Ashes Unwritten: Oblivion's Heir [Volume 1 Complete!]

Kess plunged her hand into the basin, not knowing why. It just seemed right. That voice called to her, quieter than Fanas, a calm whisper over the churning liquid of the basin. Mind slightly muddled, Kess found herself trusting it.

The library disappeared, and with it, Kess's grip on reality. She swam in those waters as the strange Fulminancy crackled around her, beckoning, tossing her to and fro on the current. A distant light beamed ahead, and Kess swam towards it, squinting.

The Fulminancy disappeared, and she stood on the top of the old palace itself, overlooking Hillcrest.

The city was utterly destroyed.

Where buildings formerly stood, the ground was scrubbed clean, and even the debris had been blown away. The city was leveled, the mountain swept clean of all signs of human life. Kess gasped and stumbled back from the edge of the palace roof, right into a woman. The woman steadied her, then took her hand. Her white hair was tucked into an elaborate bun, and her blue eyes were kind, but not quite normal. Something about them…glowed as she surveyed the city. There was something oddly familiar about her—like a statue Kess remembered seeing in her childhood.

"Fanas?" Kess croaked out. The woman smiled wryly, but shook her head.

"Not quite. My manners are a bit better. Mariel."

Kess cocked her head at the woman in disbelief. Was it a trick? An illusion? Surely the original Mariel had been dead and gone for centuries, though this woman did look a little like a statue Kess had seen of her Uphill. Mariel put a hand on her shoulder and steered her back towards the wall.

"Child, I have little time to speak, so I will make this quick. No one has touched my source in thousands of years, and I'm afraid that this might be my last chance to pass on this knowledge." She nodded towards the city. "This is what will become of your home if you don't embrace your Fulminancy—completely," she added as Kess opened her mouth to argue. Kess shut her mouth and stared at the bleak landscape.

"Fulminancy is destructive," she said quietly. "It can't prevent destruction."

"It is," the woman—Mariel—agreed. "But this destruction was caused by people who wish to keep Fulminancy in its current state. It was meant to be a stopgap—a temporary measure. When its time was up, your cycles of storms were supposed to consume it, but men have tampered with the balance. And," she added thoughtfully, "perhaps we were not as clever as we thought in our design." She shrugged. "You will need all of that incredible power you wield to stop this."

"How do I stop something like this?" Kess whispered. There weren't even bodies in the city—just an eerie, quiet sense of nothingness.

"The Ashfall can only be stopped by releasing Fulminancy," Mariel replied. "The Council has interfered with the natural process, corrupting the Seats as we envisioned them. They sacrifice men and women to maintain their power, thinking that they can fight this storm. We had hoped to have an active Seat of Mariel and Faleas in place when this all came crashing down, but unfortunately we trusted too much in the system we established. Clouds, there hasn't been an active Seat of Thanadel in hundreds of years…"

The woman trailed off, lost in thought. Perhaps her mind was not all there—if she was real at all. Kess humored the vision. After all, if it wasn't real, it couldn't hurt her, and perhaps that there was something she could learn here. "How can I release Fulminancy?"

Mariel held her eyes with her oddly glowing ones, looking slightly sad. "You must embrace the Seat and the powers that come with it—all of those powers," she added.

"You've got the wrong person," Kess said, the wind feeling oddly real as it twined through her hair. "I can't control them. I can't control myself. I—that kind of power, it makes me someone different."

"Power always has that effect," Mariel said, her voice gentle. "But your powers don't define you. You can use them without losing yourself, if you choose to do so."

Kess considered that for a moment, but couldn't see the truth in it. She'd been straddling a line for quite some time now, where she tiptoed into her powers without fully embracing them. She knew what lurked beneath the surface—a woman who wasn't afraid to abuse those powers—and she wanted to stay very far away from that woman. Her powers did define her. Using them made her into a monster, and while perhaps she'd sharpened her claws in the last few months, she was reluctant to fully become the beast.

Next to her, Mariel started as something howled in the distance.

"She comes for us," the woman said, her eyes wide.

"Who?"

"The Ashfall."

Kess frowned. The wind felt so real, but—"This is a vision," she said. "It's not real." The white-haired woman looked at her then, and in her eyes Kess saw fear that wasn't tempered by logic or reality. For this woman, at least, the dream was very real.

She grabbed Kess's arms, her touch searing into Kess's skin like a hot brand, her eyes unseeing. "Outside they gather," she said, her words quick and frantic. "Find Faleas and Thanadel. Release Fulminancy. Embrace my Seat." She looked behind her at a gathering, terrible storm on the horizon, the clouds black as soot. "I will watch you from the storm."

Mariel tightened her grip on Kess, and Fulminancy surged towards her, white-hot, painful, and blinding. Kess's vision frayed at the edges and she felt that power, white-hot and consuming as it roiled inside. She tried to push it aside—to find herself in that sea of power, but she was adrift, the Fulminancy burning into her very soul. She couldn't find herself again—not without fighting back—so Kess took a deep breath and took the floodgates off of her power.

She snapped back into herself, the library falling into place around her, but not before she heard Rowan's cry of pain as he shot back from her and into a nearby bookcase.

"Rowan!" Kess half crawled and half ran towards him, where he sat up, groaning. His shirt was torn, and beneath it, a bloody, crackling impression of a lightning bolt blossomed. Kess knelt next to him, fighting tears as she realized what she'd done. "Rowan, I'm so sorry."

Rowan just shook his head, dabbing his bloody lip against his sleeve as he sat there. "It's my fault for getting that close to you when you were glowing." He smiled reassuringly, though she didn't miss the wince as he moved his arm to sit up. "If it's all the same to you, I'd prefer we stay away from the supernatural for the rest of the trip—no more shadows or glowing pools, if you please."

This tale has been unlawfully obtained from Royal Road. If you discover it on Amazon, kindly report it.

Kess helped Rowan to his feet, then threw her arms around him without thinking. She held him like that for several moments, as a horrible realization went through her mind. She couldn't do this safely. If she did as Mariel told her, it would mean that everyone—even Rowan—was at risk. But if what she saw in the vision was real, then what choice did they have?

"Kess." Rowan pulled back from her and put his hands on her shoulders. "Truly, I'm fine, but we really need to get going."

Kess nodded, still bewildered. "I—We need to talk about what I saw in there. This is bigger than we imagined, Rowan." She told him about the Seats siphoning power to maintain Fulminancy, and about the world-ending storm. If he thought her stormsick, he said nothing as they made their way to his pile of books. If anything, he seemed thoughtful.

"If I hadn't just been reading something that said the very same thing, I'd be a little concerned about the state of your mind right now," Rowan said. "Though Mariel herself is a bit of a stretch." Thunder rumbled overhead, and Rowan paused as the library rattled, sending dust into thick clouds in the stale air.

"That doesn't sound like thunder," Kess said slowly.

"Do you think those creatures came back?"

"Whatever it is, I think our time here is up," she said, moving towards a stack of books. "Did you find what you were looking for?"

Rowan clutched a single tome in his hands, but he surveyed the library with desperation in his eyes. "No," he replied. "I still need to find something on power transfer, but there's too much here," he said. "Either we find it quick, or we have to come back."

"We can't," she said, looking at him in horror. "We were lucky this time, but what happens when they realize people have been poking around down here? I left a door off its hinges upstairs, for Mariel's sake." Rowan shut his tome. He unfurled two canvas bags from around his waist and tossed one to Kess.

"Then we'd best look fast. Grab what you can—the most important ones," he said, already moving.

"How am I supposed to know what's important?"

"Use your gut," he replied.

As they gathered, they talked. Kess barely knew what many of the titles meant, but Rowan chatted animatedly, bouncing ideas off of her mostly to the tune of her grunts and nods. It was a distinctly mundane contrast to the other oddities of the evening—if Kess didn't study the titles too closely.

"Rowan," she asked, still scanning the shelves for anything on Fulminancy transfer. "Why are there so many books on elemental magic down here? Wasn't that refuted years ago?"

"To a certain extent," Rowan said. "There's a tie to Fulminancy, but it doesn't seem to be a very important one. It's kind of like the way you might mix paints to get a certain color, only with Fulminancy."

"So why would they move everything on that subject down here?" Kess asked, frowning at the tomes. They were suspiciously clean—surely Rowan had noticed that, too.

"I'm wondering that myself," Rowan said, flipping through another tome frantically. "It's a common academic interest, but if they've banned the books entirely and stuffed them down here, then there has to be a reason—especially given that years ago they denied that elemental magic existed in the first place."

Kess searched the shelves, trying to make her exhausted mind work with little luck. She wasn't quite sure what to look for, but there had to be something here that could help Rowan—or at least verify what her fever dream with Mariel had suggested.

Kess trailed over to a historical section—or what she thought was one, judging by the size of the books. One of them stuck out slightly, a tiny, thin, almost notebook-like hand-bound copy, the edges of several pages bent and worn around the edge. Kess pulled it from the shelf, then gently cracked it open, wincing at the age of the pages. The inside was handwritten, but fortunately legible. Kess stopped on a page with a diagram of seven different names, along with classical elements. The handwriting was hard to read, but Kess thought—

"Rowan," she called, nearly dropping the book. "You'll want to see this." Rowan was at her side instantly, peering into the tome. Overhead, thunder rumbled again.

"I think this is from when they established the Seats," Kess said. "Only…"

"Only they have elements—one for each Seat," Rowan murmured. "And…" He trailed off, finger hovering over the notebook. "Plasma for Mariel," he finished. Kess's own blue lightning crackled in a damning way in her palm. Clouds, she hadn't even had that discussion with Rowan yet. What a mess this was turning out to be.

"But none of the Seats have elemental magic," Kess argued, flipping through the pages. Most of it was too dense to parse on the fly, but there was an eerily familiar locket a few pages further in, along with another diagram, several series of fractions and numbers, and arrows pointing to names. Some of them were crossed through.

Kess continued to flip through the notebook, but Rowan pushed past her towards a shelf neither of them had reached yet. His face was pale, his eyes frantic. He dumped his bag on the ground and began pulling tomes from the shelf, opening and closing each one before tossing them to the ground.

"They don't have it now," Rowan said, creating a giant pile at his feet. "They used to. This is—" He hesitated, reading, then tossed a book into his bag, a wild grin on his face. "Kess, the rumors were true. It's all here. Power transfer was fundamental to founding Fulminancy. Clouds, it might have even been a core tenant of whatever system they used to form Fulminancy." He ran a hand through his hair, mussing curls that had already long given up to the humidity of the underground.

"If anyone could transfer powers when Fulminancy was founded," Rowan continued, "then why not before Fulminancy? These Worldshapers the author mentions—they were some of the most powerful magic users of the time. What if their powers were combined to make Fulminancy? What if by combining elemental powers, they bastardized the original source? Destroyed it, even?"

Kess righted a few books in Rowan's bag with a nervous glance overhead. Perhaps Rowan was onto something, but they would have plenty of time to research it another day—provided they made it out alive. Something was building aboveground—Kess was sure of it. She shouldered her bag and was opening her mouth to tell Rowan to do the same when a boom rocked the floor.

Rowan crashed into Kess, who took the brunt of the impact on her face. Swearing, they untangled themselves from the pile of books and limbs, Kess wincing and holding the side of her head as pain lanced through it.

"Rowan," she said, suddenly worried. "We need to go."

"Surely we have a few more minutes to…" Rowan trailed off, book in hand, then peered up at the ceiling. As if in reply, thunder rolled loudly, and lightning cracked harshly enough to shake the building again.

"That's not Drystorm lightning," Kess said. Rowan sniffed at the air a few times, shouldering his bag.

"Do you…smell smoke?"

They shared a look and gathered what they could, then set off down the passageway.

This time, as they passed the creatures, Kess remembered to snuff out her Fulminancy before gathering her staff again.

The staircase was treacherous as they ascended, with each quake rocking the steps in a way that made it difficult to climb at all. Several steps crumbled to the point where they had to leap over them, and by the time they reached the top, both Rowan and Kess were winded and bruised.

A blast of heat met them at the top of the steps—a burgeoning fire, lit in the main part of the Archives. The smoke was already thick in the room, though it was large enough that they were able to find quick passage through the destruction. Coughing, Kess covered her face with her shirt and pressed on.

They darted through the domed room, feet leaving puffs of dust that wafted up into the air to join the motes lit by Kess's lone light, and dashed through the entrance hallway as another blow hit the building. It wasn't until they emerged in the plaza outside that the blows stopped, for they'd found the source of it: Rae, standing alone on the top of the stairs that led Downhill, a dark gray energy crackling in her palm.

She smiled.