The Undying Emperor [Grand Conquest Fantasy]

The grave titan's abode had been known as a treacherous abode, home to naught but a miserly lighthouse oft without its flame. The destitute keepers of the light had little support from the nearby town, and it was suspected that they intentionally let their oil run out on stormy nights such that perhaps a merchant's vessel would run afoul of the algae laden stones. Then, they would skulk out amid the waves and cut the throats of the survivors then take their goods for themselves.

The truth of the matter was lost the day the grave titan pushed open the barnacle encrusted gates. A hulk greater than any whale pushed out from the rolling waves and trampled the stone turret, claiming the lives of those brigands before marching a path through the town. While they had been celebrating the alleviation of taxes, for the Feugards no longer laid claim to them, the stone beast shoved down their walls.

When its path was charted by men attempting to understand what had happened, it appeared to take a direct path toward magnetic north, but those that saw it knew it tarried and strayed, crushing horses and homes with a dull persistence. Their only good fortune was that the grave titan's path merely clipped the edge of the town, rather than drove through the center square. There was nothing the scant garrison could have done to stop it, and their resistance stopped at the mere scattering of arrows against its muddy carapace.

Its gait was slow and unhurried, bogging down wherever it had to traverse proper wilderness. Still, it took Lucius nearly a full day to catch up with it, despite the angel wicking away his steed's fatigue. Their journey had been touched by indignation, the angel departing his side when night forced him to rest his horse. She spent the night within the comfort of a temple distant from their path while he had to sleep beside the horse for its scant warmth, but they came upon the trampled fields and lamenting farmers before it had escaped the borders of Vassermark. The locals decried it as a demon, and neither he nor Acheliah corrected them.

It was in an untamed river delta they caught up with the grave titan. More swamp than navigable stream, the landscape was a mire of twisted trees and clumps of mud held together by grass and weeds. Hills marked boulders as often as they were proper footing and the steady current streaked the disturbed mud out across the wetlands like a waving flag whose edge was the construct's path.

When they grew close, Acheliah spread her wings and took to the skies. Upon her return, they left the horse tied to a stubborn birch tree and Lucius proceeded upon foot. One might think it unreasonable for a man on foot to catch up with a machine, but for every snare and pit that his boots found, the grave titan made its own. Each time it set foot or fist to the ground, sodden silt churned and sank, gripping the ancient titan.

And it was not unaware of their approach.

Each time Acheliah circled above it, the grave titan lifted its drooping head and watched her with the crystalline orb that served as its eye. The impetus to answer Aurum's call warred with its near forgotten instinct to survive. By the same token that she could not order it back to slumber, it neither recognized her as its master. It certainly recognized her as a threat.

In these texts before, I have described monsters not of this world. Although they defied the common logic of the living in one way or another, those parasites that even today gnaw at the boundaries of our reality are creatures of flesh. It can be said that their reliance on flesh is what proves they are not gods of destruction. Just as a human is formed from a single speck and passes through ever many phases of life, so too must the otherworldly build themselves. Art and artist at once is true of their lives. The titans never knew any body but the one they awoke in. Advantages abound, of course, but there is a certain inefficiency in aligning a will to a crafted body, no matter the skill of the craftsman. Thus, the grave titan was not as quick as had been hoped. Where armor could be clad about it, the construct was strong, but without pain as a teacher, it would always be negligent of its weaknesses.

The grave titan was not a stupid beast however.

With Acheliah far overhead, it understood that the angel had come to do it harm, and it understood that the small blonde boy trudging through water toward it was her ally. Built to battle demons, I believe it judged him by the scale of his soul, and found him wanting but not insignificant. Had he been a regular man without a stigmata, perhaps the titan would have ignored him, but he had enough power to register as a threat. It sank both of its hulking arms into the water, planting them like shrine obelisks, and through them pulled up the muck and water.

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Lucius continued his approach, sword and shield in either hand as he faced down the onyx eye. To him, it was as though a cemetery and lifted itself from the earth and stood like a bear. It would be some time yet before he met the apes beyond Aillesterra and they would give him the uncanny familiarity of recognizing the ancient titan's form. Unlike those beasts, of which I will document at the appropriate time, the grave titan was not a brawler. It did not lumber around to pummel the earth with its fists, not when it had better options.

Primarily, it had a technique Lucius was familiar with from his encounter in the wastes against the colossus.

He was not privy to the churning filtration that occurred within the chest of the titan, but raised his shield until it nearly covered his eyes and marched on. When it opened its mouth, he expected flames, or perhaps a sonic blast. Instead, a jet of water drew a straight line from behemoth to his chest. It cut through the shield and through his body before flicking aside and cleaving his heart in half. The attack was over before it had even pushed him enough to drive him to his knees. Blood sprayed out his back as segments of his armor tumbled free and pain raced to his brain.

[Undying] pulled his flesh back together, the magic grabbing the severed halves of his body and fusing them the moment blood failed to reach his brain. His vision narrowed as he fell to one knee and he grasped that the titan had attacked him, but not how. What his instincts latched onto was that the construct looked away from him. Then he was charging.

He tossed the splintered shield aside and leapt up one of the muddy bulges of the swamp. The grave titan spun back and blasted him again with the cutting jet of water. The second attack was crude, arcing through chest and head. He was half blind for a moment, faltering and stumbling. He crashed down into the water like a deadman, blood flowing out from his body in every direction, until once more life choked into him.

No comprehension of what Lucius' power was existed in the stone mind of the grave titan. The spell had not been conceived of by any being I know of until the day it manifested within the boy beneath the light of the sun. But it understood the fundamental affect the moment the gears that churned within its body began to slow. It was not from the swamp detritus, but from its own power oozing out of its body the way water evaporates from irrigation lines in a desert.

The moment the grave titan realized Lucius was the greater threat was the decisive moment. While the boy came clawing out of the water, roaring in defiance as much as he roared in pain, Acheliah tucked her wings. While the titan reared back, its water jet not yet pressurized, it could only shunt a blast of water at him. The boy took the blow, his body piecing itself together as swiftly as if he were knee deep in the bloodshed of a melee. Blinded, he could not see the granite fist loom, but the angel struck.

Her reaping blade arced as the moon, cleaving up through the exposed joint of the upraised arm. Metal and stone sheared. Uncontained magic burst through the titan's body, overloading the soft, pseudo-tissues that padded between the mechanisms. Countermeasures were activated as the carapace cracked. Hundreds of snake-like entities swarmed out from the titan, biting and gnashing the air as she escaped. From its remaining arm the beast still sucked in water and its next cutting line was for Acheliah.

No more than a sweeping needle, it cut down a swath of the floodplains and beyond, forcing the angel to vanish among the debris. Rather than safety for her absence, the grave titan found Lucius upon its hulk. He paid no heed to the snapping phantoms of mud. Their bodies held no poison meant for human flesh and the spell could not sustain them long regardless. It tried to roll the way a southern alligator grapples, but was betrayed by the collapsing of its wounded arm. The construct crashed hard into the water and watched as Lucius grabbed hold of its head and slammed his blade into the eye. His steel shattered. He struck again and shattered the crystal.

Blindly, it loosed its water cutter once more and relieved the boy of his thigh, but he did not fall. The pommel of his broken blade proved a sturdy grip as the faltering construct tried to rise. As the constructs inner magic faltered, the final failsafe triggered and the construct's core set itself to detonate. This feature was as much to inflict a final injury upon the constructs foe as it was to scatter the mana and prevent assimilation. Even Lucius' stigmata would have struggled, effectively being poisoned.

In time, he would have risen from the swamp whole, but that did not come to pass. While he had grappled with the titan, Acheliah had returned. She alighted upon the construct with her arm around Lucius and the crook of her blade around the construct's neck. When she took off, she severed its head and took Lucius into the sky.

The shockwave buffeted them and blood loss proved enough to dull the boy's senses. Afterward, he recalled little of his time between the clouds and I suspect Acheliah had a hand in muddling his memory. She was prideful and would not have wished to be seen in her own fugue of mana poisoning.

For Lucius, recovery meant the full regrowth of his missing leg, and Acheliah did not immediately have the strength to return him to the capital. It was days hence, after the diligent care of several quite surprised and flustered priestesses, that he returned to civilization proper and learned what chaos Feugard's Petition had brought.