Except, I wasn’t willing to die. Not here, not now. And the ritual couldn’t make me. It begged, it grabbed, it screamed in rage to become a god, but I didn’t allow it. The Matriarch had a specific portion of her bloodline, a counterpoint to my spark, which would allow her to take it. This ritual had no such thing. And I was in command of my own spirit.

  The function of my bloodline, torn out by the spell, demanded to give divinity to someone, something. It tried to ignite the spell, but I didn’t let my bloodline, my life, my ether pool, and all that I was to escape. I held it firm, and so the sparking tried to ignite me, to kill me to turn me into a god. In a way, that was like breaking a perpetual core to become a nascent immortal. But I didn’t have the power for godhood. I didn’t have the raw strength of soul to become an entire realm of Etherius, all by myself. Hells, even with all of my friends and I working together, we were only a match for someone on the level of the weakest of immortals.

  My body was starting to get warm, so I reached for the connection that Effervesce had formed to channel power through me. It wasn’t connected to him anymore, nor any god that I was aware of. It was just a void within my spirit. But it was still my spirit. The torn off shred of my bloodline flowed into the void, and a spark of crimson and gold light bloomed. The spark began to expand until it was the size of a cherry pit, and then it slowly began to sink down into my bloodline again. It merged back into my bloodline, changed in a way that I didn’t understand, and through that change, my bloodline had also been changed. The red flames that burnt over the coals of power were streaked with gold and blue. It still didn’t seem to be helping me, but nor was it harming me. I had no idea what was happening, but that was a question for another time. Right now…

  I turned my full attention back to the ritual, and slammed my staff into the ground, drawing on the raw emotions of the magic, even as my spirit was being shredded and stuck back together. I extended my finger to Yushin, and felt her fears. I felt her worry that she was about to be betrayed by the very deity she’d spent her life serving. The betrayal she felt at the very idea, the war between the trust in her friends and her own two eyes and the faith she had in her family, in her own mother. The desire for all of this to be over. The uncertainty over who she even was anymore. The feelings of power she hadn’t earned coursing through her spirit, the chi of her peak energy drawing cultivation borne from being stuffed with priceless sources of chi, rather than slowly cultivating and integrating it. She had changed, in body and spirit, and didn’t even know who she was, other than the daughter of the Traitor Wyrm.

  It made potent fuel for the curse. More and more runes blazed to life, even as the edges of my pool were torn off and fused back together.

  Shé Rui’s emotions flowed in next. He had defined himself with loyalty to his family from a young age. It had become the very foundation of his dao. It was how he’d been able to wield so much power against Gerhard, who had objectively been a stronger opponent. To him, all things were in service to family. And now his family was tearing itself apart. His sister might be killing his niece, her own daughter, for the god that all of them served. His understanding of family was damaged, so much that he wasn’t able to continue compressing his core and building new layers. I thought the cultivation term was something like a heart demon, but I wasn’t sure.

  While I felt pity for the pain he felt, it too made good fuel for the fire of a curse. The broken understanding of family was exactly the kind of emotion needed.

  I reached for Salem, but his mind was blank of everything but his small portion of the ritual. He was allowing me to use his mind to maintain Jadis’ remodel. It was an incredible amount of trust, and I hadn’t even realized how much. I moved on to Martha Shé.

  She was confused and afraid. She loved Rui deeply, but she’d only ever wanted to make her life as a warder. With some shock, I realized that I was stronger than she was. She’d graduated, that was true, and she had denser ether, but she’d done less work on magic than I had. She was decent, but in way over her head. I was too, but she’d never signed up for this. It had only begun a few years ago, when Yushin had been sent to leave the Divine King’s court. Her fear, her confusion, and even the faint sense of betrayal from Rui and Yushin went into the spell, burning up as more fuel.

  Finally, I focused on Jackson. He was standing steadily within the currents of magic, divine sparks flowing from his hand into the berries and soil at his feet. He was pouring faith into the ritual, and Effervesce was using that fatih to work miracles. It might have just been my imagination, but for a second, I thought I heard the voice of the old god. If he did speak, I thought it might have been two words.

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  “Almost there.”

  Jackson was worried. He was afraid for Yushin, someone with whom he had something that I’d have called love. The relationship the two of them had built was complex, different from what I would want, and different from the casual satisfaction that Salem and I had, but just because it was different didn’t mean there wasn't still love. I took his fear and poured it into the spell.

  Finally, as if peering into a mirror, I looked into myself for emotions to fuel the curse. What I found was desperation. Since starting the spell, I’d nearly died twice. They’d been handled, but both of them had repercussions. I needed this curse to work. If it failed, then all of this would be for nothing. But if it didn’t even finish, then it would be worse than that. I would have consigned her to death without even trying, destroyed their family bonds, and drained what resources Rui and Martha had put into this spell.

  I funneled my desperation into the spell and lifted my staff. Across the circle of spellcraft, the components that hadn’t dissolved broke apart, transforming into motes of blue magic. Even the dust from the already consumed components began to glow blue, swirling like a tornado in the air above me, and I was in control of all of it. It was immense. I’d been able to smell the power Gerhard had in his base form, and the magic that the diseased dog had once possessed, but both of them paled in comparison to the sheer ether coursing through the tornado of curse magic. This was more like the power the Dreki Matriarch had held, or the impossibly powerful spells that the Erudite had thrown against her in the battle. The last component vanished, and the vortex of ether began to descend, ready to unleash on a target of my choosing.

  I swept my staff down, pointing it at Yushin’s core.

  “Seal,” I commanded, my voice thundering in a language that I didn’t know, but that I somehow was speaking in nevertheless. The full force of ether slammed into her, and in an instant, her dantien was surrounded by a sparkling shell of blue, red, and gold magic. It hung there, humming contentedly, ready to lash out at the Traitor Wyrm if he so much as dared to move against Yushin’s personhood.

  Then, all at once, it was over. I collapsed into the dirt, barely able to move. Salem was better, slumping to his knees and rubbing his temples. Jackson, Rui, Martha, and Yushin all looked haggard and weary, like they’d gone days without rest, but they’d been in purely supporting roles. I had taken the full brunt of the spell’s magic, while Salem had taken on a share of it when taking some of my focus. For a moment, I was surprised that Yushin seemed so unaffected, before it clicked. She had been the target of the spell, but she had only been a supporting caster. It was like when the Erudite cast a spell on us – he was the one who was using his ether and his spirit, we were just caught with the effect.

  I blinked as fuzzy black dots began appearing in my vision, and Jackson rushed over, hand clasping onto my shoulder.

  “Are you alright? Can you stand?”

  “M’fine,” I said. “Can… Can I see?”

  Jackson muttered, then pointed at someone who was covered by the black dots. The world seemed to pulse a few times, and then I came to with the face of the elderly priestess hovering above me.

  “Welcome back, child,” she said, gently wiping my forehead with a damp cloth.

  “Yushin,” I said, sitting up. “Did it work? Where is–”

  My questions cut off as I saw Salem, Jackson, Shé Rui, Yushin, and Martha all in the room with us.

  “It has only been a few minutes,” Yushin said. “Are you alright? We gave us several hours to recover, but…”

  I closed my eyes and tried to take a mental inventory of myself. My body felt better than it had been when I’d passed out, but my spirit… it still felt raw. The re-integration of soul scraps used in Jadis’ remodel was the only reason I wasn’t dead from the spiritual sandblasting that my ether pool had taken, but it wasn’t a lossless technique. Nothing was. I wasn’t confident in even touching the few droplets of ether welling up within my pool. Not only that, but my fire felt damaged in a different way. Tearing out, activating, and then re-integrating the sacrificial ascension function had done something, and while it didn’t feel actively harmful, my fire also felt severely damaged.

  “His body is healed, but his spirit is beyond my ability to help,” the priestess said. “I can recommend some spirit healers I know of, back in the capital or in the Citadel.”

  “How long will they take?” Salem asked.

  “Weeks, maybe even months. It is a good thing you are young, else it would be a matter of years, if it could even be healed. More likely, the damage would be permanent.”

  “That’s not fast enough,” I said. “The dark sects will attack tonight. I need to help fight them. I won’t stand by and do nothing.”

  The old priestess frowned and shook her head.

  “I’m sorry, my boy, but using more than a spell or two a day with your current condition is… well, let us just say that you would risk making this damage permanent. You absolutely must rest.”

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