I had expected war to feel like the training grounds—orderly, rhythmic, a sequence of problems to be solved with the correct application of force.
I was wrong. War was noise.
It was a cacophony that vibrated in my teeth. The scream of the skiff's engine as it died beneath my feet, the roar of Rasharnian shock-troopers, the high-pitched whine of mana capacitors overloading.
On the deck of the enemy ship.
A soldier in jagged red armor lunged at me with a serrated blade. My body moved before my mind could process the threat. My sigil—the three-ringed monstrosity—snapped into alignment.
Blue.
A hard-light shield materialized instantly, catching the blade with a resonant thrum. The soldier's eyes went wide behind his visor. He had expected resistance, not a wall.
Red.
I dropped the shield and punched forward. A condensed blast of kinetic concussive force erupted from my knuckles. It didn't burn him; it shattered the air in front of him. He flew backward, crumpling against the railing with a sickening crunch of metal on metal.
Three more rushed me.
Green.
I slammed my hand onto the deck. Emerald limpets—sticky, seeking clusters of tracking magic—poured out of my sigil like a swarm of hornets. They latched onto the soldiers' legs, glowing bright before detonating. The men didn't die, but they were thrown off balance, their movements slowed by the heavy, viscous residue of the spell.
I stood in the center of the chaos, breathing hard. My skin felt hot, feverish. The ambient mana in the air was so thick I could taste it—copper and ozone.
"Triarch!" one of the fallen soldiers gasped, trying to crawl toward a fallen blaster. "It's the Triarch!"
He raised the weapon.
I didn't hesitate. I couldn't.
I raised my hand, fingers splayed. I pulled on all three leylines at once. It was sloppy, unrefined—a brute-force mixture of energies that Sandrakk would have sneered at. But it worked. A beam of white-hot chaos tore from my palm, catching the soldier and the fuel cells behind him.
The explosion blew me off the deck.
I fell.
For a terrifying second, I was just a boy falling through the smoke-choked sky of his own city. Below me, Tor Lucere was burning. The beautiful white stone of the districts was stained with soot. Tracers of red magic scarred the night like angry scratches.
I focused. Green. Bind.
I cast a lash, a tether of magic that whipped out and wrapped around a gargoyle on a passing tower. The sudden stop nearly dislocated my shoulder, but I swung, turning the fall into an arc, crashing through the stained-glass window of a cathedral.
I rolled across the stone floor, scattering pews, coming to a stop at the foot of a statue of the Pentacade.
Silence. For a heartbeat, there was silence.
Then, the doors of the cathedral blew open.
Rasharnian ground troops. A squad of five, led by a Battlemage wreathed in red armor. They weren't here for conquest. They were here for slaughter. They stepped over the bodies of priests who had tried to bar the door.
The Battlemage saw me. He saw the royal crest on my chest, covered in dust. He grinned.
"Jackpot."
He fired a Fissure—a wave of earth-shattering red spikes that tore up the floor toward me.
I dodged, blinking sideways with a blue slip, reappearing behind a pillar. But the pillar exploded under the impact, showering me in stone shrapnel. I cried out, feeling a sharp cut across my cheek.
Blood. My blood.
Fear, cold and sharp, finally pierced through the adrenaline. I was sixteen. I was alone. And these men wanted to kill me.
The Ethics of Oblivion. The book's title flashed in my mind. Dominance.
I stepped out from behind the ruin of the pillar. The Battlemage was charging a second shot.
"You are just a boy," he sneered, the red magic gathering in his gauntlet like a dying star.
I looked at him. Really looked at him. I saw the flow of magic in his veins. I saw the leyline connection feeding his sigil.
"No," I whispered. "I am the Weave."
I didn't fire at him. I fired at his spell.
I utilized a technique I had only theorized about in the safety of my room. A Mana-Strip. I fired a concentrated beam of Blue—not to block, but to disrupt. The beam hit the gathering ball of red energy in his hand. Blue order met Red chaos.
The reaction was instantaneous.
The Battlemage's spell didn't fire. It collapsed. The magical feedback loop reversed, shooting back up his arm, shattering his gauntlet and throwing him violently against the far wall.
The other four soldiers hesitated.
That hesitation was their end.
The doors behind them burst open again. But this time, it wasn't enemies.
It was a hammer.
King Varren Thorne entered the cathedral. He didn't look like a king. He looked like an engine of war. He was clad in full plate, his heavy red sigil glowing like a forge. He didn't cast spells; he punched explosions. He moved with terrifying speed for a man of his size, dismantling the remaining squad in seconds.
When the last body hit the floor, the King turned to me.
He was breathing heavy, his armor scorched, his face spattered with black ichor. He looked at the bodies. Then he looked at the shattered window I had come through. Then, finally, he looked at me.
He saw the cut on my cheek. He saw the three-ringed sigil smoking on my arm. He saw the man I had neutralized with a feedback loop, still groaning against the wall.
For the first time in my life, I saw something in his eyes that wasn't disappointment.
"You took the ship down?" he asked, his voice rough.
"I... I think so," I stammered, my hands trembling now that the magic was fading. "I didn't mean to destroy it. I just—"
"You engaged," he cut me off. He walked over, his heavy boots crunching on the glass. He reached out and grabbed my shoulder. His grip was iron. "You bled."
He wiped the blood from my cheek with his thumb, then looked at it.
"Good," he said. "Now you are ready."
"Ready for what?" I asked, feeling sick.
"For WAR," he said.
He turned and walked back toward the shattered doors, toward the burning city.
"Come, Aelius. The night is long. And we have many more to kill."
I stood there for a moment in the ruined cathedral, the face of the Pentacade watching me with stone eyes. I looked at my hands. They were clean, but they felt stained.
I remembered my mother's words on the balcony. The Weave always takes.
Tonight, it had taken my fear. But I wondered, with a sinking dread, what it had put in its place.
I checked my sigil. The lenses were cracked, but functional.
I followed my father into the fire.
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Tor Lucere : Sometime later
The streets of Tor Lucere were no longer streets. They were trenches.
We moved in a phalanx of two. My father was the battering ram; I was the wall. Every time a Rasharnian spell-bolt screamed toward us from the rooftops, I snapped a Blue shield into existence, the impact vibrating up my arm like a struck bell. Every time the way was blocked by debris or enemy infantry, my father unleashed the Red.
I had seen him practice in the sparring rings, but I had never seen him war.
King Varren didn't cast magic like a scholar. He didn't weave it. He detonated it. He used short, violent bursts of Breachfire—shotgun blasts of concentrated entropy that turned stone to dust and armor to molten slag. He didn't slow down. He marched with a terrifying, rhythmic inevitability toward the Palathon.
"Keep up, Aelius!" he roared, blasting a Rasharnian grenadier out of a bell tower without even breaking stride. "Eyes up! Shields tight!"
"I'm trying!" I yelled back, my voice lost in the thunder of a nearby explosion.
The sky was raining ash. The beautiful floating barges of the merchant district were burning, drifting down from the clouds like dying comets. But the worst part wasn't the fire. It was the sound. The wail of the sirens mixed with the screams of the dying.
We reached the Grand Plaza—a wide, open kill-box leading to the bridge of the Palathon fortress.
It was a massacre.
The Royal Guard, brave men and women with single-color sigils, were being pinned down by a massive Rasharnian construct. It was a Siege-Automaton—a towering hulk of animated brass and red ley-crystals, standing twenty feet tall. Its arm was a rotary cannon firing continuous streams of chaotic red energy.
"They're pinned!" I shouted, seeing a group of guards huddled behind a crumbling fountain. "They can't move!"
"Then we move them," my father growled.
He charged.
"Father, wait!"
He didn't wait. He launched himself into the open, drawing the Construct's fire. The rotary cannon spun, and a torrent of red bolts chewed up the pavement around him. He deflected them with a heavy red shield, but the force was pushing him back. He was strong, but he was one man against a siege engine.
I saw his shield flicker.
The world slowed down again. The colors sharpened.
I couldn't overpower that machine. Not head-on. But Sandrakk's lessons whispered in my ear: If you cannot break the wall, poison the foundation.
I didn't run toward the machine. I ran toward the Leyline beneath it.
I could see it—a thick vein of natural magic running under the plaza cobblestones. The Construct was siphoning power from the ambient air, but it was standing right on top of a Green node.
I slid across the pavement, skidding behind the cover of a fallen statue. I slammed my hand into the ground.
Green. Overgrowth.
I didn't cast at the enemy. I poured my will into the roots of the ancient decorative trees lining the plaza.
"Grow," I hissed, gritting my teeth until they ached. "GROW!"
The pavement beneath the Construct exploded. Not with fire, but with wood. Massive, magically accelerated roots erupted from the stone, thick as pythons. They didn't strike the machine; they entangled it. They wrapped around its brass legs, snapping hydraulic lines, pulling it off balance.
The Construct lurched, its aim thrown wide. The stream of red fire sliced harmlessly into the sky.
"NOW!" I screamed.
My father didn't need telling. He saw the opening.
He dropped his shield and gathered a two-handed charge of Red magic, compressing it until it shone white. He leaped, propelled by a blast from his boots, and slammed his fist directly into the Construct's central power core.
CRACK-BOOM.
The machine didn't just break; it unmade itself. Brass shrapnel rained down across the plaza.
The silence that followed was heavy. The surviving guards peeked out from behind their cover, staring at the smoking wreckage, then at the King, and finally... at me.
One of the guards, a captain with a bloody bandage around his head, stumbled forward and saluted. "Your Majesty. Your Highness. We... we thought we were dead."
"Regroup," Varren barked, his breathing ragged. "Get the wounded to the lower sanctum. We push to the Palathon."
But he paused. He looked at the massive roots still twitching on the ground, glowing with fading green light. He looked at me, and gave a sharp, single nod. Approval.
We crossed the bridge to the Palathon, the headquarters of the Immortals.
The massive doors were sealed, glowing with defensive wards. As we approached, they recognized the King's signature and groaned open.
Inside, it was controlled chaos.
Magni were running back and forth with dataslates, shouting coordinates. The central map table was lit up like a festival, but every light was a distress signal.
Inside, the war room was a hive of controlled panic. But at the center of the chaos, standing around the holomap, were the two pillars of Lucium's defense.
General Kirkan, looking stern and unyielding in her battle-plate.
And Grand Magnus Sandrakk.
She looked exactly as she did in the portraits—stern, sharp-featured, radiating an aura of absolute competence. She wore the green robes of her order, armored with gold plating. She looked up as we entered, her eyes narrowing when they landed on me.
Sandrakk looked calm—almost disturbingly so. He was studying the holographic display of the invasion fleet with the detached curiosity of a scientist observing an ant colony. When he saw us enter, he didn't look relieved. He looked validated.
"Varren," Kirkan barked, her voice cutting through the noise. "You brought the boy?"
"The boy just saved my life in the Plaza," Varren grunted, grabbing a stim-vial from a nearby table and injecting it into his neck.
Kirkan's eyebrows shot up. She looked at me, really looked at me, seeing the soot, the blood, and the raw, unstable hum of the Triarch energy still clinging to my armor.
Varren grunted, wiping black ichor from his armor. "Report."
"It's a full-scale breach," Kirkan said, pointing to the map. "Rasharn has broken the Armistice. King Aristos has sent his entire northern armada."
"Aristos is a coward," Varren spat. "He wouldn't dare strike this deep unless he had a rabid dog leading the pack. Who is it?"
Sandrakk spoke up then, his voice smooth and cold. "General Kraz. The Butcher of K'ley."
He tapped a rune on the table, and an image of the enemy flagship flared to life. It was a jagged monstrosity of black iron, leaking red exhaust.
"The Eclipse," Sandrakk explained. "Kraz has parked it directly over the Lightless Sea. He isn't just bombing us, Varren. He is drilling. He's trying to tap into the Font directly."
"If he breaches the Font containment," I whispered, the realization hitting me, "he destabilizes the entire region. The city falls into the sea."
"Precisely," Sandrakk said, looking at me with a faint, approving smile. "The boy pays attention."
"We don't have the manpower to repel the ground assault and strike the ship," Kirkan argued, slamming her hand on the table. "The lower districts are buckling. If we send the Immortals to the ship, the civilians die. If we defend the civilians, Kraz cracks the world."
They argued. The King of Fire, the General of Life, and the Magnus of Mind. Attack vs. Defense vs. Strategy.
I looked at the map. I saw the red dots swarming the residential zones. I saw the massive blip of the Eclipse in the sky.
I remembered my mother's words. The Weave gives, and the Weave takes.
I stepped forward.
"We do both," I said.
The room went silent.
"Excuse me, Prince?" Kirkan asked, her tone dangerous.
"You split the Immortals," I said, my voice steady despite my shaking hands. "General Kirkan, you take the main force and hold the Lower Districts. You shield the people."
"And the ship?" Varren asked, his eyes hard.
"You take the elite strike team," I said to my father. "You board the Eclipse. You kill Kraz."
"I need a heavy breaker to breach their hull shields," Varren said. "My best breakers are dead or pinned."
"I'll go," I said.
"Absolutely not," Kirkan snapped.
"He is right," Sandrakk interrupted.
We all turned to him. Sandrakk walked around the table, stopping in front of me. He looked at my sigil—the three lenses, the raw energy humming within them.
"The Eclipse uses a shifting shield frequency," Sandrakk said. "Red, Green, Blue. Cycling every few seconds. A single-color Magnus would waste too much time re-attuning. But a Triarch..." He looked at my father. "He can break the lock in seconds."
"He is sixteen," Kirkan protested.
"He is a weapon," Sandrakk countered softly. "And we are at war. Do not leave your best blade in the sheath, Kirkan."
King Varren looked at Kirkan. Then he looked at Sandrakk. Finally, he looked at me.
"If you die," he said quietly, "I will burn Rasharn to ash myself."
"Then we better not die," I said.
Varren grinned. It was a terrifying sight.
"Kirkan, hold my city. Sandrakk, coordinate the leyline defenses from here. Keep the Font stable."
"As you command, my King," Sandrakk said, bowing low. But as he rose, his eyes met mine.
There was a glint there. Something unreadable. Show me, his eyes seemed to say. Show me what you are.
"Aelius," the King barked. "With me."
We turned toward the launch bay. As the doors hissed open, revealing the smoke-choked sky and the looming shadow of the enemy flagship, I felt a strange sense of calm.
The training was over.
"Let's go say hello to the Butcher," I said.
My father laughed, and we launched ourselves into the night.