It is a common misconception that those with a certain colour of power cannot perform certain tasks. Yes, it is easiest and most natural for one with yellow power to perform heating spells while one with blue is most naturally attuned to cold, but yellow can be liquid just as easily as blue can be flame.

Which is to say, with great difficulty; but that difficulty is not insurmountable. It is therefore our request that an additional course be added to all schools in the Leetan-Metako region in cross-hue power constructs. This is a vastly underserviced field which deserves to be lifted from obscurity into common use.

-Petition 3899-355, to the reirns of Leetan and Metako. 900 signatures were attached.

Retti never appeared.

We waited beside Desten’s body for nearly an hour while Vess and Pel worked to heal myself and Lan from the battle, then while I painstakingly reconstructed the shield. I wasn’t sure how much faith I should put in it at this point - Desten had broken it with seeming ease - but he was also supercharged with far too much power.

Power that still resonated in my chest whenever I passed nearby, trying to draw me in closer. Uneasily, I sidestepped away from the body. No thank you. I wanted nothing to do with this madness. And I still thought there should have been some way to save him. Maybe if I’d acted sooner. Maybe if I’d stayed in Varonhold instead of touring with Desten 3. Maybe… maybe I could have made a difference.

But now it was too late.

Finally, everyone recovered - apart from our dead ally, whose name had apparently been Trein - and my shield back to full strength, we resumed our methodical search of the area. It bore an incredible resemblance to the upstairs, but for the lack of windows. The only thing missing was the kitchen, which I supposed must be a communal area for everyone.

Yet though the compound could easily hold a dozen families, and seemed intended to do so, we found no one.

No sign of Retti, but for the red lines of light painted across ceilings and walls to provide light. No Tali. No one else.

Then, someone screamed. A long, broken, half-strangled sound of agony, that didn’t stop.

Pel glanced at the teal-glowing man from the second team. Daum. He nodded and motioned, and we abandoned our methodical search and hurried toward the sound. Lan in the lead, the others spread out between us.

The scream finally died away to silence. We’d reached one end of a hall, several bedroom doors surrounding it. Lan pushed the first open, then shook her head. Empty. And the next.

The third door led onto a wide stone stairway descending into darkness.

Lan started down, Pel and Daum right behind her, Vess and Cay following, myself last.

The stair curved and widened as it descended, until it came out into a wide high-ceilinged room carved smoothly and perfectly from the heart of the mountain’s stone. It flickered with multi-hued light, pulsing from dozens of unmoving bodies.

I stared, horrified. The room was filled with stone slabs, each about waist height, each with silver-blue chains running down the sides. Perhaps fifty total; the room was vast.

Over half the slabs were occupied. Some of the people had power that flickered jagged and erratic, like Desten 4’s. Others pulsed and flowed smoothly from hue to hue, like Desten 5’s had.

All were bound to their slabs by the thin blue chains, power dying when it got too close to the flashstone. Most of the bodies lay still, breathing slow and steady, drawing immediate comparison to Desten 4's coma. One woman thrashed and convulsed wildly, the clatter of the chain scraping against stone piercing the silence in a horrible rhythm. She had barely a finger’s width of slack, and none of her twisting and yanking did anything to improve her position.

Another man lay with his head turned aside, trembling silently. His power pulsed in smooth waves, interspersed with jagged shocks of instability.

I felt sick. So this is where the disappearing people had been going.

It had been bad enough when I’d imagined she’d murdered them for their powerstones, at least that would have been quick if brutal. This felt so much worse.

Another scream pierced through the relative quiet with a suddenness that made me jump. This one was weaker, rasping, ending in a whimper. Lan stepped toward the voice, then stopped short and put a hand to her chest.

Not all the bodies on the slabs were still alive.

I hadn’t noticed it at first, but one toward the middle of the room was ripped open, splattered blood vivid red against the dull skin, rivulets slowly sliding down the side of the stone slab upon which the body rested to join the growing pool on the floor. The space at the center of the chest where a hearstone should have rested was a dark hole with shards of bone protruding from the force of whatever had shattered it apart.

It reminded me too much of Fylen’s body. I couldn’t even tell if it had been a man or a woman.

“This was recent,” Lan said, her voice sounding choked.

Why?

A hand reached up and gripped the side of the stone slab. I stared for a moment, disoriented and uncertain.

Retti pulled herself up to a standing position, then levitated into the air. Her face was streaked with tears and her shirt torn, but there was nothing but cold anger and defiance in her expression. She drew herself up, her aura pulsing in slow rhythm between red, silver, and orange, with flickers of cyan, yellow, and purple. It was somewhere between the smooth integration of her son and the erratic instability of her husband, but just as powerful as either.

It felt exactly like a nightmare. She rose into the air, utterly aloof from the suffering and death of which she’d been the direct cause.

“Where’s Desten?” Retti demanded, pointing at Lan. “What have you done with my son?”

Lan didn’t answer, but Retti’s face darkened. Before anyone could speak, she snarled and flung out a hand, sending spears of crimson light in all directions. One hissed to nothing against Lan’s flashmail; another bounced off the shield of our teal-powered ally. One skimmed past me, only for its edge to brush my shield and the furious barbs tore it to mist that faded in a second.

Retti was laughing, madly, but not the same broken laugh I’d heard from Desten 5 the night he’d killed Fylen. This was deeper, heavier. The laugh of someone who knew she could not be touched. Amusement at us, layered with grief for Desten and the certainty of vengeance, interlaced with whatever broken splinters of sanity may once have remained to her.

The laugh turned to a shriek of frustration as her attacks were deflected or simply missed. Her power flickered and wavered; her control over it was weak and tenuous as it partially destabilized. She dropped down a few feet then closed her eyes and hovered in place, aura flickering, no attacks forthcoming.

Pel and Vess took that as their cue to retaliate. Pel fired off several of his ice lances, Vess adding silver-sharp points as they flew past him, intensifying the light to the point where I could barely look at them. Our remaining allies, Cay and Daum, did not bother with fancy combined attacks but joined torrents of individual missiles to the barrage.

When the attacks reached Retti’s aura, they were violently thrown off course. Instead of piercing through her protections, or even bouncing off them, they were pulled into the unstable power spinning around her. As I watched, the attacks twisted and warped like ink in water, slowly dissolving into the raging chaos of Retti’s aura.

She didn’t make any move to counterattack. She simply hovered, breathing heavily, eyes closed, power fluctuating around her like a mad multihued hurricane.

Pel and Vess continued their barrage, but to no avail. Regardless of whether they fired small attacks or large ones, slow or fast, thin and solid or broad and light, all met the same fate; sucked into the cyclone power whirling around our adversary to be torn apart before coming close to her.

“Stop,” Lan said. “My turn.” She took a half step, then threw herself toward Retti like a projectile, flying with ever-increasing speed. She collided with Retti hard enough that they both slammed into the distant wall.

Retti’s chaotic aura hissed out of existence as Lan’s flashmail cut through it.

I exhaled in relief as the brilliant chaos faded, leaving everything dimmer in its absence. The fluctuating auras of the people chained throughout the room still illuminated the scene clearly, but with Retti no longer trying to imitate the sun it was much easier to make out what was happening.

Retti said something to Lan; I saw her mouth move, but we were too far away to hear. A flash of red light. Then Lan screamed and tumbled through the air, her flight disrupted. She tried to orient herself but her blue power flared out uselessly, erratically, without giving her any lift.

Lan slammed into the ground with the clatter of metal on stone.

Retti’s ringing laugh echoed across the room. “Thank you, that was exactly what I needed. I will be sure to record your contributions to the cause. This is a marvelous discovery.”

Lan lay twitching and whimpering on the floor beneath Retti’s hovering form, and did not rise.

“No.” Pel growled. He abandoned any pretense of holding shields ready, putting all his power into a building attack like an orb of frozen power, nearly half as tall as Pel himself.

Meanwhile, Daum was doing something himself, building a group twisting ribbons of his teal power that moved like fish or eels, undulating as they orbited him, each arrow-sharp at the tip, growing thicker behind. I had never seen anything like it before.

But even as he launched them forward, Retti’s aura sprang back into existence, smooth and stable, growing stronger every moment.

Daum’s attacks reached her, and she didn’t even seem to notice. The sharp points sliced into her aura, then they elongated and narrowed, squirming in an attempt to burrow through. For a moment, I thought they’d succeed. Retti’s stable aura seemed much less dangerous than the chaotic mass it had been before.

Then her eyes flicked to the wriggling constructs trying to bite through her semi-solid aura. A tiny flare of power pulsed out, dispelling them all at once.

Pel’s ice orb smashed into her power a moment later. The moment it impacted, it shattered into a hundred shards that all converged on the same point, trying to carve through by creating its own weak point. A futile attempt. Once all were expended, the power surrounding Retti flowed as smoothly and unperturbed as ever.

She was simply too strong for anything we did to touch her. Only Lan had a chance, and she—

I couldn’t just stand by.

I waited until Vess and Cay fired their attacks in the barrage, Pel and Daum not far behind, then pushed myself into the air. I flew fast, rushing to beat the missiles to Retti. If I could bring down her aura with my disruptive shield, maybe a few of their attacks would get through.

As I neared her I focused all my power on keeping the shield strong and let momentum carry me forward. Lost god, let this be enough.

We were outmatched and we knew it. This was a job for reirns, not a ragtag group of acquaintances who barely knew each other. For a moment, I didn’t care that any such large scale invasion would shatter the Alliance and let the houses return to outright war.

It felt incredibly unfair that everyone in power had seen fit to abdicate their responsibility, ignoring this growing threat just to protect themselves politically. It couldn’t possibly be that hard to insert an assassination team into Raysh - if Pelys could do it, if Aneeyha could smuggle the Sarosa flashmail in, why hadn’t anyone else? Sure, we had maybe a dozen people here, but against this? We needed more. So much more.

Where were the conversant? Wasn’t it their job to stop something like this from happening? To ‘ensure power flowed in its proper course’ or something? How had months passed without them hearing about this and coming in to stop it?

Why??

Then I collided with Retti, and the force of my shield was immediately strained to its limit. I pushed outward, drawing on my stone for more power. The world slowed as I tore at the protective shell around the one responsible for so much death and tragedy.

Every tiny bite my shield took out of her aura began to immediately refill, but it wasn’t instantaneous. Her power pushed back, eating away at my shield like acid, but so far neither had gained supremacy.

I wouldn’t be able to keep it up for long. Already the strain was enough to make me tremble, vision fading around the edges in my hyperconcentration.

Pel’s attack swerved around me, just missing brushing against my shield, and slammed through the weakened point. The silvery light of Vess’s augment broke apart in the collision, but Pel’s spear continued through unimpeded to stab right through Retti’s throat.

For a moment, I thought it might be over.

Retti’s aura flickered and she dropped, no longer sustaining her flight, but caught herself just before hitting the ground. Cay’s attack bounced off the back of my shield, poorly aimed or out of control. Daum’s weird arrowhead-balloon-eels flew past and began burrowing into the far wall until he lassoed them with thin lines of power and set them back on target.

Before they reached Retti, she’d dispelled Pel’s spear. There was blood on her fingers, but the red across her neck was solid power and she seemed relatively untroubled.

Her power lashed out, dispelling Daum’s attacks before they came close, then slamming straight into my shield. I couldn’t hold on; I’d lost focus, and already expended too much. My power broke apart and dissolved to nothing.

Then Retti flew forward and grabbed me by the throat. I struggled and kicked, but power snapped out in gold-streaked crimson threads to hold me still. I thought I heard Pelys shout something, but he was too far away and the power around us distorted his voice.

“You’ve been an irritant for too long,” Retti hissed. “It’s high time you did something useful with your miserable existence. Where is my son?”

She let up her grip enough that I could speak. I coughed and gasped for breath, trying to think of how to answer. The truth would not do. She was already unstable enough.

“Speak!”

“Upstairs—” true. “Stuck in the floor with flashmail so he can’t break out.” That sounded possible, right? And it was close enough to the truth that my voice didn’t waver.

She smiled. “Good. Then you wait here while I retrieve him. I’m surprised you managed to find so much flashstone, but I’ll definitely put it to good use. I’ve been running low myself.”

Then something purple flashed in her hand. Before I could reply, she slammed it into my chest. I felt it collide with the lump that was my own powerstone, then a hot pressure with a thousand blades spearing out in every direction.

It felt like she’d just shattered my stone, the fragments forced out in every direction. Through my heart, my lungs, my spine—

Everything but internal sensation vanished; sight and sound and touch subsumed by the sudden hyperawareness of the unimaginable pain in my chest.

I fell.