I Only Summon Villainesses

Chapter 593: Written As An Apology

I pressed my spine against the hard black stone and tried to remember how to breathe.

My left collarbone was a knot of pure agony. Every time my chest rose, the broken halves of the bone ground together under my skin and sent a white spike of nausea straight into my skull. I was exhausted down to the marrow. My spirit well was a dry, cracked bowl sitting at zero. I didn’t have a single drop of essence left to spend.

But we were off the water.

I rolled onto my right side, keeping my left arm braced tight against my ribs, and looked down the length of the shoreline. The black cliffs of the island towered above us and disappeared into the dark of the cavern roof. The basalt shelves higher up in the Precipice had been freezing. This stone radiated a deep, unnatural heat. It felt like pressing your hand against the flank of a big, sleeping draft horse.

Protruding from the sheer rock face were the chains.

My brain refused to hold their scale. Black iron links as wide as rivers were bolted straight into the bedrock of the island, stretching down the beach and plunging into the boiling black sea to hold the landmass in place. Several of them stopped short of the water. They ended halfway down the beach in shattered links, the iron warped, stretched thin, and snapped by a force that made a joke of basic physics.

‘Something broke those. Something down here pulled hard enough to snap a river of iron in half.’

Kassie paced the edge of the shoreline, her black spiked greaves crunching on the warm stone.

She was still drenched in brine from her trip into the deep, her crimson hair plastered to the iron plating at her neck. Her horned helm was gone. She kept her greatsword resting on her pauldron, her blood-red eyes scanning the dark, churning surf for any sign of the thing that had dragged her under.

Looking over her shoulder, she barked:

“Stay off the ground, maggot. We do not know what lives on this rock.”

I pushed myself up onto my knees, my dark mantle dripping sea water onto the hot stone. My throat was raw from the brine, and my voice cracked as I muttered:

“I don’t think anything lives on it. Look at the metal.”

A thick layer of grey ash coated the shattered links of the nearest chain. Beneath the soot, the iron was scored deep with huge, angular runes. The script was ancient, rigid, and alien to anything I had seen in the upper layers or the capital. It looked less like a language than a lock.

I couldn’t read it. Kassie didn’t care about history, and Maggie only cared about the church’s permitted texts. We needed someone who understood lost divine relics.

I closed my eyes and reached into the rusted architecture of the Soul Sanctum.

My well was empty, so I couldn’t pay the toll for a new manifestation. But the Nave’s banked free window was still active, and Brunhilde had finished her job. The Frost Valkyrie had laid the road across the ocean. I didn’t need cold anymore. I needed the woman who had died trying to expose the gods.

I made the swap.

I released Brunhilde’s tether. The Valkyrie dissolved into a rush of cyan frost and stepped back through the heavy iron doors of the Sanctum. In the same breath, I pulled the fourth tether.

The air on the black beach shimmered with a soft, golden light.

Celestine arrived gently. She stepped out of the threshold and set her bare feet on the warm stone, and the scent of heavy, sweet funeral flowers spread across the beach, cutting straight through the stench of hot copper and ancient brine.

She wore her radiant attire and looked exactly as she had the last time she stood in the physical world, back in the upper layers. Her long hair caught the dim light, and her soft, courteous smile was fixed perfectly in place. Her eyes, above it, were already taking stock of me.

Tilting her head slightly, she looked over my dripping, lopsided posture:

“Ara? You have made quite a mess of yourself, my dear.”

I grunted and used Wren’s scabbard as a cane to get onto my feet.

“Good to see you too, Cellie. We’re at the bottom.”

Celestine ignored the endless black sea and the wreck of the ice road. Her gaze swept past Kassie, past Devant, who was standing calmly near the chains turning his tin cup in his fingers, and settled at once on the shattered iron links lying on the beach.

She walked forward, crossing the rough rock with an eerie, gliding grace, and stopped at the base of a broken link that stood taller than a cathedral spire.

She reached out a pale, delicate hand and brushed the grey ash away from the scored metal.

Ilse dropped to a crouch a few yards away, her breath coming in ragged gasps. The Dragonborn was still locked in her triggered form. Amber scales ridged her arms, and her hands were slick with fresh blood from clawing at the base of her curved horns. She watched Celestine trace the runes with flat, exact attention.

I limped closer, clutching my broken collarbone.

“Can you read it?”

Celestine kept her fingertips pressed against the iron. Her courteous smile thinned and then went away, and her eyes moved along the runes line by line, the way a priest reads a verdict.

Without lifting her hand from the metal, she answered softly:

“It is divine script, Summoner. The oldest dialect. I have not seen these exact characters since before my martyrdom.”

Kassie stepped up beside me and glared at the metal as if it had insulted her.

“Is it a curse? A binding?”

Celestine stepped back to take in the full sequence of the shattered link, her voice low:

“A binding, yes. But the text is not a curse. It is an acknowledgment. Six distinct signatures are woven into the grammar. Six hands forged these chains.”

‘Six hands. The six gods. They chained this island down themselves.’

Celestine turned to look at me, the scent of funeral flowers thickening in the hot air. She held my eyes for a long moment before she gave me the translation:

“It is an apology.”

Nobody said anything after that. An apology. The gods of Ealdrim didn’t apologize. They smote, they burned, and they demanded absolute obedience. Whatever they had chained to the bottom of the Precipice, they had feared it enough to lock it away and respected it enough to carve an apology into the iron holding it down.

‘Great. Even the gods felt bad about this one.’

I looked down at the smooth black stone beneath my boots.

It was still radiating that deep, biological heat. My Death Sense had been blind the whole time we were over the water, smothered by the unnatural density of the black sea. But we were on solid ground now.

I took my right hand off Wren’s hilt, knelt, and placed my bare palm flat against the warm black rock.

I pushed my awareness outward and let the attribute sink into the terrain.

I was expecting a landscape back, fault lines and cooling magma and dead stone. The feedback hit my brain like a physical blow instead, one staggering, overwhelming read of pure vitality.

I fell backward onto the gravel, gasping.

‘It’s alive. The whole island. It’s a body.’

We hadn’t landed on a landmass. We had landed on the exposed back of a living thing so unimaginably huge that its flesh formed cliffs and its breathing governed the tides of the subterranean sea.

Before I could speak, the air pressure on the beach shifted.

[Hidden Attribute Active: Voice of God]

The blue system panel flared in the corner of my vision. Celestine held perfectly still, but her eyes lost their focus for a fraction of a second as the hidden attribute she had unlocked in the upper layers finally engaged. She was tuning in to something the rest of us couldn’t hear.

She was listening to the Hex.

The maddening compulsion that had echoed down the Throat, the voice that had driven the Precipice mad and pulled Light blindly toward the edge, was finally something she could isolate.

The color drained out of her face. The courteous, maternal mask dropped away, and what was left underneath was plain dread.

She closed the distance between us in a single gliding step. She kept her findings from the group. Instead, she knelt beside me on the hot stone and leaned in so close that her lips brushed the edge of my ear, the smell of funeral flowers filling my head. Her whisper was meant for me alone:

“Summoner. The voice screaming in the dark. The madness in the air.”

She paused, her fingers digging painfully into the fabric of my dark mantle. When she finished, it was in her full, formal register:

“It is the exact same voice that hides inside your dark essence.”

The heat of the stone under me stopped registering. I was cold from the inside out.

The rust. The corruption that had broken the Sanctum door, the power that had saved me during the Overdrive and stained my skin with black ink lines for good. The thing chained beneath us was more than the apex predator of the Precipice. It was the source of my own darkness.

A deep, groaning tremor shook the beach.

The stone flexed under us like a muscle contracting.

Kassie’s greatsword flashed into a guard as the ground pitched beneath our boots, and she roared:

“Up! Stand up!”

Devant left his sword where it was. The boy simply turned his head and looked straight up the sheer face of the black cliff towering over us, his tone pleasant:

“I would look up.”

High above the beach, three hundred feet up the rock wall, the cliff face began to grind open.

Huge plates of black stone shifted, shedding tons of loose gravel and crushing ancient basalt into powder. The rock parted horizontally, opening a glowing chasm in the side of the mountain.

Then the chasm moved, and I saw the pupil. It was an eye.

It was the size of the Soul Sanctum, a colossal slitted pupil swimming in a sea of burning red light. The heat pouring off it baked the last of the moisture out of the air in an instant.

The eye looked down.

It passed over Devant. It passed over Kassie. The red pupil settled squarely on me and pinned me to the rock with a crushing weight that made my lungs stop working.

‘Oh no…’

Then the pupil shifted.

The eye rolled slightly to the left, its slit tightening as it locked onto Ilse.

The Dragonborn was still frozen in her crouch, her bloody hands resting on the hot stone, her amber scales glowing faintly in the red light. The eye stared at the horns curving from her skull, and it never blinked.

It stayed on the bleeding Dragonborn for a single, terrifying beat too long.