I forced myself to get up off the throne and walk. My arm hurt too much to sit any longer, and my thoughts were racing so quickly my body needed to move to keep up with them. I paced back and forth between our chairs, brow furrowed, eyes on the ground so I wouldn’t have to look at the Flame’s shifting shape.
“If we don’t fix, then who will?” I didn’t want to know the answer to that question, but I had to ask.
The Flame rose from its chair and stopped me with a fine-boned female hand. A man’s rough and calloused fingers closed around my wounded arm and lifted it carefully back into position. A blinding snap and crunch shot through my body, accompanied by a blast of pain that ripped the air out of my lungs.
Just like that, I was healed.
“Certainly not you.” The Flame lifted my arm carefully, patted my shoulder, then nodded, satisfied with its work. “You couldn’t remake the Design even if I demanded it. But you can find someone who can. Or, maybe, some thing.”
The Flame wrapped a heavy arm around my shoulders and raised her other arm toward the ceiling. I tilted my head back to follow its gaze and watched the silver pattern shrink until it was little more than a pale disk of silver light against the darkness.
“The world is vast, Jace. The space beyond it is vaster still.” More spots of light appeared, a dozen, a hundred, a thousand. And every one of them held its own Design. “And somewhere out there, you will find another who can draft a new plan for this world. That’s the favor I ask of you, Jace Warin, Eclipse Warrior.”
My jaw dropped, and I turned to face the power next to me.
“What are you talking about?” I asked. “How can I replace you?”
“It won’t be easy,” the Flame said. “But you’re the one for this job. Everything about your life was drawn outside the lines of my Design, Jace. You were born as part of an experiment I never saw coming. You became an Eclipse Warrior, after I’d thought them all destroyed. And, now, you’ve bound yourself to something I could never have conceived of, much less predicted. You are the chaos core, Jace, the ticking bomb at the heart of this world. And, unless you find one cleverer than me, well...”
“What do I do?” I asked.
“When you left here last year, what did you tell your friends you were going to do?” the Flame asked.
I cast my thoughts back to that night on the beach, to my friends watching me bring life back to a piece of the world I’d destroyed.
“Change the world,” I said carefully.
“Yes,” the Flame said. “That’s it. You’ll change the world. It won’t be easy, but it will happen. Because if you don’t change it, the world will change itself. And that will be the end of all of us.”
“What do I tell them, about who won the challenge?” I asked.
“They’ll know,” the Flame said quietly. “When they ask, and I do not answer, they will know.”
“My mom,” I said. “Where is she?”
The pressure on my shoulder vanished.
I was all alone, with no idea what to do next.
And the Flame hadn’t even given me my prize.
The Betrayal
I LEFT THE CHAMBER of the Empyrean Flame and returned to the arena. The candles went out behind me, and darkness chased the light away with every step I took. The Grand Design above my head faded, and by the time I’d reached the arch that had led me to the strangest conversation of my life, nothing remained behind me.
There was something missing from inside me, too. I’d never really believed in the Empyrean Flame, but its absence left a small hole near my core. I wondered if others felt it, or if it was a side effect of what I’d made myself into.
The chaos core.
The instant I stepped through the arch, I returned to the sound and fury of a war zone.
The pillars were gone, and the arena’s floor had returned. The unconscious members of the Heron Blade Academy and Battle Hall of Atlantis teams lay in a heap in the center of the arena. I had no idea how they’d gotten there, or whether they were alive or dead.
The dragons, all five of them, and the horn-helmed students of the Bright Lodge ignored the fallen teams and menaced eight humans they’d backed into a corner on the far side of the room. My teammates had taken a savage beating, and the remaining four Jinsei Institute members were bloody and battered.
A cold ball of rage welled up inside me. This is what I’d been fighting against. I was sick to death of the powerful crushing the weak. It was horrible, and it was going to end.
Now.
I cycled my breathing as I crossed the arena at a dead run. My new core filled with jinsei and my aura absorbed aspects of anger, violence, fear, and pain from the air. With every step, my rage grew, and my strength along with it.
The dragons wanted a fight? Then I’d give them a fight.
My fusion blade appeared in my hand, crystal clear and pure, while my mechanical serpents unfolded from my aura like switchblades.
“The Gauntlet is over!” I shouted. I’d reached Trulissinangoth’s team. “Stop fighting!”
The dragon closest to me spun, the red scales on his face flushed with sacred energy. His aura sparked and crackled like a roaring fire. His fusion blade, more cleaver than sword with a chiseled tip for punching through armor, rose into a striking position.
My
