The Skysworn Captain gave no sign whether he thought this was good or bad. He kept leaning against the wall, chewing his leaf. “Did he do that to your core?”

From his previous conversations with Renfei and Bai Rou, Lindon gathered that they assumed his pure core was a sort of disguise to cover the Path of Black Flame. “I split my core on my own, sir. Before I met Eithan.”

“And what did he want you to do with this new Path? What purpose did he have for you?”

Finally, Lindon saw what the Underlord was getting at. Naru Gwei assumed this was all part of Eithan’s plan, and wanted to know what that plan was.

“For the duel, sir. I asked him for a Path that might allow me to fight someone stronger than I was.”

“The way I’ve heard it,” Gwei said, “Eithan allowed the duel. Even proposed it.”

“His favorite training method is…I guess I would call it extreme duress.”

The Skysworn Captain swallowed the leaf and withdrew a long straw from within his armor. He placed it between his teeth and continued chewing. “So he proposed this duel, held you to it, and then held out the Path of Black Flame as your only salvation. That doesn’t sound like a plan to you?”

“He’s pushing me forward,” Lindon insisted. “He’s helping me grow.”

Naru Gwei unfolded his arms and leaned closer. “Into what?”

Lindon had no answer to that.

“What did he say you would do after the duel?”

“Nothing I know of. He’s helping me advance.” Lindon felt less confident than he had before.

The Underlord stared at him for a long moment, then jerked his head toward the door. His two subordinates traded looks, though they couldn’t do anything but leave. Bai Rou ducked his woven hat beneath the doorframe, and the cloud over Renfei’s head passed through with plenty of room to spare.

They didn’t look back at Lindon.

“The duel is over,” Naru Gwei said. “Now, in the middle of an imperial crisis that he helped cause, he’s trying to slip a Blackflame into my Skysworn. While he tries to take over himself. I know what he’s doing, linking Underlords to the Skysworn. He’s trying to win them over from me.”

The Underlord had loomed over Lindon, the air in the room swirling and picking up into a windstorm. His scarred face was hostile: he was working himself up into a fury. Whatever was happening out there had put too much pressure on the Skysworn Captain, whether it was the threat of Redmoon Hall or whatever Eithan had done.

Either way, Naru Gwei had decided Lindon was part of it.

Lindon’s right arm started straining against its restraints, and he almost wanted to help it.

The Underlord leaned toward Lindon, his dirty gray hair swinging closer. Lindon shut his mouth. Naru Gwei's weather-beaten face somehow looked both weary and intense, as though he were bracing himself for an unpleasant task that he had performed hundreds of times before.

“Lower your head,” the Underlord commanded, and Lindon could hear his death in that command.

“It’s not Eithan!” Lindon said desperately, tapping his Blackflame core. His eyes heated, and he knew from experience that they would have transformed into a copy of Orthos’ eyes: pure black with red irises. The Path of Black Flame flooded into his left hand, and his right remained mercifully untouched and intact.

He poured that power into his cuffs even as he Enforced his muscles. If he melted them, they would burn through his wrists, so he had to hope he could tear his hand free before the damage was too great.

Instead, the madra broke to steam on contact with the cuffs. A spike of cold shot up Lindon's arms, as though he'd driven an icicle through his wrists.

Halfsilver in the cuffs. He'd remembered, but hoped against hope that there was some flaw.

“A friend wanted to join! Yerin, I mentioned her earlier, she’s the companion that Eithan adopted. She wanted to fight Redmoon Hall, so she insisted on joining the Skysworn! I didn’t want to, but I couldn’t let her down!” He was babbling as though every word out of his mouth would slow down the Underlord’s blow.

Considering that he was still alive, maybe there was something to that theory.

“She just wanted to help! And…ah, so do I! Of course!” As Naru Gwei’s hand drifted upward toward the hilt of his sword, Lindon's breath came faster and faster. His breath started to blur, and the ice in his wrists grew sharper as he poured more effort into breaking the shackles. Even his white arm was writhing with desperation. Just a little more, he was sure. He had to believe that. Just a little more...

“Eithan adopted her too,” the Captain said quietly, and Lindon forced himself to take deeper breaths. He could feel Orthos growing agitated in his own cell, feeding on Lindon’s fear—if it went too far, or if Lindon was killed, the turtle would go on a rampage.

“Why?” Naru Gwei continued. “What was special about her?”

“She was apprenticed to a Sage,” Lindon blurted out. Yet again, he wondered if he should be sharing this, but Yerin had never kept it a secret. She would proudly tell anyone.

“Which Sage?”

“The Sword Sage!”

Naru Gwei’s green-armored fingers wrapped around his sword hilt. “Which Sword Sage?”

There was more than one?

“I don’t know!” Lindon insisted. “I don’t know! She’s on the Path of the Endless Sword, and she learned it from him, but I don’t know if he had another name, or...”

After a moment, the Captain’s hand moved down. He stared at the wall, and Lindon felt a light brush on his spirit as the Underlord’s perception moved through him…and kept going.

He was looking for Yerin.

***

Naru Gwei wasn’t an Arelius, so he had to rely on his spiritual perception to find someone. He’d long been jealous of their bloodline legacy; it was wasted on them, he felt. The world’s best scouting tool, and they wasted it on civic maintenance.

But there were some things that an old-fashioned spiritual scan did best.

He found a nearby Highgold sword artist almost immediately. Her madra moved in smooth, steady rhythms—she was cycling. That would be Yerin. There were other sword artists nearby, but none of them so close.

He’d read reports that had mentioned Yerin, but he hadn’t paid them much attention. He had been focused on Lindon, the Blackflame. He’d even seen her once himself, briefly, though she hadn’t stood out to him.

But now he’d found yet another seed that Eithan had tried to plant in the Skysworn.

At first, he felt nothing out of the ordinary. She had a powerful soul, with madra that was potent for a Highgold. She may be on the verge of Truegold, or she might have used some elixir. None of that was cause for alarm.

But upon closer inspection, he felt something: a seal. Fueled by soulfire.

The seal was like a cage embedded in her soul, and it must have been made recently. Soulfire couldn’t last forever.

What was inside?

He ran his perception around the box, probing for gaps, but he found none. Instead, he sat there with his attention on the box itself, waiting for an impression to drift through.

After a few breaths of time, he felt a wisp of something from inside the seal: blood. Like a monster that had spilled an ocean of blood and was hungry to spill more.