Ascension Gates: Rise of the Beast Monarch

For two days after the strange symbol appeared on his wall, Aether found himself caught in a quiet, persistent temptation. The urge to follow the temporal signal that had left it there pulled at him constantly, a low and insistent hum at the back of his thoughts that refused to fully quiet no matter how deliberately he tried to focus on his training instead. He would be in the middle of a breathing exercise, or halfway through a passage of ancient text, and his mind would drift, unbidden, back to the memory of that frozen candle flame, that whispered voice, that silver clock turning somewhere far beyond his reach.

He found himself, more than once, standing at the edge of the clearing behind Liora’s house, staring off toward the horizon in the general direction he suspected the clock’s resonance had originated from, his hand drifting unconsciously toward the pocket where he now kept the silver feather wrapped carefully in cloth. He never took more than a few steps before catching himself, but the pull remained, patient and persistent, a quiet argument running constantly beneath the surface of his thoughts. He told himself that a being capable of stopping time itself around him, even briefly, could likely find him again whenever she wished, which meant that chasing her now accomplished little beyond satisfying his own impatience. The reasoning held, mostly, but it did not entirely silence the hunger beneath it.

It was Fallen Succubus who finally gave voice to the caution he had been circling around without quite admitting to himself.

"You’re thinking about chasing it," she said one evening, watching him with the same unflinching directness she always brought to conversations he would rather avoid.

He did not bother denying it. "Wouldn’t you? Something reached directly into this room. Stopped time itself around me. Left a message that might be the only real lead I have toward understanding any of this."

"That’s exactly the problem," she said. "Think about what actually happened. A being capable of manipulating time chose, deliberately, to reveal herself to you. She didn’t need to speak. She didn’t need to leave that symbol glowing where you’d be certain to see it. If she wanted to remain hidden, she could have simply vanished the moment her message was delivered, leaving you with nothing but a cracked jade and a frightened friend’s voice to go on." She crossed her arms, her expression grave. "She wanted you to notice. Which means whatever happens next, whatever path that symbol is meant to draw you toward, it’s a path she’s already anticipated. Possibly one she’s already prepared for."

Aether sat with that for a long moment, turning it over the careful way he had learned to turn over every difficult truth since waking. "You think it’s a trap."

"I think it’s bait," she corrected. "Whether that makes it a trap depends entirely on what you do next. If you go charging after her now, weak as you still are, you’re walking into whatever she’s built for you on her terms, not yours. That’s not caution. That’s foolishness dressed up as courage."

He let out a slow breath, the temptation that had been pulling at him for two days finally settling into something more manageable beneath her words. She was right, and some part of him had known it from the beginning, even as the hunger for answers had made it difficult to admit.

"If someone can manipulate time," he said slowly, testing the thought aloud, "chasing them while I’m weak would be foolish." He looked up at her, something resolving in his expression. "My priority has to stay the same. Strengthen myself. Strengthen my beasts. I’ll investigate the clock when I’m actually ready to face whatever’s waiting on the other side of it. Not before."

Fallen Succubus studied him for a long moment, and something like approval settled into her expression. "Good," she said simply, and left it at that.

It was only a few days later, during one of his regular training sessions with Flame Sovereign Pup, that the next complication arose, sudden and unmistakable.

They had been running through a familiar drill, the pup unleashing controlled bursts of Sovereign Flame while Aether practiced guiding and shaping the fire with his own will, when the pup suddenly lost control entirely. Its flames erupted outward in a chaotic, blinding surge, far more powerful than anything Aether had seen it produce before, but wild and unstable in a way that sent heat rolling across the clearing in unpredictable waves. The pup yelped in distress, clearly struggling against its own fire, and Aether had to throw up a hasty barrier to keep the flames from scorching the surrounding trees.

It took several tense minutes before the flames finally subsided, leaving the pup trembling and exhausted in the center of a blackened circle of earth, its usual confident energy replaced by something closer to frightened confusion.

Aether knelt beside it immediately, running careful hands along its fur, checking for injury even as he reached inward with his senses to understand what had happened. What he found settled a familiar, uneasy certainty into his chest.

The problem was not a lack of energy. If anything, the pup’s reserves had grown remarkably since his awakening, fed by the faint golden thread he had noticed woven through its flame. The problem was something else entirely, a kind of pressure building from within, as though the pup’s bloodline itself had simply reached the edge of what its current form could safely contain.

He spent that evening buried in every evolution record he could find, cross-referencing what he already knew of Flame Sovereign lineages against the specific pattern of instability he had witnessed. By the time the candle beside him had burned low, he had narrowed the possibilities down to three distinct evolutionary paths, each described in varying detail across the oldest texts he could locate.

Inferno Sovereign. Sunfire Monarch. Hellfire Emperor.

Each path promised a transformation that would resolve the growing pressure within the pup’s bloodline, channeling its power into a new and stable form rather than letting it continue building toward some uncontrolled and dangerous release. But each path, without exception, demanded resources rare enough that simply locating them would present a challenge in its own right. Ancient flame essences, said to exist only in the deepest scars left behind by long-extinct volcanic beasts. Fragments of sunlight crystallized across centuries within forgotten shrines. A single feather, according to one especially obscure fragment, taken from a creature that had not been reliably sighted in generations.

He read through each path’s description more carefully, trying to weigh not merely the difficulty of the resources each demanded but what kind of creature the pup might become at the end of each road. The Inferno Sovereign path, as best he could tell from the fragmented text, favored raw destructive power above all else, a transformation suited to beasts meant to overwhelm enemies through sheer, unrelenting force. The Sunfire Monarch path spoke instead of balance, of flame tempered by discipline and control, a path that seemed, to Aether’s eye, closer to the spirit the pup had always shown even in its wildest moments. The Hellfire Emperor path he understood least of all, the surviving fragments describing it in language so old and so heavily corrupted by centuries of careless copying that he could make out little beyond a vague sense of something darker and more consuming than the other two.

Aether closed the last of the texts with a weary sigh, rubbing at his tired eyes. Whatever path they eventually chose, it was clear they would need to go looking for the resources required, rather than hoping to simply stumble upon them close to home.

Spirit Fairy’s evolutionary bottleneck revealed itself not long after, in a quieter and more intimate fashion.

She had been working with him during one of their evening soul sessions, tracing the strange new pathways that had opened within him since his awakening, when she suddenly paused, her expression shifting into something thoughtful and slightly troubled.

"I think I’ve reached my own limit," she said quietly, withdrawing her attention from his soul to focus inward on her own instead. She was silent for a long moment, clearly examining something Aether could not perceive, before she spoke again. "It’s not the same as what happened with the pup. I don’t need a physical treasure, not in the way his bloodline does."

"Then what do you need?" Aether asked.

She hesitated, and he could tell, watching her expression, that whatever answer she was about to give troubled her more than she wanted to let on. "A living soul-type resource," she said finally. "Something capable of surviving inside my spiritual domain without being consumed by it immediately. That kind of resource is rare, Aether. Rarer than almost anything a beast tamer typically searches for."

He understood immediately why she looked so uneasy telling him this. Soul-type resources of that kind were notoriously difficult to find, and more difficult still to obtain safely, often guarded by dangers that made ordinary treasure hunting look simple by comparison.

She must have seen the resolve already forming in his expression, because she spoke again quickly, her voice carrying a note of genuine concern. "I don’t want you to search for something dangerous just because I need it," she said. "My evolution can wait. It isn’t worth risking yourself over."

Aether smiled at her, warmth softening the determination in his expression without diminishing it at all. "You’re my beast," he said simply. "If you’re going to evolve, I’ll find a way. That’s not a burden, Spirit Fairy. It’s a promise."

She looked at him for a long moment, something gentle and grateful passing behind her eyes, and said nothing further, though the quiet warmth of her presence beside him afterward spoke clearly enough of what his words had meant to her.

Fallen Succubus’s situation, when he finally raised the question with her directly, proved more complicated still.

She was quiet for a long moment after he asked, her gaze drifting toward some middle distance he could not follow. "My path is different from theirs," she said finally. "I don’t need a normal evolution resource. Not yet. What I need is to restore a portion of power that was sealed away from me, long before you and I were ever bound together."

Aether frowned, something cold settling into his chest at the careful weight behind her words. "Sealed by whom?"

"That’s a longer story than we have time for tonight," she said, deflecting the question with a practiced ease that told him she had done so many times before. "What matters is this. If I restore even a portion of that sealed power, it may attract attention. Beings who remember what I once was, beings who had reason to want me sealed in the first place, might notice the moment my power begins stirring again."

"How dangerous is it?" he asked quietly.

She met his eyes directly, and there was no softness in her answer, only blunt and honest clarity. "Dangerous enough that I was sealed in the first place."

Aether did not push her further. He sat with the weight of her answer for a long moment, and then, rather than demanding more, he simply nodded.

"Then we won’t unlock it yet," he said. "Not until we’re ready. Not until we understand the risk clearly enough to face it properly, together." He held her gaze steadily. "I won’t force this on you, Fallen Succubus. Whatever happened to seal that power away, I trust that you’ll tell me when the time is right."

Something shifted in her expression, subtle but unmistakable, a loosening of some old and familiar tension she had perhaps carried for longer than he could guess. She said nothing more about it, but the gratitude in her silence carried its own kind of weight.

It was during his continued search through the academy’s older records, searching for anything that might help him locate the resources his three companions needed, that Aether first came across mention of the Ashen Star Wilderness.

The records describing it were old, fragmentary, and clearly written by someone with limited patience for thoroughness, but what they did reveal was enough to catch his full attention immediately. The Wilderness, abandoned now for longer than anyone currently living could precisely say, had once served as a favored hunting ground for powerful beast tamers in search of exactly the kind of rare evolutionary resources Aether now needed. Ancient territories still claimed by beasts whose bloodlines predated most recorded history. Broken inheritance grounds, their original purpose lost to time but still occasionally yielding fragments of power to those bold enough to search them. Rare flame resources scattered throughout its deeper regions, soul-type plants said to grow nowhere else, mutated beasts whose strange evolutions made them simultaneously valuable and dangerous, and, mentioned only briefly and with clear unease by whoever had originally compiled the record, a sealed ruin belonging to a civilization no one had ever successfully identified.

Aether read through every fragment he could find twice over, his excitement building with each new detail. Here, in a single abandoned region, might lie resources suited to all three of his companions at once, rather than requiring him to search three separate corners of the world for each one individually.

He noted, too, with a more cautious kind of interest, the scattered warnings woven throughout the older records, brief and often incomplete, hinting at hunters who had entered the Wilderness in search of treasure and never returned, at territories claimed so fiercely by their resident beasts that even well-prepared expeditions had been forced to retreat, at the sealed ruin whose origins no scholar across several generations had ever managed to properly identify. One particularly old fragment, its ink faded nearly to illegibility, described the ruin only as a place where history itself seemed to behave differently, where travelers reported losing track of days that should have passed normally and finding, upon their return, that weeks had vanished from their memory without explanation. He read that passage twice, an uneasy chill settling into his chest, before setting the records aside to gather his supplies.