Book 7: Chapter 3 - Heaven’s Tribulation (RAW) (Patreon)

Chapter 3 - Heaven’s Tribulation

Aranthia’s feudal structured is ordered upon land and sworn loyalty. At the top is the King or Queen, followed by powerful Dukes who ruled large duchies. Beneath them were Marquises, who in times past guarded borders or dangerous regions; Counts, who govern counties of towns, farms, and roads; and Barons, who control smaller lands such as castles, villages, mines, or bridges. These nobles have sworn vassals beneath them, including lesser lords, officials, and knightly families. Knights serve their lords in war, protect their lands, and uphold noble authority. 

- The Fanciful Travel by Beron de Laney 376 AC.

Disorientation claimed me for a moment as I adjusted to the third eye, its focus shifting constantly, dragging new angles and impossible depths across my senses. The hall no longer looked like one place seen from one body. It unfolded in layers. Stone, blood, light, motion. The Devas above me burned too brightly in that expanded sight, their outlines sharp enough to hurt. We chose a target. The Angel formed in the likeness of a woman.

We charged her, acid, poison, and hate dripping from our gauntleted hands. The Mimic’s armor flexed around me with each stride, alive to my intent, eager as a starving beast. We swept in with Manticore Claws, meaning to rake her open and test whether divine flesh could bleed and rot.

But we were not the only one blessed with unnatural speed. The foul creature evaded me blithely, her wings shifting once as she slipped aside with contemptuous grace. Her weapon of light came down for my head, and I caught it on my forearm. The force rang through my new armor like a struck bell and drove me stumbling sideways, my sabatons gouging scars across the stone.

We recovered quickly and tried again, this time with a feint. The Deva with the two-handed sword moved to cover her, interposing a wall of heavenly steel. His blade struck our breastplate, and the impact sheared away a considerable portion of my Health. The Mimic’s plate held, but it screamed through our shared nerves, its pain and mine briefly becoming the same black note.

Then they rose higher, floating on their wings toward the rafters.

We leaped after them. My claws missed by a handspan. I grabbed Zariyah and slashed, only to realize in the same instant that the dagger was no great improvement in reach. Worse, while airborne, we could neither dodge nor defend myself adequately. The celestials, damn them, most certainly could.

They punished me for that lesson. A divine blade and a mace of light struck home, smashing me back down into the firmament again and again. Each impact cracked stone beneath me. Each fall stole more Health. I rose each time, but rising was not the same as winning. We were a ground-bound, creeping thing and had no place in the air.

Again, it became a war of attrition, and one we suspected we were losing. We had thought my Improved Entropic Aura would gnaw away at their Health, turning time itself into my ally. But the Celestials’ own auras and shields proved defense enough, pressing back against the raw waves of Entropy. At range, the effect weakened further still, reduced from a devouring tide to an irritation against their shining hides.

We considered throwing Zariyah.

The thought died almost as soon as it came. She was the only weapon we possessed that seemed capable of meaningfully opposing them. If she were caught, destroyed, or driven beyond my reach, we would lose more than an enchanted blade. Worse, the Ward protecting this place might flare again the moment our contact broke, rendering her dormant once more. No. Separation was not the optimal choice. Not here, at least. Together we were stronger

We would have killed for my bow, but if wishes were fishes, we would have drowned beneath an ocean of them.

Yet Zariyah pulsed in our grip, wicked and hungry. Not merely eager to be used, but eager to be released without being abandoned. A contradiction. A promise. A threat.

We held the dagger before me and watched the Celestials gather near the rafters, looking down upon me as if I were some crawling thing beneath their notice. The third eye in my helm narrowed.

Then Zariyah answered truly. The dagger pulsed once in my hand, sharp and eager, and the air beneath its hilt began to harden. At first it was only a distortion, a faint shimmer like heat, but there was no warmth in it. The space below the blade folded inward, knitting with pressure until I felt more than saw, a near invisible shaft extended from the grip.

It grew longer, smooth and cold beneath my palm, though my eyes could scarcely see it except where it bent the light around its edges. The weapon settled into a new balance, no longer a dagger made for the intimate work of ribs and throats, but a spear. A divine lance. Zariyah remained at its head, wicked and hungry, while the shaft of solid air gave her reach. Still, not quite long enough to strike them, but it was an improvement.

“Still do you refuse my help? Still do you show stubbornness?” taunted Iasis with her melodic laugh that was at odds with her wickedness. “They grow more powerful the longer they are allowed to stay.”

A retort began to form, but it was beaten down by both the clarity that walking the Path of Carnage brought us, but also due to the brutal reality before us. As things were, there was a very good chance we would lose. Battles should not be picked up over false pride. 

Then the three Angels simply flew from the hall, passing through the windows now bereft of glass and into the open blue beyond. The tendrils of Greater Drain that joined us to them drew taut, stretched to their limit, and snapped as the Devas moved beyond the spell’s range and the bond between us broke.

For the smallest moment, we thought they had retreated. Fortune, as ever, was not with us. Bolts of light streamed back through the shattered windows, curving at abrupt angles and homing in upon us through the air. They raked across our armor wherever we failed to dodge, holy fire bursting against the Mimic’s living plate and burning through to the flesh beneath.

Should we make our escape? No. They will chase us wherever we go, the voices told us. End them now.

These were not dumb creatures. They were things of sapient, alien intellect, and they had merely registered us as a threat better dealt with from a distance. We concurred with the voices. These things would need to be ended here and now, one way or another.

We leaped, clawing and gouging our own handholds and footholds into the stone as we climbed, then launched ourselves through the ruined window and into the green of a well-tended garden. Flowers bloomed all around us in a riot of color, a place of paradise cultivated behind walls of wealth and sanctity. It began to wilt almost immediately as our Improved Entropic Aura found it. Petals blackened. Stems curled. Leaves sagged and browned as if autumn and winter had come in the span of a breath.

High above us, the Angels wheeled in the sky and began another barrage of heavenly bolts. This time, we raised an arm. The Mimic answered, flesh and dark armor swelling outward into a great shield beneath which we took shelter. Holy bolts pummeled into it one after another, each impact ringing through our shared body like a hammer blow against a coffin lid. Our combined Health dropped further, chipped away by light, force, and divine spite.

You have gained 1 Constitution.

A poor reward for my current predicament, but better than nothing.

And while we endured their attack, we were also forming the silent words of my Heal spell. It was touch and go. The impacts rattled our bones. The shield buckled. Light bled through cracks in the organic plate. But we had learned to channel magic in circumstances more difficult than this, and the spell construct held.

Heal flowed through us with its words of salvation and we became as we were. Warmth coursed through flesh and Mimic alike. Wounds closed. Torn tissue knitted. Fractured plates sealed. Our spirits firmed as our Health bar restored itself almost to full. Still, we knew it would not be enough.

“Iasis,” we uttered, feeling the weight of the words before they had even left our mouth. “We accept.”

Feeling the bitterness. The price that could never be paid. The debt that would have teeth. Yet we knew, in that moment, that it was worth it. Worth it to see these things of false heaven brought low. If such a thing was possible. 

“Finally! You are a stubborn one,” Iasis exclaimed from somewhere behind us, chuckling as she spoke. “Was that so hard? But now you shall have to work much harder, even with my aid.”

The battering of heavenly bolts stopped and we peered out from behind our shield to see just why. The three Angels hovered high above the garden, their wings spread against the hard blue of the sky like wounds cut into heaven. For one breath, they remained separate: the woman-shaped Deva with her ruined dignity and mace of light, the seven-winged thing wrapped in its fractured geometry, and the swordsman whose blade still dripped white flame. Then the light between them began to pull tight.

It started as threads. Fine strands of gold and silver stretched from wing to wing, from halo to halo, from wound to wound. The air screamed as those threads thickened into cords. Their bodies stiffened, not in resistance, but in obedience to some command older than thought. Wings folded inward. Limbs drew close. Faces tilted upward in perfect, silent submission. Then they broke apart. Not into blood. Not into flesh. Into raw, golden light.

Their forms unraveled in ribbons of molten radiance, flesh and armor and wings becoming streams of divine fire. The woman-shaped one dissolved first, her blindfold burning away as her face split into a thousand shards of brightness. The swordsman followed, his blade collapsing into a single white line that pierced the center of the growing mass. Last came the seven-winged Deva, its many wings opening wide before folding around the others like the petals of some obscene celestial flower.

The three lights struck together and for a moment, there was no shape at all. Only a sun hanging above the garden, too low, too near, and too full of Heaven’s malice. The flowers beneath it withered further. The stones of the keep cracked. The air grew heavy with the pressure of imposed holiness.

Then the new being unfolded into this reality.

It possessed too many wings to count, layered in vast arcs behind it, each feather edged with burning script. Four arms emerged from its torso, then six, then settled into something that suggested symmetry without truly obeying it. Its body was armored in living gold and white flame, smooth and merciless, beautiful in the way an executioner’s axe might be beautiful when polished clean. Where its face should have been, three faces occupied the same space at once, shifting over one another: woman, warrior, judge. None of them looked human. None of them needed to.

Above its brow burned a crown of broken circles turning within one another. The singular Angel lowered its gaze upon us and the garden fell silent beneath the weight of its attention. 

It seemed the boss battle would continue.

“Iasis!” we rasped and the dark goddess laughed in counterpoint.

The sound had barely left her before she answered with the sky. Above the garden, beyond the very heavens themselves, the blue began to bruise. A dark point formed high overhead, small at first, no larger than a pinprick in the firmament. Then it brightened. Grew. Tore a burning seam through the heavens as it descended.

A star fell. No. Not a star. A shard of burning stone wreathed in black fire and violet light, dragging a long tail of smoke behind it as it screamed toward the earth. The air split and burned around its passage. Clouds shredded. The garden’s remaining flowers flattened beneath the pressure of its approach before the thing ever touched ground.

The fused amalgam of divine flesh looked up. Again, its perfect stillness broke and it exuded fresh uncertainty as it tracked the dark missile. Then the meteor that was not a meteor. struck the garden.

The world vanished into impact.

Stone, soil, flowers, marble paths, and ornamental trees erupted upward in a single colossal burst. The sound was not thunder. Thunder was too gentle a word. It was the hammer-blow of a spiteful god against the skull of the world. The shockwave tore across the garden, ripping hedges from their roots, shattering statues, and hurling chunks of masonry through the air like dice cast by giants.

Heat washed over us. Then dust. Then fragments of burning earth. Now, where the heart of the garden had been, there was now a crater, its edges glowing red, its depths choked with smoke and molten stone. Petals fell through the ash like scraps of dying color, blackening before they touched the ground. The carefully tended paradise had been opened from above and gutted in a single breath.

In the center of the ruin of the garden, something alive moved and spread dark wings.

And above it all, Iasis’s laughter lingered like poison in the smoke.