Book 5: Chapter 19 — Flame Daughter
Aurelia’s soul was a garden. A beautiful sprawling thing surrounded by a simple stone wall. Sunlight always shone from above and the heat of her inner fire nurtured everything in its reach.
She was regularly surprised by how people reacted to her description of her inner world. She thought that she gave off a pretty stable impression of the sort of person she was—calm on the surface, with an endless furnace of rage constantly boiling underneath. But for some reason, people seemed to expect that she was either a fully enraged monster of destruction and fire, or the calm little support caster who couldn’t quite bring herself to hurt anyone.
The reality was, her inner world was as much of a contradiction as Aurelia herself.
The hillside where Aurelia had trained with her father and her inner world bore more than a passing resemblance. The real meadow had contained a pond and several ducks, while in her inner world the pond was made of lava, but that did nothing to disturb the sense of calm and peace that suffused the entire meadow.
Aurelia breathed deep and looked out across the sunlit grasses, reveling in the vibrance and life on display. Her inner world was always a little bit different, just as nature itself was, and today the flowers were large and golden. The grasses were low and thick, providing a beautiful backdrop to the more vibrant, flute-like vines that wrapped around the handful of stumps scattered throughout the meadow.
The ducks had been replaced this time with a cluster of miniature wyverns, several of which came up to her feet and squeaked at her as if begging for crumbs. They reminded her of her beloved bondmate, Vyxirax, who had been left behind when they departed Drakonias.
One of the tiny creatures was particularly forward and, as Aurelia walked slowly through the meadow, followed at her heel with the insistence of something that would not take no for an answer.
She knew how this worked. Each of the stumps was a rejected path, any of which she could forcefully revive if she chose. But if she went far enough, that was where she would find the new options. Indeed, the farther she walked, the thinner the grasses and flowers became, until she reached a flat section where only a handful of seedlings grew. She took her time wandering among them, letting her hand brush across each of their slender trunks.
The first several were simple upgrades of her existing paths, the standard advancement options that could be found in any path manual. Berserker Monk would escalate into a variety of options related to channelling her inner rage, Flametouched could become any number of elemental warrior archetypes based around fire.