Maudlina had been trying to reach the cauldron for the last four minutes and the eastern fighters were not letting her get anywhere near it.

She was not a woman who accepted obstruction gracefully.

She was certain of the cauldron and what it was doing to the boy. He floated above the Tianlan, and he had to be brought down before the cauldron finished what it had begun.

"Move," she said, to the two eastern fighters who had positioned themselves between her and the cauldron with the dedicated professionalism of men following an order they had been given clearly and intended to follow completely.

They did not move.

Maudlina looked at them with the expression of a woman who had been a Class II Sorceress for long enough that she had genuinely forgotten what it felt like to be told no by people who were less powerful than her.

"I will not ask again," she said.

They still did not move, because they were professionals and Bearfang had given them a specific instruction and they were the kind of men who followed specific instructions from Bearfang even when the alternative was a woman looking at them like that.

Maudlina raised her hand.

The eastern fighters braced themselves as they could feel what was gathering around her hand, the specific quality of a high-ranked talent winding up to do something significant, and bracing was the reasonable response even if it was ultimately not going to be sufficient.

And that was when Jake screamed again.

AAARRRHHHHHH!!!!1

It was not like the screaming from before.

The earlier screaming had been the screaming of a person in serious pain, which was bad enough and had made everyone in the rest stop aware of it in the background of everything else that was happening.

It was loud and it was awful and it communicated very clearly that something terrible was happening to the young man floating above the cauldron.

This was different.

This started as a scream and became something else partway through, something that had no clean human name for it, a sound that a person’s throat was not really designed to produce and was producing anyway because whatever was happening inside Jake had stopped asking permission from his body before expressing itself.

It rose in pitch and then dropped below pitch and then went somewhere that pitch didn’t quite cover, and it had a quality to it that made the hair on the back of every neck in the valley stand up with the unanimous, involuntary certainty of a thing the body understood even when the mind was still catching up.

It sounded like a wounded animal that was very large.

It sounded like something that had been sleeping for a very long time and had just been woken up in the worst possible way.

It sounded, Eskar thought from behind the stone wall with his crossbow halfway to his shoulder and his hands gone suddenly unsteady, like the valley itself was making a noise through the body of one eighteen year old boy.

And then the wave came.

It was invisible, and it hit everything.

There was no other way to describe it — it wasn’t light, it wasn’t force in the way that Ankerita’s talent produced force, it wasn’t fire or wind or any element that the world had given a category to. It was something older than categories, something that moved outward from Jake’s floating body in a perfect circle and hit every living thing in the rest stop at the same moment with the same total impartiality, and what it felt like when it hit you was the specific, vertiginous sensation of standing on ground that has just reminded you it is not as solid as you assumed.

Everyone stopped fighting.

Not because they decided to. Their bodies simply stopped, the way bodies stopped when something arrived that overrode the signals the brain was sending, and for a full three seconds every person in that valley rest stop stood completely still and stared at the boy above the cauldron and felt, in the deepest available part of themselves, something that the rational mind wanted to classify as fear but was actually something older and more fundamental than fear.

Recognition.

The blood remembered something the person didn’t know they knew.

Bearfang had gone still with one dagger raised and the other at his side and his face was wearing an expression that was the raw, unfiltered expression of a man who had just understood that he had made an error in his assessment of the situation and the error was significant.

Ankerita stood with the blue of her talent still gathered around her hands, not released, not dismissed, just held there while she looked at Jake with eyes that had gone very wide and very still and very focused.

Maudlina had lowered her hand.

The two eastern fighters who had been blocking her path had stepped backward without appearing to notice that they’d done it, their bodies making the spatial decision independently of whatever their minds were engaged with, because their bodies had felt the wave and their bodies had drawn conclusions.

The cauldron was making sounds that iron cauldrons were not supposed to make.

Jake felt the system come back online the way you felt a light come on in a dark room — suddenly, completely, with the specific quality of a thing that had been absent long enough that its return felt almost aggressive in its brightness.

But it wasn’t the same as before.

Before, the system had been a ledger, a knowing, a dry and occasionally witty presence behind his thoughts that managed itself with the self-contained efficiency of something that had its processes and ran them at whatever pace it determined was appropriate.

That system had been his companion for years and he had understood it the way you understand something you live with—comfortably, familiarly, without necessarily understanding all of it because full understanding hadn’t been required and he was, fundamentally, a man who didn’t work harder than the situation demanded.

What came back online now was that system having been somewhere else and returned changed.

[ALERT]

[ REBOOTING SYSTEM ]

The notification arrived not as the library-bell tone he was used to but as something that resonated through his entire body, through the dark veins and the spreading essence and the pain that was still very much present and very much making its opinions known, as though the system wasn’t announcing itself to his mind but to every cell that constituted him simultaneously.

[ INITIATING BLOOD SHADOW SYSTEM — FULL SEQUENCE ]

He felt it start from the base of him and move upward, the way water moved upward when a vessel was being filled from the bottom, and what it felt like was not comfortable but it was not the cauldron’s pain either — it was the different, stranger sensation of something being organized, categorized and filed into correct positions that it had always been meant to occupy but had never quite reached before.

[ BLOODLINE DETECTED ]

Jake’s eyes snapped open.

[ DESCENDANT OF RAIKARNDEL ]

[ BlOODLINE OF THE BEAST MONARCH ]