The Beginning After The End Chapter 355

TESSIA POV

Lifting my hand, I reveled in the response of the mana. The red particles jumped and danced, full of energy. The yellow hovered low to the ground, rolling and tumbling like tiny stones. The blue mana washed over me like the incoming tide and clung to my skin like dew. The green ones were my favorite, though. They had a cutting quality, like a sharp blade, whipping and snapping like the wind they represented, but there was also something cool and clean about them. The wind mana was both hard and soft at the same time.

I was standing on a nameless plateau, high in the Basilisk Fang Mountains. Not far from Taegrin Caelum. There was nothing around for miles that I could accidentally destroy…but I wasn't out here because Agrona feared I might lose control. Rather, he knew the extent of my power, and he wanted me to let loose.

Reaching into the sky, I focused on the mana, pulling it to a specific point high above. Water and wind condensed, smashing into each other to build into a huge, black storm cloud that darkened the mountains for miles all around us.

My small audience watched in silence. Nico was there, of course, along with three of the other Scythes. Draneeve, Nico's attendant and a few other ranking figures from the fortress had come as well. Agrona hadn't, but I'd never seen him leave the castle before.

Fire mana drifted up from the sun-warm stones and fused into white, hot bolts of lightning that crashed back down to shatter boulders and cast shrapnel across my training ground. Water condensed into ice, which began to fall like catapult stones to smash craters into the hard mountain soil.

Even at the height of my strength on Earth, I'd never been able to do anything like this with ki.

My memories had been much more stable in the weeks since Agrona promised I could leave his fortress. He said that I would begin to feel more like myself the longer I was in this body. The runes covering my flesh helped hold me together, helped keep the other voice quiet.

Wind mana coalesced into wide, cutting streams that wove around me like a dragon, separating me from the others. Wind, both soft and hard…

My life—my previous life—had required me to harden myself to endure the constant and torturous training I had received. But there had always been a piece of myself that I kept in my heart, that piece where I had felt loving warmth for the first time in my life, and it was that warmth that maintained me until…

I refocused on the mana, recoiling from the shattered remnants of those memories. I still couldn't remember my death, and Nico had only said I would learn about it in time.

Nico…

I glanced at where he stood, watching me cast spells, his dark hair lashing his face. I couldn't help but notice how he stood well away from the others. Poor Nico, an outsider even here.

Draneeve clapped his hands and shouted into the wind, his mask giving his voice a grating quality that I found uncomfortable to listen to. Nico motioned for Draneeve's silence, and the masked man stopped shouting, though he continued with a slow, inconsistent applause.

Reaching out, I tugged at the corners of the huge storm and drew it inward and downward until it hovered just above me, hardly the size of an apple tree. The creation, moments ago a deadly manifestation of raw power, was now something entirely different. Tiny winged creatures made of air wheeled within the clouds, while little watery dolphins jumped and splashed below them.

It was beautiful. Mana was beautiful. Ki had been energy, capable of being gathered and unleashed but never really formed, not in the same way mana could take shape. This was real magic.

My attention twitched nervously over to the three who stood apart from the rest: the Scythes. Technically, Nico was one of them, but they held him apart, or he kept his distance. Or both.

Their varying shades of gray skin, black horns, and red eyes all served to define them as something firmly other. Their gazes held both curiosity and unease, like an audience watching a lion tamer at a circus. It made me believe what Nico kept telling me: they knew I'd be stronger than them eventually.

"Very, very well done!" Draneeve piped up in his purposefully grating voice. "You've grown so much more quickly than Lord Nico. Barely weeks in the skinny elf girl's body and you're—"

There was a loud crack.

Draneeve straightened his mask—a plain white thing with small holes for eyes and a crudely drawn smile—and rubbed the side of his head where Nico had backhanded him. I frowned at Nico, who had the good grace to at least look embarrassed. He hated Draneeve, I knew, but he wouldn't tell me why.

Cadell and Dragoth were watching Nico.

Dragoth was enormous, as large as any man I'd ever seen, but he was otherwise cut from a familiar cloth. When I was rising through the ranks in the King's Crown tournament, there were many like him. Cocky, self-absorbed warriors. Quick to laugh at their own jokes, and quick to fight at any perceived insult.

Cadell was stranger, scarier. He had a cold and cruel face, like the sharp side of an axe, but was businesslike in his manners. I didn't like him.

But it was the third Scythe who I found most interesting. I'd only met her once before, and that was brief. Although she looked young—twenty at the most—there was a deep, curious wisdom in her eyes, and a worldly intelligence. I felt like she was dissecting me with her dark eyes, both then and now. Unlike her counterparts, she was still watching me. Not my spell, with it's silly wind-gulls and water-dolphins, but me.

Looking into her eyes, it was almost like I could see the gears behind them turning, trying to figure me out. Did she see me as a threat? A tool? I wasn't sure.

"Nico," Cadell said, his tone full of frost and fire, "be nice to your pet. After all, it is Draneeve who returned you from that awful continent." Draneeve fidgeted, his attitude unreadable behind his ugly mask.. "He'd be a general now, perhaps even a retainer, if he hadn't retreated from Dicathen to save your ungrateful hide."

My spell faded away, the cloud dissolving to mist and then to nothing as I waited for Nico to respond. He clenched his fists and took a step away from Draneeve. "Don't speak to me like I'm your lesser, Cadell. I'm a Scythe too, remember?"

Nico, his back to me, seemed to shrink in on himself. "He was our friend…"

He turned, and for just a moment I didn't see the stranger's face that Nico wore. I only saw his eyes, red-rimmed and glistening with tears. I knew the sadness in them. He was looking at me now the same way he used to look at me, helpless. Desperate.

"And he was the one that murdered you, Cecilia."

Chapter end