Page 80 of The Sunlit Man

Was…was Nomad what they thought he was?

Storms? Was he…somehow…

No. He was no mythological hero. He’d failed these people by bullishly going forward with this plan to enter the maelstrom. The signs had been there. Auxiliary’s hesitance, the others’ overeager deference to his ideas. He’d already done something they’d considered impossible in cresting the mountains. But there, he’d taken the time to get the facts, the science, the data. He’d tested their engines; he’d flown a scouting mission; he’d used the knowledge of the engineers.

That plan had been hasty, but double-checked and based on a solid scientific foundation. This time, he’d picked a direction, spouted off an idea, and started running.

That had been his problem for a while. He was the man who ran. Now entombed in rock, with no way to run from himself, he confronted it. He had failed. Experience, in this case, had served him poorly.

He’d learned from wise battle commanders that in times of tension, someone makinganydecision was often better than standing around. But there was a caveat to that lesson. Pithy though it sounded, the leaders who said it were the ones who had lived long enough to pass it on. They were the ones, in the heated moments, who didn’t just make decisions. They made therightdecisions.

Their advice was good, assuming you were the type of person who judged wisely in tense situations. He didsometimes. This time, he’d jumped in too quickly. And he’d led the Beaconites to destruction.

He tried to feel shame at that. He really did. Instead he simply felt…numb. As if…as if he’d known this was coming, and a part of him had accepted long ago that his failures would finally catch up to him.

Pain started to prickle across his arms and legs. He was so low on Investiture, it took longer than normal to heal. Fortunately these were the easy kind of wounds to survive with his particular talents. Terrible burns didn’t directly impact his core organs or his skeletal structure. The body knew what to do, and his warped soul—for all he hated the part that prevented him from defending himself—fed on Investiture to restore him, bit by bit.

His master, who had held the Dawnshard far longer, could never die. Nomad was far from that level. But today, despite excruciating pain, his body healed the burns. And as the pain receded—and he blinked restored eyes in the darkness—he realized he could hear the rain.

Honor Almighty. He could hear the rain.

“Aux?” he managed to say. “Time?”

You’ve been buried for around fifteen minutes. There is just under an hour and a half until Beacon falls. Nomad…you have essentially no Investiture left. Maybe I can use the dregs to transform, but you have no more healing, no enhancements.

Yes, but he was back in the shadow. The planet had rotated. And the Cinder King’s forces would soon arrive to harvest theirsunhearts. They would bring ships he could steal. They would find the power sources, and he could take them.

He could still save Beacon. Assuming he could get back to them before the sunrise.

The race was not finished. He wasn’t done running yet.

Nomad shifted, heaving upward on the shield, and broke out of the earth—healed, naked, determined.

His first goalwas to find a hiding place. A nearby stone arch, lit by occasional flashes of lightning from above, provided that. A place he could tuck himself away and listen to the rain whisper. He couldn’t spare much time. They’d arrived in forty-five minutes, flying Elegy’s relatively slow ship. He needed to be fast to return.

Unfortunately all he could do was wait.

It was the most excruciating of activities. The opposite of his personal mandate. Even when he was going backward, he was at leastmoving. But right now there was nothing else he could do, so he tried to let the rain comfort him. Envelop him. Others might hate or even fear it. But beneath its veil, he found his strength returning.

It only took two minutes. Lights appeared, bringing hope. The prospecting team who protected the Cinder King’s riches. At leasta dozen ships. They skimmed the area, then eventually settled down right where he’d dug himself out. They didn’t seem to notice his grave for what it was, and instead had a machine start digging into the soil.

So slow. Too slow. He watched, pained.

Ember-red light seeped from the ground, granting him an unexpected sight. Many of those present, watching the process, were Charred. Indeed, wasn’t that theCinder King’sship over there, landed in the mud? He was shocked to see the tyrant himself walk across the landscape, eschewing an umbrella as he approached the dig site.

Nomad doubted the king usually went on retrievals like this. He seemed wary—indeed, as his people dug out several sunhearts, the Cinder King watched the sky, looking about expectantly.

Why is he here, though? the knight asks. Why would he come out into the rain?

“He knows I’ll try something,” Nomad whispered. “He’s expecting a fight.”

How? How would he know?

Well, perhaps “know” was the wrong word. But the Cinder King obviously anticipated the worst. In this case, that meant making sure that Nomad—the wild card from another world—wasn’t coming for these sunhearts.

The presence of this many troops—and the king himself—changed Nomad’s plans. He couldn’t fight; he still didn’t know how to lance the boil on his soul. He might never figure it out. He was too much of an outsider for their local arcana to work on him.

So he needed a way to grab those sunhearts that didn’t involve confrontation. A possible plan formed as a ship landed nearby,engine scorching the ground and throwing up hissing steam that made the air smell of dried mud. It was a ponderous vehicle with a large, vault-style door on the back. A worker opened it, then trotted over toward the dig, where a fourth and fifth sunheart had been laid out. Nomad couldn’t grab those, but what if he waited for them to be handed to him?

---