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Seris Vritra
My dark mana blade cut deep into my flesh.
The moment the saber of black energy bypassed my skin, seeking a vein deep in my hand, I could feel the instantaneous reaction of the infection coursing along my blood. Hot lifeblood seeped from the wound, the red intermingling with particles of discordant white.
Those white particles tried to leap onto my mana blade, like a pack of world lions sinking their fangs and claws into unsuspecting prey. It was in its very nature, after all, to try and rip and tear and wither anything of the basilisk.
Before that bloodborne energy could take root and travel along my blade and back to the hand that gripped it, I relinquished hold of the spell. The inverted decay, without anywhere to go but to continue to cannibalize my own blood, returned to its feast. The white-flecked red liquid dripped into a waiting beaker, little gray-white flames dancing on the rims as the blood boiled.
My lips settled into a thin line as I forcibly calmed my breathing. The infection had rooted itself deep in my heart, and every pulse sent little motes of inverted energy coursing along my veins, sundering every inch it passed.
I had learned to direct that flow. The ravenous energy tore at me from the inside, but it still followed patterns. It feasted on flesh and mana alike, but it gravitated towards areas of high concentration. By using mana rotation to constantly refuel my reserves and concentrate the energy on specific points of my body, I could focus on healing and mending parts of my physique with my healing factor, while directing the baleful, gnawing force somewhere else.
And once that energy was concentrated, it could be extracted.
As the infected blood continued to bubble and boil inside the glass vial, the mana within cannibalizing itself in a slow, methodical destruction, I gave myself a minute to recover. With every breath, the mana in the atmosphere slowly cycled in through my weary mana veins, and into my core.
I leaned on the experimental table, feeling ever-so-slightly dizzy from the constant state of exertion I had been under for these past few weeks. I ground my teeth, forcing my vision to stop spinning and focus. I was forged in Taegrin Caelum itself. I was made Scythe through trials more gruesome than this petty infection.
It would not see me broken.
When Toren returns, I will have to speak with him regarding a more permanent solution to housing this energy in my blood, I thought. Loath as I was to admit it, I couldn't continue like this forever. The wear and tear was starting to show, and every time I pushed back the inverted energy, it surged again, stronger and more ravenous than before. It was learning how best to counteract my restriction attempts.
I couldn't let it continue to adapt, but neither could I let it disperse. It was a monumental discovery. A deviant of mana that specifically targeted those of Vritra blood and cannibalized their arts? I could think of nothing more advantageous to my goals.
But if I wanted to purge myself of this infection, every ounce of this wondrous deviant would disappear forever, and I was uncertain if it could be found again without finding another basilisk horn and repeating the process to change it to something Inverted, and then ramming that into my heart again.
"I would rather avoid such experiences again as best as I can," I muttered to myself, tracing my eyes across the makeshift laboratory that was haphazardly set up in my castle rooms. "So here we are once more, trying to make history."
On the far end of a setup of heaters and conductive material, another beaker of my blood sat stagnant. This one was entirely drained of blood using the best techniques I could manage, then further isolated from the ambient mana.
Toren had described to me in detail what had facilitated the creation of Inversion. A basilisk's horn was flushed entirely of mana, before being used as a conduit for heartfire and mana both. That act of energy transfer was what changed the integral makeup of Brahmos' horn.
Now, I would see if I could do the same. While my stagnant, dead blood was not a perfect mirror of a basilisk's horn, in theory, it should act as an even better insulator for a transfer of lifeforce and potential purification. As Toren had shown when using that heartfire array technique of his, lifeforce lingered for a while in blood after it had been spilled. It was the most natural conductor of heartfire that there was.
So, what better substance to try and Invert?
I rolled my shoulders, withdrawing a few items from my dimension ring. A pair of thin, dark gloves slid over my pale hands, blocking them from introducing any potential variable into the experiment. Next, a pen settled into my hands, alongside a familiar notebook.
Toren's journal was rough beneath my fingers. The edges of the leather bindings were ever-so-slightly frayed and discolored, revealing their constant use, but it did not appear ragged.
No: this was the kind of wear and tear that came from love and dedication. It was a monumental achievement for something to be worn and faded in this way, all from careful consideration. Within my mind, I could almost imagine the quiet resolve of this journal as it endured endless days of writing and contemplation, all while remaining quiet about the secrets contained within. This small, unassuming notebook was bound by duty and leather both to its knowledge.
As I opened the cover, slowly flipping through the faded yellow pages, I briefly scanned over the pages within, noting Toren's neat, tidy script. One could learn much from someone based on how they wrote, and Toren was no exception. While each letter and stroke of his pen was deliberate, it was in an almost absent way. I could tell from a cursory inspection that whoever had written along these pages cared for organization and neatness, but not enough for perfection.
I continued to flip through the pages as psychological analyses ran in the back of my mind like separate processes, humming lightly to myself. My lips twitched upward as I finally reached the first empty page.
Toren had granted me this notebook to read, certainly, but it was mine now. He seemed confident that I would suffer some sort of 'existential crisis' when I got around to reading it, but that was as absurd as Kezess Indrath keeling over from a simple poison.
I felt a mote of that anticipatory high I got whenever I finished a puzzle coiling in my mind as I considered the smooth paper beneath my fingers. I was so, so close. So close to this. So close to putting together Agrona's plans, too. I was only a few pieces away, of that I was certain.
I thought with glimmering amusement as I drew the tip of my pen across the top of the page like a skater across the ice, mapping out intricate patterns that came together to form words. Attempt 1, using mana-vacuum techniques to attempt a transfer of lifeforce and inversion of subject matter.
I stepped away from the table, a flash of annoyance rising from the depths of my mana core from how roughshod this experimental setup was. It was hardly even a true experiment, with control groups and perfect erasure of outside variables. Limited as I was in this dwarven basement of a castle, I was performing the functional equivalent of throwing paint at a wall and hoping to make beautiful art.
My fingers tightened slightly around the pen in my hand as I neared the edge of the table, suppressing that annoyance. It rose from my basilisk blood: that dying, wheezing ember of bloodborne resistance slowly whittled away from the energy in my chest.
I cleared my mind of everything I could, banishing the darkness of my blood with vindictive ease. Weak as I was, that force of power was weakened moreso.
And as I stared at the two beakers of blood, both connected by a thin vacuum tube, I finally pressed a button. My infected blood slowly spiraled along the tube as it was opened, the pressure differential forcing it to fill in the sudden difference. Along and along it went, tracing its red-white line toward the second beaker.
I felt my heartbeat speed up unhelpfully as I watched that slow crawl. I knew the weakness continued to spread, but I ignored it, just this one time.
And when they met…
Nothing happened. My eyes flicked to the mana-measuring readouts as the two liquids mixed together, but there was no obvious change in either. In fact, the inverted decay only seemed to spread across it faster, searching for something that wasn't there.
I sighed in disappointment, carefully noting the measurements from the various monitoring instruments in my journal. The first experiment was never a success, but it never failed to get my hopes up. Especially now, after so long with Toren's light.
When I was done alliterating my observations, I tapped the pen against my chin. The shadows of the late afternoon kept me in the dark, where I could afford to think clearly and confidently.
There was a definite increase in the deterioration of the inverted deviant when it met my mana-vacuumed blood, I thought analytically. But no direct change to the blood, either. If I were in better circumstances, I'd be able to test it across multiple control groups. Is it the blood that causes this, or the lack of mana? Some combination of both?
"Questions, questions, questions," I sighed to myself, shaking my head. I snapped my journal closed. "But yet, it feels as if I am missing something."
That intuition of mine lingered at the back of my skull, whispering echoes of my suspicions. It whispered that all the time, just like when Toren had told me of how Agrona had presented himself to Arthur as if he were a blood-mad tyrant intent on destruction for destruction's sake. It had told me that I was missing some crucial piece, some way to interpret it all.
And now, that voice told me that I was going about this experiment from the wrong angle, too. Internally, I went back over every bit of knowledge I knew about Inversion, heartfire, and Toren's strange lifeforce arts.
And I caught on something. Resonant Flow.
"A primer," I said suddenly, a genuine smile stretching across my face. That was what I was missing. When Toren had demonstrated his use of Circe Milview's altered blood array a couple of months back, he had used a flash of his lifeforce like a sort of igniting spark. Before then, the spots of blood on the sands had lain dormant. Afterward, each point had leaped into action as if preprogrammed, carrying ambient mana and hearfire in a glowing pathway.
That was the perspective I'd been missing. I viewed the inverted deviant as active, but that might not necessarily be the case. Its flavor of dormancy could be a separate expression entirely from what I expected of mana derivatives.
So I needed a spark of some sort, then, to set off the detonation. That might then propagate into true change for the affected material.
I looked up from my notebook, smiling softly at the detailed map of Dicathen hanging over my table. Progress at last. With so many weeks of stagnation, it felt wondrous to make a discovery again. With every answer came just as many questions, and all those questions…
They fueled everything even more, like fuel in a warm fire. That was something Toren didn't yet understand about me. He thought that unanswerable questions would see me languish and need wine, of all things. But those endless questions only meant there was more to peel apart and understand about the universe.
I breathed in the scent of stale, dead blood, long-forgotten dust, the aroma of solid earth, and everything else in this cavern. For this moment, I ignored the inverted deviant that had spread once again due to my accelerated heartbeat. I just allowed myself to bask in this small victory.
And that was when the entire room erupted into chaos. A hair-thin slice of wind surged toward me nearly faster than I could blink, the edge of the blade ready to sever my neck. At the same time, mist seeped in from every single crack in the walls and break in the foundation like grasping tendrils of the unknown.
I barely managed to pull my head back from the decapitating slice. Instead of relieving my head from my shoulders, the attack carved through my experimental table, before erupting into a miniature tornado of spiraling wind that pulled me toward it. My silver hair whipped about my head like threads ripped free from a perfect loom, each of them sinking closer and closer to destruction.
Undaunted, I retaliated by activating one of my regalias, Breath of the Night. Dark motes of energy surged from my hands like mist, sinking into the growing tornado and severing its lifeline of mana. Where before the attempted assassination spell had been a roaring, rising tempest, now it disappeared with barely a puff of air.
I whirled, my mana core squeezing painfully in my chest, and lashed out into the pervading mist with a conjured dark mana blade. I felt it draw across something for a split instant, before it became less than shadow as it skirted away.
A smile quirked up the edges of my lips as my eyes trailed lazily through the illusory fog. "Lance Phantasm," I said easily. "I am pleased to make your acquaintance. I have been waiting quite some time for the chance to speak with you."
I didn't show an ounce of the weakness I felt in my body as I kept my dark mana blade conjured. A thin trickle of hot, white-flecked blood trailed along my throat. I hadn't evaded as perfectly as I had wanted to.
I'm weakened even more severely than I thought, I noted warily as I felt that crimson tear slowly trail its way down to my dress. That attack would never have come close to me if I were truly able.
"It has been a long, long time since I've had the opportunity to dance with another woman," a sultry, alluring voice said from all sides. Each syllable was like a breath of the fog itself. "But I'll admit… I was expecting more, Scythe. If my first attack nearly took off your head, I wonder what else I'll take from you next?"
I sighed, unamused by the faux seductive attitude. I could respect how it could unbalance an enemy, but I was not in the mood for games. Time was of the essence.
"Regardless of your intent to 'dance,' I intend to speak," I said dismissively, "and being immersed in a crippling cloud is no way to talk. Let's see each other as we are."
As if on cue, several artifacts—each preplaced at corners of the room—surged to life with a hum of magic. Dark particles of mist seeped from them like shadows in a graveyard, and wherever those motes of energy touched, they stole the life of the mist spell around me.
If I were at my full power, a paltry wave of the hand would have allowed me to dismantle the domain of fog that swirled about me, but I had to make do with my limitations. The only satisfaction I took from this was that I had perfectly predicted the spell that would be used to try and cloud my senses and programmed the artifacts accordingly.
As if a curtain were being violently ripped from my sight, the makeup of Aya Grephin's domain spell faltered and cracked, before dispersing utterly. The elven Lance was already moving, however, revealed to the air and stripped of her protections as she was.
She lunged for my throat once more, sleek with grace and wind as her hair whipped about her. Our eyes met as she blurred across the room. Determined and focused like a knife's edge, she was already conjuring a blade of wind in her hand as she prepared for a final blow. I stood solemnly, my hands crossed in front of me.
"Cylrit," I said simply, "keep her at a distance fit for respectable conversation."
The Lance veered off course abruptly, the wind mana swirling around her hand gravitating toward the far wall. Aya's coal-black eyes widened behind her curtain of dark hair as she jerked away from her assault, instead nearly slamming into the stone.
Cylrit—who now entered the cramped room at last—deactivated the gravitational effects of his dark sword. Aya froze like a cornered cat as the Victorious Black Tower marched to me with solemn poise, silent as a tomb and his expression placid.
I could sense her focusing on him, trying to detect his mana signature. She would fail, of course. I'd instructed my Retainer to wear my cloaking artifact for the next few days exactly to lure her in. She thought me alone and vulnerable without Toren, and only now did she start to recognize how thoroughly I had prepared for her arrival. With Toren needling her every day, she was hyper-aware of the opportunity his absence would provide in completing her mission.
It was unfortunate for her that I was, too.
"Erase these strands of mana," I said to my ever-present Retainer, raising my arm to indicate the nearly indetectable hairline strands of energy that sank into the thin cluster points of my mana veins. "I would rather not have the breath stolen from my lungs. I need it to speak, after all."
Toren had informed me of this secret technique of Lance Phantasm's, but seeing and sensing its work was something else. I would have to investigate the effects of hijacking those cluster points another time, though.
Cylrit nodded. "As you wish, Master Seris." Without another word, he changed the frequency of his greatsword, before swiping them through the lingering mana strands that she had implanted in our first clash.
I watched the energy as it was swiftly absorbed into Cylrit's sword, my eyes narrowed. When he was done, he bowed sharply, before stepping to my side.
I shook my head absently, before looking at the Lance where she crouched at the far end of the room. She looked like a cross between a bow under tension and a waiting panther, all predatory grace and straining muscles. Her dark eyes glinted as she carefully weighed her current situation.
"Now that those irritating barriers are out of the way, I think it's time we had a reasonable discussion," I said, turning up my chin slightly as I observed the waiting Lance. "Don't you think so, Lance Phantasm?"
"Oh, I've always been happy to talk," she countered, mist swirling about her as her aura wavered on the edge of perception. "Simply leave and abandon this front, Scythe Seris, and I'll allow you to live."
I turned my head slightly, orienting on an empty portion of the room as I ignored the image of the Lance. "I think you'll appreciate everything I have to say. Don't be so hasty in your attempt to dismiss me. After all, you might just get vengeance on the ones who enslaved you all those years ago."
The illusory image at the far edge of the room evaporated into mist, and the Lance's control of her mana faltered. Her sudden anger hit me as a wave of palpable force rushed toward me. The elf appeared precisely where I had predicted. She had to visibly restrain herself from lunging at me, her hair flaring about her as her pupils contracted to pinpricks. Cylrit shifted, readying his sword to defend me should the worst come to pass.
"Just like you Alacryans, to taunt and mock when you're close to death," she sneered, her nostrils flaring with visible anger. "I'll make your end slow, Seris Vritra."
I held up a warding hand. "Perhaps I was too blunt in my words, Aya Grephin," I said in a measured tone. "But I did not intend to taunt you. Far from it: I offer a true opportunity. One that might offer you some closure in more ways than one."
I could see the gears in the Lance's head turning. She was no fool, nor a petty seductress. "That's what you say, always trying to weasel your way out of a trap."
I pointedly swept my gaze across the entire room, including my destroyed table where my alchemical ingredients sizzled. "In case you have not realized, Lance Phantasm, the only thing that has not gone according to my designs is the destruction of my experiment table." I shot it a disappointed glance. "I would have rather avoided that. I'll have to spend weeks restocking ingredients.
"Regardless," I continued, waving a dismissive hand, "I do my research on every opponent I face before I engage them. It's a hallmark of warfare, after all. These sorts of things are won and lost on simple psychology. Who is more likely to strike first, what tactics they might engage… Knowing my opponent means I know my avenues to victory. And considering I was expecting a late-night rendezvous from you, I did my research."
"You love to hear yourself talk, Vritra," Aya hissed. I could almost imagine her as a black cat, all her hair standing on end. But she didn't attack or take a step forward. What I had alluded to was too tantalizing a prize, and we both knew it.
"It was difficult to unearth your past, Aya. You hid it well behind countless illusions and mists. All I could discover in the end was that you entered the service of the Eraliths after being freed from slavery somewhere on the outskirts of Sapin in the lingering aftermath of the last war with the human country; something that is kept secret even among your highest echelons." I inspected my nails, drawing out the silence like a musician holding a note. "Truthfully, I didn't make the necessary connection until a few weeks ago."
In truth, I'd taken a gamble on the possible origins for Aya Grephin based on her documented tendency to psychologically torture her opponents before killing them. It was something I had seen in Viessa, too; enough for me to form a hypothesis. And it had borne the most luscious fruit.
Aya glared at me with raw, condensed hatred from the side of the room. "You're right, Scythe. I don't know who kept me prisoner decades ago. So why should you know any better? I suppose you're going to reveal that it was the Glayders all along, hmm? Or maybe the Eraliths. Or some other method that would fracture the Triunion toward your petty ends even further? I know your type, Scythe. You'll pit me against—"
"House Wykes," I said simply, cutting through her building rant like my title's namesake through flesh. "Specifically, Otis Vayhur Wykes. Decades ago, he was the one who oversaw your imprisonment from the shadows."
It seemed that for all of Phantasm's carefully crafted words, this was not what she'd been expecting. She fell into silence, her brow furrowing as she caught on to this information.
I used the intervening silence to conjure a stack of prepared paper in my hands. On it were carefully documented instances of my past conversations with Otis Wykes, proving beyond a reasonable doubt that he was a traitor to Dicathen. But within those correspondences, he had provided some interesting details that confirmed my own suspicions.
Truthfully, it appeared that even Otis was unaware of the true identity of Lance Phantasm as one of his slaves who had just barely escaped his detestable breeding programs. I deliberately restrained my lips from curling up at the edges in disgust.
A petty man who thinks himself a Sovereign, with all the arrogance and apathy they carry, I thought with distaste. But he's a pale shadow of the Vritra. All the cruelty and none of the power to back it up.
I proffered the stack of papers out to the hesitant Lance, as an administrator might offhand a simple decree. Each paper hung like a waiting knife, each sheet of white poised to draw red blood from someone distant.
"Within are some correspondences I've had with the aforementioned head of House Wykes," I said leisurely, still offering the papers to the open air. "I think you would find the statements on pages eight, ten, and thirteen quite meaningful." I paused. "They aren't numbered, sadly. You'll have to find your way there yourself."
Hesitantly, like a brush of ribbons in an autumn breeze, a wind appeared from nowhere, drawing the pages from my hands.
The stack drifted about lazily on currents, each individual page separating as the wind carted them about the room and toward the waiting Lance. They arrived in sequence, allowing the elven assassin to scan over them in order.
And with every page that landed, her expression became more grim, her smooth features marred by more and more creases and frown marks. At my side, Cylrit was silent as a stone. The sound of shuffling, creasing paper grew louder with every moment.
When she was done looking it over, her head snapped up to look at me. "Why?" she hissed, her tight grip wrinkling the pages. "Why give this to me? What game are you playing?"
I shrugged loosely, allowing my dress to float about me in the subtle wind currents. "An apt description. I am playing a game with you, Aya Grephin," I replied with utmost sincerity. I tilted my head, inspecting the Lance and her poised stance. "But you're mistaken if you think I'm the only one playing you. King Arthur sent you here to defend across from me for a reason. He's a smart man, that reincarnated King. He knew that I'd have a message for you when you made your play. He'll be waiting for your return and that information."
The Wykes were the last holdout against Arthur's centralized power. Without them, his control would be truly absolute. It was my final gift to a worthy opponent before the hammer crushed him to the anvil.
When he is finally conquered, I will have to see that scepter of his stolen before Cadell or someone else can get their mitts on it, I thought. If I could reverse engineer a method to create white core mages at will and bind them, too…
Thoughts for later.
"You're avoiding the question," Aya accused, eyes narrowed. "That's what you've always been, smoke and mirrors. But don't think you can hide the hatred in your eyes. I see it with every moment you speak of them."
The Lance slowly forced a smile along her lips as she drew the papers into a dimensional storage. "You like to act so unaffected, don't you?" she purred, her mannerisms returning in tune with her confidence. "So free of emotion. Like a machine. But you… hate them."
The elven woman slid a bit closer, standing tall as Cylrit moved imperiously between us. "That's what Spellsong meant, wasn't it? This war isn't as simple as we lessers think it is. When you talked about the Wykes, I could feel that hatred of yours."
The words came out like an irritating ooze along my skull. Momentarily, I felt the spread of the inverted deviant across my physique again, that constant, unending pain of my body eating itself alive pushing against my composure. It had made my masks sloppier than was acceptable. My ability to keep my emotions contained cratered beneath the compounding weight of everything on my slim shoulders.
She expects you to lash out, I reasoned, forcing my body to remain cool and calm. She thinks she has found a weakness. Denial will only show her that she has hit her mark.
I smiled at the Lance as she finally reached me, standing barely a few feet away. "Do you know what it means to hate, Lance Aya?" I asked, taking the chance to look her up and down. Her uniform was clean and spotless, a blazing white against the darkness of the room. "I think you do. You felt it years ago in those pits, wasting away under the cruel touch of masters whose faces you could never know and never fight."
I stepped past Cylrit, feeling something hot kindle in my chest in a rising acknowledgment of that emotion. I'd felt so, so much these past few months. Joy. Excitement. Despair. Love. Fulfillment. Hope.
But never once had I so thoroughly embraced hatred. "You might find that we are alike in a few ways, Phantasm," I said, my expression cool and placid. But I knew it showed behind my eyes, like two little embers of black soulfire that would consume everything fed into their decaying wake.
Aya snorted in disdain, turning on her heels. "You claim that," she snapped, moving gracefully toward the exit, her hips swaying. "But you move like them. You talk like them. You use like them."
She looked over her shoulder, her eyes a dim mirror of mine. "When a tool has lost its use to you, you cast it aside, just like a master does with their slave. You're pretending to be something different, Seris Vritra, but inside, you care just as little for the people of this continent as Otis Vayhur Wykes. That's why we've seen so much pointless death."
I felt that tempest flare in my eyes again. My smile became just an inch more brittle as inverted pain seared through every cell in my body, sweat beading along my brow. "I do not kill needlessly, Lance Phantasm," I said, cursing internally on the Vritra's horns that my voice sounded strained. "When I have taken the lives of your people, it has never been without a point."
Aya's eyes glimmered. "Like all those massacres in Dicathen, then?" she shot back. "That certainly had a point beyond needless violence. I suppose you're going to tell me it was just to spark fear and terror as war tactics, then? When I saw my countrymen butchered, you'll say it was all for a reason?"
"In case your information is lacking, let me explain something to you," I said, dismissing Aya Grephin's misplaced anger. "It was not I who perpetuated those massacres, but Viessa Vritra. You certainly know that. If you're looking for some sort of spark…"
My voice trailed off as my tongue caught on the words of those final syllables, the sound of my voice drifting into the air before it slowly died. That little voice in the back of my head screamed. It screamed at me, pounding a message through the pain of my body tearing itself apart.
Looking for a spark. Spark. Spark.
I began to tremble. I had been restraining the act for so long, but as I diverted all my focus to my mind, I began to shake with both rising fear and pain. The puzzle pieces fell neatly into place all along my mind as a dreadful, terrible picture wrought itself like a burning brand across my mind.
Aya's expression hardened as she watched me slowly break down, a sneer pulling at the edges of her lips. Cylrit moved to try and support me, his mouth forming words. I couldn't hear them. The world's sound fell away as the only thing I became aware of was my mind.
I turned around numbly, stumbling as I trudged back toward the far wall. I nearly tripped on my own feet, but Cylrit was there to catch my arm and support me. He turned a hard glance back over my shoulder at the poised Lance, fearful that she might try her luck, but my stumbling movement through the shattered stone debris of my table and mixing concoctions of broken alchemical ingredients forced him to move.
Agrona presented a mask to Arthur, I thought, pulling one blackened piece of this horrible puzzle into place in my head. He pretended to enjoy the violence and the bloodshed. He impressed upon his unsuspecting prey that his only motive was violence. Which meant it could not have been violence. The massacres were the point, in and of themselves.
But they couldn't be. Agrona would never kill needlessly, because I would never kill needlessly. Every body I left in my wake was because they had exhausted their use to me, just as Aya had accused.
Trembling, I pulled another piece of this grim picture together, the sensation of it like rot in my head. Toren said that the death lingered in Burim. After the breaking, there were so many dead—so much blood spilled—that it stained the aether around it, lingering like a funeral shroud.
I reached the far wall with Cylrit's worried assistance, his plated arm tense and afraid against mine. A detailed map of Dicathen presented itself innocently to the world, hung less like a painting and more like a doomed man. I touched my fingers to my throat where the cut Aya had given me leaked white-tinted blood and drew it away. I recalled a location from memory, one of dozens that had been burned into my memory every time Viessa had moved and my spies had reported another massive death toll.
Toren's array, connecting points of lingering lifeforce. As he let the spark fly with his lifeforce, each splash of blood sang to life, carrying the ambient mana with it. I had theorized immediately upon witnessing it that it could be used as something other than just a simple beacon.
I pressed my fingers to the point on the map. A few miles south of Ekshire City. Then another. South of the Valdenbreak Flow. North of Mirror Lake. Northeast of Kalberk. Along the northernmost branch of the Middle Fork. North of Xyrus City, along the Grand Mountains. Along the Eastern Fork. East of Greengate.
My vision blurred from pain as I struggled to draw each point on the map. Each time I drew a connection, my heart beat harder. Agony rippled through my small form, uncontrolled and uncontested by my distraction.
There were more places where people had died. More locations of destruction and sorrowful loss. But as I narrowed down the places where violent, raging massacres had struck with the force of a passing hurricane, I found a pattern emerging.
I heaved for breath as I finished, staring down as sweat beaded along my skin. My pulse pounded in my ears. I fumbled for a moment, withdrawing a single item from my dimension ring. I needed to confirm it. I needed to be absolutely sure.
The tracking device settled into my palm, the exact device that displayed a live feed of the last places Viessa's tempus warp had been used. A tiny, minuscule map of Dicathen projected itself over the top of the artifact. It wasn't detailed, like the scaled versions of this technology. It was rough, makeshift, and altogether disappointing as a depiction.
But the blinking red dot displaying the last location Viessa had used her tempus warp was clear as day.
"Sovereign's blood," Cylrit cursed. He didn't tremble like I did as he stared at the map, but I could feel him tensing. His eyes were wide, no doubt putting it together slowly, too. "It… It cannot be."
"What?!" Aya snapped behind us, unnerved as she stared at the map with a haunted expression. "What is happening?"
I carefully pulled away the tracking artifact that all but confirmed my suspicions. I pulled more mana in from the atmosphere, cycling it through my twinging white core. I could feel my core purifying slightly, the sensation so much more apparent amidst the burning pain for a reason I couldn't understand.
I slowly pulled myself back together, methodically suppressing the rampant deviant mana ravaging my body again. Bit by bit, I hauled myself from the brink of death, feeling my core drain at an exceptional rate. Soulfire washed over my wounds as it forced the inverted deviant back, my force of will barely strong enough to overcome it all.
I had come closer than ever before to death, then. And I knew, deep in my soul, that if the infection in my heart ever gained that sort of ground on me again, I would not be able to suppress it.
"Agrona does not kill needlessly," I whispered, sagging against Cylrit as I struggled not to pass out. "It's always for a purpose, Aya Grephin."
I closed my eyes, resisting the urge to slip into slumber. By the Sovereigns, I hadn't slept in days, not since my last rendezvous in the sky with Toren and the time after. I just wanted to collapse into the nearby bed and rest for an age.
But if I fell asleep now… Then I would never wake up. The infection in my nexus waited. It waited for the next time I let it get too far, like a serpent in the grass. It waited for the moment I would take my eyes off of it.
Aya's eyes slowly traced the drawing on the map, her expression becoming paler with each and every passing second. "You mean—"
"He was exceptionally clever," I muttered. "Smokescreens everywhere. Little variations in death count and other miscellaneous assaults muddied the pattern. But factor those out… and it all aligns. Least deaths at the tail, propagating to the most concentrated ones near the head…"
A diagram of a serpent wrapped around the north of Sapin, arching down with a massacre for every vertebrae. The altered array points wound and coiled outward, toward one single point between two fanged jaws: Xyrus City. Xyrus City, bastion of the ancient mages. Xyrus City, floating under an aetheric spell.
I didn't understand what Agrona was going to do. Perhaps something about the city, or the spatium spell that kept it aloft, would serve as some focal point of this array, or perhaps none of that mattered. But no matter what the truth was, this… this was too big for something only relating to the lesser's war. It was too monumental, too grandiose and preplanned. Which meant it wasn't for the lesser's war.
Agrona was preparing to do something that would strike at Epheotus. And if Agrona were to strike at the land of the gods themselves, I wouldn't be ready. I wouldn't be able to shelter those under my protection or see through any of the plans I'd nurtured for decades. I'd counted on a true push from Dicathen to Epheotus to take decades more, not whatever this was.
And Viessa was there right now, at the center of it all, no doubt with Cadell. That meant there was no time. I clumsily fumbled inside my dimension ring, pulling at another item: my communication artifact.
The spherical device fell into my hands with barely any weight, but it felt heavier than the stars themselves.
I couldn't make it to that place in time. I was weak, and my only tempus warp was gone. In Toren's hands.
Toren could stop whatever was coming. He was powerful, monstrously so.
But is he more powerful than Cadell? I asked myself woozily. Vritra's horns, this could be exactly what Agrona wants me to do. To send Toren into the lion's den. Agrona has been watching Toren for some time now. What if he's needed somehow to complete this?
I wasn't even given the time I needed to think. I was never given the time I needed to think. Because at that moment—as if punctuated by Fate itself—I felt the auras descend.
Aya shook this time. She had portrayed an aura of anger or predatory bloodlust throughout all of our conversation, but as the wave of King's Force from countless gods washed over her—each of them restraining their catastrophic power—she shook in a reflection of what I had displayed mere moments before.
Instead of trembling like some sort of prey animal, Cylrit froze. Like a wogart in the face of a rokavid, his heart nearly stopped beating on the spot as they all coalesced from the heavens above.
I had found that there are different kinds of fear. Pure, mind-numbing terror, where one cannot get the chance to think or comprehend what is coming to them, is the most merciful. It is the prey's fear as it runs from an unknown predator. It is horrific and primal, the sort of sensation that makes one cower in the face of the dark.
The fear that settled into my bones was not so merciful. It would have been kinder if I did not sense the auras of the hundreds of asura that hung in the sky like a guillotine's blade waiting to drop. It would have been comforting, in a way, if I did not comprehend precisely what made the world freeze with the compounding weight of those restrained presences.
An asuran army waited beyond the castle walls.