A New Star Chapter 45

Emmanuel 

I sighed as I ran a hand over my face, watching the girl, who I was sure hadn't displayed her fully capabilities straighten up and dust her dress off. She had just put one of the top students at this country's royal academy through a beating that might go down in legends while being eight years younger than him. She hadn't bothered hiding how easy it had been for her to take the poor boy apart, nor how contemptuous she had been of what was supposed to have been an enormous challenge. That was going to cause some problems, though her position in her family and who and what she represented was going to quell many of those problems. I sighed again as the Silver Lady sent me a soundless message. 

'Did you teach her that?' she said. 

'I did not. When it comes to combat mastery, I suspect that she far surpasses me. I have a feeling that all her previous lives were both long and tumultuous,' I replied.  

Before we could say more, the king of Adonaria stepped forward, the man having been the one who arranged the challenge. As someone who had educated and trained emperors and archmages, I found the current king of what, many would argue, was the most strategic of the five nations a bit…lacking. His policies were weak, though that was a matter of debate, and he thought himself far cleverer than he actually was. Take this current quandary he found himself in, for example.  

"A fine showing," he started, and I had the urge to facepalm. That was not a good opening with Alex, who would not be puffed up by idle flattery.  

"A poor showing from your contestant," she returned, though her voice was mild. I sighed again. I was doing a lot of that today. "I take it we are finished here?" 

"Young lady, while I have great respect for your parents, that is no way to talk to your-" the king started, and I moved to interject myself, as I knew this going to go even less well. 

Before I could play peacemaker, Alex turned and look at the king, really looked at him, and for just a moment, a single frozen instant in time, everyone there with any sensitivity could feel her true nature. It was not as she had done in exerting pressure on the Silver Lady more than a year ago, but was a brief, brutal snapping outward of the edges of her soul, showing a piece of who she really was. What she really was.  

Every hair on my body stood on end as the king's mouth snapped shut and he went pale, his feet locked to the ground like the roots of an old tree. I felt a chill race up my spine, a frigid cold that made the goosebumps stand up in stark relief on my skin. Looking at her in that brief moment, it was more than a powerful warrior, more than someone who had survived a thousand battlefields. I truly felt as if I was looking at one of the oceanic leviathans that kept us from sending ships to any of the 'lost' continents. It was like a being of too much flesh, too many teeth in too many mouths surrounded by too many eyes and with too many fins and tentacles the size of castle had been compressed down into the body of an, admittedly, tall ten-year-old girl. I don't know if I had ever felt anything like it, even when I had participated in driving away one of those horrific monsters from our shores thirty years ago. It was like looking at a person that had become terror, become nightmare, standing in the flesh before us. 

The moment passed in just an instant, so fast and at such a high level that most people there didn't even get a hint of it. Alex's snapped around, looking directly at one of the walls of the large training ground, her eyes starting to shine silver, something I had experienced only once before. I looked towards where she was looking, but it was obvious there was nothing close. I immediately spooled my senses to the max, not caring that it would put pressure on all but the handful of X-, Y-, and Z-rankers at the estate this day. I couldn't feel whatever she was feeling, and clearly could no one else, even the Silver Lady and the other Z-ranker present.  

"What is it?" I asked, hating that there was a slight edge of nervousness in my voice, watching as Alex cocked her head to the side.  

"You do not hear it? You do not feel it?" she asked calmly, as if discussing the day's weather. 

"I have no idea what you mean," I replied, now genuinely nervous. 

"Stay here. I believe…an old, old friend is nearby. I will go see them," she said. Before anyone could move to stop her, darkness swelled around her feet, a massive black tide rising up and consuming her, the girl disappearing from all my senses in an instant.  

"Well, that was…something," the king said a bit lamely.  

Alexandra 

I felt it. Something I knew in my very bones. A whisper I had heard resonate more times than I could remember, more times than I cared to count. It was incredibly familiar, something I had lived with my whole life, and many blurry lives before that. Thousands of years, and they never changed, their voice echoing out to me strongly, though I felt an odd warmth burn within me.  

I walked through The Dark to the place I felt them, stepping out of the strange dimension over an hour later having traveled more than a hundred miles. I was a long way from home, deep into the Wilds and past the barrier mountain range. Still, I was in a cave, and before me knelt a man, his back to me. I couldn't see his features, but what little hair he had left was whiter than the driven snow and had an ethereal quality about it. I could feel the age on him, a life that had been pushed to its absolute limit. He knelt in full plate armor, many and long years of service etched into its surface, the metal worn and scarred and oft repaired. I could feel the little flicker of life left in him, understanding that at one time, this man was a raging inferno, his vitality a pillar of fire that scorched the sky and cracked the earth. 

Directly across from me, on the opposite side of the man, stood a shadow that drank in and snuffed out the light. The image of a heavy robe played in my mind as I looked them, and a thick cloak draped all about them. Only their eyes were in any way visible, two glowing orbs of pure red that shone with an eerie, evanescent light.  

"It is not often Glorious Death comes for a soul in person," I said quietly.  

'And what a soul it is,' his voice echoed all around us yet came from nowhere. It said everything, and contained nothing. 

"I did not expect an audience at my final hour," the old man rasped, though there was no malice nor shame in his voice. I walked around to his side, seeing that he had his blade sheathed and set crossways on the ground before him. His face was waxy and sunken, age having spotted his skin and made it thin as parchment. On a continent where the strongest lived between two and three hundred years, often more if they had the blood of elves or others in their veins, he had endured uncountable years. Even based on the old smoke in his soul that spoke of the raging fire of his vitality, his age was astonishing.  

'In this, she is the best audience,' Glorious Death said.  

I glance between them, one an old man that had lived a life of unimaginable glory and power, brought low now in his twilight years, while the other was the embodiment of a true warrior's final grace, the long shadow that fell at the end of the path. I felt something stir within me, something powerful and raw and, acting on instinct, I stepped backward out of my body. Well, it was not my body, but calling on Soul Resonance, I stepped out of Alexandra's body, standing as a spirit behind her. My new body in this world did not fall, but instead tilted her head, examining the man before turning to examine me, which is when I saw that her irises were black as death and twice as cold.  

Alexandra? 

I looked behind me, almost stumbling as I controlled my own body for the first time in ten years. The woman standing now in front of me radiated power on a scale that was hard to comprehend, the force of her very existence crushing the space around her. She had eyes of pure silver, alight with an inner fire that glowed, hot and true. Her hair was molten gold, long waves cascading down her back to end at her knees, fluttering in an ethereal wind that didn't reach into the cave. This was the person who had piloting my body for ten years, the monster from another time, another place that had been reborn as…me. 

"Thank you," I said, seeing the surprise in the woman's eyes. "Thank you, for taking care of my body and my family. I won't forget it, now or in the future." 

"I did not do what was right, but what I must. Always, what I must," the woman said, her voice like a mountain falling or a tidal wave breaking.  

"Still, I thank," I said, curtseying to her before turning to the man and Glorious Death. 

'You are different than the rest,' Death said to me. 'You echo with a death that never was but always will be.' 

"I feel it. I feel it in my bones," I said, kneeling down next to the man. "Warrior. I would see you laid to rest true." 

"Take of my fire," he said in his weak, rasping voice. He extended his right hand to me and I grasped it, ignoring how the leather felt or how the metal dug into my flesh. Thanks to my benefactor from beyond the stars, my body was tough beyond all limit, and he do no damage to me. His grip, despite the last few moments of his life passing before our eyes, was strong and firm. I could feel in it the power of a man who had swung a blade for five centuries, a man who had stood in the gap when none else would, a man who had saved his home and his people without thanks or praise, but simply because it was his duty, and his honor.  

Glorious Death reached out, his cloaked arm extending far from where he stood, and he placed his hand on the old man's head. A chill permeated the room, frost forming across the man's armor, but I felt a radiant heat shoot up my arm, blistering and scorching. I had not been idle these last ten years, but I had immersed myself in Xera's memories for much of the time. I had also been aware of what she did with my body, speaking as me and acting in my stead; I had no complaints. That knowledge and understanding allowed me to grasp the fire as it clawed up my arm, taming it and drawing it in before spreading it out, igniting every cell and molecule of my being, from the top of my head to the tips of my toes.  

The feeling faded, and I knew that our…that my body had just improved, though it obviously hadn't gone up a tier, just increased a grade. I looked down, feeling the old man's hand slip from my grasp as Glorious Death took him, his life slipping away. Glorious Death turned, looking me over with a certain intensity, though all I could see was the glowing of his eyes. Waving a hand, he summoned forth something with a burst of darkness and held it out to me, gesturing for me to take it. The object was a small seal, a sigil with a complicated array of symbols carved across the face and a sigil of a skull biting a sword on one side. As soon as I grabbed the symbol, everything changed. A darkness spread before me before I felt I was whisked away. 

When I was aware again, I was standing in absolute darkness, with a series of glowing portals surrounding me, all leading to vastly different places. What I saw beyond the gates I couldn't even comprehend, but I feel an affinity with the gates themselves, a link of some kind. That knowledge, and that feeling, settled within me before everything changed again and I was suddenly back, looking at Glorious Death as he stepped back. The old man, or his body, rather, was now gone, disappeared completely. I checked behind me, seeing that Xera was still there, before looking back at Death. 

'You have the connection. Death welcomes your grace,' Glorious Death said before disappearing in a flash of darkness and frigid death mana.  

"I suppose we should talk," Xera said to me. 

"We don't have time," I said.  

Before she could protest, as she was clearly about to do, I was suddenly submerged back into my half-dreaming state, Xera back in full control of my body and mind. I wasn't able to do much, but I was able to send a feeling of warmth that she was able to pick up on. I settled back, exhausted by all that had happened and my encounter, rather too young, with Death itself. Surprising that Death was an embodiment with a form and a consciousness, but Xera had not reacted to finding him in the slightest, though it was a combination of both of us that had detected his presence. I would have to think on it, but for now, I was tired and would need to rest while Xera walked us home. 

Xera 

I was back in control of my new body, though calling it my body seemed a bit of a stretch at this point. I had no idea that real owner of the body hadn't died, or had even existed in the first place, but was instead living inside my own mind without me even having the faintest idea. I felt a warmth course through me for a moment, realizing that that was what that had happened the several times I had gotten a strange sense of warmth and odd feeling of a presence. I returned to the estate, thinking about what I was going to do from now on. Obviously, I wasn't going to say anything about this, not until both I had learned a lot more about it, and until I was a lot more powerful. I felt like I owed this young girl an awful lot, though a brief flash of warmth followed that thought, making me grin slightly.  

Back in the estate, I returned to my rooms, having had quite enough of all the excitement that had popped up, besides being tired of the annoying guests we had cluttering up the house and grounds. Fortunately, it was late enough, and others were busy enough, that I was left alone, allowing me to bath and take care of my evening tasks in peace before climbing into bed. I fell asleep as soon as my head hit the pillow, not even taking a moment to think about everything that I had learned that day, particularly within the last two hours.  

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