Heir of the Fog

An Omen of Endings

"Are you… No, I mean, were you once a God too?" I asked the elf. She looked at me, puzzled, clearly not understanding a word. Then the symbols along her ring shifted: intricate shapes that somehow threaded meaning straight into me. "You know the language of the world and yet do not use it."

Language of the world? Those symbols?

"No. I don't know them; I can't use them," I tried to say, pointing at the ring. She followed the gesture, head tilting, the veil hiding whatever passed for her expression. My words landed only in pieces.

"This," she said, tapping the symbols, "is not the language of the world. Will is. Let will carry through your words, and your intent will be clear to any, intelligent or not." As if to demonstrate, the markings turned again while she looked toward a nearby hill beyond the rim of Sjakthar's domain.

"Be gone." Two simple words, and in the next moment the hill vanished, as if it had never existed.

The hill had understood, and so it was no more.

I gasped, lacking words for what she'd shown me but understanding her meaning. I had used that language of the world before, though never to this extent.

Her presence pressed at me as pressure rather than menace. Crimson vessel or not, she felt vast. Standing near her was like standing near a cliff face at night, knowing the drop was there even when you could not see it.

The power of gods defied everything I knew, everything I had learned and studied, as if reality itself were only a concept to them. Hazeveil was proof: once my hooded cloak, it now lay as a thin veil, drinking mana from me and feeding its shadows.

Through that veil the world dimmed by a single shade; edges softened; distances loosened like knots. My own outline seemed to sit a half-step away from where I stood. Even the sound of my breath arrived in my ears a fraction late, as if the air couldn't agree on the path to take. In that dim I felt hidden, not only from eyes but from the measurement of space itself.

"Thank you for the blessing," I said, and tried to do as she had just told me, let mana tangle with intent, let will shape the sound so it carried beyond the language barrier.

She inclined her head. This time she understood. "Waste no time. You know what you have to do," she said. "Use it wisely."

One step, veiled by Hazeveil's new power, hid me from almost everything; reality warped around me, and even distance lost me. There, distance bent, and with my next step I was no longer at the elf's side. I stood miles away, behind Sjakthar in his domain of shadows.

Sjakthar's gaze found me even through Hazeveil's new power, yet it vanished the moment I entered his domain of shadows. In his domain, shadows reigned, and my cloak's did too. There, not even a God's gaze could settle on me.

He fought on all sides at once. Corrupted beasts closed like a tide, deformed monsters wearing too many faces, each one certain of the single enemy that could deny them a world. Sjakthar was a one-man army, and still his reach ran farther.

Creatures fell across the Abyss before corruption ever touched them, cut down because they might rise against him in the next breath. He spared no follower; none could help him hold back the grey. Left to live, they would only feed it.

Letting the Sigil of Severance flare on Doomcarver, I finally swung the mightiest blade toward him. There was no honor in this battle, so I aimed for his back. Motion amplified, a massive arc of cutting energy formed and tore forward, carrying across the distance until it struck his back.

At first I saw no damage, but Hazeveil dimmed my vision again, and then I saw rivers of magma pouring from the wound I had opened. "Liar, Sjakthar. You cannot hide your weakness from me anymore," I taunted.

He did not need to turn. No place in his dominion lay outside his sense. Vines answered at once, feeling their way along the vector of my strike, slashing toward the point where the arc had begun.

They were fast, and they were not delayed by anything in their path—rock or beast alike, each parted as cleanly as thread. A flat thump rolled through the air when one broke the sound barrier, but speed did not slough off. A heartbeat later it cleaved the space where I had been. But another shadow step let me slip past it completely.

I unleashed another arc of energy against his stone flesh, but the reaction was even quicker: not one vine but dozens, lancing from every direction, erupting from the ground, from my left, right, and behind. They filled the space and every possible escape route, uncaring if they cut through themselves.

Another shadow step and distance bent; in the next instant I had avoided it again, an impossible dodge that defied logic, yet there it was. The blessing's power made me doubt my sanity and my knowledge. I glanced toward the elf to make sure she was real, and there she sat upon her ring, watching without a care in the world.

Then I looked back at Sjakthar, and the wound had already closed. Mere moments were all it took, even while he fought a battle across the Abyss. Still I pressed on, attack after attack, often slipping past the vines by a hair's breadth.

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The land trembled with his pain, tremors without pause, and I wondered if we could actually kill Sjakthar. But my cuts sealed in seconds. He was a God, and my chances of killing him were none.

Even after a dozen strikes, none sank deep enough, and countless aberrations had already fallen. For dozens of miles, life had become a single battlefield, heaped with mountains of corpses.

Yet the true battle wasn't this one. It was the one within Sjakthar, the internal war that truly took a toll on him: the clash of wills, the mutations bursting wherever light touched. That was what hurt him.

And even there, Sjakthar was winning. I couldn't let him.

My next arc of energy leapt from Doomcarver and tore a pale groove across his flesh; a breath later a frozen spear followed, fracturing on impact and webbing the wound in hoarfrost. The sudden blast locked the magma in place and slowed the rippling mend, but that extra heartbeat I spent lining up the second strike nearly ended me. The ground under Sjakthar thickened like dough and rose in slabs, a circular wall heaved inward to crush all things toward its center.

All around his dominion, and even inside it, the battle flared. Abominations in crimson vessels hurled themselves against the curtain of shadow that ringed him. Each fall only swelled the mountains of corpses piling high on every side. My mist gnawed at the edges of his realm in a slow grey tide, while his shadows shoved back in jagged waves. Where the two met, the air hissed and spat.

I readied another attack and saw what the frost had bought me. The wound had not yet closed. The stone flesh there had vitrified; trapped magma dulled to amber beneath a lattice of white cracks. I drove a second arc from Doomcarver through the ice seam and felt the blade's current bite deeper, my will threading into the fissure until the light vanished inside the God, quickly followed by another frozen spear that burst on impact.

Another boulder answered—no, a cluster of them, braided with vines, and my own shadows thickened at my ankles to hold me for the blow. I tore free and stepped, aim fixed on the far edge of my dim vision. I made it, a coughing leap through thin reality, but not cleanly. Something sharp and black caught my arm as the world snapped back, and blood ran down my forearm in sheets of heat. It had nearly taken the limb.

A green, sickly liquid bled from the cut—venom from the vines hidden inside his shadows. It had been prepared for beings like me; where it touched, healing halted outright. The flesh tried to knit and simply… stopped.

It quickly became a battle of attrition; each time, my attacks bit a little deeper into his rock-flesh. He, however, began paying more attention to me, as what had been an annoyance quickly became a threat.

Sight in that dimmed state leashed the distance of my shadow step, and Sjakthar learned the length of that leash. He no longer struck only where my arcs were born. Hundreds of vines swept his domain, rock rose to bite at random, and shadows carried knives through empty space. Cuts multiplied until they were wounds that would not close, venom seeping along every edge. I dragged in a breath, heard the strain in my own voice, felt fear making my grip on Doomcarver grow heavier.

But I refused to stop, weak as my blows were against a God. I held to the same spot, again and again, sending arcs of pure energy from Doomcarver. Once. Twice. Twenty. Fifty. When the surface finally cracked, what spilled wasn't magma. Golden blood jetted in a bright arc and spattered the battlefield in gleaming drops. The scream that tore from Sjakthar made the Abyss itself feel his pain, the ground shaking and setting loose entire avalanches of rock.

The tremors rolled through not only the Deep Abyss but across the whole of it. Sections of lower and upper caves gave way, buried under their own ceilings as entire civilizations vanished. Bound as I was to the grey, the torrent of deaths didn't stay distant. Each life slid toward that realm and fed the mist; for a moment their fear, terror, and anger braided through it. This was a land of monsters, yes—but also of life, of creatures who had never once been given the chance to see the sky.

"Ka—Kara, please, I beg you, tell me. Am I the evil here?" I muttered to the wind, hoping my companion would finally speak to me, hoping for her confirmation and finding none in her silence.

I was the invading force in the Abyss, the one who unleashed hell upon the world, the who dealt with death, an omen of endings. Could it be that Kara had left me behind? Thought me unworthy of her assistance.

My senses numbed, yet motion never stopped, not for a second between my thoughts, as I struck the same spot again and again. I hoped he would have to drop his domain of shadows to see and strike me, which would give Winged Death's light the perfect chance to take control of him.

In my moment of doubt, Sjakthar proved to me yet again that He was beyond me. An army of shadows rose from the ground; thousands took shape mid-stride, bipeds about my size, each bristling with blades of night where fingers should have been. They did not hunt the source of my arcs alone; they manic-swept the entire ring of his domain, striking at empty air in the hope of eventually striking me.

"Shit," I muttered, knowing my ice only bought me a few moments before he closed the gap my attacks made. I had no time to worry about it and continued, but one of them struck my ribs, and blood poured from my mouth just as golden blood poured from his wound.

Breathing turned hard. Like the vines, the shadows left a mark that made healing impossible. "Shit, shit—I can't stop," I said, and kept going despite the hole in me.

More strikes came. Each time my arc landed, one or more of his found my flesh. My movements slowed, thick and clumsy, as I tried to swing again and again. Twenty attacks later I missed the step, and a vine came faster than sound.

I tried to shadow step away, but the instant my feet touched stone a second vine arrived. I vanished and reappeared far off, then failed to find footing and went down face-first.

I pushed to rise and nothing answered. "What?" I breathed, and then saw: both legs severed clean, venom varnishing the stumps.

Merely a few seconds later, Sjakthar's wound closed completely, showing me yet again the difference between me and a God. But the shadow army never stopped, and it didn't take long before one of them struck me as I lay there on the ground.

I crawled, trying to move away, but once the first found me, all of them did. Stab after stab, each found its mark. Above, another boulder gathered, one the size of a district, and it fell straight for me.

Cold hands caught me first. The Isari came. They couldn't see me either, but they appeared where the shadows converged. One crouched and lifted me; the other ran wide as a decoy.

The Isari ran fast as the wind; the decoy, however, was crushed soon after by the boulder. Still, the shadows were relentless, attacking the Isari carrying me as he tried to leave Sjakthar's domain.

A master of runs, he was an Isari with the spirit of a chainrunner as he ran through the sea of monsters, protecting the cargo—me. He was a chainrunner brought back for one final run.

Just like passing through a ward, he crossed from Sjakthar's domain into the corrupted mist, and only there did he end his run, falling to his knees as he succumbed to his wounds.