> “The biggest problem with Heaven's Path practitioners, which is also in some ways their greatest strength, is that if you keep kicking them when they are down, yet never actually finish them off decisively, their talent for overturning all expectations is without compare. In this regard, they make for the best stones to cast at any problem where collateral damage is the least of your worries.”

  ~attributor unknown

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~ Sana and Arai, Unknown Beach ~

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Sana pulled her mind and body back together one painful recollection at a time. The entire thing was just...

-Ah they had survived somehow. That was all that mattered, a relieved part of her supplied.

One desperate gamble after another. Clearly the beast had been able to suppress the symbol. Whether it was dead or unconscious from the damage she couldn’t yet say, so all that was reasonable was to keep carving a bigger fate thrashed hole in its innards. After a while spent bloodily hacking and cursing at the flesh in front of her, she managed to re-open up its stomach and drag them out of the organ cavity. Arai was still out cold, but her wounds were better.

The bile was on the far side. It took her a moment to orientate herself and realise they were facing down. The bile and stomach acid of the thing was on the far side and wasn’t moving, which was something at least.

Checking her sister’s condition again she sighed wearily. Beyond being conscious she wasn’t much better really, mainly because she hadn’t been the one to trigger the crazy transmutation attempt. She could dimly feel that it was still spreading elsewhere in the monster, thanks to her own impetus of qi into that act at the last minute. The suppression was gone at least, but it was somewhat inconclusive in her current circumstances whether that was due to the creature, the water or some nasty combination of both. The whole thing was such a blur that it was hard to piece things together.

She dragged her sister out and made her way with some effort to the opening of its oesophageal tract. The wounds they had carved down it were still visible in its contracted and twisted state as nasty red scars. She could also make out the passage of the influence of the transmutation array through one side of it thanks to her qi enhanced vision. The flesh there was slightly petrified and oozing what she guessed was blood that didn’t look a healthy colour, so that was good. After a few moments, she slapped her forehead and then went rooting for their various weapons. Half the daggers were gone without a trace, but the blades were easy enough to locate and recover after some interrogation of her memory.

Thinking about its innards, if the liver had been below the stomach, then the heart was maybe somewhere up above and ahead of them? Her sister had found the ribcage, but that really only allowed her to orientate to the spine. As to where its monster core, or the physical anchor for it was, she guessed either somewhere above and ahead of her, or in the skull. Assuming this wasn’t something like the uncaged from the fissure flats. Considering that, she carved a deep hole in the wall and watched it for a moment. It didn’t heal noticeably which was something.

Extricating them from the stomach turned out to be horrible, icky and slimy. Her continued attempts to do damage elicited no response from the leviathan as they wormed their way up the tract. Soon she was cutting her way through contracted muscular locks in it that added further credence to this being some kind of water creature. Periodic stabs through the wall and examination of the cavities beyond didn’t show any evidence of air-breathing lungs either.

“Please don’t let us be buried in the den deep underwater…” she grumbled to herself, as she kept on working her way forwards, hauling Arai after her.

-Or unconscious demonic water beast, she winced as a wave of icy water rolled out of a wound and made her arms numb.

The way things were going she would probably bet actual spirit stones on the latter.

She wasn’t sure how long it took to get back to the mouth, its gullet wasn’t that twisted, but she reckoned by the time she was done tearing her way through the third muscular contraction that she had gone almost 30 metres. Finally clawing her way out, into the mouth, she was pleased to find it half-open, in shallow water. The cloudy, eerie, storm-lit half-light above her confirmed thankfully that they were not buried in some subterranean lair, but washed up on the shoreline somewhere. Less helpfully it confirmed that the thing was still somewhat alive, as she could see a faint pulse in some of the veins in its mouth.

The damage that they had carved in the roof of its mouth was down to a gap as thick as her forearm and scabbing over. Behind it, she could dimly make out healing bone.

“No way are we having that,” she hissed to herself.

Taking up the Arborundum leaf she set about the healing scar with renewed vigour, determined to finish what they had started. It took only a few moments to cut a hole big enough to work with. Beyond it, she could see grey sludge and whitish-red fibrous matter that was pulsing so slowly she had to stare at it for a good few seconds before she was certain she wasn’t imagining it.

-Yeah, you are definitely still alive, she thought grimly.

Without further hesitation, she cut the opening larger and then went and retrieved the stone sword from her sisters back. In the process, she had a sad grimace for the fate of their clothes. What they were left with between the blood, gore and acid was little more than bound rags at this point held together by whatever luss fabric pieces remained that were not securing their scrips on their arms.

Their flight from the depths had gotten rid of most of the spider ichor, but she had been rolling in the innards of this thing for however long it had been…

Being mostly naked in this place meant what exactly anyway? Everything was out to eat, dissolve or just obliterate them anyways. They were not exactly poor, but even if they had been wearing almost all luss cloth it would be mostly gone by now. Their existing pieces were surviving because they were specially treated. Full garments in that manner would cost dozens of Earthly Jade. She would sooner buy a storage artefact that would bind to one of her bones at that point and just carry as many spare clothes as she needed.

Shaking her head wryly, she pushed those thoughts about modesty out of her head and set to carving at the thing's brain indiscriminately.

The fluid was corrosive but now she could recover her qi, she could judge it to be not in the same realm as the Spider Queen’s ichor. Inconvenient but not immediately lethal. Pausing she considered where its brainstem was likely to be located changed the angle of her attack after clearing out a bunch of the grey, spongy flesh slabs she had already lacerated away.

Three stabs and a gouging cut later and she finally found what she was after as the whole creature twitched slightly. Wedging herself against the side of the wound she levered even deeper, wiggling the sword back and forth as the whole thing juddered and then finally spasmed and convulsed properly. The sudden movement still managed to dislodge her, dropping her into-

The howl was soundless, yet made all the hair on her body rise even as something immense dropped into her mind’s eye like a sledgehammer. Her body went numb, her limbs were like ice and her insides twisted and knotted horribly. The amount of blood she vomited was lost amid the pile of excavated organic mess she had collapsed into.

The symbol twisted in her mind, already working overtime, it wasn’t panicked… but she got a sense of intense concentration and focus from it as it fought to expel something from her body she had no real understanding of beyond the absence of anything else that was left in its passing as it-

Her whole sense of being grew fuzzy for a few seconds and she was… detached….drif-

Her focus snapped back as if she was hit in the face with a bucket of iced water, her body screaming in agony and her memories weaving back together as her mind survived. The symbol saving her from mental fragmentation and death even before she really registered what had happened.

-It had just targeted her?

In a panic she looked around and thankfully saw Arai nearby, she was… still okay…

She exhaled frothy blood, and didn’t even care, it had just been directed at her.

Staggering up she slumped against the wound and grasped what was left of her qi and stabbed it into the brain. What she sensed was chaotic, dwindling and decaying. She pried out the sword and leading in gave the still faintly trembling brain a final vengeful stab into the depths of the wound with the leaf.

Pulling out the leaf she nearly gagged as something came with it. A rich, sickly rotten smell and a milky pink-grey liquid that behaved more like molten wax than water or blood. It trickled then stopped, pooling and appearing to set-

She darted backwards as fast as she could as the substance came for her like a snake, seeking for her!

Scrambling back she shoved lumps of cut meat at it, dispersing it, but still, it came, subsuming flesh and gore with ease.

-Shit, monkeyshit, fate thrashed…

-It’s one thing then a nameless cursed another thing!

She thought she knew what this was now, what she had just cut into and exposed with the knife and nope! They were out of this now.

-Right now!

Uncaring for how ungainly it was she grabbed her sister by the arm and dove out of the half-open mouth into the shallows. The mouth was almost six metres across, truly it was a leviathan.

-Ahh if you knew you would die because you tried to swallow us from below stupid thing, would you curse in the afterlife?

Struggling up, holding her sister, who was starting to come around under the arms she thrashed wildly away from the thing, finally finding purchase to stand, waist-deep in the dark icy water, her feet on the sandy shingle.

As she had observed earlier, there was no lair, just a windswept rocky shoreline with nothing remotely like vegetation. The world was dimly illuminated through dark… clouds? A distant orb or maybe three orbs in close proximity, it was hard to tell. Shadow and rock rose above her, miles away, vanishing into the cloud, so either they were in the biggest pit she had ever seen or they were in a cavern so huge it had its own weather system somehow? In any case, it was more than light enough to see. So bright in fact that it was causing her eyes a tiny bit of trouble still.

In the mouth, the liquid lost its pinkish-grey colour and swirled in the water, now a viscous and gloomy black.

-Virgin Defiling Nameless, she swore properly and pushed qi into her limbs as much as she dared to crash through the surf onto the shore.

The liquid pooled after her, twisting this way and that in the water as she broke through the last bit of surf and into the shallow water behind.

-It would have to be something like the ‘uncaged’ after all, she groaned in her own head.

Those giant leviathans that burrowed through the earth and had the physical strength to war with Golden Immortals and even Ancient Immortals if roused had no beast cores as such. Not even the ability to cultivate directly. Instead, they had something like a pool of condensed qi that ran through their brains and puppeted or parasitized the larger forms. If the form sustained enough damage they would leave it and seek out other vessels; animal, plant even human. Those that seized human cultivators or potent qi beasts were powerful enough to call authority censures directly from Shan Lai, even if the person or beast captured was comparatively mediocre.

Dragging her still groggy sister out of the shallows and onto the beach, she saw the thing cut through the waves directly for them and cursed, the sword and the leaf were both back in its skull. That oversight made her want to cry in rage now, having managed to cart the thing all the way out of that hell, having had it save them multiple times she left it stuck in that fate thrashed things brain while they ran away from it.

Tearing off the blade, she unbound it and started dragging Arai up the beach. If there was a mercy, they might be able to recover it, assuming they survived this new hurdle. From what she recalled frantically of half-remembered bestiary entries from her advancement exam to eight-star rank, the liquid form of the uncaged could not sustain themselves long without a host. Even powerful ones would only live for hours outside of any form of living containment.

It cleared the surf and surged towards her with fearful speed, a tendril of water punching towards her. She ducked behind a rock and then kept diving because the thing cut the rock like it was cheap wood.

Rolling up, she saw it twist and start to rapidly move towards Arai.

“No you don’t you nameless born piece of…” she screamed in fury.

{Flickering Steps}

She used her movement art and lashed down at the thing, hoping that the qi disrupting effect of the stone would work.

The shingle and sand scattered and the liquid was split, even as it twisted and flowed oddly for a moment. She took the opportunity to strike again as it flinched away from the blade.

It swirled faintly, turning to track her as she warded against it with the blade, rapidly circling to grab her sister by the back of her neck and start dragging her away like a bedraggled cat.

“W-wha..?” her sister tried to articulate as she moved her head to try to grasp what was going on.

She pushed some of her remaining qi into her to help heal the wounds faster.

Her peripheral vision caught the nearly invisible slick of liquid flowing through the shingle to her left.

{Flickering Steps}

It snapped in empty air as she carried them both almost ten metres away. Turning she slung her sister over her shoulder and fled across the beach from it as fast as her body would allow, already preparing to use her movement art again.

Behind her, the liquid thing no longer held back and shot after her like a serpent, so fast it was almost impossible for her to follow. It gained on her in a matter of moments, forcing her to spin and use her movement art to dance backwards, cutting at it in the same motion. The tendril-esque maw that had opened up in the air like a net flinched backwards as she cut towards its centre.

Arai gasped and her eyes snapped open.

“W-what is?” she rasped, coughing out blood that was not her own.

“You’ve been out a while. Sea creature dead. Also, it’s uncaged or like it,” that summed up the events.

“Can you move on your own?”

“Not really… I… I think I did a lot of damage when I did that transmutation thing, my meridians feel like wet paper, and dozens of minor parts of them are a hair's breadth from being ruptured still.”

She dodged again as the thing swirled out of the rocks on the edge of the beach trying to surround her.

“Based on this things speed, maybe I’m only good for a qi reserve anyway,” her sister’s voice laughed weakly in her head.

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What followed was hours of tense cat and mouse dodging and hunting. They were on some kind of promontory. The more she ran away from it, the more certain it was some kind of uncaged she became. It was blisteringly fast in straight lines, and frustratingly hard to track, able to hide from her qi perception and almost invisible to her enhanced vision. Fortunately, it seemed difficult for it to change directions when it moved quickly. Likely it was not used to moving outside a host, which was giving her the edge.

Eventually, about halfway through their pursuit, her sister had recovered enough of her own physical condition to move on her own. Their bodies’ abilities to heal fast from almost any injury, including some disturbingly serious ones, left her flabbergasted really. Even understanding as much as she did about how hard it was to properly kill a physical cultivator, they were, impressively durable.

Whatever they were cultivating now, she was becoming more and more certain in their conclusions from when they were refining below. It was a lot more holistic than their physical cultivation had been before. A hybrid art that somehow walked the line between Spiritual and Physical Cultivation courtesy of the changes done to them by their ‘Physiques’. That they appeared to be unnaturally resistant to Soul based attacks was also… well she wasn’t sure what to make of that, it was such a game leveller that she was just willing to roll with it for now.

She dodged into the air, returning her thoughts to the moment as the liquid rolled out of cracks in the rock around them. Arai followed suit and the liquid snapped and lashed for a moment before falling away, even as they landed on a large rock nearby and immediately started making their way back along the bay the leviathan was washed up in.

It was getting sneaky now, conserving strength where before it had been happy to just attack madly and confidently.

She dashed across the sands past the corpse and then turned immediately into the rocks above the beach in the same instant her sister did. She had taken to relying on senses other than sight to be forewarned of the uncaged, especially hearing. Now, she could hear shouting from beyond the next bay. Distant, guttural, snarling calls and hisses, coming in their general direction. There was enough pattern in them to make them seem more like a language than the utterance of a pack of beasts as well.

“No intention of seeing what the fates this is!” her sister signed from ahead of her as she scrambled warily through the rocks.

“Too right,” she sent back, agreeing.

Everything else here had been aggressive and determined to either eat her, possess her or eat then possess her. The odds of more overtly intelligent beings also wanting to do that, just more sneakily and competently wasn’t appealing at all.

The liquid rolled after then, chasing them up this gully and onto the top for a few more moments… seeming a bit… indecisive?

She cut at it a few more times as it half-heartedly lunged at her, then tried to grab Arai, before flowing back, rippling in a way that gave her the impression that she was being insulted. They kept retreating only to observe it waver where it was, then turn and rapidly flow off in the direction of the distant noises that were now on the beach and sounding much more animated.

Presumably, the body had been discovered. It was certainly large enough she reckoned at almost two hundred metres long. They opened more distance, travelling back up the promontory before finally stopping for a moment.

“My meridians still feel like they are trashed,” her sister groaned.

“I’m not much better and I’m still nearly out of qi.” she agreed the meridian stress in her limbs was also pretty brutal.

They had been using qi so incessantly and their movement arts to such a degree and in such condition for the last few hours that even the symbol wasn’t able to devour qi fast enough to keep them her in much of a reserve at this point. The feeling of empty tension in her Dantian was very unpleasant, as her meridians tried to draw on qi that wasn’t quite dense enough to properly sustain the effort she was requiring of her body.

“Do you think that thing will come back and grab us once it has a host?” Arai said looking into the distance.

“I’d bet spirit stones on it.” she grimaced.

“The leaf ‘knife’ is still stuck in its head...” She passed the blade back to Arai.

“The leaf is small enough and doesn’t react to any qi that it might pass notice if someone grabs the other things…” Arai winced.

She ran her hands through her matted hair and shook her head apologetically, her sister’s annoyance was as pronounced as her own.

They sat there, recovering warily as the sounds of commotion on the beach became more frenetic and then started to move into the distance, finally dwindling away.

“What do you reckon?” her sister said grimly, shading her eyes.

“We can only try and recover it… if they are setting a trap we will just have to run, it’s the most useful tool we have by far,” she muttered.

They both moved cautiously around the promontory keeping the utmost vigilance for the liquid and eventually made it back to the beach and the leviathan. Whatever the mysterious others had been, there was no sign of them now, although sand on the beach was badly torn up and had footprints that looked kinda like those of a large...bipedal... lizard, with four claws.

The Leviathan itself was something between a serpent and a squid, covered in broad scalloped scales, each one the size of their head. Its long body, close to two hundred metres and half out of the water had a broader mid-section with a broader shell on the back. Its front half was long and snake-like. The head and maw were broad and shovel-like with long sharp teeth. Five eyes were arrayed around its head, all bleeding. Gills were just visible where its neck met its broader body within the water. Now she wasn’t running away and had time to devote to examining it, she could see the long petrified scar that oozed corrosion and steamed faintly along its flank. It extended onto the shell which was split and rotted looking. The scales were blistered and the flesh below, where not petrified was desiccated. Bones where visible in the wounds on its neck were cracked and corroded.

“That’s a lot of damage!” she whistled admiringly.

“Should fate-thrashed hope so! Our lives shouldn’t be that cheap,” Arai scowled.

Making their way into the head, she cautiously peered around it in case there was more of the liquid, but there was no sign of anything. There was a second large hole out through the nose that she was sure hadn’t been there, before as well.

Satisfied that there was nothing there, beyond a few crabs that were already moving in for scraps, she clambered back into the head and re-entered the cavity she had gouged out. Behind her sister was prying one of the daggers out from the base of a tooth where it was wedged. Within the wound, there was evidence that something had clawed around the damage. The sword was now in the channel, abandoned. The leaf was gone from where she remembered, but…

Suppressing panic she recalled that it was prone to just cutting things without caring if it had been stabbed in and then there had been a lot of juddering...? Grimacing, she carefully searched around in the corrosive mush of the brain. In the end, she found it a full arm’s length further inside than it had been and nearly traded a finger for it in the process.

Wincing and glad she had avoided having to test limb regrowth at this juncture, she made her exit quickly, prize secured, snagging the sword along the way.

Standing in the maw she considered its throat as her sister pried a second dagger out from by the tongue.

“No sign of the other daggers or my pack,” Arai grunted, finally levering it out of the muscle where it had become wedged against the jaw bone with the help of the leaf knife she handed over.

Sighing, she held her forearm where the scrip was still bound tightly like a bracer. “Well, the only really important things beyond our lives are the Jade Scrips and the leaf…”

Looking into the distance along the shore for a long moment she started back up the rocks. “Yep. Now let’s get out of here because either the liquid is going to take over some of whatever came, or they are going to kill the liquid somehow then come back here with more.”

“Either way that’s bad,” her sister agreed starting to ascend after her.

Without further discussion, they rapidly made their way off the barren promontory and along the rocky shoreline beyond it. As far as she could see as she scanned for threats, it was largely devoid of any obvious life apart from the odd bit of scrappy seaweed like algae on the waterline. Reading the landscape as best she could, the water level was consistent for the wave-worn beaches and bays they skirted. There was no obvious weathering or other signs on the cliff like cavern wall to their right that rose into the storm lit twilight that suggested higher water levels at some point in the past. The waters themselves held no draining property either.

After a few miles, the rocky ground rose in front of them shifting from sloping coastal escarpment to another promontory. Carefully navigating a fissure they rounded a ledge and found their first evidence of constructions beyond the reservoir where they entered this space.

A carved pillar-like section was stepped into the cliffs and bay ahead of them. At water level, it spread out into a series of interlocking piers that ran several hundred metres out into the swell of the bay. They appeared to be made from shaped blocks of the same stone that they carved weapons out of and showed no signs of any erosion from the waters. There was a large rectangular carving that looked like a set of doors at the base of the heavily quarried cliffs. Neither felt like testing if it could be opened or accessed. Both of them were more than done with enclosed spaces and fetid darkness.

The presence of that other mysterious group also weighed on her mind as they rapidly traversed through the ruin, keeping as much to open ground as was feasible.

The only humanoid creatures they had encountered so far had been the grey demons. A single one had nearly ended them in seconds and there were clearly quite a few somewhere from what she had seen in the reservoir. Encountering a whole tribe of them would be death without a grave.

Looking over the edge of one of the piers Arai drew her attention to several limpet things in the shallows sat between the outcroppings of straggly seaweed. Once you knew what to look for they became more obvious just above the tidemark as well. assuming this place had tides, the evidence for that was... scant.

Crossing that ruin and heading over into the next bay, she changed that evaluation, they were more like oysters, blending to the rocks in subtle, well-disguised colonies. This new bay also contained a much larger ruin. A huge carved inlet with a cavernous crack leading into the cliff that towered above them into the clouds. A large broken bridge crossed it close to the seashore, amid a complex of buildings carved into the rock. A river ran out of the great fissure, containing smoking sulphurous water.

They crossed it jumping from slab to slab and pushed on. The cavernous opening felt ominous to her in a way unlike anything else she had yet laid eyes upon in this place. Comparable to the worst aspects of Evergrove in many ways and her qi vision was unable to penetrate the shadow from the walls, let alone the gloom of the fissure itself.

“The qi density is rising…” Arai frowned as they scrambled down into the next bay, which was mercifully ruin free.

She kept an eye on it as they headed onward. After another hour or so, it finally plateaued out at a level she felt was, if anything slightly denser than it had been in the tunnels.

The progress of her cultivation, once her body finally recovered was also quite startling. Her qi reserves were nearly replenished and some quick conferral with her sister as they jogged revealed she was also mostly healed. The symbol had started passively refining qi once again and was imbuing it into her blood as much as her bones. This process was slowly attuning the qi to their bloodstream which permeated their organs and muscles refining them. The impurities within them were, as she kept half an eye on the process, broken down and drawn into their meridians where they were collected in their Dantian and slowly refined away into an ever-expanding rippling mist of pure Qi. The process no longer took clear ‘cycles’ now, it just was… as far as she could see. A continuous, autonomous process of refinement that seemed much more in sync with how her body's normal biological processes worked than any imposed rhythm of cultivation.

It was a clear deviation of any cultivation method she had ever seen. Even the mantra didn’t really touch what was happening, continuing to do its own kind of refinement passively under the direction of the symbol and her subconscious, working on the reservoirs in her bones.

During short breaks for Arai to speed up the final healing of her meridians, she also found that using meditation to focus on this task, trying to understand it better, did, in fact, speed it up. the more she ‘actively grasped’ of the process through observation, the faster it became of its own accord as if the knowledge and comprehensions being gleaned were fed straight back into it.

On the second day, as her scrip counted it roughly, they started to see flashes of light on the horizon behind them. By this point, she reckoned they had gone almost 30 miles from their original point, which wasn’t anything like she would have liked. The cavern was immense in any case, barely showing any inclination to change as they moved onward. The weather oscillated between wind and rain, but the light never shifted from stormy half-light, and the distant blazing orbs behind the clouds far above never moved.

Even at that distance, the thunder of explosions and crack of lightning were soon visible beyond the distant shadows of the promontories between sheets of rain and low cloud that swept in off the sea.

As they continued on, with renewed concern, because certainly whatever was going on was nothing she wanted any part of, earth tremors began to run through the cliff above them and the promontories themselves. Rocks collapsed periodically and waves started rolling along the shore from behind. The winds also changed and the clouds began to swirl faintly, as if in the early stages of forming a cyclone.

Soon, much more concerningly the sense of suppression started to creep back. Within a few more hours, and with no sign of whatever was happening behind them abating, the water also rapidly regained its draining qualities.

Stood on the beach she stared at the distant flickering lights and held her arms, shivering.

“Yours as well?” Arai said eventually.

“Yep, just there, as soon as the suppression stepped up again.”

She stilled her thoughts as the symbol suddenly sank deep into the shadow of her mind’s eye, stopping all its efforts to refine qi from their surroundings.

A quick test told her that it was indeed possible for her to effect the same thing it had been doing, albeit much more crudely, but it was much more intensive and almost impossible to do while moving.

“How long do you reckon it’s been?” Arai said, eyeing her own scrip.

“I counted at least three hours since the light show began, it’s also waxing and waning I think.”

“Well, I for one do not want to be close to it,” she said decisively, starting to head off down the beach once more.

Arai followed, shaking her head with wry amusement but not disagreeing in the slightest.

Over the next hour, it became increasingly clear that the suppression was indeed waxing and waning, it would rise and then undergo a period of stabilisation before rapidly intensifying. The manner of the intensification put her in mind of water rolling over sand flats on the coast by Blue Water City. It was deceptive until you met the current and then it tried to tear your feet out. Accompanying these phases, the lightning became more and more pronounced. Now it was flashing overhead, and arcing across the distant ocean like the coiling tendrils of some ancient sea beast. Fingers of orange and blue dancing across the clouds that swirled miles above.

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Soon they were forced up from the coastline as the waves became surges of water that rolled down the coast, washing around bays and even covering the ends of some rocky promontories, like the ocean was being shaken like a rug. Soon they were even washing over the top of small promontories and lower-lying areas of the rocky shoreline entirely.

Throughout all this, the suppression continued to ramp up and up. Occasionally it felt like it plateaued, but always it would start upwards again with renewed hunger, pulling and pushing on the qi in their bodies. The forces made her circulation sluggish and interfered with the execution of her movement art when she used it to travel across more broken up ground above the bays.

They were traversing one such cliff when she nearly stumbled and fell. As the water surged below this time the spike in suppression, transcended mere inconvenience and forcibly tried to rip the qi straight out of her body. It felt like something had reached into her new dantian and yanked her backwards through her spine for a brief moment. The qi in her meridians shook and her body creaked faintly before she was released by it and felt like she could breathe again.

“What the fates was that!” Arai gasped as she stumbled as well.

“It almost feels like something is actively triggering it?” she grimaced frowned looking at the distant light show and the lightning still tracing the low cloud above them, arcing off the ocean in the distance.

“Some kind of profound formation?” Arai grimaced and held her stomach as well.

It had been a deeply unpleasant feeling.

A moment later, another rolled over them, tugging backwards at her like it was a gust of wind and water snatching at her. The symbol, already hiding and still had sunk even further into obscurity she realised and was making no effort at all to touch the qi in her body.

-Well, that’s not at all ominous, she thought grimly.

“It’s changing for you as well?” Arai asked after a moment, looking in the distance uneasily.

“Yep,” she nodded.

Another surging wave came and grasped at her, they were oscillating it seemed. One that grabbed from within somehow and 'pulled' and another that flowed with the world and 'pushed' at her. Between them, a not inconsiderable quantity of her qi was destabilised in her body with each shift.

“Whatever is doing it is at a level that exceeds its ability to directly resist. It seems to have a pretty keen sense of things more formidable than itself…” she muttered.

“Doesn’t do us any good though,” Arai said with a sigh, “shall we get over this ridge, I guess we will have to climb?”

Nodding, she trotted after her sister, trying not to stumble amid the now continuous destabilisation. The ascent of the cliff was pretty grim. They had to stop several times for surges that tried to drag her physically backward through pure disruptive intent.

Reaching the top, she grimaced again and wiped her mouth, half expecting to find blood with the strain she had been under.

“This is vile,” her sister declared eventually, staring back behind them as a colossal bolt of lightning with a greenish tint split the sky and pulsed a dozen times far behind them before dissipating.

“A bit like knowing that lightning will kill you. Just because you know doesn’t make it any less dangerous,” she grumbled, as blue bolts scattered everywhere as the chasm in the clouds collapsed back and the world became a touch darker.

“But at least you know not to stand under tall trees…” Arai chuckled sourly.

Another bolt of greenish lightning arced in from somewhere far behind them skipping across the ocean thrice before vanished in shadow and afterimages, once again pulsing half a dozen times. The silence that followed it was eerie. Thunder was no longer a sound, and simply a sensation within the air. The lightning in the sky dimmed away entirely as they watched. For the first time, the storm lit half-light properly dimmed and the suppression shifted.

She had a horrible sense of foreboding in the instant before the sensation of something grasping at the qi in their bodies nearly pulled her right to the cliff ledge. Beside her, Arai slammed her sword into the ground and barely resisted the pull herself.

“Monkeyshit… it really is…” her sister gasped.

Shaking her head, certain she looked as wide-eyed, she ran for the far side of the ridge and skidded straight down it without pause. Rocks clattered around her as she crashed onto the beach below, grunting under the impact. Arai landed beside her a moment later, and they both sprinted along it.

The draw on their qi was continuous now, moving forward was like wading through mud.

“What the fates..?” she almost screamed in horror as the inlet suddenly deformed around them.

In a way that was sickeningly familiar, space warped around them and the inlet, with them in it, flowed backwards all around them into the previous one. everything wavered as she struggled to stay on her feet and then it twisted again and flowed backwards in scattered and twisted streamers into another and then another so fast it was like watching an image moving in reverse even as everything compressed and constricted around them.

With a gasp, it relinquished her. They both crumpled onto the beach and stared up blankly at the charred and dead corpse of the leviathan they had left behind over two days previously.

Space compressed again and suddenly both they and the leviathan were hauled in the direction their qi was now being drained in.

The world spun and blurred around her...

Shore… ocean…

Leviathan hit something and was scattered on a shoreline?

Buildings blurred around them?

There was an absence of movement and then she hit something so hard that every bone in her body shook and her vision went dim. She felt her body deform under the impact before her remarkable durability reasserted itself and she was okay if feeling like she had just had a rock dropped on her.

She was stuck against a huge black stone stele.

Moving her head faintly, even as the suppression ramped up again, dragging her into the stele so strongly that she felt the blood in her body move backwards faintly, she was able to see that it was in the middle of a dais about sixty metres in diameter. Her peripheral vision told her it was carved with barely visible, but deeply uncomfortable to view symbols that had strange half red half black inner illumination.

All around the raised platform was a sea of vertical columns carved in strange and unsettling shapes that seemed to resemble forms of living beings if you squinted at them. Each one was set facing them had a stele that she couldn’t really focus on. The columns and the stele carried oppressive ‘prestige’ about them that tried, through brute force, to convey ‘Righteousness’ and ‘Upholding the Will of Heaven’. Each one had an ornately carved lantern on top.

The drain from the Stele on the qi in her body was now sealing her… both of them to its surface. Every fibre of her body, every bone, muscle, organ, blood vessel and nerve creaked simultaneously as the pillar tried to tear every shred of vital force from her and devour it.

[You… cannot escape me.]

The words sank into their consciousness and made her mind shake. The symbol quietly dragged some part of her behind it, sheltering it like a tiny flame in its hands as a figure strode up the steps of the platform.

A hulking four-armed lizard creature wearing a shabby yellow robe made some kind of hide, with five eyes set into its skull and a long jaw that opened horizontally rather than vertically stalked across the dais towards them. As it approached she felt a strange unclean sensation slide across her flesh and found her gaze drawn to its robe, which was shifting, revealing faces with bloody eyes that reflected a nauseating desire to consume her.

Tearing her gaze from that disturbing sight, she met its gaze and found that its eyes were grey and dead, black ichor like blood oozed from a wound in one of its arms as it made its way towards them, leaving a trail of steaming droplets behind it. Occasionally one of its arms twitched erratically.

[Grinning:. Amusement~ Displeasure*& Suffering.]

The sensation sank into her head and gave her even more of a headache if that was possible.

[You Killed My Puppet, I liked that one, It was WELL Suited to here]

Unable to even speak she could only watch it stroll out of sight as it walked around the black pillar.

[You caused a big mess… down below… for a mortal brat…]

The words whispered into them somehow, arriving even though the thing was no longer even in…

-Telepathy!?!

[Such a wonderful mess… it made them wake me up… they were so desperate]

[….so terrified of the fungiform incursor…. Such weak things… so easy to fool.]

[such a time, and now I can be free of these chains!]

It entered back into view stopped in front of them both and ran a claw across their faces…

She wanted to scream in her head but had no words with which to process anything. The part of her that was hidden away by the symbol was being held mute by it somehow. The rest of her was involuntarily frozen like a small fluffy animal before a feral predator.

[Once… I would have revelled in your flesh.]

It leaned close and licked her body with its long tongue. Her mind gibbered and wailed even as the part of her that was still there screamed inarticulate insults, vainly struggling against the constraint of the symbol… and something else… the hands holding her back didn’t seem like the symbol?

Abruptly her focus shifted and she was…

She would have screamed from its touch if words were actually possible but the constriction on her body was so strong now from the Stele wrestling with the QI locked in their bones that it was impossible to move even a fraction.

[Made you watch as I defiled you, despoiled you. Devoured you.]

It ran a horrible claw down each of their bodies then back up again cupping their faces and leaning close to both of them. The pallid grey eyes still somehow held a ravening darkness that tried bore into her mind’s eye, looking right through her…

[Flayed your souls…]

The eyes were her whole world now, held there vicelike by the claws, which were drawing blood now. Her sense of self was fuzzy and indistinct, but somewhere in there was an iron core of rage that refused to bend.

-Fates take you, we made it this far! Her thoughts spat back in its face in a metaphorical sense.

[Steal away everything you could ever be!]

The words ignored her enraged, desperate taunt and wormed their way into her body… and her sisters she was dimly away through a sort of shared sense of horror. They flowed everywhere, like a creeping, defiling darkness, exploring every shred of their physical beings. Meticulously. As if looking for something.

[So… curious…]

The pressure increased and increased. Her vision went wobbly and the world around her was… wrong, two scenes briefly overlaid, she saw… she wasn’t sure what the fates she saw, two figures perhaps, watching the creature, the fury and the disgust in their eyes resonated with her somehow. Maybe a reflection of them?

The words pried open her very thoughts, eviscerated her memories and tore apart the subsidiary parts of her consciousness.

[You can resist… yet there is nothing…?]

Its intent scoured her meridians, in a torrent of icy agony, swirled through her dantian making her feel like her navel had just been ripped out, broke everything, put it back together, broke it again like it was curious as to how… she was.

[…And you are barely in the first circle besides…]

The gaze retreated and her grasp of reality and being, tenuous as it was flooded back from somewhere. She watched mute and screaming in pain and fury in her own head as it looked from one to the other. It almost seemed… confused?

Its gaze shifted to the leaf held in Arai’s hand currently, it plucked it out, ignoring the damage the edge caused to her hand in the process.

[Ahhh…]

[So… this is the tool you used to cripple my vessel…. Remarkable, a castoff piece of a verdant locoi, but made into a decoration… so decadent.]

It slid the blade into her, piercing her abdomen, twisting it brutally. It punctured the place where her dantian was smoothly and any restraint that remained in her body on the qi within her meridians gave way and flooded into the stele

The creature pulled out the blade and stabbed Arai, beside her in the same way.

[So it is not that… remarkable, remarkable…MOST remarkable.]

-Remarkably my fate thrashed inborn good fortune you evil abomination, I curse your nine generations-

It turned back to her and sank a clawed limb into her side. She couldn’t see what it did, but the sensations, amplified in horrible detail somehow told her everything as her flesh rent and her ribcage creaked. Her spine twisted faintly and in a single fluid moment it tore out her left floating rib in its entirety.

Holding it up in front of both of them, it examined her bloody rib pensively. Even through her horror, rage and pain she could tell that her bone had some sort of silver filigree like design on it. It licked the blood with its long tongue speculatively.

[So it is not your blood…Ahhh]

[…Or bones… although they are also impressive treasures….]

As she watched, unable to do anything, it chomped on the bone right before her, crushing it in powerful jaws, sucking out the marrow.

She wanted to scream, to cry, and to curse… anything. However, the suppression was even slowing her thoughts somehow. The symbol shifted slightly for the first time, it seemed to be reaching out to something? Touching something else or trying to contact something? The sense of other hands holding her was back as well… they felt… motherly?

-Am I dying? She thought dully as she became slowly aware of a shadow within her that was embracing her somehow.

The creature looked pensive as it continued to crush up her rib piece by piece.

[Ahhh? Soul]

[It is your soul…that is special somehow.]

It leaned in close and its eyes were centimetres from hers boring into her trying to see something she could not.

Her whole body felt like it was on fire as the intent ransacked every corner of her consciousness cracking memory and lingering over sorrows, pulling them out lovingly like tools of torture and twisting them this way and that before abandoning them. All the while words shimmered in her mind like half-heard whispers in the wind, urging her to be strong, to not give in... It was like her voice, but not… older somehow? Sorrowful and afraid, yet with a strength part of her just wanted to trust…

-Her words?

-Her mother’s words?

[Where IS your soul little girl…]

The words tore through the whispers yet never quite banished them. Its searching sensation flayed her mind, made it grow fuzzy. she felt her sense of self slipping second by second, even as the whispers still lingered giving her things to hold on to even as her sense of being slipped away into a sea of black shards and cold oblivion. Each one trying to dig into her, and grinding away a little bit of who she was.

[Where... is… your… soul!]

Its form hissed right in front of her without ever seeming to speak. But the symbol and something else, that other shadow within her that had come with her mantra had retreated even deeper and started shifting differently.

The creature flickered its gaze between the two considering.

[Ahh… it is crude… but this method may do…]

It turned to Arai beside her and slid the blade into her chest.

[Will you give it up…for your sister?]

[Will. You? Give? It. up!]

Spectral blades clawed at her flesh, cut at her bones, corrupted the remaining qi in her body in unique and uncontrollable ways.

She felt her bones getting hot as if they were on fire and somehow radiating pain and damage in a way that was wholly unnatural. The only reason she was still alive she was sure was because this monster willed it.

"NO!" The other voice… her voice actually… in her head screamed.

With it came an eruption of fury and desperation that welled up from inside her. From some lingering part of her own determination to not die.

-I. {Spirit} Live. {Blessed} Because. {Bestow} I. {Body} Will it! {Day}

The words that echoed in her mind were at once quiet, and yet utterly overwhelming, crushing her uncertainty, feeding it to her mantra somehow, in a way that she would never have believed possible. Except clearly it was because she had just done so. Commanded herself not to crumble, and somehow succeeded. The strength was hers, but somehow it was so immense, upwelling within her, from within her mind’s eye as to be almost inconceivable.

[I will make her death painless…or I can make it something beyond pain]

The words from the abomination bombarded her, fighting it out with her mantra, trying to worm beyond, inside wherever the symbol was obtusely hiding away doing whatever it was trying to do.

The creature slid the blade down incrementally. Centimetre by centimetre. She could just see it out of the corner of her vision.

[Ahh you cannot see it… and she cannot speak of it]

It reached out and twisted her head around. She felt her vertebrae shifting and distorting, her neck did not break but the tension in the position was somehow even worse than having a rib torn out thanks to the unnatural pull of the pillar behind them twisting everything in her physical body as it tried to devour her qi.

She was now looking at it while it lazily moved the leaf around Arai, cutting open pieces of limbs. Blood flowed out of her body, out of both their bodies onto the stele.

[Give it to me... and I will merely refine your souls and feed your flesh to a slime colony, or maybe I can make you puppets for my amusement, play with you all day until you break.]

It changed tack even as it tormented her sister, and tormented her mind with its whispering, even as the echoes of whatever the mantra had done still sheltered her remaining sanity.

The symbol was still shifting. The last of the qi in her body not held deep in her bones was finally bleeding out into the pillar at her back.

Something within her mind was crumbling now, the sense of self, everything was falling away, the black shards finally reaching critical mass as her perception of the world around her dwindled away.

-So… this is…

She never got a chance to vocalise that thought though because suddenly the symbol snapped, unshielding itself completely, seizing her consciousness and connecting with the pillar behind her in some inexplicable way.

----------------------------------------

The world went black and she was standing in some other place. She looked around mutely but the symbol somehow dragged her forward and she saw chains and seals. Corpses, well desiccated to the point of being near skeletal now, bound down around her. Horrible barbed spikes were driven through them rooting them to the floor, with chains leading to wherever it was she was going. Many still wore scraps of cloth or dull and tarnished armour. She recognised them duly from the city. Both attackers and defenders bound here? Some third-party… like humans but slighter, lighter... some even had the skulls of animals?

They arrived at the altar in the middle, the analogue of where they were, but stood up much higher. From this new viewpoint, she could see that this was just one of twelve that were arrayed in a vast circle, each with their own set of chains. Before her, rising up in the shadows was a vast pyramid-like altar in the centre of the circle.

The altar she was on held a black spear made of some strange metal that was bound around by the inauspicious green-tinted chains and shivering slightly, as if… sobbing?

Her soul creaked as she touched those sensations but the symbol pulled her on, urgently. Somehow saying she didn’t have much time left, bringing her towards the central altar. The closer she got the more it put her in mind of a sacrificial altar. The scale of the space was also all wrong. in the distance it had seemed vast, but as she approached if anything it shrank and collapsed to something about the same size as the one she had just-

Arriving at it there was a strange sense of disjunction and all thirteen altars were the same altar. Looking back, the vast circles of corpses were realigned to form wedges, still in a roughly circular form, aligned with their altars. Each of the subsidiary ones held a weapon. Two spears, several swords in various forms, a bow, two sets of chakram and a few other polearms and blade weapons. The barbed chains, eerie greenish-black, and thin as string, festooned everything.

In the middle, before her, on the raised dais was a figure, three times her size and somewhat incorporeal. The chains were as thin as string here, tying around the form, passing through limbs, in ways that suggested that their barbed forms were twining around or into its skeleton rather than its flesh. She could see it was female or had feminine aspects in the gloom. Tracing the chains, they met across her body in the place where her core should be, piercing through her and feeding back to the twelve altars and then onwards to the hundreds of thousands of corpses beyond.

The scene shifted faintly and the figure, mirage-like shifted, revealing a spear in the same space, planted in the altar.

It had a blade about one metre in length, broad, double-edged at the top leading down to a flat back on one side after forty finger-widths with an asymmetrical curve. The shaft was almost nearly the same height as her. Something about it sang, whispered… almost called to her.

With a jolt, the symbol did something pulling her up short and she felt hands holding hers, stopping her from grasping it? She flinched but there was nothing there. Distracted, she looked down and hissed in shock. The altar was carved as a massive array. It was the biggest she had ever seen, blurring in a maze of lines through every surface. The symbols within it were eerie and strange, projecting grandeur and surety outwardly but somehow leaving her cold and uneasy after she turned away from them.

Looking around, she grasped that the layout was focused around the twelve weapons, each of which appeared to be a node, and this, the thirteenth weapon was somehow the focus of the interlocking circles.

The longer she stared at it, the more hypnotic the array’s draw also became. It whispered to her that this was a vile demon.

[YOU MUST HELP SEAL IT AWAY]

-It was a thing that could bring about the end of all things.

-A devourer.

-A tool of a despoiler...

-A twister of ways and means that had brought into the world abilities that all righteous people would consider… unnatural.

-A thing against Heaven…

-A thing that went against the natural order...

-Against what God Wanted…?

-Against Sacred Order…?

-Against Fate…?

-Against the Heavenly Dao?

She stumbled back, confused because the initial instincts had seemed… convincing, yet the longer she was drawn to it the more strangely searching it had become as if trying to match within her… a reason… to…

"Against Sacred Order?"

That phrasing somehow jarred her memory, brought the scenes of the city squares back to her… the words in Easten on the banners, the fate of all those people…

The words the other spear and the bell had…?

At that thought something within the altar shifted, it snapped at her like a trap. Trying to make her part of its cage in one swift decisive attack.

She was frozen, locked in place as chains swirled into her from the ground trying to-

The symbol itself didn’t do anything as the chains arrived before it pierced it…

With a single thought, she was certain that she needed to free this spear, break this array

Everything flowed backwards. The intent to devour her became the intent to break. The symbol’s intent, her intent was drawn into the altar, reversing the bindings. The intent to make her become part of the cage became intent to make her break the cage. It was so smooth in its execution that she was stunned, thoughtless for a brief second until the price for her action caught up with her.

Her consciousness fragmented like a smashed jar, her memories flowed away like water from a broken bucket and her vitality in her body as the array tried to exact vengeance on her somehow. Her whole being grew fuzzy and indistinct. She wasn’t sure where she was… then who she was… then why she was…?

Darkness…

A gentle consuming darkness flowed around her and cloaked in it—a young woman, a mirror of her, with dark hair that held a faintly multi-hued corona suddenly stood before her. She appeared to be a few years older than her, beautiful and otherworldly, yet with a certain edge and her eyes, which were dark, held shimmering multi-coloured fire. On her forehead was a symbol for ‘Harmony’. That figure took her hands and wrapped her, small and broken as she was in the darkness and was then gone as if she had never been, leaving her confused and disorientated but very much alive as far as she could determine.

The darkness kept swirling and then it welled up properly. The spear twisted and the feminine figure who had been on the altar reappeared. Her hair was dark at first, with streaks of red and gold swirling through it mysteriously before eventually coalescing into a deep reddish-black with golden streaks. On her forehead was a symbol that settled into her mind as ‘Heaven and Earth’. Her form was youthful, shrouded in shadow, but with a few hints of ancient maturity graven into her facial features. Opening her eyes, the figures gaze met hers and she saw within them reflected the same symbol as on her forehead, a grand prestige that shrouded her from the devouring vengeance of the array as a mother might shield a babe from a threat.

Her garments settled, dark and shadowed on her body, in the style of an old Sage’s robes from their Eastern Azure Great World. Multi-layered attire a little reminiscent of a dragon robe, but entirely lacking in ostentation or ornamentation, beyond shifting patterns of clouds and water within the shadows. Her hair swirled and was done up in a simple style and fell behind her.

The symbol faded in her eyes, leaving placidity, like a moon reflected on a midnight lake.

{You freed us from their chains….}

At her words, the space began to crumble. The array around the spear where she had entered collapsed and washed away like it was dust in a gale. All the desiccated corpses on that wing stood, one as one and howled. Strange symbols with ugly, inauspicious hues blazed over their heads and a thousand black bloody chains ripped out of the breaking space towards them both.

{It seems they have tried to refine my reason to be}

The woman’s eyes narrowed, and she felt fear. It was so instinctual and primal that it defied any sense of logic. Even with the symbol shielding her, it was unstoppable. Not fear of anything, pure, absolute fear of existence, for a heartbeat, before it passed.

The intention, if that was what it was, vanished from her. It had never been focused at her, she realised with a shudder, and she had just happened to be in the proximity and was already affected just like that? Something beyond her comprehension shifted within the space a sensation of transformation and change that resonated within her faintly.

The altar broke beneath the woman’s feet and the space collapsed outwards without a sound. The skeletons vanished in ash, the symbols where they had been wavered and resisted fading away somehow.

{THEY would burn the karma of HER all-soul to… refine… ME!?!}

The words the spirit spoke had a hypnotic cadence to them that sang in her soul, harmonised with her and carried her along with it this time. The rage that came with them on the other hand, was unspeakable. It found parts of her she didn’t know existed to be angry and rang in her mind like a primordial gong.

Something took her by the hand, a shadow of a young girl with dark hair and a painful, drained countenance, stepping forward-

----------------------------------------

Her consciousness snapped back to the present.

She was still bound to the pillar for a second then everything exploded outwards.

Rather than damage her, the force that shattered it seemed to feed it in some mysterious way supporting it and healing her body and mind slightly even as the world became blurry and her memories of the events she had just experienced fell out of her mind slightly, as if she had seen something mysterious that was beyond her understanding.

She crashed down about thirty metres away off the edge of the dais platform. Bits of inky black stone falling down around them. Arai hit the ground nearby and rolled finally stopping against a pillar. In one instant the creature had been taunting her and in the next minute, everything just exploded, amid a dim series of very confusing memories about a spear…

-Multiple spears?

-And a huge array?

The suppression was gone. The drain on her qi was gone. The symbol started to devour qi from the air around her.

The lizard abomination struggled to its feet and screamed in fury, pounding its claws on the dais where it had been sent sprawling.

[ WHAT!?! HOW HAVE THEIR BINDINGS COME UND-]

The strange non-words were drowned out when a seismic howl shattered the void.

The whole world bent slightly as if reflected in a slightly wonky bronze mirror. A black jagged line coalesced out of nihility where the black stone block had been and a simple-looking broad-bladed spear dropped down and pierced the ground in its place.

When it hit the ground every lantern on the pillars lit up.

Each one carried a flickering eerie flame that whispered of death and corrosion. The thousand corpse lights flared with tyrannical auras of suppression and cast out flare like chains of black and grey fire towards the spear with the clear intent of restraining it.

The pillars twisted and warped becoming desiccated skeletal figures that had strange stele fused to their hands. As the corpse lights flickered above them in the cage-like pillars, each one bowed down and smashed their stele into the floor of the courtyard.

{~FALL INTO RUIN AND BE EXTINGUISHED~}

The entire platform collapsed upwards.

Reality rippled outwards from the dais in a way that any who looked upon it would consider to be wholly unnatural.

The dais and city seemed to drop down even as the rest of the world flowed away and upwards in every direction, bending bizarrely with the plaza they were in at its very centre. The edges of the city became visible, the seas rose, promontories were towering over them, the clouds crushed inwards, the cliffs were drawn bizarrely from every direction like jagged spikey planes. All transformed as if reality were being papered over the inside of a bowl. Everything twisted and tried to collapse in towards the centre…

Something descended from on high, from another place. A shadow between heaven and earth that rose and fell simultaneously, arriving from every direction at once to stand in the plaza.

Almost contemptuously it turned over its palm and everything snapped back.

The shockwave of it doing so tore up the forest of pillars, shattering the stele in the hands of the desiccated corpses and sent the lanterns on the tops of the pillars tumbling.

Even as the dust settled, the figure clasped the spear and gestured to the raging clouds, the words the shadow spoke were like wind and rain, shaking the world and crushing the atmosphere of the whole cavern as the lizard abomination screamed in horror and tried to crawl backwards. Even if the language spoken eluded her, the intent in them was hard to misinterpret.

{~ Sors devorantis in caelis Morsus Mihi ~}

The world twisted through dimensions that probably weren’t ever meant for mortal knowledge.

The scattered and inauspicious corpse lights swirled towards the shadowy figure and congregated in its outstretched hand like a galaxy of stars, drawn towards one fixed point. As they spun, the entire space flowed towards it momentarily. Her body was distended unnaturally, nearby Arai looked like she was metres long and twisting bizarrely. The ground deformed and melted around them in a way that had nothing to do with temperature.

She tried to scream but there was no air in her lungs, no air anywhere.

The buildings around them were warping in towards that grasping hand, the clouds falling down towards it, the cliffs pulled like melted wax. The ocean swirled in towards them as if they were at the heart of some terrifying heavenly maelstrom the leviathan carried with it from the shore.

Colour bled from the world, leaving only shades of blue… then red… then black.

*CRACK*

What came when the shadow closed its hand into a fist was more a sensation than a sound. The devouring vanished and the world was filled with a white light that was everywhere and nowhere at once, somehow never quite reaching their location.

The lizard abomination who tormented them was not so lucky.

For a split second, she saw it silhouetted against the white, surrounded by dark miasma as it screamed in agony and clawed at itself, seeming to twist and distend towards that point even as it was eaten up by the all-consuming whiteness. There was a noise like a thousand voices both screaming and sighing at the same time and then the world flowed back to normal so abruptly she thought she got some kind of memory whiplash just from observing the whole process.

{Foolish thing, you escaped the judgement that came, found fortune in eternity, yet STILL your crimes find a way to consume you…}

The words were quieter now as the shadowy figure…

She felt her vision swim because she was sure it wasn’t the figure that moved but everything else, bringing the crumpled four-armed lizard and its location on the platform to her.

Everything righted itself again and the figure loomed over the horrible thing, even as it tried to claw its way backwards. Compared to how it had been before, it was sluggish and unable to exert any of that cruel influence that had tormented them both.

[Please... have- ]

Its broken sending hung pathetically in the air, even as the white fire edged shadow reached down and grasped it through the chest dragging it up until it was dangling like a child’s puppet before it. The scale of the scene was now somehow completely wrong yet entirely natural at the same time.

What was said to the creature was lost to the sound of the storm rolling around them, but the lizard creature and its presumed possessor desperately raged at it, to no avail.

As the shadow spoke quietly to it, the world around them faded away.

Reality grew thin, the sea beyond started to glimmer with stars. The walls of the cavern reflected shadowy mountains that rose up and fell from the sky at the same time, bending sanity simply by viewing their shadows.

The plaza was now a place of silver sand, buildings and rocks shrouded in unnatural shadows in which other things lurked.

Beyond them, something else stood, silhouetted against the shoreline of that sea of raging stars and cataclysmic depths.

A shadow against silver, edged in white fire, multitudinous wings of flowing nihility that split the endless sky, its robes cast from the very sky and sea itself as it rose up to stare down at everything, reflecting their tableau in eyes like silver moons from beyond the starless void itself. Just viewing it changed the very perspective of its being, drew reality around it even as it arrived. Everything was sublimated to it and beyond it was nihility. The sky fell away, the mountains faded into insignificance, the sea was gone leaving only silver and shadow. It towered beyond everything, its wings were everything, its reality was everything, an inevitable certainty that all things must eventually arrive before it.

Everything was tiny, not in stature, because geometry seemed to have no genuine meaning here, but in its impact within the scene. The creature, in the sand no more than a broken newborn babe, bloodied and abandoned, the leviathan was a worm rotting in the mud and she… a tiny mote of-

The moment passed and collapsed like a mirage even as the symbol hung in her mind, stilling her thoughts and somehow keeping her... her in the face of the immensity and insignificance of reality she had just witnessed.

Silver and shadow faded and the four-armed lizard vanished with that world, as did the ruins of the stele, the lanterns, the central dais of the platform, much of the ruin scattered throughout the city and finally the remains of the huge aquatic creature.

The being of shadow and white starfire lingered a moment more, planting the spear back where it had appeared before also vanishing.

Finally, the scene itself quietly drifted from her memories leaving only an idea of what had been in the most abstract senses. Above her, as she lay there dumbstruck, the clouds swirled and the cave walls shook faintly like they were made of unset mud.

The lingering, inauspicious oppression that came with that strange rippling also finally bled away and there was only the sound of water, wind and waves, and the thudding of her own heart and her unsettled thoughts gibbering quietly in her mind’s eye. Turning her head, she saw her sister lying nearby, also just staring dully at the sky, her breasts rising and falling as she presumably tried to get a grip on her own emotions.

Her words sounded unnaturally loud in her own ears as she whispered to the world at large.

"How the fates are we still alive..?"