Packing is one of the most annoying things people have to do at one point or another. That pair of shorts you just know is there will almost always be somewhere else and you have to go hunting through your cupboard to find it. And underwear. Don’t even get me started on underwear.

Thankfully, I’d had to pack often enough in the recent past that I hadn’t found it worth the effort to fully unpack. All I had to do was take some stuff out, put in some more climate appropriate clothes and rearrange the mess my travel bag had become. Still annoying, but infinitely more manageable.

I blinked. Was it just me or was that eye-poppingly orange jacket I had bought in a moment of insanity suddenly seeming much more pleasing to the eye?

Looking around, I found that it wasn’t just the jacket. Everything around me had started losing its colour. Turning to the corner of the room I saw that the ordinarily brilliant white flame of the smokeless torch had caught a dull greyish tint.

My heart sank. I immediately tried to shadow step out of the room. I failed. My attempts to tug on the ambient shadow mana with my soul were about as effective as a child trying to stop an adult by grabbing his shirt.

I recoiled from the connection as though I had touched a live snake. If I persisted in my attempt, I would get locked in a struggle of souls with whoever it was that was trying to trap me in my room. As this person was clearly much stronger than me, that would be tantamount to suicide.

Dropping the jacket, I quickly cycled through all the elements, testing the effectiveness of my magic. Shadow and fire. Those were the elements I had lost control over. I took a deep breath. I think I knew who had come to pay me a visit.

As everything in the room except for me faded to grey, the flame of the smokeless torch degenerated to the darkest of blacks. The dark fire welled up from the cup of the torch and cascaded down onto the ground, forming a pool of flames beneath it. The surface of the pool rippled and two figures rose out of it.

One of them met my expectation. Clad in dark crystal armour, her long midnight black hair hanging behind her like a cloak of fire, pale skin, amber eyes – the Dark Sun.

The other was a surprise. “Master?” I asked, doubtfully.

The reason for my hesitation was that, standing one step behind and to the left of the Dark Sun, he looked like a completely different man from the one in my memories.

His sloppy lime-green shirt and slack pants had been replaced by a dark red gold embroidered tunic and cream trousers with a black sash cinching the shirt to his waist. He had cropped his hair short and combed it back, revealing a jagged scar in the centre of his forehead. And instead of his customary slouch, he now stood ramrod straight with his hands clasped behind his back.

And his aura. It was the greatest change of all. I could feel his presence weighing on my soul. Rather than a bondless Tamer with no magic of his own, the person in front of me was someone who could easily rival and probably even exceed father.

During our escape from the marine battlefield, I had lost sight of master and his dead-eyed friend. After returning to land, I had inquired about their whereabouts, and when that failed to give any results, I had put out a reward for news about them.

As more and more time had passed without any progress, I had slowly started to accept that they might have met their end in the chaos of the war.

‘I clearly don’t know master as well as I thought I did,’ I sighed in my heart self-deprecatingly.

“We meet again, Mars Felidae,” said the Dark Sun, breaking my thoughts with her hoarse, magnetic voice.

Clamping down on my confusion and curiosity, I greeted her with a formal bow. “I’m honoured, my Lady.” I gestured towards the living room sofa. “Please, feel at home.”

With a curt nod, she took her seat with a poise and grace I had only seen demonstrated by the aristocrats in the Capital. A sure indication of noble upbringing. I narrowed my eyes.

‘She looks like Hei Lian, but the wolf princess had little use for etiquette. Not to mention the elemental. And seeing that she assisted the Shogunate to defeat us… Could it be that Miyagi Vulpine is in control?’

My heart sank. If that was the case, then I was doomed.

Thankfully, that didn’t seem to be the case.

“We’re here because I owe you a favour,” said the Dark Sun, holding out a loosely-clenched fist. She opened her fist, revealing a rose-red spark of flame with tinges of pink dancing upon her palm.

As soon as the flame appeared, my heartbeat sped up. An intense sense of familiarity welled up from the deepest recesses of my mind. I knew, without the shadow of doubt, that the flame was mine.

“What happened to me was a miracle,” she explained. “The fusion of three separate entities – specially those as disparate as the three of us – is a near impossibility. The most likely outcome was for all three of our minds to shatter, leaving an empty husk behind – a monster filled with only the desire for destruction.

“But due to Hei Lian’s unique circumstances, she was able to take the leading role and keep that from happening. Even so, our union was unstable. Over time our situation would be getting worse and worse. We were walking closer and closer to the edge of the abyss…”

She turned her gaze to the tiny flame burning cheerfully in her palm. “But this flame of yours held us back.” She closed her fist again and when she opened it, her palm was empty.

“It is a beautiful flame,” she said softly, her frozen expression softening into the hint of a smile.

Turning to me, she looked me in the eye. Maybe it was a misconception, but in the inky depths of her pupils, I thought I could see a spark of pink-tinged red. Her voice carried the roar of a thousand flames; it had the quietness of ash.

“I owe you a favour, Mars Felidae. What would you have of me?”