The crowd rippled as someone pushed through, and Lindon turned, readying his madra in case it was another challenger. He sincerely hoped it wasn't; he had never had to adjust his strength to avoid hurting someone before. If they attacked, he couldn't hold back.

From the wall of people, a girl stumbled out. She was slender and a little taller than Yerin, with her hair pulled back into a long black ponytail. She wore white-and-black sacred artist's robes, with a breastplate of smooth purple armor over her chest. The armor matched her eyes, which were a startling, vivid purple. The eyes looked human, not as though she'd borrowed them from a sacred beast through a contract, but he couldn't be sure.

She carried a staff in one hand. It was as tall as she was, thick as her wrist, and made of smooth-looking black tendons. The tendons coiled up to the top of the staff, which was capped by a dragon's head.

The girl stumbled as she came out of the crowd, steadied herself, and then dropped to her knees next to Kotai Taien. "Oh, wow! You really hammered him, didn’t you? Just…” She gave the air a little mock jab. “He’s on the Path of the Unstained Shield, too. Must have been skipping his training, huh?”

She looked around at the other gray-skinned youths standing around. They shifted in place, clearly unsure how to respond.

Taien coughed again, blood splattering his lips.

“Are you his…friend?” Lindon asked hesitantly.

“I try to be friendly, when I can!” she chirped, brushing a lock of hair away from her eye and smiling brightly. “But no, I can’t say that I’ve ever met him before.” She put two fingers to his ribs and winced. “Sorry, you must be in pain. Give me a second.”

She removed a pouch tied at her waist, rummaging inside. Her hand seemed to dip further into the pouch than it should have, and Lindon noticed that she wore tight black gloves up to her wrist. They seemed to be made out of the same substance as her staff, as though she had dipped her hands in glossy black liquid. Her Goldsign, perhaps?

After a moment of rummaging around, she brightened, withdrawing a smooth white bottle with a cloth tied over its opening. She untied it in one swift motion, popping out a round green-and-gray pill.

Lindon could smell it from where he stood, like a rainstorm in a pine forest.

“Open up,” she called down. When he didn’t respond, she propped his head up and shoved the pill into his mouth. He gagged for a moment, his face turning red, but she held his mouth closed and he eventually swallowed.

The effect was immediate. Light of green, red, and purple burst from his chest in long strings, and the aura inside of his body was ignited into a storm. He sat up as though someone had pulled him on a string, gasping loudly, pink eyes wide. The fish flying in the air around his head grew excited, bobbing up and down and all around his face.

The girl slapped him on the back, smiling proudly. “There we go, good as new! Try not to eat for an hour or two, or you might start vomiting up living creatures. I’ve done it, it’s not pretty.”

Only a few seconds later, Taien was conscious again, breathing steadily. He glanced once at Lindon and then looked away, turning instead to the young woman who had saved him. “I thank you. The Blackflame attacked me before I was—”

At the sight of her eyes, he froze. She waited patiently, seeming to expect what was coming.

“…Akura?” he asked, voice hoarse.

“Akura Mercy,” she said. “I’m honored to meet you.”

If everyone had taken a step back when they’d seen Lindon crush the other guy’s ribs, they fled at the mention of Mercy’s family name. Even the other gray-skinned members of the Kotai clan abandoned their fallen cousin, scrambling to get away.

There were two types of people who stayed: the ones who looked as confused as Lindon felt, and the ones who were bowing too deeply to run. Not everyone had heard of the Akura name, it seemed. But all of the students from major clans had: none of the Jai, Naru, or Kotai remained.

Except for Kotai Taien. His gray face went ashen, and he planted his forehead on the ground. “Forgive me my disrespect,” he said. “I am not worthy of your help.”

Mercy pushed herself to her feet and swayed for a second as though unused to her own legs. She leaned on her staff for balance, and the dragon’s head at the top shone with purple light. Its eyes were glowing purple pinpricks, and Lindon thought he heard it snarl.

“No atoning necessary,” Mercy said with a smile. “Just don’t bow to me anymore, how about that?”

Taien jumped up as though the ground had become red-hot, and vanished into the crowd just as quickly.

Mercy looked after him for a while, then sighed, and walked into the distance idly twirling her staff.

“…what just happened?” Lindon asked Orthos.

No response. Lindon looked to the turtle on his left.

Orthos had withdrawn his head and all his limbs into his shell. His core seemed small and quiet, though that could have been because of the veil over his spirit. After a moment, his voice echoed from within the shell. “Is she gone?”

“She didn’t seem so bad to me,” Lindon said, watching Mercy’s ponytail vanish into the crowd. Every few steps, she tripped over her own feet and had to catch herself on her staff.

Orthos peeked out of his shell, confirming that she really was gone, before he finally emerged. “If she’s really a descendant of the Akura clan, we’re lucky she was in a good mood. Her family owns three-quarters of the continent.”

“Not the Empire?”

“The Blackflame Empire is one of their territories,” Orthos said, still staring at where Mercy had vanished. “And not their most valuable. She might receive the Empire as a coming-of-age present.”

“Then why doesn’t the Emperor come from the Akura clan?”

Orthos snorted smoke. “The Emperor runs the Empire. They own it. They don’t put one of their own on the throne because they don’t have to. Naru Huan knows enough to do whatever they want him to.”

Lindon rested a hand on the turtle’s head. Though Orthos would never acknowledge it, Lindon knew he found it comforting. “She must be impressive, to get a dragon to back down.”

“Even dragons,” Orthos said, “know when to bow.”

***

Eithan stared up at the fortress of death and wondered how he had gotten in so far over his head.

The heart of Akura clan territory was clearly designed to intimidate anyone who laid eyes on it. The wall—which rose high over his head and stretched for miles beyond sight—was made of absolutely black Forged madra and topped with man-sized sword blades. He was fairly certain that the material of the walls had at least some aspect of death-madra to it, from the icy cold dread that pressed against his senses and the cold howls that he heard from deep within.

And that was just the outer wall. The Emperor had a gatekey that had transported Eithan over ten thousand miles straight to the entrance, but even such a key couldn't get him in the door. The Akura family Matriarch must have created the gatekey herself, or one of her close disciples, because no one in the Blackflame Empire had such control of space.

The guards were even more intimidating than the wall they guarded. The two Remnants were the dark green of murky swamp-water, and they looked like dried lizard-corpses. Only they were fifteen feet tall, and each of them carried a halberd that blazed with black-and-violet flame. A different breed of dragon's fire than Blackflame, but just as deadly.