The rook horrors eventually reached their destination. After perhaps two thousand of them perished on the infinite chains the first bony hook touched the slick black bone finger of Charon, and exploded into a black mist. I sighed in relief, I wasn’t sure what might happen but apparently touching the waters of the river of the dead was a bad move.
I refocused my attention on their leader who hadn’t yet noticed me. He seemed to believe Charon was the enemy, and his focus showed a great deal of intelligence and respect for his adversary. That was troublesome. It went against my preconception of a cyclops king being a big nasty dunce.
The army of cyclops joined in the effort then, gripping the chains and using the rook horrors stuck to them as insulating grips as they attempted to simply pull Charon from the sky. It was an absurd tactic and I gulped when the immense skeletal avatar actually shivered a bit under the pressure. A red glow appeared in the eye sockets like before, but I waited. The more Charon consumed before triggering the second half of the attack, the stronger it would be.
“The One Who Weeps!” The deafening call came from Zurg. “You are powerful indeed! But Zurg is the strongest!”
It was in that moment that Zurg began to grow, rapidly dwarfing the other cyclops until they only reached his thigh. Even with his feet on the ground, his eye was now level with Charon’s bone sternum. With his magnified features, I could now see the flaming runes tattooed onto his skin, and the massive horns that jutted from his brow and jaw. Epic and horrible would be a sad understatement.
When he moved, the wind changed direction. When he stepped, the ground rolled in waves like the surface of a lake after a stone was thrown in. He reached up to grab Charon, and on instinct I unleashed the second part of Charon’s skill.
Zurg’s hands sizzled and black flames erupted where he gripped the titanic skeleton but he simply growled and began to pull Charon down. Charon’s mouth opened wide, and a black wave of the purest essence of death and decay flooded forth like a billion liters of vomit. It washed over Zurg and he roared. It was a sound that would shake the stones for miles around. The wave of death flooded the ground below, turning the cyclops and thousands of rook horrors to nothingness like cotton candy in water.
Beyond all possible reason, Zurg still held his grip onto Charon’s rib cage. His skin and much of his flesh had been dissolved away. His bones and tendons were exposed and slick with gore and the black liquid death. Steam rolled off of him from everywhere, making the entire scene a surreal haze. Somehow his great blood red eye was intact and glaring up at Charon from within the wretched and exposed skull.
“Zhuurg SHTRONGEST!” He somehow roared as blood poured from the hole where the skin under his chin had once been. My own mouth fell open in that moment as Zurg wrenched with all his strength, and Charon fell from the sky to shatter into countless black fragments on the ground.
This all happened in the span of a moment, and I was paralyzed with disbelief at what I was witnessing. A sudden sting in my right hand where I held the spear snapped me back to reality. Cracks were forming in the dark wood of the handle and all the way up to the tip. Black light was flooding from those cracks. “Shi...!” I yelled and tried to throw the weapon away too late.
I felt damage and pain on a scale I was not familiar with. It was physical, and something far worse. As the supposedly indestructible item exploded, I felt it deal damage to my very essence as a being.
Soul Damage was something that had been an abstract to me, a useful stat that bypassed annoying resistances. Now I understood. Soul Damage was to be feared on a different level. I could feel memories leave me, my willingness to exist begin to unravel, and I felt so very tired and alone. It was despair and terror, a glimpse into the paradoxical nothingness that by its own definition cannot exist. It felt like an eternity in that moment, but in reality it only lasted for the amount of time it took for the explosion to propel me perhaps a dozen feet through the air.
I recovered, but was seriously hurt. My right hand was numb, and black as a lump of coal. It looked like the worst case of frost bite you could ever imagine. I could feel that perhaps half of my health was missing, but my regeneration wasn’t recovering it. The blast had also canceled my cloak’s camouflage and I was exposed for the first time.
Zurg didn’t even care. He threw his head back and screamed in triumph and pain. He should be regenerating too but he wasn’t. Something was happening to the cyclops king though, something very bad for me and the world at large. Black tendrils were erupting all over his body. Killing Charon had pushed Zurg into evolution.
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Inside the throne room, somewhere near the center of the celestial oak, eighty of the most important celestials gathered to assess the threat and their response to it. The room was roughly twenty meters in diameter, and floating in the air at the very center was a white crystal acorn surrounded by a barrier similar to the one surrounding the tree itself. Saet took her place on the throne, and Niiya promptly followed her and took a position of readiness at her right hand. A trio of armed guards reacted as if to remove her. A glance in their direction from Saet was all it took to freeze them in their tracks.
“She has standing orders from her master to protect me. Simple rumor should let you know who that might be.” Saet let a slight smile touch her lips. “She stays with me, not that we could do much about it anyways.”
Niiya watched the room with razor sharp focus. Should she use her domain right now? Something was making her skin tingle, a deep instinct was telling her that there was danger among them. Her Avenger skill allowed her to sense when any specific creature had the intent to commit violence, and that skill was beginning to fire warnings from just beyond the open double doors to the throne room.
“There’s danger coming.” Niiya whispered to Saet as she focused on the door. She lowered her stance and narrowed her eyes, ready to act at any second.
“What!?” Saet urgently asked in reply. “No enemies can pass through the barrier without my knowledge.” She sounded skeptical but concerned.
Her younger sister Athana, the General of Intelligence entered at that moment. Saet sighed. The little girl had to be mistaken.
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“Athana, we need your eyes dear sister. Zurg has finally made his move...” Saet greeted her, and her voice trailed off as she looked more closely at the woman she had known from birth. Her eyes were hard, her jaw was clenched, and in her hand was a very specific artifact weapon. “No, Athana. Please tell me this isn’t you.” Tears formed in Saet’s eyes as a glorious and gently curved sword made of pure starlight appeared in her hand.
“I must end this prison you have built around us, and finally that fool of an infernal has given me my chance.” Athana growled in determination. “I would destroy the very world if it meant flying free from this hell with my real body for just one minute, and with this gift I shall do just that.” She hefted the weapon, which looked like a short handled spear studded in rubies and practically dripping with dark enchantment. “Hamathael’s Talon, the weapon you looted from Kutris and so carelessly kept in this tree has told me its secrets, that it can even kill you.” She hefted the weapon to throw, and dark ash began to flood the area.
Suddenly Niiya sensed violent intent from more than a score of other celestials in the room. Their focus was not the traitorous Athana, but Saet herself. It would be an ambush from all sides. There was a microsecond of tension that felt much longer, and then the whole room exploded into action.
The spear flew, and Niiya conjured a rapidly expanding wall of solid ash around her and Saet. She herself flew into the celestial ruler, pulling her to the side as the ring of ash knocked every celestial around them back several feet. Unfortunately Niiya was mistaken. Saet had never been the target of that throw. The tip of Hamathael’s Talon, a weapon of such legendary power that it was able to pierce the flesh of the greater gods broke through the supposedly indestructible concentrated barrier surrounding the celestial acorn and scratched its surface. The weapon turned dull, and the rubies glittered no more as it clattered to the floor. The acorn began to slowly follow it down, red light permeating it like blood dripped into a clear glass of water. It came to rest lightly on the rich woven rug below where it had once hovered, and broke into two lifeless halves. An agonized cry penetrated the ashes. It was a strangled sob from the lips of Saet as she weakly dropped to one knee.
“You don’t know what you’ve done...” It was a little more than a pained whisper. “I can never forgive this.”
“You won’t live to forgive it.” Athana grimly retorted. “Kill the dryas! Kill the infernal’s pet!”
“You really think you few can defeat me?” Saet growled. “You forget your place.”
“Us few?” Athana laughed as she repeated. Several black disks appeared around the room at that moment. “The barrier is gone, old foolish woman. You’ll never be able to manifest your true self in time to stop us all. The hells come for you now, and they thirst for your blood.”
Huge scaly hands with dark claws appeared at the edges of one portal and Saet grimaced.
“Niiya, run!” She shouted. “Use your powers to evade them and flee this place. Run to your master and get far away from this valley.”
“I won’t” The words came as a deep and throaty growl. Niiya had disappeared from sight, hidden perfectly in her domain. Her presence had dispersed, creating a stifling sensation as though she were always standing just behind each enemy. “No enemies will get near you. Gray said so. I can’t make Gray a liar.”
“Never mind that!” Saet pleaded. “There are demons coming through those portals, powerful demons!”
As if her words were the cue, a huge crocodilian head emerged from the two dimensional black disc. Its eyes gleamed with evil cunning, and its massive neck bulged with muscle. It was too late. The beast was a threshodon, a low noble class demon with wicked magic and crushing power. On its own there wouldn’t be much threat to Saet but every portal was now showing signs of the same. She opened her mouth to beg Niiya to flee one final time but simply left her mouth hanging open at what she saw then.
A dark armored figure appeared next to the threshodon as it emerged from the portal. It was a huge knight, over eight feet tall with blackness glowing from within the eyes of the full helmet it wore. Blood leaked from the armor’s joints and beneath the helm as the ashen knight raised its longsword and swung it down silently, shearing the crocodilian head cleanly off with a spray of black blood. Everyone in the room was similarly shocked, and froze for just a moment as the head heavily hit the floor. Ash instantly covered the exposed torso and head of the threshodon and it twitched before rising easily and bending down to retrieve its own head. It calmly placed the head back on its shoulders, and the eyes glowed the same color as the knight’s. It turned, and took a silent stalking step in the direction of Athana. The ash thickened then, obscuring the scene as the woman shrieked and a piercing wolf’s howl shook the room.
This power, this horror, this nightmare was so far beyond what the girl had displayed in the park and Saet realized she had been hiding it all along. Ashen Nightmare’s strength was based on the pain and trauma the wielder had witnessed or endured. What had she seen? What hell had she been through? Saet’s heart ached for the child even as her enemies were being ruthlessly destroyed and grotesquely reanimated by her.
The nightmare dragged on, the sounds increasing in intensity and brutality with each second. Saet couldn’t see a thing, and realized now that Niiya was manipulating the space itself. She could isolate beings from one another and decide who encountered what and when. Domains truly were in their own league.
She quickly came to her senses. Eventually Niiya’s Soul Energy would deplete and the power would fail. Saet’s power was sealed away in the tree itself, nurturing it and the entire region. She would need to reclaim some of that strength to stop her enemies before Niiya could endure no more. Determination lit the face of the Celestia Dryas in that moment. She would not waste a single second more of the time the brave girl was buying her.
A third eye, blazing with celestial power slowly opened on Saet’s forehead and the entire jungle quaked at the awakening of the celestial queen.
“Ahh finally, a competent tool does their job properly.” A cool, overly cultured voice cut through the ashes and Saet’s blood ran cold. She didn’t answer, and continued focusing on her ritual.
“Oh, little Azitet also came to play?” The voice sounded surprised. “I guess my little niece finally got bored of slaughtering her way through The Pit.” The voice suddenly rose in pitch as though speaking to a cute pet. “Azi dear, it’s uncle Hamathael you can come out of your domain now. You know I can’t see a thing in here. Hey that looks like one of my Threshodons, you know better than that - and it nipped me! This is no time for one of your pranks Azi, now I mean it come out this instant! I didn’t want to do this since it’s been so many years but.” The sound of fingers snapping ended the sentence, and suddenly the ash dissipated.
Niiya and the dozen living guards that hadn’t fled and remained to defend Saet reappeared and collapsed unconscious. There was no sight of any other traitors or demonic invaders other than a single man, though he was a man in appearance alone. This was Hamathael, an overfiend invited to this realm by Saet’s own traitorous sister.
He appeared as a tall and well built human man in the gentlemanly years of life. His thick hair was meticulously combed and black with streaks of gray. The robust mustachio on his strong featured face was also salt and pepper in color. He wore a pristine white suit complete with an embroidered white cape and a thin blood red tie. His posture told the story of a man that had spent a thousand years looking down on everyone and everything. His hands were folded behind his back and a confident smile curved his full lips. His eyes betrayed his true nature though. The pupils were the same red as his tie, and his irises were startling white. Where the whites should have been was inky blackness.
He scanned the room with those eyes, growing confusion apparent on his face. Then his gaze settled on the small cat girl and the confusion deepened to open mouthed disbelief.
“Another Ash Huntress, and born in the realm of mortals?” His expression changed from confusion to one of wicked delight. “What a lovely pet for me to groom!”
“You will not have her.” Saet growled, finally drawing the man’s attention.
“Saet?” Hamathael squinted as though struggling to spot a gnat buzzing about the room. “My how weak you’ve become since we last met.”
“You mean since you called a meeting for peace and stabbed me in the back before unleashing The Worm to reduce the Great Rakashi Forest to lifeless dirt?”
“Well yes, obviously then.” The man chuckled lightly. “What a fun day that was! How long ago was that, a hundred years?”
“Two thousand, four hundred, and seventy years.” Saet replied coldly. She hated this, but needed to keep him talking for just a few more moments.
“My the centuries pass like falling leaves, do they not?” Hamathael laughed lightly. “My apologies, such an insensitive analogy. What’s that you’re doing there?”
Saet’s smile then was wide and wicked. The room fell into darkness for a moment as the wisps lighting the room suddenly zipped away in panic. The great tree groaned in protest under its own weight for the first time in its infinite life as all of the primordial energy of its being flowed into Saet’s tiny body.
Three eyes opened and brilliant blue light blazed from within them. The gaze illuminated Hamathael like a stage performer under a spotlight.
“You did THAT!?” The overfiend balked incredulously. “You just extinguished the life of every plant and animal in the valley just to settle things with me? Not very celestial of you, Saet.”
“Do you know why that ritual takes so long?” Saet asked. The voice sounded like wind through the trees, and vibrated with perfect harmony. “It is because I must reach out to every blade of grass, every flower, every squirrel and mouse... and beg their aid. This land has chosen, down to the last black beetle and green clover to rise as one and destroy you. You stand before the Celestia Dryas, the spirit of life itself, and you are unworthy.”
The confident and flippant mask that Hamathael wore slipped, and for the barest fraction of a second concern crossed his demonic eyes.