Karma, perception encapsulating the pitch void seating its inhabitants, inwardly whistled at the uncle and nephew's dramatic greeting.
"Uncle Dante, you live? Father said you perished at Monarch Loti's inheritance grounds …"
Dante spat in contempt. "Hmph! Naturally, that traitorous scourge proclaims my death. He would be my killer, after all."
"What—"
Karma's obscured voice impeded their familial squabbles, "I hate to interrupt, but maintaining this channel is extraordinarily costly."
Lance shivered, sensing the surrounding emptiness hone in on him. "Know that our bargain is not above circumvention. Your value must outweigh your price—remember your place," indicted Karma, isolating his ominous portent from Dante's ears.
Snarling, Lance refocused on his uncle, "We have much to discuss. From your presence, I presume you bear the mantle of main combatant?"
Dante nodded.
"Myself and a contingent of mercenaries; we operate under the moniker Spectral Coup, a name you've doubtlessly come across in your torturous extractions." A malevolent aura spurred from his being. "As for your father's treason, I'll summarize it as such: the demand exceeded the supply."
Peering into the encompassing emptiness, Dante added brusquely, "All those years ago, we discovered a Domain Catalyst—the artifact recently stolen in the siege I and our mutual benefactor orchestrated."
Lance's eyes widened, his tone slightly accusatory in its shock, "You lead those heretical vigilantes in their plunder!?"
"Yes—"
Rumble.
Incandescent scars riddled the space, portending imminent collapse.
"Half an incense stick remains. I suggest you pick up the pace, gentlemen."
"Boy, we can catch up once the deed is done. I ask only this: can you lure Frederick out from his throne room?"
Exhaling through his nose, Lance bowed his head beneath folded arms. "Your request is ... difficult. Recently, father's excursions have grown exceedingly rare, and those he does take are beneath the clan's notice."
Pre-empting Dante's response, Karma's esoteric voice boomed, "I can help pry the rat from his hole."
**
The mid-morning sun trickled its gentle warmth between the scaffolds of inky green sequoias. Two men clad in dark-brown robes—old and young—bounded beneath the overhanging sieve, flitting between light and shadow.
“Recite your evaluation, Lance. I will not tolerate inaccuracy,” Frederick—the senior of the pair—demanded in an unearthly timbre, his proud, hulking frame fixed forward.
“Yes, Father. Warden Delphose insists his attack trajectory is consistent with the site my agents uncovered. All signs point to the thief,” replied Lance, avoiding his father’s deep-set emerald eyes framed below bushy, blond brows.
“Mm."
He measures me, Lance reminded himself, measures all. His eyes look forward, but his spirit entombs everything to its limit. I'm merely a variable in his perception, an object defined by parameters.
"How much further?" Frederick questioned. No emotion was evident in his inflections—no humanity.
"Five incense sticks," declared Lance, sparing no effort in hiding his inner turbulence—such a blunder could not escape his father.
He relishes my nervousness, wants me to fear him, to acknowledge him as superior. To Father, humanity is a weakness. An adversary to defeat. And so he strives to become something more. Something better.
Frederick did not respond, though his gait accelerated, burdening Lance's lower cultivation base in his efforts to keep pace.
Lost in his calculative trance, he neglects the cunning of those he deems lesser. A folly most human—the irony! That is why we will succeed; that is why you, Frederick, will leave this forest on a bier.
Enjoying this book? Seek out the original to ensure the author gets credit.
Lance whirled around a passing bear, effortlessly dodging its bared teeth. His hand casually raked the beast's fur in passing, deflecting its lumbering form as if swatting a fly.
What's left of you, that is.
**
Lance and Frederick’s pace crawled to a slow, arriving at a cordoned-off clearing with scattered crimson splotches. Several Selenium Clan members patrolled the area, all of whom immediately dropped into deferential bows, shouting in unison, “Greetings, Grandmaster! Greetings, Young Lord!”
Frederick waved them away, flashing toward a pool of dried blood. Studiously bending a knee, he inquired, “Have our auguries borne any fruit?”
Lance, joining his father in a crouch, reported, “They have not—hence your urgent summoning. We believe the thief’s heavenly secrets are hidden via means at or exceeding the Embryonic Inquisitor realm.”
Grunting, Frederick abruptly stood, barking, “Everyone is to vacate the premises now. After three breaths, I will kill every living being still in sight.” Leveling a harsh glare at Lance beside him, he added measuredly, “Every. Living. Being.”
Lance wordlessly retreated with the Selenium Clan retinue, negotiating welters of dense flora until his father’s monstrous aura lost its threatening luster.
Angry or not, the Frederick I’ve known for decades would never exit the Selenium Clan compound without months of due diligence—at minimum.
The blurry image of a subtle facade draped in deep green robes flashed in his mind's eye.
We met only yesterday, yet I cannot remember your face. Just … what are you?
**
Karma crested an earthen plateau, admiring the lucid azure expanse overhead. His elevation placed him just above the clouds, their ethereal bodies wheeling atop a grove of lush canopies.
“What am I?” he wondered aloud, casting a forlorn glance at the spatial pouch beneath his robes. "That’s a better question for that damned codger Frederick. What bullshit mental fortitude—Administrator Zhao didn’t require one-tenth as much spiritual energy to influence."
Faint Ouroboroi flickered across Karma's vision with every blink, their afterimages akin to circular cataracts.
Almost there ... I'm so close.
For far too long, Karma's unique abilities operated in a binary fashion, restricting him to fleeting glimpses of a game that never ceased.
A game of attractions and consequences, fatal in equal measure.
A game of culling.
I tread a duplicitous path shoulder to shoulder with adversaries leagues more powerful. I cannot continue roaming blindly amid a den of wolves.
The sequence of ocular oscillation quickened, painting fuzzy outlines of pupils encircled by Ouroboroi.
The little charade with Lance, though profitable, could have just as easily heralded catastrophe. I need a deterrent—a compromise of omniscience and susceptibility.
"Something ... in between," murmured Karma, arrested by the three simple words.
Something in between, something in between, something ...
His legs, deaf to their owner's pensive state, continued trekking atop the muddy plain below. All the while, Karma relentlessly chased an illusive fragment of inspiration, convinced it hid among the endless permutations of repetition.
The phrase lost meaning, melting into a stream of consciousness and occluding his every thought and emotion. In their unceasing production, an abstract synchronism bound the scene within to the one across his gaze, as if reaching a state of—
A content smile splayed Karma's face.
"Harmony," he intoned, propelling his amorphous eyes in their final evolution.
**
Frederick's divine sense tyrannically swept his surroundings, scrutinizing every nook and cranny in a labyrinthine offensive.
No entity—regardless of sentience—survived unmolested.
Empty.
Convinced of his solitude, Frederick reached down his silken collar, tugging a chained locket above his robes. The relic reeked of antiquity: its carapace marred by reddish-brown specks of rust so pervasive they obscured any hint of its original color.
"Amitabha. Disciple of Monarch Loti greets Anlîthëma, Great Arbiter to the Epoch of Suffering, Calamity of the Unenlightened. I seek to invoke the Dharma of Absolute Exchange."
Granted.
A shrill click resounded as the chained locket unlatched, unleashing a horde of slithering chains. Half of them plunged into Frederick's flesh, extracting whisps of colorless energy; the others split further, burrowing into scattered patches of blood.
Frederick's bulky musculature visibly shrank, streaks of grey coloring his blond hair. His harrowed voice struggled to gasp a string of words, "I tribute twenty years to the Sea of Bitterness. I plead for the identity of whoever bled these lands before me. Am-amhitabha."
Gr�̸͇͓̘͔̳̻̬̄͗ͤ�̪͉͈͉̋̐͘ͅͅ�̥̗̱̞͎̼̳̲̅̈́̈�̸͇͓̘͔̳̻̬̄͗ͤ—
An ocean of murky darkness corroded the chains, summarily infesting Frederick's immobilized figure like ravenous parasites. The eldritch swarm practically fought in their intrusion of his orifices, subsuming his being down to the soul.
"Oh? A mortal dares ask my name?" thundered a heaven-rending voice from the darkness.
Incomprehensible dread seized Frederick; he felt his sanity rail against the confines of his being, struggling to escape, begging for its torment to end.
"How nostalgic! Mortals—even deities—prostrated at my feet, praying that I spare them from learning my name. Yet you ask for it?"
An apocalyptic cacophony quavered the universe. In his teetering awareness, Frederick barely recognized it was a laugh, Their laugh.
"Do not fret, mortal. Mother and Father have shielded you from my wrath."
Frederick's wailing sanity lightened its actions, feeling a subtle change in the all-consuming darkness.
"Or, I should say, they have promised to restore you after what happens next."
It was then he realized.
The change he felt was not release.
"You want my name? You shall have it and so much more."
Celestial bronze scales the size of galaxies sundered the void, their curvature nearly imperceivable, yet Frederick knew it was there.
That what hovered before him was circular.
Was cyclical.
"Feast your eyes on the primordial form of—"
Blankness. Impenetrable blankness.