It was ten years ago when Blaze saw her first orc.
Fire. Walls and ceiling ablaze. She was trapped. Her own screams echoed in her ears, frantically calling for help, only to be drowned out by the grunts and deep-throated war cries of the enormous creatures ransacking her village.
And then it all happened. The flaming door broke apart, and a girl all clad in armor rolled across the floor. She wore gauntlets and carried a sword and shield.
She could not have been more than ten years older than Blaze, maybe fifteen or sixteen years old. Her blue-gray armor shone in the flickering blaze set by the marauding orcs. “Come on!” the girl screamed, beckoning to her. “The roof is going to—”
The center beam broke, and the armored girl reflexively raised her shield. The roof beam slammed into the girl, driving her down to one knee.
“Climb under me!” she shouted.
Blaze could still feel the fear that had paralyzed her.
The girl sheathed her sword and shoved back a piece of burning wood with her gauntleted hand. “Got to . . . unggh,” she strained.
Panic seized Blaze, and she reached out to help, pressing her own hands against the burning wood.
The girl’s eyes widened in panic. She stared at Blaze’s smoldering palm. Blaze drew back her hand. Had she done something wrong?
Then the girl laughed. “You have the spark!—listen to me. I’m going to get you out of here. I’m going to protect you.”
“But the orcs—they . . .”
“Just come with me. You have a fire within,” she grunted under the load of burning timbers. “Please. I promise to get you out of here. You have the spark. You must live so that someday you can become an Ember Mage. I am Princess Sapphire. I swear it will be done.”
She sounded so certain, Blaze couldn’t help but believe her. She crawled under the girl’s legs and out into the street.
Princess Sapphire rolled clear of the rubble just as the rest of the house came tumbling down.
“You’re safe . . .” Princess Sapphire started to say, when four huge orcs spotted them from farther up the road.
They charged.
Princess Sapphire thrust Blaze backward. “Run!”
The princess drew a second sword and dropped into a defensive stance. She had lost her shield in the burning house.
Was she really going to fight them? Four full-grown orcs? Blaze had never seen anything like it in her life.
It really was the Princess Sapphire; Blaze was sure of it. Everything about her—strength, courage, the way she moved, her armor, the glowing blue jewels.
But where were her guards?
Blaze should have run, but she stood rooted to the spot, coughing the smoke from her lungs as the great orcs, shoulders twice as wide as a man, heads the size of an ox’s, raised their clubs and hammers and bellowed their war cries.
Their horrible faces burned into her memory. Each warrior bore a tattoo of a claw that wrapped around one eye—the infamous raiders of the Crook-Eye tribe.
The young princess stood her ground and bellowed her own cry. “Come to me, beasts!”
The first orc raised its club and swung. Princess Sapphire hurdled the club, swiveling one leg above the other and twisting in midair. Her leaping roundhouse kick slammed directly into the charging orc’s face, while its errant swing crashed into the second orc, knocking it through the burning wall of Blaze’s home.
Blaze screamed as the third orc raised its great hammer and rained a crushing blow down on the princess.
But the princess’s sword drew an edge of blue fire and sliced straight through the hammer’s handle, while her other blade severed the suspenders holding up the orc’s buckskin trousers. The raider tripped over its pants and fell on its face. Princess Sapphire’s next swing came down on the fourth orc before it could raise its great sword. Her blow hit the orc’s metal helmet like a hammer, and the helmet rang out like a bell. The tusked orc’s eyes rolled back, and it fell like a sack of coal.
Blaze’s jaw dropped. The teen princess had single handedly knocked out four orc warriors.
“Run!” Princess Sapphire commanded.
Blaze obeyed, retreating from the embattled village as two dozen royal cavaliers on horseback charged down the hill, the thunder of their horses’ hooves drowning out all else.
The young Princess Sapphire, by riding ahead of her men, had saved Blaze’s life. She had taken a huge risk.
And that had awoken Blaze’s Ember spark. It was that day that she set on the path to become an Ember Mage.
And now Princess Sapphire was missing.
Blaze trekked through the snow of the Frostbyte Reach, wrapping her blue cloak tight around her.
First Princess Amethyst and now Princess Sapphire—how could a king lose a princess of prophecy? It wasn’t like misplacing a shoe—the entire fate of Crystalia depended on all five princesses.
And why send a reject Ember Mage? Did the king really not have another Hero to send?
King Jasper was a seasoned tactician and, arguably, as great a master of lore as the long-lived elves. There had to be method to his madness.
Or was there? Could it be that his daughters’ disappearances had brought on actual madness?
Blaze’s inner fire had taken her to the halls of the Order of Ember. And when the fire had grown out of control, she had been cast out. She should have had a new family of mages to accept her. Instead, she had only shame, disappointment, and a firsthand knowledge of what she could not have.
And now she was walking alone in the mountains. All alone.
Blaze stopped on a ridge to catch her breath. If only travel by portal was more precise. They could have sent her straight to Hetsa. But they knew better than that. Better to land at the crystal landing point than to risk getting dropped off the side of a cliff.
In the distance, she could barely see the last hint of the green plains that spread out from the base of the Frostbyte peaks.
These were the rolling, grassy hills and patches of shaded forest she had once called home.
Somewhere in those grassy hills, too far to see, was the tiny speck that was her home village of Midway—the exact midpoint on the road from Crystalia Castle to Yuyang. Beyond that were the Wandering Monk Mountains, rising in the distance, with the beautiful Path of 1,000 Shrines carved into their faces.
Not far from the village, a private cemetery with two headstones bore the names of her parents killed by Crook-Eye Orc raiders.
“Hello, Pa. Hello, Mum.”
She spoke to them as though their graves lay before her. Somehow, the distance made it easier to find the words.
Blaze drew in a breath and held it before uncorking her bottled-up emotion. “I got kicked out of the Order—I was too angry. Too angry! Anger is what gives a mage their power. I don’t understand. All I ever wanted was to stand up to the enemy—to fight the ones who took you from me. All I ever wanted was to send them back to the Dark Realm where they belong.”
She shoved her hands into the oversized pockets of her travel cloak. “And now I’m going on a job that nobody else wanted—why else would King Jasper have asked me—and I’ll probably die in the snow, and nobody will ever find me.”
She pulled her blue cloak tight around her. It was the last tangible evidence of the Order she had once belonged to. It was all she had left. With a sigh, she trudged forward in the snow.
Her foot fell deeper than usual. She looked down, expecting to see a crevasse opening up in front of her.
It wasn’t a crevasse. It was only a footprint.
A large footprint.
Not human.
Her palms tingled with sweat as her stomach twisted into a knot of anxiety.
How long had it been since she had seen one—ten years?
An orc.
Blaze carefully lifted her foot and stepped forward. There was another footprint in front of the first. It was a long stride, but not as long as she had expected. She took another step. Large feet, but medium pace for an orc—so it was growing but not full-grown.
This was an adolescent orc.
Blaze’s palms tingled with a mixture of fear and excitement.
A scout perhaps?
Blaze itched to ignite the spark. She felt her temper rising into rage. Did she really dare fight an orc alone? If she saw one, she was almost certain it would come to that. She would have to defend herself.
But there was no guarantee how far away the lone orc was. She didn’t want to flame out before reaching her quarry.
Blaze hurried ahead, following the footsteps down a set of switchbacks and charging around a large outcropping.
The slope shallowed into a bowl where the pines dotting the landscape grew low and dense. The footsteps in the snow continued into a tight grove.
She would either have to scale a steep escarpment on the rock face or go lower on the slope where a snow slide would put her far down the hill and away from her quarry.
Blaze lugged her pack across the bowl, heading directly for the copse of pines.
As she stepped between the trees, she found that several of the trunks shared a common base, like fingers growing from a hand. Other trunks had grown sideways and even buried themselves in the ground, as if twisted by some unseen force. There was no snow here, which was strange given the shade. The rocks underfoot were riddled with a shaggy moss and crumbled under her feet.
Something was wrong about this place.
Then she saw the skull.
The enormous white bone skull sat directly in her path. Trees curled over it from both sides in an ominous arch. The skull bore long fangs—too large for an orc.
Perhaps a gnoll? The skull was large enough to engulf her entire head if she were to stick her neck in it.
That was not going to happen.
The ground around the skull was littered with what looked like fragments of fine parchment. As she stepped forward, she noticed the pattern of scales.
Not parchment. Skin shed from some very large reptile.
Oh no.
She turned to charge back up the ridge. Just as she shifted her weight, the skull hissed, exhaling a noxious, black fog.
The fog swirled around Blaze, then glistened and began to coalesce at three points equidistant from the skull.
She had almost certainly discovered a spawning point. As scared as she was, Blaze was rooted to the spot. She couldn’t look away. She was actually witnessing the emergence of life into Crystalia from beyond. Few experienced it.
Fewer lived to tell about it.
She knew from her lore lessons that the black fog that swirled from the spawning point was a mutagen. It carried the will of the dark demons, mingled it with the Goddess’s vitality, and brought the three hallmarks of the Dark Consul’s influence:
Corruption.
Evil.
Destruction.
Here, in the frozen north, the essence was sure to form into something suited to the cold, something—
Three lizard-like humanoid creatures, draped in icicles, with red-stained fangs agape, rose from the snow where the fog had coalesced, their long crocodilian tails lashing aggressively.
A vile white-skinned ice kobold flicked its forked tongue as it leveled a blade-tipped polearm in her direction.
Ice Pick Kobold. Blaze was not excited about the prospect of losing her head to this weapon of wholesale dismemberment.
Its companion lifted a sling with a snowball and began whirling it. Blaze nearly laughed, before the snowball in its sling began shedding razor-sharp crystals in a wide arc.
If that snowball hit her chest, it might just send a shower of spikes into her heart.
“There she is—just one Crystalian human,” said the Ice Pick Kobold.
The Snowball Chucker cackled with laughter. “We shall feast on this trespasser.”
A streak of pure rage rose within Blaze.
“This is our world. Ours!” she said. “You are the trespassers.”
The third ice kobold rose up out from the snow. Gray blue armor tinged with ice crystals that sparkled in the sunlight. This was an elite Frostscale warrior. It banged a blue steel sword against the skull emblem on its shield and raked its tongue over its fangs. “Your world is passing as the day into night. The Midnight Queen will see to that.”
“The who?” asked Blaze. She’d never heard that name before. It didn’t sound good at all.
“Kill her!” the kobold cried.
She had to ignore the chill. She had to fight the exhaustion in her legs. Blaze’s rage burned through the fog in her head and tapped into the heat deep within her. Her spark lit, and the world took on a red hue.
“An Ember Mage!” The ice kobold swiveled its head and gave a guttural cry that sounded like a broken wagon wheel squeaking. “Eeeeeeeeeewa!”
She thrust her right fist out, blasting a fireball into the Ice Pick Kobold. The fire hit it square in the chest, knocking it backward. Its polearm went spinning away into the snow.
She blasted four more fireballs in quick succession at the Snowball Chucker and the Frostscale warrior, blasting them both backward into the snow.
The Snowball Chucker hurled a glowing snowball at her. Blaze didn’t want to find out what the cursed snowball would do when it hit her skin.
“Fireball!” she cried, hurling a fireball nearly half as tall as she was straight at the Snowball Chucker.
The snowball vanished in a burst of flame. The Snowball Chucker fell easily, but the Frostscale warrior stayed on his feet, huddling behind his enormous shield which had taken the brunt of her attack.
“Fireball! Fireball! Fireball!” cried Blaze, blasting three quick bursts of molten heat at him. The first two hit his shield, throwing him off balance. She caught him in the head with the third, and he screamed, the snow and ice on his scaly skin hissing as it burned into steam.
“Yes!” cried Blaze. Maybe she would learn to love the Frostbyte Reach after all.
Clouds of black fog spilled out of the skull at the center of the spawning point, rolling and coalescing into ten more ice kobolds.
Ice dripped from their dragon-like snouts, and their human-like arms held even larger swords, or heavy ball and chains. Each one bore a spiked shield.
“Uh oh,” said Blaze. It was hard to hide her disappointment.
These hulking warriors were Blockheads—not the smartest but certainly the largest. Blaze had seen sketches of them in her training long ago. She had studied their names. And now they had come for her.
Blaze slammed her fists together twice until the pain in her knuckles doubled the fire within.
Not today.
An ice kobold at the back of the pack with a headdress dangling with shrunken skulls pointed its priest staff at her. Three ice spikes grew right out of its head.
“Human . . .” it hissed.
A Frozen Priest too? Blaze shuddered at the hideous sight. Its scaly hide was old and wrinkled, and its eyes shone with pure hatred.
“Foolish, girl. Your magic is no match for the power we bring from the Dark Realm.” Its crackling voice was raspy, like the scratch and crunch of feet on dry leaves.
The Frozen Priest hissed a command, and all ten of the hideous, pale-skinned lizards hissed in unison as they fanned out around her.
She needed time. She’d shot out that first barrage of fireballs so quickly, and her inner fire was not yet the vortex of roiling power she would need to fight so many enemies. She needed time to stoke it.
She was going to need a lot of fire to take down ten of these monsters. She’d never summoned that much so quickly, especially in the cold. And this was not the place to be caught slow-footed.
Blaze pulled back her hands, ready to form a sheet of flame, when the Frozen Priest swung a twisted skull-tipped staff in a wide arc. Dark magic poured from it, conjuring a whipping, icy wind that blasted straight into Blaze, knocking her backward and flinging her rucksack from her back.
Blaze picked herself up. Her rucksack lay open in front of her, its contents scattered in the snow.
To her delight, a small, round flask with blue liquid inside sat inches from her nose.
“Fire Water!” she cried. She snatched the flask of blue liquid, uncorked the bubbling potion, and drank it in one gulp. She’d trained with Fire Water before. The familiar aftertaste of the Fire Water tingled on her tongue.
Less than a second later, Blaze’s arms rippled with new heat. The snow melted around her, and ice crystals swirling in the air melted before they even touched her skin.
These potions really work!
And just in time too. She could hear the Blockheads beating their swords against their shields behind her as they charged.
She’d have to target one at a time.
No, she had two hands.
“Ahhhh!” cried Blaze, leaping to her feet, the inner fire swirling within, a torrent of power rising up within her. Her hands burst into flame. The Blockhead Kobolds hesitated. Fire was not their favorite. Well—there was plenty to go around.
“Fire Blast!” she cried, thrusting both hands forward at an angle and spreading them outward. The fan of flame knocked three Kobolds down and sent two more screaming in terror.
The Frozen Priest raised its staff. “Cutting Wind!” it cried. A blast of cold snow whirled around Blaze. Ice crystals lashed at her as the whirlwind grew tightly around her, nearly blocking her view of her attackers.
Through the haze of whirling ice, Blaze was just able to make out the shapes of the remaining Blockhead Kobolds as they closed in on her from either side.
If Blaze was going to survive this battle, she would have to be able to see her attackers.
Letting the magic surge within her to a dangerous level, Blaze lifted a large stone at her feet out of the snow. She poured every ounce of heat from the Fire Water potion inside her into it. The rock hovered between her hands as raw energy swirled into it, like a whirlpool of heat.
The stone melted into red-hot lava.
“Magma Strike!” Blaze thrust both fists forward, unleashing the magma like a stone from a catapult. The Frozen Priest disappeared over the snow bank in a burst of fire, and the ice storm stopped abruptly, leaving her enemies in clear view.
Their source of magic cut off, the Blockhead Kobolds stopped and exchanged looks, either worrying for their own fate, or trying to come up with a new plan. Perhaps now they would retreat.
“Surrender?” asked Blaze. She was hopeful.
One of them raised its sword. “Our master!” it cried in a dull, slow voice.
The rest of the Blockheads screamed savagely, beating their shields.
“Destroy the human!” cried the one closest to her.
As a swarm, the entire mass of Blockheads surged forward. In less than three paces they would all be on top of her.
Blaze tapped her anger, opening it to full and unleashing a rapid-fire barrage. “Fireball! Fireball! Fireball!” Three balls of superheated plasma found their targets, but now the Blockheads were in range with their own weapons.
Blaze unleashed a flash of heat to blind their eyes momentarily. She spun in a melee attack, sweeping the legs from under the largest Blockhead while blasting a double-handed fireball into the face of the next nearest attacker. She spun, releasing two fire streams from both hands in a circle of devastation.
“Get back!” one cried. Shrieks of terror met her ears. She forced a column of flame into the enormous skull. It cracked, then broke in two.
Blaze cut off her inner fire. Those shrieks reminded her of her own cries of terror as a child trapped in a burning house.
The ice kobolds were fleeing, rolling themselves in the snow to douse the flames that licked at their scaly hides. In full flight, their long tails lashed side to side until all were out of sight beyond the next ridge.
The fire within winked out, and the blood-red tint that had covered the world around her faded from her vision. New, brighter colors shifted into view: green pines on white snow set against a bright blue sky.
The spawning point skull flaked into cinders with a slow, satisfying hiss.
She’d won. She’d destroyed a spawning point. So the darkness could be beaten back. She had proved that much.
The Ember Mage dropped to one knee. She tried to lift her pack but couldn’t. She lacked the strength. She shivered. She had spent all her heat. Suddenly even the inside of her bones felt cold. She had channeled too much heat too quickly.
She shook herself as an ashen tree collapsed in a pile of soot, entirely consumed by her last fire burst. Blaze felt just as hollow.
Must keep moving.
Her body desperately craved the softness of the snow, to simply lie down and rest.
Please. She begged her body not to give up. When night fell, the kobolds would be back and attack under cover of darkness. She needed to get as far away as possible and find shelter.
With a tremendous effort, Blaze lifted her pack. She stood and turned to continue on the path and made it several steps forward before she looked up.
Through the gap where the tree had fallen, she spied a lone figure on the rise.
It was the orc.