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Toren Daen
When I had begun my training in the depths of Dicathen's Beast Glades, I had… struggled with taking the lifeforce from my foes.
It was not so much that I couldn't or a lack of ability. It was how easy it was. How simply and casually I could just rip the life away from mana beasts as they threw themselves at me with primal rage. And every time they sensed my vampiric draw, there was this unique, primalfear that overtook them: an animalistic realization of what was happening, and that by the time I'd sunk my talons in, it was far, far too late.
But as my intent spread through the world like a summer haze—carrying every ounce of pent-up rage I'd been unable to release throughout my time as a broken spirit, a caricature of what Aurora had always wanted to be—I found none of that reservation I might have once felt. No mercy.
Mercy died with my Mother.
So, as Vajrakor stood frozen at the suddenness of my aura seeping through him, I tore. His lifeforce—tinged red and purple to my eyes, the fire of his heart radiant and audible—wavered, flickered, then bent.
His soultether flowed like molten honey along my veins, surging toward my pierced heart. The reddish-purple morphed and changed as it reached the anchor of my existence, turning dawnlit and true.
How would a corpse describe Death to those who hadn't felt its draw? What would it demand first after returning from the impossibly deep soil of a grave, driven by vengeance and grief? Maybe a glass of water. Maybe fire that it had lost. I had not even been able to feel the heaviness of my limbs or the ache across my body. I had forgotten the scents of the world and the sensation of ripping flesh. I had lost what it felt like to force a foe to their knees for hurting those I cared for.
I remembered them now.
Vajrakor's legs buckled, his mouth struggling to form words as I forced him to his knees. I was so hungry. The arrogant dragon struggled to put together a cohesive push into his intent at all, his eyes wild as his left arm shriveled. I had awoken as a wax caricature of a man, empty of lifeforce. But no more. My hair slowly changed from the white of the ashen dead to the vibrant red I knew so well.
But the Indrath dragon wasn't done for yet, and I was still weak. The surprised asura finally managed to adjust his arm, his heartbeat wild with fear. He swung a scaled claw at me, the obsidian reflecting the darkness as it carved toward my throat.
With hardly any mana in my body and the lingering touch of the Beyond on my Vessel, I couldn't dodge. The dragon tore a bloody arc from my hip to my shoulder, before backpedaling away with trained precision.
I growled as Vajrakor retreated out of my reach, an arm pressed to my chest as it leaked orange-purple crimson. The feather runes along my body flickered as I forced my heart to beat, lifeforce streaming to repair the damage.
It was slow. My body was an engine that had been left in the cold for far too long. The pipes that carried my energy across my physique had forgotten what it was like to hold such warmth, and it took all that I had just to seal over the jagged claw marks on my chest with some of the lifeforce I'd stolen from Vajrakor.
The dragon in question stared at me from fight-torn black hair, his amethyst eyes wide and uncomprehending. The ravaged catacombs breathed dust from the earlier clash with Wren, a dozen craters and pock-marked indents trailing the path of Vajrakor's duel, but nothing had damaged him quite like this. His claws dripped with my blood as he pressed them to his shriveled left arm, his gaze snapping with disbelief from the stone pillar my body had been laid atop, to me, and then back again.
Drip. Drip. Drip. The blood flowed from his talons, each drop glimmering with my dissipating heartfire.
"It's impossible," he whispered, more to himself than to me. I could feel his intent, hear his voice with a clarity that seemed so foreign, and yet so precise all at once. "Dead. It was dead."
Vajrakor isn't afraid, I thought, drinking in the sensation of being alive once more. His pride burns too brightly for that.
Sensations and colors and perceptions that had been so dull and empty when anchored to Chul suddenly felt impossibly real. Heartfire, mana, sound, touch, taste, smell… Even with hardly any mana in my body at all—only the meager motes I managed to pull inward with mana rotation—it all felt clearer than it ever had before. His pride isn't one of true arrogance, though… No.
"You feel so… hmmmmm," I muttered in a low whisper, drinking the flavor of Vajrakor's deepest insecurities on eddies of the ambient mana. I wavered there on my feet, placed between a dragon and the crumpled body of Chul as I drew on the potent energy, trying to understand how Integration had changed everything and nothing all at once. "I see the source of all that hatred, Vajrakor. You feel so…" I wheezed out a breath, fighting for the word with the right… substance. "Small."
I caught the first, feathering brush of it there, as I scoured away this mutant lizard's masks. The texture of it made me think of the sea, dark and unfathomable and boundless. It rippled with what was just outside of perception, the barest flicker on the edges of consciousness.
The first scent of fear. Fear of what he couldn't see. Fear because he didn't understand. Fear because I did not make sense. Fear because he could not fathom what had happened to his arm or how I was standing or what I could be.
"Guards!" he snarled angrily, causing the entire room to shake, "On me! The prisoners are here!"
I blinked weakly, forcing my body to stop trembling. I could feel the lifeforces of all the approaching dragons—and a few other asura—as they closed the distance at a rapid pace, racing through the tunnels. Their heartfires burned to my eyesight over physical matter in the distance, the drumbeats of their pulse thunderous in my ears. And not just their heartbeats: their mana signatures told me without question that every single enemy in this place was leagues above what Taci had been.
"I need you to cover me," I said quietly, finding the threads of my plan once more. "Just cover me for as long as you can. We need to make it to that central room with the Tree Prison…. And then, I just need some mana. Enough mana for a single spell. That's our only chance."
Wren Kain IV had emerged from the ground, covered in a few cuts and scrapes himself as he lounged on a throne of earth. I could feel his intent, hear his heartbeat. That told me this one was real.
I turned slightly, favoring Chul with a look as he recovered our Mother's body from one of the pedestals, holding it with a mournful agony that resonated through both of our souls. Her hair should have burned brightly like mine. Her eyes should have shone like mine. Her heart should have beat like mine.
Lady Dawn's son trembled, ignoring the backlash of his Vessel as he held his mother's body close, unable to speak or think or feel beyond the fear and sorrow. His eyes traced Aurora's features, trying desperately to find some semblance of life.
I gave him hope. Hope that she can come back to us, I thought, feeling my will solidify. I will not waste that blessing.
Wren, who had probably been about to say something quippy or smart, hesitated as he followed my attention. "You're Spellsong, then," he said gruffly, his intent curious despite the undercurrents of fear and the roar of the approaching dragons. "Heard a lot about you. Back in Alacrya."
"Later," I said weakly. "Now, we need to—"
"Get you idiots to that Deva-forsaken tree, got it!" Wren yelled sharply, raising his shaking arms up high. Vajrakor was rushing toward us again, now accompanied by more dragons in gleaming plate. Each of their steps cratered the earth, the mana trembling with power I'd never faced before.
And under Wren Kain IV's command, the stones rose up to swallow us whole. The gaping maw of the stone—so painfully similar to that taunting, wretched esophagus of an ascending staircase—hauled us back down into the mountain, gleefully ready to digest our small and frail bodies. The only light was the low ember-orange of my eyes.
I laid a hand on Wren and Chul's backs as the earth began to part around us, heaving us downward like a Darvish sandshark. I did what I could to heal them both, hauling their lifeforces closer in tune, but it wasn't enough. I was still too weak.
"They follow!" Chul professed weakly, holding our Mother's body close. "Quickly, Worker of Wonders! Can you not go faster?!"
"I'm going as fast as I can, you oaf," he grunted, his arms shaking as he forced himself to stare ahead. "The stone here resists me with everything it can. Some sort of attempted countermeasure to those with earth mana arts. It's exhausting just trying to manipulate this chaff!"
I ground my teeth as I stared through the rock, the burning fires of a dozen asura flitting about in a well-organized pattern. In the sheer, claustrophobic darkness, that was all I could see. Their intent focused and honed in a way that made sweat bead along my brow.
I can feel the sweat, I reminded myself feverishly, the adrenaline in my veins making me hyper-aware of how near I teetered Death once more. I can feel my sweat. That means I'm alive.
Unfortunately, it seemed that the guards of this mountain prison weren't going to let us go so easily. Wren cursed in a dialect I didn't understand, his intent flaring as he veered us to the left, causing Chul to stumble in our makeshift little cocoon. He cursed as he cracked his bloodied head against the side of the streaking stone, but it spared him the lance of light that had suddenly punched its way right in front of us.
Wren was forced into a dizzying attempt to avoid every burning spear of pure mana as they hummed past us, obliterating the flesh of Mother Earth without care. Flickers of blinding light, then terrible nothingness were all I knew as we were stretched like taffy about a thousand winding poles.
The situation was made worse by the fact that a few heartfires were seeping toward us through the rocks like water through the cracks of the mountain stones. Titans. They have titans of their own who can swim through the earth!
I had no doubt that the self-proclaimed "greatest crafter in all of Epheotus" was aware of this fact, but he was currently occupied trying to keep us all from dying a grisly death, and I was too weak to help in direct combat yet. Chul had curled himself protectively around Aurora's Vessel, unwilling to let even a chip of wayward rock glance across her.
Think, Toren, think! What can I do to help?
I found my answer quickly enough.
I growled, calling what little mana I'd been able to gather these past few seconds, and engaged Sonar Pulse. A ringing, omnidirectional wave of sound mana rippled from me like a solar flare, feeding me a three-dimensional picture of the earth and stone and everything. Except for one spot, where the mana just… twisted in on itself, in a way that made my head hurt. It shouldn't have been possible, but—
"Wren, avoid the right!" I called, the hair on my arms standing on end as I recognized what it must have been. "Spatial weave on your three!"
"You choose to tell me that now?!" he snapped, abruptly shifting our trajectory through the stone once more and barely avoiding a lance of light that seared his robes."
"I'm fucking sorry," I hissed, trying to keep alert about everything Sonar Flow was telling me. "I'm just as busy as you trying not to dieagain!"
I could sense the clashes of mana in the distance: Wren was sending dozens of golems out, swimming through the earth. They intercepted some of the pure mana lances, and others tried to fool our pursuers. He even sent one into the spatial weave—and sure enough, it vanished from my senses, before appearing high above and being torn apart.
"Below!" I howled, sensing a sudden attack as it melted through the earth.
Wren lurched backward just in time. A screaming buzzsaw of fire erupted from the makeshift ground where we'd been a moment before, but it didn't continue onward. It stopped, gleaming like a wicked knife. With my deep affinity for fire-attribute mana, I sensed what was about to happen before it struck us. The ambient fire mana followed the lulling demands of that ticking bomb as it cast a blazing glow across our adrenaline-shot forms. It wasn't that strong initially, but as it gorged on the fuel beneath the surface of the earth, building itself toward an impossibly devastating crescendo—
On instinct and desperation, I engaged my regalia, funneling what mana my weakened physique could afford into it. I knew my spellform was an aberrant anomaly, born of unique insight. I was able to make the ambient mana carry and push and pull on the world in the same way the mana lifted white core mages into the sky.
And with my level of seared insight, still leagues beyond anything I'd known in Soulplume, I found a connection I'd never realized before. Or… one I would have never been able to understand.
I reached out with my will, with my intent to the ambient mana, the space glowing white-gold for a fraction of a moment, and then I heaved.
The atmospheric mana that had been slowly collapsing in on the detonating bomb of a spell abruptly reversed direction, outlined in a shining light as it surged toward me instead. The moment the red motes of fire mana crossed the boundary of my flesh, it was purified
I spun on my feet, energized by the influx of power. My body felt looser, stronger, faster, more powerful again. I leapt in front of Chul, thrusting my hand forward, because even as that gyrating super-grenade of a fire spell lost its fuel and began to make horrifying popping sounds as it neared detonation, I focused on a far more dangerous threat. I pointed two fingers into the darkness of this underground tomb, hoping it would be enough.
"Brace!" I bellowed, my lungs reveling in the exhalation of air. The feathered runes along my arms brightened, then hovered over my skin as I summoned a haphazard telekinetic shroud of shining yellow to try and protect myself.
A flickering star of perfect aureate—a fusion of fire and sound beyond anything I'd ever known—flared into existence over my fingers. I directed every ounce of mana I still had toward that single anomaly of light.
And then the flood struck. A beam of screaming white mana—pure only in its affinity and desire for our ends—tore through the earth without heed, a dozen meters wide. And then that white scream of a dragon's breath attack, ever so slightly purple from something I couldn't sense, kissed the impossible gold of my hovering star.
The beam parted cleanly in two, the separate halves burning through the rock and leaving only molten lava behind. I was Moses before the Red Sea, barely able to stand as the heat tore through me. Sound and sight lost their meaning as my body burned from the force of impact. My shroud flickered as I forced myself to hold against the concurrent stream, the flesh along my hand blackening and burning away.
And then the spatial weave that had allowed the attack to appear from practically nowhere, the one I'd barely sensed in time with Sonar Pulse,collapsed, taking the attack with it.
I fell to my hands and knees, heaving for breath. I belatedly ordered my heartfire to flow, washing over the agonies of my charred hands, quietly grateful that Chul was still alive at my back. Wren hastily hauled earth in to fill the gaps left by the searing attack.
"The dragons are… luring us in," I said weakly, forcing myself back to my feet. I kept my regalia engaged, the air around me tinted with a slight, light undertone as I redoubled my effort to pull the mana in. This technique was as shaky as my legs, imperfect and unpracticed. But I'd take what I could get. "They know there's no escape for us."
It was true; the dragons had more than enough firepower to just vaporize the thousands of tons of stone around us. But this was all coordinated in a way: the titans strafing us from deeper inside the mountain and sending up fire bombs, the carefully thrown light lances, the testing and prodding use of aetheric spatial tears… all leading us like rats toward a water barrel. I was certain that Wren individually was more powerful than most of these asura, but their teamwork was infuriatingly precise.
"Get to the surface," I said, my voice melodic. Inversion resonated in my chest, my heartbeat strong despite my weakness otherwise. "We're close now… just need line of sight. Need the tree."
The titan spared me a single glance through his reedy, dark hair, his eyes uncertain. But the strength I imbued into my voice settled somewhere in his intent. "Fine, wonderkid. We're going up."
We stuttered to a halt in our horizontal trek, then lurched upward with enough force that I was surprised my stomach didn't reach my legs. The spears of guiding light that sought our blood shifted abruptly, the dragons refactoring their plans high above.
I did what little I could. Whenever an attack from the titans far below—molded of too-hot fire—tried to burn us alive, I siphoned it of its ambient fuel, instead taking it into my body. I couldn't weaken the dragon's pure mana attacks; those didn't use ambient mana at all. But when Wren Kain sent out his golems, I tried to reinforce his spellcraft, pushing the ambient mana toward them.
And with every second that passed, I learned a bit more about Integration. I understood more about my apotheosis and how the world flowed around my overwhelming gravity. How I was using the push and pull of intent and emotion, the same and different from how I'd always done.
We breached the surface like a great whale erupting from the deep, the surface tension of the stone hurling us upward.
And I could finally seeit. The massive, upside-down willow tree that dominated the great cavern not far away. Each hanging fruit of crystal and demented space was another prison cell, filled to the brim with acclorite and broken gods. The terrible stillness of the River Hosh, flowing unnaturally along the ceiling in defiance of the natural order, fed that great testament to Kezess Indrath's cruelty, the tree's stone-bound roots drinking every drop of gray water and feeding it into its fruits.
And the most important thing. Beyond the asura flitting about the massive cave, I could see it. Its lifeforce was gray-green, flowing along every weeping limb as they strained beneath the weight of their sins.
I swiveled in the darkness of the great cavern, sensing everything everywhere all at once with my weakened body. I swung my hand in a line, golden starfire surging through the caverns before crashing into a coordinated strike from the dragons. My arc of plasma wavered for a moment, before carving through the attacks. The three asura who'd launched the assault managed to avoid my strike, but one of them earned a searing cut along their plated arm that nearly relieved them of it.
And that was where it all went wrong.
Wren, who'd been turning toward me to say something, was nearly swallowed whole by a sudden burst of purple-tinged lightning that crackled and screamed. His body visibly convulsed as he tried to fight through it, and he was too slow in sending a small platoon of golems to intercept the attack. But even as he shrugged that off, wheezing and bleeding from his mouth, the attacks didn't stop coming.
The titan covered himself in a suit of earthen armor, rising higher and higher as he stood guard over Chul and me like a sentinel. But every incoming attack chipped away at it. Every time he sacrificed a golem or a spell to protect me from an attack I hadn't sensed, or Chul from the probing assaults from the side, the dragons slowly, methodically whittled us away.
But when the weapon finally streaked through—a rune-covered sword that beelined for the defenseless Chul, and Aurora's body—Wren's careful and systematic deflection of attacks failed. His intent dipped as he dove in front of it, his colossal, earthen form sheltering the young phoenix from the finely crafted assault.
I sensed as the blade sank deep into Wren's stomach, lodging there as it robbed him of his blood. His spelled armor crumbled abruptly as he lost focus on everything, tumbling back toward the ground limply. Chul—hardly able to move—watched in horror.
My eyes stayed fixed on the one who had thrown the blade: not at Chul, but at Aurora. At my mother's Vessel. At her only chance. Vajrakor, his eyes gleaming malevolently from the backline of the dragon squad. Even as he mourned the loss of one of his arms, the limb shriveled and sunken, he used his remaining one for malice.
I felt my hate rekindle, that oath I had sworn burning in the back of my mind. My fire-red hair brightened, the runes along my arms burning with my rage as I stared at that contemptuous asura.
His mouth twitched as we locked eyes, his intent evened out. No longer afraid as it should have been, sheltered as he was behind a dozen of his kind. Then he gave a single command, careful and even in its cadence.
"Erupt."
The titans who'd been following us from below completed a spell, one that had been building as I'd been forced to keep my attention split between a dozen warrior gods. The earth cracked, fissures opening beneath us that glowed with baleful light. Like splinters through Antarctic ice, they spread further and further, the stones not yet willing to relinquish us.
But this was not ice. Ice was cold and chilling, like the desires of the distant Beyond. On some level, it was apathetic. But the light that roared up from the chasms, like those terrible echoes of a distant Darvish city, they were angry. The grinding of chains and sulfuric stench of incoming Hell told me in no uncertain terms.
The Inferno beckoned.
I threw myself over Chul and Wren, wrapping them both in my arms. I gnashed my teeth as I forced more and more and more and more mana into my regalia: all I could afford to muster, even as I commanded the ambient mana to fuel me. A Shrouded Avatar grew from my body, strata and interlocking veins and arteries of heartfire stretching outward to support the growing expression of my inner soul.
A white-gold, avian form of telekinetic mana grew around me, every feather scrawled with ember-orange runes as its wings swept around us all. My avatar—barely ten feet tall with the mana I'd absorbed—shivered as it braced.
Hell breathed her fires, turning my entire world into heat. Just red and sweat and burns as I sheltered Aurora and Chul and Wren from Death's touch. Fires licked at the edges of my shrouded avatar, trying to slough meat from bone.
No, I thought, feeling my anger rise as I stared down at the delirious Wren, a sword still embedded in his stomach. As I stared at Lady Dawn's son, his arms wrapped around the body of his Mother. Of our Mother. No. I refuse to let myself burn.
I found the answer to what had truly changed within me upon Integration. It was not truly anything new, but another step forward on a path I'd always been taking. The mana reacted to my emotions, but there had always been a separation before: a distance between my commands and my deepest expressions of self.
But now, as I forced all my rage and hatred and refusal into the world, using every ounce of my seared soul, I realized that there was no more barrier between my intent and my mana control. They were truly one and the same, a union that had been long in the making.
And my avatar held. Even as it was bathed in fire and brimstone that could leave mountains nothing more than slag, I matched it with my meager reserves and inborn defiance. My emotions burned hotter than these flames.
When the titans' ritualistic spell finally died away, I could sense the intents of my foes with far more clarity as I found my form. They were surprised that we weren't piles of melted flesh. All around the cavern, molten stone flowed in a demented reflection of Burim's Breaking.
I held my charges within the safety of my burning wings, holding them close to my Shrouded Avatar's chest. Holding them as Aurora would have. I glared through the translucent veil of my avatar at the distant dragons, my emotions bolstering my control. Golden steam rose from my spirit, hissing lightly into the silence.
"You think that was enough to kill me, dragons?" I breathed, unwilling to show my exhaustion or how close I was to dropping. I laughed madly, my avatar's beak mirroring the action. "You don't even know what it is to die, and you think you can kill me?"
I saw hesitation for the first time from my enemies. The way my intent and surety flooded the ambient mana itself, carrying the underlying flavor of my will, served to unnerve these warrior gods. I was a concert of rage, more potent than anything I'd ever played with my violin.
Vajrakor stepped forward, his bloodied body rippling with obsidian scales from the backline. Behind him, the great willow tree flowed with unnatural heartfire, each limb of energy sustaining the spatial prisons. "It is in a lesser's nature to die, Burned One," he growled. "The end is inevitable. The more you struggle, the more painful it shall become. Did you ever think you could escape this place? This is one of the Indrath Clan's most secure prisons. There was never a light at the end of the tunnel, worm."
I grinned through bloodied teeth, half a grimace of disgust and half a snarl of rage. The feathers along my avatar fluttered. "Try," I dared. "Try."
My confidence resonated through the air, clear as any violin's strings. The song of my surety kept them hesitant, an unknown variable they'd never known before. And their biggest mistake? The majority of them kept far away, guarding the exits and tunnels to the sky. Not the tree.
As I kept my focus on the distant dragons, I engaged my regalia, ripping the sword free from Wren's stomach. He grunted in pain, coughing fitfully as red spread through his rags.
"Go underground," I conveyed with sound magic. "When the moment comes, cover."
Wren blinked, gritting his teeth through the pain. If I could spare my attention, I'd heal him, but this would have to do.
Vajrakor hesitated for a long few moments, bound as he was by his fear. I played with it, toyed with that deepest insecurity of his. That utter terror of the unknown, of what he couldn't understand and how small he was… What if I had a plan? What if I could rip him apart right now? What if my talons were already at his throat? What if? What if? What if?
"Lord Vajrakor," one of the dragons said uncertainly, a woman who looked only a little older than me with green scales and golden scars, "your orders?"
A few other dragons shared nervous glances, staring at their leader for direction. The questions burned within the Warden, ripped to the surface like a wound by my intent. But it didn't linger for long. The Warden was unwilling to show me the terror lingering behind his eyes. He snapped his fingers, flourishing his robe. "End him."
I felt Vajrakor's intent as he pressed it into the world, compelling the ambient aether. Sonar Pulse told me of the many strange weaves in space, my sound mana warping whenever it was subsumed by those pockets. And the dragons—each of them arrayed in battle armor and brimming with mana—conjured more spears of pure mana, compacted and hardened beyond mortal belief.
I realized between heartbeats what was about to happen. Surrounded by dots of spatial portals, with enemies charging their attacks—
The soldiers hurled their fury through the weaves, creating a crisscrossing network of light. Spears leapt from portal to portal to portal, rebounding half a dozen times before finally erupting towards me.
The barrage tore into my avatar, splintering feathers and sending reverberating shocks through my telekinetic protections. The air screamed with the wrath of a dozen warrior asura, each of them pacing themselves to wear me down.
I would hardly last a few seconds sitting still, weathering this barrage like a turtle. I trembled, my exhausted body and mind threatening to cave inward one more time. I shared a single look with the delirious Wren, then looked at the body of my mother, drawing strength from it.
Then my Shrouded Avatar opened its beak, the whirling vortex of an accel path manifesting there as it balefully glared at Vajrakor. I gripped the dragon's sword, taken from the titan's stomach, then let it align within my spirit's maw.
The dragon's blade accelerated at a speed leagues beyond that of sound, tearing through the atmosphere with a burning scream and ignoring every beam of pure mana in its way. Spear after spear after spear shattered in its wake as it blurred like Paris' arrow towards Achilles' heel.
Vajrakor must have thought himself clever. A spatial weave appeared before the dragon, catching the attack, before opening right near my back. My attack, instead of goring through the arrogant asura, instead opened a hole through my shrouded avatar, tearing its way through my gut, before sinking into the stone.
I heard Vajrakor laugh through my agony, audible somehow over the continuous scream of the pure mana spears. "See!" he yelled, victorious in his assumptions. "See, now—"
I grinned past the pain. Fool, doing exactly as his intent told me he would.
Then I fell backward into the second accel path I'd conjured right behind me. I blurred through it nearly faster than I could comprehend, shooting through the spatial weave Vajrakor had just created to gore me.
I emerged from the other end like a bolt from a godbow, carrying the momentum of a thousand trains, right in front of the still-laughing dragon. When he saw me, bathed in blood and rippling with fury, however, he didn't even have the time to scream.
The collision was like a bomb going off. My hand tore through Vajrakor's sternum as we hurtled backward, trailing blood and terror. I slammed him into the trunk of the massive willow tree, his bones shattering from the impact. The entire cavern shook as the bark of the prison tree splintered inward, the shockwave traveling through the world.
"You could have lived for fifty thousand years," I snarled, leaning over my prey as I kept him pinned to his final resting place, looking him in the eyes.
Then I tore out his mana core in a spray of crimson.
Every single portal winked out at once as Vajrakor died, his blood painted across the willow of this demented asylum. The once-coordinated assault of the prison guards instead became a sudden, maddened horrorfest as they had to dodge to avoid their fellows' assaults.
I clenched that mana core in my hands… So pure. So full. Another telekinetic spirit grew around my hands like talons, wrapping the core in a blanket of subsuming heat.
As an Integrated mage, my body was my core. The moment mana passed the boundaries of my flesh, it would start to be purified, far more efficiently than it ever had before. And my shrouded spirit technique, my Shrouded Avatar? What were they, if not extensions of my body?
I drank from Vajrakor's core like a vampire, looming like a broken scarecrow over his corpse. My decimated stomach finally started to heal over as I commanded my heartfire onward.
Some of the dragons belatedly began to realize that something was terribly, terribly wrong. One of them spun toward me, his golden eyes wild with fear as he stared at what used to be his Warden. I noted with some slight sorrow the sudden surge of grief in his chest as he howled, rushing toward me with a blade held high.
"Too late," I whispered, pressing my other hand to the willow tree at my back. My shrouded talons sank into the wood with deceptive ease, my heartfire interlacing with that of the great bark. "You're all too late."
And then I began to drink.
I did not know a tree could scream. I didn't know they could writhe or twist or shudder in horror, at least not until I ripped at the center of this terrible testament to the Indrath's malice. A shudder went through the entire cavern as the roots curled and uncurled, the branches whipping this way and that with their barely-balanced fruits. As I dominated its heartfire, I stripped it of every ounce of anchoring balance.
This tree… it was alive in a way I hadn't understood before this moment. As gray-green heartfire was morphed to the orange-purple of the dawn, filling my depleting reservoir, I wondered what exactly this tree was.
I didn't stop. Even as the young dragon reached me, bellowing in rage as he morphed into his full, scaled form, I didn't take my hand from my prey's terrible, barked skin. "You craven monster!" he howled, scaled lips and green horns reflecting the darkness. "He shall be avenged, creature!"
I did not give this dragon heed. Even as the other dozen dragons reoriented, horror playing through their intents more deeply than any sea.
A single spire of rock erupted from the earth, spearing the young, grief-ridden dragon through the chest. His rabid charge turned into a catastrophic tumble, legs flailing, blood spraying, wings crumpling.
Wren Kain IV, proclaimed "Worker of Wonders," hauled himself up weakly from the stone, Chul in tow. He coughed a mouthful of blood, but I felt a sort of vindictive pride from him at his successful sneak attack.
"Closest direct path to the sky," I said quickly as the dragons rushed back toward me, several of them abandoning the pretense of humanoid forms. Silver-purple fire licked at the edges of their maws, a frenzied sort of understanding finally gripping these jailors. "Now!"
Wren was too weak to say anything, but his eyes drifted toward a single section of the wall to the far left.
I didn't say anything more. My grip concentrated around Vajrakor's core as I siphoned it of more and more mana, building another Shrouded Avatar around us all, the head angled toward that distant wall. Heartfire and mana swirled within, keeping Wren, Chul, and Aurora suspended in safety.
Then the tree behind me started to finally go limp, its branches shriveling into nothingness as its fitful struggle relented. Hoshwater streamed along its bark like rotten tears. And then the fruits fell. The weaves of crystal and concentrated misery—each several meters large—struck the ground like anvils, crunching into the stone. Thunk. Thunk. Thunk. Thunk.
All at once, the asura—who'd been intent on rushing me once more and tearing out my throat—halted in their flight. None of them had felt fear quite like Vajrakor had, but now… As those hovering in the sky, flapping their wings and gazing down upon the coming doom, they felt fear. The ambient mana was rife with it as they recognized what I'd done, a smog that deadened my heart.
One of the dragons, a beautiful, lithe creature with emerald scales and golden scars, looked at me with an expression of horror. Her reptilian lips pulled backward in a surprisingly human expression, her feathered wings trembling.
"You've killed us all, lesser," she whispered as the cavern collapsed around us. "We shall all perish in this tomb."
Within the confines of my avatar, slowly being healed by my heartfire arts, Wren muttered something that sounded like horrified respect.
An accel path slowly formed in front of my shrouded avatar, corded of golden thread that would haul anything it met at speeds incomprehensible to the mortal man. Golden plasma burned along my wings, outlining me like a rising star. My guilt licked like a rising campfire along the edges of my intent, tongues of dying heat seeping through me.
"You will all die here," I replied with solemn confidence, sensing the distant sky beyond this stone. My domain. "But Kezess will never know I'm alive. He'll think we all perished here, too. And all it will take… is you."
Strange, how Death can make me so ready to exact it upon others.
The first fruit cracked. It reminded me of the sound of an egg hurled against a brick wall. The sound was nearly louder than anything I'd ever heard.
The emerald dragon howled, building mana at an absurd rate in her jaw, prepared alongside all the others to try and halt my escape. But as I allowed my avatar to fly upward, entering the slipstream of flight and burning with golden plasma, I knew it was too late.
The world passed by in a blur of molten stone. The lifeforce I'd stolen from the tree burned around me, banishing the attempted grip of the spatial spells that weaved through this mountain. It was so, so dark as I burned through the rock, searching for a distant light.
And when I emerged beneath the false warmth of the sky, leaving the mountain behind in all of my shrouded glory, I didn't stop. I continued to ascend through the atmosphere, though the sky and air and freedom. Within the confines of my avatar, Chul laughed so hard that tears flowed from the edges of his eyes. Wren vomited blood and bile from the whiplash.
Still, I kept going, putting more and more and more distance between me and the crystalline tomb, until I was above even the clouds themselves. Until I was miles above even them.
I hovered in the sky, flapping the wings of my shrouded avatar as the golden plasma coating me drifted away. I hovered there, feeling the ebb and flow of the ambient mana. So rich and pure. So much more vibrant than anywhere I'd ever experienced before.
But the sun that burned on high, smiling down at me… It was false. An empty light, crafted and molded in imitation of the real world, planted in the sky to give the dimension of Epheotus a mimicry of what they'd once known.
Am I angry at that false star, I wondered, hovering in the air currents, or do I pity it, for never being able to be what it should? A lie hung like light?
I turned in the sky, looking down at the ground. Mountains stretched as far as the eye could see, like the ridge of some great beast. A river a mile wide flowed unnaturally through the sky, gray and lifeless as it absorbed the light. The River Hosh coiled about the nondescript mountain I'd emerged from like a greedy leech, the memory-stealing waters seeking a new source of pain.
The mountain crumbled, collapsing in on itself for a moment. I felt the rippling effect through the ambient mana as those prison fruits finally burst from their shells.
Acclorite suddenly erupted from the mountain, spraying outward in uncountable directions like glistening shards of doom and destruction. The trembling boom of more than a dozen asuran cores feeding the crystals made my body shake, even from this high up. Earthquakes rumbled through the land far below, audible to my hyper-sensitive ears.
I stared down at the scene of my destruction solemnly, strangely contemplative as the wind brushed past my Avatar's beak. It made me think of how Burim broke. It made me think of the lavatide, a pure and unstoppable tide of hell that ripped apart any livelihood it met.
"Cold," Wren whistled, blinking through his exhaustion as he stared down at the unfolding destruction, the acclorite spreading like a cancer through the mountains. "Most of that crystal will go permanently dormant or just… flake away. But it served its purpose. Cold. But smart."
It took me a few moments to respond, the adrenaline of my battle still coursing through my veins. Vajrakor's core was still gripped in my shrouded fist, the incalculable amounts of mana still being absorbed into my Integrated physique. "There will be no trace of our survival," I said quietly. "No trace of any of it."
Chul, who'd been laughing for a time, finally sobered slightly. A haunting of horror and guilt slashed through his earlier joy from our ascent. "This is not just," he said after a moment. "So many still lived in those prisons, did they not? How could we leave them to become…"
"I told you I'd resolve myself to sin, Chul," I said after a beat of contemplation. In the subjective weeks we'd spent in that pocket dimension, I'd scoured the outside, recognizing that the lifeforce of the great tree was what kept it all in check. I'd understood quickly that if I simply took it all away,siphoned it like a parasite, then the entire equilibrium of the prison would collapse.
The prisoners reaped their vengeance at last. All it took was the death of one Nico to condemn a hundred more.
I felt so tired. Exhausted by what I'd done, and all I would still have to do. "I entered those prisons… Saw what was left of the prisoners. This was their vengeance, however empty it might feel."
My answer did not make the son of Dawn feel any lighter. His hands simply clutched tighter at our Mother's Vessel, as if she might awake and tell him something different. As if she might run her fingers through his hair and tell him sweet little lies.
Funny, how death changed your perspective on the world. How unliving made me so much more ready to take lives. Shouldn't it have been the opposite?
There were many, many fruits that hung from those trees. How many of them still held captured asura, each of them looking for hope like we had been? I'd searched the closest ones as far as my shade would allow, seeing only shattered minds and shattered crystal. But what if…
"We need to move," I said somberly, watching the acclorite gradually slow in its sudden gorging. Now, a mountain miles high of reflective crystal was all that remained of the once-solid earth. The false sun cast it in false light. "The Indraths will be here soon, and I have oaths to keep."