Early the next morning, several units of Sun Tribe warriors left their camp in the Hollow Forest, moving swiftly toward Fire Isle. The journey would take nearly three days, so they had to travel fast enough to reach the rendezvous point in time for the window Colonel Dallas could open—yet not so fast that they risked detection.
Initially, Dallas had insisted the troops travel separately to minimize risk, but Adan argued that only by moving together could she make full use of her Tracker abilities to steer them safely. The colonel had pushed back, but since the Sun Tribe warriors were not hers to command, she had no choice but give in.
As they moved through the dense woods, Lynn found his eyes lingering on Adan’s back. She walked ahead of them, her now shoulder-length hair shimmering as it caught the stray shafts of sunlight that filtered through the trees. He could still feel the warmth of her breath against his cheek from the night before, the press of her forehead to his—so near, so hesitant.
He had almost kissed her. And it hadn’t felt like a mistake.
He’d shifted closer, heart pounding, only to freeze when he felt her tensing before him.
‘Was I rejected?’
No, he didn’t think so. He could feel she wanted it too. But something had stopped her. Just like something always stopped her from being fully honest with him.
Lynn glanced at Duke Kimba, marching beside him with vigor surprising for a diplomat. Lynn had initially assumed that Adan’s strange reserve had something to do with her title as the “Ancient One” or whatever honorific the Sun Tribe gave her—but it had become clear they knew even less about her than he did.
‘It must be something else. . . .’
A tightening knot of unease twisted in his chest. He’d thought there would be time to unravel her. But now, he wasn’t so sure.
Adan never answered clearly when he talked about the future.
A protruding root caught Lynn foot and he stumbled forward. A firm grip steadied him. For a moment, he thought it was Adan—but the scent of tobacco gave it away. Duke Kimba.
“Thanks,” Lynn muttered, glancing toward Adan.
She hadn’t even turned. Of course, she must have noticed the misstep—she always noticed—but she didn’t act on it this time.
It was like she was drawing a line between them.
Lynn didn’t like it. But he didn’t know how to cross it, either.
His gaze dropped to the bracelet on her wrist. The water-forged band was sustained by his control, and its presence still resonated with him. If he focused, he could feel her through it—her distance, her warmth.
He smiled faintly. At least she hadn’t rejected his gift.
Despite the weight in his chest, Lynn’s steps grew lighter. He had faced down Sun Tribe warriors and Adan’s fire—he could handle this too. Maybe
The journey northward around the lake’s rim was uneventful, at least on the surface. Thanks to the Sun Tribe scouts who had charted a lesser-traveled path through the Hollow Forest, their movements had gone undetected.
But more than that—it was Adan and her A.I. companion.
“Two patrolling guards, two klicks northwest, have deviated from their predicted path,” her A.I. reported. Two red dots got updated trajectories on the topographical map floating before her eyes. “Suggested to adjust course five degrees east to maintain requested safety radius.”
“Affirmative.”
Adan subtly shifted the groups’ direction yet again. Her movements had grown increasingly erratic the closer they came to Fire Isle, but her reputation as a Tracker—and the Sun Tribe’s unwavering trust—kept anyone from questioning it. Even Dallas had, begrudgingly, stopped commenting.
“We are approaching the designated breakthrough point,” the A.I. noted, “Given the current speed, Sai estimates arrival at 0117.”
Adan glanced at the troops behind her. The stars were out, faint light spilling through the branches, more than enough for her to see clearly. The others moved more slowly in the dark, but they were competent—and quiet.
She agreed with the A.I.’s assessment.
Just over a kilometer from the lake’s edge, Adan signaled a halt, and motioned for the group behind her to crouch down and gather.
“All right. Scout groups One and Two, head north. Draw out the guards at shift change,” she ordered. The leaders nodded without hesitation.
“Colonel, has your captain confirmed they’re in position to relay the false intel when the distraction begins?” Dallas gave a terse nod.
“Good. Duke Kimba, you and your team will follow me and Lynn. No matter what you see, stay silent. Be ready for the speed boost Lynn will give once in the water. The rest will rendezvous four klicks . . . four kilometers north of the lake. Colonel, you’ll enter the city by daybreak and remain on standby at the castle in case we need a second push.”
“Any questions?” Adan looked at the gathered crowd, taking in their expressions as she let the last mission brief sink in. She saw a healthy mix of fear, excitement and determination. She could smell adrenaline in the air—it would help them move faster, but it would burn them out if they weren’t careful.
“Parameters are within acceptable range,” the A.I. confirmed. “No indicators of mental breakdown. Mission cleared to begin.”
Adan gave a sharp nod. “Move out!”
The scouts disappeared into the woods like shadows, heading north to begin their diversion. Dallas slipped off southward, linking up with her troops embedded in the outskirts of the city.
That left five at the forest’s edge: Adan and Lynn at point, Duke Kimba and his two hand-picked warriors forming the rear.
They waited and Adan could feel Lynn’s gaze on her, palpable in its silent intensity.
“Focus, Lynn,” she whispered without looking at him. “This mission comes first.”
“I know the stakes,” he said through gritted teeth. “It’s my family.”
Adan winced inwardly, but showed no sign of it. She knew she was being harder than necessary—but the moment for softness had passed. She had to keep him sharp.
“You need to focus too, Adan,” her A.I. chided, but Adan didn’t want to reply.
Nobody spoke after that and Lynn had moved his gaze away.
It was as if even the forest held its breath as they waited.
Then—shouts echoed in the distance, followed by faint flickers of torchlight between the trees. The guards had taken the bait.
Adan narrowed her eyes, studying the map overlay.
“Thermal signals to the south as well. Both stationary guard units are pulling away. The patrolling units intercepted.”
Adan tensed her body, signaling for the group behind her to be ready. She felt Lynn shift next to her.
“Ideal window of movement in five . . . four . . . three . . . two . . . one . . .”
“Go,” Adan breathed as she moved forward with light but quick steps. In five minutes they reached the shoreline. Without a word, they slipped into the water, heads barely breaking the surface, masked by tall reeds.
The water stilled. Adan listened, but picked up nothing alarming.
Sai reported no irregularities.
Step one, complete.
“You have been very secretive about this next step,” the A.I. noted, sounding a bit upset. “Would you kindly inform Sai how you plan to cross the lake unseen?”
A small smile tugged at Adan’s lips. “Remember Caligo Lake?”
“Of course Sai remembers Caligo Lake. Sai possesses complete mission recall—wait. You can’t possibly mean to—”
“Oh, I think I do.”
Adan’s smile widened as she slowly raised a hand above the surface of the water. A tiny flame ignited in her palm, then began to shift—burning hotter, tighter, until it turned from red to blue… then vanished entirely, translucent as glass.
“1 642 degrees Kelvin!” Sai blurted. “How are you containing the heat? Even the BioArmor’s sensors aren’t detecting it.”
Adan suppressed a chuckle. “I’m not quite sure myself, to be honest. I just felt . . . doable. So I tried it.”
“. . . and if it had failed?”
“We’d have to take the scenic route, I guess.” Adan winked. “Now then, next step.”
She spread the flame into a thin fan, spreading out to cover the surrounding lake just above the surface. Slowly, mist began to rise, the hot vapor cooling as it met the air.
Adan moved deliberately, balancing precision and patience. Too fast, and it would draw attention. Too slow, and they’d lose their chance.
Time passed slowly. It was a delicate process, if she let the heat slip, the air would be too warm for the water to condense into mist. Or worse, she might cause the water to boil. With them still in it.
“At current pace, Sai calculated that the mist will not reach sufficient density before sunrise.”
Adan gritted her teeth, about to push the flame hotter—when she paused. A chill swept down across the lake like a curtain being drawn. Adan looked to her side.
Lynn had raised his hand too, With closed eyes, his element resonated with hers, catching the vapor, cooling it instantly.
Cold met heat, and the mist bloomed—thick, swirling and silver-white, like breath on winter glass.
They didn’t speak.
But in that moment, they moved as one.
Her fire. His ice. Seamless.
Adan had collaborated with people before, fighting together both on ground and in space like dancers coordinated in a bloody performance. But this was something else. Deep inside Adan, something stirred—like a bell struck in her core, echoing outward.
It was a resonance she couldn’t quite name. But, she couldn’t be distracted by it now.
Just as the first rays of sunlight hit the highest point of Fire Ilse’s spiers, the white mist hovering above the lake had gotten dense enough.
Adan retracted her flame and motioned the team forward. They swam out into the water, silent and slow. Once they were on slightly deeper waters, Lynn stepped in and gave them gentle but firm push forward in the water.
The contact with water controlled by Lynn felt different to Adan now. She could feel it, feel him-as if his wrapped in his arms. Even his scent seemed to reach her, enveloping her in a crisp winter wind.
“You are above the entry point,” Sai’s synical voice rang out, snapping Adan out of her daze. “You have been inattentive of your surroundings for 27 minutes and 42 seconds.”
Adan ducked her head into the cool water to hide her blushing cheeks. “I would argue I had too much attention to my surroundings.” She mussed. “My immediate surroundings.”
The A.I. scoffed. “Sai is starting to agree with you; your focus on Lynn is getting dangerous.”
Adan clicked her tongue, popping her head back above the surface and signaling for Lynn to stop pushing them forward. Looking around, the group was just over 300 meters from the shore of Fire Ilse. The mist was still dense so not much could be seen with normal vision, but heat signals indicated that quite a few people were patrolling the wall that surrounded the island.
“Any readings from the BioArmor Sentinels we left behind?” Adan asked her A.I..
“Sai has yet been unable to reestablish connection with the sentinels. Previous data indicates that max range within the city is two klicks, one within the castle.”
“Noted.” Adan looked over at Lynn, pointing first to her mouth and then downwards.
Lynn understood right away. Quietly, five spheres grew out of the water, encasing air within them, large as a mid-sized melon. Once done, the spheres floated over, attaching themselves to the faces of the people present like gas masks.
The crisp scent of cedar and crushed mint became even more noticeable. Almost overwhelming. Adan glanced at the particle readout charts-there wasn’t actually any scent present.
Pushing the thought out of her mind, Adan allowed herself to sink down below the surface and was soon followed by the rest of the team. She could see the shock in the faces of the Sun Tribe warriors and even Lynn seemed a bit surprised that it had worked.
They were breathing without issue under the water surface.
Adan smiled and started swimming downward. They had to swim ten meters straight down. A thogh feat for untrained divers but Lynn’s control over helped immensely by pushing them towards the bottom of the lake.
“The tunnel entrance is two meters northwest,” the A.I. reported as a yellow ring appeared in Adan’s field of vision, highlighting a non-descript stone at the bottom.
“I will be hard-pressed to explain this,” Adan mused as she reached out for the stone. “Our friendy, neighborhood Chief A.I. will have to take the blame.”
“That is advisable, yes.”
At Adan’s touch, the stone split open, reveling a code pad beneath.
“Here we go.”
Lynn strained his eyes to see what Adan was fiddling with at the bottom of the lake. It had started to brighten before the dive, but this far down, not much light remained.
For a moment, a brief light appeared by Adan’s fingers but before he had a chance to see what it was, a soft rumble vibrated through the water. The ground under Adan started to move, splitting open to reveal a perfect square in the ground. Without hesitating, Adan swam in.
The Duke and his men seemed a bit reluctant to follow, unsure of what was going on. Lynn gritted his teeth. He trusted Adan after all, so why hesitate?
Lynn swam into the hole, that turned out to be a small square-shaped room. Not wanting to wait for the rests’ nerves to settle down, Lynn manipulated the water around them to forcefully pull them down.
Adan smiled at him and pressed a button that was glowing faintly on one of the walls. The low rumble returned, and the hatch they had swam through started to close. Once closed, a repetitive shrill noise sounding something like a warning. Lynn felt a sudden pull in the water around him and quickly stretched out his legs to find the ground beneath him. The Sun Tribesmen where not as lucky. As the water left the room they were in, the three men collapsed in a pile on the ground.
Lynn could see Adan suppressing a laugh, and he felt the corners of his mouth raising as well.
Lynn gave the water an extra tug, pulling it out of everyone’s clothes.
Clearly pleased, Adan gave him a brief smile, but her face quickly hardened again, slipping back into the seriousness of their mission. She tapped on the wall next to her and a square pad with multiple buttons appeared, seemingly out of nowhere. Adan quickly pressed on a numbers of buttons in sequence and with a low hum, the wall slid to the side, opening up a brightly lit path.
Lynn was forces to cover his eyes at the sudden light, but Adan didn’t wait for them to adjust. She headed straight into the tunnel with calm and measured steps. She moved as if she had been here before, but if she had gotten the information from the Sun Tribe Chief, it had to be her first time here too.
Glancing at the Duke Kimba and his men, they looked at the tunnel before them with awe.
‘So they haven’t been here before either.’
Ignoring their gazes, Lynn hurried after Adan. He inspected the walls of the tunnel, perfectly smooth, perfectly squared. He had never seen the material the walls where made of before. It looked metallic but there were no seams in the metal, no bolts—just impossibly smooth curves, as if the tunnel had been grown rather than built. They gave off a faint hum, to consistent to be from something living.
Light sources floated in recessed arcs overhead, shedding a harsh, shadowless glow. No flames. No chanting. Even the air smelled wrong, sour. Like scorched stone after lightning. It prickling his nose. The air smelled faintly of ozone and something older, like scorched stone after lightning.
“Adan?” he whispered, surprised by the echo his voice still gained. Adan just hummed in response. “What is this place?”
She glanced over her shoulder. “No lies?”
“No lies.”
“I can’t tell you then,” she continued walking, looking ahead. “But the Chief of the Sun Tribe told me where to find it.”
“You only met him on the day of the awakening, right?”
“Correct.”
“And he thought to mention this tunnel? Before he even knew you would need it?”
“He mentioned a lot of things to me.” Adan didn’t look his way but he could hear the smile in her voice. She chuckled. “And almost nothing at the same time. Very frustrating.”
They turned a corner and Lynn saw a door in the distance. “Did the Sun Tribe build these tunnels?”
Adan’s shoulders stiffened—not quite a flinch, but close. She didn’t answer right away.
“What do you say, Duke Kimba?” she prompted instead, smoothly redirecting the question.
“Not in our time,” the man answered from behind Lynn, pious awe in his voice. “It looks like the structures left by the Ancient Ones. I’ve never seen it outside of the Chief’s residence before.”
Lynn looked up at the odd light sources in the ceiling and the impossibly smooth metal walls. It didn’t seem like something from a long time ago.
When he looked back at Adan, she gave him a pointed look.
‘She knows more, but can’t say it.’
Slowly but surely, Lynn was starting to figure out the boundaries of what Adan could talk about. He just couldn’t understand why they were there. Lynn had seen her twitch sometimes when they were talking, as if speaking the truth physically hurt her. But how?
“Then how about if I say that I’m a genetically altered being from beyond the skies, created for interstellar warfare and destruction?”
The sentence suddenly came back to Lynn with a snap. Adan had said it as a joke when she had caught a fire boosted arrow at point blank on their first journey to Fire Isle. He had taken it as a bad joke at the time, but thinking back on it, didn’t she look like she was in pain then too?
‘Surely not . . . ‘
Suddenly, Lynn bumped into a warm body. The impact was about to cause him to fall backwards when an arm wrapped around his waist, steading him.
“Focus, Lynn.” Adan warned, the green speaks in her otherwise golden eyes glowing stronger in the cold light of the tunnel. She had stopped in front of the door without Lynn noticing.
Lynn wiggled his way out of the grip and tidied up his robes. “Sorry.”
Adan grunted at him, her attention shifting back to the door. With tap of her fingers, another box of buttons appeared and Adan pressed a new combination of them. There was a slight delay this time before anything happened, but eventually there was a faint click and in the same instant, the door swung open with tremendous force.
“Back up!” Adan shouted as a large ball of flames exploded between her and the door. The pressure from it propelled all of them several meters back into the tunnel they had come from. For a moment, the world went black. A sharp ringing in his ears.
When he regained his senses, gravel lay scattered across the tunnel floor, smoke curling from the singed ceiling. The once-silent lights above now pulsed erratically, casting sharp shadows.
Adan stood, dusted off her robes, and coughed once. “Well,” she muttered, “that wasn’t on the map.”
[Thermal explosion detected. Structural integrity reduced by 12.4%. Recalibrating.]
Several warnings glared in Adan’s field of view but she dismissed them calmly.
“Adan! What on earth are you doing?” the A.I. screamed in her ears, disconnecting her from the ringing caused by the explosion.
“Saving lives?” Adan replied mischievously as she bent down to inspect the gravel.
“Saving lives? You have several broken ribs from the pressure wave alone. You could have just dodged the boulders!”
“Nonsense, they would have blocked the passageway.” Adan flicked away a the gravel she had been fiddling with, ignoring the pain from her ribs. “Besides, I need to experiment more with my new powers, don’t I?”
“Not by nearly blowing yourself in the air!” the A.I. practically fumed. “It’s not protocol!”
“So, do you have the replay?” Adan asked briskly. “What should I improve for the next time?”
Silence.
“Sai?”
“Fine.”
The full sequence replayed in front of Adan. From opening the door to her releasing a compressed fireball, pushing her team out of danger while breaking up the boulders that came falling through the door. Charts analyzed the pressure dispersion, heat centers, and more. The boulders took most of the damage, followed by Adan, but the BioArmor had blocked most of it. The group behind her got a milder pressure wave, enough to send them flying but they should only have sustained bruises.
“Sai notes irregularities in your control on the push back from the explosion. If you could have focused it forward 17% more, your ribs would have been spared fractures.”
“I feel like I should have been able to block it from us entirely.”
“That’s not sci-“
“Scientifically possible? I thought we left that statement behind weeks ago?”
Adan looked towards the doorway. On the other side a much more rough space opened up, more similar with the architecture she had seen in the castle, but judging by the map, two thirds of the distance remained before they would be under the castle.
“Release sentinels to scout ahead. Maintain 40% BioArmor protection.”
“Is that advisable?” the A.I. hesitated. “There are too many unknown variables.”
“I can handle it. Knowledge will improve the situation.”
“. . . Affirmative.”
Unseen by the naked eye, small balls rolled of Adan’s skin and scurried through the gravel and out into the tunnel.
Adan turned to the discombobulated group still prone on the corridor floor. She might have discussed a lot with her A.I. but outside only seconds had passed.
“Can you hear me?” she asked, raising her voice slightly. “Someone could have heard that, so we need to move.”
Adan helped pull Lynn to his feet. Both he and the tribesmen behind him were a bit unsteady at first, their sense of balance no doubt impacted by the ringing in their ears, but they quickly adjusted.
“Let’s go.”
Adan stepped over the pile of gravel and entered the rougher tunnel on the other side of the door. Once everyone was out of the hallway, Adan sent a new ball of fire to strike the ceiling above the passageway, causing new boulders to fall down and block the entrance.
Moving red dots appeared in the periphery of her eyes, quickly moving towards them.
“Some one definitely heard that. This way, keep quiet.”
Adan set off in a light jog in the opposite direction of the approaching people, leading her team deeper into the tunnel system. She was not yet sure where these tunnels led, but at least they seemed to lead toward the center of Fire Isle, so likely they would take them in the right direction.
Snowy Publications 