Chapter 4 - 3 — The Banished Sun [I]
POV: Jace
The sword hit the floor first.
Then the First Elder’s body followed it down, and blood began to spread out from under his neck in a widening dark pool. His fingers stayed curled around the edge of the open door, as if some part of him hadn’t caught up to the rest.
It happened too fast to feel real. One moment he was a wall between us and the corridor. The next he was a shape on the ground.
My father didn’t move from in front of his throne. He just stared at the body.
I knew him well enough to read what was on his face, and it wasn’t only the death that had frozen him there. It was that he hadn’t felt it coming.
Until that blade came through the door, there had been nobody in the corridor. No aura. No killing intent. No movement, no breath — nothing, and my father’s senses covered every inch of this room and beyond.
Someone had hidden an entire attacking force from one of the ten strongest Players alive.
Lightning began to crawl up his arms, thin blue threads of it winding over his skin as he turned his eyes to the doorway.
"Who dares attack the Myrmidon Clan?"
A man walked through the open door.
He didn’t answer. Behind him came the aura swordsman who’d killed the First Elder, and behind him, more — Players in dark combat clothing, filling the corridor, more of them than I could count in the smoke.
Before I could make out the first man’s face, the estate exploded.
Not near us — everywhere else. The chamber windows rattled in their frames. Smoke rose beyond the glass, and through the walls came sounds I would never forget. Screaming. Warning bells layered over the War Bell. The clash of Abilities, dozens of them, coming from the residential wings.
Because the Myrmidon estate wasn’t just a fortress. People lived here. Clan families. Servants. The old craftsmen who’d worked the forges for decades. Retired Players. Merchants. Ordinary men and women and their children who had never held a weapon in their lives.
All of that was where the explosions were.
The man stepped forward, into the light of the chamber, and my father’s anger caught in his throat.
I saw it before I understood it. The intruder had my father’s face — the same jaw, the same brow, aged along the same lines. I knew they were blood before anyone said a word.
"Aurelian?"
The name came out of my father like something dragged up from a long way down.
"Why," my father said. "You were banished. Our father cast you out. Why come back now?"
Aurelian let his eyes travel the room. The throne. The elders. The banners hanging along the walls. Me, standing among them in my soaked training clothes.
"Revenge," he said. "Isn’t that obvious?"
"You were going to be one of the greatest Players this clan ever produced." My father’s voice was tight. "And you threw it away preaching that we should stop serving governments and rule over people instead."
"Not ’over people.’ Above them. Where we already are." Aurelian’s tone stayed almost gentle. "Ordinary humans are weak, brother. Dependent. They cannot even defend their own streets. You know this better than anyone — you’ve done it for them four hundred times."
"He didn’t banish you because you were strong." My father’s jaw worked. "He banished you because you wanted to turn Players into tyrants."
"The world already belongs to us." Aurelian spread his hands to take in the burning estate beyond the walls. "Governments beg for our protection. Armies stand back and let us fight because they know they’re only in the way. Millions of people are alive tonight because Players allow it. Our father simply didn’t have the courage to say it out loud."
"And killing families?" Christopher said. "Servants? Children? That’s how you prove you deserve to lead anyone?"
Something in Aurelian’s face went hard.
"The clan chose you," he said quietly. "They stood behind our father. They watched him strip my name from me and send me out the gate, and not one of them said a word." His eyes moved across the elders. "So now they share the punishment. All of them."
My father rose fully from the throne.
Lightning gathered around his right hand, so bright it threw hard shadows across the whole chamber, black shapes lurching up the walls. The pressure of his aura pressed down through the floor, and cracks spidered out beneath his boots.
"Coming back here," he said, "was the same as choosing death."
Aurelian lifted one hand.
The air around him began to shimmer, warping the way it does over hot stone in summer. White-gold flame gathered at his fingertips and then spread up over both arms, wrapping them like pieces of the sun had come loose and clung to his skin.
I knew both of their Abilities by name. Every child raised in this clan did.
My father’s was Thunder Sovereign — the lightning that had cleared four hundred Gates. And the other one, the one they’d scrubbed from the records along with the man who carried it, I’d only ever heard whispered.
Sol Invictus. The banished sun.
The seven remaining elders moved.
One drew stone up over his body until he wore it like armor. Another raised ice spears that hung and turned above his shoulders. A third wrapped his hands in tight coils of compressed wind, and the last threw a translucent barrier up around me and the wounded side of the chamber, sealing me in behind a wall of faint light.
Aurelian’s men answered.
The swordsman’s blade drank in a coat of cutting aura. Another attacker swelled — his muscles thickening, his skin darkening and hardening like bark. A woman opened her palms and black chains poured out of them and pooled on the floor. Another gathered fire around the head of a long spear.
Aurelian looked at them.
"Kill them."
My father moved first.
He vanished in a burst of lightning and crossed the entire chamber before the attackers could scatter. His fist landed in the hardened man’s chest with a crack of thunder that I felt in my teeth, and the man went through a stone pillar and out the other side.
Aurelian caught his next strike.
Lightning-wrapped fist met burning palm, and the sound of it was less a punch than an explosion. The floor split between them. Banners tore off the walls. The shockwave threw me and half the fighters in the room off our feet.
Then everything happened at once.
The ice elder loosed his spears, and the swordsman had to carve them out of the air before they reached him. The wind elder struck at his flank — but the woman’s black chains whipped across the room, wrapped his forearm, and yanked him off balance.
The stone-armored elder charged straight through the middle of it and drove an attacker into the wall. Before he could finish the man, the swordsman appeared at his back and cut across the stone plating again and again.
The first strikes only chipped it.
So he stopped swinging wide. He drew all that cutting aura down into one narrow edge and hit the same crack a second time. The blade broke through the armor and sank deep into the elder’s back.
I’d been knocked to one side in the first collision.
The barrier around me shattered the instant its elder was pulled into the fighting, and the light winked out. Suddenly there was nothing between me and any of it.
I could barely follow my father and Aurelian at all. They moved too fast — I caught only the flashes where they met, lightning and solar flame throwing broken chunks of the chamber across the room each time their fists connected.
And everywhere else, elders were fighting for their lives while attackers pushed past them, toward the doors that led deeper into the estate. Toward the people.
I drew my sword.
I wasn’t stupid. I couldn’t stand in front of any of these people and trade blows — I’d be dead before I lifted the blade. So I stayed low, in among the fallen furniture and broken pillars, and I only moved when an attacker’s back was turned.
Six years. Six years of swinging at a post in the rain. This was the only thing it had ever been for.
An enemy Player had one of the elders cornered, drawing back a spear wreathed in fire.
I came up behind him and rammed my sword at his back with both hands. The point skidded off his skin — hardened, the same as the swordsman’s bark-covered ally — and barely dragged a shallow line across his shoulder. Nothing. On any other night it would have been nothing.
But he felt it, and he flinched, and his throw went wide of the elder.
That half-second was all the elder needed. A burst of wind caught the man in the chest and put him down.
My hands were shaking. I didn’t wait around. I was already moving.