I heard something from behind me and drew my sword. Someone or something was trying desperately not to alert me to their presence.
“Effin!” Kegohr’s voice sounded from behind me.
“Shhh,” I said as he emerged into the starlight.
Vesma appeared behind him, a long-bladed spear in hand.
“What are you two doing here?” I asked.
“Helping you, dummy,” Vesma said.
“I told you, this is something I have to do alone.”
“We’re your friends,” Kegohr reminded me. “That means you never have to do this stuff on your own.”
“If the Ember Cavern is as dangerous as you said, then I’d prefer to go alone.”
“Rutmonlir told us to practice our techniques,” Vesma said. “Where better to do that than in the Ember Cavern?”
I shook my head and laughed. “You two are crazy.”
“We’re not the ones who think a dragon needs rescuing.” Kegohr said as he tapped a thick finger against his temple. “Have you seen the shadow puppets of those things? No way they need our help.”
“But you do.” Vesma nodded at me. “So, we’re here.”
The pair had fought alongside me a few times now, but I’d never expected they’d be willing to help me retrieve the Sundered Heart Sword. I’d called them my friends before, but our bond was never clearer to me than it was in this moment.
“We need to distract the guards,” I said. I’d been watching them for almost half an hour now, and it was clear from the way they intermittently peered back at the cave mouth that they were afraid of the place. Vigorous zones were terrifying places for those without the ability to channel.
I decided to use their fear. I shot a burst of Stinging Palm thorns into the bushes on the other side of the clearing, and the guards glanced at each other. I couldn’t hear them, but I imagined that their frantic conversation concerned who would be given the task of investigating. Rather than a single guard, all four went to inspect the origin of the noise.
“Let’s go,” I said to my friends.
Together, we crept across the clearing and entered the Ember Cavern.
Chapter Thirteen
“So, this is the Ember Cavern.” Vesma peered around as we walked down the tunnel, her features illuminated by the red glow of the wall. The light that gave others a hellish appearance somehow accentuated the prettiness of Vesma’s heart-shaped face and brought out the rich red of her lips. With her usual cynicism replaced with an expression of curiosity, she looked better than I’d ever seen her.
Not that I would risk telling her that. It didn’t seem like the sort of compliment she would appreciate.
“I forgot that you guys hadn’t been in here before,” I said.
“Just you and Hamon.” She raised an eyebrow. “Some special male alone time.”
“Ugh,” I said. “If you didn’t want to think about him that way, what makes you think I would?”
“All that tension between you two; sometimes, that means something special, right Kegohr?” she asked as he nudged him with her elbow.
Kegohr didn’t respond but kept staring down the tunnel, his two-handed mace clutched tightly in front of him.
“Are you all right, Kegohr?” I asked. I’d never seen him like this before. Normally, he was the one keeping up the conversation, even when training left us breathless or unable to string together a coherent thought. But now, he strode along silently, looking grim even by the standards of the place.
“Oh, gods!” Vesma slapped a hand against her forehead. “I should have thought of this.”
“Thought of what?”
“Kegohr’s been into a Vigorous zone before. Several times, back home.”
“Did he get hurt there?”
“No, but…”
“But I haven’t been back,” Kegohr rumbled. “Not since my parents died.”
I didn’t know what to say. Assholes like Hamon were usually the ones to mention Kegohr’s parents, and then as a source of mockery. I hadn’t thought about how little Kegohr talked about them, or how it was all in the past tense.
“What happened?” I asked.
“You know what a tainted guild is?” Kegohr asked.
“No.”
“Imagine if everyone in a guild was an evil fucker, from the highest master to the lowliest initiate. People who would do anything, however cruel and wretched, to increase their power. That’s a tainted guild.
“I came back from the Vigorous zone one day. I’d been hunting for cores. It had left me full of power, feeling like I could take on the world. I was through my front door before I even realized that anything was wrong.
“My da was there, lying on the floor, dead. There’s this thing the tainted guilds do, where they find an Augmenter’s channels and they dig them out. Suck the power dry so they can empower themselves. To do it, they keep the victim alive, so the power still flows. Keep them alive as long as they can while the butchery goes on, and they eat what they’ve taken. Imagine what a body looks like after that. Imagine finding your dad that way.
“They were still there, eight of them, with their black knives and the fire glowing in their eyes. They had my mum, still alive, but cut, battered, bleeding, bent over the table. They’d made her watch while they killed Da, and now, they were… were… were…”
He took a deep breath. When he spoke again, his voice was still low, but there was an anger behind it, a burning fury I’d never heard from him before.
“I’d mastered the Spirit of the Wildfire technique. It was all I had, but it was enough. I let it flow through me, and the fire took over my body, filled me with strength and rage. It didn’t matter that I couldn’t control myself. I didn’t want to.
“I don’t even remember what techniques they used against me. It didn’t
