Chapter Forty-Four: Sacrifices of the Sun King

I must warn you that the next part of my tale isn't pretty, but it's what happened and I feel obligated to present at least some decent semblance of these events. You've no doubt gathered that Nargillis of the Outer Relams, the so-called 'Sun King' was neither the kindest nor stablest man. He was imposing, too, standing nearly the height of a taurin, with the great gangling legs of a dreamer, all while being one hundred percent fae… anybody who says the fae are all beautiful is doing a disservice to the diversity of our race. Though, come to think of it, most homely fae are just as nice (if not nicer) than the beautiful ones, and Nargillis was actually very handsome if you only considered his face and ignored the strange, sharp-filed teeth and the perpetual sneer he seemed to wear. I hated that he resembled Calivar so closely.

We were within that strange, ghastly, almost-skull-shaped construct - it had the makings of both a very gruesome sculptural countenance long since gone to ruin and of some ancient artifice. Perhaps it was a weapon of war, and perhaps it was something so strange that we cannot comprehend it. But I suspected that I knew what this place was - at some point, some small scrap of the corrupted fae homeworld had touched down upon this continent, and it had corrupted an entire continent and rendered it a mostly-uninhabitable nightmare for two millennia and counting. And now Nargillis wanted to muck about with those forces.

"Hook the Earth-man up to the engine," Nargillis ordered.

Ben looked at me with his sad, hollow eyes, and my heart just about broke. But I was too angry to cry, and too scared, if that was possible. "I'm sorry," Ben said, and he let the mad king's men strap him into his ancient artificed chair, the Crown of Stars, without a hint of resistance. Meanwhile, a team of human technicians fiddled about with the various cables and extrusions of the chair, hooking it up to the complex grid of controls of the skull-construct's innermost engine - Nargillis had called it the Engine of Change, and something deep within it glowed an eerie pale blue that pulsed deeper and brighter as the crown was attached.

Two guards dragged Meliswe's struggling form to a basin-like depression near the front of the chamber, right in front of where they'd placed the Crown. I screamed against my gag and thrashed at my restraints, unleashing as much magical might as I could. Once again, I called down lightning, which struck the outer frame but did nothing. I cried out a muffled woodsong, but nothing grew for hundreds of yards. I blasted out a mostly-undirected propuls, which was about all I could do without any sort of vocal, physical, or channeling element at my disposal. I think I killed a handful of Nargillis's guards - certainly, several were seriously injured. But the mad king himself was unharmed - he was too close to Meliswe and the others for me to direct the full brunt of my power at him, and it wouldn't have mattered anyway, for he held an intricate staff of a dozen interwoven materials. Not one tenth as good as a spellsword, but good enough to direct almost any sort of magical attack or defense, including a defense against something as simple as a force spell. He was strong enough that, at my weakest, I had no chance in hell to beat him with magic, and he knew it.

"Ungag her," he said. "I want to hear what she has to say… to beg for your friends' lives? To beg to be first upon the sacrificial altar?"

The gag was pulled from my mouth, stinging and sore from hours of tight constriction. I worked my jaw before speaking, my voice slightly hoarse from all the screaming. "I won't beg to you because you're a psychopath and you'd just enjoy it," I said. I spat at him, managing to land a few little flecks of spittle - he seemed to find that amusing. "But that also means you think pretty highly of yourself. This insane plan of yours? It'll swallow all of Alfheim… the whole world. There won't be anything left to rule…"

Nargillis ran a finger along my jaw, seeming to take pleasure in my discomfort. He wiped at my tears and licked them from his fingertips. "You truly are desperate if you'd seek to mislead me so, sweet Laeanna. You forget that I've seen the vision of the Rune Oracle, that I've peered into the world to come, and the Engine of Change doesn't herald the destruction of the world, but the convergence of all worlds… which I shall control. You could have ruled at my side - I am not an unreasonable man. I'd have found other fae to sacrifice easily enough. Your mother would have done nicely. But, I must admit, my long exile hasn't cultivated my patience much. You have all rebuked me, and I will not be rebuked. I am the Sun King, and you are not worthy to stand beside me. But you have the fortune of watching my greatest triumph…"

With that, Nargillis unsheathed a ceremonial dagger and coated it with what was obviously accursed poison. Meliswe's bindings were undone so her limbs could be bound to knobs of some strange, dark metal that reached right into the heart of the Engine of Change. He nodded to a cruel-faced man, who prodded Ben with some sort of artificed wand. And, as Ben cried out in agony, Nargillis stabbed the dagger into Meliswe's heart.

"No! You bastard! You…" I screamed. Most of my sounds were wordless, primal rage. More lightning and more force pulses followed, and none of it did a bit of good. I watched as the blood flowed forth and the light died in Meliswe's eyes. I sobbed, feeling every bit of the stab-wound as my own heart broke. My love, my Meliswe, gone before my very eyes…

"We'll do the dandy prince next," Nargillis said. Meanwhile, the Crown of Stars and its strange throne crackled to life as Ben groaned in agony, his pain passing beyond screams. Outside, the sky flashed with arcane energies, blue and inky violet rending the very fabric of space.

The guards dragged Meliswe to the side and dumped her body unceremoniously before cutting Gaelin's bindings and re-binding him to the sacrificial basin. Another prod to Ben's side. Another stab with the accursed knife… and Nargillis looked at me, watched with a curious glee at the desperation, sorrow, and mounting grief all played across my face. Now my step-brother was dead and the device's activity grew to a dreadful hum, the pulsing vibrations seeming to bend the space around us. They dumped Ben to the side and dragged Calivar over.

This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

As they untied him, Calivar pulled free, headbutting one of the guards… and it takes a hell of a headbutt to stun a sauryx… and then throwing knees and elbows at the others, smashing another man's face bloody, breaking another's knee with a well-timed stomp, and surging toward an amused-looking Nargillis, who simply waited for the remaining guards to bring Calivar to heel. It took six of them, and another two had to be taken from the chamber, as they were too wounded to do much good. But Calivar was eventually restrained, though he'd managed to loosen his gag.

"I love you, Laeanna!" he cried out.

"I love you so much! Don't go! Please don't kill him!" I knew it was futile, but in that moment I was powerless to stop my pleading.

Nargillis's grin spread wider, spittle flecking at the corners of his lips. "Goodbye, brother," he said, and the knife plunged down.

I sobbed, scarcely aware of what was happening as the guards dragged me over next. But I wasn't about to leave this world an undignified, blubbering wreck. I forced my tears back, drew my face into a scowl, and stared daggers into Nargillis's eyes… I only wished they were real daggers. Even he seemed a bit taken aback by my sudden display of resolve.

"Wait…" he started.

But it was too late. The instant the guards cut my bindings to attach me to the machine, I was at them. I didn't try to cause brutal damage like Calivar did, though. I threw a man over my hip, stomped a foot, poked at least three eyes, and then deployed my wings and buzzed upward during the split second I wasn't being actively held. The ceiling was only about ten feet up, so I struck it with a bang, caromed off, and landed next to Ben, still strapped into that horrible Crown of Stars. I tore the crown from my head and brought it over my own brow just as Nargillis lunged at me. But I spun away from his grasping hand… and right into his accursed dagger. Just as I'd intended to do.

The world didn't fade to black… it faded to a gray, featureless nothing.

+++++

It's a little-appreciated feature of magical artifices that, those that are bonded or otherwise coded to an individual invariably have a single point of contact through which that recognition happens. Usually, it's some innocuous part of the device as far away from the really complicated bits as the inventor can make it, such as the armrest of an odd throne with a golden circlet attached. The bonded person has to be touching that bit, but literally anybody with the magical knowhow can operate the device as long as that bond is satisfied - this has occasionally led to a sorceress's undoing… or occasionally their salvation, if they happened to be channeling their friends' mana through a spellsword during a pitched battle. In any case, I was well aware of this phenomenon and used it to my advantage.

Also, I happened to have a vast store of pure mana, still mostly-full despite my recent and desperate outbursts. This comes in handy if you want to put a little English on an artifact to get it to do something a bit weird, whether that's summoning a huge, flaming meteor or pulling your whole physical body directly into limbo at the instant your soul departs the mortal world. This is why young adepts are advised to read their texts carefully and listen to their masters - you never know when these tidbits will come in handy.

The haze of limbo gradually lifted - it was no less gray, but I seemed to drift from a realm of infinitely-dense, completely opaque gray into a great transparent gray that nonetheless stretched for infinity. Somewhere, out beyond that infinity, I felt the stirring and ruminations of vast entities, things so much greater than myself, that I imagine I felt like what a bacterium would feel like if it had the ability to appreciate its position in the universe… though, don't forget: bacteria, in sufficient numbers, have killed many millions of people across human history. The demiurges, therefore, were known to exercise some amount of caution, though even a mighty storm-maiden couldn't hold them at bay indefinitely.

"Laeanna… oh goddess… oh love… they got you, too."

I spun about in the nothingness of limbo-space to face Meliswe. She was obviously very distraught and trying to weep, but it wasn't quite working. The tears wisped out of her eyes in little motes of sparkling light. Her hair was radiant like rose gold flowing about her, her wings spread wide and sparkling with light from a thousand unseen directions, and clad in a resplendent gown. It was the Meliswe I dreamed of when I thought of her, which was often.

"Why is there still a knife in your chest?" Gaelin asked.

That was a fair question. As he and Calivar resolved into view, all of us floating in the vastness of limbo as the formless demiurges shuffled beyond us, trying to decide what to make of us, I managed a glance down at myself. I was the only one of the four of us who didn't have a Platonically-perfect form or a halo of spectral energy about herself. The accursed dagger was still embedded deep in my chest, my clothes damp with just a spot of blood. I didn't seem any the worse for it, though. I pulled the dagger out and watched as a few blebs of blood dissolved into a coppery plume of light. The skin and cartilage of my sternum knit right up before my eyes, though the dress still had a slightly-bloody incision in it.

"We're dead…" Calivar said… "I… I suppose whatever those things are… they're going to take us away." Light wisped away out of his eyes. "I… I'm going to miss you… if I can still miss things wherever I'm going, that is…"

It wasn't clear whether he was speaking to Meliswe or myself… both of us, I suppose. A moment later, another figure came tumbling out of the ether, screaming in terror and far less controlled than any of us since he wasn't used to flying. Ben Boyd found himself caroming past our group - he would have missed us completely if Calivar didn't intercept him and nudge him into the space between himself and Gaelin.

"Sorry, Ben," I said. "If it's any consolation, it won't last long…"

"Right…" Meliswe said. She dabbed at her eyes even though there was nothing to dab. "Should we hold them off for as long as we can or just make it easy for ourselves?"

I drifted forward until our noses were almost touching. I tried to kiss her, but my lips passed right through hers. Oh well - it had been worth a shot. "That's not what I meant, love," I said. I gestured toward my grimy, sweaty, recently-stabbed body. "I have a real body. With real mana. I think I can send us back…"

"You think?" Ben asked.

I shrugged. "I'm pretty sure. It's magic, not science."