NOVEL NEXT 204 - No Delay
Mythic Destiny [Fleshwarper] chosen
The duration and cost of your [Necromantic Alchemy] rituals have been reduced by [75%]
Your Maximum Thrall Capacity has been reduced by [50%]
As soon as Lieze willed it, her choice was set in stone. All at once, she could feel some intangible force altering her fundamental knowledge of necromancy. Chants, somatic gestures, and newfound shortcuts for stitching flesh flooded her brain to capacity - entire decades of study absorbed in an instant. Simultaneously, what was once familiar to her became alien and indecipherable. No longer could she recall the transient methods by which so many thralls were shackled under her command.
One boon in exchange for another. Time was of the essence, and she had no intention of wasting hours reinforcing a handful of thralls when she could be empowering her entire army instead. Akzhem would demand subtlety where voracious numbers had succeeded before. Lieze wouldn’t be a slave to a single tactic, especially not when she was one victory away from securing her far fetched dream.
With Baccharum and Drayya gone, she was left to pursue her own devices. What few tasks remained on her dwindling checklist could be pounded out in a few hours, which would leave plenty of time in the coming days for her to focus on preparing for the upcoming journey.
“...Right. It’s time to get that grimoire out of the way.” She reached into her Bag of Holding and yanked out the tome by its rounded, pale-leather binding. A cursory flip through its pages revealed the kind of exhaustive research expected from a leader of the Order, dotted with diagrams and spellcraft and mind-numbing theory on the secrets of the universe.
..me…
Her eyes glazed over a sentence, distracted for a split instant.
co.. .. ..s…
She raised her head, “...What is that?”
A voice - no, voices - echoing from the distant nothingness. She was alone in the fortress then, plagued by what must have seemed like the phantoms of her enemies. But the more she lingered, the clearer they became, and their words were not those of damnation, but invitation.
Come…
Come to us…
She passed through the doorway of the dining room and peered down the hall, whispers deepening all the while. As if scouting out a warm meal, she followed the trail bewitched with a certain longing, arriving not long after at the quietest knoll of the fortress uncursed by light, windowless, and choked with shadows.
A single grate was affixed to the floor there, and at first glance, Lieze took it to be a prison of some sort - a convenient hole to throw dismayed criminals where they could be safely ignored for the rest of time. She took one step closer and noticed the ladder descending into the hatch, from which the scattered voices beckoned.
There could not have been a worse decision than to follow disembodied whispers into a pitch-black shaft, but Lieze suffered from a practised, tiresome love affair with bad decisions. She was surprised by her own bull-headed nature, having arrived at either a much-too-deep understanding of the world, or a childish underestimation of the horrors left unexplored by her single-minded devotion to necromancy.
Either way, the grate beckoned. She peeled the lattice of rusted iron from its housing and lowered herself down the ladder, bumping the back of her head against the stone hatch more times than she was comfortable admitting. When her feet found solid ground, there was nothing to be seen but a dying light in the distance flooding the Dwarf-sized corridor with unearthly violet.
Beyond, she found neither answers nor sense. A scarred ridge of stone, only just wide enough for both feet, extended and rose towards a standing pillar in the cavern’s centre. She surmised from its deliberate placement that it was a place of great importance to someone. Strangely, as she moved forward, the voices hushed and faded into the dark. The silence, all of a sudden, was so thick that it grew heavy like water in Lieze’s eardrums.
What dire abstraction of faith had she happened upon in the depths of Alberich’s fortress? The void beneath, she thought, had to be the nest of an abomination too vile for words, liable to leap out from the dark and swallow her whole. But upon the plinth, she awaited that terrible fate only to be greeted with the same ear-scraping silence.
As if to answer her pleas for a sign, smoke poured out from the cavern’s hidden alcoves. She watched the violet plumes descending like poisonous smoke into the void, pinching her nose to deaden the acrid smell and wondering if she still had the chance to turn around and pretend as if none of what she was seeing was real.
One Thousand and One Orphans Wagered,
One Thousand and One Eyes Won,
From the Beginning, to the End, to the In-Between,
These Childlike Eyes Perceive All That Was, and All That Will Be.
Make the Sacrifice.
The voices were one, conjoined to form the will of a single entity. Lieze was reminded of her troublesome run-in with the Blackbriar on her long journey into the realm of sleep. But whoever’s voice was responsible for that demand was as real as real could be.
“...What?” She suppressed a sigh, “Enough riddles for once, please. I’d need more than two hands to count the number of times I’ve left a conversation with more questions than answers over the past few months.”
A Sacrifice,
of blood.
“Okay.” She bobbed her head, “No, I’m not doing that.”
Silence.
Let blood be your cosmic mirror,
perceive truth in your suffering,
or begone.
“Hah…” Lieze sighed again and reached for her waist, “Why is it always blood…? My wrist is going to look like a pie crust by the time all of this is over…”
The slither of a dagger against her flesh had become mundane. She recalled a time when the sight of a blade sharp enough to pare skin inspired fear in her core. Ever since, she only became more disconnected from her body as the years went on, to the point where - having been bruised and battered by her constant self-abuse - she now wondered why her health was ever a concern to begin with.
Unsure of where to place her ‘sacrifice’, she allowed the blood to drip from her wrist into the maw of darkness, listening closely for a distant splatter only to be rewarded with silence. The presence within those censer-laden shelves seemed to stir at her offering. She couldn’t be certain of who - or what - she was appeasing, but if it wanted her dead, she assumed it would have already killed her.
“Who are you?” The most boring question of all escaped from her lips.
“We are the eyeless seers of a bygone age.” The voice was terrifyingly close then. Lieze swore she could feel an icy breath against her neck, “We are the faraway prophets, the acolytes of formless Ur. We lived before the beginning, and we shall live after the end - after quiet oblivion stalks the cosmos and the spark of distant fate stirs within the void.”
“Ur… Sigmund mentioned that word as well.” She recalled, “What is it? A God?”
“Ur is the unconditional force which propels reality. It is chaos, order, life, and death. Within Ur, every facet of creation mingles to birth the virtues and sins of the universe. Ur is everything. Ur is nothing. In the absence of Ur, there is a poignant nothingness expressed by concepts beyond rational explanation - beyond the whims of mortals and immortals.”
Beyond the crisis of Lieze’s faith, there existed something worth worshipping after all. Something that didn’t have the world’s obedient faith in mind. A true God, devoid of thought and action, playing the blind observer whose only interest rests within perpetuating the phenomenon of reality.
“...How many layers of existentialism do I have to peel away before ‘destroying life’ becomes a reasonable goal?” Lieze wondered, “Things were so simple when I was only interested in murdering as many people as possible. Now I’m back to my uncertainty about whether or not any of this is actually worth the trouble.”
“Cessation of body, mind, and soul resides within the slumbering entity you seek.” The seers replied, “Trapped in a game of wits between creatures beyond mortal dimensions, your blessing surpasses any other. One will imposed upon another. A singular hope stretching towards the heavens where the dying hours of spiritual beasts tick down to their shared destruction.”
“Wow.” Lieze wasn’t sure what else to say, “Thank you for being straight with me. You have no idea how refreshing this is. All I’ve ever wanted from day one was for someone or something to reveal fragments of the truth without hiding them in riddles for once.”
The Light-in-Chains was her answer. All that remained was to guarantee that its power would belong exclusively to her when the time came to awaken it.
She stepped forward, “If I asked what the Light-in-Chains is, are you going to give me an explanation that’s even half as simple to understand?”
“Usurper. Betrayer. Murderer.” Those three terms lingered like mist in the air, “When once there were many, now there are few. Those who remain insist upon the world’s strictness and devotion, and that which is responsible for their plight resides within a prison of its own design. From its heavenly carapace, the grand jewels of the chosen were carved and infused. Now those fragments seek to become whole again in the place where fury gathers in the air like the fire of a dying star.”
“I see… so my quest is to unleash the wrath of some divine caged beast upon the Gods.” Lieze closed her eyes, “My dream - the extinction of all life, both physical and spiritual - will just be a side effect of its rampage across reality. It almost sounds a little too good to be true.”
“Those who would see their dreams made reality are the most ambitious of all.” The voices bounced in her skull, “In the distant north, where the first withering stages of consciousness blossomed upon your world, the last among those chosen awaits your intervention.”
“Akzhem.” She said, “Fitting that my final crusade will take me straight into the dark. I don’t suppose you’d be willing to reveal exactly who the final Scion is?”
“All will be answered in time.”
“I didn’t think so.” Lieze turned on her heels, “Whatever you are, you’ve been very helpful. I can now recount at least one encounter with the divine when their guidance actually helped me.”
“You will not struggle against Ur as you struggle against the wardens of your own world?”
“If you can state with absolute certainty that it’s possible for a mortal like me to take a stand against God itself, then I’d gladly oppose Ur.” She replied, “Otherwise, I’ll keep to what I can defeat. It doesn’t sound like Ur particularly cares whether or not life is extinguished, anyway. All I want is to unshackle this world from the bindings imposed by our supposed masters.”
In a different story, beset by different circumstances, a crusade against the fabric of reality itself may have been within Lieze’s means. It was refreshing enough to hear of a single God that didn’t have a hand in humanity’s suffering. As far as Lieze was concerned, a world governed by the startling whims of chaos was miles ahead of one whose destiny was governed by celestial forces.
“Now…” She breathed a sigh of relief after crossing the ridge back to the cavern’s entrance, “It’s about time I enjoyed some light reading for once.”