Chapter 173 — The Measure of a Myth
Blade woke with a gasp, the kind that pulls the lungs into cold air and leaves the body trembling as if the bones had been rearranged in the night. The dream had been a room of white and a slow erasure: he had been Kuro, standing while his body thinned into light and time opened like paper. He had heard a woman—Rei—shouting, high and panicked, and then the echo of Shira and Kaira calling his name as if the world were slipping. For a moment he’d been floating in that nether where faces are both near and impossibly distant; then he was in the inn room, sunlight slicing the curtains and his heart hammering the same rhythm.
Shira and Kaira still slept, curled like small, fierce animals against the travel-worn blankets. Cinder—the little dragon—stretched with a squeak and opened one round, inquiring eye. He watched Blade tremble, and for the first time in the small creature’s memory the big, steady figure he trusted looked fragile.
“Master?” Cinder asked, voice higher than usual. He hopped to Blade’s knee and peered directly at him. The dragon’s bright gaze was all honest question.
Blade blinked and found both himself and the shaking. He swallowed hard and tried to arrange his face into a steadiness he did not entirely feel. “I’m—” he began, then cut himself off and laughed a little, a breath meant to smooth away the alarm. “I’m fine, Cinder. Just a bad dream.”
Cinder’s whiskered snout wrinkled as if it could not accept that answer whole. “You don’t look fine,” the dragon said bluntly. “You shook like a sapling in a storm. Are you ill?”
Blade’s hand hovered for a moment over the small silver chain at his breast—the pastel-blue sapphire Pyrothax had given him still tucked under his shirt. The jewel was warm from his body and oddly comforting. He pressed it and then, with the odd practicality that had gotten them through worse, he asked the dragon a favor that made his voice small but steady. “If anything happens to me—if I don’t wake up—look after them,” he said, nodding toward the sleeping shapes of Shira and Kaira. “Promise me.”
Cinder’s eyes widened, and a flicker of indignation—spiced with worry—spiked through his bright features. “Why would I promise such a dull thing unless I thought you’d actually leave me to tell lies to the campfire? I promise.” He puffed up like a soldier assuming final rank. “I will roast any hungry thing that dares come for them.”
Blade tried to smile and realized it came out as half-grin and half-grimace. “Thank you,” he whispered. He could not tell the dragon why the dream had been so sharp—how Kuro’s sensation of fading had felt like an obligation returning unpaid—but he didn’t want the others to shoulder the same weight. For now, he put the worry away in a small pocket of himself and rose to start the day.
By the time the inn’s common room spilled light and the smell of bread, they had eaten and packed. The innkeeper—an obliging woman with flour on her cheek—patted Blade’s shoulder and said, “If you’re heading on, the Adventurers’ Guild has been asking about you. They said they’d like you to come by; they have some papers for you.”
“And they’re not the sort of paper you refuse,” Shira piped up, eyes still drowsy but happy to gossip. “Someone said there will be cake if you return as a hero.”
Blade’s lips twitched. “Cake motivates more than coin sometimes,” he said. “All right—guild it is.”
They rode the short distance to the town’s Adventurers’ Guild in the carriage. The guildhouse stood proud on the market square—banners knotted with old kills and maps pinned to the boards. The receptionist, the same girl with ink-dark hair who always wore a look of bureaucratic surprise, blinked when she saw them.
“You’re here,” she said breathlessly to Blade. “You have to do a quick magic test before the promotion. Master Thera insisted. We must make sure the crystal reads properly.”
Outside onlookers pressed in—adventurers who had traded tales of Emberfall, merchants who’d watched the road, and a scattering of children trying to see the famous man who never seemed to stop changing shape. The guildmaster, Thera, a woman whose authority could silence a room as easily as it stirred a warband, came from behind the heavy doors to watch.
Blade set his hand on the crystal as requested. The guild expected the usual: a shimmer, a hum, a reading that would translate into a promotion form. Instead—before anyone fully understood—light exploded in the crystal and it shattered like sugar under heat. A shockwave of mana pulsed outward, not malignant but undeniable. The room went still.
“By all the saints,” Thera murmured, then straightened with a look that mixed awe and protocol. “This…this is not ordinary power. The reading is off the charts. Blade Lunaria—by testament of the Guild and by unanimous vote in light of your deeds—Rank-S++.”
There was a roar in the guild that sounded like a market bell being rung for a day of feast. Shira squealed and hugged Blade; Kaira allowed the faintest smile, a fold at the corner of her mouth that meant she was pleased for him though she would never parade the joy. Cinder bounced nearly out of the carriage in a frenzy.
Word leaped. Men who had once whispered that the southern mines would buy them safety now had a louder chorus: the man who had sealed a volcano and felled a demon lord had broken a magic crystal with his palm. The implication rippled: whatever aura had been present in Nyxarion’s domain, whatever odd weave of light and shadow had been at work—this man’s presence registered against measures built for mortals.
Far to the west, beyond the smoke of the caravans and the song of market stalls, the Church in Valerion gathered with equal gravity. Ryuto sat across from Grand Cardinal Sarion and a small assembly of cardinals beneath the high vault. The news had drifted in: Nyxarion’s light had gone still; a replacing darkness had been noted by arcane readers; and a man had risen to a rank that scratched at myth. The Church could not blazon the “death” of the First Summoned Hero—history and faith were stitched tightly and the consequences of rewriting the cathedral’s ledger were enormous—but the urgency in the room was as heavy as a bell.
Sarion’s fingers toyed with a rosary as he spoke, voice low and careful. “If his existence is ended—if Nyxarion truly is no more—how will the people accept a change in a story as old as their prayers? We cannot simply tear out a saint’s chapters without the world stumbling.” His eyes were old and precise. “Yet any shift in the balance may force us into an answer we have delayed.”
Ryuto—still young in years but hardened by war and the weight of summoned purpose—pressed his hands together. “The readings showed a void where there was light,” he said. “And in that breath, a dark signature responded. It matches what some call the Darkness Lord.” He spoke the name with no flourish; it was an accusation that tasted of dust. “If Nyxarion’s intervention sealed the volcanos centuries ago and now the seal required repair that used another hand—then the man who used that hand must be reckoned with.”
A hot conflict moved across Ryuto’s face, a private war masked by doctrine. “I was brought here by Elmyria to stop the Darkness Lord,” he admitted quietly. “That was the charge. I have not seen him since our battle three months past, and yet the man who moves in shadow now has done things that look like good in the world. I want to return to my world. I want to go back to the World of Presence. But this place needs someone who can hold both its light and its dark. I am torn.”
A murmur in the room—some priests bowed their heads in thought, others clenched small fists beneath layers of cloth. Sarion’s reply was practical as only old faith can be. “We must verify before we break history,” he said. “We will not announce until we understand. But you—Ryuto—do not go chasing ghosts for the sake of doctrine. Watch, listen, and learn. The world may yet need hands that can both heal and hold the blade.”
Ryuto’s fingers loosened on the rosary. “I will watch,” he promised, which was both a vow and a confession of reluctance.
Back in the guild, drink and song rose; travelers shouted for more bread, and children were given the smallest coins to tell the tale of how Blade Lunaria had become not only a man of legend but a living sign that the world’s accounts were shifting. Blade himself stood quiet for a while, the hollow the Chronael had left at his ribs present and gnawing. He had the highest rank now: a crown made of paper and ink and a responsibility that fit like armor—heavy, helpful, and impossible to shed easily.
Shira hugged him so hard he thought she might have splintered small bones into laughter; Kaira watched with a quiet pride that suited her new edges; Cinder sang a ridiculous song about being the tiniest dragon in the largest tale. Outside, markets shone and the world turned, but inside Blade’s chest the clock ticked like a mood he had to answer soon.
He let his hand close around the small pastel sapphire in his pocket and felt, for a single breaking second, both the weight of new rank and the hammering charge of the unknown days to come.
__ __ __
✦ To be continued...