Ascension Gates: Rise of the Beast Monarch

The black crystal broke with a sound like a bell cracking in half.

Aether felt it before he heard it. A pulse rolled outward through the Ashen Star Wilderness, low and heavy, passing through the soles of his boots and up through his ribs until his teeth ached. The shards fell like black rain, and where they touched the ash-grey ground they dissolved into thin threads of smoke.

Then the Wilderness went silent.

It was not the silence of a quiet night. It was the silence of a held breath. The wind stopped. The distant howls that had followed them for two days stopped. Even the ash, which always drifted lazily across this cursed land, hung motionless in the air.

"Aether," Liora said quietly, one hand already on the hilt of her weapon. "Something is wrong."

"I know."

Far to the east, the treeline of blackened trunks began to shake. A moment later the first of the mutated beasts burst out of it, a hulking thing with three curved horns and skin the color of old bruises. An hour ago it had been hunting them with patient hunger. Now it ran past without so much as a glance. Behind it came another, then ten more, then a flood of snarling, shrieking bodies tearing across the plain in blind panic.

They were not charging. They were fleeing.

Flame Sovereign Pup pressed itself against Aether’s leg, golden fur standing on end, its small body trembling. This was a beast that had stared down creatures three times its size without flinching. Aether had never once seen it afraid. Yet now its eyes were fixed on the ground, as though it could see straight through the soil to whatever lay beneath.

"Easy," Aether murmured, resting a hand on its head. "I’m here."

Liora took half a step forward, and Aether caught her sleeve.

"Wait."

"They’re running from something. We should be doing the same."

"Or we should find out what it is before it finds us." Aether did not take his eyes off the ground. "Charging in blind is how people die in places like this. Give me a moment."

So he watched. He watched the way the dust settled, and the way the cracked earth around the shattered crystal had begun to glow, so faintly at first that he almost mistook it for a trick of the light. A thin line of color seeped up through the fissures in the stone, neither gold nor red but somewhere in between, a burning amber like the heart of a forge.

Spirit Fairy drifted out from behind his shoulder. Its translucent wings gave off a soft green glimmer, and its tiny face was unusually serious. It circled the glowing cracks once, twice, then came back to hover in front of Aether’s eyes.

"This isn’t ordinary beast energy," it said.

The words were barely a whisper, yet they carried a weight that made Liora stop breathing for a second.

"Explain," Aether said.

"Beast energy has a pulse. It rises and falls with the creature’s anger, its hunger, its fear." Spirit Fairy turned back toward the glowing ground. "This has no pulse. It doesn’t move. It simply is. It feels like something that has been lying still for so long that it forgot how to move at all."

A soft voice answered from the shadows at Aether’s side. "It’s coming from something that has been sealed for a very long time."

Fallen Succubus stepped out of the gloom, her dark eyes half-lidded, her usual lazy smile nowhere to be found. She crouched and laid two slender fingers against the glowing earth. The golden-red light flickered against her skin, and for a heartbeat she looked almost like a stranger.

"Sealed," Aether repeated.

"Not buried. Not forgotten. Someone worked very hard to put it there, and someone else has worked very hard to keep it there." She lifted her fingers away. "The seal is old, Aether. And it is tired."

Liora exhaled slowly. "That explains why the beasts are running."

"It explains part of it," Aether said. "It doesn’t explain why Kael came into this place alone."

His brother in all but blood had disappeared nine days ago, leaving behind a single message scrawled in a hurried hand. Do not follow me. Whatever you hear, stay away. Aether had read it a hundred times. Kael was not a man who gave warnings lightly. If he had written those words, it meant he was afraid.

And Aether had come anyway.

He rose, brushing ash from his knees. "We follow the energy. It’s the only trail we have left."

It was Liora who first noticed the damage.

"Look at this."

She had stopped beside a stand of dead trees. The trunks were not broken so much as scoured. Long black stripes ran across the bark, and where the stripes passed, the wood crumbled at a touch. A few paces away, a boulder had been cut cleanly in half, its edges melted smooth.

Aether knelt and ran his thumb along the nearest scar. The residue was oily, cold, and faintly sour. He knew it at once.

"Abyss Raven. That’s its darkness. It eats the light out of whatever it touches."

"And this?" Liora pointed to the boulder.

Aether examined the edge and grimaced. "Voidscale Serpent. Its venom corrodes everything. Kael always said he could never lean on a wall beside it without checking it first."

A little farther on, they found a trail of shallow, staggered footprints that vanished halfway through each step, as though whoever made them had stepped into a shadow and out again somewhere else. Fallen Succubus gave a low hum of appreciation. "Duskwalker Beast," she said. "It moves through shadows rather than over the ground. Your friend fights beautifully."

"He does." Aether could read the story in the wreckage. Kael had fought through dozens of mutated beasts, calling on each of his companions in turn, never resting for more than a few moments. It was a remarkable thing to witness, even secondhand. But something nagged at Aether, a small wrong note in an otherwise familiar song.

He walked another hundred paces before he understood what it was.

"Aether?" Liora said. "What is it?"

"Kael wasn’t fighting his way toward the gate."

"What do you mean?"

"Every attack is aimed outward. He was clearing a perimeter, holding a line." Aether pointed at the trail. "Every beast he fought, he fought with his back toward the deep Wilderness. He wasn’t pushing forward. He was pushing back."

"He’s trying to stop something from escaping," Aether said quietly.

Nobody answered. There was nothing to say.

They did not get far before the Wilderness remembered that it was alive.

The ground ahead trembled. From every direction at once, shapes rose out of the ash. These were not the fleeing creatures from before. They were the ones too slow, too wounded, or too stubborn to run, and the energy leaking from beneath the earth had driven them half mad. Their eyes burned the same amber as the cracks in the stone. Their bodies had begun to swell and twist, muscle bulging under torn hide, bone breaking through skin in jagged crowns.

There were dozens of them, and at the center of the horde stood an armored brute the size of a small house, with a ridge of obsidian plates down its spine and a mouth wide enough to swallow a horse.

Liora drew her weapon. "Aether, we can’t hold this many."

"You won’t have to."

She looked at him sharply. Aether was not reaching for his own weapon. He simply stood with his hands at his sides and spoke calmly to the three creatures gathered around him.

"This one is yours. All of it. I won’t step in unless I have to."

Flame Sovereign Pup looked up at him. Spirit Fairy blinked. Fallen Succubus raised one perfect eyebrow.

"You’re serious," she said.

"Completely. I’ve always been the center of every fight. I decide, I direct, I fill the gaps. But the three of you have never had to cover each other without me. If we’re going to face whatever is under this ground, you need to learn how to move as one."

For a moment, none of them said anything. Then Flame Sovereign Pup let out a low, fierce growl and planted itself between its master and the oncoming horde. Its fur ignited, golden flame rippling along its spine and rolling off its shoulders in great sheets of heat. It was small, but in the light of its own fire, it looked enormous.

Spirit Fairy rose above it and opened its wings, and a soft emerald glow wrapped around the pup like a second skin. The flames did not dim. They steadied, grew denser, burned cleaner. Every scratch the pup had gathered over two days sealed itself closed.

"Hold the front," Spirit Fairy called. "I’ll keep you standing."

The pup barked once, agreement and challenge in a single sound.

And Fallen Succubus smiled.

"Now," Fallen Succubus whispered.

The world shimmered.

Where there had been one Flame Sovereign Pup, suddenly there were a dozen, standing in a ragged line, each one wreathed in the same blazing gold. The beasts hesitated. Half of them lunged at the wrong targets and hit nothing but smoke.

But the fire was real. That was the clever part. Fallen Succubus had taken the pup’s own flames and threaded them through each illusion, so that every false copy breathed real heat. Every phantom spat a ribbon of fire, and every ribbon curved along a path no creature could predict. The horde was caught in a web of burning light, with no way to tell which flames were solid and which were smoke.

"Spirit Fairy," Fallen Succubus murmured. "The true one is on the left."

"I see it."

Spirit Fairy’s wings flared. A bright green pulse touched the real flame, the one thread among a dozen that carried the pup’s true strength, and the fire thickened and brightened and rose like a living thing. It surged through the horde in a single devastating line.

The armored brute tried to turn. It did not make it. The golden flame punched through its obsidian plating as if the stone were paper, and the great beast crumpled with a groan that shook the earth.

The rest of the horde broke and scattered into the ash, howling.

Liora lowered her weapon slowly. "That was..."

"That was the first time," Aether said.

Their synchronization was not just improving. It was beginning to evolve.

He was about to say as much when the pup cried out.

It was a sharp, startled sound that cut through the smoke like a knife. Aether was at its side in two strides. The pup’s body had gone rigid. Its golden fur had darkened to a deep crimson at the edges, and along its spine, where the old, unstable thread of golden light always shimmered faintly beneath its skin, something had ignited.

The thread blazed.

It lasted only a few seconds, but in those seconds Aether saw the Sovereign Flame change. It was no longer the clean, bright fire he knew. It had become heavier, hungrier, with a dark gold shimmer that seemed to swallow the light around it. A wounded straggler lunged out of the smoke in a last desperate attack, and the pup lashed out without thinking. The changed flame caught the creature across its flank.

It did not burn the beast.

It drank.

The flame sank into the creature’s body and pulled. Aether watched, frozen, as a thread of pale light drew itself out of the beast’s chest, a faint shimmer with a shape he had never seen, something ancient and layered and deeply personal. The beast screamed. The light poured into the pup’s flame and vanished, and the creature collapsed, still alive but hollowed out, its eyes blank.

It had not simply taken the beast’s strength. It had devoured the energy of the beast’s bloodline.

"Stop!" Aether said, and the word came out before he had decided to speak. "Pup, that’s enough."

The pup flinched. The dark gold shimmer sputtered and went out. The crimson faded from its fur, and the pup swayed and sat down heavily, panting.

Aether crouched and cupped its small face in both hands. "Are you hurt? Does anything feel wrong?"

"That wasn’t an ordinary skill," Liora said slowly.

"No." Aether stood, still looking at the pup. "Normal beasts don’t have abilities like that. That might be the first sign of its next stage."