Chapter 73 Yassen
YASSEN
I have woken to a great and terrible transformation. I am the Sixth Prophet.
—from the diaries of Priestess Nomu of the Fire Order
Yassen Knight awoke to the sound of her memories.
The first thing he realized was that he had made a promise to find her.
The second was that tubes were attached to his arms, his chest, his legs, pumping a rich red liquid into him.
Faintly, he could hear the wheezing of someone dying.
It took him a moment to discover that the wheezing came not from someone, but something.
The large metal contraption around him shuddered.
He touched its side, and it brushed against his palm as if alive.
He shrank back. Panic—thick, drip-like—beaded down his throat, and he knew he should be screaming, trapped within a metal beast, but then the glass before him slid back with a hiss.
Slowly, he heard it.
The inferno.
He turned to where a tiny fire crackled along the back wall. It blazed brighter beneath his gaze. The flames pulsed and lengthened, their tips curling upward toward him.
“You’re finally back.”
An all-too-familiar voice cut through the space. He forced himself to look away from the inferno to Akaros. Behind him stood a tall Yumi girl with eyes of amber and cheeks streaked with dried tears. Why had she been crying? Her eyes met his, heated, accusatory.
“Wh—” he began, but his tongue flopped in his mouth. His voice was a pale sliver of its former self.
“Think you can sit up for me?” Akaros said.
Before Yassen could respond, Akaros hooked his hands beneath his armpits and hauled him up. Pain gripped his body. Yassen moaned, leaning forward. Gently, Akaros brushed back Yassen’s hair, his fingers lingering along his ear.
“Phoenix Above, boy, it really is you.”
Akaros dropped his hand and stepped back, his eyes full of an emotion Yassen had never seen him wear before.
Hope.
Unbridled, untainted hope.
Why would he look at him this way?
Yassen began to speak again when the fire hissed. A stray flame rolled out and inched toward his metal coffin. Yassen pulled back in alarm, but a part of him, a deep guttural instinct, bade him to stay.
The flame’s tip flickered, as if testing the air, and then latched around his ankle.
He yelped—but the pain did not come.
Yassen Knight found then that he did not burn.
He felt alive.
The flame’s heat vibrated through him, from his bones to his very cells. It was like a comet, distant and sure in its beauty, but when he focused on the flame’s touch, it became a bright blaze fueled by momentum and speed, careening to an end point he did not know, was afraid to know.
Slowly, carefully, he opened his hand. At once, the flame shot up and tightened into a small ball in his palm. He stared in bewilderment. It hummed, waiting.
“What…” he said, his voice foreign to his own ears. “What is this?”
Akaros’s eyes glistened in wonder, but his lips curved into a cold, knowing smile, and Yassen felt more afraid of that than the fire that no longer burned him.
“We have been waiting for your return for a long time, Cass.”
Yassen could only gaze at the fire, a slow dread building within him.
This was a hallucination. A dream. He would wake up in the cabin again to find Elena puttering about in the kitchen, attempting to wrangle together a pot of tea.
He dug his nails into his palms to wake himself.
But the room did not change. Akaros’s watchful gaze did not blur into Elena’s honey-brown eyes.
“Please,” he said, his voice scratchy, his tongue like sandpaper. “I—I don’t know what you mean. Where am I? What happened?”
“What do you mean, what happened?” Akaros said. He gestured to the fire lapping at his feet. “Haven’t you already figured it out?”
“But the last thing I remember was the cabin. No… there was something else.” Yassen’s voice trailed off as he looked down at his chest. Memories, bitter and frayed, swept through him as he remembered the explosions, the fire, Elena’s desperate voice as she grasped his hand.
You’d better. And then there was the sound of a bullet.
The hot pain in his chest. The soft press of the earth beneath his back as he looked up at the flames…
Slowly, Yassen pulled up his kurta and hissed at the scar, red and angry, slanting diagonally above his heart.
“You shot me,” he said.
“And I saved you,” Akaros replied. He paused then, glancing up to a silvered screen above them. “We saved you.”
“Div saved you,” the girl snapped, finally speaking.
Yassen saw a quiet rage in her eyes, made only fiercer by the desperate angle of her lips, the tension in her jaw.
She stood beside another metal chamber, as if protecting it.
There was a shadow of a face in there. Young, boyish.
He leaned forward to get a closer look, and she blocked his vision.
“Jaya,” Akaros said, a warning in his voice.
“You said we would wake Div after the third,” she said. Fresh tears formed in her eyes. “You lied.”
“We will. Give him a chance—”
“Wake him up, then,” she said.
“Jaya—”
“Wake him,” she said, this time leveling her gaze at Yassen.
Despite the flame, Yassen felt a chill skitter down his spine under her glare. There was so much anger in her eyes, and he half expected her hair to rise and shred him into ribbons of flesh.
“I—I don’t understand,” Yassen said. “Why did you save me and not Elena?”
“Oh, for sand’s sake, forget about Elena. I am tired of the world revolving around that fucking queen,” Jaya snarled. “We rescued you. Div gave you his blood. Now it’s your turn to return the favor.”
“Elena survived on Sona,” Akaros said quietly. “Can’t you feel her Agni?”
“Agni?”
“Your inner fire,” Akaros said, and at this, the flame coiled tighter around Yassen. Again, he felt that ancient instinct, like an opening inside him. Yassen raised his hand, and the flame zipped up his arm. He shuddered.
“You’re one of three, Yassen,” Akaros said. “You, Elena, and Samson. Maybe there are more, I don’t know. I hope not. Fuck, you were trouble enough to get.”
“Me?” Yassen sat forward, so quick that Akaros flinched back.
“Did you find me on the mountain? Did you find Elena, then, too?” The sudden memory of her running through the ravine, flames at her heels, sliced through his chest and carved downward to his Agni, for he was already understanding that it was an essential part inside him.
He could feel her. He didn’t know why, but he did.
When he focused on her, on her memory, Yassen saw a golden spark. It sat within him, below his belly button. Small and awfully bright for its size, sizzling with power. It pulsed as if it could feel his awareness turning to it.
“Keep your eyes closed,” Akaros said in a hushed voice.
Yassen hadn’t even realized he had closed his eyes. He obeyed, concentrating on his inner spark, his so-called Agni. It burnished from gold to bronze. Yassen reached for it, and as he did so, he felt something sharp and metallic in his throat, as if tasting lightning.
His Agni grew, and in its glaring light, he saw two infernos emerge.
One was blue and small, so small that it barely even existed.
The other was the color of deep reddish earth, as if soaked in blood and left out to wither and die.
They felt familiar, and horribly, awfully wrong.
He could taste something rotten in their core.
Like spoiled meat, ridden with maggots. When he tried to feel for their warmth, all he felt was a blistering cold. So vicious it sank its claws into him.
Yassen recoiled. When he opened his eyes, he found Akaros and Jaya watching him intently.
“Did you find Elena and Samson?” Akaros asked.
“Can you siphon their Agnis?” Jaya said.
“I—I—” And then Yassen stopped, the realization stark and hard in its awful absurdity. “That was them? That was them. Their fires felt wrong.”
Akaros frowned as Jaya turned to him.
“Their Agnis are linked, Akaros. If something is corrupting theirs, then it’s only a matter of time before it reaches him. We need his Fireblood to wake up Div. Now,” she urged.
“I don’t know how,” Yassen said. “This—this fire, this Agni, I don’t understand—please, Akaros. Take me to Elena. She needs my help. She is in pain, I know it—”
“He is not ready,” Akaros said.
“Like hell he isn’t,” Jaya snarled, reaching for him.
It happened so quickly. At the sudden jerk of her hand, her flashing eyes, the thought of her hair sharpening, burrowing into him, Yassen heard the cold, crisp warning of his Agni, and he reacted.
He could not stop himself. It was instinctual, ineluctable.
He snapped his wrist, and the flame shot forward and latched around her arm.
Jaya screamed.
It sounded from far away. Upon his fire touching her skin, he was suddenly overcome by a flood of sensory information.
The heat of her skin, the map of her veins, the intricate loops of her nadis, the bright, sparking cores of her chakras.
It was brilliant and beautiful and terrifying.
Like gazing into the glare of a thousand blazing suns, only to know they could not blind him.
It filled him with a dizzying sense of power.
Control. He knew at once her hair was not a weapon.
He also knew that she wrote with her left hand, that she had a recent injury on her right leg, that she hated him, feared him, even desired him.
“Stop!” Akaros cried from a long, long distance.
With an almost detached curiosity, Yassen delved deeper.
He saw the layers of her mind. Memories with their own heat signatures, sparks snapping in her brain with every thought, every emotion.
He saw Div. Her parents. Akaros. Samson.
Elena—Elena. He snagged. The sight of her, in Jaya’s memories, hit him cold.
Yassen yanked away. The flame curled back to his wrist as Jaya crumpled and Akaros rushed to her side. She was still screaming.
But it was the smell of her burning flesh that arrested him. He suddenly remembered the inferno searing his arm in the king’s chamber. The white-hot pain. The coppery tang of his scorched skin. His horror made anew.
“No.” Yassen fell forward, crashing to his knees. “No—no, no. I’m sorry, I’m sorry.”
He saw the vivid molten red of her burns. The stutter of her chest. This was his doing. His error. His power. He reached for her, jerked his hand back.
“I’m sorry,” he repeated.
“Enough,” Akaros said quietly, forcefully.
He took off his shirt and gently wrapped it around her burnt forearm. Jaya moaned, her voice soft, but it sounded like a thunderclap. It struck Yassen down to the marrow, to the deep, ugly guilt rotting within him. He fell back, staring at his hands, his fire, in terror.
“What is this?” he said, his voice shaking. “What have you done to me?”
Akaros did not reply right away as he gently cradled Jaya in his arms. His face was drawn, tired. Yassen had forgotten how old he was, how old he had become. When Akaros turned, he looked at him with a cavernous sorrow.
“I have done nothing. This is what you are, Yassen Knight.”
“N-no—”
“Guardian of the Phoenix. Creator of the desert. Third of the Agni. You are the Seventh Prophet.”