The two of them fled the immediate aftermath of the attack, not so much because of fear as because the blade wanted to seek safety to sort through the souls it had obtained while it's wilder came to grips with the devastation that he’d just wrought. What had it to feat? Hundreds of mages had just died, and any that managed to survive the avalanche of quarried white stone were either grievously wounded or buried alive. It was good that they did.
Less than a minute after the rubble had settled, when they were three blocks from the pile of stone that had once been the Golden Tower, the clouds above where the tower had once been began to stir. The blade didn’t notice at first. It barely registered the widening patch of blue because it was too busy looking for ambushes. However, when a pillar of fire ignited that was so bright it made the sun seem to fade by comparison, it couldn’t help but notice.
Then, its wielder crouched for cover behind a low stone wall, which had only been slightly damaged by the earlier debris. That was a good move because the blastwave that followed ripped apart taller buildings in the neighborhood that surrounded them, reducing whole city blocks to rubble and ash in a single shockwave.
It was an awesome display of destructive might that was easily on par with the earthquake the weapon had brought to bear against the city so recently. The blade could do many terrible things; it could survive the unsurvivable and slay the unslayable, but it could not do this.
The celestial flames burned silver-white. From the sight of them, it was impossible to say how hot they burned in those first few seconds. The first indication of that was when the stones in the immediate vicinity began glowing red and then orange as they melted under the intensity of this terrible magic.
The damage wasn’t limited to the tower rubble or even the surrounding buildings, though. Its heat was bad enough to burn its wielder, even where he sheltered. The fire didn’t burn so hot that the blade’s healing couldn’t counter it, but it was quite painful for the lad, and even though the weapon regenerated him continuously, he screamed in pain the entire time.
The weapon saw no need to suppress it. The roar of the heavenly fire drowned out everything else, and by the time the terrible flames had faded to something tolerable several seconds later, his cloak of invisibility, along with most everything else he was wearing, had been burned away to taters. Read complete versıon only at 𝔫𝔬𝔳𝔢𝔩⁂𝖿𝗂𝗋𝖾⁂𝔫𝔢𝔱
It wasn’t quite as bad as what had been done to poor Var’gar, but then, Var’gar had been bathed in magical fire, not been hidden from it hundreds of feet away, which made it all the stranger. Still, the weapon was less concerned about the damage than the source, though. Divine power? High magic? It wondered. What could cause this?
For a moment, it searched its wielder’s mind for ideas, as it considered plucking one of the souls that swirled within for answers, but that proved not to be necessary because as the light faded, it could see the powerful threads of magic that wove through the thing, and it found a familiar pattern.
To call the magical nature of what it had just witnessed threads wasn’t quite right. Lucian’s magical cloak that had just burned away to nothing had been full of threads. It was full of even more threads. Even the world around them, beyond its physical nature, had a weave to it, but the magic it had just witnessed? Those were not threads. They were ropes or cables. They were thigh-thick chains that you might see on a drawbridge, woven together to create a work of unimaginably vast power, but the thin, glittering golden threads that clung to them like frayed cobwebs? Those, it recognized.
“What… What was that?” Lucian asked.
The throne, it whispered to him. In the time that it took them to realize I was attacking the tower, someone made it to the throne room, sat upon it, and the blasted thing is now seeking to eliminate me with a Miracle or two.
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“How are we supposed to fight that?” the young mage asked.
By fleeing, the blade admitted. The words galed it, but it would not attempt to give them a veneer of respectability by calling it a tactical retreat. It was running away, and with any luck, it would live to fight another day.
“But… How are we supposed to fight something that can do that?” its wielder asked, stunned. The Ebon Blade was unwilling to be too hard on him in this moment. He was wrapped in a fog of confusion and denial.
Everyone I know is dead,
Despite all of his earlier bravado, he was practically in a fugue state now. He had plenty of people he’d planned to kill in the tower assault, of course, but there were plenty of people he’d wanted to save, which was not something the blade cared about. There was no such thing as a good mage. Not after the elven temptress that had stolen Ivarr from it. Not after the men that had ripped Baraga’s soul from his body.
Even its current wielder was guilty of those crimes, though it did not plan on punishing him for them, not if he did a good job. The Ebon Blade didn’t try to snap him out of it. There would be time for that later. For now, it simply started moving him again, away from the tower and toward the capital’s western wall. The throne is not omnipotent, the blade assured him. I have seen through its eyes and…
For a terrible moment, the blade thought it had made an awful miscalculation. It thought that it was now in the hands of someone that the throne could see through the eyes of, but that did not appear to be the case because if it was, the next pillar of fire would have landed right on top of them. Instead, it landed on the far side of the tower.
It was still warm, even from that distance, but it did not burn its wielder again or raze the buildings he sprinted between. The thing had massive power, but it was firing blind.
What’s the difference, though? What changed? It asked itself. Could it be that all traces of the Paralon bloodline are gone or that the power I used only applies to the family of whoever sits on the throne?
The weapon couldn’t say, but it was concerned either way, and as they moved quickly through the streets, it kept waiting for them to be struck down, but that didn’t happen. They were just one frantic member of a panicked crowd. The streets had been crowded before, but they were packed now, and Lucian was far from the only person who bore marks of this terrible magic. Many others who had been further from the flames had been blinded or marked with strange burns.
When he reached the gates, there weren’t even any guards to challenge him. They’d fled as well, like the coward they were. That rankled the blade, but it saw no point in hunting them down for their cowardice. How could it? It was doing the same thing right now. The difference was that as soon as it was clear of whoever sat on the throne now, it would be advancing on the next target, and its wielder would help it find them.
The mage towers of the Aetherarchy, large and small, were spread throughout the Inner Kingdoms and even beyond, and it would fell every last one of them, but first, they needed time to regroup. Its wielder would need time to recover, too. He was a limp noodle, being propelled by the blade’s urgency, and as soon as it had fought free of the crowds and found an outlying farmstead off the main road with a disused shed, it let him curl up in the hay and sleep.
Vengeance could wait at least one more day. It had much to do between now and approaching its next target.
Later that night, it saw one more distant flash that was far too bright to be lightning. What is it that they think they’re targeting? It wondered. Leveling their city won’t help them to defeat me. It will just put their whole kingdom in disarray.
The mages were afraid. Even the Golden Throne was afraid. It knew both of those facts with absolute conviction, but it wasn’t a comforting thought. Desperate men did desperate things, and there was no telling what they would try to unleash on it when it showed itself again.