The Crown Tournament [Chapter 4]

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More chapters. I hope you enjoy!

Shami

Chapter Four

“It wasn’t your fault, Hyperion,” I said. “You were against three dragons. And without your arcanist. Not even one of the god-creatures could’ve stood against that.”

A voice, flat and emotionless, cut through the moment. “Hyperion, take this.”

Dario stepped forward, gently pressing the golden caladrius talisman into the drake’s massive flank.

But unlike with Haoyu, the talisman didn’t immediately knit Hyperion’s wounds back together. His injuries ran deeper. When he attempted to rise, his hind legs buckled beneath him, and his colossal form crashed back to the floor with a thunderous shudder.

“I… apologize…” Hyperion groaned. “The bone dragon… when it touched me… my bones shattered. Some kind of magic, I… I don’t understand it.”

I placed a hand on his injured leg. The limb felt brittle, disturbingly soft beneath the scales. The talisman was helping, but it wasn’t enough.

“I can help you,” Dario said. “Haoyu can lift you with his wind manipulation alone.”

Haoyu’s body shimmered, his scales flashing with molten gold and crimson. Light coiled around him as his form shifted. His fins stretched and reshaped into wings, his jaw narrowed into a long, stork-like beak, and vicious talons unfurled from his lower limbs. Though his new avian form had legs, he hovered effortlessly, suspended in the air just as he had floated as a fish.

With a single beat of his wings, the wind obeyed.

Dario clenched his jaw, a vein briefly surfacing on his temple as he focused. Most eldrin, like Wren, bonded with only one human, their magic harmonizing into a seamless connection. But Haoyu was second-bonded. His magic strained to align with a new arcanist, and a task as immense as lifting Hyperion must have pushed Dario to the edge, especially with Lux now so far away, their connection weakened.

“Where are you going?” Dario whispered.

“I… I need to find the others,” I said. “I’m hoping they can help Elias and Hyperion. And maybe… everyone else.”

“And after that?” he asked. “Is there anything else you need help with?”

“I, um…”

Dario was being unusually direct. I thought we were friends now, but I’d never seen him so… cooperative. His willingness to help Hyperion made sense—he loved all mystical creatures—but this? Traveling with us? That felt like something more.

“Lux,” Dario said, answering the question I hadn’t asked. “She told me to stay with you. That was the last thing she said. She believed that if we worked together… we could save Yumi.”

Of course. Lux had passed him a final thread of guidance, just as Roux had done for me.

“Then we need to focus on saving Master Elias,” I said. “If he’s able to fight again, that changes everything. He nearly killed Aziel once, maybe he can do it again.”

At the mention of Aziel, Dario stiffened. He must’ve heard him call me “son” earlier, but if he had thoughts, he didn’t voice them. I kept talking, unwilling to dig into that mess now.

“I need to find a woman called the Falcon. Do you know who she is?”

“The Falcon…” Dario murmured, brow furrowing. He glanced at Haoyu, who looked just as startled. “That woman in the Lightning Straits?”

“Yes! You’ve heard of her?”

“Some of the mystical creatures I stayed with spoke of her in hushed tones. They said she was the queen of all flying eldrin. Master of the air.”

The title rang faintly in my mind, stirring a sense of déjà vu I couldn’t quite place. I shook it off.

“Well, then you can take us there, right?” I asked. “Can’t Haoyu fly us to the Lightning Straits?”

Dario stared at Haoyu, who gave a slow shake of his head.

“A journey to the Lightning Straits is perilous, even under perfect skies,” Haoyu said. “Without Lux—and while carrying both an injured Hyperion and Elias—I couldn’t manage it alone.”

“Don’t forget, I can control the wind, too!” Wren chimed in.

“I haven’t forgotten, and I accounted for that,” Haoyu said. “But aren’t we bringing your other teammates as well? As I said, the trip would be far too risky. The Lightning Straits aren’t to be trifled with. They can only be safely traversed aboard a proper airship.”

His words brought back memories of the Sunset Desert and its savage, swirling sandstorms that devoured the unprepared. Few survived it unaided. Only a master arcanist like Elias, with his sandstorm aura, had ever navigated its fury and brought us to safety.

If Haoyu said flight was impossible… it likely was.

I let out a heavy sigh, my hope draining away. Just when the path forward had begun to seem clear, it slammed shut again.

Yet Dario and Haoyu didn’t share my dismay.

They strode from the Feng household and into the garden, Haoyu’s winds carrying Hyperion behind them with remarkable gentleness. Despite the dragon’s size, he moved as delicately as a patient on a stretcher.

“We don’t need to rely on Haoyu for transportation,” Dario said. “We can charter an airship.”

“An airship?” I echoed, stunned. “How would we even afford something like that?”

Dario pulled a gleaming gold bar from his pocket. “Yumi gave this to me months ago. I never used it, but it should be enough to secure a ship.”

I stared at it, speechless. He was casually holding a solid bar of gold, in the open, in a household where half the staff wanted to throw him out.

“She gave you a solid bar of gold…” I muttered.

“Yeah,” he said, unfazed. “She told me to buy something with it. I didn’t know what to buy. But now seems like the right time. Let’s use it to commission a ship. Lux said working with you is the fastest way to get Yumi back.”

He said it so plainly, so matter-of-factly, like he was explaining the steps of a board game to a child. Dario hadn’t the faintest idea why I was so floored. Ming-Sheng had accused him of using Yumi for money, but the truth was even stranger.

Dario didn’t even fully understand what money was.

“So this is how Finlay feels…” I said.

“To the skies, Haoyu!” Dario cried.

With a roar, Hyperion was carried upward, Haoyu flying beside him, wings slicing through the air like great blades of iron. Dario followed. He wasn’t riding either of them, but sailing along the winds.

He reminded me a little of Elias.

Dario drifted through the sky, gliding effortlessly like a bird of prey. Wind curled around him, lifting and turning him in slow spirals as he caught thermals and rode the rising heat higher and higher. It was a subtly different form of wind manipulation. It was fluid and wild.

Perhaps it was something he could teach me.

“He looks weirdly comfortable up there,” Wren said. “Like he was born in the clouds or something.”

“Probably lived among flying mystical creatures,” I replied. I hadn’t thought about it before, but of course, there had to be creatures who never touched the earth. I turned to Wren. “Think you’re strong enough to carry me and Elias?”

“Should be fine,” he said. “The amulet did its job. I’m not half as beat up as Master Hyperion or Elias.”

I nodded, carefully climbing onto Wren’s back while cradling Elias’s unconscious body.

With a deep breath, Wren coiled his limbs and tail, then launched into the sky like a ballista bolt. The wind screamed past us as we streaked after Dario, Haoyu, and the wounded but still-mighty Hyperion.

“Where are we heading?” I called out.

“Shenkantin,” Dario replied. “The airship port’s right next to the tournament arena. I spotted it after our last bout. That’s why the Feng family keeps a residence in Rosela Town. Yumi always said the wealthy act like mob bosses. They like to keep their claws close to their investments, in case they need to squeeze someone.”

His voice trailed off, lost in the rushing wind. He stared down at the beach disappearing beneath us, eyes burning with something unspoken, jaw clenched tight. He didn’t say Yumi’s name, but he didn’t have to.

Was he in love with her? The way she loved him?

If so, it must’ve torn him apart to watch her vanish like that. Then again, I was worried about Yumi too. She wasn’t just an incredible arcanist. She was kind. Brilliant. Brave.

I wanted to ask him, just to know what he really felt, but I’d spent enough time with Dario to understand his silences. He wouldn’t talk while his anger still burned hot. Instead, I tried a different route. “That flying technique… did you learn it from one of the mystical creatures you lived with?”

“Yeah. I did.”

That was all he offered.

And just like that, the conversation fell away. We climbed higher into the sky, the air thinning, the earth shrinking below. I didn’t know exactly where we were going, but Dario moved with certainty. If he’d fought in Shenkantin before, he’d find the way again.

After a while, I spoke again. “Did you see that crossbow Aziel had?”

“The huge one strapped to his back?”

“Yeah. And the talisman. That weird, spongey thing around his neck.”

“Those weren’t normal artifacts,” Dario said. “They were made from entire mystical creatures.”

“What?”

I must’ve misheard. The wind was howling in my ears, but I couldn’t ignore what he’d said. Artifacts and trinkets needed parts of a creature to gain the magic. Using a whole mystical creature was unnecessary, or so I thought.

Dario repeated himself, his voice low and cold. “Aziel Theano. Some of the mystical creatures I lived with spoke of him in whispers. They called him the Deceiver. He and his kirin, Kismet… They’d promise a bond. Promise to share power. Then betray them. Kill them.”

Even after everything I’d learned about my father… that was monstrous. I remembered the way Wren’s eyes had lit up when he first bonded—how mystical creatures couldn’t grow, couldn’t truly evolve, without a partnership with an arcanist.

“But… but what about the Trial of Worth?” I asked. Every mystical creature had one. It was a test of soul and strength to determine if an arcanist was worthy of bonding.

“He didn’t need to bond,” Dario said grimly. “He just had to lure them away from their homes.” Dario turned to me then, his expression clouded, equal parts curiosity and unease. “I heard what he said… back at Yumi’s estate. Is he really your father?”

“Elias is my true father,” I said. “But… yes. Aziel used my mother the same way he used those creatures. As tools.”

Dario fell silent for a moment, and when he finally spoke, his voice surprised me. It was softer, younger and tinged with something close to empathy.

“I don’t remember much from when I was little. My family was poor, a minor offshoot of the Hon line. Unlike the Fengs, our clan doesn’t exactly take care of its own. But my father… he used to say that it’s not where you come from that defines you, but what you choose to do.”

There was truth in that. Aziel had passed down his blood, but that only made rejecting him more powerful. “That’s… a good thought. Your father sounds like a good man.”

“He was. An artificer. That’s why I started loving mystical creatures when I was a kid.”

Then Dario exhaled slowly, the weight of memory dragging on his shoulders.

“But we lived in Keshari. And in Keshari, the queen’s word is law. When Empress Xiu heard whispers of a gifted artificer, she demanded he join her court. We ran instead. And while we were in exile… that’s when the East Sea Raiders found us.”

“I’m sorry,” I whispered.

The East Sea Raiders had scarred both our lives, left both our families broken. It was the first thread that had bound Dario and me together, but I’d never heard the full story until now.

“It was a long time ago,” he said. “But there are too many people like your father. Like Empress Xiu. People who see others, people and creatures alike, as pawns. They take and use and twist, and the stronger they grow, the more innocent lives they ruin.”

Dario looked forward again, his voice taut with conviction. “I just hope Lux was right. That if we work together, we can bring them back. Yumi. Lux. All of them.”

As we continued rising, the sky deepened into a darker blue, and the air turned thin and cold. Then Haoyu’s voice rumbled through the wind, slow and low, but with quiet authority.

“Wren. Amir. Use your wind magic now. Be gentle with yourselves. Breathe carefully. Help Elias.”

It struck me then, how high we had climbed. The shift in the air had come gradually, almost unnoticed. But now my head was buzzing, and my lungs felt too small.

I lifted my hands, coaxing the wind with quiet intention. It wasn’t like blasting an opponent out of the ring with raw force. This required finesse. I thought of crafting artifacts in fire, of how gentle power could be.

The wind responded, swirling around us in a careful embrace. Not as graceful as Dario’s instinctive drift, but it was enough.

Soon, the lightheadedness passed. I steadied myself, and Wren did the same.

But Elias… he didn’t stir.

No matter how tenderly I guided the wind into his body, his face remained ghost-pale, his breaths shallow and ragged. My father’s cowardly ambush had shattered his chest.

And I had no idea how much of it Yumi had managed to save.