“Any day,” Ballad responded. “How much time do we need to buy you?”

“They need to occupy the demon for around five minutes,” Vera said, gesturing to the men around her. “I need you for the Ritual. Otherwise, it’ll take longer.”

Ballad frowned at that, his mustache bristling at the thought of not leading his men in battle. But due to his experience, he knew that this was their best shot. “I hope you know what you’re doing.”

“I always do. Now, I suggest you tell them to start attacking. It looks like the demon has woken up from its nap.”

A groan sounded just as she finished saying that, and the soldiers turned to see the giant demon slowly pushing itself up straight with its five hands and one stump.

“Quite right. Men, you know what to do. And come back alive; we’ve already lost too many good men today.”

“Yes, sir!” the soldiers barked, storming fearlessly towards the demon.

Lokus moved to join them, only for a hand on his shoulder to stop him.

“Ah, ah, not you,” Vera said. “We’ll need your Majesty. Ballad here is nearly tapped out.”

Lokus blinked, the action hidden by his mask, but stayed put.

Vera took her hand off of his shoulder and proffered it to him, extending the other to Ballad, who grabbed ahold of it without question after sheathing his sword.

“Don’t just stare at it,” Vera said with a smirk, seeing that Lokus still hadn’t taken her hand. “We all need to be in contact for the Ritual.”

Lokus hesitantly put down his axe and shield, grabbing her hand and Ballad’s hand afterward. After hearing the word “Ritual,” all sorts of wild imaginings had filled his mind, and considering where he was, he found it difficult to stifle them.

“No need to be so tense,” she told him. She tilted her head back and closed her eyes, breathing in deeply through her nose. “The only one at risk is me.”

Ballad snorted, a small protest at the notion of that being true, but didn’t say anything to disagree with it. “Just hurry up and start, before someone else dies.”

“I was about to.” Vera cracked the eye not hidden behind her bangs. “Before someone interrupted me. Now, silence, please.”

Ballad just snorted again, leaving her to do her thing.

Vera took another deep breath through her nose, and when she expelled it via her mouth, it came out in a string of strange words Lokus couldn’t even begin to understand, and yet could understand on a fundamental level at the same time.

The words were menacing, yet majestic. They conjured the image of a beautiful, serpentine dragon coiling in the skies within the minds of her small audience of two, which made the hearts of the weak waver with a roar no less grand than its long body.

Its scales were a glimmering, dark purple, twinkling like amethysts against the backdrop of the blue sky. Each of its claws and teeth were shaped of the most exquisite of ivory, finer than any Lokus had ever seen, and its eyes were like two black holes of purple, sucking in the attention of all who gazed upon them.

Its size eclipsed the giant demon they sought to kill, the planet it flew in, even the solar system that tried to contain it. It was impossibly, unfathomably big, and yet paradoxically, it could fit in the skies of a planet that had no right containing its majesty.

The longer Vera spoke, the more Lokus began to feel that that dragon wasn’t just in his imagination. If anything, it began to become more real, the foggy outline of its edges slowly shedding the rough sketch drawn by his mortal mind to become something more.

This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

Vera spoke of power, of offerings and exchanges. She beseeched that coiling dragon for strength, for the ability to do something her mortal form found impossible. And after a pause that seemingly lasted for centuries, the dragon’s mouth opened.

And it spoke one short word.

Lokus’ eyes snapped open. He didn’t even know when they had closed, and as the sounds of the six-handed demon’s wrath came rushing back to him, his mouth worked, trying to say something that his mind couldn’t find the words for.

Eventually, he eked something out.

“What…?”

His confusion seemed to vanish in a blaze of fire a moment later as Vera’s entire body began to shudder, blood seeping out of her nostrils and eyes as her hand quaked in his grip.

“V-Vera? Are you all right?” Lokus asked.

“Leave her be,” Ballad snapped, tightening his grip on Lokus’ hand. “Lest you bungle it all up.”

Lokus frowned, not quite liking how the man had responded. But after he noticed the way the chords in Ballad’s neck were flexing like disturbed cobras, and the clammy cold of his sweaty palms, he nodded and stopped trying.

The man hadn’t snapped because he was angry at Lokus, but because it took so much out of him to speak.

His attention was soon drawn by the intensifying of Vera’s quakes.

Her mouth parted, mouthing words that her lips moved too fast for Lokus to decipher.

A cloudlike substance formed in front of Ballad’s chest, the same stuff that had coated his sword before, and lengthened like a rope as the man in question grew even paler. Lokus wanted to take off his mask to see what it really was, but didn’t dare to disrupt the Ritual.

That cloudy rope tethered itself to Vera’s own chest, and a tug at Lokus’ Sovereign Gateway informed him that it was time to play his part.

He opened his Majesty to the woman, a flood of energy rushing through his arm and causing him to gasp as every drop of it that he had was torn away by the growing rope connecting Vera and Ballad.

As it grew, it coiled around to her back before splitting and winding down her arms and around her neck. The rope squeezed tightly, visibly pressing against the bare skin of her neck to the point Lokus was worried it would choke her.

Then the world grew silent.

The silence that spawned from that Ritual wasn’t a superficial, shallow existence like the peaceful quiet of the night. It was an all-devouring maelstrom of forced peace that left nothing behind.

The sounds of the demon’s roars, the frantic breaths exiting Lokus’ chest and spilling back into his face after bouncing off his mask, even the very light the King demon gave off vanished under the power of this silence.

For this silence didn’t just quell sound, but sight, touch, the world itself.

The grip Lokus had on Ballad and Vera’s hands vanished, his Domain seeming to revert to that time before he had brought it out of himself.

He was once again that man lost in the endless darkness of Grimn’s Nerves, only this time not even up and down were distinguishable to him.

A darkness so thick that it licked his skin and caressed his hair surrounded him, like the inviting embrace of the end of the world. It smothered him, Domain and all, until he could see, could feel, could THINK of nothing but it.

His thoughts slowed to a stop, empty of all but the void.

If he had the wherewithal to do so, he might have recognized this darkness as the same cloudy substance that wafted off of Ballad’s sword earlier in the battle, but the current Lokus couldn’t even blink, much less think of such inconsequential things.

It was unknown how long he was like that, simply existing without thought or drive or stimulus. Could it even be called “existing?” It was hard to say.

Regardless, it all came crashing down around him when his ears popped.

Considering what he had been going through before, the sudden noise was like a supernova going off within his ears, blowing his eardrums and causing his orifices to gush blood in a grotesque display that was more unpleasant to experience than it was to see.

He fell to his knees, sound and the feeling of stale cavern air and stone underfoot rushing back all at once, far too fast for his mind to cope with. His heart beat erratically, his chest rising and falling at the speed of a hummingbird’s wings as a full-blown panic attack overcame him.

It was too much. Too much, too much, too much. Too much!

“AHHHHHH!!!”

Lokus threw his head back, pouring his frustration and panic into a desperate yell of pain. His body split open in several places, the pulsing flesh and thumping veins underneath his skin revealed to the world as the Majesty flowing through him ran rampant.

Blood poured down his arms, legs, and chest in rivers as the magical energy escaped its confines, lighting up the darkened cavern with a blazing blue light. But right after it started, it washed away like a tide, leaving him panting and bleeding on the ground.

He looked up through bleary eyes, only half-registering that his mask had fallen from his face, and found that his hands were still in those of Ballad and Vera.

And they had it much worse than him.

Vera was now completely consumed by the dark tendrils, wrapped in a velvety cocoon made of stuff darker than the emptiness of space. That inky black substance left nothing exposed, even wrapping around the hand that connected her to Lokus and partially consuming his own hand.

It appeared to pulse rhythmically, to the beating of his own slowing heart, but after a moment Lokus realized that it was just an illusion conjured by his eyes. He hadn’t used them much recently, after all.

As for Ballad…

Well, Lokus had discovered the source of Vera’s prison.