The Beginning After The End

Chapter 510: Wounded

ARTHUR LEYWIN

“A trick. Of course,” Morwenna said, her lips pursed, her stiff posture even more rigid than usual. “We should have known.”

Rai Kothan was pale. Agrona’s capture had been a way to help heal the basilisks and their relationship with the rest of Epheotus. I could practically see the calculations being rapidly processed behind Rai’s eyes as he gauged the consequences of this mistake.

I almost laughed. It seemed so unlikely, so preposterous. How had I missed it? I’d cut the literal threads of Fate, connecting him to—

Connecting him to the real Agrona, I finished, something clicking into place. Dozens of thoughts splintered and branched out under the effects of King’s Gambit, my mind holding many different thought processes simultaneously.

Each connected back to a single point. Fate. Somehow, this played into what it wanted.

‘So this whole time Agrona’s just been…what, exactly? Puppeteering this Vritra flesh suit from the depths of his creepy castle?’ Regis’s disgust intermingled with my own. ‘Huh. You think you know a guy.’

Another branch of my conscious mind was already considering the ramifications of this discovery. We had to assume Agrona was still alive, which completely changed the context of the message Chul brought.

I can’t second guess the decision to stay, yet another branch processed. The relationships I’m forging with these asura—especially the younger ones—will be even more important in the future now, because if Agrona is still in Alacrya, that makes Kezess even more dangerous.

Kezess’s voice drew the thread focusing on the present to the forefront.

“Khaernos Vritra.” Kezess practically spit the name. He sneered, and when his eyes skipped to me for an instant, they were a thunderous purple, almost black. “What is this?” He reached out and took hold of Khaernos by his flat chin. “How—”

Suddenly Khaernos jerked, pulling his face away from Kezess. His horn, which curved down and out like an aurochs, caught Kezess across the temple. Kezess was reeling back, swelling with mana and aether alike, the air becoming thick around him, the entire castle seeming to constrict in around us.

But the mana that bound Khaernos within the beam of light was sliding over his skin like water over the waxed feathers of a duck. He was moving, slipping free of the bounding white light that held him. One hand, an arm, then a shoulder were free before anyone had even blinked an eye. Black light was shining from within him, through his skin. The light seemed to eat away at the prison cell and Kezess’s building spell simultaneously.

I started forward, aether shimmering in my hand, condensing, in the process of forming the violet blade of a sword, but the raw power emanating from Kezess was clamping down on the chamber like a vice, and I moved through it like I was running underwater.

Khaernos Vritra snarled, an ugly, vindictive expression.

Black light exploded out of him like he was the center of a bomb. I had a fraction of a second to recognize the sight of rending skin, then everything in front of me was dissolving.

I threw up a thick barrier of aether. Beside me, Rai Kothan did the same with interlocking shards of blood iron. The black light crashed against both barriers, then receded almost as rapidly. For an instant, I had a view of Khaernos and Kezess: the former, hanging half out of the prison of light, black lightning-bolt cracks spreading across his flesh; the latter reeling, seething, his controlled demeanor fallen away as the same black cracks flickered and faded across his hands and face.

Then, Khaernos exploded again.

A cloud of razor-thin black blades of light sliced through the chamber.

A few, then a dozen, then even more cut through the barrier, the strikes so fine they practically slipped between the particles of aether. I felt sharp tugs across my body, then the warmth of blood dripping. Around me, there were grunts and a sharp scream. Regis’s form, blazing with amethyst flames, stepped out of the uneven lines of my shadow in front of me.

The energy flashed back into Khaernos. Another snapshot: this time, the cracks ran deep, issuing the black light, his body nearly in ruins; Kezess only a few steps away, a deep cut across the side of his neck; the mana and aether between them bending around and condensing, attempting to hold Khaernos’s spell inside.

With a sword of concentrated aether in my fist, I activated God Step and waited.

Khaernos erupted for the third time. The mana of Kezess’s binding began to break down as a void extended outward from the Vritra Sovereign, unraveling mana in the same Seris’s abilities could.

I stepped into the aetheric pathways and appeared right next to Khaernos within the bubble of void space. His eyes were shot through with red, blending the irises into the sclera. Ashen gray patches of skin fell off and fluttered to the ground, revealing raw red flesh beneath. One of his horns had shattered from the force of his own spell.

He was dying. I didn’t entirely understand the mechanics of the spell he’d cast, but his core was shattered. I could sense the pieces of it spreading out like shrapnel through his chest.

Almost all of his mana was now concentrated in the single remaining horn. I didn’t wait to strike.

The aetheric blade jerked as it met the tough, mana-dense tissue. It jerked—and then bit through.

The horn tumbled to the floor, clattering, and all around us, the mana broke apart, the void blast dissolving into nothing.

Behind me, I could feel the others’ mana releasing. For a brief, bright moment, they had held off the roaring void, and they were left stumbling with no opposing force pushing back.

Then their power erupted throughout the prison cell.

Radix flashed forward, his form wrapped in black diamonds, brushing past me to take Khaernos by the throat. Stone-like vines thrust up from the floor in a circle around Khaernos’s prison of light, and bright teal flowers sprouted like crystals from them before ejecting motes of bright white mana into the air. Orange phoenix fire pierced Khaernos through his wrists, elbows, knees, and clavicle. Thick chains of blood iron coiled up like a snake and began to wrap around him.

“Enough.”

Kezess stepped around the strange, stony vines. The white and gold of his clothing was bright and fresh, unstained by crimson blood, and he seemed outwardly composed. With each step, only the faintest hitch hinted at the injuries he hid—a fact only noticeable because of King’s Gambit.

“I almost forgot,” he mused, stepping closer to the lolling, barely conscious basilisk. “Khaernos Vritra, such an expert in mana manipulation that you are nearly resistant to its use against you.”

Radix grunted. “Not resistant to having his head smashed against the stones like a ripe sun fruit.”

Morwenna let out a sharp exhale of approval.

The blood iron chains constricted, pulling Khaernos fully back into the beam of light which, an instant later, darkened and oozed until it was a blood-red color.

“Release him,” Kezess said. His voice lacked any emotion. He radiated cool detachment.

The others withdrew, Radix releasing his physical hold, while Novis recalled several spinning, fiery hooked weapons. The chains remained though, a physical binding within the crimson prison of mana.

Each individual was wounded, although not badly.

Novis’s arms were a patchwork of thin cuts. Flames licked from them, slowly burning the wounds shut. Half of Radix’s face was pockmarked with what looked like shrapnel wounds, but crystalline scabs were already forming over them. Half of Rai’s right hand was missing bloodlessly, the open flesh black and smooth. Only Morwenna showed no obvious signs of injury, but she was wrapped in an aura of the pure mana that emanated from the crystalline flowers.

My own wounds were largely healed already, the skin knitting back together rapidly. I disregarded them, focusing instead on Kezess and Khaernos.

Kezess stared down at the Vritra Sovereign, who was no longer floating in the middle of the red beam but on his knees at its center, the black chains pinning him—needlessly, I thought. He looked as if he’d be dead any moment.

“His power is devouring the fragments of his core,” Morwenna noted, stepping closer. She raised a hand delicately, and a swirl of mana flitted like fireflies around it. “I don’t think even my healing can save him now.”

“Save him?” Radix grunted, scratching absently at the diamond scabs on his face. “It is my professional opinion that perhaps speeding him along would be the better option.”

Rai Kothan looked down sadly on his fellow basilisk, the only one to show an emotion other than bitter disgust or seething anger. “Morwenna is right. This void technique…it isn’t meant to be something you recover from.” He kneeled in front of Khaernos. His fingers extended toward the severed horn but he didn’t touch it. He looked up at Kezess. “What’s left of the void will consume him from within.”

I could just barely sense it, the hungry nodes of Decay-attribute mana moving like worms through his body, eating as they went.

Power rolled off of Kezess, and the chamber seemed to buckle. The crimson light grew dark and took on a magenta hue. Within the cell of light, the mana froze, as did the falling skin that still flaked away from Khaernos’s body. He was no longer breathing, either—frozen in time. “We can buy more time if necessary. I can make your death take as long as needed, Khaernos. And it will be unpleasant. Every stretched second will feel like an age to you. An endless afterlife spent slowly degrading, with the relief of death just out of reach.” He paused. “Unless you feel like speaking of your own accord. Perhaps, Khaernos Vritra, you do not feel like defending your High Sovereign, Agrona, and his secrets—”

Time snapped back into motion within the cell. Khaernos spit blood and black pus, which drooled down the bare bone of his chin. “You and Agrona, you deserve one another. I hope you rip each other to pieces.”

“So this wasn’t something you signed up for then,” I asked, watching him carefully, King’s Gambit helping me to dissect his every movement. Even without the godrune, though, it was clear he had no need—or strength—to deceive us.

His gaze turned to me, his expression empty of recognition. “Why does this lesser speak in my presence? I am Khaernos the Black Scourge, Sovereign of—”

“You are a meat puppet,” I said dryly, cutting him off.

Regis snorted from where he lingered behind the great lords.

Kezess, who had stopped time in the cell again when I spoke, gave me a look. There was no humor in it, but his eyes briefly brightened to lavender before darkening again. “Did Agrona send you here to attempt to take my life?” He then released the movement of time.

Khaernos scowled at me murderously. “No. But when I opened my eyes and your face was the first thing I saw, all I could think was how I wanted to carve it off.”

The others stirred, but Kezess gestured for silence.

“What is your reason for being here, then?” Kezess pressed. His tone was even, the earlier fury he’d openly expressed now masked.

Khaernos shrugged, or tried to. He couldn’t quite manage it, but the sentiment was conveyed nonetheless. “You tell me.”

“You don’t remember anything?” Rai asked, clearly not convinced.

“All that time—decades, potentially—as Agrona?” I added, just as doubtful.

His face melted into a furious grimace. “Decades? That traitorous bastard.”

Radix chuckled, the noise resounding off the stone walls. “You weren’t a willing participant in his spell.”

“Willing?” The word ripped from Khaernos’s throat, jagged and bloody. “He turned me into his…” He glowered at me. “His flesh puppet. No, I was not willing. The degradation!” His teeth gnashed, but the outburst seemed to drain him. His head lolled, and his eyes fluttered. “I have no…memory of it. I can tell you…only one thing: you were fools to let us live this long.”

He froze in place, the last word barely off his bleeding lips. The dark worms of mana devouring him from within also stopped, suspended.

I paced around Khaernos in a circle, taking in the Vritra. “Why doesn’t he remember? This sounds pretty similar to what Cecilia was doing to Tessia, and she was conscious for most of that time.”

Rai stood, turning away from the grizzly sight. “Agrona Vritra specializes in subjugating the mind, twisting perception, and even rewriting the past through memory. His presence inside this sad excuse for a basilisk’s head would have been too much to overcome.”

“So you don’t think he’s lying?” I asked, leaning up against the wall so I could see all of the lords. “That this isn’t yet another manipulation by Agrona? As assassination attempts go—”

“It failed,” Kezess said simply, but there was a smoldering tension beneath the cool exterior, and his hand twitched toward his ribs.

“What, then, does this mean about Agrona?” Morwenna asked. The healing motes of her vines had drifted to the others throughout the conversation. Now, she dismissed them. They retracted back through the floor, leaving no indication that they’d ever been present. “He must still be out there somewhere.”

“He’s doing something in Alacrya. Seris sent me a letter. Chul brought it.” I took a sharp breath and pushed away from the wall. “I need to go back. If he’s lost his…factotum…then he might be desperate—and vulnerable.”

Novis glanced at Khaernos, still suspended in the viscous maroon light and wrapped in heavy black chains, motionless. The others focused on Kezess.

Kezess was thoughtful, his fingers tapping absently against his smooth jaw. His eyes seemed to lose focus as his mind turned elsewhere. Then he snapped back. “Indeed. We need to know what he’s up to—now that he’s been driven into a corner. You and your companions should head to Alacrya immediately, scout out the situation. Before we can—”

Suddenly, the ground quaked. The entire castle lurched as if the mountain beneath it was collapsing. Outside, there was a strange sound, one that came from far, far away, something between the rush of hurricane wind and the ripping of strong fabric. Kezess spun, looking through the walls and floor to the magic that underpinned them and held his castle together.

Morwenna, Rai, Novis, and Radix all wore the same dumbfounded expression. “What—”

Light, not a flash, more like a reflection on distant water, then Myre was there. She was still wearing her younger form. A barely shrouded panic trembled just underneath her skin.

“Great lords, quickly, the—”

Space folded around us. We stopped standing in the cell and appeared before the front gates. The many-colored bridge that guarded the approach extended before us, but no one was looking down. As one, the asuras all stared up.

“No…”

A cold dread shook me, clinging to my heart and lungs.

I heard my name in my mind and on the wind whipping around the cliffsides beneath Castle Indrath: Sylvie, questioning, afraid. I didn’t answer. I couldn’t.

Standing just beside and behind Kezess and Myre Indrath, flanked by the other great lords, I looked into the sky and struggled to understand what I was seeing.

It was as if the sky had simply been opened up, like a titanic blade had been drawn across its surface, opening a would in its flesh and revealing what lay underneath. An aurora writhed violently at its edges, red and purple, like raw skin around a forming bruise at the edges of folded space.

Unlike the cut of a blade, though, the wound in the sky was not straight and clean, but jagged, like it had been torn open with claws and teeth, or blunt force. Around the aurora, the sky was gray and forlorn, and there was an impression of malformation, like the sky—like all of Epheotus—was being bent toward the wound.

Like a black hole.

But the hole itself was not the thing that made my blood run like ice water in my veins.

The wound wasn’t simply an opening into the void, to the black-purple of the aetheric realm or the star-dampled emptiness of deep space. On the other side, there was a different sky, still cloud-filled and light blue, fading to purple and then black at the edges. And within that sky, a blue globe.

Two landmasses broke up the blue with greens and browns. One, a simple square or diamond, carved in half by a rough slash of mountains. The other, jagged and broken, a shape roughly like a twisted, horned skull…

And between them, a vast and empty sea.

“Dicathen. Alacrya.”

I stood as if in a dream, seeing a world that didn’t quite connect properly in front of me, like I’d stepped from one room in a house only to end up in the wrong adjoining room.

The view through the wound was imperfect, cut across by purple wind and distortion of light, but I knew what I was looking at: the rift that connected from Dicathen into Epheotus had been ripped open. Even as I watched, the distorted edges of the wound were widening, exposing more and more of the world beyond it.

I swallowed, my feet heavy, my mind moving with all the smooth motion of rusty gears.

Epheotus had been pulled from our world and contained within a barrier or bubble, housed outside of real space within a separate dimension, something akin to the aetheric realm. They pushed up against one another, with the barrier around Epheotus relying on the aetheric realm to exist. I’d known since the last keystone that Epheotus couldn’t survive indefinitely, but…

I didn’t know what to do. I’d expected the slow turning of the asuras to my cause, the evacuation of Epheotus and reintegration of the asuras back into the physical world, to be a work of decades, even hundreds of years. But now, while I stood helpless, I watched the world on which I’d been reborn come closer and closer with each passing second.

There was a soft gasp from behind me, and I turned to find Sylvie, Ellie, and Mom stumbled to a halt as they saw the wound. Regis was sprinting along behind them, taking in everything.

Sylvie’s expression hardened, but I watched Ellie and Mom both teeter on the edge of mental collapse. Ellie sprinted to my side, wrapping her arms around me. Mom was a little more controlled, but only a little.

“What’s happening?” Ellie asked in a breathless whisper at the same time that Mom said, “What does this mean, Arthur?”

Standing with my family, I wanted to give any other answer, but I couldn’t. “I don’t know.”

AGRONA VRITRA

I leaned against the parapet and watched the sky ripple and open. The path into Epheotus, like the mouth of a waterskin that was being held shut, was now tearing wide, a rend in the sky that stretched from the Beast Glades of Dicathen, across the sea, and over Alacrya’s Basilisk Fang Mountains. A violent red and purple aurora surged at its edges as reality itself gave way, the barrier holding Epheotus in its own realm collapsing from the connection point outwards.

“I tried to do this the easy way,” I said, staring up into the wounded sky. “All I wanted was the power that you’ve spent countless ages hiding. You could have died, but this world—both worlds—could have continued on, back in step with the natural order of their existence. But you just. Won’t. Let. Go.”

My words caught as the tear opened wider. Through it, I began to see light and color.

Home.

Or, what once might have been home. Not anymore.

“Everything you’ve built, everything you’ve clutched onto from the very beginning, is going to crumble. And I will take what I need by sifting through the wreckage.”

A/N: Hi everyone! Lots of exciting things are in the works, so my schedule has been busy. I usually go over my chapters a few times before I post it, but I haven't had the time to do so for this chapter yet. A revised one will be updated later today(it'll likely just be a few proofread changes). I wanted to thank everyone for their support. The 2-week hiatus for the novel will begin next week!