Toren Daen

I had heard heartbeats that sounded wrong before. With my sense of lifeforce, I could listen in on the heartbeats of the smallest insects to the largest mana beasts. They all had different, subtle inflections in that pulse. A jump here could indicate fear or anxiety. A resounding pulse could tell me of their passion and adrenaline. And maybe a slow timbre sang a song of sleep and slumber.

But Agrona’s heartbeat was all of that. Every possible frequency and rise and fall and emotion and feeling and everything, all forced into a tiny singularity. But it wasn’t a peaceful thing, made harmonious. It was as if the God of Alacrya had torn these emotions from the hearts of everyone around him and gorged himself on their discord. Agrona’s lifeforce reveled in the chaos.

That horrible heartbeat throbbed in my head again, making my vision swim. Blood leaked from my mouth, dripping onto the small pool I’d hurled up not a second before. My limbs were heavier than stone. Heavier than iron. Heavier than lead.

Agrona Vritra’s footsteps echoed out across the empty temple as he descended the altar, his hands clasped behind his back. He smiled in a friendly way as he approached, each footfall the ringing of an executioner’s bell. Every step heralded the end of a world.

He stood not far away from where Seris clutched my shoulders tightly, observing us like we were pets that had misbehaved. I groaned, wanting to curl into a ball and hide. This was a nightmare. A figment of my fevered mind. I must still be in the shock of fighting Mardeth; in some sort of coma in a bed.

Seris’ breathing hitched as the High Sovereign watched us inquisitively. I saw the tremble of her lips; felt the terror in her intent. Yet she stayed kneeling, clasping my shoulders like a rigid, steadying statue.

“Seris,” Agrona said lightly, unclasping his gray hands from behind his back. “Move away.”

I felt the Scythe’s hands clench tighter around my shoulders where she held me. I looked into her eyes, silently begging, pleading that she stay. I didn’t want to be left alone with this monster. I–I couldn’t be left alone. I was so, so alone. Aurora had already fled, and–

Sensing the Scythe’s reluctance, Agrona shook his head. The jewelry adorning his horns jingled lightly like chimes. “Seris,” he said again, shaking his head as if she were a dog that had torn apart furniture. His tone lowered slightly. Became ever-so-slightly threatening. He waved a single hand dismissively. “Move.”

The Scythe watched my eyes with her wide, onyx orbs, her arms shaking as they retreated from my shoulders. She haltingly stood, her movements jerky and unrefined as she stepped away. Her grace was gone, washed away in a tide of fear. Her fingers trembled as they left me, an unrelenting cold taking their place. The sole bit of warmth remaining abandoned me.

Agrona Vritra rubbed his chin as he stared down at me, the horrible, horrible discordant heartfire blocking out nearly every other sound.

But even as I stayed petrified on my knees, there was another presence in my body that refused to be chained. That hated everything the basilisk stood for on a fundamental level; that despised each and every decaying touch they left in their wake. That claimed the sky, and defied those that slithered across the wet earth.

Lady Dawn’s Will surged, rising to the surface of my skin against my wishes. I saw orange, feathering runes run along my arms, tracing their way under my sweat-soaked shirt. The chain enwrapping my left arm glowed a powerful red light, banishing the darkness in the cathedral, and I knew my eyes glowed with the light of a star.

Only too late did I try and contain the raging power in my core. Too late did I realize what this would mean. Too late did–

Agrona shook his head, laying a palm vast enough to block out the sky on the top of my scalp. I saw as his fingers ran through my deep, fiery red hair, the Will inside roaring in contained fury. “When Lady Dawn threw her soul to the wind, I’ll admit I expected something more interesting. For such a Discordant Note within the grand symphony, your power is… paltry.”

I felt his mana pierce my mind, the tendril beelining for the burning fury of my Phoenix Will. Its metaphysical wings unfurled, daring the High Sovereign to encroach upon its skies. Blood leaked from my nose as my body heated up, my physique unprepared for the depths of Soulplume. My mana surged without control, pulsing with the heat of a nascent star.

Until Agrona’s tendril wrapped the Will in its clutches. Casually, as if pushing aside the annoying snap of a fly, the Lord of the Vritra pressed down with his mental might. I screamed as tracks were torn through my mind, the power wrenched from my bones.

Aurora’s Will crumpled. The searing warmth that cascaded through my channels winked out like a candle flame, true shadow overtaking it. The power was compressed back into my core with minimal effort, the runes disappearing from my hands as all the light in the world was overcome by the surety of darkness.

I fell forward onto my forearms, every sense I possessed going haywire. My breathing came in short, choppy gasps, the violation of my mind–my sanctum–leaving me unable to even feel. My vision doubled. Tripled. Then fractured further. I vomited blood onto the ground again.

Agrona stepped back, that tendril receding from my mind. A bit of my blood had somehow tainted his pristine skin. He flicked it away. “I’ll admit it was a novel idea, trying to possess a no-name lesser from the middle of the slums. Perhaps if Lady Dawn’s soul held more power, she could have truly overwhelmed your pathetic little mind, Spellsong. The lingering effects of her presence in your head are amusing, with her Beast Will entrenched in your core. But what she truly left behind…”

I curled into a ball, trembling as my blood pooled around me. I shut my eyes, trying to keep out the pain. Maybe, if I kept my hands over my head, I could stop that horrible tendril from scraping away at the insides of my thoughts. Maybe I’d be safe.

I was a child again, afraid of the unknown. I wanted my mother. I needed her warm, soulful embrace. Needed her to tell me it would be okay. That it was all a bad dream. That the monsters under my bed hadn’t manifested before me to tear apart my very soul. I wanted to hear her sing a lullaby that would tell me it would all go away.

But she had left me. Abandoned me in the dark.

Agrona petted me on the head, ruffling my hair. My body creaked from his casual strength, my tendons stretching and my muscles straining.

“No matter,” the Lord of the Vritra said from above me. “The main event must begin.”

I looked up, my vision tainted red from my blood. Inside my core, the Phoenix Will of the Asclepius clan crooned in defeated terror, its metaphysical wings broken and torn.

Agrona clapped his hands, the sound shaking the foundations of the temple, and two indistinct forms were hauled by hooded men toward the altar. Their hands were bound in black chains, utterly trapped.

My vision slowly focused as I took in the two prisoners brought bound before the altar. The hooded men bowed deeply as they deposited the bodies, then retreated back into the shadows.

My eyes widened as I noticed one. His horns twisted back from his bald scalp, wrenching up and through his eye sockets. Varadoth’s dagger-like goatee was in disarray, a few cuts across his face and arms. His ragged robes looked even dirtier under the circumstances. His sockets wept a constant stream of black blood.

For the first time since the High Sovereign revealed himself, I managed to have a single, coherent thought. Why is High Vicar Varadoth chained? He is the Voice of Agrona himself. What is going–

My thoughts fell away as my eyes landed on the second figure. Their mousy hair–which was usually pulled up into a conservative bun–fell loosely around their shoulders. Unlike Varadoth, who stood ramrod straight even while shackled, this person was slumped, their breathing strained.

I forgot how to breathe. Greahd.

“There are two here who defied my will,” Agrona said casually, but I had trouble comprehending his words.

My focus was entirely on the woman who had helped me master the violin. Who had been a mother in place of my deceased parents. Who had taught me what it was to care for those who could not help themselves. In the face of her chained, prone form, even the High Sovereign of Alacrya felt… inconsequential.

Agrona stepped toward Varadoth, looking down at the bound High Vicar. “Mardeth was a poison to all things he touched,” he commented lightly. “Your actions in protecting him allowed countless citizens of my continent to die. You made it impossible for my agent–my Scythe–to fulfill her duties.” The Lord of the Vritra cocked his head, a wry smile stretching across his face. “It is possible to embrace any idealogy too much, Varadoth.”

Varadoth slowly raised his head. I heard his hammering heartbeat quicken as he stared his lord god in the eyes. His power flexed, ripping out at the mana-suppressing shackles in a wave of force that washed over me like a tide. “The foremost Doctrine,” he said coolly, not showing a hint of fear, “Is to fight for one’s self. To prove one’s strength in every way,” he said, the chains that bound him snapping as his form swelled. “All my life have I upheld these virtues. For a single purpose,” he snarled, rising into the air and away from Agrona. “Today, I die. But I die as I lived.”

The explosion of power pulsing from the High Vicar sent Greahd’s body tumbling away. Acting purely on instinct, I hurled myself toward her, catching her and tumbling through the pews as Varadoth flexed his might. Scythe Seris, on the opposite end of the cathedral, began to fly toward me. Maybe to protect me. But she was forced to turn midair, throwing up a bubbled, black shield of pure mana as shadows engulfed everything.

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I wrenched the defeated Phoenix Will in my core to the forefront of my mind, uncaring of how each touch scalded my channels and made my body ache. My hair painfully shifted colors, the array of runes burning as they dug themselves along my forearms.

I threw my hand out, encasing Greahd and me in a bubble of white fire.

The shadows licked and seeped over my protective barrier, the white fire straining to keep out the invasive dark. Blood dripped from my nose and eyes as Varadoth’s pervasive power tried to rip my protections apart.

I saw the High Vicar there, facing off against his Lord God. He hovered above his domain of shadows, holding his hand out to the side. The black streams of liquid that ran from his eyes shifted under his control, coalescing in his hands. The blood elongated into a perfect staff, each inch brimming with unfathomable power.

“I die today!” Varadoth declared, sweeping his staff to the side. A hundred tendrils of shadow speared out, trying to impale Agrona where he stood. I felt my coating of fire strain as the entire domain of darkness seemed to condense, the air becoming heavier. The chains on my arms flickered. “I die with my soul intact!”

Whenever the tendrils speared at the High Sovereign, they seemed to dissipate the moment they got a bare inch from his body. I could not see what happened; what power was causing them to evaporate. But it was as if time itself ground away the shadows to dust, the utter decay of the basilisk denying the spears of inky black any blood.

“Do you know the true origins of our decay arts, Varadoth?” Agrona said, not moving a single step as the world itself seemed to reject his presence. Tendrils tried to wrap around his legs. Tried to strangle his throat. Tried to do anything. But none could even touch the asura. His horns drank in the darkness. “At the beginning, there was only one spell the basilisks could call their own. Not soulfire. Not blood iron. Not graveice or corpse poison.”

The shadowy domain shifted tactics as Varadoth redirected the tendrils. They erupted from the expansive nothingness, gripping anything they could. The stones of the floor. The pews that lined the temple. Even the black and red glass, depicting every scene of the Vritra dominating the lessers beneath them. All swarmed inward in a terrible tempest.

Wood and stone and glass buffeted my fiery barrier. Greahd whimpered beneath me as a shard of glass whizzed through, superheated red silicone nearly spearing me through the eye. I snapped my head to the side just in time, earning a burning cut along my scalp instead.

I panted, pressing an unfocused wave of pushing telekinesis into my circular barrier. The strain of it all drained my reserves at a massive rate, Soulplume extracting every bit of mana as my Phoenix Will took its toll.

I struggled to even hold off the shadows and debris, each speeding faster than the eye could perceive. But as they compressed around Agrona, I saw the barest flash of amusement in his scarlet eyes.

“There was only one spell unique to our race,” the High Sovereign’s voice echoed out, somehow perfectly clear despite the coffin of ice, stone, and glass that surrounded him. “One of decay; of weathering and erosion. But it was not a physical thing; no.”

That horrid heartfire–Agrona’s discordant rhythm–pulsed. And then Varadoth’s domain shattered. The High Vicar lurched in the air, a spittle of black blood erupting from his mouth as he felt backlash from his broken spell. The shadows fell away, every single bit of refuse and rubble that compounded against the High Sovereign seeming to weather away without a single cause.

I fell to my hands and knees once more, my consciousness winking in and out as my Will retreated into my core, fearful and afraid. It took nearly everything I had just to protect myself on the outskirts of that spell, but Agrona didn’t even have a scratch on his clothes.

My vision came in spurts. I saw Seris Vritra’s black barrier of mana as it slowly fell. Underneath, the Scythe was heaving for breath slightly, but unharmed. She looked over at me for the briefest instant.

I must have blacked out for a moment, but the absurd swell of mana that poured from Varadoth’s core wrenched me from my unconsciousness like smelling salts being shoved into the depths of my sinus cavities. Mana… so, so much mana. More mana than I had ever felt in a single spell congregated in a blackened tide.

Black blood poured from every orifice the High Vicar had. From his eyes, his ears, his nose… Too much blood for a single person to have streamed toward the staff in his hand, condensing a dozen times over. The air itself warped with the power contained in that conjured weapon. Overtop of that, the shadows seemed to layer in on themselves as they danced and writhed along the liquid surface.

When it was done, Varadoth was breathing heavily, his skin sinking inward not unlike how I had left Mardeth. He looked almost frail, but the horrid compression of swirling black blood in his hands told me the truth.

“I prove my soul,” Varadoth said weakly. His heartfire thundered like a gong, belying his lack of power. “My death proves my worth.”

Seris blurred toward me, a flash of silver and panicked features. She halted in front of Greahd and me, throwing up another one of her black, domelike barriers. This time, it covered me as well. She pressed more and more mana into the barrier, the edge sparking with purple-tinged soulfire as it thickened half a dozen times over. When she was done, the Scythe heaved for breath, her skin soaked in sweat as her breaths came in gasps.

Varadoth threw his staff down.

The tip pierced the floor near Agrona’s feet. Then it began to grow, immediately elongating and thickening in a tide of blood. In no time, the pillar of power pierced the roof of the cathedral, and then continued to expand. The swirl blocked both from my sight.

The wall of blood and shadow edged closer and closer toward where I lay broken, my only protection Scythe Seris’ shield. I held up a weak hand, adding the barest barrier of telekinetic force to her spell. Anything to add just a little bracing force against the oncoming impact.

Somehow, even as the rumbling swirl of an expanding pillar of blood and shadow reached me, I heard his voice. His smooth, amused voice.

“They say the eyes are a window to the soul,” Agrona said nonchalantly. “Let me show you why, arrogant vicar.”

I closed my eyes, waiting for the storm wall to finally hit. A beat of silence passed.

Varadoth’s spell never impacted us. Instead, the oncoming pillar simply dissolved, falling down without its previous ferocity. As if all its intent were erased.

A tide of black blood washed around Seris’ barrier, the force worth nothing of note. The rubble and debris of the battle–if it could even be called that–were washed along in a gentle stream of dark liquid. I looked up, confused by the sudden failure of the spell.

Varadoth stared down at Agrona. Though the High Vicar didn’t have eyes, I could feel how his ‘gaze’ matched the scarlet pupils of his god.

And I could sense it; feel the contact in Varadoth’s intent.

Like the tales of old, Varadoth seemed petrified by the gaze of Agrona Vritra, Lord of the Basilisks. The serpent held its prey in its gaze, and now they were naught but stone.

But that wasn’t right. No, what I felt happening… it was so much worse.

Varadoth fell from the sky. He hit the ground with a wet flop, his body limp and unresponsive. The High Vicar’s intent became nonexistent, no inflection in his mana signature. No life to his core. The once-thundering booms of his lifeforce were now a horrible, horrible monotone. Like the flatline of a heart monitor, there was nothing except a subtle buzzing emanating from his body.

I could not explain how I knew, yet some instinctual part of me understood. The part that could trace the heartfire threads all through the body.

Varadoth’s body wasn’t dead. His heart still beat and he still breathed, even as he lay sprawled in the vast pool of dark blood that coated everything in the cathedral.

But his mind… his mind was gone. Eroded away in an instant too fast for me to comprehend.

The sensation of that body, devoid of a mind… It was nearly as horrid as the High Sovereign’s collage of heartbeats themselves. One was far, far too much. A failed attempt at combining different tunes. But the other…

The other was simply nothing. Looking at Varadoth’s body–it wasn’t truly a corpse–left me feeling disjointed. It was like looking into the eyes of one you loved and seeing no recognition. No thoughts behind the veil. No true consciousness.

I keeled over once more, struggling to remain awake through it all. The scouring effect of my unrestrained Phoenix Will left my body aching and burned, a subtle redness along my skin that belied my horrid state.

I felt a boot nudging me in the ribs. Weary and unable to think, the toe rolled me to the side. I splashed into the black blood.

Agrona stood over me. Except he wasn’t focused on me. No, he was looking down at…

The High Sovereign knelt, grabbing the bound Mother of Fiachra. I felt adrenaline course anew as the Lord of the Vritra carried her away from me, strolling toward the altar.

No, I thought headily. No, no no! I need to move! To stop him, somehow!

I groaned, my mana core aching as it flared. Power thrummed down my burned channels as I tried to push myself to my feet.

A hand wrapped my shoulder, pulling me close. I stumbled into Scythe Seris’ steady grip as she held me fast, her eyes carefully blank as she watched Agrona carry Greahd up the steps of the altar.

“No,” I muttered weakly. “I can’t let him–”

Seris’ hand covered my mouth, preventing me from speaking further. Her body trembled slightly as it held my weak struggles at bay. She refused to meet my pleading, begging eyes.

“I heard you said something very interesting during the Plaguefire Incursion, lesser,” Agrona said, setting Greahd down on her knees. She was still chained, any sort of power she may have had stripped further. The sun from above died away the moment it streamed through the gaping hole in the cathedral’s roof. “You are going to tell me exactly what it was you said.”

Greahd, caked in black blood from where the thick liquid had flowed around her, slowly, pitifully, raised her head up.

Except she didn’t look at Agrona. She looked at me, her kindly eyes enwrapped by the deepest terror. My mind remembered Aurora’s words long lost. Those so kind tend to burn themselves away in their selflessness.

That moment stretched into a brief eternity. I saw it all there: her fear, her joy, her love. Every cookfire replayed in the depths of my mind. Every instance where she gave and gave and gave. And above it all, I saw her hope. Hope for what, I could not tell.

Tears streamed from the edges of my eyes as I thrashed, fought, and struggled against Seris’ grip. Her hand stayed over my mouth, denying me the ability to call out. To beg and plead for Agrona to stop. That I’d give him what he needed if he’d just spare the mother of this life.

Greahd, her body trembling, turned to the preeminent asura of the world. “We suffer because of you,” she said in a shaking voice. “Every bit because of you. And you say that it is our pride to overcome our suffering with strength,” she pushed out, tears like dewdrops streaking down her face. “But you will never let us simply live.”

Agrona chuckled lightly, tilting the middle-aged woman’s chin up with a perfect gray finger. “You’re correct, lesser,” he sneered. “I don’t suffer ants to live when they nip at my flesh.”

Agrona’s eyes met Greahd’s.

And then there was nothing within her soul. Greahd, who had brought nothing but kindness into the world. Greahd, who had been the only person to feed a populace abandoned by all others. Greahd, who was willing to teach a little boy how to play his violin simply because it made his eyes sparkle.

And Greahd, who dared to defy Agrona Vritra.

Her body fell limp like a doll’s, splaying out across the altar as her head lolled sickeningly to the side. I looked into those eyes, seeing only the mist of nothingness. Where before there had been so much emotion, so much humanity, now only void remained.