Ember and Frost II

  AUSHEN

  “Surprisingly, I do remember you.” Aerix smiled at me.

  “Checks out,” Sablune put in, clearly upset about the burns on his arm.

  Fadabiea rolled her eyes, “Because that’s definitely my fault. Besides…” she shot me a defensive look, “I didn’t kill him. Your father was already dead.”

  I set my eyes on the entrance to my safe house, trying to ignore the boiling hate stirring inside me alongside my equal fear of Fadabiea. I’ve seen what they could do and what they were willing to do. I heard she blew up an entire pack of dogs just for the fun of it, gotten Sablune nearly killed and placed on house arrest, and had to run with Masamyr for days through the forest from Acedani because of something she did. It all happened on that island so it’s not a standard representation of her, but it also didn’t make her less dangerous.

  “I have an entry point hidden in the side of a car, there’s a separate section on the other side of the wall it’s parked next to. There should be… Holy Fu- get down!” I shove the others behind a line of roadblocks to avoid being spotted by the unexpected gathering of soldiers surrounding the car. I heard one of them request authorization to search the rest of the vehicle and notify HQ that the breach team had arrived.

  “Okay,” I started, “how’re we go- “

  “Kill them all,” Sablune hissed.

  “You haven’t changed much.”

  “Yeah, he’s still an idiot,” Fadabiea interjected.

  “Yes, unfortunately,” Aerix said plainly.

  “Okay, that’s fine, I guess,” I try again, aiming for an agreeable tone, “It’s just that I would rather not kill if I can avoid it.”

  “Just like you didn’t want to kill me. Not that you could’ve,” Sablune rehashed.

  “Looks like we’ve got another Nova here,” Aerix observed.

  “What’s a Nova?” I ventured.

  “An angel,” Fadabiea said breathily.

  “A domestic sex offender,” pouted Sablune.

  “Lapis’ Wife,” answered Aerix, calmly.

  “Those were all very different answers and frankly I’m scared to ask about that second one. Also, YOU GOT MARRIED?”

  “Nova is very physically affectionate woman,” Aerix clarified. “So, she often tries to seduce him when he’s busy, despite her charm of innocence.”

  “What charm of innocence?” Sablune snorted, drawing a confused look from Aerix.

  Fadabiea elbowed him. “You shouldn’t talk behind your wife’s back.”

  “Please, she may have angel wings, but that woman is a devil.”

  Aerix ignored those two and turned back to me. “Her bright ideology makes her less inclined to take lives; that’s what I meant by a second Nova.”

  “Enough about my love life,” Sablune whispered, “Can we just deal with these idiots our way. You don’t have to get involved if you don’t want to.”

  “I can stay on the sidelines; I’ll leave the killing to you maniacs.”

  “What plan are we thinking?” Fadabiea wondered aloud.

  “Scatter Shot, we go on three,” Aerix said.

  “Seven, black, apple, sixty, pickup truck, three,!” Sablune spat out quickly, before disappearing into the shadow of a pillar.

  “YOU ASS, YOU DO THAT EVERY TIME,” shouted Fadabiea, “JUST COUNT NORMALLY!”

  By now, our presence is obvious to the soldiers by the car; I spotted about twelve before taking cover. Three of the armed soldiers began moving in our direction, and the rumble of boots on stone rolled throughout the space, counting down each second until they reached our location.

  The next person to move is Fadabiea, she stood up and slid around the roadblock, putting herself in full view of the enemy. It’s then that I understood the beginning of their attack plan.

  Sablune reappeared in a dark spotlight behind the three soldiers just as they took notice of Fadabiea and kicked the middle soldier in the back, sending him flying in front of his two other colleagues. They ended up momentarily distracted from their initial target and turned around to face Sablune.

  “I didn’t hear you guys counting,” Sablune said in regard to Fadabiea’s shouting.

  Fadabiea raised her scythe above the head of the fallen soldier and brought it down fiercely, pierces the man’s skull through his helmet. She removed the blade from its mark and rubs her finger across the blade before touching the blood to her tongue.

  “Sinners,” Fadabiea rolled her eyes, and looked back at Sablune, “don’t hate me because you aren’t patient enough, idiot.”

  Sablune was left to deal with the other two targets as Fadabiea rushed by him to watch his back as more men were sent their way.

  Aerix reached towards the ground beside me and waited as the ground cracked and the handle of a sword protruded from the ground. The Echo of Crystals ripped it free and rushed off to assist Fadabiea, their blade scraping against the ground.

  I watch Sablune take down the other two guards, jump-kicking off the first and sliding past the second. As he whirled around the soldier, he slashed a blade against the back of his knees which causes the man to drop to the ground. The first soldier fires his gun at Sablune, who forms a shield from his hoodie’s sleeve as bullets rain down at his feet. “I don’t hate you because I’m impatient, I hate you because you’re a pain in the ass.”

  Aerix came up behind the man with the gun and slammed the flat of the blade across his back, causing him to stumble forward. “You two are both ridiculous,” Aerix scoffed.

  Sablune spun and molded his shield into a weapon that resembled a baseball bat and swung upward in a single flourish. The weapon slammed into the soldier’s chin, knocking off his helmet. His limp body slid across the slick concrete and Aerix took it upon themself to crush his skull with a falling stone.

  The rest of the soldiers opened fire on the three echoes. Sablune phased into darkness, a wall of stone raised to protect Aerix and Fadabiea. The Echo of Love and Secrets reappeared beside me and shouted around the side of the roadblock, “I don’t want to hear jack shit from you, seven-foot-six-looking ass.”

  The remaining soldiers persisted in firing rounds at Aerix and Fadabiea, “Surrender now and lay down your weapons.”

  “NO!” Sablune, Aerix, and Fadabiea spat simultaneously.

  Yep, those three are still insane. But I can’t say I haven’t missed them.

  Fadabiea called out to me, “Aushen! I need you to unbalance them.”

  I reacted instantly, firing ice at the feet of the soldiers as I jumped over the roadblock, until a lustrous sheen of frost formed on the ground. Dread seeped into my bones when it reoccurred to me how many enemies there were to face.

  Fadabiea launched herself at the enemy alongside Sablune and Aerix jumped in front of me to raise another stone barrier, defending me from the head-on fire.

  “What is with those two?” I asked Aerix, “How do they fight so well together, I feel like you two would be better off in combat because Sablune has his overly promiscuous wife.” I look around the stone wall and spot Sablune judo throwing someone into the ground and stabbing the soldier advancing behind him in the stomach.

  “They’ve still been getting into fights,” Aerix broke it down for me.

  “Can’t believe they’re still at it. But I’m not sure how that matters, to be honest with you.”

  “Watch them closely.”

  Fadabiea finished off Sablune’s first target with a scythe to the throat and choke-slammed the soldier that he stabbed just as Sablune Shifted behind the soldier moving in on Fadabiea.

  Perfectly fluid. No words. No signals. No plan.

  It’s as if years of cutting and piercing each other had mixed their blood and with it their intentions.

  “Do you see it?” Aerix pointed, a scholastic gleam in their eyes.

  “I guess so,” I agreed unsurely, watching as Fadabiea crushed her assailant’s windpipe while Sablune spin kicked the new challenger off his feet.

  Another stone slams into the fallen soldier, confirming the kill, and Aerix shoots me one of those chilling grins. “So that’s all there is to it.”

  Aerix called out to Sablune and Fadabiea, “Leave whoever is in command alive, I want to interrogate them.”

  “Uhhhhh…”

  “Guys,” Aerix sighed, their hands in their face.

  “In my defense, I didn’t think there was any relevant info to have gathered,” Sablune craned his neck slightly.

  “You didn’t think, in the slightest, that maybe finding out why we’re being targeted is considered important info?” Fadabiea said accusingly, gutting another soldier with their scythe.

  Only five left. I can’t keep letting them fight on my behalf.

  “I want to help, let’s go,” I told Aerix before rushing off into the fight. I pick my target and prepare to attack the still unbalanced group of soldiers. That’s when I noticed my mistake, the group I went for all had equipment for weakening elemental Concepts.

  This narrative has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. If you see it on Amazon, please report it.

  “Initializing elemental countermeasures. You’re clear to engage Lumi-suits and Bio-degraders,” One of the officers instructed.

  Two of the soldiers’ body armor lit up like candles and the other three pressed buttons on their vests, causing gray cloudbursts to spew from strange backpacks they wore. Several boxes on the ground I hadn’t noticed before unfolded into vividly bright floodlights, spilling light across the icy ground. One of the soldiers threw a flash bang in Sablune’s direction just as he fell to his knees.

  Aerix pulled me back behind the shield just before it went off, the shriek of the bomb pierced my ears, but I was spared the blinding flash of light. I looked back to witness Fadabiea clutching their ears and Sablune struggling to get up from his knees.

  “Thanks for that.” I locked eyes with Aerix, “you don’t seem worried.”

  “Oh no, why would I be?” Aerix stuck their sword into the ground, and it sank without a trace, they then drew the pickaxe from inside their robe.

  They flicked it outward, and the handle extended and the ends of it flipped out into place, they pulled outward the radiation symbol on it that was between the picks. They turned the symbol like a dial and pushed it down, resulting in the pickaxe glowing an intense green color.

  “Is that thing safe?” I asked in a concerned tone. “I mean safer since you got it off the Island.”

  Aerix laughed, “Not. At. All.”

  They swung back with it slowly, “Onyx, get close to Lapis and take cover! Opal, tell me when they’re safe.”

  Forgot about that name. Aerix had nicknamed me after the blue and red dragon breath opal when we met for the first time.

  I peer around the side once more and see Fadabiea dive past a soldier who had a double-honed machete instead of a rifle like the first seven of them.

  “Sifyx, can we get a shield please?!” Fadabiea shouted in Sablune’s direction, who looked up in incoherence as she jumped behind him and lifted his arm, the fabric flew to defend them both, interlocking in a pattern of woven plus-signs.

  “They’re clear!” I informed Aerix who reacted immediately. They slammed the pickaxe into our temporary concrete defense. It shattered into mini stone particles and blew outward in a storm of deadly shrapnel, burrowing right through the soldiers’ armor, resulting in them all dropping to the ground in agony.

  I turned slowly to look at Aerix in utter disbelief, “I think you may be even more dangerous than the other two.”

  “Dunno, maybe.” Aerix shrugged dismissively.

  “You can hit someone with the power of a hydrogen bomb if you so please and your reply is ‘maybe’?”

  Aerix walks over to the others, casually tiptoeing over the moaning, half-dead soldiers. They tossed their hand outward, and bits of rocks flew into the floodlights, rendering them useless.

  Suddenly, one of the soldiers with a glowing suit raised a pistol and squeezed off two rounds. I move without realizing it, sending several shards of ice into the man’s chest.

  Killing him instantly.

  I couldn’t be bothered to process what I had done because I’d just seen Sablune’s condition. Several burn wounds that were worse than the ones I had given him somehow. One on his neck the other on his wrist. Even sunlight didn’t burn him that badly, so the lights must have had an enormous UV concentration.

  Fadabiea pulled Sablune to his feet and rushed to Aerix’s side, who then protested at Fadabiea’s fussing.

  “My skin is bulletproof, what are you worried about?” Aerix pointed out, their tone confused. “Maybe check the one that’s actually injured.”

  “Hey, piss off. I’m allowed to be worried about you,” Fadabiea complained.

  I sat down next to Sablune and held out my hand, modulating the temperature until it began to steam in the damp, muggy air. “Give me your hand,” I grabbed his wrist with my chilled hand and held it there, treating the blister. Sablune had little strength to resist and resorted to glaring at me, ignoring the banter between the others. I move my hand to place it on Sablune’s neck, and he bats my hand away, “Absolutely not.”

  “Dude, I’m just fixing your neck,” I protested and decided to form a chunk of ice and hand it to Sablune for him to hold against his neck, he took it with not so much as a word treating the burns from the lights on top of the fire I used on him earlier.

  I straightened up in and turned to the Echo of verdancy. “My father, is he… he’s not-“

  “He’s gone. It’s what he asked of me, he said he already explained it to you, he told you about the vision of me,” Fadabiea had the decency to drop her gaze.

  Aerix stepped towards me and rested their hand on my shoulder, “Is this the safehouse entrance?”

  The bluntness they operated with was just as rigid as always. I sucked up my churning emotions and answered as evenly as I could. "Oh yeah, this should be it.”

  I rose and moved toward the car by the wall and opened the driver's side door, revealing the entrance to my safe house. The other side had a hole through the wall and straight into a ventilation shaft. “You three. In. Now. Go.”

  “Gimme a minute,” Sablune tore the pistol out of the hands of the guard that shot Aerix and held it at his side. Fabric flew from the emblems on his sleeves and molded around the gun into a holster around his thigh.

  He looked up at the group staring at him, “What? It’s just in case I want to try it, stop trying to laser-eye me you freaks.”

  Sablune brushed past me and went through the entrance to the car, shortly after, I followed behind him. The sound of hollow metal reverberates behind me signifying that Aerix and Fadabiea are behind me, following closely.

  “What’s the whole Son of Two Houses thing about?” Sablune called back to me.

  "It has to do with my patrons," I responded.

  "You said patrons, plural. Care to elaborate?" Aerix asked cautiously.

  "I have two patrons, Embris and Akullius. The Celestials of fire, sorrow, and creation, and ice, joy and destruction."

  Sablune stopped in his tracks and turned his head back, bewilderment filled his eyes, Fadabiea and Aerix wore similar expressions.

  "You can't have more than one patron," Fadabiea expressed dismissively.

  "I do.”

  “Hey, so, that’s actually not how this works,” said Sablune, giving me a look filled with dumbfounded condescension.

  “That be too convenient if it were true,” Aerix said. “There has to be drawbacks.”

  “Well, because of it, I can’t even walk the path of another Celestial."

  "Weird, I only knew about Embris," was all Sablune had to say about it as he began crawling once more through the ventilation shaft.

  Fadabiea, however, had more to say to me, "For what it's worth, I truly am sorry about your father. I gave him a better end than what he would've met had he not found me."

  Inexplicable guilt tickles the back of my mind, "I know... I just wanted to see him one last time. He went missing one day, so I went to where he was last seen and ended up in this labyrinth. Despite him warning me it might happen, I left anyway. Now I’m not around to be there for mom when he isn’t. I left her and now I'm stuck here."

  "How long have you been down here?" Fadabiea spoke softly as if there were more ghosts for her to startle.

  " It's only been two months for me, but I overheard AID talking about the logic of this place—which is to say, there really isn't any. Time flows differently here, so I have no idea how long I've really been here."

  "Well, what was the date you went looking for your dad? That information could give us insight on when you first entered this place," Aerix advised.

  "Around late April, I think it was the twenty-second." I rolled my neck, working out a kink that had developed in the muscles from being in a cramped position for so long.

  "We ended up here on the twenty-seventh, which makes no sense..." Fadabiea trailed off, her voice left in the echo of the lead-lined vents.

  "So, you haven't been here for very long which, to a degree, is a good thing," Sablune reassured me.

  "It is I think, but I'm still recovering from the Silent War. So, on top of that-"

  "The one you and Acedani started!" Sablune said loudly through the vents.

  "You didn’t have to scar me, though,” I felt the dark line on my head that could be seen through my frost-colored hair.

  “I got my point across at least," Sablune recalled, in an unnervingly fond manner.

  “That’s when you first started to break through the Concept suppression, right?" I said, mostly to confirm.

  "I guess so," Sablune spoke in a tone that suggested he was rolling his eyes, "I didn’t really start to notice until Dani nearly killed me.”

  "Yeah, that's right. By the way, I have a friend that stays here with me. I thought-," I began as I turned around to look at the echoes behind me.

  Fadabiea sighed, cutting me off, "How long is this damn vent, we've been shimmying down this shit for an hour."

  "This update coming from someone with the worst perception of time," Sablune said snarkily.

  "Mi mi mi mi mi mi," Fadabiea was moving their fingers open and closed in a mocking fashion.

  "Shut the hell up, I'm not arguing with someone that watches trees grow for fun," Sablune shot back viciously. “So… this friend of yours?”

  “A famous pop idol, any of you ever heard of Timebomb Aika?”

  Sablune grunted. “My wife loves her music, that’s all I know about her. She pisses me off hearing her every day.”

  We make it to the end of the tunnel, back to my safe house. Familiarity invites me to relax. I look around at the various computers placed about, the unfinished walls, and the exposed wood support beams. At that moment I realized I hadn't been thinking ahead.

  I feel a rush of wind by me and turn slowly to see the very friend I spoke of wielding her two time-disks at Sablune's throat. The part that surprised me was that the disks hadn't gone through his throat and that he managed to block them with a blade of his own, conjured through Sifyx. He had blocked a strike by Nika, The Echo of Time and Technology, who before now I had known to be the fastest girl in existence.

  Black lipstick and eyeliner defined the set of her irritated features. She stepped back and spun away from Sablune, her plaid skirt flying out like a black pinwheel. The moment the disks left her hands, the soft purple pulsing faded and rendered her prized tools dormant in the clasps on her belt.

  She turned back to us, tucking in her white T-shirt with sloppy line art depicting the Burning of Big Ben tragedy. The scion of Eternium stood scrutinizing her lime and violet nail polish before shoving her hands into the pockets of her leather jacket.

  "Impossible," she hissed through her light Nitish accent. Her agitated tone harmonized with the frustrated tapping of her platforms on the creaking floorboards.

  "Eugh! Now I wish you'd killed me," Sablune looked to his companions, "Guys, she's Nitish!"

  Aerix and Fadabiea responded with noises similar to the one Sablune made.

  “What do you mean, 'Impossible,'” Fadabiea questioned, demandingly.

  “I have power over the flow of time, I am time. All manner of speed is relative to whatever I please,” Nika's discs flew to her sides as she lifted her hand and an ethereal clock appeared behind her in a purple light, “I am Nika Aika, It’s your pleasure to meet me.”

  Sablune raised a doubtful eyebrow, "thanks?"

  "An echo of Time, huh," Aerix commented.

  "All I care to know is how you blocked my strike."

  "Darkness doesn't move. It's always there, the light is what moves to cover it up. So, time doesn't constrain my abilities," Sablune had an arrogant expression on his face.

  “Blu, you sound just as pretentious as Nika,” Fadabiea snorted.

  Aerix smiled slightly, "So… What sort of technology do you specialize in?”

  Nika's eyes lit up at that, and she began chattering away with Aerix.

  That comfort I had felt earlier came back, allowing me to revel in the sight of my companions getting along. The safety of not having a family torn apart by war or anomalies almost felt real with these four and not like we were currently being run out of my home by the High Authority.

  “Oh, shit,” I whispered to myself. I ran over to my corner of the room and snatched a contraption off a workbench. “Yeah, Nika, I forgot that AID knows we’re here, we need to go, like now!”

  “Oh, yeah I did forget about that,” Aerix said blandly.

  “No shit,” Fadabiea and Sablune said in unison.

  Aerix asked what was in my hands. I looked down at the knives resting in my palms, “I guess I could show you.” I flicked out the mechanisms until I was holding two short ice skate blades. I tossed them on the ground and the lengths of the blades snapped to the bottom of my feet. “Multipurpose Universal Skating Knives,” I said confidently.

  Fadabiea snickered, “Musk.”

  “I feel movement. Human shaped shadows are moving nearby.” Sablune said seriously, although he was also smirking.

  I grabbed my staff from its mount on the wall and began to head toward the emergency exit. Mentally checking off my-

  An explosion sent a wave of heat across the room.