Chapter 24: The Obsidian Tide

The air in the war room was no longer stifling, but it was far from comfortable. A strange, localized chill clung to the stones around me, a side effect of the "Eclipse" state I had inadvertently triggered. My arm, now etched in obsidian and gold, felt like a foreign object—heavy, cold, and vibrating with a power that didn't just want to take, but wanted to realign.

"We strike now," I said, my voice carrying a resonance that made the crystals in Kaelen's staff chime. "The Jade fleet is reeling. Their Sol-Cores are cooling, and their mirrors are useless in the dark. If we wait for the sun, they regain the advantage."

Thane stood over the naval charts, his face a mask of grim determination. "The Legion is already on the skiffs. We’ve muffled the oars with shadow-silk. But Elora, their hulls are made of deep-sea bone. Our iron rams won't dent them—they’ll just slide off."

"We aren't going to ram them," I said, looking at my blackened hand. "We’re going to extinguish them."

Jace checked the tension on his cross-bow, his eyes darting to the window. "The fog is rolling in. Perfect for us, but those Jade scholars can see through mist using thermal vision. We need a way to mask our heat signatures."

"I can handle that," Kaelen interjected, holding up a flask of shimmering, viscous blue liquid. "It’s a cold-fire slurry. If we coat the skiffs and the men, we’ll be invisible to their Sol-vision. But it only lasts an hour. Once it evaporates, we're sitting ducks."

I turned to the three of them. The Tri-Mark bond felt different—less like three separate strings and more like a single, thick cable of iron. "One hour is all we need. I’m going with the first wave."

"Elora, no," Thane started, but he saw the look in my eyes and stopped. He knew that the Eclipse Sovereign didn't lead from the rear.

We launched under the cover of a moonless sky. The water of the bay was black and glassy, the only sound the soft lap of waves against the shadow-silk muffled hulls. As we approached the Jade perimeter, the bone-white ships loomed out of the fog like the ribcages of dead leviathans. They were beautiful, even in their broken state, glowing with a faint, dying amber light.

"Target the flagship," I whispered.

As we drew within a hundred yards, the Jade Sentinels on the deck began to stir. Their beetle-husk armor clicked as they raised their solar-lances, the tips beginning to glow. They had sensed us—not through heat, but through the displacement of the Aether.

"Now!" I commanded.

I didn't wait for the skiff to touch the hull. I leapt, the Eclipse power coiling in my legs. I didn't glide; I moved as a blur of darkness, a literal shadow cast by nothing. I landed on the deck of the flagship, and the wood beneath my feet instantly turned to brittle, blackened charcoal.

A Jade guard lunged with a solar-lance. The tip was a sun-bright point of plasma meant to incinerate steel. I didn't dodge. I reached out and grabbed the lance with my obsidian hand.

The guard gasped as the plasma didn't burn me. It drained. The gold veins in my arm flared as I inhaled the solar fire, siphoning it out of the lance until the weapon was nothing more than a stick of dead glass. I swung my other hand, unleashing a wave of Eclipse force that sent a dozen guards flying into the sea, their armor shattered by the sudden pressure.

Thane was over the railing a second later, his shadow-wolf form a whirlwind of teeth and claws. Jace followed, a ghost in the rigging, his daggers finding the gaps in the guards' beetle-husk plates.

"Elora! The Core!" Kaelen shouted from the skiff below.

I looked toward the center of the deck. High Scholar Vanya stood there, her hands pressed against a massive, pulsating Sol-Core. She was trying to force a manual restart, her skin glowing a dangerous, incandescent red as she channeled her own life-force into the engine.

"You are a plague, Elora!" Vanya screamed, her eyes bleeding blue light. "You are the end of progress! The universe demands order!"

"The universe demands balance," I countered, walking toward her.

Every step I took drained the light from the deck. The glowing lanterns flickered and died. The amber light of the ship's hull faded to a dull, sickly gray. I was an inkblot on a white canvas, spreading until there was nothing left but me.

Vanya unleashed a pillar of pure solar fire from the core. It was enough energy to vaporize a city block. I raised both hands, lacing my fingers together. I didn't try to ground it this time. I used the Eclipse Paradox.

I folded the light back on itself.

The pillar of fire hit my palms and inverted, turning into a crushing weight of gravity. The flagship groaned, the bone-hull cracking under the sudden, immense pressure. The Sol-Core turned from gold to violet to a terrifying, absolute black.

"This is the debt," I whispered.

The Core imploded.

The shockwave didn't produce fire; it produced a vacuum of sound and light. For three seconds, the entire Jade fleet was plunged into a total eclipse. When the light returned, the flagship was sinking, its spine snapped. Vanya was gone, her armor found later as a heap of melted glass on the deck.

The remaining Jade ships, seeing their flagship fall to a power they couldn't even quantify, didn't stay to fight. They cut their vine-anchors and fled into the deep mist, their solar-sails flickering like dying embers.

I stood on the tilting deck as the water began to claim it. Thane grabbed my waist, pulling me back toward our skiff. I looked at my hands. They were shaking. The obsidian color was receding, leaving my skin raw and sensitive.

"We won," Jace said, looking at the retreating ships. "But they’ll be back with a bigger fleet, won't they?"

"Let them come," I said, leaning my head against Thane’s shoulder. "Next time, we won't be defending a harbor. We’ll be hunting a sun."

As we rowed back to the Silver Heart, I looked up at the stars. They seemed brighter now, as if the darkness I had unleashed had cleared the air. I had saved my people again, but the 400,000-word journey was only beginning. Because somewhere across the Great Divide, the Jade Emperor had felt the death of his scholar.

And the Emperor did not believe in balance. He only believed in the Light.