Chapter 57 – The King of Ash
They all looked. Three silhouettes rode the wind down the spine of the mesa—broad wings, thicker bodies, manes like charred silk. They descended with contempt, not hunger, shadows stretching across the dead Arrowhawks like a funeral banner.
Mara gasped "it's Black Winged Lions."
The lead lion landed a stone's throw away, claws scoring furrows in the rock. Up close, it was worse—more power than bulk should allow. Its shoulders rolled under onyx hide, every line of muscle sharp, efficient. Feathers along its wings shimmered with heat ripples. When it opened its mouth, the air tasted of copper and coal.
Intelligence burned in its eyes. It took in the corpses, then the humans, then John. A slow, deliberate step forward. The air grew hotter, as if the mesa itself remembered fire.
Two more lions hit the ground to either side of it—smaller, though nothing about them was small. Their hackles rose. Feathers rattled. The world narrowed to breath and heat.
John slid one foot back and spoke without raising his voice.
"Mara—front. Keep Sera behind you and lock their left. Lysa, traps on that lip—mark the fall lines. Blake, right flank, cut tendons if they leap. Tamara—cool the wind and choke the flames. Ember—"
The little bear moved before the order finished, placing himself between Sera and the advancing beasts, fur lifting, eyes bright.
Tamara's hand brushed John's wrist. "Don't," she said quietly. "Not alone."
"We don't have a choice," he said. He didn't look at her, but the corner of his mouth almost softened. "Keep them breathing."
The leader's wings opened, vast and black, glorious and terrible. Heat rolled off them like a tide. Then it moved—no warning, no roar, just velocity.
John met it halfway.
The impact shook the mesa. He slid, boots carving sparks. Claws hammered down. He caught the first strike on forearms sheathed in fire, Flameflow answering his will, a bloom of heat that turned talons orange. The lion twisted mid-strike, tail whipping like a scythe. It hit his ribs. Pain rang through bone. He rolled with it, came up into a straight-line punch—fire-fist launching point-blank into the lion's jaw.
The blow landed. The beast barely blinked.
It spat a sheet of pure flame.
John threw an arm across his face, Flameflow flaring to meet it—it wasn't enough. The fire wasn't heat; it was purity, a razor of essence. It tore through his guard and ate at his cloak. The leather blackened, cracked. His skin screamed.
He stepped in anyway.
Punch. Pivot. Heel sweep. Flame curled into mirrored fists that drilled the lion's flank. Most of the fire scattered off its hide like rain. Some bit. Not enough.
"Down!" he barked, and jumped. The lion's second gout baked the rock where he'd stood, leaving a glassy scar.
Behind him, the world exploded into another fight.
Mara took a Step 3 head-on. Her shield boomed against stone, braced into the ground with an earth-splitting slam. The lion hit like a falling boulder and stopped. She grunted, shins sliding an inch, then locked.
Blake dashed in on the lion's right, poison glimmering green along his blade. A quick slash across a hamstring, a deeper stab at the joint. The beast snarled and kicked. He rolled under, came up grinning blood through his teeth. "That's right. Look at me."
Lysa's sigils flashed along the ridge—three sharp bursts. The second Step 3 leapt and hit a mine mid-air. The detonation turned its wingbeat sloppy. Tamara's frost seized the mistake—ice blossomed from nowhere, ran up the creature's wing like winter catching fire. It shrieked, crashed, thrashed.
Sera's Light slid between them all, thin as breath—closing a gash on Mara's forearm the instant it opened, pulling the sting from Blake's ribs when a claw grazed too close. Ember darted in and out, a streak of silver flame, raking an eye, vanishing beneath a wing, reappearing to drag a wounded lion away from Sera's line.
The field devolved into circles of violence. And at the center of the largest circle—heat and bone and will—John fought the king.
The lion took the air with a single beat, then crushed downward. John met the descent with a vertical flame uppercut, a column of knuckled fire that smacked the beast's chest. It bled off momentum. Claws still hit. He slid backward, boots carving grooves.
It faked left, cut right, tail snapping. The barb glanced his shoulder. Meat tore. Warmth spilled down his arm. He didn't have time to care. The lion's head slammed forward. He ducked. Teeth closed on empty air, the heat of that maw blistering his scalp.
"John!" Tamara's voice—sharp, controlled, nearer than he wanted.
"Not here," he said, and forced the lion backward with a machine-gun string of punches—the air pocking with flaming fists, each one snapping the beast's head a fraction, buying inches. He could feel the difference: its fire was deeper. His burned hot, moved fast, obeyed shape. Its burned true. It melted the shapes and ate the space beneath.
You're losing the attrition, Alaric said, calm even in urgency. You cannot trade blows with it.
He skated across the glass-scarred stone, dragging the lion sideways. It pursued, hot breath on his neck. He leapt, hit the ridge, kicked off—came down behind it, both palms hammering the joint of a wing. Firefists detonated point-blank. The lion bucked. Feathers burned. Not a break, but a stutter.
He pressed that stutter. Low feint left; real cut right—fist lancing like a lance into the ribs where he'd already cooked the hide. The lion hissed—soundless, a pressure in the air—and blew fire in all directions. John crossed his arms, sank into it. Pain roared. When it passed, his sleeves were ash and his skin was the color of raw meat.
On the periphery, Blake whooped—one of the Step 3s toppled under Mara's shield-bash and a knife through the throat, steam rising as Tamara's frost locked its heart. The second tried to leap over Lysa's line and met a trip-sigil that twisted its fall into a jaw-first crash. Ember hit its eye like a thrown star. Sera dragged Mara two steps back, sealing a rent across her thigh as the lion thrashed and bled out.
"Help John?" Sera asked, breathless.
Mara looked and swallowed. "We can't get in there."
They couldn't. The heat around the lead lion warped sight. John's fire added to it until the air itself seemed to bend. The beast read that bending like written language. It moved where heat would move, erased what it could erase.
John's stomach opened under a claw he misread by inches. He felt it without feeling it—pressure, release, the slick slide of something not where it should be. Knee, twist, heel into the back of the paw that had gutted him. A crack. Not enough. A knee to his face snapped his head back. He staggered, vision doubling. The lion's shadow covered him. It stepped in.
He hit the ground on one knee, one palm braced, blood spilling hot down to his belt. His breath came ragged, each inhale hitching on the torn place inside. The lion lowered its head and studied him like a craftsman regarding a flawed piece.
"John!" Tamara took a step before Mara's hand clamped on her wrist. "Don't," the shieldbearer said. Her voice shook.
The lion's throat glowed. Purity gathered—white core, black flame. It opened its mouth.
John's hand closed into a fist around nothing. He exhaled once, long and thin. The world tunneled to a point.
You are not done, Alaric said. if you use the Eclipse heart, you may be strong enough to fight it. But you will have to deal with the darkness that comes after."
He heard him. He also heard his pulse trying to climb out of his throat.
"Just a taste," John whispered.
He reached inward, past the burn of his own Light, past the disciplined latticework of Flameflow, to the cold eclipse pressed into the core. It was not dark so much as empty, a scar the shape of hunger. It did not resist his touch. It welcomed him like a blade welcomes a whetstone.
The world tilted.
Heat went out, then came back wrong. The color around the edges of things thickened. Sound elongated, then snapped. A pressure like grief pressed his mind flat and left it sharp. When he rose, it was in pieces he hoped would become a man again later.
The lion fired.
John moved through the breath between its intent and its release. His fire, fed by the heart's absence of Light, twisted color—went white at the core, ringed in ink. He cut the stream with a knife-hand of inverted flame, stepped inside the void he'd carved, and drove his fist up under the lion's jaw.
It shuddered.
It didn't just burn there. It stole. The punch pulled heat out of the lion's mouth as it landed, ripping the shape of its breath away, turning hunger into weapon. For the first time, the beast recoiled not from pain, but from something it did not understand.
"Again," Alaric said
John obliged.
He became rhythm. Inverted fire for denial, true fire for hurt. Block with white, hit with gold. A step to the left that made the lion turn, a pivot that dared it to erase, a second strike that punished the erasure. He climbed the beast like a problem, solving it with red knuckles and stolen heat.
It learned. It always did. It changed its cadence. Tail feints became real. Shoulder dips set up wing hooks. One caught him across the ribs he'd already battered. He felt something give with a wet pop. Breath vanished. He punched blind and the fist still found throat.
They dragged each other across the ridge—bleeding, burning, breaking stone with heel and claw. Once, the lion's teeth closed on his bicep and shoved through muscle. He screamed and drove a knee into its eye and felt gel explode under kneecap. It screamed back, and the scream came out as an aurora of heat. Half his hair singed off.
He lost count of his cuts. He stopped tasting the blood and started tasting metal. The Heart wanted more. It always did. It would take him to step something for a minute and then leave him in a ditch. He kept it on the edge—the line between use and surrender. Maybe it was a line. Maybe it was a wish.
Tamara's voice felt the only thing left in the world. "John."
He heard his name like a hand on the back of his neck. He didn't turn. He did look, once, at the place where she stood. That was enough to make him choose to push harder.
"All right," he said to the lion, and to the darkness inside him. "Let's Finish this."
He let Ember in—just a sliver, the spirit beast synchrony he'd learned—but not the full effect. Ember wouldn't last long and neither would John. The power was more then his body could handle. The lion lunged. John stepped into it, took the cut across his stomach. So he could get close enough to the lion.
—and struck a straight line with blazing fire on his knuckles.
The blow entered under the jaw and left between the shoulders. For a bare instant the lion hung on that line, wings locked, eyes wide. Then the world caught up. The beast collapsed, head wrenching sideways, body pitching in a tumble that carved a trench through glass and sand. It slid to a stop in a steaming heap. The smell of burnt iron rolled over them.
Silence took a full second to remember itself.
John stood there swaying, fist still outstretched, steam lifting from his skin. The eclipse in him pulsed once, hungry, and he shoved it down like a door against wind. The edge of the world softened, sound found speed, heat found color.
He dropped to his knees.
Sera reached him first; her hands were already glowing, panic well-hidden under practice. "Don't move." She said it like an order she knew he wouldn't follow.
"Not going to," he managed. His voice sounded like it had been dragged over stone.
Tamara knelt opposite Sera and touched his cheek with two fingers, as if anything more would break him. "You idiot," she whispered, and there were too many things in the words. Relief. Anger. Something that made his chest hurt in a better way than it already did.
Blake limped up, sweat cutting paths through soot. He stared at the dead lion and let out a low whistle. "That was wild man."
Mara sank her shield into the sand and sat on a rock like it owed her rent. Lysa sat down and started cultivating.
Ember crawled into John's lap and pressed his head against the torn place in his stomach, rumbling. The pain eased a fraction. Sera's Light did the rest, knitting edges, washing heat from burns, cooling skin. It wasn't perfect. It was enough to keep him here.
Alaric waited until the Light dimmed to speak. You held the line without falling over it, he said, the rarest of his tones filling the back of John's skull—simple respect. There will be a price later. Your personality will be darker for awhile.
John shut his eyes and let his head hang. The scent of char and frost and sand filled his lungs. When he opened them again, the world felt like it might allow a next breath.
"Cores," he said, voice low. "Strip the field. Quick. There'll be more that heard."
"On it," Mara said, already moving. Lysa was ahead of her. Blake gave a jaunty salute that failed to hide the shake in his hand and went to work on the Step 4, grimacing at the heat coming off the corpse.
Tamara didn't move. She stayed with him, fingers still on his face, as if her touch were a vow.
"Your light feels dark again," she said
"It'll pass," he said
The wind shifted, tugging the smoke sideways, carrying the smell of cooked feathers down into the gullies. The sun set one more inch on the mesa, and the shadows moved with it.
They went to work, quick and silent, small figures moving among great, broken shapes. Above them, the sky was clean for now, blue as a blade's edge.
It wouldn't last. It never did.
John pushed himself to his feet. Tamara rose with him, hand steady at his elbow until he didn't need it. He looked at the dead king, then at the shrinking red on his own hands.
They harvested in the heat until their packs were heavy with cores and the sun had shifted enough to make the shadows long. When they finally turned away from the mesa, the wind erased their prints almost immediately, like the desert preferred its own stories to theirs.
None of them argued. They had their own to carry.