Book 7: Chapter 5 - Scars of Darkness (RAW) (Patreon)

Chapter 5 - Scars of Darkness

The Sara Sikittu are said to have learned their arts from beings who found balance and centered themselves within the fivefold elements of nature, as understood by the Empire: wood, metal, earth, water, and fire.

These beings are called Sages: men and women who have dedicated their lives to meditation, discipline, and the unlocking of their own potential. Through that inner mastery, they claim to unlock the secrets of the universe itself. They worship no gods, bow to no altar, and kneel before no divine throne. They seek only truth, cultivating a path that is uniquely their own.

Some say they are immortal. Others say their immortality lies only in the teachings they leave behind, passed from master to disciple, blade to blade, breath to breath.

I look forward to meeting one such being, should they honor me with a dance of steel.

- Master Huanjien Lan of the Land of Streams 123 A.C.

Victory, as always, would be ours.

It was time to ground the foul abomination, that warped thing of corrupted sacrament. Yet even impaled, even wounded, it struggled against the shape of its own ending. Fresh golden chains lashed from its many hands and broken halos, cracking against our armor and biting into the exposed hide and flesh of our mount. Pain tore through the bond between us. Health was lost in jagged chunks. The Manticore screamed its hatred into the sky and answered the Deva in kind, its serpent-tail vomiting a stream of corrosive bile that splashed across the Angel’s perfect form and ate smoking furrows into its divine plate.

We pointed the lance downward and drove the Manticore into a dive. Our beast furled its wings, and together we dropped like a stone cast from heaven’s own battlements. Wind screamed around us. The Angel thrashed upon the point of our weapon, its many wings beating in broken panic as the firmament rushed up to meet it. At the last moment, the Manticore opened its wings, and the force nearly tore us apart. For one brutal instant, we felt ourselves compress against the creature’s back, armor grinding, bones straining beneath the violence of sudden deceleration. Our Constitution held, though our Health fell by a considerable measure.

The same, however, could not be said for the Angel, for it struck the earth like judgment. The impact tore another wound into the garden. Soil, stone, dead flowers, and burning fragments of divine light exploded outward in a choking storm. When the dust cleared, the fused Angel lay broken in the crater, its many wings shattered and spread around it like the wreckage of some obscene cathedral window. Its halos flickered. Its three faces shifted into expressions of pure agony.

The contest for the air was over.

Laughing, we slid down from the Manticore’s back and struck the ground with an impact that would have shattered mortal knees. All that remained was to deliver the coup de grâce and reap whatever experience could be torn from this boss creature’s carcass. Our Health hovered near half, a potential weakness too obvious to ignore, and so we began to cast Greater Heal.

Our hands formed the signs, the silent language of power that gave shape to intent, correcting what had been broken and making whole what had been ruined. Golden light filled us, holy and warm, pouring through flesh. It purified, it restored, and it burned away pain, doubt, and corruption with the clean light of heaven.

It was perfect, and in its perfection, it was a mistake.

As our Health crested and filled, we were violently shoved from the Path of Carnage, from the way of the Asura. Heaven and hell, we were reminded, did not meet. The glorious strength left us. The terrible clarity abandoned us. Enhanced attributes collapsed back toward their baseline; still powerful, yes, but no longer touched by that divine and monstrous excess. Passion returned in its place, along with emotion and the old, messy fever of the self. Still, the way forward remained simple enough, for it required only the killing blow.

But with the loss of the Path, our strength was not the only thing to sleep. The solid air that formed the haft of our lance wavered, flickered, and vanished. Zariyah, our vessel weapon, became only a dagger again. The hunger that had filled her retreated, spent and drowsing, and she drifted lazily back into our hand. We knew at once that, for the moment, she was done. Just a dagger. A precious one, perhaps. A wicked one. But not the god-felling spear she had been moments before.

With a tsk of annoyance, we sheathed the blade and let her rest. Lost to us was our borrowed divinity. Lost to us was the weapon that could fell a thing from heaven.

No matter, we thought. We will tear the creature apart with our bare hands if necessary.

As we approached the fallen, mewling thing that had been an Angel, a familiar presence touched the edge of our awareness. The third eye in our helm tracked it before our mortal senses could name it, following a current of energy that resonated with our own. It was known, familiar, and irritatingly late.

Distracted, we turned and saw that beyond the castle walls, a pillar of water rose into the air, twisting upward like a living thing. Atop that moving column rode a manta-ray shape we knew too well.

Bubbles.

Larynda had come, late as ever, only in time to gather what glory remained. Yet even through that bitter thought, another colder one needled through us. A fallen enemy, not yet dead, was still a threat.

“Get back, girl!” we shouted, using Improved Dash to close the distance and seize the fallen Angel.

Either she could not hear us, which we doubted, or she was willfully ignoring us. The latter seemed far more likely. Worry threaded itself through our thoughts as our armored hands found the Angel’s heaven-forged plate. We tried to tear it open to get to whatever substance was beneath. For one promising instant, we felt it begin to give beneath our grip. But it held as our strength was not enough.

The Angel’s three faces stared up at us, a silent mockery of mortal pain. Fine cracks ran across its mangled body, and gold bled from the seams. If we could not strip away its armor, then we would pummel it into oblivion. We raised our fist and aimed a blow at one of its faces, pouring every scrap of wrath and hate into the motion with an Improved Power Strike.

It should have been devastating. Instead, the creature blocked with one of its broken wings. The impact nearly sheared the limb away, twisting it into a parody of an appendage, but it was enough and the attack failed to land cleanly.

Then, out of the corner of our eye, we saw Larynda point one of her staves at us just as a bubble of gold burst against our side as the Angel unleashed a desperate defensive spell. Next, we were flying.

The force of it hurled us away, spinning end over end through smoke, dust, and falling ash. We struck the ground disoriented, and the world was reduced to a thing of confusion. Though the impact was softer than it should have been. Wet and yielding.

A glance down showed unnatural water spread beneath us, cushioning the fall. Larynda’s work, of course. Its duty done, the water lost its shape and seeped back into the broken earth.

The bubble enclosing the fallen servant of Heaven began to collapse inward, coalescing around its body in a cocoon of raw, golden change. Still mounted atop the manta-like Lirkud, Bubbles, Larynda reacted at once. She raised her staff and sent bolts of multicolored light screaming into the Angel’s prison, each chaotic impact splashing across the protective gold as we regained our feet.

While Larynda hammered away at the cocoon with Chaotic bolts, we used Improved Rush Strike and drove another punch into the barrier. It was perhaps a futile gesture, but we knew well enough not to let an enemy recover. Our armored fist struck the golden shell with a heavy, ugly thud, yet no visible crack appeared.

Still, there were small flecks of black blooming within the gold where our Improved Entropic Aura ate away at it. Slowly. Too slowly by far.

But, there was one consolation prize.

You have learned Improved Rush Strike

“Gil!” Larynda cried, throwing something toward us.

In the stories, the hero always made the desperate catch. But this was no story. This was life written in struggle, blood, and pain. Our sword traveled through the air, its elegant curve spinning, once, twice, three times through the smoke-stained light.

It fell short. Of course it did.

We had to dash toward it in something perilously close to ignominy, snatching it from the blackened ground with feverish fingers while the Angel’s cocoon brightened behind us. Still, the solid weight of the Saint’s Silver sword brought a measure of comfort. Adamantine fists had failed. Perhaps Godmetal would fare better.

Then we heard it, the familiar words. Doom in the shape of a spell for the Deva was reciting the First Spell.

An ungifted person, one not truly blessed by Mana, could cause an explosion that would rend stone and scatter flesh across a courtyard. An Angel, a servant of Heaven and a being of raw magic, would not merely cause destruction. It would invite an apocalypse. One that would consume even us.

To flee, or to fight?

It would have been easy to call the Manticore and escape upon the wings of our dread steed. Easy, and perhaps even wise. But flight would mean the deaths of those around us. Sinners and saints alike. No, there were no saints here. Only sinners, and those less stained by its passage.

To flee would mean Larynda’s death, and we had never been one to shirk from responsibility once it had been placed in our hands. I had made a promise, and I meant to keep it.

So we held the scabbard at our side and settled into the stance required for a draw cut. We no longer had the Path of Carnage to guide us, no cold Asura clarity sharpening every line of the world. Only training remained, half remembered from a dream that felt like it belonged to a different life. We focused as best we could, gathering the energies into the scabbard, feeling them coil there like a storm trapped in too narrow a vessel.

It would not fill fast enough. Our concentration was too scattered. The pressure was too great. Even we could see that much. So, we recast Sage’s Sight, refreshing the spell and hoping it would lend us some fragment of the clarity we had lost when we stepped from the Path. A breath passed. The Angel’s cocoon glowed brighter. The words of the First Spell continued to gather, each syllable tightening the noose.

Then, in counterpoint to that doom, Larynda began to chant.

It was a new refrain. A new spell. Almost intimate in its cadence. It resonated with our own magic. Chaos and order moved through it together, braided within the flow that was Water.

I ask the spell: who are you? Larynda spoke, eyes closed, in a language without true words.

Understanding answered.

Seven are my swords, gifted of light. Six are my blades that can pierce the sky. Five are the elements that bind this world. Four are the broken...

The litany continued, rising toward a crescendo as the air shivered between us. Her magic reached for ours, not seizing, not commanding, but aligning. The energy in our scabbard swelled beyond its previous limit, mixing with our own power until it became something larger than either spell alone.

“Resonance Flare,” declared our ward in the language of the Old Ones and we became more closely joined than lovers.

The scabbard burned against our side and the energy within it was primed. Became ready. More complete than it had ever been with our magic alone. It demanded only one thing now; the perfect release.

We took a step forward, as unafraid as a mortal creature could be when facing annihilation. Not fearless, vever that. For fear was honest and fear was useful. But we were gifted, in that moment, with something rarer and perhaps more dangerous. 

Trust and an unyielding belief.

“You can do it, Gil,” Elwin said, his voice carrying the hollow weight of a haunting.

Enkidu only nodded, holding back a grunt, his presence like an old shield raised one final time.

So we drew and gave it everything we had.

The sword did not so much move as it simply ceased to be in one place and became present in another. The cut was imbued with all that remained in us: wrath, frustration, duty, desperation, and the hateful fusion of two wills and two magics forced into a single impossible edge.

It was more than a physical attack. It was more than a magical attack. It was a strike at the conceptual level, a single line of denial carved through the fabric of the world.

You do not belong here.

The blade of Godmetal met the divine cocoon, and the golden light fractured, then shattered.

The sword kept traveling, guided by destiny, fate, and the stubborn violence of our hand. It pierced through layer after layer of hastily raised shields, dissolving the divine mathematics that had formed them. It continued through plate, through corrupted flesh that was never meant to exist upon this plane, through the false architecture of a celestial servant given stolen form.

It answered Heaven with a simple and absolute “no”.

A line of black followed the path of our blade, a gaping wound cut into the universe itself. Beyond it writhed tentacles, eyes, and things that would have given madness to lesser men. We looked through that sliver into the abyss and felt nothing. There was nothing to feel. Madness had long been a friend to us, and ironically, perhaps the only true tool by which a semblance of sanity could be preserved.

Behind us, before us, around us, we saw a thousand versions of ourselves fail. But, in this one, the one we lived, and we succeeded.

For one trembling instant, I saw something. Not the world as it was, but the world as it should not yet be. Amid mist-wreathed mountains, beings born from the arrogance of meditated perfection began to stir. To the south, beneath the endless sands, something clawed its way toward waking from the Dream: a thing of bone, betrayal, and old hunger. And across the seas, in a place so distant, something cried out in fresh fear.

Then the vision was lost as I saw the Angel began to dissolve into nothing, its lie exposed at last to the truth of our existence. The only truth that had ever mattered. The truth that was found at the edge of a blade and at the endpoint of an abiding hate.

There was no grand reward, no triumphant fanfare. Only another message.

You have gained 1 Strength.

You have gained 1 Dexterity.

You have gained 1 Wisdom.

You have gained 1 Luck.

You have learned Advanced Swords (lvl.4)

You have learned Advanced Power Strike (lvl.1)

You have learned Vorpal Slash (lvl.4)

No experience, for the world would always seek to cheat me whenever it could.

The Mimic, sensing my ire, retreated and we were no longer us. I did not laugh. There was no emotion left in me as I watched the Angel fade into motes of corrupted golden light. There had been no experience. Of course there had not. The creature had never truly existed. It had been a deception, a summoned thing forced upon this plane and given false form by the arrogance of Heaven.

“Damien...” Larynda said, breaking the silence. “He...”

“I know,” was all that I could croak as the adrenaline and battle fever began to leave us.

I knew. I knew and found that I did not much care.