“It helps,” Audrey says as we stand in the GDF Headquarters elevator, “to be close to your dominion when you ascend.”

  We stand side by side, alone in the long elevator as we wait for it to whisk us up to the very highest point — the roof. The others all went with different sentinels that Audrey called in to watch over them during their ascensions; apparently, it’s something of a ritual to have your mentor watch over you while you ascend, as sentinels are left incredibly vulnerable during the process. However, a few of my teammates’ original mentors are dead, and now Audrey and Kayne mostly mentor our entire team, facilitating the need to call in help from others.

  Audrey, I suppose, must still view me as her mentee, however, for as the others began finding sentinels to walk them through ascension, she took me by the arm and led me to the elevator.

  “Normally,” she continues, “something like the roof wouldn’t be good enough for weather domain ascensions. Most sentinels end up using the specially prepared ascension rooms, but we’ve never been able to make a good one for weather. What does work, however, is going up as high as possible to ascend. You should gain the ability to fly eventually with a weather domain, and at that point, we’ll both fly up for your ascension; until then, though, the roof should work for your first one.”

  I rub the back of my head awkwardly, still stewing over the discussion with Celeste earlier. Which path is it correct for me to take? A very large part of me wants to stay the course with my Astral Path. It might not be the most powerful, but it feels truer to me. And yet, with the lives of so many at stake, can I really justify giving up more power in order to follow what I feel is right in the moment? It’s the same choice Audrey needed to make, and now I find myself wondering if I can find a way to stay true to myself and still have the power to save everyone.

  Stars, I should have discussed this with Akari before allowing Audrey to push us all forward. She would know what to do; she always does.

  “Kid?” Audrey prompts, making me look up to meet her eyes.

  Blushing, I realize I never responded. “S-Sorry, I was lost in the clouds.”

  “It’s fine to be worried about your ascension; I sure as hell was,” Audrey says, offering a smile.

  I swallow, “I just… I don’t know what to do, Audrey. This should be an easy choice, right?”

  At this, Audrey laughs. “It is never an easy choice. I know a sentinel who sat on his ascension for years because he couldn’t figure out what he wanted to do. Even with only two options, it can be difficult to decide what you want to dedicate your future to. It’s part of why I wanted to light a fire under you and your team to get to it.”

  “What if… you have three options?” I ask hesitantly.

  At this, Audrey’s eyes widen. “Alright, I knew you were a special cookie, but three options? Explain.”

  And so I do; the elevator quickly reaches the roof, and we step out into a small room atop it. Then, staying there, I tell Audrey the whole story. Meeting Althia, her plan to attract Nightsong, and the revelations she put on me. I wanted to tell Audrey about Althia in the first place, but she was gone for the majority of this. This seems as good a time as any, and I want her to have full context if she’s going to help me.

  Eventually, Audrey and I find ourselves sitting against the wall of the room — there’s no furniture in here. My story finished, and Audrey still watching me with a touch of amazement. Idly, I’m happy that I’ve finally managed to do something that has actually surprised her.

  “Stars, kid!” she finally exclaims, “I’m willing to bet that even Karma doesn’t know half of that. We will be talking to her as soon as we finish your ascension. She can do more to help us time Nightsong’s visit than anyone else, and she won’t mind playing dirty to get what she wants. First, though, let’s figure out these options of yours.”

  I shrug, “I don’t actually know that there is much to figure out, I have this third option, but I have no idea what it is or what it means. All I know is that it’s apparently more powerful.”

  [A lot more powerful,] Celeste agrees in my mind. She can’t communicate with Audrey while unsummoned, but she still helped me with the explanation.

  “Power isn’t everything,” Audrey says, running a hand through her lush hair. “This is new ground, though. I honestly don’t know that I can give you any advice other than to make a choice you’re sure you can live with. Once you start your ascension, you’ll be able to understand what you’re binding yourself to, and then you’ll have a decision to make.”

  “So, you don’t think I should just take all the power I can get?” I question.

  Audrey shrugs, “That’s your choice to make, kid. I’m not going to influence it. Just remember what I said, power isn’t everything — whatever you do, make sure that it’s a choice you’ll still agree with ten years down the line. I’m not sure if you’ll be able to change your mind if you want to swap.”

  “Right…” I mutter, “This should be fun then.”

  Audrey laughs, climbing to her feet and offering me a hand. “Say what you will about our job, Serena. But at least it’s never boring.”

  A few minutes of careful discussion later, we step out onto the roof, and stars is it windy! I mean, yeah, the roof of a building as tall as the GDF Headquarters was always going to be windy, but the gusts up here have me feeling prone to being blown off my feet entirely. Luckily, all along the outer edge of the truly massive rooftop, there is a large gate that must be around five meters tall.

  Occasionally, in Shinara, gates like this are used at the top of buildings to prevent — or at least heavily discourage — suicide attempts and to encourage the person to get help instead. In this case, however, it seems to mostly be to prevent small teenage sentinels like myself from getting flung off the roof in a particularly powerful gust of wind. I might have the weather domain, but I absolutely cannot fly at the moment.

  Standing beside me, Audrey’s loose hair is being tossed all about her face — and while she seems perfectly okay with that, I take a step away from her as her hair is being blown into my face, too. Luckily, my ponytail prevents me from suffering the same fate, but I’m not looking forward to trying to brush out the knots in my hair tonight. Maybe I’ll finally just have to learn how to braid it — without my mom to teach me, things like that often fell by the wayside while growing up.

  For now, though, I do my best to push those memories aside and focus on the present, no matter how difficult it is. Things like the death of a loved one can be like that. You never know what thought or sight can trigger a memory or a regret, and then you can find yourself sobbing in the grocery aisle because you saw a can of the soda your mom used to love.

  Swallowing and attempting to focus, I ask, “So… how do I start?” I’m forced to raise my voice slightly over the wind, but high-rank sentinels like Audrey have keen senses — even in their rest states.

  “To start your ascension dream,” Audrey says, “you’ll need to split your focus between your soul gem within you and your domain around you. Start by sitting down and getting into a meditation posture. It shouldn’t be too hard to start it, but remember that your real body will be helpless while you’re in the dream. I will watch out for you this time, but make sure either me or someone else is always with you before starting this — preferably someone you really trust.”

  I nod, lowering myself down to the roof and sitting with my legs folded. I’ve never been one for meditation — my mind just wanders way too much to focus on breathing or something like that — however, something tells me this won’t quite be the same thing.

  “Are you ready, Celeste?” I ask mentally.

  [Ready!] she quickly confirms. [It’s time to choose our path.]

  Indeed, it is. Let’s just hope that when the time comes, Celeste and I will agree on what we should do.

  Closing my eyes, I allow myself to focus within myself on that swirling core of power and clouds I gained on my first day as a sentinel. Simultaneously, I feel the wind swirling around me, tossing my hair and clothes violently around me.

  I keep my eyes closed for what feels like fifteen or so minutes, just trying to focus, as Audrey explained. However, as I continue to not feel anything different, I open my eyes to ask Audrey if I’m doing something wrong — this kind of thing is generally quite easy and intuitive from my experience. Instantly, though, I realize my mistake. Despite the still swirling wind and violent gusts, I am no longer still on the rooftop with Audrey.

  Instead, I find myself back atop the same swirling white cloud I was on when I first bonded with Celeste. Although, this time, the scenery is a little different. First off, the cloud looks more alive than it did before, and I mean that literally. White-gold trees with blue leaves sprout up around the edges of the cloud — which is now a whole lot smaller than it was before. In addition, patches of odd wavy blue grass spring up around the cloud, making it look like some kind of alien landscape.

  Immediately, I find out why the cloud is so much smaller than it was before — it’s contained within a large transparent crystal that looks akin to the one that sucked me inside during my bonding. Outside the crystal is a daylight sky and a bright sun, but I can’t make out much from this distance.

  Right… so I’m on a small cloud island within my soul gem. I suppose that makes a sort of sense. At least with the gem itself appearing so large from my perspective, I feel a bit less trapped than I did the first time when the crystal barely contained me.

  After looking around, I notice a swirl of mist coalescing beside me, which quickly dissipates into the form of Celeste. However, this version of Celeste is a lot… bigger than I’m used to. She stands almost half a meter taller than me, and her four wings spread out gloriously beside her.

  Intriguing, this must be how she views herself, as I would guess that our bodies here are more metaphorical than real. I can understand, I suppose, with how big Althia is, she must feel awfully small most of the time.

  She looks down at me with her bright blue eyes. [How interesting!] Celeste exclaims, [This is where my mind goes when I get discorporated. From here, I can look out your eyes and see what you see.]

  This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.

  With a flick of her tail, a bit of cloud rises up from the ground and quickly forms a circle in the air. Almost immediately, the circle fills up with darkness punctuated by dim orangish lights. [That makes sense; your eyes will be closed right now if you are dreaming.]

  “Strange,” I say out loud, not seeing any reason to speak mentally. “I wonder if this is where we would end up if I died?”

  [That seems likely,] Celeste says, [although I’m willing to bet we would quickly fall into a state of torpor. We would have no real way of regaining mana without your body slowly absorbing it from the outside world. Without that, I imagine we’d fall into a state akin to hibernation until someone found a way to revive us, or our gemstone broke hundreds of years later because we died of mana starvation. That’s complete guesswork, though; no one has ever been able to speak with a dead sentinel before — obviously.]

  I nod at this. Still, it seems like we have all the pieces to actually go about a revival. We know that the sentinel’s soul is still within their gem, that their life force still burns, and we already have magic that can go as far as regrowing limbs. Why can’t we regrow an entire body? There has to be something holding us back, something I haven’t learned about yet that is halting progress. Otherwise, reviving a sentinel could become just as simple as applying healing magic to their soul gem in a massive burst to remake the body. I’m not sure how you’d deal with the toxicity from that, but it seems plausible.

  Anyhow, that tangent aside, I suppose it’s time to focus on what we’re supposed to be doing here.

  “Any idea how we ascend?” I ask Celeste, glancing around.

  Almost as soon as I say the words, one entire half of our little cloud island splits into three parts — each different.

  Each part of the cloud looks like a path leading up towards a set of what looks like swirling lights; however, looking more closely, I find that I can actually see visions within the lights… visions of myself.

  On the first path, the cloud path looks like relatively normal cloud stuff — if a cloud you can stand on could ever be considered normal, that is. The visions it leads to at its end shows me as I am now, fighting with the rest of Team Picnic and occasionally Team Firestorm. My blue hair flutters in my assault state as I move quickly from foe to foe, dispatching them with practiced ease before stopping to heal up any injuries.

  Immediately, I get a strong impression that this is the “easy” path to ascension, the way forward that doesn’t require me to change but just get stronger without needing to bind myself to any path or concept. I also get the impression that if I take this path, I’ll be presented with the other two options again as soon as I reach my next ascension. Perhaps an excellent possibility if Celeste and I agree to delay the main choice or just decide not to bind ourselves to anything at all.

  The path next to the left immediately makes me think of my Astral Path, Chiron. The cloud material the path is made up of looks extremely similar to my living mists — white with swirls of different shades of blue. The visions I see at the end of this path show me running from person to person on a battlefield full of soldiers. Occasionally, I look up and snap off a shot with my bow, but I spend the majority of my time healing the injured soldiers and rushing to help injured sentinels to get them back in the fight.

  This feels like the true supportive option here, and I immediately know that if I take it, offensive abilities like the ones I’ve recently received will become few and far between. However, these visions speak to me more than the first path’s did. They make promises of having the ability to cure all wounds, of being the salvation that others run to in their biggest time of need. These visions show a version of me that could have saved my mother and will go about saving many other children and parents in the future.

  The third and final pathway is immediately the most eye-catching one present. Its path is made up of cloud material like the others, but these clouds look entirely golden and seem to shimmer with power. Gaudy arches and pillars of white-gold marble rise up alongside and over the top of the path — all of which seem to shimmer with power.

  Rather than just flashing lights, the visions at the end look like shimmering golden waves. Within them, I find myself wearing a completely different assault state, my outfit still largely blue but trimmed with bright gold instead of white and looking more like armor. My hair is golden blonde, and I stare out over a battlefield with the even gaze of a queen.

  In these visions, I start to get a clear sense of the rules caught up in the Celestial Truths, the first of which being truth itself — for taking this path would remove my ability to speak lies, even kind ones. Half-truths and non-answers seem to be allowed, but walking down this path would completely remove my ability to outright lie, among other things.

  After spending some time watching the visions and feeling the impressions, I manage to put together the five “laws” that this path would enforce upon me.

  First, never speak lies. No longer would I be able to tell a lie, not even to myself.

  Second, never let corruption fester without challenge. Wherever corruption lies — be it volcora, man, or something else, I must rise to the challenge and defeat it.

  Third, never strike down the defenseless. This means to always have honor in battle; if a foe surrenders, I would be unable to strike the final blow.

  Fourth, never refuse genuine pleas for mercy. This one truth feels more about giving people second chances and not punishing them for their first mistake.

  Finally, never allow needless destruction. I would need to protect places, people, and nature from needless and wasteful destruction.

  Now, from what I see in the visions, I would not be bound to these concepts to the point where I can do nothing else — like chase after the Volcora forever because they are corrupt. However, I wouldn’t be able to directly ignore them either. If the Volcora are coming to destroy my home, waiting out the fight would no longer be an option unless I am literally unable to fight. It’s complex, but I can admit that these rules feel honorable… mostly.

  Each and every rule seems to have a loophole of sorts to allow exploitation. For example, a half-truth or omission of information wouldn’t count as breaking the first rule. Also, things like who decides when someone is considered defenseless or what pleas are genuine. From what I can sense from the power, these are all loopholes that those following this path have abused in the past — even Althia herself.

  At the end of the day, though, how these rules would apply to me would depend on me. Sure, I could circumvent them, but a lot of these feel-like actions I might have taken anyway. Althia was right that they aren’t actually too bad.

  The main thing I don’t like is the potential version of me I see in the visions. An imperious golden queen, looking down on others from a great height. Yes, I stop to heal and even help others, but this version of me seems to do so not out of love for her city or the people in it but for the worship those people lay at her feet.

  I turn to Celeste, who already stands at the beginning of Althia’s golden path. “That… doesn’t feel like me,” I say, looking longingly toward the path representing my current astral path. The version of me that helps and heals others.

  Althia described that version of me as someone who blindly runs around chasing everyone with a paper cut, but that isn’t what I see in the visions. Instead, I see someone full of compassion, unable to bear the thought of another in pain. She fights, yes, but her calling is for restoration, not destruction. I genuinely can’t see anything bad about that — perhaps that’s why it’s my Astral Path.

  [You can clearly see that mother’s path has more power, yes?] Celeste asks, turning to me. I know that she wants to take that path; it’s her heritage, after all, but I still find myself conflicted.

  Instead of stepping up beside Celeste, I move curiously toward the path representing my Astral Path, examining it. “That isn’t me, Celeste. I’m not some golden queen… I’m just a teenager who likes to help people.”

  I gesture to the blue-white path before me, “This fits me better.”

  For the first time, I start to feel genuine anger flowing through my bond with Celeste. [I understand, Serena, but this isn’t just about you. We’re a pair, and I want to… no, I need to follow my mother’s path. All daughters of Althia follow this path. It is my legacy, my birthright. This is who I was meant to be,] Celeste says, her mental voice sounding almost pleading.

  I swallow, a part of me wanting to join Celeste just to make her feel better. I truly do love my familiar, and I will admit that she has been largely living for me up until this point. And yet… the more I look at that golden power, the more it just feels wrong. Off, in a way I can’t describe.

  It feels as if a power that worships a form of purity that doesn’t exist, even within its bearer. It is as if the power wants to craft a perfect, honorable queen but always ends up making impetuous tyrants instead. Now, I would never call Althia a tyrant; I by no means have enough information to say that. However, that is the feeling I get from that golden path. It feels as if it’s trying to be the perfect path and failing somewhere along the way.

  If my lot in life is to be a simple healer, then it is one I will be happy with.

  “I know this isn’t just about me, Celeste,” I say, “but look at those visions. That power will change us… and not in a way I like.”

  Celeste’s blue eyes go wide. [You’re going to pick your Astral Path no matter what I say. Aren’t you?]

  “Unless you have a good argument otherwise… I think this is the right path for us,” I say, trying to be reasonable. “Still, let’s go sit down and talk about this. I won’t force you into anything; I think that path is the wrong choice, but maybe you can talk me into it. Or maybe we delay the choice altogether until C Rank if we can’t agree.”

  At this, Celeste looks frustrated, her tail lashing as she paws at the ground. Then… she looks resolved. Without a word, she starts sprinting down the golden path toward the power that waits at the end.

  My eyes go wide. Can she do that? If either of us touches one of the powers, is that the ascension we will achieve? Why would she-

  I don’t think, I don’t have time to think! Instead, I sprint down the blue-white path, my Astral Path. I know that if Celeste touches Althia’s power, we will both regret it. How could she not even discuss this with me!?

  Somehow, despite the fact that Celeste should be much faster than me, we find ourselves neck and neck, racing down the paths toward entirely different futures. To be a simple healer or a golden queen.

  “Stop!” I yell, panting for breath as I run all out. Mentally, I bless Kayne for his training plans and forcing me to do so much running on a treadmill.

  I want to pull up short, to talk this out, but Celeste isn’t slowing down, and she’s right about to reach that golden power!

  So, putting my head down and all of my willpower into my legs, I sprint forward with everything I have. Headlong, I sprint straight into the power of my Astral Path right as Celeste sprints into the power of the Celestial Truths.

  For a moment, my vision fuzzes out — scenes of me as a golden queen and a merciful healer playing out before me. Then, everything goes black.