Lindon was fairly certain that they would have promised anything to get these outsiders to leave. They would marry off their children to the exiles if it would get these powerful outsiders to leave them alone.
He guessed it would only be a matter of minutes before the first members of the School approached them privately, trying to get a hint about how to grow stronger.
But that had little to do with Lindon.
The Fallen Leaf School looked more like a farming community than an organization dedicated to the sacred arts, with barns and tilled fields separated by grassy plains. He and Orthos stood in the shade of a tall, purple-leafed orus tree as Little Blue sat on the turtle’s head, recounting their adventures to him in a series of chirps and ringing tones that sounded something like a bell tumbling down a flight of stairs.
Listening to Little Blue calmed him.
And the quiet gave him time to wrestle with his anger.
[Everyone’s alive,] Dross pointed out. [Everyone you cared about, that is. Some people are dead. So it could be worse! They could have been killed while you were gone, when you would never have known.]
Orthos hadn’t told him the details of what Heaven’s Glory had done to his family, but he couldn’t gloss over the core details.
The Heaven’s Glory School had hunted Lindon’s family down and punished them because of what Lindon had done. The Wei clan had given them up. They had suffered for over three years, living like scavengers in the wilderness.
And Lindon had held back his Void Dragon’s Dance. He could have wiped them all out in one stroke.
He preferred the anger to the guilt. Picturing what he could do to the Heaven’s Glory School kept him from thinking about what he should have done differently.
The sooner he punished them, the better. Both for his own satisfaction and because he was getting weaker.
He cycled Blackflame, and the madra felt fainter than it had in years. He hadn’t recovered from his expense yesterday, and it seemed that while he was here, he wouldn’t fully regain what he’d lost. The more power he spent, the weaker he would become, until he was truly fighting like a Jade.
But he had another core.
Even his pure madra was weaker than usual, but his second core gave him an advantage over the others. He could retain his power longer than anyone else. He would slowly lose it, just like everyone, but he could hold on to his original strength the longest.
Although he could bring ruin to Heaven’s Glory even if he had to do it as a Jade.
Kelsa emerged from the other side of a tiny cabin. She looked leaner now than he remembered her, harder edged. The deprivation had left its mark.
[Hey, there’s another bright side! As long as she’s with you, she won’t have to worry about food anymore!]
“No, she will not,” Lindon said aloud.
Kelsa looked grave as she met his eyes. “Mother’s only been back for a few days. She’s still not quite herself, yet. She and Father haven’t had much time to catch up. Did Orthos prepare you?”
Lindon found it hard to speak through the tightness in his throat. “Not…not really.”
Kelsa’s style had always been to deliver painful truth bluntly. A fast cut was cleaner.
“Father’s eyes were burned,” she said, and the words struck Lindon strangely. They should have meaning, but that meaning didn’t quite sink in like it should. “He can see basic shapes and can tell the difference between light and dark, but he gets by mostly with his ears and his cane.”
[There’s a bright side to that too!] Dross was starting to sound a little desperate. [Human eyes aren’t so great. With Remnant eyes, he’ll be able to see brand-new colors he never even imagined!]
“He’s been living this way for years now,” Kelsa said. “It isn’t so bad. To tell you the truth, he’s still more upset about his leg.”
That brought a faint smile from Lindon. As far back as he could remember, his father had been bitter about a leg injury he’d gotten as a young man. He blamed the wound for his failure to reach Jade.
“Mother has been held by Heaven’s Glory. They needed her to work for them, so they didn’t treat her too roughly, but she has been a prisoner for a long time. She hasn’t slept in days, and she’s still convinced that she will be captured again.”
Lindon was more prepared for that. While Orthos had said little about his father, suggesting that it was Kelsa’s place to tell him, the turtle couldn’t avoid telling Lindon about his mother.
She was the one that Orthos and Kelsa had gone to rescue from Heaven’s Glory.
Lindon had assumed that she’d been captured recently. He hadn’t imagined that Seisha had been a prisoner for so long.
The guilt for that settled on him like a pile of bricks. It was yet another way that his family had paid the price for vengeance directed at him.
There’s a bright side for you, Dross, Lindon said silently. I’m done thinking about what I’m going to do to Heaven’s Glory.
There was no point wasting his thoughts on the dead.
[…I’m not sure how bright that side is.]
“And you?” Lindon asked Kelsa. “You can’t have escaped unharmed.”
She looked at him like he was crazy. “They were the ones who suffered. I was the lucky one.”
Lindon had already heard from Orthos what she’d been through. He knew already.
His sister had lain motionless in the cold, waiting for sentries to pass, trying not to shiver in case they heard the motion. She’d stolen scraps of food, gotten caught, taken beatings, and gone back the next night because if she failed, their father wouldn’t be able to eat. After a day of scavenging whatever she could, of taking care of exiles that weren’t even part of her clan, she had spent nights studying her Path manual and working on the one technique she’d ever learned.
When Orthos arrived, she’d spent every spare moment training and re-training, un-learning the habits that Sacred Valley had ingrained into her. She had reversed her Iron body, a process that sounded agonizing, and gained another one so her foundation would be solid.
On the day she reached Jade, under Orthos’ instruction, she had started working to free her mother.
Orthos said he saw Lindon in her, but Lindon didn’t agree.
He had been shown a world beyond this one. When he pushed for improvement, it was because he knew improvement was possible.
She had fought for a victory that she must have believed impossible. Every day. For three years.
But she wouldn’t have to anymore.
“I’m ready,” Lindon said.
Kelsa didn’t question that or prepare him any further. She didn’t give him any more advice. She only walked through the cabin’s door, leaving it open for him to follow.
Lindon ducked through the doorway and entered.
The interior of the cabin was simple: wooden walls and wooden floors, covered by a rough-woven rug. A one-person bed had been pushed against the back wall, and his parents sat at a tiny table in chairs that looked like they had been hand-carved by the cabin’s owner.
These people looked like his parents, so familiar he could never mistake them. At the same time, they looked like strangers.
They were both tall, broad people, built for the battlefield. His father had more gray in his hair and had lost some of his muscle, his shoulders more rounded and his middle a little softer, but he was still unmistakably Wei Shi Jaran. His bad leg was stretched out on a chair, his cane held loosely across his lap.
Wei Shi Seisha had gray in her hair too, which he didn’t remember, but hers was still a deep brown like no one else in the clan. She looked healthier than Jaran or Kelsa, and she had the same drudge floating over her shoulder: a brown segmented fish made of dead matter that reminded Lindon of petrified wood.