By the time I awoke, Saint Solomon and Krakowah created an enormous mess of the whole ordeal. Solomon believed the interrogation involved tough words from a stern voice, not outright torture. Krakowah’s outrage exploded from her lips like a rampaging river. With their dissenting voices, the charges for Sir Regis’s death were voided along with the my apparent stealing of their star stone.

When Saint Ara was forced to apologize in public, Krakowah laughed until tears poured from her eyes, her belly bouncing with every breath. Solomon’s disdain for the palisade swelled after the event, and instead of agreeing in disgruntled silence, he voiced his concern cautiously. Even though I’d never seen his face, his eyes opened wider after that. His voice sharpened.

He’d come to realize how dangerous the palisade’s experiments were. Unlike with the plague, the church turned on their most trusted vanguards this time, and the thought unsettled his composed calm. Even after centuries, he changed his way of thinking. He changed himself.

In turn, I stayed more or less the same. I leveraged the sudden boon of fame for expressing tolerance and acceptance of the tribes. Tragedies like Solomon and Kade held heavy in my hand and on my shoulders, so I pushed for the kin’s rights. Of course, the nobles pushed back with unwavering prejudice.

Still, my efforts cemented a growing resistance against their unreasonable oppression. My chest puffed with pride at the thought, and Solomon thanked my efforts with a sincere and austere thanks that left me feeling fine and fresh.

The victims of the beacon remained mad and mutating. The palisade mentioned the effects parallels with their other prototype; veins sprouting in every direction along with a desperate desire for blood in all forms. Saint Ara froze them with the powers of the Blood Glacier tribe, but even then, the swirling monsters morphed under the icy prison, alive and waiting for warmth.

Abraham hid a boiling hatred under his every smile in my direction, but Ara conceded after I rid them of the star stone. Sophia spoke with Ara about my mistreatment, but she never gave a decent answer in reply. Whatever reason she had, it simmered at the surface of her skin, threatening to spill over at any moment.

The situation resulted in sizeable increases in prestige along with the respect of the other saints and the recognition of Nelastra’s nobles. All in all, it played out well for me, and Sophia’s slipping sanity regained its previous stability. She breathed easy, sighed less, and smiled with a full, frequent creasing of the eyes.

The tempo of my stay turned into a smooth routine as the weeks passed and my coronation came close. Joan talked about Galen’s satisfaction of the Arcanum’s activities, and Deluge discovered the secrets of Kade. The man used a telekinesis fueled by Gaia’s energy, simple as that. Even with Deluge’s utter mastery over all things biological, mimicking a god’s force was beyond him, so he kept busy with other matters like gaining the tribe’s trust. It was four days before the coronation ceremony when we learned of an essential discovery from Deluge.

I combed through the tribes that night before returning to the hollow underground where Razor and Aether hid. Despite the tense argument he and I had prior, Aether searched around Nelastra, digging miles and miles of tunnels. He mined several pounds of alexandrite, and the heaped pile shimmered a violet reflection of the other, charged alexandrite slabs he carried.

Aether covered the cavern in walls of boulders, preventing the incessant flow of insects from all directions. Carvings he drew depicted the endless wealth of jewels below us. He engraved opals, tourmaline, onyx with obsidian, amber with amethyst, even lapiz lazuli. Elegant and refined, they bundled onto the central art pieces of the cavern.

Aether’s tireless labor produced murals of marble, flowing into the iridescent reflections of bismuth. In the passing month, Aether had transformed the bug ridden hole in the ground into a king’s castle condensed into a single room. The room was poise and style and grace. Several minutes passed as I explored its intricacies, enthralled at the detail and variety of construction of each nook, cranny, and corner.

As I bathed in the afterglow of the area, I walked up to Aether before saying, “Ah...Hmm...Alright, I wanted to apologize for what I said before...Human emotion distorted my thoughts and my words, and you faced the brunt of my callous, brutal nature because of that...I meant to help you, Aether, not harm you. I am sorry.”

Aether turned towards me, his voice like the sun, “I forgive you, and besides...you were right in many ways.”

Grasping at the opportunity, I said, “Of course I was.”

Razor giggled in the side of the room as the fur of the white wolfs I saved hung from her frame. She floated over before saying, “Sometimes you show your age, like anytime you’re wrong.”

I frowned before saying, “I see you showed favor towards the wolf’s fur.”

She nodded, her smooth facing glowing like an ocean full of phosphorescent jellyfish. She and Razor offered enough light that the room had no need for the alexandrite slabs of before. That light shifted as Razor spun around like a lazy cat floating in the air as she said,

“Aether found something during his mining trips that you probably have quite the interest in.”

I raised an eyebrow as Razor laid her back onto my head, her body defying gravity as I said, “Besides this room?”

Aether nodded before turning towards me and saying, “I dug until I reached a cavern much like those near Mareovosa. After several hours, I found a type of people covered in metal.”

I nodded as I said, “They were the Blackiron tribe.”

“Ah, so you know of them then?”

My hand shivered for a second before I said, “More than I’d like, in fact.”

Aether paused before saying, “Well, they seemed like a perfectly kind people to me. Regardless, they reached an edge of the barrier underground. I was curious, so I watched them until they found a gap under the barrier.”

My eyes turned to slits as I said, “Really now?”

Aether nodded before continuing, “After they breached deeper, something...killed them.”

His voice strained at his last words. Even then, his naive nature remained through all the carnage of our journey. After experiencing the sensation for so long, I’d become endeared to it, as if he were a giant, indestructible puppy. In a weird way, it disturbed me.

Despite that, Aether said, “I followed behind with Razor afterwards. Razor took care of the things down there.”

I turned my eyes up her as I said, my words rough as sandpaper, “What was down there?”

Razor replied, “A few things like what you said Petra looked like. They were far easier to kill than her though.”

When we fought against Petra, our previous mentor, she had deformed into a mass of veins and pulsing mounds of flesh. Her black blood kept her together like a living shadow. Hands and faces struggled for release from her. Even with her head riven from her disgusting body, she continued fighting for hours after. She spewed fountains of puss and corrosive acid, melting her surroundings. The wretched gurgles of the insane and squirming organs fought for freedom under her translucent skin. She embodied the worst of the palisade’s potential, and her haunting memory lived on forever in my mind.

Hearing how others had fallen the same way, it cut into my chest like a well swung axe. I grimaced as I said, “I understood they’d done the unthinkable, but hearing of it...”

Anger surged, so I swung a hook right into Aether’s back, breaking the bones in my hand before I fell to my knees. A torrent of agony swarmed up my arm before Razor laughed at me while kicking her back feet. I squinted my eyes at her before saying with spite, “Funny, isn’t it?”

She floated from me before replying, “It is better to laugh from pain then to cry. Isn’t that right?”

I frowned before I snapped, “That doesn’t really apply to other’s misfortune.”

She landed on her feet before pulling me against her as she said, her voice warm, “It was my misunderstanding. In our culture, we would laugh at the death of any members. In its own way, it kept their memory alive as they wished it would.”

She laid the nape of her neck over my head as she said, “Who wants their loved ones to cry? I never understood that human custom. It just adds to the sadness.”

I nodded before saying, “I can relate. It makes little sense to waste the resources.”

Aether turned and said, “We found something else important, more so even.”

I pursed my lips, “What would that be?”

Aether said, “Guarded by several saints was a rather large slab of Alexandrite, glowing brilliant as a second sun. There was the remnant.”

Razor flew onto Aether as she said, her voice melting, “Ahh, it felt sooo good. Her power’s as brilliant as it ever was.”

I opened my hands before glancing up at the second chandelier of silver and amethyst. I spread my arms before I bellowed a laugh deep as dark water and uncertain as Nelastra’s near future. Razor flew towards me before saying, “What’s so funny?”

With a toothy, fanged grin, I replied, “How easy killing a god can be.”