Genetic Ascension

Chapter 2319: Ties of Fate

Iskaleth looked up at Sylas and met his gaze with as much firmness as she could force into herself.

Her heart was trembling hard enough that she could feel it against the inside of her chest, but she tightened her grip on that fear and refused to let it spill any further.

Fate still showed her nothing but darkness. The Reaper remained behind her, its scythe resting against her throat, every possible path she could see still ending in the same cold certainty. But that was exactly the problem, wasn't it? She had spent her entire life allowing Fate to tell her what was possible, what was wise, what was foolish, and now the first time she found herself standing before something that seemed to break those rules, her instinct had been to fold.

Sylas had called her Will weak, and the more she thought about it, the more she hated that he might have been right. So she found the only sliver of light she could see, wrapped both hands around it, and spoke with a confidence she didn't truly feel.

"If you kill me now, you will die. The bounds of Karma will not allow it."

She didn't explain. She knew she didn't need to.

Sylas was too intelligent for her to insult him with a long-winded breakdown of something he could piece together on his own, and if he couldn't, then she had already misunderstood him badly enough that she was dead anyway.

Giving someone a Karmic boon of sufficient weight was never free. There were always strings, whether either party acknowledged them or not. And the larger the shift caused in another person's life, the heavier those strings became.

Iskaleth didn't know that Sylas had already experienced something similar before, back when a member of the Florineth had saved his life, the only woman outside of Cassarae who had ever called him "hubby."

That moment had occurred at one of the most pivotal points of Sylas' path, one of the few times he had truly lost and had no method of extracting himself from the consequences. Because of that, the grace of saving his life had become impossibly heavy.

Sylas could have hated that woman, resented her, even wanted her dead, but the Karma between them had made retaliation almost suicidal. Worse, that debt didn't remain static. Because it was tied directly to his survival, the more valuable Sylas' life became, the heavier the boon became as well.

This wasn't the same. Iskaleth wasn't saving Sylas' life, just changing it.

The difference sounded small until one considered what a Fate Dragon actually represented. Even a failed Fate Dragon was something formed by an organization arrogant enough to try and condense enough Karma to challenge the myth of Dragons itself, to take an idea built across generations, civilizations, Races, and perhaps entire Heavens, then forge something real enough to stand shoulder to shoulder with it.

The attempt had failed, just as all the others had, but failure at that scale was still something ordinary people couldn't even comprehend. For a force to begin such a project, the Karma they wielded had to be vast beyond reason, and some portion of that weight would still remain within whatever broken creation survived.

And Iskaleth was tied to it. Not through some map she had found or rumor she had overheard, but rather, she had been born in its eye.

Its leakage had altered her body before she had even spoken her first words, leaving her blind to the physical world while binding her senses to Fate in ways no one around her could explain.

There was no one alive who carried a stronger natural connection to that incomplete Fate Dragon than she did. Anyone who might have should already long be dead. That ancient clan, whatever it was, simply didn't exist anymore.

That meant if she guided Sylas to it, helped him claim it, and placed something of that scale into his hands, the resulting Karma wouldn't just recognize her as an informant--though at this scale, even that was enough.

She would benefit from two prongs. First the fact she would be the one to guide Sylas to such a treasure, and second because Sylas benefitting from it and tying himself to it would be equivalent to tying himself to herself as well.

If Sylas truly claimed it through her, killing her afterward would become extraordinarily difficult without that backlash folding back onto him.

Not impossible forever, though.

That was the important difference between this and the Florineth. Iskaleth wasn't preserving Sylas' life, so her debt wouldn't continuously grow with his value. If Sylas became powerful enough, if the weight of his existence eventually surpassed the Karma created between them, then he could crush that debt and kill her without much consequence.

But that didn't matter, she didn't need forever.

She just needed time. Time to grow stronger and refine her Fate Path. Time to find another sliver of light in the darkness, then another after that, until she was truly free.

So Iskaleth spoke, and then she waited.

Sylas' expression didn't shift. Instead, he simply stood there looking at her as though he had just been waiting all this while to hear her answer, an answer that he had already long figured out himself.

Her heartbeat continued to tremble. But then... something changed.

Not in Sylas, but in her.

The shaking slowly faded, not because the danger had disappeared, and certainly not because Fate had suddenly shown her a path out. The Reaper was still there. The scythe still rested against her throat. But for the first time, Iskaleth didn't care as much about what it was showing her.

She had spoken anyway and a faint confidence began to creep into her chest. It was small and fragile, but it was there.

Then Sylas nodded. "Decent."

Iskaleth froze.

There was no shock in his voice, no surprise, and certainly no awe. If anything, it sounded as though he had already known the answer and had only been waiting for her to finally reach it herself.

Sylas looked at her for another moment before turning away.

"For now, this is good enough."

A crushing wait of Will descended and Iskaleth lost consciousness. In those last moments, she realized just how frayed her Will had become and how much pressure it was withstanding. The moment Sylas made the slightest poke at it... the same chains that wrapped around Dry Mouth and a certain coffin lover wrapped around her as well.