A low rumble sounded all around.
Kael balanced his blade on his fingers absently, watching the trees drift past the wagon with distant eyes.
It had been good, traveling like this. For the first time in as long as he could remember he had something close to actual free time, and he had spent it the way he would have chosen to spend it normally. Reading. Learning. Following whatever thread of curiosity presented itself. The old couple had filled in gaps he hadn't known existed, the kind of mundane knowledge that books rarely thought worth recording. Kael had never measured the value of knowledge by where it came from or what field it belonged to. Knowledge was power, and curiosity had its own justification simply by existing.
This free time, by any reasonable measure, had been exactly what he needed.
And yet.
He still felt like he had stalled.
'I'll need a mote that helps me move through the world faster. Eventually.'
He flicked the blade into the air, caught it, and slid it into its sheath.
Just as he settled the blade on his lower back the wagon stilled.
"This next stretch is a little dangerous." Julian started. "It's infested with ruby monkeys. Could one of you head ahead and make our presence known before we move through? Last thing we want is to startle them."
Kael stood and rolled his shoulders. He had been wanting to stretch his legs for a while now.
His shirt sleeve fluttered as he dropped down onto the dry dirt below.
He took a breath.
The air was dry despite all the vegetation surrounding them.
"I'll go. Start moving again in twenty minutes." Kael said, and walked ahead without waiting for a response.
His hand rested lazily on the handle as he ducked under a branch.
'So this is the Weeping Willow Woods.'
All around him old and crooked trees stood draped in thick moss, their crowns heavy with low hanging branches that swayed in the wind like emerald curtains.
From what he understood, a long time ago one of the nine Paragons had planted billions of willow trees along the entire western coastline while attempting to refine a mote. No records survived of what that mote was meant to be. The forest had outlasted the attempt regardless, becoming something grand in its own right, a symbolic feature of the west that had long since outgrown its origin.
Maybe it was the idea of walking where a Paragon once had, or the ancient feeling the willows radiated, or most likely a combination of both. A poem found its way into his thoughts.
Like a weeping willow,
I bow before the breeze;
beneath an indifferent heaven,
there are no guarantees.
The rigid soon are broken,
the stubborn seldom stay;
but those who learn to bend
outlive the fiercest day.
We spend our years reaching,
believing height is worth the climb;
then find that grace grows downward,
with the patient roots of time.
Kael nodded quietly to himself, satisfied, when he stopped.
A ruby monkey hung upside down from a branch an arm's length away, watching him. Its fur was a metallic silver and its ruby red eyes caught the sunlight, reflecting it directly into his. Its head alone was roughly half the size of Kael's entire body.
'The pack leader.'
He didn't move his eyes from it.
He wasn't entirely sure whether this was a blessing or a curse. On one hand he hadn't needed to search for it and could establish himself as harmless immediately. On the other it had caught him completely off guard, and he was in no position to pretend otherwise.
Much like mountain trolls, ruby monkeys were fiercely territorial. Unlike trolls they moved in packs with a clear hierarchy.
The monkey tilted its massive head with what seemed like curiosity.
'Seems there are privileges to appearing rank one.'
At rank three his presence alone would have been oppressive enough to register as a threat. At rank one he was apparently something worth examining rather than something worth driving away.
'If I back away now I can guide the others around its territory. But that assumes it lets me leave. How territorial are they really? Will it track our scent if we pass through or simply lose interest?' He held the thought for a moment longer. 'Backing away would be the safest choice. Julian knows these woods better than I do. But...'
Then again, there was no guarantee he would stumble upon ingredients this rare again.
Kael crouched low and drew his blade.
A red blur. The blade moved faster than the monkey could register.
For a moment nothing seemed to change. Then a thin vertical line appeared across its face. Both ruby eyes shattered, and pale translucent blood began flooding down its forhead.
It lost its grip on the branch and fell. The impact sent dust erupting upward several times Kael's height. It rolled, shrieked, and clutched its face, but the blood kept coming regardless of what it did.
Kael glanced at the blade, watching the faint red glow it carried begin to fade.
The monkey rose and lurched toward a nearby tree it seemed to have remembered, each step landing with a thunderous crack as its hands and feet slammed against the ground.
Before it got far Kael swung once more. Another red blur and its hind leg went limp, tendons cut cleanly through.
It turned and swung its arm blindly in his direction. He stepped back without urgency, evading it easily.
A second monkey appeared above, much smaller, the same ruby eyes catching the light. It launched itself from the branch with what seemed like genuine conviction.
Kael thrust his blade upward through its chest and released it in the same motion, sidestepping as it fell. It hit the ground hard and struggled to push itself up.
He looked down at it for a moment, then raised his leg and brought it down. The skull collapsed, sending fragments of ruby and translucent blood across the ground.
He was no weaker than the strongest rank three. How could a normal beast compare?
A new monkey leapt from branch to branch until it perched above him. It didn't come down. Instead it hissed at Kael with what could only be described as hysteria.
Kael kicked the body aside and retrieved his blade, then walked over to the pack leader. It leaned against a tree, turning its head frantically in every direction as though it still had eyes to see with.
One. Two. Three...
Slash after slash until its silver pelt had turned metallic red.
He sheathed the blade and watched.
More than twenty monkeys stood on branches all around him, jumping, and baring their fangs towards him. Some beat their chests in a desperate attempt to frighten him off, but none dared to come down.
The pack leader's movements had grown sluggish from blood loss. A pool had formed beneath it large enough to drown a small animal, and still the bleeding didn't stop.
'It's effective, but situational.'
Kael tilted his head.
This was one of the very few motes he currently had and the only rank three. The Crimson Arc mote.
He wasn't using it in the traditional sense. Activated conventionally it launched a small red arc forward roughly ten steps. Whatever it cut would begin bleeding uncontrollably, without ever coagulating. If a blood pathway existed anywhere in the world, this was where it would belong.
Realising their leader had died, the remaining monkeys scattered like leaves in the wind.
Kael summoned the Stone Coffin and worked through the corpse methodically, collecting everything that could be considered an ingredient.
Not long after, Julian came around with the wagon, yanking the reins a few times as he took in the scene. He scratched his head at the sight of the corpse but said nothing.
Kael jumped back on without breaking stride, settling onto a crate padded with cloth.
"Clear road ahead?" Julian asked without looking back.
"The ruby monkeys won't be a problem." Kael said, cleaning his blade.
—
The night sky had arrived by the time Kael drew his blade again.
He activated the Crimson Arc, letting it glow faint red. He made a small cut on his finger and watched it seal shut in an instant. There was something faintly amusing about being a complete counter to his own mote.
This was the result of more than half a year of research.
After leaving Velthoria, once things had settled enough to think clearly, Kael had spent a significant portion of his time studying the arrow that had punched through Point Aegis. It hadn't taken long to understand how profound it was. By now he believed his understanding sat at roughly ten percent.
Severely simplified, it was a mote that had somehow been infused into an otherwise ordinary object. This was why it had been able to pass through Point Aegis even with a rank one firing it. Under normal circumstances a rank one lacked the Thoughts to even activate a rank five. But that wasn't what had happened. The Luminaire hadn't been a rank one launching a rank five attack. They had been a rank one firing something pre-made, and charged, already carrying the Will and Thoughts of whoever had created it.
What had actually happened was closer to someone of low rank issuing an order that a higher ranked Luminaire had already agreed to carry out.
And while he was nowhere near capable of infusing a mote into an object the way the arrow had been infused, what he had managed through considerable effort was something adjacent. Taking traits from a mote and applying them through his Will directly onto an object. In this case, a blade.
It hadn't been easy.
First he had needed to reverse engineer the Crimson Arc mote completely, gaining a full understanding of its underlying rules. Then from that understanding he had to do something that had no real name yet, something like half-activating the mote, taking only what he needed and pressing it into the blade through his Will rather than releasing it outward in the traditional sense.
That alone had taken five months. And so far it was the only mote he had managed to apply this way.
At first glance it might not look like much, but Kael saw the potential.
By not fully activating the mote it drew even fewer Thoughts than normal use would. The efficiency alone made it worth pursuing. But the requirements to do it at all were absurd. He doubted anyone outside the refinement pathway could even approach it, and even then only with the kind of understanding of how threads of rules worked that Obsidian Shard had given him.
He had asked Syleena whether she knew of any pathway that operated on this principle.
She hadn't.
So without fully realising it, what Kael had done was scratch the surface of something that didn't exist yet.
A completely new pathway.