Shadow's Seventh Step

(These summaries have been taken from the author's website with permission]

# Shadow's Seventh Step - Summary

Ruwen leaves the Third Secret to join Sift at the Bamboo Viper Step trial to gain the title of Master. Echo is also at the trial, and she witnesses Ruwen place the Apocalypse Band, that once belonged to Pen, into Ruwen’s Void Band. The students are broken up into four groups based on their skill, starting with Rung One. Ruwen, because he is late, must join Rung Four.

The first trial mirrors one of the three obvious lessons of the Bamboo Viper Steps: you end where you begin. During this trial Ruwen speaks with Echo, planting mental seeds to alter her behavior. He also begins training Rung Four to fix the major issues in their Steps.

Ruwen is allowed to choose a relic from the Bamboo Viper vault, and he ends up with a Thieving Misfortune Golem named Tarotmethiophelius or Tarot for short. This golem provides a card-based reading and the three cards come with effects that cannot be resisted. The three cards appear on the right-hand wrist.

After the first trial the entire class is taken to a place called Savage Island. They battle other Step Clans and cross a bridge. On the way across the bridge, it begins to sink and Ruwen notices Rung One is under attack at the bridge exit and Echo appears to be leaving her Rung behind. Ruwen yells at her to do better. Ruwen uses his Diamond Fortified body to fend off the attacks from the creatures in the river and Rung Four makes it across the bridge. In addition, Echo did return to help Rung One, saving them.

The second trial highlights the Steps return all the energy they produce while executing the forms. Ruwen and Sift continue to train Rung Four, and their skills greatly increase.

The third trial takes place in a swamp. This trial teaches how the hard and soft styles of the Bamboo Viper Steps balance each other. Ruwen meets a Gloom Stalker from the Shadow Realm, a Warden named Zylkin. The Gloom Stalker can use a person’s shadow against them.

The entire class makes its way to Savage Island again to collect resources for the Step Clan. The class comes in contact with a large number of Shattered Clan and it becomes apparent that this place is a staging ground for an invasion of another planet. The army will use a massive crossing stone to move to this new planet. Rung Four’s planet is being destroyed by an army like this that is using an identical crossing stone. When Rung Four can’t break it, Ruwen does, and realizes he has unleashed an explosion so large it will destroy the entire planet. Unable to think of anything else, Ruwen uses his Void Band to capture the explosion, saving everyone.

The next trial is the beginning of the three hidden aspects of the Bamboo Viper Steps. The first one is underwater and used to demonstrate the importance of breathing. Ruwen meets underwater creatures, and he realizes many of the movements in the Viper forms came from these creatures’ natural attacks.

The second hidden aspect of the Bamboo Viper Steps centered on the force used for each step. To test this aspect the class needed to perform the Steps on top of a bamboo forest where the bamboo could only handle the correct amount of pressure before collapsing.

Ruwen and Sift continued to teach the other students in the trial using direct language, quickly improving everyone’s abilities and skills.

The last hidden pattern in the Steps centered on timing. This was tested in the middle of a canyon where a series of air bursts would arrive to hold your body in place. For the first time Ruwen experiences the Steps as they were meant to be performed, that is not mechanical movement, but with joy and connectedness.

To Ruwen’s dismay, there is a seventh trial he is completely unprepared for. The Founders beg him to not take the Seventh Step as they believe he will never survive it.

Ruwen learns the seventh trial is related to balancing his inner and outer worlds. The issue is that his responsibilities and obligations to the outside world are staggering, making him massively unbalanced. Even his epiphanies on the makeup of this trial have no impact on balancing his inner self. He eventually decides to give the mental constructs in his head free will so that they can self-actualize and hopefully add to the weight of his inner self. This works and also has the benefit of releasing Overlord and Uruziel from the place they had been trapped after fleeing Lalquinrial’s gaze when entering the Infernal Realm at the end of book six, and they return.

The other students had waited for Ruwen and now that everyone had passed the seventh trial it was time to become Masters. Before the Founders could punish Ruwen and Sift for the oaths Ruwen had broke when using the Shadow Steps in self-defense against Lalquinrial, he challenges the Founders to combat. If he won it would move him to the level of the Founders, skipping the Master level, and thereby circumventing the issues surrounding breaking the oath.

As Ruwen fights the Founders he discovers his newfound internal and external balance has allowed him to manipulate his surroundings with something he calls Harmony. Using this ability, he fights and beats the three Founders.

To finish their time in the Master’s Trial, the class returns a final time to Savage Island to gather additional resources for the Step Clan. They are all attacked there by five of the Infernal Aspects of Lalquinrial. Because of the damage Ruwen did to himself to escape the Infernal prison by Smearing himself into the Third Secret, his Core and spiritual network are too damaged to use, making him much weaker than the last time he faced the Aspects. Sift and Ruwen fight to save the lives of their classmates but fail, leaving only Nymthus of Rung Four alive.

Echo arrives in the form of her Death Aspect and upset at the death of Rung One, demands the other Aspects leave. The work Ruwen had done to change Echo’s behavior had worked, as she had grown attached to Rung One, becoming their leader.

Ruwen gives Nymthus the sculpture he had taken from Valora that was so perfect it granted a buff by just looking at it. Nymthus was connected to the others in Rung Four by a magic that transferred the power of the dead to the others. Because the others all died so fast, the magic altered, and instead of gaining the strength of seven others, Nymthus had turned into the equivalent of a Gem level fighter. She was now capable of fighting creatures like the Aspects and surviving. Echo, Nymthus, Sift, and Ruwen all take an oath to not reveal the location of this Artifact that Lalquinrial desired.

Ruwen is crushed by the failure to protect his classmates. He experiences true loss for the first time and blames himself for it happening as he left these Aspects alive in the Infernal Realm.

Returning home, Ruwen takes on the appearance of Uru’s Shadow to try and quell the simmering civil war. He meets the leader of the rebellion, a Bard named Gunder. Ruwen goes to kill the man but learns at the last moment that Gunder is one of Uru’s Hands, a person Uru had marked to help Ruwen on his path as Uru’s Champion.