The Tears of Kas̆dael

The inner sanctum of the Temple of Nūr was beyond anything Jasper could have deemed possible. The dome had looked massive from the outside, easily the size of several football fields smashed together, dwarfing anything on earth, but the inside was clearly larger.

The far side of the chamber was easily five or six miles away, while the golden dome above them soared nearly as high as the sky itself. Darkness raged against its contours, thousands of smoky tendrils beating against the transparent amber glass, but they were held at bay by the sun in the center of the sanctum.

The Sun. Suspended near the peak of the dome, a replica of the sun filled the whole sanctum with light. Somehow, it was no mere mechanical artifice, but a genuine star, whose fiery flames drove off the darkness that beat at its sanctum, but its battle did not come without cost. Streaks of darkness marred its golden surface, but it had yet to succumb to the corruption that had swallowed up its brethren outside.

But it was in danger of losing its battle. Twelve floating platforms rotated around the star, ascending in a spiral like a staircase that ended in a final, thirteenth platform, barely a hundred feet beneath the sun's surface.

A man stood on that platform, one that even from a distance Jasper recognized - the Bloodspiller. From their position on the ground, most of his body was obscured, but from the dark tendrils waving around his body, it was clear that the darkness had found a courier into the heart of the sanctum.

"What do you want to bet he has the key to closing down the portal?" Jasper sighed.

"Lord Ardûl said he'd be at his weakest point now," Erin replied nervously.

"Yeah, but Ardûl didn't know about, well, whatever the hell that is," he waved at the black tendrils the blood mage was using to attack the miniature star.

"Doesn't matter," Ihra shrugged. "We have to at least try to close it."

"If we can distract him long enough, Lord Nūr might recover enough to help us."

"Isn't Lord Nūr dead?" Jasper asked, trying not to visualize the black sun that watched o'er the ruined city.

"You don't know what you're looking at, do you?" she scoffed. "That star isn't some burning ball of gas; it's a hypostatization of Lord Nūr himself, and unlike the original, it has not yet fallen to the darkness. We can't beat the Bloodspiller on our own, but with its help…" she shrugged, "we might just have a chance."

Jasper smiled wryly. "Well, I guess we'll be adding a new task to our 'honey do' list. Save a god. Kill the Bloodspiller. Close a portal. Easy-peasy."

His hands brushed across Ihra's shoulders as he cast Spectral Wings, first on her and then on himself. "We don't have time to do this in shifts, so I guess we're having to carry you," he spoke to Erin and S̆ams̆ādur.

He took a step forward toward the pair, and S̆ams̆ādur backed up with an uneasy expression. "I'm not so sure I feel comfortable in your hands, laddie."

"You think I'm going to drop you?"

"I think after a few minutes, I might just feel as heavy as an anvil to you. No offense, but I'd feel much better if the stronger of the two took me," he nodded his head toward Ihra.

"Whatever," Jasper shrugged, letting Ihra take the durgu, as he turned to Erin instead. "You wanna do this piggy-back or princess style?"

"Did you really need to ask?" Erin walked behind him, shuddering as the spectral wings flicked through his body, and jumped onto his back.

"Just tell me when it's over," he grumbled.

The man formerly known as Amēls̆ar had to admit that the day had taken a turn for the worse. He had always prided himself on his ability to roll with the punches or even, if necessary, to take one on the chin and keep fighting. That man had died in the village of Naqû, reborn in the forge of despair as Ēpis̆dāma, but he had retained that same dogged determination.

He would not fail, he could not fail, but the universe was certainly doing its best to thwart him. The attack on Dūr-Sūqerbettû had largely gone to plan; true, he had not counted on a bloody Sidhe, of all things, showing up and killing his wyrm before it had barely had time to go on a nice rampage, but, fortunately, the Sidhe hadn't stuck around to finish the job - likely afraid of attracting the ire of the Divine Warrior, and the rest of the defenders of the castle simply weren't up to the task of defeating someone like him. It was everything after he opened the portal that had gone to the void.

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First, an entire bloody army showed up at his doorstep, before he'd had time to recover his strength from the ritual or bring over even a fraction of the forces through the portal that he was planning on. Knowing he was in no condition to take on that many troops by himself, he'd been forced to flee through the portal, throwing his forces to the wolves until the wyrm could arrive and, hopefully, set things right.

There was a reason he rarely went through the portals, though. Lord Inās̆ru did not always open them to the same place, but the worlds the portals visited always shared certain similarities, ruined realms afflicted with a terrible corruption. Ēpis̆dāma wasn't sure what had destroyed these worlds, warped their people, consumed their stars, and he was content not knowing. He hadn't needed to watch his fellow acolytes of Inās̆ru be swallowed up by the darkness to know that that road only led to ruin. There were some things that mortal minds should just not know, but, unfortunately, his hand had been forced.

His concentration slipped for only a fraction of a second as the star hammered with a ray of light that sliced through a hundred of the black tendrils that now sprouted from his body, and in that fraction of a second, the dark advanced further. STOP. Just leave me alone and I'll help you fight this bloody thing, he screamed internally, but the darkness, as always, did not respond.

He wouldn't have thought it was even alive if not for the fact that it had successfully taken him by surprise in an ambush that showed at least a minimal amount of animal cunning. He'd thought himself safe when he'd boarded himself up in one of the manors on the outskirts of the ruined city, happy to lick his wounds in peace until the wyrm arrived, but he'd failed to notice the darkness encroaching on the manor until it was too late. He'd used up what little essence he had to fight its tendrils off, but somehow a piece of the corruption had slipped past his guard.

It had been an hour later when he first realized that his own blood tendrils were striated with black, and it had been a constant battle since against the darkness. He'd tried reasoning with it, bargaining, pleading, but nothing had worked as it slowly spread through his body.

His mind was still intact, of that he was sure, but his body was now more under the corruption's control than his own. He certainly hadn't wanted to pick a fight with an avatar of Nūr in his weakened state, but he'd been a passenger in his own body as the corruption had driven him to the temple.

Yet, every storm had its silver lining, and the man once known as Amēls̆ar felt certain he had found it. With every blow the dark tendrils suffered, their power diminished slightly; he only needed to hold on a little bit longer, and their own aggression would be their downfall. And then? Perhaps the man known as Ēpis̆dāma would die and a new legend rise in its place. He could see it now-

He went flying backward as a beam of light hit him square in the chest, burning through the corrupted tendrils and digging into his own flesh. He cried out in pain as the beam straight through his chest, and time seemed to slow as it cored out his very heart. For most people, it would be a killing blow, but he was a blood mage after all.

As his body fell to the ground, skidding dangerously close to the edge of the floating platform, he left it to the corruption to stop their slide and focused on circulating the blood through his body on its own. I just need to get through this fight, and I can find someone who can regenerate my heart-

But fear gripped him as his heart began to reform on its own, a black, festering thing that reeked of pure corruption. All thought of continuing the circulation in his body was abandoned as he focused all his will on stopping the new heart. For a moment, they were locked in a battle of wills, a battle he slowly began to win as the star continued to burn through the corruption's tendrils.

But the corruption was cunning. For a brief second, the tendrils fell limp, giving the star a perfect shot at his body, and as the beam burned through his flesh, Ēpis̆dāma's focus collapsed. A moment later, the tendrils snapped back in place, rolling him out of the path of danger as his new heart reformed, and in their cocoon, the man known as Ēpis̆dāma was reborn.

They had front row seats to the battle between the sun god and the blood mage as they flew toward the floating shrine. Frankly, Jasper wasn't sure if it even was Ēpis̆dāma up there, or an avatar of the corruption itself. Then, again, maybe he was always its agent. The body certainly looked like the blood mage, but his usually bloody tentacles had been replaced by roiling black ones that reformed as quickly as the star could strike them down.

The sun was holding its own, despite being attacked on both sides, but he could tell it was losing ground. The streaks of darkness across its form were slowly spreading even as the attacks it launched grew more powerful.

They were only halfway there, however, when the battle seemed to come to an end. With a particularly powerful beam of light, the star punched through the chest of the blood mage. The tendrils writhed around him as he collapsed to the ground, stopping him from flying off the edge of the platform and forming a protective barrier around him as the star struck with a frenzy of blows.

It was likely a mortal blow, Jasper thought, and that idea seemed proved right as, a minute later, the tendrils wilted, leaving his body exposed on the platform. "Looks like Lord Nūr's gonna win on his own," he yelled out to Tsia. "We might not even have to fight."

The sun struck again, with a beam so bright that Jasper was forced to avert his eyes, but when he looked back, he saw that the mage had not been obliterated. Instead, he had rolled to the edge of the platform, with a cocoon of the black tendrils reformed around him, and a sudden, terrible sense of foreboding fell over him. I just had to go and jinx it.

The star struck at it frantically, beams of light tearing through the tendrils as fast as they could form, but it could not breach the cocoon's protective shell before it began to crack open of its own accord.

Jasper flinched, nearly knocking Erin off his back, as a wave of pure malice and terror washed over them, and from the broken shell of the cocoon, a black and withered corpse resembling those they'd seen in the city streets crawled free. Compared to the imposing figure the blood mage had cut, it seemed almost comically weak, until it opened its mouth.