How could we have been so stupid?
The Lost
MY SERPENTS BURST FROM my core to deflect an attack my Eclipse nature detected, and I spun to face my attacker, fusion blade still in my hand.
He was tall and thin, completely naked save for wisps of sacred energy that encircled his body in hazy clouds. His eyes were the same black voids as mine. Like the woman who’d killed the Death Weaver and Henry in my cottage, he was completely bald, and his white scalp gleamed in the orange light from the portal he’d opened in the courtroom. The air cracked and hissed around him as he pulled streams of jinsei into his aura.
“I didn’t betray you,” I said. “But I can’t let you destroy those who did.”
“Let me?” The man laughed, a sound as sharp and jagged as breaking glass. “We’ve planned this since before the Empyreals turned on us. You can no more stop what is coming than you could halt a tidal wave approaching a distant shore.”
Even if he was right, that didn’t mean I wouldn’t try.
My aura was still filled with the aspects I’d stolen from the Locust Court. I fed them into my serpents, amplifying them again and again as I surged across the courtroom. I leaped into the air, clearing the fallen seats, and raised my long-hilted blade above my head to split my foe in half. The jinsei I’d shoved into my channels moved me faster than humanly possible. The world blurred around me as I sped toward my target like a bladed missile.
The Lost slipped out of my path with surprising ease, and his aura flared out toward me as I landed next to him.
My Eclipse core yowled and drove jinsei into my legs. Its raw survival instinct sent me hurtling away from the aura before it could drain me dry. The dark urge made it clear that any contact with the Lost’s aura would leave me an empty husk. As powerful as I was, this man was far stronger.
The Lost hadn’t expected me to evade his aura, and his moment of surprise gave me time to act. I thrust my blade toward his exposed left side, burning more of my jinsei to speed and strengthen my attack. The weapon’s tip tore through my enemy’s alabaster skin, revealing a strip of striated muscle that glistened like wet ivory.
My foe spun away from the attack at a blinding speed. An arc of straw-colored blood hung in the air behind him for a moment like a string of gemstones from a broken necklace. He lashed out with one hand and caught my blade before I could recoil. A wave of cold rushed up the blade toward me. The Lost smiled a shark’s grin. The instant that cold touched my flesh, I was a dead man. He’d devour my core. He was sure he’d won.
And, if I’d been anyone else, he would have.
I banished the blade, and my enemy’s technique snapped closed around nothing.
The Lost staggered back, stunned by his failed technique.
“The final assault is coming even now.” He stepped to one side, and we circled one another warily. “You showed us the way. Your light is what guided us through the darkness. Don’t stand in our way now. Accept what you are. Stand beside us, and rule over these lesser creatures.”
He swept a hand toward the sages, who had gathered in a defensive ring around Grayson Bishop. The ex-headmaster was conscious, though he looked too weak to do anything but watch in horror as the scene unfolded before him. The other sages weren’t handling this much better. They hadn’t even raised a defense, and their cores flickered within them like dying embers.
The Lost was ripping jinsei out of everything and everyone nearby, except for me. The civilians had collapsed to their knees, their eyes fluttering as they struggled to escape from his dread grasp.
If I didn’t do something soon, they’d all die.
“You know this isn’t right,” I said and summoned my blade once more. The hunger and terror aspects I’d stolen from the Locust Court clung to its surface in a mottled black pattern that writhed like drops of ink on a turbulent stream. “What they did to you was wrong. But destroying everything that you once defended won’t fix that. It will only make us all vulnerable to the next attack.”
“Attack of what?” the Lost asked with a smile. “The Locust Court is no threat to those like us, Jace. Do you think the hungry spirits would have served as our vanguard if we were still enemies?”
Images danced unbidden in my thoughts. I didn’t know where they came from, but I knew they were true. Pale men and women wandering through a night-black wilderness, hungry and empty, desperate, willing to do anything to survive.
The Lost had struck a deal with the Locust Court. In return for safety in the worlds beyond the Far Horizon, the exiled Eclipse Warriors would show humanity’s ancient enemies how to find us again.
When I’d become an Eclipse Warrior, it had been a flare in the darkness. They’d followed the light back to Earth.
“No,” I said. “They’ll betray you. They’ll turn on all of us.”
“We’ve already been betrayed once,” my opponent said. “We were more careful this time. We’ve made arrangements that ensure we will not suffer the same fate again. The Court will serve us here, and we will aid them in their battles beyond the Far Horizon. Time has grown short, Jace. You must choose. Join your people, now, or die in this futile attempt to save a world that has been doomed for longer than any of us have been alive.”
I hung my head. It all seemed so pointless. I’d struggled and stolen and fought and suffered to finally be accepted into Empyreal society. And now that I finally had what I wanted, it was all going to be washed away.
Unless I joined the Lost.
Or beat them.
I whipped my arm
