She was a killing machine.
She was born out of anger, sharpened by bloodshed, and built to succeed at whatever she put her mind to. The tumult of loosing herself from Darian’s invisible chains had shaken her. The influence of Robin over her mind had confused her, knocked her off balance. But now after seeing Adonis, slain and lifeless on the dirt, she felt a clarity borne out of rage.
Her name was Lucidia Draxos.
She had no money, no title, no place in the world. She was anonymous and alone. She didn’t know about literature, or math, or chemistry, and she’d never picked up a paintbrush in her life.
But she did know how to fight. She knew how to get knocked down and pull herself up, lightning fast, taking the opportunity shot to bury a dagger in her opponent’s gut.
She was a powerful, powerful woman that could lay waste to empires if she set her sights on it.
And right now, she wanted to kill Clay Brooks.
“You had no right!” she roared, cracking his jaw with her first again.
He staggered back, his face a bloodied mess, and finally brought his hands up to fight.
About damn time, she thought with manic anger.
She let loose a series of blows that knocked his strong, muscled arms out of the way like they were sticks.
He groaned, and fell to his knees, bracing himself against the gravel with an outstretched arm. “Lucidia!” he bellowed.
“How… could… you!” she seethed, raising her hand again.
A stab of electricity shot into her neck and she doubled over, writhing in pain. Her vision cut into darkness.
Reykon
The world slowly came back to him, and he looked around.
Willow and Dag’s apartment was quiet and warm and hadn’t changed much since the last time he’d seen it five years prior.
He pulled himself up and checked his shoulder, where he’d remembered being skewered like a kebab. There was barely a wound and the area felt like a pulled muscle. Back in business. Reykon took a moment to think about what happened while he had been out.
The fact that they were here meant that Robin had succeeded in getting them down the six-hour gauntlet. He surveyed the room, his eye catching movement from the kitchen.
Reykon’s spirits lifted, and then deflated again when he saw it was Willow, and not Robin.
But still, he was happy to see her.
He’d met Willow and Dag on a mission to derail a group of prisoners sent from the casters’ guild.
The young naturalist siblings had stolen a recipe form the Great Library of Ahgenstand to save a boy’s life. Since the caster wars, all naturalist texts had been locked up, and only given out with the strictest supervision.
Needless to say, elementalists were very territorial.
Years back, they didn’t like all the gains the naturalists were making, all the powerful allies they’d gotten. The elementalists created a creature (since then, extinguished off the face of the earth), that neutralized magical abilities. It was essentially sterilization, but for spellcasting. After they’d engaged in their ethnic cleansing, the remaining few and far between naturalists were subjugated and put to work as servants.
The elementalists had good cause for concern; they drew their power from items with elemental essence, which are rarer and have to be gathered. The five categories of essence are, ascending in terms of complexity: ancient elements (crystals, metals, and such), meteorites, human vitalurgy, electricity, and matter manipulation.
The most common and simple method of elemental magic is derived from elements; depending on which element is in use, the caster has to find those materials and then focus them into a spell. By mixing and matching resources they can manipulate the sources of power, and end up with much more potent spellcasting.
Naturalists, on the other hand, can only draw so much power from their environment. Consequently, their spells are limited.
But no matter where naturalists are, they can cast. And assuming they don’t overexert, their focuses never run out; a self-perpetuating magic machine.
If you’re an elementalist hell-bent on imperialism, obviously, this poses a threat.
So, they decided the naturalists had to be knocked down a rung. Their numbers were obliterated, and their sacred spell books were concealed from the young. Result: a once unstoppable people became nothing more than lab techs for the elementalists.
But naturalists were also incredibly adept healers. That came in handy if you were a vampire planning on using hundreds of humans as Capri-Suns every night. Not to mention, humans tended to get hurt around ancient beings that were thousands of times stronger than them; broken wrists from a vampire trying to get someone’s attention were more common than you’d think.
Naturalists were few and far between, and because of that, they were incredibly sought after. There were many vampire masters that seemed (at least to Reykon), to be good apples out of a bad bunch; vampires that respected life and treated humans carefully. Sadism is never a blanket generalization.
Those houses tended to be smaller and therefore, not powerful enough to have a healer on hand. But if there were more naturalists, he had no doubt that there were vampires that would use them for good. They’d become allies and help maintain minimal damage to life.
In an ideal world.
But it wasn’t an ideal world, that much was clear to him. After so much observation of vampire, werewolf, caster, and even human behavior, it had become apparent to him that power – the pursuit, attainment, and maintenance of that power – led to evil. Either, it attracted evil in the first place, or perpetuated it once achieved. He didn’t know, and he really didn’t care.
So, Reykon did what he could to derail the actions of greedy, evil, powerful creatures.
Willow and Dag had been one such derailment.
There was a massive network of freed creatures – supernatural beings implanted in the human world, hiding in plain sight, keeping to themselves. They facilitated roads by which one could use to escape enslavement. He’d used those roads to set Willow and Dag up here.
If all
