Chapter 110: THE BLOODLINE TRIAL

They went east off the kiln-belt at first grey, and the country changed under them by the hour.

The clay gave way to blacker ground. The grass thinned, then stopped. Past that it was bare rock on which nothing grew at all.

Even after dark, the ground gave heat back through his boots.

Cinder changed with the country.

Aiden watched it happen as they walked.

The light in her coat brightened on its own. The air here fed her more of what she needed than her own body could produce.

She was steady, settling into a place her body had been homesick for without ever knowing it was missing.

She’s getting stronger just by breathing.

We crossed Vane charter ground with handlers hunting us while half the cure was bringing her here, to warm air full of golden motes.

On the second day, Cinder took them off the track.

She stopped as she had at the lightning tree in the marches. Her whole body went still. Her head came up, nose pointed toward a hollow.

Found something good before we even reached the Peaks? Tell me you sniffed some Magma Sap, so we can head back before I cook from the inside out.

He followed where her nose pointed.

Not one tree. A dozen. More. Crowded up out of a hollow. The ground glowed orange in the cracks between their roots.

Short, thick trunks. They looked like the lightning tree.

Embercore fruits hung from the low branches, warm and faintly hissing.

The one in the marches had stood alone, lightning-struck, with a Vane fence around it.

Here, Embercore fruits hung from dozens of branches, and nobody had fenced the trees.

I had to steal one from the Frost Wolf...

At least nobody’s fenced them. That means the fruit isn’t what’s valuable here.

He walked around the edge of the hollow.

The trees formed a ring, spaced too evenly to be natural. Inside them was a clear patch of black ground.

The ground was scorched in circles. Rings inside rings. The oldest were grey beneath the newer ones.

Something had burned there over and over.

Then the system identified what it was.

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

[ BLOODLINE TRIAL SITE — DETECTED ]

Affinity: Solar

Encoded condition: endurance, open flame

Eligible: Cinder (Solarflare Hound

Lineage: D

To initiate: −1.3 Years (tamer)

WARNING: one attempt. Failure is permanent stagnation.

[ CURRENT LIFESPAN: 31.3 Years ]

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

Aiden read the box twice.

The metal waste and forge work had brought Cinder off the bottom of E, back to the D she was bred in. But climbing higher needed more than that: ancient relics like the Vesperian heart, or a trial like the one that had improved Miasma’s lineage.

Vesperian trial sites aren’t the only ones! That’s the real deal.

If Cinder’s lineage awakens to C, she’ll have a better foundation for evolution. And the stronger her lineage, the better her chances.

Cinder was already at the edge of the ring, looking in.

Her ears were forward. She leaned toward the fire, hungry, as she had been for the Ember Peaks.

She knew the Embercore fruit was good for her when we stole it. She knows this trial is better than the fruit.

Cinder turned and glared at him.

Not at the ring. At him.

She couldn’t see what he saw. But she knew that when Aiden stopped and stared at nothing, something had happened.

Her ears went back, and she let out a low growl.

"Don’t," Aiden said.

She took a step toward him, away from the ring.

"Don’t you dare. It’s only a year." He put his hand on her jaw. "I have thirty-one. It’s a year and a bit, and it helps you climb higher."

Cinder didn’t move.

"You’re going to fight me every time I try to pay for you now, aren’t you?"

She kept her eyes on him.

He’d seen Cinder collapse on that slope, frost spreading across her flanks, the heat in her chest guttering. He wasn’t risking that again.

I’m not kneeling on a hillside emptying myself into you because I saved a year or even ten instead of using them to make you stronger.

"Move," he said. "Or I’ll pay while you try to stop me, and you’ll have to live knowing you wasted both the year and the chance."

She stood there for another moment.

Then she turned and walked to the edge of the rings, growling her disagreement. She had given in. Aiden paid before she could change her mind.

The year went out of him.

It was nothing like the fifteen years. His knees held. The year left him weaker, and his hands shook a little more than they had that morning.

Thirty. I had forty-six not long ago.

Turns out I’m very bad at living a long life.

White fire erupted from the scorched rings. It climbed around the trees and filled the hollow with a heat that drove Aiden back a step. The flames turned the black ground red beneath them.

Cinder walked into them anyway.

The flames swallowed her.

Miasma climbed from his shoulder onto a warm stone and flattened her spines. Nyx pressed hard against his ribs.

Neither of them could do anything to help Cinder.

Neither could he.

I can only stand here and watch to see if her fire stops where she was bred to be, or if she climbs beyond.

The fire nearly overwhelmed her from the first breath.

He held his breath as it roared past her shoulders.

You can do it, Cinder.

Then he forgot to breathe when he saw what she did.

She pulled the heat and light from her coat down into herself and tried to make herself small inside the flame.

No.

She staggered.

The fire bit into her coat. White flames crawled over her flanks, burning through the light she was trying to pull inward. Her legs buckled, and she dropped to one knee.

That’s what you learned to survive the cold, and what I taught you to avoid attracting guards in the city. It won’t work against fire.

Aiden could not shout through a wall of fire.

So he pushed his will through the bond.

You’re not in the cold. You’re home. Don’t resist the fire.

Take it. All of it. Like you’re evolving. Like the Frost Wolf drinks from the Ice Heart.

He never knew whether she caught his words or simply saw his silhouette through the flames as he refused to look away.

But she planted her feet. She lifted her head high.

She howled.

Her heat burst outward instead of inward. The flares rose from her shoulders. Her coat blazed brighter as she pulled the grove’s fire into herself.

The scorched rings roared as more flames burst from them and poured into her.

She drank them in, and the flames thinned.

Fire drained from the circles until the old rings sat black and cooling, with Cinder standing on them, blazing brighter than she ever had.

She was the same size and shape. Nothing else was the same.

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

[ LINEAGE AWAKENING — TRIAL PASSED ]

Beast: Cinder (Solarflare Hound)

Method: Bloodline Trial (Embercore Grove)

Lineage: D → C

Cost: −1.3 Years (paid at initiation)

[ CURRENT LIFESPAN: 30.0 Years ]

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

Aiden’s lips curved as Cinder came out of the rings.

She pressed her head against his chest, putting her full weight into him.

He caught her and braced against her weight. The heat under his hands felt deeper, denser, stronger.

"C." He laughed into her coat, low. "The old smith bet you couldn’t climb past D. I win this one."

She pushed harder against him.

"I’ll tell him you cheated. Walked into a fire and asked it to make you worse to live with."

Heat pulsed beneath his palm. She wasn’t sorry at all.

Then she pulled her head back and looked at his hands.

At the shake in them.

"Don’t start," Aiden said. "It was a year, and your lineage is a whole grade higher. That’s one of the best trades I’ve made in my life."

She kept looking.

He put both hands in her coat so she could not see them.

Then he looked past her, up the black slope, to where the golden motes thickened toward the Peaks.

You did well. C. Deeper, stronger, more yourself than you’ve ever been.

That’s still not Tier Three.

Lineage was not what ended the Frost Wolf. A tier was.

Magma Sap was their best chance. It grew further up the range, behind a line of standing fires he’d seen from the widow’s brick-stack. He hadn’t crossed them yet.

I’m happy she’s stronger, but she also burns hotter.

The Frost Wolf will sense her. We need to reach the Ember Peaks. If we get deep enough into the heat, we’ll lose it again.

The cat had claimed Cinder’s shoulder back while he thought.

Miasma looked at Cinder with her patient green eyes. Then she moved from her rock onto Aiden’s shoulder and stopped looking at her. The corner of her mouth was raised.

Nyx threw a shadow at Cinder’s feet.

Cinder walked back. For a moment, she frowned at Aiden’s coat as if the cloth was a great enemy.

No more shadow came.

Aiden pulled his coat. Nyx was pressed against his ribs, her pale eyes curved.

Are you happy for her too? That’s a weirdly amusing way to show it.

Then he turned toward the Ember Peaks and started climbing.