attention to the dozens of lives still remaining in the cloudship. They were battered and cut and bruised and in terrible shape, but they were alive.
Not to mention the hundreds—maybe thousands; Lindon couldn’t be sure—who had made it out on the Akura ships before. Dross pulled up that memory and shoved it right into his mind’s eye.
The spirit prodded him further. [What did you really set out to do?]
To save Sacred Valley.
That was the answer, and they were the words he’d always used to himself when he thought about his purpose for gaining strength.
But what did that mean, really?
Saving his family? They were safe. Here in Moongrave, with Mercy’s endorsement, they could be as safe as anywhere. Once their cloud fortress was repaired, he could take them with him or even leave them here.
Lindon had always pictured himself saving his home, but deep down, he had wished for something else as well. He’d wanted to stride back into the Wei clan and show them his great power.
He mocked himself for that now. The people of Sacred Valley hadn’t been impressed even when they should have been.
The best he’d accomplished was bullying them into obeying.
As a distant third, he’d wanted to preserve the place he’d grown up. He had been gone from Sacred Valley for a long time now, but it had been his home for longer. He had almost as many fond memories there as painful ones.
Now…it was too late for that. It was gone.
The images of the bodies, spilled all over the foothills of Mount Samara, cut him as though the memory was razor-edged. They had died outside Sacred Valley, just as they would have died if they had stayed home.
But some had made it.
And some were still trying to leave. Still trying to escape.
Even so, Lindon felt the burden on himself lighten. Akura Charity had been a Sage before he was born—before his father was born, probably—and even she couldn’t have taken him across the continent in one trip. There was nothing he could do. The battle was over.
[Ooh, that’s what I said! I said that! Focus on the victory and not, you know, the failure. All that failure.]
Lindon did, and he found the lack of responsibility a welcome relief. He would be wrestling with himself for the rest of his life, he knew, looking to find every little detail he should have done differently to save more lives.
But right now, he couldn’t save more than he already had.
Only then did he notice Mercy, standing against the windows. She held her dragon-headed staff loosely in one hand, and the wind from outside stirred glass shards around her feet and whipped her ponytail into her face.
She had turned around, but otherwise stood exactly where she’d reached when she’d lunged for her mother’s hand. Now she chewed on her lip so strongly that blood welled up.
As Lindon met her eyes, she spoke, as reluctantly as if he’d pulled the words out of her.
“Does anyone want to go back?”
A buzz passed through Lindon’s body. At the same time, he and Dross remembered the item she’d left buried outside of Sacred Valley’s suppression field.
I was right, Lindon thought, and he himself didn’t know if the words were excited or hollow.
[I was way off,] Dross said.
From her void key, Mercy pulled out a stone carved with script. It looked as though she’d etched the scripts herself, and Lindon knew what it was even without inspecting it closely.
The stone itself wouldn’t do anything. Neither did the script, when it was powered. It only linked to a teleportation anchor.
Like the one Mercy had taken from Daji. The one she’d left buried in Sacred Valley when she’d seen her mother show up.
She had known Malice might send her away, and had prepared herself a way back.
That same anchor had allowed the Blood Sage to transport a group of Overlords halfway across the world in one trip. Such small teleportation anchors were disposable—permanent ones were huge, like the tower beneath them that Malice had used to send them here to Moongrave—but this one had been made by Reigan Shen. It would last another trip.
“We’ll need you to carry us there, if you can,” Mercy went on. They all knew it would be difficult for Lindon to move so many people, even if the anchor made it possible. “But…do we…”
She took a deep breath.
“It’s not like there’s much we can do. We can’t bring anyone back.”
That was a safe bet. Now that they were here, Lindon could carve