Heir of the Fog

The Ray in the Deep

Watching the creature I once thought was the manifestation of perfection die such a pointless death, to be nothing but food, made me feel small. It made me doubt whether I would ever leave the Abyss and find those I loved. Perhaps I would break my promise to Meris after all.

Sharn looked upon me yet again. "He does not wish you to despair, only to know and accept your fate. That subject who just died could have ascended long ago, a century even. He refused, thinking his light would one day defy the darkness of my master. All for nothing. He died all the same."

The worst part was that I had studied Winged Death deeply and knew she spoke the truth. Sensing my dread, she continued, voice level. "It's nothing to grieve. It is an honor to become part of Sjakthar, to return his strength and take your place at his side."

When Sharn spoke of Baruks who would fight in the Deep to join Sjakthar's side, I had not thought she meant this, to be eaten. Not an honor I wished for myself.

As Winged Death's light vanished, all that remained was Sjakthar's shadow, contained but immense. He suppressed it into himself, but still the Abyss darkened further. The ground, the walls of the crater, the broken ridges, everything lost a step of brightness as if a layer had been stripped away. The dark felt heavier, old and patient.

Hazeveil tugged at my wrists again. Not a warning about the Isari. Something else. Something he did not want me to miss. In that deeper dark I understood. "Not everything returns to him," I said.

I raised and set the monocle to my eye. The darkness thinned at the edges. Shapes resolved. The light that should have been gone showed itself again in small threads, remnants in the grey realm.

Sjakthar wanted me to believe resistance was futile, that there was no point delaying my own ascension, that following Winged Death's path toward perfection was a waste. But the monocle showed otherwise.

Upon the vast form that was Sjakthar, a living mountain that had seemed impenetrable, I saw marks. Not many: thin cuts along his body, shallow gouges at their seams, and a smear that looked like cooled blood where Winged Death had struck. Pointless, I had thought; nothing appeared to wound him.

He was a master of shadow, and through shadow he hid the truth. Through the monocle the world bled to black and white; the edges of his darkness thinned, and the damage came clear—hairline faults bright as chalk, scorched veins where the life within the rock had recoiled, fresh stone fused over older breaks. Small. Few. Present. And in that same colorless reach I saw it as well, the remnant of the dead God, a pale ember from a realm with no color to give.

"Hear me, harbinger of light. Your wings were the most beautiful—such a shame you never reached the skies above." I spoke evenly, letting the words travel where breath could not, into the realm in between. The fragment noticed. A pale ember in a colorless reach turned toward me, not with eyes, but with intent.

"I have little to offer, but if you so wish, a bridge back to our realm, another chance." Even dead, he could unmake me; that was the power of a God, the power to bend reality. I felt it in my bones, his notice turning toward me. In time even a God would erode, forget who he was, and be forgotten in turn.

But the piece of him lingering was still strong. When I called, its will met mine, and the danger of what I attempted became plain: I was calling a God the way I had called the souls that became Frostkin.

Sharn looked at me, confusion etching her face. "Already delusional? Speaking to the wind? A shame, you may never reach Auric form after all."

I ignored her. It seemed wise to make peace with myself. I might never truly die, but would that matter in a fight between Gods? I doubted it. For the first time I understood it was all or nothing, this time, this moment.

I looked upward. Even through fog and darkness a ripple reached my skin, a thin warmth, sunlight touching this deep in the Abyss as it had never touched before. "The time has come. I am coming back," I said. The words were not for Sharn, but for Meris.

In that stray ray that found the deep, I asked the wind to bless my words and carry them. A foolish gesture, perhaps, but it felt right. If my end was here, let it be known I spent my last attempt on keeping my promise.

I took the monocle in my shaking hands; Doomcarver slipped from my grip and struck stone. Then the voices, the crowd, the pressure I had learned to live with, closed in. In unison they spoke, half-words no mouths should make:

"vahl… veyr… valeth…

kru-khal akhur…

nehr… ai… nehrin…"

My mist poured from me. With Winged Death gone, no rival aura contested it. Sjakthar noticed what I held and, with it, his anger rose, so much anger I felt as if I could touch it with my hands, and in that instant I knew he would not stop until I was destroyed, regardless of the possibility of me advancing or the fact I couldn't die. His anger was so strong everyone present felt it just as much as I did.

Sharn did not understand her God's fury, but she felt it all the same. "You haven't even ascended, yet you dare challenge him? Are you mad?"

"Yes," I said, and it was the truth. After so long in the Abyss, a person might do insane things, burn the world if that was the way out. And, honestly, I was ready to do so, just so I could fulfill my promise.

Perhaps I had no home left to return to. Perhaps I had already spent lifetimes here while those I loved went gray and silent under the passage of years. All because of Sjakthar. Watching Winged Death reach perfection and die the same, I knew I couldn't spend hundreds of years repeating the same steps.

I faced Sjakthar, Devourer of Gods. I, a creature who had walked too far from human paths, small as I was, defied him. "I tasted your hell, Sjakthar. Now it's time for you to taste mine."

Some voices of the realm between, the human ones, chanted as I issued my challenge:

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"Skrit… skrat… cage of glass—

let it crack, let it spill, let the grey pass."

I answered them. "You all shall be free." My fingers closed. The monocle broke. It did not shatter; it clicked, soft as ordinary glass and the cage that held the grey was no more.

Wrongness opened. Edges bowed inward. Straight lines learned to curve. Space folded before me. Sound arrived too late, then too early, then not at all. The air thinned until even I shivered. My mist spread, no longer obedient, becoming the road the grey preferred as it took everything to black and white.

Color fled the ground. The last stains of it ran from my hands, from Sharn's armor, from the bioluminescent veins in the rock. Even Winged Death's remnant was not gold—only a white paler than bone.

The voices stopped being far. They stood near, unseen, pressed close and sang with throats that sounded cracked and young and wrong all at once:

"Long last, long passed,

long shall be our welcoming at last."

The mist moved without me. I reached for the edge of my domain and found no answer. Command slipped through my grasp like water through an open hand. The fold breathed in. Something without color poured through and learned outline by touching us. The disembodied came not as visitors but as the source—the plague itself crossing the bridge I had built. Where they brushed the living, flesh flinched. The air twisted with white-on-black silhouettes that had once belonged to this world.

Sjakthar's fury pressed harder, a weight that made the cliff under my feet creak. Sharn's stance faltered as the light drained from her; for the first time since I had met her, I saw doubt naked on her face.

"What have you done?" she hissed.

I did not answer. I didn't need to. Standing beside me, Sharn was the first they found.

Her stance faltered; the set of her jaw broke; the yellow in her eyes washed out to a flat white. I watched the shadows in her aura lift like smoke from a pyre, then knot into shapes, figures dancing all around. The aura twisted once, as if wrung out, and then went into her.

It began slowly: a single soul, the way I had learned to recognize them, pressure without mass, an intention with no breath, pressed through her and searched for a vessel. Metal creaked. Tiny fissures laddered across her breastplate. She tore at the seams, ripped the straps, dragged the ruined plates away, then ripped through the cloth beneath as the thing under her skin moved.

Her palms flattened over a swelling under the right breast, an orb of meat rising against her ribs. The skin stretched shiny and thin, blood beading along lines that had not been cuts a moment before. What had been round found a wedge, then a ridge; cartilage pressed forward; a socket pushed for space. In seconds the bulge became a head: hollows where eyes should be, a mouth that gaped too wide.

"What—what—what is this? What have you done?" she asked, panic lifting each word.

"Corruption," I said, feeling it take hold of her. "It's rare here in the Abyss... When too many wills ride the same mana, the body takes orders from all of them at once. It tries to wear every face it's given."

It was the most accurate explanation I had come up with so far about what corruption truly was. The dead brought no cores with them, but there was mana everywhere; and wills, once formed, could outlast flesh.

Sharn, on the other hand, didn't seem pleased with my answer. "What the fuck are you talking about? Is this some kind of curse? Uncurse me, right now."

Clearly my answer wasn't exactly what she was looking for; she wasn't interested in the scientific side of it while having something growing inside her. Unfortunately, once the gates were opened there was little that I could do; even my mist was out of my control, and I had little compassion for Sharn herself.

More souls converged. I felt them reach her as a crowd reaches a narrow doorway, one after another shouldering through. Her breath stuttered. Her abdominal wall crawled. Her shoulders hitched as something farther back pressed for room. She yanked a dagger from her hip and drove it into the bulge under the breast. Thick blood came out black in the grey light. The blade opened a smile across the new mouth and the head under the skin bit down on the steel. She screamed and cut again, again, sawing through her own flesh to kill the invader she had already given a skull.

She felt the other teeth a moment later, farther around, below the clavicle. The panic changed pitch. She stabbed by reflex, hacked at her chest in fast, shallow chops until the head nearest her hand slackened and slid wetly against her ribs. For a breath she won. The rest of them did not care.

She felt her flesh convulse and mutate. Even in the white of her eyes, I felt understanding settling in. "I can't die. I will not die."

She pulled on the bond to Sjakthar. Mana flooded her, not in threads or streams, but as a sheet poured at once. For a heartbeat she looked relieved. In the next heartbeat, what had merely been growing started to take form in seconds inside her, as she was filled with mana that could be fully used, a state of free-flowing mana no core could control, not even hers, as it happened.

She dropped to her knees. The confidence I had always seen in her was gone; her eyes ran with tears and blood. Even blinded, she looked at Sjakthar, hoping he would fix her.

Long slits split open across the muscles of her back. Four arms pushed through, each from a different owner. One ended in a talon like a raptor's foot, scaled and hooked, the claws flexing as if testing weight. Another was chitin, jointed in too many places, the edges ridged like a beetle's wing. A third was furred and heavy, pads black and cracked, each finger tipped with a blunt, crushing claw. The last was thin and translucent, veins like white threads inside clear flesh. They did not agree about direction. They tore at each other as they came, stripping meat from Sharn's spine as if the bone between them were contested ground.

"Help me," she said, voice small, then stronger, pleading. "Sjakthar. Please."

At that moment, despite knowing who Sharn was, I tried to think of ways that I could help her. "Why did it accelerate so much?" I asked Kara.

But she met me only with silence, as she often had since we ventured inside the Abyss. I tried to understand how mana could birth life so easily; this was no mere healing of growing flesh but a total transformation, and then it snapped.

"Life is the source of mana, just as souls are the source of will. The more mana she holds, the faster corruption spreads, and that is one of the reasons a core must evolve before cycling greater flows of mana." It felt right. It might also have been the voice of madness speaking in a tone that pleased me. Either way, it did not change what lay in front of me.

Sjakthar's attention shifted. The weight of it made the stone under my boots creak. Sharn felt it too; the panic drained from her face and steadiness came back like warmth. She lifted her hands as if to meet her God.

The ground in front of her opened without a crack. Rock and metal became fingers. A hand rose from the floor, knuckles like ridges, palm veined with ore, vast and careful. It cupped around her shoulders, drew her in as if to shelter. She leaned into it, mouth open with gratitude, eyes closed like a child who has found the cloak in a storm.

Then the hand closed.

There was a wet, compact sound, like a basket of ripe fruit crushed under a stone. The arms on her back flailed and then stopped as if someone had cut the strings. The hand withdrew the way a wave withdraws. What it had held dropped to the ground and lay there, only the white in her eyes remained.

I stared at what remained and at what steamed on the rock around it. My next breath went in and did not want to come out. Around us, the grey kept filling the world in black and white; the disembodied kept pushing at other bodies; the chorus kept working its way along bones that were not built for it. But none of that changed the new quiet where Sharn had been.