Outworld Liberators

By the third lifetime, they made the Aberrant live through the Karmic Weighing Ghost Array, Radeon felt himself bottoming out.

His breath came shallow. Each pull on the creature's mind pulled on his too.

Behind him, three hundred Tiyanak infants sat within the circle. Small bodies. Too quiet. Their eyes were open, but not truly seeing.

They acted inside the array, channeling their consciousness into it. Each infant played a part in a carefully crafted deception.

Calyx stood at the core. Not simply as a helper. Not simply as a hand on the ritual.

He was the core of it, the anchor that made the whole thing hold.

The lines of the array ran through his like veins.

Radeon watched him and felt the old fact again. He had been born a ghost. Not made, not raised, not dragged back.

The difference mattered here. Memories flowed through Radeon with a clarity that hurt.

Calyx was not simple. The name he carried, Lurienna, was not a farmer's name, not a soldier's name. It was a lineage name.

The kind that drew eyes in certain halls and closed doors in others.

White Impertinence.

Calyx's mind had avoided thinking it aloud for years. Still, something inside him woke.

An inheritance that knew how to weigh a life. The Art of Equal Karmic Judgement.

The Karmic Weighing Ghost Array did not treat the Aberrant as a living thing. It treated it as a dead soul, because Calyx said so.

"Just one more lifetime. We just need to modify the memories a bit further," Radeon said.

He was more proficient at creating falsehoods than the rest of them.

The ghosts did not complain. Their flesh, once clear enough to pass for living, was turning thin and ethereal from all the good they had done for the world.

Fingers faded at the edges. Cheeks lost their warmth. Even their voices sounded farther away, like words spoken down a long corridor.

None of them cared. This was not charity. This was vengeance.

This was their one chance to land a sucker punch in the mouth of something that had destroyed their home and stolen their identities.

If the cost was their own shape, then they would pay it with open hands.

The array spun again. Lines of light tightened, then snapped into a new pattern.

Another life flashed over the Aberrant's soul.

"No need to delay. If we can reduce its wits to those of a turkey, I should be quite satisfied," Calyx said, allowing himself the faintest smile, his large body seeming to cradle the larger soul of the Aberrant.

A heartbeat ago there had been a screaming man on a stake.

Now there was a body on a low table, the Aberrant's true body, pinned and stitched down beneath lamplight.

Masked hands worked with careful speed. Needle, thread, pull. Needle, thread, pull. They treated the monster like a wound that could be closed if they were gentle enough.

Then the chest jumped.

The eyes snapped open.

"He's awake. Everyone look. He's awake. The king is awake."

"Thank goodness the king is saved."

"Our country is saved."

The creature looked around with a dazed recognition that did not belong to it.

Subjects, its mind insisted. Loyal men. A court.

Element wielders stood in the crowd with their fists clenched, heat, frost, and wind pressing at the edges of the room.

Hulking forms loomed like statues carved for war. Diviners held turtle shells and bone slats, their thumbs smudged with soot from too many readings.

The Aberrant blinked hard, as if trying to recall who it was. It was human. That was the first thought.

Whatever had once driven it, the old hunger and the old knowing, had been muffled.

It did not reach for eldritch power. It reached for breath. It reached for stance.

Qi stirred in its belly, thin at first, then thicker, as if it had always been there.

Movements tried to come, not tendrils, not spines, but forms, steps, strikes.

A lifetime of martial habits, injected by Radeon, rose in its muscles.

A masked man stepped close. The creature's eyes softened, as if seeing a trusted shadow.

The man's outline was Jekyll's. The shape of his shoulders. The controlled way he held himself.

Even through the mask, the authority fit him like skin.

"My king. We need to win the war."

He unfurled a scroll, slow and deliberate, the way you show a starving dog a strip of meat.

Ink marks crawled across it, too neat to be honest.

The Aberrant leaned forward to read, and its pupils shivered. Dizziness struck like a hammer.

The body sagged. The stitched chest heaved once and went slack.

Radeon kept one eye closed and one eye open.

With his open eye he watched the array lines, the way they trembled when the ghosts strained.

The closed eye he directed the ghosts and their coherence. The way a voice held together. The way it looked realistic.

All that while suppressing the constant call from the void that its body would innately send out, as the Aberrant was part of a collective eldritch mind.

What was more, Radeon did not plan to lose a single one of these free laborers over a trifle. Vengeance was useful. Excessive heroism was not.

Calyx was at the core, and he was starting to burn through himself as vengeance blinded his mind.

He clung to the head of a Aberrant like a madman, a wild grin frozen across his face.

The third lifetime had taken too much. The fourth would take a name.

So Radeon chose to pull out. The moment he broke the flow, the backlash slapped everyone using themselves as the array.

The bodies of ghosts and wraiths scatter and tore. Arms and torsos and faces scattered into thousands of pieces, not blood and bone, but pale fragments, drifting like ash blown in a hard wind.

Along the side wall, four disciples watched without blinking. They held brooms and dustpans like they had been told to sweep a stable.

Now they would sweep souls. Radeon's voice cut through the ringing in his skull.

"You will help them."

By this time, Fay, Good Chip, Spice Cure, and Gauge Point could not even muster doubt. They could not. The truth hung right in front of them, floating in pieces.