard to come up with the moral outrage that the Sisters would expect me to show.

    I was about to ask if Akell would be able to beat the rest of the Khan’s forces to the Jewel when Taisen walked in. He had a bloody lip which he was in the process of healing.

    “What happened?” I asked. I couldn’t see any way he could have gotten injured unless he’d beaten himself up for some reason.

    “Your plan is in motion.” Taisen said, speaking to Opal. “But I didn’t have to fake losing the fight to Akell. The boy’s quite dangerous.”

    “Does he think you’re dead?” Opal asked.

    “Probably. If I hadn’t been expecting his attack, I wouldn’t have been able to regenerate the injuries he inflicted fast enough.” Taisen said.

    “What happened!” I demanded.

    “Our prisoner has escaped.” Opal said, a mischievous smile playing across her mouth.

    “What? We’ve got to stop him! He’ll lead his people right to us!” I said.

    “I don’t think so.” Master Hanq said. “But perhaps we could be filled in on the scheme you’re running here Opal?”

    “It’s nothing that profound. You saw that I exchanged a memory with Akell. It was of two of his brothers. They had failed in a mission, much like Akell had. When they tried to return to Karr Khan, the Khan ordered them to be executed but promised that they would be listed as having ‘fallen in battle’. Apparently “falling in battle” is a common fate for Karr Khan’s scions. The Ruby Guardian’s who defeated them originally were able to rescue them from the execution and turn them over to the Empresses side. Given the way Karr Khan raises his scions, they were quite willing to renounce him once it was clear how he really felt about them.” Opal said.

    “You did more than just show him a memory though didn’t you?” Master Hanq asked.

    “I only planted an idea.” Opal said.

    “Let me guess; if he comes back with the Jewel, Khan’s not going to care about him missing Mel.” Master Hanq said. “And then you placed a tracking spell on him.”

    “She also predicted that if he was only partially asleep, he’d wake up, disable or kill me and then make his escape.” Taisen said.

    “I apologize for asking you to play that role. How badly did he hurt you.” Opal asked.

    “No permanent damage, just enough to make me regret healing his wounds earlier.” Taisen said.

    “So what are we going to do? Follow him?” I asked.

    Opal and Yael paused, both looking at me, but each in very different ways. I couldn’t read Opal’s expression. She looked hopeful, but I couldn’t tell for what. Yael was much easier to make out. Her scowl wasn’t ambiguous. She didn’t like me and she didn’t see any reason to hide it.

    “I don’t think there should be a ‘we’.” she said, her voice firm. “You two should find somewhere to hide. You’ll be safer and we’ll be safer.”

    “You seriously think I’m going to hide in a hole? After what they did to my planet? Are you crazy?” I yelled at her. For a moment I forgot about the anima sword she was wearing. I think she did too, because she backed away when I jumped to my feet.

    “While I agree with you Yael,” Taise said, stepping forward to keep us apart, “I’ve had this discussion with her before and I don’t think that’s a suggestion she’s any more likely to take now than she was then.”

    “If she knows what’s good for her…” Yael began, but Opal cut her off.

    “Be calm my apprentice. None of us know how this is going to play out yet.” Opal said and put her hand on Yael’s shoulder to steady her. I felt a twinge seeing the gesture. The Sisters didn’t believe in any sort of bodily contact. When they needed to correct us, it wasn’t with a reassuring hand, it was with an “instruction wand”.

    Scowling for a whole bunch of reasons, I relaxed and backed off too. There wasn’t any point to starting a fight with Yael. Plus if the Ruby Guard was as tough as Master Hanq made them out to be, she’d probably clean the floors with me.

    “I understand what you’re facing Opal. And you as well Yael.” Master Hanq said. “This is a very sensitive mission that you’re on and you’re far from any backup.”

    “And how would you know that?” Yael asked.

    “There are more direct routes that you could be taking if there was another Ruby Guardian here, or nearby enough to join you soon. You’re not waiting for anyone to arrive though, which tells me you’re on your own for this one.” Master Hanq said.

    “If we are, that would be all the more reason to be careful to avoid betrayal.” Opal said.

    “Agreed, but we’re not going to betray you, and you know that.” Master Hanq said. They held each others gaze for a long moment and I was pretty sure I felt magic echo in the room.

    I also started to feel a chill spread through my chest. It was a familiar feeling, but not a welcome one.

    “We’re in danger.” I said, restraining the panic from my voice.

    “I don’t…” Yael started to say. I’m pretty sure she was going to finish it with something like ‘sense anything wrong’, but her expression changed to match my own as she focused her magics outwards.

    “Yes. We are.” Opal said, not taking her eyes from Master Hanq.

    “You needed proof right?” Master Hanq said with a smile.

    “Shall we then?” Opal asked.

    “It will be a delight.” Master Hanq agreed.

    I couldn’t begin to figure out what weird, private conversation they were having, but the smiles on both of their faces were similar. I didn’t know what it meant when Opal looked like that, but I’d seen Master Hanq smile that way a few times. He wore that expression when he was about to commit a whole lot of mayhem.

    “Karr Khan troops are landing outside! They’ve pierced the illusion I had in place!” Yael said.

    When an animal encounters a predator, it will react in predictable ways. The first response is usually to seek to put as much distance between itself and its enemy as possible. Then it will bare its teeth or claws and try to make itself seem too threatening to mess with, unless it chooses the opposite route of playing dead.

    Pretending to be non-threatening had never worked for me, so I tended to go for the claws and teeth approach by instinct. That’s how I found myself out of the bed I was in and pressed into the corner of the small room where everyone had gathered. What was new was that my hands were burning with a brilliant light and that I’d moved so fast I had no memory of crossing the distance from the bed.

    “I told you we shouldn’t have had him in here.” Master Hanq said. He was glaring at the commander boy who was strapped to chair on the other side of the room.

    “You also said she was going to be ok.” the offworld girl said. She was the nearest one to me. I registered the anima blade, or really the anima sword, that she held in her hands before I processed much else about her.  My body shivered in revulsion at the sight of it. I was trying to repress the memories of what the soldier’s anima knife had done to me, but the glowing sword the girl held was making that difficult.

    “Yael, sheath that.” the older woman said. I glanced at her but it wasn’t till the girl put the blade away that I was able to take my eyes off it and see who I was dealing with.

    The older woman wasn’t that old, maybe in her early thirties assuming she was as human as she appeared to be. She was wearing a dark brown traveling cloak and a leather jerkin and breeches in a lighter shade of brown. Her blonde hair was cut at shoulder length and the clasp on her cloak was a silver medallion with a blue jewel in it. She was about my height, so fairly tall, and, due to the clothing she wore, it was hard to tell if her thin build was a sign of slender frailty or carefully developed muscles. Judging by the softness of her face and the kindly expression she wore, I wasn’t going to bet on muscles, but something told me I didn’t want to mess with her anyways.

    Yael, the younger girl, on the other hand seemed like she was spoiling for a fight. She was shorter than me but stockier. Her clothes were the same as the older woman’s which suggested they was some kind of uniform, but the outfits didn’t look like from any military I was familiar with. The scowl on the girl’s face made me wonder if I’d kicked her in the teeth, repeatedly, at some point. On the chance that I hadn’t yet, I decided I should probably be ready to do so in the future since it looked like she was one good excuse away from drawing that anima sword again.

    Behind them, I saw both Master Hanq and Taisen watching me. They’d been standing near the bed I’d been laying on, but in jumping away from the boy’s voice I’d put myself on the opposite side of the room from them.

    Master Hanq rolled his eyes at me, making me feel a little foolish for overreacting. The knowing smile that adorned his broad, dark face also told me that he’d more or less expected me to react as I had. I noticed he’d positioned himself between the boy and I, though I’m not sure if that was for my benefit or the boy’s.

    Taisen meanwhile was looking sort of panicked. It was a cute look for him. If I had to guess, I’d say that despite being a physical anima prodigy, he had probably the least fighting experience of anyone in the room, given how out of his depth he looked.

    Then there was the commander boy. His robes betrayed the fact that he’d taken a fairly serious beating recently. His face looked fine, flawless in fact, but where he could heal his injuries with anima, fixing his clothes would have taken more freedom of movement than they’d allowed him.

    “What is going on here.” I asked, calming down to the point where rational thought became possible again.

    “We’re hiding from the troops of Warlord Karr Khan until nightfall. Then we’re going to get out of the city.” the woman said.

    “Who are you?” I asked, my tone neutral.

    “My name is Opal Kinsguard. You’ve met Healer Taisen already I believe, and this is my apprentice Yael.”

    “What about him?” I felt my teeth grit against each other as I asked.

    “I am Akell of the Third Scion Circle of Karr Khan. You may all address me as Master.” the boy said, the smug superiority of his tone at odds with his apparent predicament.

    “Well, except of course for you sister.” he added. “You may address me as ‘Senior Scion’.”

    “I’m not your sister.” I said. I knew that he was baiting me. Probably out of some kind of deathwish. I held myself back, but the glow that had disappeared from my hands began to crackle along my fingers again.

    “Is there a reason we haven’t gagged him yet?” Yael asked. I revised my opinion of her upwards several notches.

    “That wouldn’t be a civil way to treat a dignitary of his rank.” Opal said. There was something about the way she said it and the sparkle in her eye that struck me as odd. It took a moment for me to see it, but looking at the smile that snuck onto Akell’s face at her words made it clear. She was playing him. On some level he probably knew it too, but his title meant something to him and he expected it to mean something to the people he met, so he couldn’t help but buy into her deference a bit.

    “If you seek to parlay with the Undying Warlord for your survival you would be wise to release me from these restraints immediately.” Akell said.

    “I’m afraid we can’t do that. We need to understand why Karr Khan has assaulted this world first.” Opal said.

    “Why to reclaim our lost sister of course.” Akell said. Even I could tell he was lying about that.

    “And the assault on the city?” Opal asked calmly.

    “It was an expensive trip to make. The Undying Warlord required some tribute from this world as well.” Akell said.

    “Your troops are soul siphoning the ghosts that remain imprisoned within the shelter wards in the city.” Yael accused Akell. It made a sick kind of sense.

    I’d been blasted with the anima remnants of the people who’d died in the shelter I’d visited. The wards that were set to keep attacks out had also held the ghosts in. That meant the shelters were essentially enormous anima batteries that could be drained and stored if you had access to the right tools and rituals.

    “Of course. It’s not like the former hosts have any need of that anima any more.” Akell said without shame or remorse.

    “You murderer.” Yael growled and drew her anima blade again.

    “Stay your hand Yael.” Opal commanded her apprentice in a soft voice.

    “Why?” I asked. Everyone turned to look at me so I clarified my statement. “Why is he still breathing.”

    “Because he is going to tell us what we need to know. And because he is going help us stop Karr Khan the Undying Warlord once and for all.” Opal said.

    “Yes, of course, that seems very likely.” Akell said, his voice dripping with sarcasm.

    “You might want to consider what happens if the rest of us stop believing the nice lady there.” Master Hanq said. He didn’t have to flex his arms, or crack his knuckles. He was totally relaxed and yet the implied threat in his words came across as a clear and certain promise.

    “You’ll kill me? Do you know what the Undying Warlord does to those who harm his Scions? Slay me and you will spend a century begging for death. As will everyone you have ever known or cared about.” Akell said.

    “You will want to consider the fate of your brother Scions Jakeet and Magikel.” Opal said.

    “Those fools? They ran afoul of the Crystal Empress. The Undying Warlord will make her pay for their deaths when the time is right.” Akell said, his voice turning harsh.

    “Oh they’re not dead at all. Didn’t you know that?” Opal asked. “No I suppose he wouldn’t have told you. That would be kept from the any but the First Circle Scions I imagine.”

    “You’re lying, and you’re quite poor at it.” Akell said.

    “Am I? Would you like to see them? I have a message from Jakeet that he asked me to deliver to any of his ‘siblings’ that I might run into.” Opal said. She walked over to Akell and placed her index finger on his forehead.

    Whatever happened next was something that only Akell, and possibly Opal, saw. They were still and silent for a long moment before either stirred.

    “That’s not possible. You lying witch. I will kill you myself.” Akell snarled.

    “You’ve had a long day, and this is a lot of absorb. Sleep now.” Opal commanded and Akell went suddenly limp.

    “Taisen, would you move him to the next apartment over. He should sleep for the next few hours, but I don’t want to chance him waking early and overhearing anything we don’t want him to.” Opal said.

    “Certainly.” Taisen said with a deferential bow. He then wheeled the sleeping Akell out of the room we were in.

    “Were you able to get what you were looking for?” Master Hanq asked Opal.

    “Most of it. I’ll need to meditate for a few minutes to piece it all together. Why don’t you bring your student up to date on what had transpired. I can see she has a crowd of questions lurking in her mind and they’re better answered coming from someone she knows.” Opal said.

    “What should I do?” Yael asked. She’d put away her sword but it didn’t mean she looked any less dangerous.

    “Focus on the illusion you’re casting. We need to be overlooked here and Karr Khan’s forces will have trackers out searching for Akell, even if he is just a minor member of the clan.” Opal instructed. Yael nodded and together the two left the room to meditate.

    Master Hanq gave up leaning against the opposite wall of the room and came over to sit down beside me as I collapsed to the floor.

    “So what would you like to know?” he asked me.

    “Everything.” I said.

    “That’s a tall order.” Master Hanq said.

    “Who are these people?” I asked.

    “Agents of the Crystal Empress. Ruby Guardians, unless I miss my guess.” Master Hanq said.

    “Seriously? Taisen was telling the truth about that?” Of all the unbelievable things I’d experienced in the last several hours, that one held the special place of being the first that had completely crossed the line of plausibility.

    “Taisen’s the cleric they have with them right? Then, yep, he was telling the truth. They’re really with the Ruby Guard. Or at least Opal and Yael are. I don’t know about the cleric. He doesn’t seem to have the training for it.”

    “What are they doing here?” I asked.

    “They came looking for you.”

    “Why me?”

    “The cleric said he’d been treating you and that you saved him from the spell bomb. He wouldn’t say anything more, but it’s kind of obvious why he was excited to see you.” Master Hanq said.

    “Why’s that?”

    “He thinks you’re cute.” my teacher said. I felt a blush creep up to the tip of my ears. I knew Master Hanq was just teasing me, but it still felt weird. I didn’t talk about boys with him. For that matter I didn’t talk about boys with much of anyone. Not even the cute ones.

    “And he knows about the way you can use Void anima.” he said, more seriously.

    My heart sank at that. Among the memories I was trying to repress, that was one of the biggest and most unpleasant ones.

    “I guess everyone saw that.” I said, feeling ashamed.

    “You want to talk about it?”

    “Not yet. I don’t even want to think about it.” I said.

    “When you’re ready then.” Master Hanq said.

    I wrestled with myself for a moment. There was a lot I wanted to know about what I’d done and about what I could do, but losing control like I had was terrifying. The image of Master Hanq withered and dead like the soldiers flickered through my mind and I wanted to throw up.

    I waited for Master Hanq to break the silence. To help me pretend nothing was different. He keep silent though. He wasn’t going to insist I tackle this, but he wasn’t going to help me run away from it either.

    “What about that daughter of the Undying Warlord thing? What was that about?” I asked him.

    “It’s a Karr Khan thing. Supposedly the original one was the guy who first figured out how to work with void anima. The whole clan’s crazy. They think that that everyone who can use void anima is descended from him.” Master Hanq said.

    “How do you know about them?”

    “Believe it or not I had a life before I started training little knee biters how to bust people’s heads.”

    “I’ve always wondered about that.” I said.

    “Oh trust me, you don’t want to listen to an old guy like me tell old war stories.”

    “Don’t suppose they’d have any fights like the one you had with Akell there would they?”

    Master Hanq snorted.

    “Him? Was that supposed to be a fight? I’ve had longer warm ups than that. Of course part of that was Opal and Yael showing up when they did. I did the boy a favor by pummeling him. Pretty sure Yael would have beheaded him if he’d still been fighting when she got to him.”

    “You said they were Ruby Guardians, what’s the deal with that?” I asked.

    “They’re the Crystal Empresses special forces.”

    “How special can they be, Yael’s my age isn’t she?”

    “They usually operate solo.” Master Hanq explained.

    “So how strong are we talking about. Could you take one?” I asked.

    “I’ve seen one of them take down three Warlords at once back in the day. The warlords didn’t even lay a hand on him.” Master Hanq said.

    “How did that happen? I thought the old warlords were super tough. Didn’t they have to fight their way to the top of the pile?”

    “They did. These three weren’t the strongest or the best warlords out there but they were pretty good. Young enough to be strong, confident enough to not hold back, and just stupid enough to believe that they were invincible.” Master Hanq said.

    “You’d think they’d have known better after the Empress kicked their butts out of known space.”

    “I mentioned the stupid part right?” Master Hanq said.

    “So why are they here? For me? How did they even know how to find me?” I asked.

    “The cleric told them. You filled out some paperwork at his office right?”

    “Oh yeah. I guess this would be only place they’d know to look for me. What about Akell though? How did he know to be here?”

    “I don’t know. He didn’t get chatty until you woke up.”

    “Yeah, thanks for that by the way. That’s just what I needed to wake up to.” I frowned.

    “My apologies.” Opal said as she returned. “I needed him to be distracted so that I could probe his recent memories.”

    “You’re a mentalist?” I asked. Casters who worked with Mind anima weren’t as common as the ones who worked with physical anima, and most of them were specialized for enhancing their own mental capabilities. Being able to actually read other people’s minds was a rare and creepy gift.

    “Among other things, yes.” Opal said.

    “What did you see in the boy’s mind?” Master Hanq asked.

    “He was here for Mel, but that’s not why the Karr Khan’s forces are here.” she said.

    “Tell me something I don’t know.” Master Hanq said.

    “They think this world holds the key to destroying the Empress and claiming control of the worlds that are under her protection.” Opal said.

    “Are they crazy?” I asked.

    “Yes, but I’m also afraid they might be right.”

    Beyond a certain level, pain isn’t something you can fight. The body just shuts down. That’s what I expected to feel as I fell away from the soldier’s bloody knife. The pain didn’t come though. The weakness didn’t either. There wasn’t even fear. All I felt was emptiness. I was so removed from what had happened that it felt like I was standing outside my own body.

    I watched like an external observer as “Mel’s body” stumbled away from the soldier. The soldier leapt back to gauge the result of his attacks, but it was clear that they’d done their job.

    “Mel” wasn’t breathing. “Her” limbs weren’t working. I’m not sure her heart was beating.

    I wasn’t afraid though. I couldn’t process what was happening well enough to be afraid.

    I pulled my hands away from my chest and again it was like watching someone else. Some part of me expected them to look normal. That part needed to see the blood to believe it was real. The rest of me wanted to look away though. That side of me, that could feel the pain, that wasn’t crushed under denial and shock, knew all too well what the soldier’s anima blade had done. Neither side of me was ready for what I actually saw though.

    There was no mistaking that there was blood on my hands.

    But it wasn’t red.

    What my hands came away drenched in was something inhuman. It was alive on its own. It flowed down my arms, crawling over me and unevenly covering my forearms. My vision blurred as though I was crying, and then darkened like night had fallen.

    There was something wrong with me. I felt a wave of revulsion and panic sweep over me as my emotions caught up to what was happening. Then I watch as my blood covered hands curled into claws.

    I didn’t want to die.

    I knew that more than I knew anything else in the world. It was the only thing that I knew in that moment. As the world grew dark and dim and faded away from me, I knew that I didn’t want to leave it. No matter what I wanted to live.

    “Mel’s body” rose to her feet. That was terrifying. I hadn’t tried to get up. In fact, I wasn’t in control at all. Whatever was moving the arms and legs that had been mine, it wasn’t me. I tried to fight it, to make my body run, but instead I moved forward.

    In the darkness that had fallen over the world, I made out a brilliant light nearby. It was warm and red and vital. I watched as it flickered towards my body. My left arm raised of its own accord and caught the flickering light. Except my arm no longer looked human at all. In place of smooth skin, my arm was covered in a dark carapace that ended in a sharp, serrated talon.

    I tried to blink, and while I wasn’t able to move my eyelids, my vision did clear. For just a moment I saw the world as it was. My arm was encased in a field of dark anima and I had caught the soldier as he tried confirm his kill.

   I watched as he slashed at my arm to free himself. The anima knife shattered and I felt its power flow into me. More anima poured in after it.

    I was injured, my physical anima was literally bleeding out of me faster than it could repair the damage that I’d sustained. Alone there was no way for me to recover from the injuries I’d sustained.

    But I wasn’t alone.

    My vision faded back to dimness and I saw the soldier as nothing more than a strong vital flame. One with so much life to draw on.

    When I’d sucker punched Badz with a wooden plank to the head, I’d done so because of what he’d been planning to do with Laz. Guys like Badz, Davos and Maraz have plenty of physical anima, but in their line of work plenty is never enough.

    One way to get more is to train and practice and work hard to build it up. That way offers the best long term rewards, with Master Hanq being a prime example of how far natural talent and hard work can take you. Badz, Davos and Maraz wouldn’t have been the thugs they were if they believed in getting ahead by hard work though. They opted for the faster, easier path to power; stealing it from others.

    There’s a number of ways you can take magic from other people. I’d read up on them as a kid thinking I could find some easy way to reverse my terrible anima scores. Unfortunately none of the options for stealing someone else’s power were what you might call “nice”.

    Badz and his crew used “soul reapers” – devices that ripped the magic right out of their victims. The people who were drained suffered symptoms similar to a severe flu. There were rituals that could establish more permanent conduits but they were difficult to setup and usually required a willing donor.

    What I did to the soldier had nothing to do with a willing donor, but it was quite permanent nonetheless.

    In my dimmed vision, the flickering flame sputtered and strained away from me. It couldn’t escape though. In great, delicious gulps, the flame rushed into me. My ears rang with screams that gurgled into an inhuman sound and a laughter that somehow sounded even more alien.

    I blinked again, trying to find some kind of control. I was stronger, I could feel my wounds fading into memories, but the thing that had control of my body was far bigger than me. I saw other flames nearby and my body reacted with a beastial hunger. Before it bounded away after the nearest flame, I caught sight of what the soldier who’d attacked me really looked like.

    I knew he’d be dead. The flame I’d seen was his anima, all of his anima, and I’d consumed it. What was left of him was barely recognizable. The corpse was withered and shrunken, like a piece of fruit that had shriveled in the sun for years. Without his uniform to identify him, I might not have been able to tell he’d even been human once.

    I fell on the next flame as it charged at me and looked away. I didn’t want to see what was really happening anymore. However tightly I shut my eyes though I couldn’t block out the screaming or the laughter.

    I’d wanted to hurt them, to pay the invaders back for the murder of a city, but that wasn’t what this was about. This was about taking everything from them because I was hungry. I’d needed the first soldier’s power to save my life. As I ripped everything vital out of the second soldier I was filling a different need though.

    I’d spent my life feeling powerless compared to the people around me. It didn’t matter that the stolen anima wouldn’t remain with me. All that mattered was that I’d tasted power and I needed more. I needed enough that I would never be hurt by anyone again.

    I couldn’t stop myself from tearing the life out of the second soldier. I hated them too much, and there was a part of me that felt like they deserved this. The laughter bothered me though. I couldn’t figure out why they were laughing while something so terrible was happening to them.

    They weren’t of course. From the moment I got my hands on them all they could do was scream, and even that was short lived. The only one who could be making the mad, alien sounds that followed the screams was me.

    I tried to stop that, to struggle back to myself enough to at least touch on sanity again. The laughter only grew louder though. That’s when I found something to be afraid of that penetrated even the dark haze I was smothered by.

    I was hungry for power, for life, and I couldn’t stop taking it. I knew as I listened to my laughter that I wasn’t going to stop with the invaders. I was going to consume all of the life that I could find. I was in a dead city so there weren’t that many people that could be harmed. Only Master Hanq, the Sisters and the children who’d survived the bombs.

    The first soldier’s life had given me back my health and had charged up me up stronger than I’d ever been. The second soldier’s life added everything he was on top of what I’d become. I was faster, stronger, tough and more powerful than either of us had been. With that much raw energy at my disposal, I didn’t know if Master Hanq would be able to stop me and by the time I was done with the rest of the elite team I wasn’t sure anything could stand against me.

    I felt a third flame drain into me and forced my vision back to the mundane. I was terrified that I’d just killed the one man who’d ever wasted any time on me. It was almost a relief to watch another of the soldiers turn into a mummified husk in my grasp rather than Master Hanq like I’d feared.

    That relief turned to horror as I caught sight of two other flames. One was an enemy, the boy in the robes, the commander of the expedition. The other was Master Hanq. The hunger in me went wild watching them in action. Physical anima and energetic anima flashed around and between them like a lightning storm.

    For Mel, the girl I’d been, this was the greatest exhibit of martial anima prowess that I’d ever seen. Master Hanq had years of experience and dedication to the craft and was clearly the superior of the two fighters. The robed boy, while overmatched was not completely on the ropes though. His style was deadly and precise. What he lacked in experience, he compensated for in vigor and speed. In its own way, there was beauty and grace to their battle.

    Whatever was controlling my body saw none of that however. All it saw was an answer to its insatiable hunger, a chance to have enough power that it would be safe at last. I tried to cry out, to warn them of what was coming, but I couldn’t make a sound as I sprinted forward to tear into both of them.

    “You don’t want to do that.” a woman said in a soft and gentle voice.

    I tried to spin to see who it was, and my body followed, all parts of me in agreement on that action. There was no light beside me, no person standing there.

    “I don’t think you’re that far gone yet.” the woman said, encouragement in her voice.

    I spun again. The only lights I could see were Master Hanq and the boy. The Sisters and the children had escaped indoors and were probably fleeing to another building already.

    “Will you let me help you?” the woman asked.

    I felt my arms lash out and hit nothing but empty air.

    “Sleep for now then. We’ll work this out once you’re back to yourself.” she said.

    With her words came a tendril of blue fire. The void anima in me reach up to consume it and I felt it filter out through the darkness in me and pull me completely under, away from all the cares and worries and terror of the world.

    I would have liked to stay in that guilt-free, panic-free, pain-free state, but that’s not the way life works. After what felt like less than a moment, the harsh, cruel world beckoned me back.

    “She’s coming back around now.” I heard Taisen say. It took me a moment to place his voice and I only managed it because I thought I’d been dreaming about him.

    “You’re sure she’s not going to try to kill us?” someone asked. I didn’t recognize the voice, but I could place it as an girl from offworld by her accent.

    “I make no promises.” the woman who knocked me out said. There was a light, friendliness to her tone that made it clear she didn’t truly believe I was a threat.

    “She’ll be fine. Won’t you Mel?” Master Hanq asked.

    I opened my eyes at that. So many surprises greeted me, first and foremost of which being that I was seeing just the normal, mundane world. No weird dark haze at all.

    The second, even more welcome, surprise was that I had control of myself again.

    “You’re…I’m…” I stammered, trying to take everything in.

    “Just fine.” Master Hanq repeated, a big smile breaking across his wide face.

    “Why wouldn’t she be? She is the daughter of the Undying Warlord after all.” the boy who’d lead the expedition of invaders said.

    Half a dozen on one are terrible odds. That was true even for someone as talented as Master Hanq.

    I’d never been able to pry much of his background out him. As an anima caster, he was more talented than anyone I’d ever met, but for some reason he rarely used those abilities. I’d seen him spend hours working on magical techniques while I was drilling basic combat forms, but the few times I’d seen him in serious fights, he’d stuck to purely mundane means of dispatching his opponents.

    Of course what I considered a serious fight wasn’t much more than a light workout for him. Most of them ended less than ten seconds after they started. One on one fights were even quicker than that. It wasn’t that Master Hanq was blindingly fast. He never seemed to move that quick, just a little quicker than the other guys.

    “Fights aren’t about magic.” he’d said one day when he was trying to cheer me up about my abysmal anima scores. “They’re about power, and there are a lot of ways to be more powerful than the other guy when you get into a fight.”

    Given that he stood somewhere close to seven feet tall and weighed enough that scales just said “ouch” when he got on them, I could see where he’d have the power to fight without magic. I’d always been a bit dubious of how well that advice applied to me though. Being on the tall side for a girl and having a fair amount of wiry muscle was fine if I was fighting someone in my own weight class.  If I had to fight a guy like him Master Hanq though I had no illusions as to how I’d do. If I was lucky I’d get one hit in before he turned me to paste.

    One on one, the soldier would have been in the same boat as me. Which was why they acted as a group and carried extremely deadly weapons. In this particular case they weren’t deadly enough though.

    Between the time that Master Hanq put a spear of light through the squad leader and the time the ex-soldier’s corpse hit the ground the rest of the squad had their weapons sighted on him, charged and were firing. It was an impressive display of tactical coordination. I’m not an expert on military strike teams, but if these guys weren’t an elite unit I had no idea who would be.

    Master Hanq had apparently expected as much though. He crossed his arms in a warding gesture and the soldiers’ anima bolts were absorbed into the motes of blue fire that danced around him. The motes surged in brightness and, with another gesture, he cast them down to the ground.

    The soldiers scattered, diving for cover. The boy in the robes who was in command of them didn’t budge. Instead he raised a shield of crackling light around himself.

    My teacher hadn’t been aiming at any of them however. Instead, the blue motes slammed into the ground near the captives. There was an explosion of dust and smoke that followed which completely obscured the front of the dormitory and everyone that was gathered near it.

    I watched as Master Hanq leapt from the roof of the dormitory. He eclipsed the sun for a moment, his dark skin a perfect silhouette against the sky and then he fell into the magically thick smoke and dust, trailing blue fire in his wake.

    “Form on me, and kill the wizard.” the commander boy shouted to his troops. There were calls of assent from cloud but then I heard a strangled cry that cut off in an instant. It was hard to tell but I was pretty sure a grown man had made the noise and it didn’t sound like Master Hanq.

    “Two down.” I whispered to myself.

    I couldn’t see the action anymore, but it occurred to me that I was still plainly visible to anyone who walked out of the cloud of dust. I’d rushed out from cover when it looked like Laz was going to be shot and had frozen when Master Hanq made his appearance. Playing “statue” however wasn’t going to lead anyone to mistake me for one. I looked around for the closest cover or concealment while my mind spun over what options I had.

    Going to ground seemed like the smart move. The last thing Master Hanq needed was for me to become a hostage or a distraction. He was going to have a tough enough fight with the soldiers and once the commander boy joined in things would turn ugly quick.

    I started to scramble over to one of the nearby apartment buildings to duck into its entrance. It wasn’t the best hiding spot but it would have been enough to keep me out of sight. I didn’t even make it halfway there though before two soldiers stumbled out of the dust cloud.

    Cold swept over me as they looked up. We were no more than twenty feet apart and their bolt casters were already pointing in my direction and charged. I considered leaping at them but the fact that I was thinking about it meant I wasn’t doing it. My legs wouldn’t move in that direction. Fear had nailed my feet to the ground.

    The nearest soldier shook his head and grabbed his partner by the shoulder. They exchanged silent hand signs, and headed back into the cloud in the direction the commander boy had called from.

    There was no way they hadn’t seen me and yet they’d paid no attention to me. I looked at my hands again and found the same dark smoke curling around them that I’d seen when I ran into the sewer cat.

    “I’m invisible.” I didn’t even speak the words. I let them form soundlessly on my lips, trying to grasp the reality that was before me.

    I could hide.

    I could hide perfectly. If I wanted to, I could be safe forever. Some deep, old longing in me rejoiced at that notion. The number of times I’d wanted to crawl away and disappear from the world were too many to count. Some days, it felt like they didn’t make numbers that went that high.

    Running away and being free of this whole situation was tempting, but I felt something deeper moving in me too. I remembered the ghosts. I remembered the man and his daughter who had left Taisen’s clinic when I was waiting there. There was no way they’d gotten out of the radius of the spell bomb that I’d lived through.

    Concealed within the dark smoke, I felt a confidence I’d rarely known. The soldiers couldn’t see me, so they couldn’t hurt me. That chased the fear away and into its place stepped anger. They couldn’t hurt me, but they’d hurt a whole of others. If I was the noble sort, I’d say that I thought about how I could balance those scales. The truth was I just thought about hurting them worse than they’d hurt us, and the idea seemed delightful.

    I stepped into the cloud and I felt my vision shift. I knew the smoke and dust were there but it didn’t block my vision. I could see the people who were obscured by it in a weird sort of half light.

    The Sisters were using the distraction that Master Hanq had provided to usher the children back into the dormitory. I doubted they’d stay there, but putting a building between themselves and the soldiers seemed like a solid plan to me.

    Master Hanq was in close combat with one of the soldiers. He had the man almost entirely disabled and was using him as a moving shield against another soldier.

    The two soldiers who’d preceded me into the cloud were moving in unison towards their commander, covering the possible fields of fire as best they could. Their commander was not making things easy for them however. He’d left the place he’d been standing and was moving cautiously towards the area where Master Hanq was fighting.

    I waited until the two soldiers had wandered a little way past where the commander boy had been standing. Their steps slowed and their body language screamed confusion at not finding him where he’d ordered them to meet him. That’s when I struck.

    I’d been hoping that my blows would have the same effect on these soldiers as the one I’d fought earlier. Things didn’t quite work out that way though.

    I hit the first soldier with a spinning hammer fist to the base of his neck, followed by a sidekick to the back of his knee. I put every bit of force I had into the blows and was rewarded with brilliant flash of light at each of the impact points. The soldier gasped and went down, but not like a ragdoll as I’d been hoping. Instead, he fell into the kind of evasive tumble that I’d only seen well trained people pull off.

    My vision flickered in the wake of the attack and everything got harder to see. Whatever special effect being invisible gave me, it had worn off. The other soldier turned and raised his caster at me, which told me the invisibility was gone too.

    Practiced reflexes took over from there. As the soldier brought the caster up, I slid forward and grabbed the barrel of the weapon. He triggered a shot but it was too late, I’d already deflected the barrel away from myself. The snapshot left him off balance which I capitalized on without thinking about it. Jerking on the barrel, I pulled him to stumble towards me and met his chin with an elbow strike that had all of my weight behind it.

    There was a brief flash of light again, but this soldier didn’t stumble to the ground. He flew off into the air at the force of the blow and was lost in the cloud before he landed.

    I heard and felt the movement behind me as the other soldier caught his balance. In one motion I turned to look at him and stomped downward to pin his caster to the ground. He didn’t fight me for the weapon. Instead he swept my legs out from under me with a low spinning kick and came up with a glowing ruby knife.

    Anima weapons tend to use focusing crystals to help the wielder manipulate magical forces. In the case of a bolt caster, there’s a crystal in the weapon that converts the user’s physical anima into kinetic force, augments it and projects it at whoever the user wants dead. In the case of a melee weapon like a knife, the magical force doesn’t have to be projected, so it can be concentrated and honed to a much more potent level.

    In a sense it was a compliment that the soldier had drawn an anima knife on me. It’s the kind of thing that high powered casters will do when they need to kill someone who’s on their level or higher. I didn’t feel thrilled by that compliment though.

    Seeing my imminent demise in the soldier’s hands, I rolled away from him and kicked up to my feet to buy myself time to think. He was good enough not to give me any of that though. I’d barely stood up when I had to drop and fall away from his next attacks. He didn’t let up either. This wasn’t like a sparring match where we paused for breath after a good exchange. He was coming as fast as he could with each blow meant to kill.

    I moved without thinking, the long hours of training and drilling with Master Hanq being the only thing that kept me alive. The thing with dodging though is that you can’t dodge everything. Especially not when you’re fighting someone who’s just as fast as you.

    I felt the first slash that I didn’t get out of the way of on my arm. From the damage I took, I know the second one landed on inner thigh. I didn’t feel it but that one slowed me down. The next three I felt as rapid pokes to the chest.

    Knives don’t poke you of course. I just hadn’t felt the pain as it pierced my vital organs. In less than a second, I’d taken two serious cuts and three fatal wounds. As it turned out, that was really unfortunate for him.

    The wrong thing to do after sucker punching someone is to stand over them gawking at what might be their corpse. There was so much that didn’t compute about the soldier lying at my feet though that I couldn’t manage much of anything else for a few heartbeats after I put him there.

    Fear once again came to the rescue. I knew with bone deep certainty that if I hung around I was going to be found and then killed in short order. That got me in motion, at least mentally. A quick scan of the alley showed that I was still alone. The access cover to the sewers was where I expected it to be and in just as bad shape as I recalled. Getting in wasn’t going to be a problem.

    I looked at the guy who’d tried to kill me next. I could take his bolt caster but, from what I knew of them, military bolt casters placed a heavier demand on their user’s physical anima in exchange for their increased stopping power. The chance I’d be able to use one seemed dismal at best. Worse, there could be anti-theft enchantments on it. Even a simple locator spell could lead to tragic consequences if it let the invaders follow me to any survivors of the bombings.

    I considered trying to hide the soldier’s body, but the best I could come up with was to put him inside the shop I’d been in. It wasn’t much but if it delayed pursuit for a minute that might be all I needed. I grabbed soldier to try dragging him into the shop. I’d thought he’d be pretty brutal to lug around, especially with all his gear, but it turned out he was surprisingly light. That said “alien” to me, none of the species who’d set up camp on Belstarius were hollow boned the way the soldier seemed to be.

    My focus on escape kept me from thinking too deeply on any of that however. Or on the fact that I’d probably just killed someone. There was a little conclave in the back of my mind debating on whether to feel righteously gleeful, terrified, ashamed, dirty or stoic about that issue but the overwhelming need to be somewhere else, or anywhere else as long as it was safe, kept that debate out of my conscious awareness.

    Not that the sewers were that much more pleasant to contemplate.

    There’d always been legends about the sewer tunnels, but most of them were just things the kids at the Sister’s orphanage made up to scare each other. I was too old to believe most of them, but I couldn’t deny that the sewers were a dangerous place.

    They’d been laid down by hand, rather than direct spell working. Spell constructed buildings and utilities are generally of high quality, but also extremely expensive. Belstarius didn’t have that kind of money when it was being founded so the original settlers cut corners and used manual labor and machinery to put in a sewer system designed to service the grand capital that they imagined would someday grow up. That had worked out fairly well for them, or at least those of them who didn’t die during the construction.

    That led to the most common myth the kids would tell; that the sewers were haunted by the dead workers who’d perished building each tunnel and cistern. Then there were the tales of the monsters who’d been bred for the sewers. Refuse eaters who weren’t so picky about whether the garbage they were ingested was still moving or not. Of the two, I knew the refuse eaters to be true though less sensational than stories made them out. The normal variety grew to the size of my arm and were shy creatures. They weren’t any threat or problem. The problem was the creatures that preyed on them.

    In theory the predators were shy too. In practice that depended on how many people were in your group. Small teams who ventured into the sewers rarely found them. People who went searching for them solo on the other hand didn’t always come back.

    “They’ll have to catch me first.” I whispered to myself.

    The light from the shield I was holding on my right hand was enough to navigate the otherwise pitch black of the tunnels. It was also enough light to attract anything that was feeling hungry to me. Or the soldiers, if any of them thought to look below the streets they were searching. With my only other option being to run around bashing into walls blindly though I opted to take the risk and rely on speed to see me through. Predictably, I wasn’t that lucky.

    I’d counted on being able to find my way to the street near the orphanage because the sewers were laid out in a simple grid pattern. That was true, but I hadn’t accounted for the presence of the “nests” that the predators had setup. I stumbled through one as I whipped around a corner and, as I was tripping over it, discovered that I’d come face to face with a sewer cat.

    My momentum pitched me forward and I rolled up into a crouch about three arm lengths away from it. The creature was bigger than me, probably twice my weight and half again my height. It had the kind of speed that a human like me would need to burn a lot of physical anima to match. Lots of training could also get you there but, despite the years of martial instruction I’d scrounged out of my teacher, I wasn’t eager to put those skills to the test against a beast like the one in front of me.  For one thing, it was packing the equivalent of four deadly daggers in each hand, plus a mouthful of razors. If it hit me, I’d be ripped to shreds. I felt a cold chill run through me at that thought.

    Seeing the look in the sewer cat’s eyes, I knew I wasn’t going to have much of a vote in the question of whether we were going to fight. I’d kicked it in the head in the course of stumbling past it. It was more than a little annoyed.

    And yet it didn’t attack me.

    In fact it didn’t look at me, or even seem to register that I was there.

    I tried moving my right hand. It didn’t flinch. I did though.

    My hand wasn’t glowing anymore.

    But I could still see ok.

    Something was very wrong.

    Looking at my hands, I saw that both of them were covered with wisps of black smoke. The smoke ran up my arms and played across my chest. I reached up to my cheek and brushed a wisp of smoke away from my face. My skin was cold to the touch.

    A mewling grumble caught my attention and I saw an adorable little sewer cat kitten stick its head up out of the nest. The big cat, apparently the mother, was looking around too warily to pay attention to her offspring though. That shocked me even more. A mother defending her young should have ripped me to pieces already.

    Not wanting to tempt fate any further I got to my feet and tip toed backwards away from the nest. The mother cat glanced at where I was a few times but her gaze didn’t linger on me any longer than it did anywhere else.

    Once I got far enough away, I broke into another run, trusting whatever weird sight I’d acquired to not cut out and leave me in the dark. As I ran, it occurred to me that the sewer cats were a good sign. The shelters had been underground and were better defended than the sewers. If the sewer cats had survived that had to mean that the area I was traveling under hadn’t been hit by a bomb. The elation at that thought was short lived though. Less than a minute later I ran into an empty nest. I might have tried to make myself believe that it was just abandoned but the material of the nest was the same uniform grey as the dead areas I’d run through.

    I exited the sewers a few minutes later, to find the city around me grey and lifeless as well. Overhead, another of the invaders’ transport ships streaked across the sky.

    “I can at least get my stuff.” I told myself, trying again to push away the vision of what the orphanage would look like. I wasn’t successful at that, but I couldn’t survive on what I was carrying with me, so I was able to push myself towards home despite the mounting emotional pressure that wanted to keep me away.

    When I arrived at the orphanage I saw both my worst fear and my best hope mixed together. Half of the dormitory was grey, but the other half was still the melange of cheap paints that it had always been. It took me a second to figure out what had happened.

    “The bombs. They were right on the edge of the one of the bombs!” My breath was coming fast and irregular and I could feel my hands shaking. “Someone’s alive. Someone had to have survived.”

    We didn’t have a nearby municipal shelter, so the dormitories were set up with sub-basements that served as our “shelters”. They didn’t have the spell wards to keep anyone out. In fact they barely had any supplies of food or water. That wasn’t enough to weather a long term siege but it meant that anyone who’d taken refuge in the sub-basements would still be there.

    I broke from the cover of the building that I’d been peeking around just in time for one of the invaders’ ships to come screaming down into the empty lot besides the dormitories. I couldn’t tell if they’d seen me but I dashed back behind the nearest corner for cover anyways.

    Cursing every grace the Sisters had ever tried to teach me about, I glanced back around the corner to watch what was happening. The good news was that it wasn’t one of the big troop transports that had landed. The bad news was that it looked like a personal ship instead, though it bore some of the same insignia as the soldiers I’d encountered had.

    Taisen had said he’d checked me for curses and hadn’t found any. I was finding that increasingly unlikely. However good his mending spell was, I was inclined to believe he absolutely sucked at noticing curses. There was no other reason I could conceive of that I would run into someone important enough to have their own ship when I was a stone’s throw from home.

    The exit ramp from the small flyer descended and a squad of a half dozen soldiers in combat armor exited. Behind them came a human boy. He was in his late teens and was wearing a long red robe with a grey mantle that hung down to his mid chest. His hair was dark and pulled back in a braided ponytail.

    “Damn, one landed too close.” the boy said, looking at the dividing line of grey and color on the dormitories.

    “Search the buildings.” he directed the troops. “Assemble any survivors here.”

    “Orders if we encounter resistance sir?” the squad leader asked.

    “They need to be alive. I don’t care what shape they’re in beyond that, just make it quick.” the boy said. He made a gesture with his hand that cut off any further discussion and the soldiers hurried into the nearest dormitory in an attack formation.

    The order to keep their soon-to-be captives alive gave me some hope, but it was tainted by knowing the kinds of things that could be done to live prisoners. The invaders hadn’t hesitated in killing millions in the capital city. There was no reason to think they’d be any more merciful to the people who’d happened to survive.

    It also wasn’t comforting to hear that a bomb had landed “too close” to the dormitories. That meant they’d known of its existence and that it had factored into their plans. Given what had been happening with me, I had to believe that some part of their plans had centered around me.

    That left me with the question of what I was going to do about it. Unfortunately the only answer I could come up with was “not much”. The boy was on his own and only wearing robes rather than combat armor. A much dumber girl than I might have assumed that he was therefore an easy target. I knew better. In addition to my physical training, my martial teacher had taught me about evaluating people who were picking a fight with you, or who you wanted to pick a fight with.

    The robes the boy wore weren’t a sign that he was vulnerable. They were a sign that he didn’t need combat armor because his shields were just that good. He was around my age and if he was naturally gifted and had been trained extensively since he was young it was likely that he was more dangerous than the entire squad of soldiers that he commanded combined.

    A part of me wanted to try taking him on anyways. Between the training I had and the new things I seemed to be able to do, I had wonder if I could put up a good fight. Since the price of failure was either death or a fate worse than death, I was able to keep that particular impulse under control.

    At least until they started bringing the kids out.

    The soldiers hadn’t wasted time in finding them. They had them marching out the door less than ten minutes after they landed. The biggest ones went first, followed by the smaller ones, all lined up just like the Sister’s had us stand when we were going somewhere as a group. At the end of the line walked four of the Sisters. The four who looked after the younger classes. The classes that were on the living side of the dormitories.

    I bit back a cry of rage and more tears. There weren’t many kids my age in the dormitories, most had moved out or moved on. There were some girls I hated who were a year younger, a few boys who I mostly ignored because they were both ugly and idiots and a small group of boys and girls who I got along well enough with that we could say hi without it being a challenge of some kind. It was the ones a couple years or more younger than I was that I liked the most. They were a good group of kids.

    Or they had been.

    And the Sisters who’d looked after us. Who would have been taking care of getting their charges into the proper rooms. I’d hated them, but I’d loved them too. They were harsh and unforgiving. We were as much a burden on them as anything else, but in their own way they’d cared about us. In all the universe, they were the only ones who cared about us really.

    That was over though. They were gone. The kids near my age. The Sisters who looked over us. All of them. Erased.

    I thought of walking into the grey dormitory and meeting their ghosts and I started shaking uncontrollably. I watched as the soldiers had the kids and the Sisters kneel down for their leader to review. The prisoners had all been bound in restraints, so their arms were behind their backs. The boy in the robes walked up to each of them, cupped their chins in his hand and looked them in the eye for a moment.

    “Not here. That’s not possible.” he said when he reached the end of the line. “Was this everyone?”

    “Yes sir.” the squad leader answered.

    “No.” the boy said and returned to the Sister at the end of the line. He grabbed her face again, harder than before. “Is this everyone? Or did one of them hide somewhere?”

    She didn’t answer him. She didn’t have to. Even from several dozen feet away I could see the look of utter contempt on her face.

    “You won’t talk. You think you’ve got nothing left to lose perhaps? Kill one of them.” the boy said. The order was casual but the effect was immediate. The squad leader charged his weapon and strode over to the nearest child.

    Laz. The young boy I’d saved. His face was stained with tears but he looked up at his killer and he wasn’t crying anymore. He wasn’t pleading, or afraid, or angry. There was a look of quiet defiance in his eyes as the squad leader stepped towards him and brought his bolt caster up.

    I started to move forward, knowing I was far too late to do any good. Knowing I was just going to die too. A squad plus someone with full wizard training was a death sentence to oppose unless you were a wizard yourself.

    The children and the Sisters knew that too. If the wizard boy wanted their dignity though he was going to have to work a lot harder than just killing them to get it.

    The cold rage I’d been holding in swept over me at the thought that this was how things were going to end and I promised myself that I would take at least one of them with me. For Laz if nothing else.

    The squad leader never got to aim his caster at Laz though. A crack like thunder split the air as he was transfixed by a bolt of blue light. The charge that he had prepared in his bolt caster fired wildly into the sky as the soldier dropped lifeless to the ground.

    “You don’t want to do that.” a deep, booming, wonderful voice called out from the top of the dormitory. Looking up I saw a man standing there. He was too far away and at the wrong angle for me see the lazy, confident grin on his face that I knew would be there. All I could make out were the orbs of blue fire that played around each of his massive outstretched arms.

    I barely caught myself from cheering out loud. My teacher had shown up!

    Laying on the ground struggling to keep from bawling my eyes out wasn’t the best plan for survival. I knew that, but after a thousand ghosts funneled through my mind I didn’t have enough left in me to do anything else. Not right away at least. To tell the truth, it was tempting to lie there forever. Giving up seemed so easy, and maybe even the smartest play I could make. With what I had seen, it seemed like the only thing opening my eyes was going to do was let more of the grey city crawl inside me.

    For a long moment that was more than I could bear. So I stayed there. Curled up inside myself. Wrapped in the darkness of my eyelids.

    The ghosts hadn’t hurt me. Not physically. I’d even been buffered from their emotional pain. The tears I fought against weren’t for them. They were the selfish, childish tears that I’d held back a thousand times before.

    I’d been knocked down a few times in the last hour or so, and getting back up was getting harder each time. Where will and desire left off though, stubborn habit pushed me back to my feet.

    Something looked wrong when I did and it took me a moment to notice that it was the grass under my feet. The green grass.

    In running from the shelter, I’d stumbled into a park and collapsed there. Looking behind me I saw that the grey hadn’t disappeared. Instead, there was a sharp dividing line where the effect of the spell bomb stopped. On one side, there was only bare earth and death and, on the other, the grass and trees were green and vibrant.

    “Someone might be alive still.” I said in a whispered breath.

    I looked around and got my bearings before taking off towards the orphanage. There were other people I knew, but my first stop had to be what passed for my home. I might have hated parts of it but it was still my place. Maybe the only place where I belonged.

    Ten minutes of jogging later and I was surrounded by grey once more. More than one bomb had fallen. More than one area of the city had been razed of life. I tried to reassure myself that the Sister’s complex wouldn’t have been hit. We were in an unimportant section of the city, and on the outskirts of it at that. There wasn’t any logical reason to waste pricey magical ordinance on a target like that. That argument didn’t make me feel any better though since the same could be said about attacking my world in general.

    I ran faster, trying drown the thoughts in my head with the rushing wind. Physical exertion had grounded me in past, but not this time. Even at a flat out run, I couldn’t distract myself from thinking about what I was going to find when I got back. The image of the dormitory as a grey and empty shell was crystal clear in my mind’s eye.

    There wasn’t going to be anyone there for me.

    I couldn’t tell if that was another vision of the future or the voice of despair speaking. Or if there was any difference between them.

    That thought made me angry. I hated feeling whiny and weak. I hated the idea that I couldn’t do anything, that I had to just watch as horrible things happened. I’d spent years fighting that. Fighting the other kids at the orphanage when they tried to push me around, fighting guys on the street like Badz and Davos and Maraz who thought that I was easy prey because I was a girl, or because I was smaller than them, or because I didn’t hit them first.

    The bombs had been different though. I couldn’t fight back against a bomb, especially not one that the actual military couldn’t deal with.

    And yet I had. In a way. I looked at my normal seeming left hand. I could still feel the darkness within me, the Void anima, clearer than ever before. It’s presence was a contradiction. Alien and yet familiar. Terrifying and disgusting and somehow reassuring.

    I didn’t know what that meant, except that it made Taisen’s offer of help more appealing. Even if he was crazy. In his favor was the fact that his mending spell was working fantastically. Despite the pace I was running at, I wasn’t feeling tired at all.

    That might have been why I had the energy to jump high enough to land on the roof of a hover truck when something broke the silence that was smothering the city.

    I crouched on the roof of the truck and looked around like a frightened cat to identify the source of noise. Overhead I saw an airship, one of the big ones, its engines screaming as it tore through the sky. I strained my eyes to follow it but it was too far away by the time I caught sight of it to make out any markings. It could have been one of ours doing a fly over to see what kind of damage had been done, but the cynic in me doubted that. Anyone who was looking to bomb us would have targeted our meager military bases first. Given the size of the airship it seemed a lot more likely that it was landing troops to secure whatever they’d been willing to murder a city for.

    I wasn’t sure what that meant in regards to me. I doubted they’d be expecting to find lone girls running through the city, but I was pretty sure they’d be happy to shoot any they came across. Hiding was one option, but there were almost too many problems with it for me to count, the largest of which being that if anyone I knew was alive, they wouldn’t be if a troop of invaders found them before I did.

    With that off the table, I picked up my pace. Taisen’s mending spell must have been incredibly overcharged by the the extra energy he poured into it because, as fast as I ran, my body was able to keep up without tiring. I was so into the effortless running groove in fact that I didn’t even notice when someone shot me.

    One moment I was sprinting down East Canal street and the next I’d tripped and gone sprawling through a stand that sold dried fruits and tourist knick knacks. The crack of the bolt caster was distinct enough to tell me someone was shooting. The pain in my left arm followed along after that to let me know they were shooting at me.

    “There was a live one!” I heard an armor muffled voice shout out.

    “Target down. Advancing to confirm kill.” another said.

    Several more called out “Advancing to support” in response to that.

    I wasn’t used to dealing with military types but it didn’t take a master of mind magic to work out that they were talking about me. That should have been terrifying but instead I felt a cold anger simmering inside. On its own, it might have sparked some rather stupid and suicidal thoughts, but my fear mixed with it to keep me rational.

    There were a lot more of them than I wanted to try fighting, but there was no way in hell I was going to sit and wait for them to kill me. Staying low to the ground I broke for the alley behind me. Cries went up from the soldiers and bolts crashed into the bricks of the shops I was running between.

    I felt the cold passage of a pair of bolts narrowly miss my head as I dodged and weaved my way to the alley’s end. The fence that blocked off the alley to prevent traffic from passing down it was twice my height and topped with rusted spikes. That would have made the alley a dead end but, fortunately, there were piles of shipping boxes piled against it that let me spring over the top of the fence and hit the ground of the far side in a rolling tumble.

    I made it to the far end of the alley by the time the soldiers reached the fence and, without pausing, cut to the left and then across the street to disappear down another alley on the far side of the road. I heard the soldiers behind me as I ran, their leader calling for them to fan out and search in both directions. Unless I missed my guess they’d also be reporting my position to someone who could dispatch more troops, possibly with the kind of magic wielders who would be able to pin down my location no matter where I ran.

    That thought kind of sucked. On the other hand, the thought of leading half the invasion force on a wild goose chase brought a grim smile to face. I knew it wouldn’t really be half the invasion force but if I was going to entertain the delusion that I would live to see the next sunrise, then a grand delusion seemed like the way to go.

    I cut across a few more roads and took a few more alleys to get away from the troops that were pursuing me before dodging into a store that had been open when the bombs hit. I locked the door behind me and dashed into the back room before the pursuing soldiers caught up.

    With a second to think, I tried to put together a plan but I came up blank at first. My escape hadn’t been entirely due to luck. The soldiers were carrying a full load of field equipment. I was unencumbered. They were professionals trained in searching and capturing cities (most likely), but I knew this area. I didn’t have to guess which alleys led to which streets, or what the fastest way to get out of a line of sight was. Also, I was able to run as fast as I could and they needed to stay wary of traps and ambushes. I had a lot of advantages, but something still didn’t feel right about the fact that I’d gotten away from them.

    I looked at my arm. The one that had been shot. It still hurt a bit but it looked fine. As far as I knew that was impossible. Even civilian bolt casters are designed to pack enough punch to kill someone. The anima shields that your typical thug like Davos could raise gave them a good chance of withstanding a glancing shot, but a dead center hit would still punch right through them. Any respectable military wouldn’t mess around with bolt casters like that. They’d go for the ones that would kill you even on a glancing blow.

    In my case I should have been even deader than most since I didn’t have any anima shield to protect me. Even if it was an extremely glancing blow, it seemed like I should be short one left arm. Not that I was unhappy to still be roughly symmetrical, or alive for that matter.

    I pitched that line of thought away. Maybe if I found Taisen again he could explain it. Given that I’d never even held a bolt caster there was probably a lot I didn’t know about them I decided.

    What I needed to think about instead was how I was going to get back to the orphanage without leading the soldiers to any survivors who might be there. I tried to plot a path from where I was to there and saw too many places where I’d be visible for too long. Too many places, unless I was underground.

    I closed my eyes and sighed. The sewers could get me close to the orphanage.

    “Maybe the bombs will have killed the things down there too.” I said, hating the idea but knowing that it was my best option.

    I figured the soldiers would doubleback and start checking the shops as soon as they confirmed that they’d lost me. That meant I needed to keep moving as fast as I could, so once I had the idea, I had to start acting on it. What I hadn’t figured was that not all the soldiers would have made it past me or that there’d be one carefully moving through the alley behind the shop that I’d hidden in.

    I didn’t see him as I slipped out the back door, but I heard him charge the bolt caster as he lowered it to my head. He did call out a warning or order me to freeze. His immediate reaction to seeing me was to shoot to kill.

    Adrenaline flooded my body and I reacted faster than thought would have allowed. I dropped and spun, catching the barrel of the caster with my right hand and shoving it aside. The twisting spin pulled my right side away from the soldier and gave forward momentum to my left.

    If I’d been thinking, I would never had tried to hit him. He was in armor sturdy enough to deflect any punch I could throw and he had a solid anima shield in place on top of that. My best bet would have been to knock him off balance and run for it. Instead I hit him with a left handed palm strike to the center of the chest that had all of my weight behind it. Against armor and an anima shield, he shouldn’t even have felt the blow.

    Impossibly, I watched his anima shield shatter under my blow and felt a surge of force drain through me. The soldier didn’t trip or stumble, he dropped like a puppet whose strings had been cut.

    Without a shot being fired or any noise being made, the fight was over and the soldier wasn’t moving.

    I looked down at my hands in shock.

    Black smoke was drifting lazily around my left hand again and my right held the soft glimmer of a tiny anime shield.

    I should have been dead. That was the first and only thought that rang through my head as I picked myself up off the floor of the clinic’s treatment room.

    I hadn’t made it to the shelter. I hadn’t been protected by anything more than the clinic’s walls and windows. There was no chance they’d held off the deadly magics that had rained down over the city.

    But I was alive and I was having a hard time understanding why.

    I glanced around. We were both alive. Taisen was still with me, just watching quietly and holding very still. In the distance I heard more explosions and I felt something coiling within me.

    I wasn’t sure how I’d wound up on the ground. I couldn’t remember falling. All I could recall was the sense of knowing that I was in danger a moment before the the blast.

    “You can let that go.” Taisen said. He was holding himself still but I was able to follow his gaze to the circle that had manifested on the floor around us. Wisps of oily, dark smoke chased each other around us in a ring as thick as the width of my hand.

    “What is it?” I asked, my voice strangled with nerves. Whatever it was felt alien and cold.

    “Your hand.” Taisen said, not answering me and still not moving.

    My left hand was shrouded in the same dark smoke that was racing around us. Seeing it, I started to shiver and almost fell backwards. Taisen reached out to stop me but jerked his hand away before he grabbed my arm. I stumbled but stopped myself before I crossed the ring of smoke.

    “What is this!” I asked again.

    “Void anima. Please, let it go.” he said with quiet insistence.

    I uncoiled my hand from the fist I’d clenched it into and the smoke swirling around us dissipated .

    “Thank you.” he said, breathing deeply and relaxing at last.

    “What happened just now?”

    “I think you just saved us both, but in a very dangerous way.”

    “How?”

    “Void anima consumes other magics. Any other magics. That boom we heard? That was a spell bomb detonating. Somehow they found a way to get one through the defense grid. You reacted to the transmutation wave the bomb spread by creating a shield for us.” Taisen explained.

    “This doesn’t make sense. Why would this all be happening now?” I demanded. Too much had changed too quickly and I felt like I was coming apart at the seams.

    “I don’t know. I’m not a senior agent. I just know that I have to report this. All of this. You most especially.” Taisen said.

    “Me? Why? Because I have some weird anima condition? Why not the city? Why not get the Crystal Empress to come here and stop whoever’s bombing us.”

    “We’re outside her dominion. By the time a ship gets here, this will all be over.”

    “Then what does it matter! We’ll all be dead!” I yelled at him. I wasn’t giving him a fair break, but, if I knew one thing, it was that life wasn’t fair.

    “No. My shelter is well hidden. We can stay in there and be safe. The bombs they’re using? Those have to be life extinguishers. There was no damage done to the clinic, just the people. They’re not going to be looking for survivors. We can wait for them to go. Once they leave, we can be picked up by the Empress’ forces.” Taisen offered.

    It wasn’t even vaguely tempting.

    “The people? They’re the only thing I care about here! If I can defend myself then I’m not staying. I’ve got to see if anyone I know survived!” I told him. I felt anger seething within me at the thought of what had happened. Taisen’s eyes went wide at my words  but he was focused on my hands, not my lips. From my left hand, dark smoke was steaming forth.

    “I’m leaving. Make your calls and hide in your shelter. Someone should survive today.” I told him. “And tell your Empress, if you see her, to murder the hell out of whoever was responsible this.”

    Without waiting for him to reply, I spun and ran out of the door of the treatment room. I barely slowed in the reception area when I saw it covered in a grey film. Just like it had been in my vision.

    The streets outside were grey as well.

    And empty.

    I ran faster and aside from my own breathing and the slap of my shoes on the pavement, the city was silent. No hover car horns blaring. No crowds bustling. No birds screeching. Not even the wind. Just emptiness and grey everywhere.

    I crossed street after street, directionless, just running, as the enormity of what had happened sank into me.

    I was alone. Maybe in the whole city. Maybe in the whole world. Except for Taisen. I slowed to a walk and let myself catch my breath. I felt tremendously cold, but my body wasn’t shivering. I couldn’t feel my body much in fact. I felt disconnected from it. Disconnected from my whole life. In the grey, empty city, I might as well have been the one who was a ghost.

    I’d felt like this before. I didn’t know when, but I knew the sensation of being utterly alone was one I’d experienced at some point. The end of the world was a place I was familiar with. I coughed out a short, barking laugh. Maybe it was my real home? Maybe it had come to take me back?

    I could have gone crazy, but that would have been too easy. The cold that brought me back. It reminded me that I was alive. However screwed up things were, I was still breathing and I had to deal with that.

    I moved forward. The city was huge. I’d run for minutes but that didn’t cover even a small fraction of it. There was more to see. Other places that might not have been affected by the spell bombs.

    I’d recovered most of my breath during my little meltdown, so I started jogging again. The holo taxi had dropped me off miles away from anywhere that I knew but I was familiar with the major landmarks of the city. Since the bombs had left structures intact that meant I was able to navigate without much trouble.

    I considered taking one of the holocars that were in the streets. Some had plowed into buildings or each other but with the general gridlock of the evacuation none were very damaged. Unfortunately they were all spell locked to their owners. If I was a career criminal and could cast spells worth a damn I might have picked up how to break a spell lock or, even better, reset one to accept me as a legitimate user. Since neither of those were true, I had to make due with jogging past the hundreds of perfectly serviceable vehicles lining the roads.

    The jogging wasn’t bad though. Moving my legs and feeling the breath in my lungs helped. I knew Belstarius wasn’t the first world to have suffered an orbital attack like this. Other cities had been destroyed and there were almost always survivors. I wasn’t the first girl in history to be in this sort of situation and I was better off than a lot of others would have been. I hadn’t been injured in the attack and I was still benefiting from the mending spell that Taisen had cast, feeling stronger all the time.

    Then there was the issue of the Void anima.

    Assuming Taisen wasn’t insane or lying, I had some kind of protection and maybe a weapon that I could draw on. Without any training in Void magic, I knew it wasn’t something I could depend on though, but it helped me hold back the terror of thinking about another bomb dropping.

    Instead, I thought about Taisen as I ran. He didn’t seem like a nutcase, but the whole “I’m an agent of the Crystal Empress” thing had been kind of crazy. Belstarius was an unaligned border world. We weren’t on the wild frontier but we also weren’t particularly noteworthy either. Far from anywhere important, no special resources, no special history. No reason for the Crystal Empress to have any interest in us.

    Even presuming she (or her underlings) did station agents on planets like Belstarius, I couldn’t imagine how tiny the chances were that I’d run into one of them right before the city came under attack for the first time in ever.

    The safest assumption was that Taisen was delusional, but that didn’t feel right. He’d seemed sincere. Thinking about that, I felt a pang of guilt at leaving him behind. The guy was probably trying to help me, but sitting locked away in vault would have driven me completely insane. I couldn’t hide from what had happened. I had to know.

    My resolve on that was tested a couple of minutes later when I noticed the signs for one of the city’s shelters. I slowed and then stopped, uncertain of whether I had what it would take to handle the things I might find inside.

    “I’ve got to know.” I whispered thinking more about myself than the unknowns who would have been in the shelter when the bombs hit.

    I felt magic as I walked forward. I wasn’t adept at sensing anima, I was just guessing, but the strange, buzzing hum of power that sang along my skin as I drew close to the shelter couldn’t have been anything else. I knew I was approaching something dangerous, but I wasn’t afraid. Whatever was waiting in there didn’t have any claim on me. I felt untouchable as I pressed forward through the curling, invisible wisps of power that were leaking from the shelter.

    That didn’t seem like a safe mindset to have, so I forced myself to stop and take stock of the area. The shelter was below ground with the entrance sloping down about twenty feet from street level to the main gate. Slate grey, ensorcelled bricks lined the walls and road leading to the shelter. If it had been in active lockdown, they would have burned with a brilliant red light. The runes were dark though indicating that the defenses weren’t fully active and it was safe to approach the shelter. Even the iron gate, wrought with hexagrams and protective circles, was inviting since it was swung completely open.

    Just like it would have been if people were still streaming into it.

    Beyond the gate, the lights were on in the shelter but there was no movement. Knowing I wouldn’t find anything more inside the shelter than I had on the streets I walked forward. All I had to do was look inside to be sure, but I was fighting myself. Not for any special mystical or deep reason. I was just scared as hell.

    I wasn’t wrong to be either.

    Looking in to the shelter I saw that it was as empty and grey as I’d expected it to be. That gave me the courage to step over the threshold. The one that still had an active anima field going.

    The moment I breeched the shelter’s constraining field, I felt a blast of pure force hit me and a thousand screaming voices echo in my ears. The blow felt like it should have knocked me across the street and through a few buildings but instead I felt it drain through me, like I was a conduit to the earth beneath my feet.

    The voices remained longer though. So many, screaming so loudly, but I was apart from them. Their pain didn’t reach me any more than the physical blow had.

    “It’s ok.” I said aloud, speaking to the ghosts that were only in my mind from everything I could see. The screams grew softer and some of the voices grew quiet.

    “It’ll be ok.” I repeated, believing it for no good reason whatsoever.

    “I wasn’t done yet.”

    “I never got to tell him.”

    “How could this happen.”

    “We did what we were supposed to.”

    The cacophony of screams turned to pleading and requests, bargaining and denials. That made it so much worse. They wanted answers and I had none.

    I stumbled away from the shelter but the voices didn’t grow any more distant.

    I ran again for a while, hearing the echoes of people, young and old. I wasn’t running to anywhere consciously and I wasn’t running to get away from them. I just couldn’t stand still, couldn’t do nothing, while their voices rang through me. I didn’t want to find the ghosts of the people I knew. I didn’t want to hear their voices added to the chorus in my mind but that’s where some part of me was pointing my feet.

    Home was too far away though and the voices too disorienting. I collapsed on the way there and lay on the ground, listening as the voices poured out their fading memories.

    “What do you want?” I asked in a whisper.

    The voices went silent for a long moment.

    “Restore us.” a man said. He had been in his prime with a family and everything to live for.

    “I can’t. I don’t have that kind of magic.” I said.

    “Avenge us.” a woman said. She had been one of the city guards, a protector who hadn’t been able to defend those put in her charge.

    “I don’t know who did this, and I’m just one girl. I can’t fight a battleship.” I said.

    “Remember us.” a child said.

    And then they were gone.

    The last thing I needed was the hammerblow of adrenaline that hit me in the wake of the receptionist’s accusation.

    “You killed him! Why did you kill him?” the receptionist screamed, repeating himself.

    I looked at Taisen’s body, crumbled beside the table I was on, and tried to make sense of what had happened. The surge of blood through my veins fuzzed up my head for a moment, but I fought it back. I needed to think, not fight. Not that thinking helped much.

    A scowl settled on my face as the gears turned in my head. I hadn’t killed him. I couldn’t have. But he’d done something, or tried something, and it obviously hadn’t worked out well.

    I didn’t notice that I was glaring at the receptionist until I saw him go pale and dash away like a mouse. He wasn’t smart enough to figure out that I couldn’t have killed Taisen in the condition I’d been in, but he was clever enough to know that if I’d killed his boss I wouldn’t have any reason to leave him alive. I slumped on the table and listened to him go, the outside door slamming as he fled the clinic. Even with the healing Taisen’s spell had given me, I didn’t feel up to chasing the receptionist down and explaining what had happened. Instead I got off the table and bent down to check out how the healer was doing.

    In my expert medical opinion, the verdict was “pretty damn bad”. He wasn’t moving and his arms were burnt and ugly, but he was still breathing from what I could see. That last bit was a good sign. I looked around the room for anything that might help wake him up but I was no cleric. Even with their labels still on them, there were way too many jars and bottles for me to have a chance of figuring out which ones might contain something useful.

    I briefly considered trying the spell that he taught me. If I could separate my physical anima from the darkness in me, I might be able to lend some to him and make him feel better. At a very coarse level that was what healers did, at least as far as I knew.

    It took maybe a half second at most for me to discard the idea. I’d never cast a meaningful spell before and healing spells were some of the most difficult to work with. There was even a decent chance that whatever I’d done when I tried to cast the spell the last time was responsible for Taisen being in condition he was in.

    Instead I settled for slapping him, lightly, on the cheeks and saying “hey, wake up!” a lot. That worked about as well as you might expect.

    “Where I am supposed to take you? We’re already at a clinic!” I grumbled.

    On the off chance that the table had some kind of passive healing magics built into it, I picked the fallen healer up and laid him him on it. He grunted in pain as I touched his burnt arms but didn’t rouse any further.

    “We can’t stay here. Your desk boy babbled something about the city being under attack.” I said. He wasn’t awake enough to hear me but I was talking for my own benefit so that didn’t matter much.

    It didn’t seem surprising that we were under attack, I’d been expecting it since I heard the news report about the warp portal forming. It didn’t seem surprising, but it did feel unreal. Like it was something I’d been dreaming about for a long time. I would have pinched myself to make sure I was awake but the aches and pains that I still had made it impossible to deny that everything around me was real. I shook my head to clear the deja-vu-like feeling that had gripped my thoughts. I didn’t have time to lose myself in a daydream, however compelling it might feel.

    “You’ve got to have contacts right? Other clerics you keep in touch with?” I asked the unconscious Taisen.

    He’d said he run the clinic by himself but the guy must have needed a day off once in a while. If I could call one of his cleric friends they might be able to come over and get Taisen on his feet again. I headed out to the receptionists desk to look for any emergency numbers they had on file. It seemed like a long shot, given the impending attack, but if there was one sort of person it would be worth sending a cleric to make a house call on, it would be another cleric. Even if the planetary defense grid held there’d still be a need for Taisen’s services to treat the people who were invariably trampled in the rush to get into the shelters.

   It was factoring in the defense grid that made me think we had enough time for someone to come and get Taisen back on his feet. After centuries of galactic warfare, only frontier worlds were set up without a fortress-like defense system to protect them from orbital bombardment or worse from potential enemies. Belstarius wasn’t rich, but as an unaligned world we were on our own when it came to defense so we’d invested in some decent enchantments from what I’d read.

    They weren’t going to be enough.

    I didn’t know how I knew it, but I was certain they weren’t going to save us.

    I found the list of emergency contacts on a pad In the waiting room. As I dialed the holocomm for the first cleric on the list, I looked out the front window and saw the crowds in the street. The alarms had been raised. People weren’t being encouraged to go to the shelters anymore; they were being required to.

    I dithered when the holo didn’t connect to the first cleric. I knew I should be in the crowd that I saw, moving to the shelters. I also knew that if I left Taisen laying on the table in the treatment room I’d be leaving him to die.

    “Damn.”

    I have a pretty strong self-preservation instinct, but the thought of abandoning someone who was in bad shape because of me made me feel sick. I tried the next cleric on the list, but the holocomm said they weren’t available either.  I punched up the next three with the same result. Probably because they were heading to the shelters or the emergency care wards. Just like Taisen should be.

    “Maybe I can carry him there.” I said to no one but myself.

    I’d lifted him on to the table, so I knew I could hoist him up. It was one of the advantages of the martial training I’d done. That plus being on the tall side for a human girl, had given me more strength than people assumed I had. I had stamina too, since my teacher was an absolute nightmare about the training regime I had to keep up. If I hadn’t been beat half to death, I wouldn’t have had a problem with throwing a lightweight like Taisen on my back and hauling him to the next nearest clinic. The idea of trying to carry him through the crowds that were on the street, while I was feeling only half recovered, was not an appealing one though.

    Giving up on the holocomm, I stomped back into the room to consider what other options I had.

    “I can’t leave you here.” I told him. “But we can’t stay either.”

    I felt a shiver pass through me. It started in my chest and ran down my left side to the tips of my fingers.

    “Something’s coming. The city…” I trailed off.

    The city was going to die. I saw it, like a hallucination, or a dream, but more solid and clear. I saw the clinic, grey and empty. I saw the streets outside, steel grey dust covering them as well. Even the shelters.  Empty and grey.

    A frosty anger yanked me out of the vision and back into the clinic. I stumbled and caught myself on the edge of the table feeling light headed for a moment.

    “I can’t go crazy.” I ordered myself. I’d never had a vision before, I didn’t have the Aethereal anima needed for them. Very few people did. So what I’d seen couldn’t have been a real glimpse of the future. What it could have been, what it most likely was, was a sign that I was losing it. Between the head trauma and having a really rotten day, some people might even have found that reasonable. I wasn’t one of them. I couldn’t afford to be crazy, and some part of me knew that I wasn’t.

    It occurred to me that might be the crazy part speaking but, one way or the other, I had real things I needed to focus on.

    “Need to call this in.” Taisen muttered.

    I spun to look at him and saw that he was starting to stir, but he was only half conscious still.

    “Call who? I tried calling your emergency contacts but none of them are answering.” I said, hoping he was awake enough to hear me.

    “Not them.” he said, forcing the words out through the haze of fatigue that held him down.

    “Who, just tell me who to call!” I demanded.

    “You can’t.” he said, his words slow and slurring as he dragged himself back to consciousness. “Give me a moment.”

    I didn’t have any healing skills, but I knew what it was like to get knocked out, so I went and grabbed him a cup of water. Juice would be have been better, but I had to work with what was available. By the time I got back it, Taisen was sitting on the bed and cradling his arms over his lap.

    “Here.” I said and passed him the cup of water.

    “Thank you.” he replied, and then poured the water over his arms. Instead of falling to the ground though it clung to his burns and began to glow with a pale light. He shuddered and slumped forward but I managed to catch him by the shoulder before he tumbled off the table.

    “Wow. I haven’t felt like this since my first year in school.” he said, his expression pained and his face almost as pale as the light on his arms.

    “What happened?” I asked.

    “Anima drain. How are you feeling?”

    I’d heard of anima drain. It was what happened when someone cast spells that drew out too much of their personal magic. If the vids I watched were to be believed, it could have a wide range of effects, from a headache at the low end to death or even disintegration at the worst extreme.

    “Better. Or better than I was. What did you do?”

    “Believe it or not, I just tried to a simple mending spell on you.” Taisen said. He was focusing on his arms, which I noticed were looking much better than they had been.

    “And that damn near killed you?”

    “No. You did.” he said. I jerked back at that and he pitched forward without my support. I was able to catch him before he fell, I didn’t want to hurt the poor guy any further, but I was still stunned.

    “Don’t worry. It wasn’t your fault. I’ve studied this. I just didn’t think I was ever going to run into it myself. Especially without any warning.” he explained as I helped him get back onto the table.

    “What’s ‘this’. What did I do to you?” I asked. I knew I hadn’t done exactly as he’d instructed, but I’d never thought it could kill him. I felt a flash of anger go through me. If what he was doing was that dangerous the jerk should have warned me.

    “It’s not something you did, it’s something you are. Or maybe something you have. Ugh. I’m not doing any good here. Let me ask a question instead. How many anima types have you been tested for?”

    “All four. Physical, Mental, Energetic and Aethereal. Zeroes across the board.” I said.

    “Four. Right. So you were never tested for all the animas then.” Taisen said, and laughed. It was a short chuckle but it made me want to hit him all the same.

    “What else is there?” I demanded instead.

    “Nothing. By which I mean, the anima of emptiness. I know that doesn’t make sense. Bear with me for a minute.” he said and shifted around on the table. The glow faded from the water on his arms and he directed the liquid back into the cup. The burns had faded to where his hands and arms looked like he had a mild sunburn.

    “Ok, analogies don’t work well here, and I haven’t studied this in depth, so take this all with a grain of salt. The simple version is, the anima in us is tied to various aspects of who we are. Big guys have a lot of physical anima and so on, like we talked about.” he explained.

    “So this Nothing anima is tied to something we’re missing then?” I asked, trying to guess where this was going. I should have been more surprised at the idea, but I could still feel the darkness that I’d gathered into my left hand.

    “Yeah, that’s a good way to look at it.”

    “Great. And healing me nearly killed you.” I stepped away from him. I knew I wasn’t hurting him by holding him up but I felt unclean somehow. Like this thing in me could lash out and kill him at any moment.

    “I was unfair before. I’m sorry about that. It’d be better to say that I hurt myself by being careless. When I tried to cast the mending spell on you, I didn’t hold back on my anima at all. I’m used to encountering resistance and with you there was none.” he said.

    “Resistance?” I asked.

    “Yes. People resist spells, even healing spells. Even when they’re injured, most people’s bodies won’t accept foreign anima easily. One way around that, is to put more energy into the spell than it needs. It makes for a faster treatment regime at the cost of caster spending more of the anima on each spell. I’m lucky, I replenish my anima quickly, and with the clinic being as busy as it is I’ve gotten into the habit of treating my patients as quickly as I can.”

    “And since I have basically no anima, there was no resistance and you dumped too much into me?” I asked.

    “Not at all. You have quite a bit of anima from what I could tell. The problem in this case was that what I touched on was the Void anima.”

    “Let me guess, that’s like opening a water bottle in space.” I said.

    “Exactly. I’d only planned to feed you a small amount of anima but when I touched the Void anima in you I wasn’t holding back at all and it pulled all my power out through my hands.”

    “And that’s what burned you?” I said.

    “Yes. So, you can see how it’s my own fault. If I’d been casting the spell properly I wouldn’t have been in any danger.”

    I’d had a lot of people lie to me over the years, with the Sisters being the masters of the lies meant to spare my feelings. I probably didn’t need it from a guy I’d almost killed, but a part of me wasn’t sure of that. The idea that there was something dark and evil inside me was almost worse than the beating I’d taken.

    “I don’t think I should try any magical healing again.” I said.

    “That’s ok. You should be fine for now. I need to call this in though. I know this is unusual but I’d like to ask you to stay here while I do. I think I’ll be able to offer you the help you need if you do.” Taisen said.

    I wondered what kind of help I needed that he could offer. He had to have more important things to work on than a street rat like me. Then I remembered that we both had something more important to worry about.

    “No! We can’t stay here. We have to get to the shelters!” I told him.

    “The shelters? Why?”

    “The city is under attack, or its going to be.” I said and started pulling him towards to the door to the treatment room.

    “Wait, attack? When did this happen? How long was I out?”

    “Five or ten minutes. A new warp portal formed, big enough for a warship to get through. They’ve been evacuating people to the shelters for the last half hour or so.” I told him.

    “Why didn’t Daske tell me?” Taisen asked and then yelled for his receptionist.

    “He took off already. He came in right after you collapsed. Thought I’d killed you.” I said.

    “That idiot.”

    “You’ll have to chew him out later. We have to get to a shelter. I think this is going to be bad.” I said.

    “No, he’s an idiot because we have a shelter here.” Taisen said.

    “You do? But there’s no signs for it.”

    “It’s limited use.” Taisen said.

    “Oh, do all clinics have it for their clerics?”

    “Not exactly.”

    He lead me to the other side of the room and placed his palm on the light switch for several seconds. A series of glowing glyphs appeared in a circle around the light switch and he tapped them in a sequence that was clearly a password. When he hit the last number a section of the floor beside me moved to reveal a ladder leading down a room below.

    “I’m not just a random cleric.” Taisen said. “I’m also an agent of the Crystal Empress. I have access to resources that can help you.”

    I pulled away from him. I couldn’t tell if he was crazy, or I was, or everything was, but going down into an enclosed room with a guy I’d just met did not seem like a great idea to me. I’d done my part. He was awake and could look after himself. I didn’t need to buy into anything else he was selling. Not when it was way outside anything I was supposed to be involved in.

    I’d just turned to go when the spell bomb went off that killed the city.

    I’ve never liked visits to the clerics and, since the good Sisters of Water’s Grace have never been particularly well funded, I haven’t had to deal with visits to clinics too often. As a result, I wasn’t used to the the idea that no matter what sort of shape you were in, there was paperwork you had to do before they’d agree to take your money and patch you up.

    “Fill this out please.” the receptionist said as he passed me a document on a clipboard.

    It looked like a standard form, though the blood seal on the bottom made me a little wary. Those were only used on legal contracts from what I’d heard. There wasn’t any fine print on the form that I could see,not through my swollen eyes at any rate, but I suspected that putting down any false information would be a bad idea.

    Under “Name”, I put down “Mel Watersward”. It was my real name as far as I knew. As an orphan though it was possible I’d been born under a different name. Either way I didn’t think the blood seal would mind that bit of potential inaccuracy.

    For the rest of the details, I gave out the information for the orphanage. I was lucky in a sense. I’d turned seventeen a month ago, so I didn’t need to have a guardian sign off the paperwork but I wasn’t out on the street yet either. Instead I pressed my thumb to the blood seal and felt it draw out a drop of my blood. More details appeared on the form, including my ethnicity (human, mixed worlds), my age, allergies and current anima levels.

    “Here. How long is this going to take?” I asked as I passed the form back to the receptionist.

    “I’ll let you know when we’re ready. If you could take a seat.” he said. I glared at him. I was not in good shape. The number and variety of things that were wrong inside me were sufficient that I couldn’t keep track of them and from the way my thoughts were going occasionally spacey I was pretty sure something unpleasant was going on in my head. Given the beating I’d taken, I knew that had to be clearly visible in the condition of my face, but this guy was as unhurried as if I’d walked in with a stubbed toe.

    “How long is it going to take.” I repeated through gritted teeth. There was no one else in the waiting room. It seemed absurd that they couldn’t take me in and make with the healing spells immediately.

    “I will let you know when we are ready.” he said, irritation rising in his voice.

    The thought of smashing his face into the desk until he looked worse than I did was a seriously tempting one. The only problem with it was that the cleric would probably heal him first which would just delay things for me even longer.

    I suppressed my pain-fueled anger and stalked back over to the flimsy waiting room chairs. On the holodisplay the news casters were still rambling on about the warp portal that had appeared. They had zero new information to share so they’d dredged up a panel of “experts” to blather about what this “shocking development” might mean.

    For fun, I mentally edited everything they were saying to be about a giant zit on the planetary governor’s forehead.

    “It goes without saying that we’ve never seen anything like this, and that means there’s cause for concern.” one of the experts said.

    “Clearly, clearly I agree.” another one stammered and then added, “but you have to admit this also represents a unique opportunity. We’d be fools not to study this.”

    “It’s true, this could be the biggest event of the decade!” a third expert interjected.

    Smiling hurt but it was worth it. The alternative was dwelling on how bad I felt and that wasn’t going to lead anywhere good. Despite my attempt to distract myself though, the icy feeling in my chest wasn’t going away. Every time I thought about the warp portal I felt sure that whatever came through it was going to be a lot worse than anyone was expecting.

    Below the babbling experts, a ticker tape ran on the holodisplay listing off the few facts the channel had collected. The portal wasn’t a large one. It’s mass distortion profile suggested it could transport a battleship but not an entire fleet.  It had been detected an hour ago and was located about a twentieth of a light second off the starward side of Belstarius, our planet.

    Since it was outside our atmosphere, it could be stable over interstellar distances. Since it was in near orbit, it would be perfect to launch an assault from. Neither of those thoughts made me feel particularly comfortable.

    “The cleric will see you now.” the receptionist said.

    I got up and felt dozen arcs of pain shoot through various parts of my body. I grimaced and forced myself to step towards the doorway that the receptionist indicated. As I approached it, I saw a father holding a baby wrapped in multiple blankets exiting the treatment area.

    “Be sure to give her the syrup before she goes down for the night for the next two weeks, and I’ll see you again in a month.” the cleric was saying as the man left the room.

    Seeing that they’d actually had a patient, I was glad I hadn’t put the receptionist’s face into the desk, but I still wasn’t thrilled with his attitude.

    “So let me guess what you’re here for, sore throat?” the cleric joked as he escorted me into the treatment room. He was younger than I would have guessed, maybe in his early twenties. About my height, which put his at the normal height for a guy his age, unlike Davos and Maraz who were both on the gigantic side of the scale, as thugs tend to be.

    “Yeah, it kind of hurts when I smile.” I told him flatly.

    “I see. Well if you can get ready, I’ll get your file. I’m Healer Taisen by the way.” he said.

    “Mel.” I told him, offering my name since he’d given his.

    “Ok Mel. If you’ll lie down on the table in the circle over there and get as relaxed as you can, we’ll get started just as soon as I review your forms.” Taisen said and stepped out of the room.

    The room was a simple affair. The treatment table was the central piece of it. It was covered in a fresh white cloth and looked padded enough to be reasonably tolerable to lay on even in my current condition. Around the table was inscribed a circle to help channel the cleric’s spell casting. It was etched into the floor and set with a reflective metal, probably chromed steel since I doubted the clinic had the resources for ensorcelled silver or similar high quality materials.

    Around the edges of the room were counters and cabinets that looked to hold various elixirs and sampling kits. I noticed from the labels that the bottles were mostly over-the-counter medicines, probably enchanted to greater potency by the cleric himself. In a way, that felt comforting. The few times I’d been to a cleric’s on my own, I’d had to go to one of the “back alley temples” that only lived up to half that description. The quacks who ran them usually had some skill but for anything more than simple, straightforward injuries you were taking a serious risk of them making things worse rather than better.

    “Admiring our supplies?” Taisen asked as he returned.

    “Just trying to figure out how to get up onto the table.” I told him. Twisting and bending did not seem like comfortable things to be doing at the moment.

    “Here, try this.” he said and placed a small stool in front of the table. Guessing that he’d dealt with people in my shape or worse before, I stepped up onto it, turned and sat gently onto the table. Bending over to remove my boots wasn’t pleasant but I managed it while Taisen read the form.

    When he looked back to me, his mouth was crooked in puzzlement.

    “Odd anima levels you have here. Can you tell me what happened?” he asked.

    “I’m not sure.” I said “Are you bound by doctor/patient confidentiality?”

    “Yes, under my license as a practicing cleric, I am not permitted to disclose anything you tell me to the planetary law enforcement personnel.” he said. He was picking his words carefully, which tripped a red flag for me, but my head was battered enough that I couldn’t think of what he wasn’t saying.

    “A guy was trying to grab one of the kids from the place I’m at. I knocked him out but two of his friends took exception that.” I said.

    “Lay down, I have more questions, but I want to make sure you’re stabilized first.” Taisen said. He walked around to the head of the table once I’d made myself “comfortable”. I felt him place the index and middle fingers of each hand on the sides of my head. He chanted something in Old Galactic, probably the centering words for a healing spell, and I felt a buzz of anima go through me. It felt great for a moment but the relief was short lived. It seemed to drain away as fast as it came in.

    Taisen cut off his chant mid-word and stepped back away from the table.

    “Well now that was unusual.” he said. I craned my neck and saw him rubbing his hands together as though they were frozen.

    “Tell me more about what they did to you.” he said as he started tracing a luminous sigil in the air.

    “Nothing too special. One of them grabbed me so I broke his arm and knee. I think I might have given him a skull fracture too but I didn’t have a chance to check. I was going to make sure of it but his friend caught me before I could. That’s the one who did most of this damage. He slammed me around a few times and mashed my face in a few times more.” I explained. Looking back on it, it wasn’t one of my better fights. One more punch probably would have done me in.

    “That explains the physical trauma I suppose. Oh and thank you for not saying you ‘fell down some stairs’ or were ‘hit by a hover’. Even if you’re lying, I appreciate the effort at coming up with a unique one.” Taisen said.

    “I’m not lying. I know it sounds stupid, but these guys were idiots. The first one didn’t put up any anima shield at all and the other one dropped it right after he punched my face in.” I said.

    “Wait, are you saying you fought someone with enough training and anima to manifest a visible shield? No, two people like that and you managed to beat them?” he asked.

    “Yeah, they’re goons though. I just got lucky and surprised them.” I said.

    “I imagine you did. Tell me, have you been tested for your anima capacity?”

    “Yeah, I flunked in all four categories.” I told him.

    “It’s not a test you can flunk, but I gather you tested very low for physical anima?”

    “Bottom fifth percentile for all of them.” I wasn’t proud of it, but there wasn’t anything I could do about it. Sure, I could practice and improve but you needed to be in the 60th percentile or higher in at least one of the four categories to be employable for any magical work and getting there from where I was didn’t seem practical at all.”

    “You’ll pardon my saying this, but that’s ridiculous.” Taisen said.

    “Excuse me?”

    “Your current condition aside, you’re obviously very fit. Add to that the fact that you’re not whining and sobbing for a pain relief spell and I’d say you’ve got more willpower than any two or three of my other patients combined.” he said.

    “So what?”

    “Magical aptitude isn’t directly linked to our physical, mental, emotional or psychological states. I’m sure you’ve been taught this. It’s entirely possible for someone who’s very small and very weak to have a tremendous amount of physical anima.” he said.

    “Yeah, so I’m the reverse.”

    “That’s the thing. There’s not a direct link but there is what we call inherent capacity.” Taisen said.

    “Meaning a big strong guy is going to have a decent amount of physical anima just from being big and strong?” I asked. I’d noticed that was true for thugs like Davos and Maraz, but I’d assumed that was selection bias. Meaning it was only guys who were big, strong and had a lot of magical juice who’d make a career of being thugs.

    “Most of the time. Exceptions exist when the person has been damaged or is naturally unbalanced.”

    “Unbalanced?” The Sisters had never gone too deeply into magical theory with us since almost none of us tested at exceptional levels. Those few who did were sent to special teachers or wound up getting adopted before the Sisters had to worry about their education.

    “Yes, magically speaking. Take me for example. The coursework to become a licensed cleric is grueling. Biology, anatomy, organic divination. You don’t get through the classes without having a pretty respectable brain. For a normal person that would mean that their mental anima would be above average. Mine however is in the same range as yours.”

    “So even though you’re smart you can’t work mental magics to save your life?” I asked.

    “I like to think of it as, I’m smart, I can’t work mental magics, and that can save your life. See the aptitude I should possess for mental magics is instead expressed as physical anima. I’m not a big hulking guy, but I’ve got enough magic to run this clinic by myself. A lot of healers are unbalanced that way.”

    “So what does that have to do with me?” I asked.

    “Well, from what I can see you should have a significant amount of physical anima and energetic anima, based on your fitness and you’re emotional control. From talking with you, I’d be shocked if you were below average in terms of mental anima too and yet your readings indicate you’re almost entirely lacking in magical aptitude. That doesn’t fit.” he explained.

    “Maybe I’m cursed?” I suggested.

    “Nope. That was the first thing I checked for. Add to that the fact that I am seeing very odd spikes of anima in you, and what happened when I tried to apply a simple pain relief spell.” he said.

    “I saw you jerk your hands away.” I said.

    “Can you tell me how it felt?” he asked.

    “The spell? It felt good for moment but then it kind of drained away.” I explained.

    “Interesting.” Taisen said. He was staring at me through one of the flowing sigils that he’d traced. There were close to two dozen floating in the air around the table and he moved from one to the other, observing and adjusting them as he went.

    “Are you going to be able to fix me up?” I asked.

    “I don’t know. You’re a puzzle.” he said.

    “Maybe I should go someplace else then.” I said and tried to get up off the bed. That was a bad idea. WIth the state I was in, the bed wasn’t exactly comfortable but moving was infinitely worse.

    “No, I don’t think you’re in the shape for that. If I can’t help you, we’ll call a medicar for you and I’ll take you to the hospital myself.” Taisen said.

    “Wait, how bad is this?” I asked.

    “Bad enough.” he said.

    “I need more details than that.” I told him.

    He pushed aside the sigil he was looking through and eyed me critically.

    “From what I can see of your internal injuries, you’ve suffered sufficient trauma that your system should be going into circulatory shock. That’s a fatal condition. You are not exhibiting the symptoms of circulatory shock however, which suggests that you possess sufficient physical anima for your body to self-correct and return to homeostasis. That would normally indicate a treatment plan of light mending spells and rest if your lifestyle allows it. However, your observed anima levels do not support the diagnosis that you are regenerating your injuries.” he said.

    “So I should be dead but I’m not?” I said.

    “No. You should be healthy but you’re not. Something is suppressing your natural capacity.” he explained, “Add to that the fact that your body absorbed or dispelled the effect of a pain relief spell whose minimum duration should have been an hour and that applying the spell to you caused severity one frost burns to my hands.”

    “What does that mean?” I asked.

    “That’s what we’re going to find out.” Taisen said. “I need you to work with me on this.”

    “How?” I asked. The mention of frost burns scared me. I could still feel the cold mass in my chest but, up until Taisen had mentioned freezing his fingers, I’d assumed it was just an effect of my body being messed up. I hadn’t thought I was literally freezing from the inside out.

    “I imagine you haven’t had much training in magic. I need you to cast a very basic spell for me though. I’ll monitor your physical anima while you do it and that should help me identify where your energy is going.” he explained.

    “How can I do that?”

    “The spell I’m going to have you cast is a rest spell. It’s not even a full sleep spell. It’s one of the first medicinal spells that’s taught. It puts the body into a state that’s conducive to falling asleep if no other factors are present. With your injuries, I don’t expect you’ll be able to fall asleep, but it may distance you from the pain somewhat.”

    “Ok. How do I cast it?” I asked.

    “I want you to place your right hand over your heart.” he said.

    I lay my hand on my chest expecting it to burn with cold. I was relieved to find that from the outside at least I felt as warm as usual.

    “Ok, close your eyes. I want you to focus on your right hand. Picture it holding a small ball of light. The light is your physical anima. Feel the warmth of your hand, that’s your pathway to your anima. Don’t worry about finding the magic though. Just feel the warmth and imagine it spreading through your body, starting at your heart and sending waves of relaxation out with each beat.”

    “It’s hard to relax with my ribs feeling like this.” I told him.

    “I know. Don’t worry about getting the spell right. All I need you to do is try.” Taisen replied.

    I closed my eyes and focused like he’d told me to. It felt a little strange to think of my right hand holding my magical life force. My left hand, the dominant one, kind of wanted in on the action. Since I was pretty sure that would mess up Taisen’s readings, I shook off that thought and let my focus drift into my body the way I did when I was practicing my martial forms.

    It wasn’t my right and left hand that I thought about. It was active and passive. It was weighted and free. On my active side, I pictured my anima, light, joyful, healthy, powerful. Memories of shattering boards and speeding through katas faster than my mind could follow wrapped around that image of my anima. Me, when I was active and alive. That’s what I held in my right hand.

    Over it all though I felt a huge darkness. The weight of the cosmos against the freedom of my anima. On its own, the cosmos would have swallowed up my anima, but an idea occurred to me. In fighting, I’d learned to move my weight from one foot to the other, freeing me to move without fighting myself. I tried something similar with my hands. In my right hand I wanted to hold my physical anima, that meant I needed to shift the darkness within me to my left hand.

    I pictured my left hand draining out and becoming empty. I felt it sink down against the table, heavy and cold. The anima in my right hand sparked and flickered to life. I felt my chest warm and relax under my hand.

    From my left hand though I felt almost a growling sensation. The darkness I was holding there craved the light of the anima. I pushed harder to keep them apart.

     I felt Taisen put his hands on my head and I willed the darkness in my left hand into an imagined sphere. I tried to draw in as much of it as I could from the rest of my body but there was just too much there.

    For a moment, I think, my heart stopped entirely. Then I felt a flood of energy pass through me. My eyes shot open but I couldn’t see anything except a brilliant light until I forced a breath in past my lips. That took more effort I’d ever expended on anything but it was worth it.

    I felt alive and I felt better. Not great, but like I was mending at last. I sat up on the table and looked around for Taisen, congratulations and a smile on my lips.

    That’s when the receptionist came running into the room. He hadn’t gotten halfway through the door before he started screaming.

    “We’re under attack! From the portal! They’re sending ships!” he blurted out.

    Then we both noticed Taisen, collapsed at the head of the table. His hands and arms were badly burned and he wasn’t moving.

    “You…you killed him!” the receptionist gasped.