The Everburning City

Act 1, Part 6, Chapter 2

Vincent

Someone was speaking Vincent's name. Barely feet away from where he burned in a shape smaller than his fist. He heard the voice easier than if it had been spoken directly into his ear, could dissect the slightly fearful tremor, and the rising volume meant to mask it. But it might has well have been spoken from half a mile away, for all the attention he paid.

All he could see right now, was the fallen form of Captain Dremora. Lying at rest, his hands resting over his chest and his eyes closed, and his mouth still wearing that slight smile that the man always had on. As if his last breath had been spent winning a fight.

"Vincent," someone said. And he couldn't say if someone said it where he stood near the wall, or where he burned by the fountain.

"Captain," Vincent whispered as he hopped over the Captain's body. "I could have..."

"Vincent, did you hear me?" Cameron asked. Somewhere in the distance, so far from Vincent's thoughts that he struggled to look through his eyes to notice, Cameron was trying to push past Sergeant Lorec. "Vincent, they need you out there!"

"The captain's been killed," Vincent said. As he let the words slip off his tongue, his own anger felt a furnace had just been lit inside his stomach, hot and bitter rage like scorched metal that drowned out his thoughts. He seized the flame, gripped it tight, and willed himself into being.

To wield the flame was to become it. And his anger wasn't content with being careful.

His heat haze took shape so violently it kicked up all the silt and dirt in the area and threw it up, so the fires bordering the town were joined by a rising wall of glittering grey dust. Vincent became every torch along the perimeter, every pilot light warding the Gloam. The fires in the pipes running below the wall felt like the sword at his hip. He had a hundred arms, a hundred eyes, he was the heat and the air all around Barleybarrel.

And only now, was he large enough to fit the anger he felt.

Asserting his will also threw the pilot lights into new, vigorous life. The Gloam recoiled from it, rushing away a hundred feet at a time. And like children hiding under a blanket, the Gloamtaken still marching on the town seemed to shiver and shrink as if they knew someone was looking at them.

Vincent turned his head. It was difficult; like paying attention to your toe while you were dodging someone's fist. But he managed it, and tired to make his voice heard over the the rising nose. He began to say something, but even through the flame he could barely hear his own voice.

That would have worried him, were he still just flesh and blood. But the cacophony was just a damn nuisance now. He took a pinprick of fire, and traced it on the ground in front of Sergeant Lorec.

I will help them.

Vincent took a deep breath, and opened his eyes over all of Barleybarrel. Though a hundred eyes, all at once.

And waged war.

A gathering mob of creatures on the north side of the line of rubble, waiting as others tried to climb over or find a path through. Vincent waved his hand, and the ground beneath their feet was thrown half a hundred yards in the air. He felt the shrapnel of pulverized stone riddle whatever creatures weren't rent apart by the blast, and knew the moment it happened that every single creature was dead.

His eyes turned.

A gap in the rubble wall, just enough for the creatures to come a few at a time. Fire congealed and whirled about, a whirlwind of fire as bright as the Spire touched down and ripped along the path. And like a paintbrush drawn across a map, where his power passed there was nothing but black left behind. Black ash as the ground and rubble was left scarred. Beneath that power, not even the bodies of the Gloamtaken were left behind.

Hundreds behind that gap. He cut his craft into dozens of pieces, each a speck as large as a man's fist, and flung them into the creatures. Each time one punched through a creature's chest, Vincent could feel his power reach out and touch the Gloam, where it erupted into a fire larger and more violent than he intended. It was a surprise, but he fit it into his attack easily enough. Ranks upon ranks exploded, rent apart and laid low in barely enough time to take a long, slow breath.

He swept his hand and blasted out the bottom floor of a building, to trap and crush the hundreds of creatures aside. Squeezed his fist, and the air around the creatures imploded, sweeping streets clean as the Gloam burned inside their lungs.

And even as he swept his hands and crushed the creatures inside the town, he readied his will to deal with the creatures outside.

Vincent linked the pilot lights stretching across the edge of town into a long line, and then turned it into a wall. Like the wall behind them, he grew his Craft a hundred feet high, and just as impassible to the creatures on the far side of it. And from there, he turned it into a flood.

The Gloamtaken didn't vanish from his sight as the fires poured onto, around, and over them. Vincent was fire. He could see each creature as his will rent it into smoke. Hear the hiss of flesh as it flashed into smoke, the pop of the Gloam inside each creature as his will drowned out what strung the dead along like puppets. Taste the air they became, even as the heat of his power turned what was left of them into fire.

His rage took other shapes. Whirlwinds of fire as tall as the towers of High Central, screaming birds as large as buildings that dove into the Gloam and caused explosions that could rip city blocks into ruin. Beyond the pilot lights of Barleybarrel was now Vincent, as much as his own flesh and blood, and he turned hands that could turn stone into smoke against the City's enemy as violently as he had ever used his power.

"I will scour this field of you and the things you throw at us," Vincent said, and he wasn't sure how he spoke those words. From his mouth, from his flesh and blood, or somehow making the words in the maelstrom of his unleashed rage. He laughed as he fought. It felt like freedom. It felt like finally being born, and being able to scream for the first time.

"I'll come for those walking mountains of yours," Vincent promised. He knew something was out there, beyond the Gloam at the horizon. The hand that maintained the siege. He wanted it to hear him. "Each in turn, each of those ash-stained things, and I'll carve my name with a burning hand onto every one!"

Vincent whirled around in the maelstrom of his own making, and shouted into his storm. "And I promise you, wherever the burning hell you hide. No matter what you do, what you try, the City will burn forever. We'll outlive you, and everything you throw at these walls."

They would live. Barleybarrel would survive. Vincent would make sure of it. He couldn't live with himself, if he let it be otherwise.

To live is to burn. These hours didn't cost him life, even if he had burned away a part of himself to see them safe. Because he wasn't willing to live without seeing this done.