Book 2: Chapter 56: Revelation

  The gates of Terraxum rose out of the night like the jaws of some great beast. The city beyond them was not the one they remembered. It was quieter, sharper, every shadow stretched long and accusing beneath the torchlight.

  The squad entered under the watch of grim-faced guards, the kind who didn’t bother to hide their suspicions. Armor clinked softly as they passed, but no words were exchanged. The streets were nearly empty, save for the occasional flicker of movement as shutters slammed closed or curtains twitched aside. A curfew this strict didn’t need to be announced. You could feel it in the air.

  Whispers traveled faster than footsteps. Even with the streets deserted, the city spoke in hushed tones that rode the wind:

  “The envoy was a trap.”

  “The attack used something… unnatural.”

  “It wasn’t a spell. It was something else.”

  The words curled into the squad’s ears like the buzz of gnats, impossible to ignore. Garret glanced around nervously, muttering, “Friendly welcome, huh?”

  Alex stayed close to the rear, hands shoved deep into his pockets, eyes darting between dark alleys and glowing windows. A heavily cloaked figure suddenly appeared beside him, as quiet as the rumors themselves. He started to enter a combat stance, but stopped himself once he realized the person wasn’t attacking them.

  Her cloak was drawn tight, her face hidden in the shadows of the hood. When she spoke, it was in a voice low enough that only he could hear.

  “I’ve been listening,” she said. “The Arcanist networks are on fire with talk of what happened at the envoy. They say the explosion wasn’t magical at all, at least, not the kind anyone knows. They’re whispering about power that eats spells, power that doesn’t belong to this world. And worse–” Her head flicked to the side, scanning for eavesdroppers. “–they say the Prince was at the center of it. That he… became something.”

  His mouth was dry, his stomach sinking with every word she spoke. He didn’t know who this was, he didn’t recognize her energy when he peered at her with aether sight. He damn sure didn’t know if he could trust anything she was saying. Whatever truth hid behind those rumors, it was enough to twist an entire city into fear.

  He looked back, and the woman had vanished once more. All he saw behind himself was Holly and Eric walking slowly, covering his flank. He faced forward again, pushing the thoughts aside for now. Right now, his team needed him sharp, his head on straight.

  Ahead of them all, Alex kept walking, his shoulders tense but his stride unwavering. The others followed, silent. The city whispered louder as they moved deeper in, and the whispers all said the same thing in different ways: Terraxum was not the same place they had left.

  The suite Terraxum they provided the worldstriders was just the same as they had left it. Gold filigree lined the walls, the floor polished stone that gleamed in the lamplight, even Tom-Tom greeted them as they entered. But the mood was gloom and doom, the squad sat scattered across the common area like shadows, their gear piled in corners, their voices hushed.

  The city’s whispers had followed them up the stairs, and now they all put out feelers to gather information on what had happened. Those political galas and tea-time garden events paying off for once.

  Cole shared what he’d heard from his servant contact, Allie repeated a warning from a sympathetic healer in the Church. Devon, pale and tight-lipped, explained how the merchant guilds were scrambling. Every piece of information was worse than the last, and none of it fit until Alex laid it out all at once.

  He sat at the suite’s central table, images projected over every inch of surface showing rumor, intel, speculation of their own. In one hand, he held the stolen aether-slab they had gotten in the Leyline-forge deep under the capital. The rune-light from the object spilled up over his face, sharp and cold.

  Obby’s illusion body hovered beside him, the little construct chittering in his mind as it ran through data calculations. They worked in tandem, pulling up battlefield residue reports, energy traces, and the aether patterns burned into the explosion site. All information they gathered through… less than morale channels.

  It was all too much. Too many possibilities lay before him, and the information contradicted itself in places. He didn’t know where truth began, political trust ended, or where lies and schemes took over.

  I need a break. Alex got up from the table and sat down cross legged in an empty section of the room. He closed his eyes to meditate, his aether gathering technique spiraling energy braids behind him absently. It wasn’t like he needed to cultivate, but it was more habit than anything.

  His consciousness, meanwhile, pulled back into his soulspace, the near featureless void that Alex assumed was a representation of his soul and psychi melded as one. Obby’s appeared once more, but he kept a distance, simply floating about at the edge of the space to give Alex time.

  He stayed like that for some time, just existing as he peered out over his own soul. The floating remains of his shattered core spun slowly underneath the beating organ of the [Wyrm-heart] constitution. He still had to work on the Wyvern blood for the experiment to boost the [Wyrm-heart]. But that was a task for another time.

  “You already know what happened.”

  Alex spun around when he heard the words, already knowing what he would see. He knew the voice, and this had happened before, in the Dark Den Dungeon. He turned to find Adam, his twin brother, standing in front of him.

  “You’re not my brother, why do you keep presenting yourself like this?” Alex waved his hand at the mental hallucination, his supposed brother wearing a formal earth-style suit and tie.

  The fake-Adam simply shrugged. “It’s your soul, your mind, why do you keep viewing me like this?”

  Alex sighed, despite not having to breath in his soulspace, before he spoke. “Fine, then what are you hear to tell me? I know what happened? What does that mean?”

  “Exactly what I said, big brother, you know what happened. You just don’t want to admit it, don’t want to face the truth.”

  “Care to elaborate then?”

  “Come on, you can’t think I’d just spoon feed it to you? Think, Alex, you studied them for hours and hours, obsessed over them, even made a whole new spell thanks to a kind donation of a fallen comrade.” Fake-Adam’s appearance shifted subtly, faint hints of tattoos morphing under his skin.

  “The glyphs,” he muttered, creating a mental projection in front of himself. He had studied the Terraxum glyph tattoos for some time. Even getting captain Drenn to allow him time to study a body of one of the dead soldiers.

  He looked over the mental projection of the tattoo designs he had seen, looking for something that would point towards what fake-Adam was trying to tell him. It took only a minute or so before he saw it.

  Each soldier had a unique set of body refinement tattoos. Power and complexity was added to the tattoo as the soldier earned higher feats of military achievement. But they all started with the same base, and the additions were nearly identical except for very minor alterations to match the individual in question, or efficiency improvements that were learned over time.

  “So you see it now?” fake-Adam mocked.

  He did see it. Alex brought up the dead Lieutenant’s tattoos, the most advanced and complete set he was able to see up close, and then the tattoos he had seen on Kailan in the tent, the day they left for the peace summit.

  The Prince’s tattoos, as a royal heir, would be far more advanced than a soldiers, that was a given. But what he saw didn’t make sense. Things were far too different, in a way that had starling implications.

  “They’re different. Not Terraxum standard, not even close. These weren’t designed for body refinement. They were… structural, reinforcing energy flow, containing aether pressure and force feeding his core as much energy as possible. Like someone rebuilt his core from the inside out.”

  Fake-Adam leaned forward. “Whose core?”

  Alex bit his lip. He didn’t answer directly. Instead, he brought up the blast sight residue scans Obby had projected on the suite’s glyph table earlier. “And here, the containment sigils and compression lines are matches to the ones we found in the undergran leylineforge. Those beast core weapons... Same unstable energy, only refined for a more complex structure and to fit a specific elemental attunement.”

  He remembered the prince in a traveler’s coat, satchel slung over one shoulder, and the grey dust he had trailed into the palace suite when he had visited Alex the night before the final big vote. The dust looked familiar at the time, but he had ignored it. He remembered now, it was the same dust that had clung to Cole’s and his own boots when they came back from investigating the Leyforge.

  His internal soulspace stilled.

  This story has been taken without authorization. Report any sightings.

  “So you’re not stupid after all. What does this tell you? What happened, Alex?” Fake-Adam was smiling now.

  “They weren’t just making weapons,” Alex said, his strained tone cracking at the edges. “The Leyforge was stage one, turning arcane beast cores into bombs. But that wasn’t enough. They perfected it. Stage two…” He swallowed, forcing the words out. “Stage two was about turning human mage cores into magical nuclear detonators.”

  New projections formed in the space. The intel they managed to get from the survey’s of the attack sight. The origin point of the blast was undeniable.

  “The explosion came from inside the peace summit,” Alex pressed on. His hand trembled as he tapped the projection, data streams spilling like cracks in glass. “Prince Kailan had different glyphs tattooed across his body, ones that weren’t anything like the soldier’s. They turned his core into the bomb. Kailan wasn’t sent to negotiate…” He fell to a whisper. “…he was the payload.”

  The weight of the truth crushed the projections in his mind. Alex looked over at his brother’s image, slack jawed. He only got a soft smile in return, the kind of smile that said “I told you so.”

  Through their silence, memories rose like ghosts around him. Illusions of his past experiences in the palace as they played the political game of their execution vote. Alex’s mind showed him past conversations with Kailan, words that had seemed poetic at the time now dripped with fatal intent. The prince had spoken often of duty, of sacrifice, of a future he might never see.

  The visions showed to Alex, Kailan and himself talking;

  “You’re the tiebreaker, aren’t you?” Alex had said.

  “Yes. And no. Being a Prince doesn’t mean I get to do whatever I want. It means… I’m forced to make delicate choices.”

  Then it shifted to Alex and the Prince at the Duskmoor party in the palace drawing room;

  The Prince speaking, the words plain to Alex now. “You think being people earns you safety in Terraxum? Unfortunately it doesn’t. We all play the same games, even I…”, “...Anything that can improve the lives of my people, I will welcome. “

  He saw himself on the warfront, Kailan passing him a bottle of winterwine;

  “You think I like this war? That I sleep easy while sending children to die with a blessing carved on their bones? I don’t want any of this. But wanting doesn’t undo reality.”

  And then their last meeting, in the tent while the Prince prepared himself to march towards death;

  “I’m a prince, Alex. I spend my time thinking whats best for my people and the kingdom, no matter the personal costs. I was born thinking like a sacrifice.”

  And finally, the last words Kailan had spoken to him;

  “Tell me, Alex, what would you find worth it to die for?”

  And then there were the nobles, the sects, the guild representatives. Every smug smile, every cryptic comment he heard, or that had been relayed to him, from the others. All making a different osrt of demented sense to him now.

  Mother Theralyn; “But you must hold peace, and not blood. Not until the vote is done.”

  Thessalia; “I see an unlit torch held by a nervous hand. But that means someone might still light it with purpose.”

  Verrianna Thorneth; “You don’t have allies here, Commander. Not real ones… And the noble houses, they collect curiosities. Until they don’t.”

  Halraen; “You know as well as anyone, the greatest fights happen long before the first blow.”

  He thought about Vess Auralde, and her insistence on getting Devon caught in a contract for her, something that made no sense if you were truly making attempt to have that same person executed. They couldn’t provide trades goods if they were dead.

  The same went for Duke Vaelros’ interactions with Alex at the Gala. Why mention sharing research in the future if you plane to kill that person within days? Unless the plan wasn’t to kill them, and it never had been, only to make them think they could be killed, then relieved enough when it didn’t happen to not ask too many questions about it.

  He recalled the image of Malric Vaunt as he explained his presence in the palace. How he described the Terraxum Kingdom. “King Terraxum and his lands are but an Adept Regency. None of their citizens are yet to show their talents to step into the Third Realm, or Magus Tier as I think you may call it.”

  He had said ‘citizens’, but Alex had no doubts he included the royal family in his statement. Meaning the peak Adept power he had sensed from Prince Kailan was not his natural talent or cultivation level, but an artificial boost from the sheer amount of energy they had packed into his core from the modified tattoos. They had stuffed him before the slaughter, bloated with power barely contained, all to make their little bomb as powerful as possible.

  All of these bits of memory clicked into place, all pieces of a puzzle Alex hadn’t realized existed until now. Houses that should have been enemies had conspired with quiet precision. War and peace were not opposing forces, just two sides of the same coin they flipped for profit.

  The vote for freedom? A lie. The summit? A stage. The worldstriders? Pawns.

  Alex’s hands clenched as the truth burned through him. They’d been losing at tic-tac-toe while the royals played chess with the world.

  Fake-Adam nodded at him with a grin. “Yes, and now that the plan has come together, who do you think they will use as a scapegoat? Who would Aeralith and Terraxum citizens alike accept as the villain of this tragedy? A group of worldstriders, led by a Demon?”

  “Those mother fuckers.” They we going to pin it all on Alex and his friends. And that wasn’t even the worst part for Alex. Accepting what happened also meant he had to accept another realization about Kailan.

  “He knew…” Alex’s eyes were unfocused, staring past Fake-Adam, and instead at something far darker. “Kailan knew he wouldn’t come back. And the worst, he really was doing it to help his kingdom. He cared. He was my friend.” His throat tightened. “And he did it anyway.”

  Alex finally opened his eyes back in the suite. He felt his rage bubbling up, and wrath heavy enough to press down on the others in the room and stopping their breathing. The others sat in it, staring at him, confused, lost in their own spirals. Alex stood, trembling just enough not to be noticed.

  Without a word, he slipped his hood over his head and made for the door. No one stopped him at first. Not until the soft click of the door alerted them of his absence.

  “Alex—” Holly stood but she was too slow. By the time she reached the hallway, he had already gone.

  Kate caught sight of him in the corridor. He moved with the terrifying calm of a man who had decided on something that he couldn’t take back. “Pierce!” she yelled as she stepped into his path.

  He didn’t look up at her. His eyes still shadowed beneath his hood burned with something she didn’t dare name. When she reached to grab his arm, Zach’s hand shot out and stopped her.

  “Let him go,” Zach said almost reverently.

  Kate’s mouth opened to argue, but the look in Zach’s eyes stopped her. It was a look many of them had seen before. They hadn’t seen it in Alex, but in men who came back from the brink with the storm still raging inside them. Men who didn’t care what about the world’s plans, because they were about to burn it down.

  Alex walked through the palace halls like a demon possessed phantom. The curfew seemed to extend even to the palace, as few souls were still out and about. Those that were he could see retreating into doorways and shadows as he approached. He moved without hesitation, each step radiating a cold fury that coiled tighter and tighter as he went. The air followed him, taut and electric, like a storm crawling across the cobblestones.

  By the time he reached the royal keep, the sky above the city had gone dark in ways even the moon didn’t explain. Two guards at the gate crossed their spears to bar his way. “State your—” one began, but the words died as Alex raised his head.

  “Was it true?” He spoke softly, the kind of softness that made the guards’ skin crawl.

  The other guard scowled as he adjusted his grip. “Stand down. You are not permitted—”

  “Was it true?” his cut swords harper that time. The air around him vibrated. Heat and shadow bled into the edges of reality as the purple-blue aura of the Demon Asura began manifesting.

  The guards drew their weapons. The steel flashed once in the torchlight. That was the last thing they managed to do. The wrath inside him uncoiled all at once. The demon asura in his being roared awake, its fury merging with his own until he wasn’t just Alex Pierce anymore, he was the storm, the fire, the shadow, the wrath.

  The night split open as he snapped.

  The gates of the royal keep exploded inward. Shards of metal and stone scattered like leaves to the wind. Alex stepped through the smoke, eyes burning dark blue and ethereal horns rising from under the shadow of his hood. The storm overhead walked with him.

  Soldiers fell.

  The first wave rushed him with spears lowered, they didn’t make it three steps before the ground cracked and hurled them back, armor folding under invisible force of Alex’s [Flare]. Others screamed as they were ripped off their feet and slammed against the palace walls with enough force to crumple steel.

  A captain of the royal guard roared, swinging a burning enchanted hammer. The weapon struck air, Alex caught the handle with one hand and shattered it like glass with a squeeze. Before the captain could register the loss, Alex’s fist blazed with a burning aether. One strike sent the man crashing into the wall, with the glyphs on his armor flaring then snuffing out entirely.

  The barrier sealing the hallway awoke to life. Alex raised his hand, condensed the air into a needle of shimmering death, and released it. The [Wind Lance] screamed down the hall, slicing the barrier to ribbons. The remains of the ward flickered, then shattered into sparks.

  Walls cracked.

  Each step bled pressure into the stones, the very air screaming around him. Chandeliers rattled, portraits fell, marble split. Doors locked with glyphs imploded at his touch, their glowing seals shorting out like dying stars.

  “Uh, Alex, are you okay?” Obby’s words were soft and worried.

  Alex ignored him and kept walking, his vision focused in front of him.

  Nobles scrambled in silk laden panic. Some tried to run, they didn’t make it. Some groveled, tried to buy their lives with titles and favors. Alex didn’t speak to them, didn’t even look at them. Those who weren’t in his path were spared by indifference. Those who were… weren’t.

  A flash of light obscured his vision for a moment. A sliver of a memory. Kailan’s smirk, lit by the balcony moonlight.

  Flash.

  Their talk, the prince leaning on the railing, saying things Alex hadn’t understood, until now.

  Flash.

  The toast between friends at the northern warfront, the laughter hiding sorrow.

  Flash.

  The peace summit’s explosion — white light, screaming fire, raining ash.

  He kept walking. Through bodies, through rubble, through the storm tearing the keep apart from the inside out. Alex Pierce, the Demon of Terraxum, was coming, and the world was breaking around him.

  The inner sanctum ahead was bathed in cold blue light. Glyph-barriers hummed across the archway, creating layer upon layer of reinforced spellwork. Barriers formed that could stop an army or hold back a siege. They shimmered with the signature of the Crown. Elegant, seemingly unbreakable.

  Alex stopped before them, breathing slow. The air around him flared with heat, the stones beneath his boots cracking under the pressure that leaked from his body’s aether channels. The fury inside him coiled tighter, the demon asura snarling in his veins. He let it rise, let it consume, let it burn everything else away.

  The glyphs flared brighter as if sensing the threat. Wards snarled awake, chains of light and sound weaving a cage.

  Alex smiled without hint of humor in his glowing eyes. He reached inward, into the molten heart of himself, and ripped it open. The Wyrm-heart reacted, and it roared to life, a torrent of primal power, searing white, coiled with purple-blue darkness. The air ignited, the ground split. The walls themselves seamed to scream.

  He raised his hand and released a [Flare], the spell came out as a focused and narrow cone of force directed in front of him. A concentrated blast containing sheer power. The barriers, so carefully woven, shattered like brittle glass. Glyphs howled, and died in cascades of fading light. The explosion of force slammed through the sanctum like an ocean wave, ripping banners and blowing the twin doors inward with a deafening crack.

  The throne room beyond was swallowed in smoke and silence.

  He stepped forward, his silhouette framed in the ruin and smoke.