The stairs down into the Temple of War felt, to Remus, like descending through the layers of a very cold cake, each landing colder than the one above it, stone sweating with a damp that had nothing to do with the lake above the Temple of Healing and everything to do with however deep this mountain's own roots actually ran.
"How much further?" he asked, breath fogging in front of his face.
"Not much," Akira said, leading him down another flight, her own hooded cloak doing considerably more against the cold than Remus's borrowed layers were managing. She caught him rubbing his hands together hard enough to hear the friction and brushed the backs of two fingers along his cheek without slowing her pace.
Skill Activated: Warm Embrace.
Warmth spread through him fast enough to make him blink, chasing off both the cold and, more usefully, a good portion of the anxious churn he'd been carrying since the summit. "Thank you," he said, and meant it.
"Be careful with Master Daegon," Akira said, not looking back. "He was cast out from the rest of the Masters over ideas nobody wanted to hear. Learn whatever you need from him, and let's leave before he decides he'd rather keep you than teach you."
"What kind of ideas?"
"He went too close to the fog at the bottom of a place called the Abyssal Maelstrom, years ago, and came back raving about creatures riding giant wasps through the sky, bringing fire behind them," Akira said. "The Council laughed him out of every room he tried to warn. Nobody's laughing today."
They reached a bare, empty cell at the bottom of the last flight, and the voice that answered them arrived before either of them had seen anyone at all.
"I can feel your anxiety from here," the voice said, dry, unhurried. "Tell me why you've come."
Akira flinched hard enough that Remus caught the motion out of the corner of his eye.
"Search," Remus said, mostly out of reflex.
Skill Activated: Search.
Nothing answered. No shape resolved anywhere in the cell, no heat signature, no motion, and Remus understood, filing the fact away with real professional interest underneath the unease, that whatever was hiding this man wasn't a stealth skill at all, since Search should have punched straight through one of those the way it had for Rhaeya back in the vault. This was something stranger. Something closer to a trick played directly on the eyes and ears rather than a gap in his own detection.
A tall elf stepped out of what had, a half-second earlier, looked like an ordinary section of bare wall, long dark hair, a scar running the full length of his left eye down to the middle of his cheek, an expression that suggested he'd already decided he wasn't going to like whatever came next.
"Why have you come," Daegon said. Not a question, exactly. More an accusation dressed as one.
"I need to learn Dark Soul Magic," Remus said.
"Nobody needs to learn Dark Soul Magic," Daegon said. "Turn around. Leave the way you came."
"Respectfully, sir, I can't do that," Remus said. "Your warning about creatures on giant wasps has already come true. I lived through it personally two nights ago. They're calling themselves the Nightforged."
Something moved behind Daegon's scarred eye, fast and unwilling. "How can you be certain."
"We believe a scout ship kidnapped him and drained him the way it drained everyone else strapped inside it, then crashed before it could finish the job," Akira said. "One of the Nightforged who reached shore alive broke a Holy Steel blade into three pieces with a weapon forged from Dark Soul Magic. We need to be able to build the same weapons, or we'll have nothing that can meet theirs."
"I told those fools exactly what was coming," Daegon said, low, something old and bitter surfacing behind the words. "They laughed. Put me down here as their warden, as punishment for saying it too loudly. I'm inclined to let them find their own answer to this now, purely on principle."
"You were right," Remus said, "and now everyone finally knows it. But that doesn't help either of us if the Nightforged reach this island and we're still standing here arguing about who deserves an apology first."
Daegon considered him for a long, silent moment, the scar along his eye catching the cell's dim light at an angle that made it look, briefly, older than the rest of his face.
"I know exactly how badly the Council treated you," Akira said, quiet, careful. "This is your chance to prove you were always worth more than every one of them put together."
Remus half expected the elf to see straight through the flattery for exactly what it was, and instead watched something in Daegon's expression settle, decided, the way a man's face settles once he's already made the choice and is only now admitting it to himself.
"Fine," Daegon said. "I'll teach you. But this magic can only be learned by someone carrying real repressed rage. Not performed anger. Not a grudge you enjoy telling stories about. Something buried."
"I don't have repressed rage," Remus said, evenly. "I'm about as level a person as you'll meet."
"Perfect," Daegon said, and something that might have been the ghost of a smile crossed his scarred face. "Exactly what a man with repressed rage always says. The fact that you believe it means the anger underneath it is enormous, and I intend to call it up whether you're ready for that or not."
"You're welcome to try," Remus said. "You won't find anything."
---