Chapter 87: The ritual (1)
When Calen woke up on the day of the ritual he felt rather nervous - according to Sylara there was no possibility of the ritual actually harming him, but the fact that in theory something could happen scared him a little.
Since Sylara was preparing the place where he would inherit the flame by herself, the ritual was scheduled to take place in the afternoon, and as it was early morning now, he had plenty of time to kill.
He finished purifying all the animals yesterday, so he could focus on things he wanted to do - like checking how much his strength increased from all those herbs he ate.
Calen didn’t have time to test his new capabilities, but he did notice that as of yesterday evening all the scorched skin on his left wrist has fallen off, leaving the symbol pure gold.
When he looked at it the mark was nowhere near as bright as it initially seemed - perhaps because of the contrast with the blackend surface of the symbol it looked like it glowed more. Now it was just pure gold, with barely any glow noticeable - he knew it would change as the flame grows in strength, but for the moment it was scarcely different from a regular golden tattoo.
If he was being honest, he didn’t particularly like how the mark worked - sure, it sounded cool on paper, but I’m practice there was a lot of inconvenience involved with a perpetually glowing spot on your body.
Calen was lucky enough that his mark was on his wrist, so he could cover it fairly easily, but there where Flamebearers who had the mark on their cheek, or side of the neck - any stealth missions were completely out of question for them.
And even if he tried to hide it, he had no idea how bright the mark could become - for all he knew it could glow so much that there would be no way of hiding it, short of putting his entire forearm in a metal cast.
As far as the ideas of the Sun God went, this one was pretty shitty.
His deliberations were cut short by Isara who has just woken up and entered the common room.
"Why are you standing there like that?" She narrowed her eyes. "It’s weird."
"I was planning to leave but got lost in thought." He explained. "Decided that it would be good to see how effective were those herbs from Sylara."