Chapter 5 - 4 — The Banished Sun [II]
Another attacker had his whole weight thrown against the stone elder’s grip, every bit of his focus on breaking it. I didn’t try to cut him — I’d already learned my blade wouldn’t do it. I drove my shoulder into the back of his knee and hooked his ankle out from under him instead.
He dropped an inch. Just an inch. It was enough for the elder’s reinforced fist to come down and finish him.
I couldn’t hurt these people. Not really. My best swing barely scratched them, and we both knew it the moment steel met skin. But a body in the wrong place, a blade in someone’s eyeline at the wrong moment — that was enough to spoil a strike, or throw a foot off its mark. And every time I managed it, an elder got half a step he wouldn’t have had otherwise.
That was all I had. So I spent it, and I kept my head down, and I tried not to think about how fast any one of them could kill me if they turned around.
Then it started to turn.
The aura swordsman finally split the stone elder’s armor for good and killed him. The chain-woman poured too much of herself into holding another elder down, and an ice spear took her through the chest before she saw it. My father caught two attackers in a wide sheet of lightning and dropped them both — but throwing it forced him to break away from Aurelian.
Aurelian took the opening instantly.
He swept a wave of solar fire across the whole chamber. My father threw both arms up and a barrier of lightning snapped into place, catching most of it — but the edges curled around him anyway. Furniture caught. Stone went black. Part of the ceiling came down in a roar of dust.
I was thrown behind the wreck of an elder’s chair.
When I forced myself back up, Aurelian was only a few steps away. His back was half-turned to me, his attention fixed on my father across the room.
He was exposed.
My hand tightened on my sword until the leather bit my palm. My breath came fast and shallow, and it wasn’t only from the fighting.
The meeting kept flashing through my head. The elders lined up to strip me of my claim. My father about to ship me off somewhere to prove I deserved the name I’d been born to.
But if I killed Aurelian right here — none of that would matter. Not one word of it.
I’d have saved the clan. The elders would have to recognize me. And my father would finally look at me and see that six years hadn’t been a joke.
I rushed him.
I used the broken stone and the smoke to cover the last steps, and I thrust the sword at his back with both hands and everything I had left.
Aurelian reached behind himself without turning around.
His bare hand closed over the blade an inch from his spine.
I pushed. I threw my whole weight into it, my boots sliding on the cracked floor. The sword didn’t move a hair.
Slowly, he turned his head to look at me.
"Oh." A flicker of something crossed his face. "If it isn’t my nephew."
Heat ran down his fingers and into the steel.
The blade went red, then white. It began to sag and bend, melting back toward the hilt, and I had to let go before the molten metal reached my hands. My fingers opened on their own. I tried to step back and my legs wouldn’t answer.
Aurelian turned the rest of the way to face me.
His eyes moved over me, and I watched him notice what wasn’t there. No aura. Nothing around me at all. Whatever mild surprise had been on his face curdled into contempt.
He laid one burning hand across my face.
"GYA— GYAAAAAAH—!"
The scream tore out of me before I even knew it was coming. His palm cooked into my cheek with a sound like raw meat dropped onto a griddle — ssssHHHHH — the skin bubbling and splitting under his fingers. I clawed at his wrist with both hands, hauling, twisting, throwing everything six years had built into my arms against it.
Nothing. He didn’t shift so much as an inch. A man pulling on a bar of white-hot iron, and the iron doesn’t even feel him there. Whatever I had wasn’t strength to him. It wasn’t anything at all.
"Jace!"
My father’s voice tore across the chamber. Lightning burst out of his body in every direction, and the shockwave hurled the nearest attackers off their feet as he came for me.
He wasn’t fast enough.
Aurelian let go of my face and buried his solar-wrapped fist in my stomach.
BWOOOM—
The blow folded me around his arm and tore me clean off the floor. Something gave, deep inside — heat and force punching straight through the middle of me, opening a hole of white agony where my stomach had been. I couldn’t even scream. There was no air left to do it with.
Then he threw me the way you throw something you’ve already decided is dead.
I smashed through the broken furniture and slammed into the wall.
My sword was gone. Half my face was burned raw, and my middle was one spreading knot of pain I couldn’t make myself look down at. My legs wouldn’t answer me. I got my arms under myself and pushed, and they folded and dropped me straight back down.
My father reached Aurelian.
His first lightning-fed punch caught Aurelian across the jaw and sent him through what was left of the council table. My father was on him before he could rise, another fist slamming into his chest.
Aurelian answered by loosing solar fire at point-blank range.
My father crossed his arms in front of his face. The flame burned through his clothes and forced him back a step, skin blistering along his forearms.
Then they were on each other again.
My father accelerated with his lightning, hammering Aurelian from one angle and then another, faster than the eye could hold. Aurelian couldn’t catch every strike — but his solar armor swallowed part of the damage, and it burned my father every time he closed the distance.
Their fists shook the whole floor. Lightning punched holes clean through the walls. Solar fire melted the platform the throne stood on. The chamber was coming apart around them while, off to the sides, the last elders and the last attackers were still busy killing each other.
I watched from the floor.
My vision kept sliding away and swimming back. Every time my eyes started to close, I forced them open again.
And I saw what Aurelian must have seen too.
My father had already cleared a Red Gate that day, before any of this. He’d spent this whole fight shielding the elders and cutting down men who were trying to reach me. He was running on nothing.
Aurelian had walked in rested. Prepared. He’d chosen the night.
My father’s lightning began to flicker.
Aurelian saw it.
Christopher gathered what he had left into one fist and charged for a final strike. But instead of pulling back from it, Aurelian stepped inside the swing. My father’s fist glanced off his shoulder, and Aurelian trapped the arm against his own body.
Solar fire erupted over his free hand.
He drove it into my father’s chest.
The last of the lightning around my father’s body flared out all at once and died.
I saw my father go still.
Aurelian pulled his fist free and let him fall, and my father dropped in front of the ruined throne and did not get up.
I tried to call out to him.
Only blood and a broken, wordless sound came out of my mouth.
Aurelian stood over him, the chamber burning down around them both, and did not even look at the body a second time.
My breathing was going shallow now. Thin. I could feel it slipping.
And the last clear thought I had wasn’t about revenge. It wasn’t about the throne, or the elders, or any of it.
It was only this — that if I’d had even a fraction of what they had, even a sliver of that strength, my father might still be breathing.
If only I had been strong enough.
[Condition has been fulfilled.]
[Now regressing.]