Gilded Ashes: When Shadows Reign

Raizen stared at her with wide eyes.

War.

Of course she had said that like it was nothing.

The gray land stretched in front of them. The line where it ended and real rainforest began sat sharp in the distance.

He swallowed.

"How" he asked, "do you even declare war on a city like Ukai?"

Elin leaned back on her hands, legs still dangling off the stone.

"Oh, but I didn't send them a letter!" she said.

"Obviously."

"I didn't march beasts up to their gates, or torch their bridges. That would have been super cute. Pointless, but cute."

Raizen waited. Nothing she said up until now made sense.

She glanced at him, then back at the grey.

"They decided the forest was their pantry" she went on. "So... I changed the pantry!"

A small, cold feeling settled under Raizen's ribs.

"What do you mean?" he asked the only question in his mind.

She lifted a hand and pointed lazily toward the living edge.

"Those animals you saw on the way here" she answered. "The birds with the different yet beautiful heads. The fox-deers. The flying rodents with tails too long to make sense. The moss boars in the river. All of them used to be normal."

Raizen's first instinct was to say, "Those certainly didn't look normal", but he caught himself.

"They were just… Normal animals?" he asked instead.

"Of course! You couldn't have thought that they were born this way! Boring birds. Deer that looked like deer. Squirrels that did squirrel things. It was quite disappointing!" she said. "Then Ukai started killing them. Over and over. So I… Updated the software."

He blinked.

"Updated the… What?"

She wrinkled her nose. "Wrong timeline. Ignore that. I changed their patterns. Wrote new instructions inside them."

He turned that over once in his head.

"You infused them with Eon."

"Not just infused" she corrected. "I gave them new ways to be alive."

He thought of the gliding creature with feathered membranes, the parrot with the chameleon head, the glowing fish spinning in the river.

"You did that to all of them?" he asked.

"Every single thing that walked, flew or swam in the upper forest. Everything Ukai thought they could eat or use."

He stared.

"That is… A ton of things."

"Indeed! The ecosystem was quite packed."

"Elin, that is NOT a minor adjustment. That isn't like healing a broken leg or regrowing a wing. That is… I don't know..." He gestured with both hands at the world. "Everything! How are they even still themselves?"

"They are more than themselves" she answered promptly. "Most of them still live the way they did. They just live better!"

Then she sighed, turning on the stone so she could face him properly, one knee pulled up.

"Think of it like this" she said. "Healing Eon remembers what a body was before it broke, right?"

"Right...? Where are you going with this?"

"I asked it to remember what it could be if nothing ever hurt it! If it never starved, never froze, never had to run from anything. If it had enough time and safety to evolve into something beautiful."

She shrugged.

"Then I brought that idea to life."

Raizen stared at her.

"That cannot be good."

"But it's very good!" she countered. "They are stronger, faster, harder to poison, harder to hurt, harder to break. A few even grew new tricks. Some hide better. Some see in more colors. Some can move between branches better. But they are still themselves."

"Then why does it…" he searched for a word, "feel so wrong?"

"Because humans never asked for it" she said. "And humans hate anything they didn't choose."

He thought of that, then tried a different angle.

"So you changed all the animals" he said slowly. "And then what? Ukai kept hunting them anyway?"

"They tried" Elin answered, and now there was a hint of satisfaction in her voice. "They sent their best tamers into the rainforest. They brought down new beasts. They took the new meat home."

She tilted her head, watching his face.

"You know what happens when a human chews a piece of something made almost entirely from one Sovereign's Eon?" she asked.

He didn't answer.

"Eon isn't neutral anymore" she went on. "It stops being… Just life. It becomes mine. My patterns. My rules. If you try to absorb it without my permission, it does not feed you. It repels you."

Raizen's stomach tightened.

"How bad?" he asked.

"Depends on how much they ate" she said. "Some people fainted. Some got sick. Some lost their ability to channel Eon properly for weeks. A few patterns inside Ukai's beasts started glitching when they used meat from my animals as reinforcement."

Her tone stayed conversational. The words were not.

"You… Made the entire forest inedible!" he said, half shocked.

"I made the consequences expensive" she corrected. "They could still eat. It would just hurt."

He thought of Ukai's desperate hunger. Of people trying to feed families, then realizing their food source had turned hostile without warning.

He exhaled.

"That is…" He searched for the right word again. "Insane."

She smiled.

"Effective" she corrected. "After a few bad hunts and a lot of angry council meetings, they stopped treating the forest like a food source!"

"You forced them to."

"I gave them a choice" she said. "Starve slower while you can find another food source, or keep stealing and killing, watching your own strength rot from the inside. They made the correct choice. Eventually."

He fell quiet.

Ukai's portraits flashed in his head again - the riders, the soarers of the sky, the proud stances. He imagined those same tamers coming back from hunts bent over with cramps, strange Eon churning in their veins in ways it was never meant to.

"So you did all that…" he said, "for the animals?"

"For the entire rainforest, yeah" she said. "Animals, plants, insects, the whole ridiculous mound of things that keeps air inside lungs and seeds in places where they can grow. Ukai treated it like a background. Like something disposable. I simply disagreed, that's all."

He thought back to the cave. To the way the hybrids moved. To the quiet calm around the river.

"I mean… It worked" he admitted.

"Of course it worked. I am very good at what I do."

He almost smiled.

"But some of them changed more than others" she went on. "The eagle you saw earlier? Mostly just color and stamina. It didn't need much help. The gliding squirrels? They were always one bad decision away from falling. I gave them something better to fall with. The moss boars down there were already stubborn. I made them impossible to move if they don't want to."

"And they trust you because of that."

"They trust me because I protected them" Elin said simply. "And because when I changed them, I made sure it didn't hurt."

He blinked.

"You changed an entire forest and it didn't hurt?"

"Not the way you are imagining" she said. "There was one very long night. It felt like a storm that couldn't figure out which way to fall. A lot of things woke up feeling… different. But no one screamed. No one burned. No one rotted."

Her eyes drifted along the gray again.

"Not then."

Something flickered in her expression at that last word, then vanished.

"Even if I accept that" he said slowly, "there is still one thing I do not understand."

"Only one?"

"One… Big one."

He turned to face her fully.

"How did you have enough Eon for that?" he said. "You said you rewrote every animal that mattered in the upper forest. And you said that you weren't a Sovereign during that time…"

"Oh, but I was the Sky Sovereign then!"

"Alright, but still… That is not a Sovereign trick on one battlefield. That is an entire ecosystem. That is… Too much."

Elin watched him, face unreadable.

"You think I made that title up?" she asked.

"No. I mean…" He tried to keep his voice even. "Atman said a Sovereign has the highest mastery in one mastery branch, not necessarily the strongest person alive."

"Correct."

"So even as Sky Sovereign" he went on, "you are still one person. One Eon source. You said this happened about eight years ago. That is… Not a long time to reach that level and then change an entire forest overnight. It sounds like there was something else. I don't know, just…"

Something behind Elin's eyes had gone flat.

The lopsided smile was gone.

Her fingers snapped into a knuckle.

He heard her hands crack once.

Every muscle in Raizen's body clenched at the same time.

It was like invisible hands had grabbed every fiber inside him and squeezed. His jaw locked. His back arched a fraction before something pinned it. His fingers tried to move but couldn't. Breath stuck halfway in his chest, chest tight, ribs refusing to move.

Pain flared, not sharp like a cut, but everywhere at once - a full body cramp that arrived in one instant and refused to release.

His mind jolted.

He tried to take a step back.

His foot didn't answer.

His hand tried twitching toward his sword.

Nothing.

Only pressure. An awful, strong, deliberate pressure from all directions.

Elin had not moved from her seat.

She sat there on the stone, one knee up, one leg dangling, head turned toward him.

"Tell me… Raizen." she said softly.

"Are you calling me a liar?"