Heir of the Fog

The Devourer

The fog, so similar to the mist yet also so different, brought warmth and life, while the mist brought cold and a place where the rules were not entirely respected. I felt the contrast in my bones the instant I reached its edge; the mist hummed with familiar alignment, a chorus tuned to my will, while the fog beyond lay like a living sea where currents moved in crooked patterns. This would be the first time in so long that I would venture beyond the mist. Truthfully, the mist was mine, my aura, my realm. But the one in the Abyss was mine and the Frostkin's.

The Frostkin were now so many that the mist would survive without me; it would keep its hold for weeks, perhaps more, even without me. Their cores could shoulder the weight of what I had woven. But the Frostkin, as expected, felt the moment I crossed the threshold into the lands beyond. My absence rang inside them like a plucked string.

Outside the mist, their voices didn't reach me anymore. Only Ella stood by my side. "Mobilize, yes mobilize we should, not alone. It might be distant, but we can reach it with our brothers and sisters," she advised me.

I felt her worry. Winged Death was a creature of perfection, one in which no Isari had found any flaw or weakness, and on top of that, he could call the power of Sjakthar himself, the power of a God at his fingertips. But that was not the greatest problem.

My greatest worry was whether he would have become a God himself by the time we arrived with the Frostkin. Blinded by my time with the Frostkin, I became complacent toward my enemies and didn't plot ways to kill him. I set those thoughts aside, and now I knew I had no time. "Do it. Call upon Haldrin and have him make the arrangements quickly. But I cannot wait. I will go ahead," I told Ella, and she vanished with a single nod.

Despite being outside the mist, the path had already been mapped by the Isari. I knew exactly where to go, and the beasts, demigods in their own way, hardly ever approached the territory of Winged Death. The ground there remembered pain. Even the fog seemed thinner, as if the light it hated had licked it clean too often.

None challenged his dominion, for he was a creature to whom all monsters bowed. His territory could not be missed, for he, amidst the Abyss, was the one who conjured light. He could see through all; everything light touched in his territory became part of it.

Rocks, debris, the earth itself. As I stood upon the edge of his territory, I noticed the land change before me. I watched as the damaged terrain ahead took notice of me. Eyes opened in every cranny, every rock, even the fallen bodies of the beasts who were brought to him.

Lids of stone peeled back. Pupils budded in cracked clay. The empty sockets of carcasses filmed over, then focused, and their gazes met mine.

The Isari existed for many reasons, but their specific way of hiding was designed chiefly to foil his light, as creatures who traversed his territory had a tendency to have their own bodies turned into his, losing control.

The Isari were the ones who could enter his territory untouched, as long as he, Winged Death himself, didn't lay eyes upon them. I, however, was not engineered for it. Fear, something I thought I had renounced, reached me, but I knew I would never see those outside again if I let it dominate me. The feeling was not a shout but a cold hand around the spine. I breathed until the tremor left my fingers.

So, as I pushed forward into his territory, the pressure closed on me. It gathered from all sides, a polite host ushering me deeper. I felt my body rebel; I felt his gaze. I looked at my forearm and something slid under the skin—a worm, then more than one, making shallow wakes that crossed and blurred. Winged Death's touch was undeniable.

Then the light took my sight. The world burned down to white and the shiver it made in the air. My nerves rang like wire. The worms kept moving, feeding, and the places they passed grew hot enough to blister before cooling to a sick, numb throb. His light carried radiation, and with it came blood. It threaded from my nose and ears, beaded from my pores, seeped from the corners of my eyes in thin, stinging films.

Life mana tried to mend, but the burning did not stop. It licked every fresh seam open again, patient and thorough. Under my palm I felt them cross my temples, curl beneath my cheeks, nest in the soft places around my eyes. My scalp crawled as if my hair were trying to pull free. My jaw began to move without me—a slow, testing grind—and I tasted iron as my own tongue slid between my teeth. My hands shook, not from fear but from the wrong rhythm my body had learned, a cadence borrowed from his light.

Life essence flowed harder. It stitched, soothed, froze the skin where the worms had traveled and still the worms returned, doubling, tripling, a map redrawn beneath the flesh. I swallowed and the motion wasn't mine. For a breath I was a glove worn by something else.

But I was not the same as the first time we faced each other. Using my will, I let the mist pour from me. It spilled low and dense, a tide of hoarfrost that softened edges and cooled the light's intrusion. Rime bloomed along pebbles, stitched a veil around me.

I let my aura challenge his, but I knew it was not enough. Perhaps once the Frostkin came it would improve, but it would take time for them to organize and traverse the land, so until then it was me against him. I tested the width of my domain: a few meters only.

That was what I thought, but then Hazeveil tugged at both my wrists, and the mist strengthened, a minor change but still noticeable. The cloak had its own instincts; its warning was a double pulse against my skin, left then right. The two Isari who were watching Winged Death came to my small mist, merely a few meters around me, but they stood hidden to avoid the gaze of Winged Death himself, silent as they always were.

I did not turn. I let the knowledge arrive through Hazeveil and through the very slight extra weight the mist now bore, as if more hands held the edge taut. The radius thickened by a stride. The light hesitated.

Time passed as we traversed through his territory, devoid of life as it was. The eyes watched and did not blink. Stones shifted positions without moving. My breath made a pale halo that trailed, then tore in the light. "Come on, face me!" I screamed, but no reply came. The sound broke into glitter and fell apart before it could travel. It was as if Winged Death were simply ignoring me. Perhaps I was truly already too late.

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Upon my arrival, on what looked more like a mountain inside the Abyss itself, several kilometers away from a huge crater, I saw a place highly illuminated by Winged Death's four butterfly wings, which resonated and reflected their own light in blinding ways. The crater below breathed glare like a furnace mouth, a bowl of pale fire sunk into the Abyss's dark. It was then that I understood.

"Sjakthar," I muttered, noticing his God was present. I knew the moment I saw Sjakthar that a God had come to see his warlock's ascension in the flesh. His body was akin to a mountain, but his shadow nature made it impossible to fully see him at once, parts of him shifting like tectonic plates grinding, others rippling as if filled with water currents. Winged Death's light was consumed once it touched his flesh. The beams that painted everything else slid across him and vanished, as if light itself forgot how to be light when it met that stone.

"The Abyss hid him? Shadows?" I thought to myself, realizing I should have thought of it before. Sjakthar dominated shadows. From his form he was probably mainly an earth creature and, considering the design of the Abyss, he probably had a hold on life itself as well. The realization arrived with certainty, the sense of three essences braided in one will.

He shifted his form toward me, allowing me to see more segments of his flesh, resembling cliff faces and obsidian ridges, patterned with fault lines that glowed faintly with the heat of molten veins beneath. Within the cracks, veins of bioluminescent moss, strange flowers, and parasitic vines could be seen. Those living veins pulsed slowly, light traveling under the rock like thought traveling under a skull, and the vines drifted in a wind that did not exist.

As his face turned toward me, it was no face at all. A vertical split in the stone, no face, only a chasm so dark it consumed all light, even that coming from Winged Death. The split did not end; it only narrowed until the eye could not follow. This was the master of the Abyss, and the moment I saw him I knew I had already lost. My fingers tightened on the haft of Doomcarver until the sword began to feel heavy in my hands.

A presence appeared beside me, one protected by Sjakthar's aura, one who could easily enter my mist, but far too familiar even while inside Sjakthar's shadows: Sharn. "You come at last, Omen, lord of the frozen lands. Good, my God was waiting for you," she spoke in perfect human tongue. "Watch and behold, be an emissary of this great day. It has been centuries since the last Baruk has risen beyond this stage, stepping into Auric form." Her words fell soft, but the softness had edges.

Countless crimson horrors and onyx creatures could be seen kneeling all around, many of which were already dead at Winged Death's feet, but the rest were here to watch. Other warlocks and subjects, I assumed. It had indeed been too late. Winged Death's ascension had already begun. The crowd's heads tilted toward the crater and stayed there.

I thought of fighting them, of pushing forward through the line of countless horrors, including other warlocks of Sjakthar, with the two Isari near me. But the thought of it pressed too hard on my bones. My will frayed. It was not fear of death alone, but of leaving the Frostkin behind.

Evolutions were always brief, and my deep understanding of Guile made me no fool. Ahead there was only pointless death; my presence was well known before something that would soon become a God and, worse, before another God. I had no chance even with all the Frostkin.

"What does your God gain with this? Creating other Gods?" I asked, noticing that watching and learning was the only thing I truly could do. After all this time, I yet again felt as I had the first time I entered the fog, a starving child fighting for scraps. Too weak to do anything except hide.

Sharn, however, only smiled. "You know the answer. You've known all along, and that is why you are afraid," she said. The smile was a small crescent cut into her orc face.

Indeed, she was right. I knew the answer, why the Abyss existed, the reason for all of this.

As Winged Death ascended to Godhood, his presence, the light within him, became too much for me to bear. My mist was stripped from me, and even the Isari who moments ago were invisible became fully visible, their forms clear for them all in the presence of such magnificent light coming from the beautiful butterfly wings, six of them now.

The extra pair unfurled with a sound like silk catching fire. Color fled the world except for that auric blaze; my frost sheeting turned to melt, then to steam, then to nothing. The Isari's semi-reflective plates gave up their tricks and resolved into stark lines; they stood out like ink on snow, no matter how still they kept.

Its form reflected more than perfection, and its brief gaze toward me made me feel small. I knew his aura alone could kill me if he so wished. That was, after all, the power of a God. It was not a threat, only a statement of what was. My heart stuttered against that fact and found its rhythm again, slower.

With Winged Death's ascension, however, Sjakthar's full attention was upon him. Then Winged Death, realizing what was about to come, tall as he now was at least forty meters, his body suffused not with molten crimson anymore but with molten gold, struck in an instant with his long talons toward not me, but Sjakthar himself. The strike was so swift the air stitched behind it—a seam puckered and smoothed before the sound arrived.

His talons struck across Sjakthar's flesh, which was stone itself, but it resisted, leaving no marks upon it. His aura extended further, and I saw beams of light striking Sjakthar. I saw abilities, and techniques that far surpassed my own, honed over centuries by constant combat in the Abyss, all of which left little to no mark on Sjakthar.

Lances of light that would have erased a mountain bent and went out like candles pinched by wet fingers. Patterns I did not know—hard-won arts, perfect arcs, impossible feints—hit the same result: nothing. Impact after impact folded into the God and did not come back.

At last, I saw Winged Death kneel, by a command or power I could not say, despite noticing how much he struggled against it, as if he knew what was coming but thought he could overcome it. Yet he had no chance. Sjakthar moved slowly, as a turtle might. From my angle I soon could not see Winged Death anymore, just Sjakthar's back and the light coming from Winged Death reflecting all around. That terrible slowness said everything: a predator that never wastes breath on running. Winged Death's wings beat, beating light into the crater walls, but brightness without purchase only made the shadows look deeper.

Until that light was no more. As Sjakthar turned his chasm of a face toward me, Winged Death had vanished, consumed by Sjakthar himself. There was no spasm, no tearing—only the sound of distant stone settling after a quake, and then an absence where a godling had been. The air cooled. My eyes watered as if they had been staring into noon and had at last been allowed to close.

At that moment I received the confirmation of what I had suspected all along. The Abyss was a farm of power. Crimsons were so rare on the surface, yet here they were common due to the way it was engineered, due to the number of lives in a single place. I could only think Gods on the surface were much rarer.

Sjakthar was not merely a God; he was a devourer of Gods. All the power he bestowed upon his subjects, either through mana crystals or blessings, eventually returned to him tenfold. All to create nearly awakened Gods on whom he could feed. This was the purpose of all the lives of the Abyss. The generosity I had seen spread like seed among his followers was a net; the crystals were bait; the blessings were tethers braided from gratitude and hunger. Life here was not granted. It was loaned at interest.

Sharn seemed delighted by it. Her posture eased the way a believer relaxes beside a shrine, and her voice lowered as if to savor the ritual words. "All within his domain is his. Life is not granted, but borrowed, all of which shall return to him."