Chapter 261 - Bottom of the Sky VII
A small, confident smile crept its way onto Arciel’s face as she cast her eyes across the horizon. From her position in the sky, she could see the capital city in all its glory. The dark alleyways, the pirate-infested wharves, the underwater drug trade. The beautiful beaches, the fine gardens, and the familiar napping hill. All of it was made clear beneath the light of the moon. The winter wasn’t quite over. It would only be at midnight that the goddess of the frozen wilds released her grip on the world, but the clock was ticking, and the seasons were changing. The icy cap that covered the ocean was gone, the snow was no more, and the leafless trees were revived with buds anew. The perfect night to put her enemy in her place.
Queen Priscilla wasn’t as calm. Her tiny, hideous eyes were shaking, and her jaws were constantly in motion—she regarded her foe with a twinge of fear.
“It is a beautiful evening,” said the bloodkraken, “a fine night for a usurper like you to breathe her last.” Seeing the elin so rattled only bettered the squid’s mood. She tilted her hat forward to mask the top half of her face as an extended, sinister giggle escaped her lips.
The eel furrowed her brow. She wore a trembling grimace at first, but she clenched her tail until her calm returned. “Why did you kill the ministers?” With the bubble removed, her words were finally clear. She spoke the question in a low, raspy voice, twinged with hints of rage. “There was no reason to involve them in this conflict.”
“No reason? No reason!?” The vampire squid scoffed. “Have you no eyes? They were your loyalists, whore. It was under your orders that they worked, toiling away at your vision and your vision alone.”
Priscilla gnashed her teeth together as her fins trembled. “They were key to running this nation! Do you understand what you’ve done, the amount of talent you’ve thrown away!?”
“They were key to running this nation as you saw it, perhaps. I am fortunate enough not to share your ignorance.” The squid discarded her jacket, unfastened her tie, and unbuttoned the top of her shirt. Her ponytail billowed in the wind, its raven black locks fluttering as she turned her eyes away from the invisible moon and regarded her sworn enemy. There was an unbridled storm in her gaze, swelling with such bitter hatred that the leech quivered in her boots. “They were not unaware of the horrors that take place in your dungeons. And yet, they continued to serve.”
“It is your people’s fault for refusing to comply. Our demands were very reaso—”
“Silence, wench! I will hear none of your excuses.” Arciel drew her wand and pointed between the elin’s eyes, her breathing heavy and her knuckles white. The shadows responded immediately to her call. Giant, pitch-black tentacles erupted from their surroundings, springing from the air like worms from the ground.
“There is no purpose in this,” said Priscilla. “You may strike me down, but my philosophies will live on, forever ingrained in the minds of the people.”
“That is not for you to decide.” The tentacles struck as the last word left her lips, whistling through the sky with their grasping feelers distorting the aether. But they were intercepted.
A watery blob formed in the space between them and blocked the attack. It spun and whirled as a feminine shark head grew from its crest. Thick, conical arms extended from both sides, each ending in a muscular fin. When it hit the ground, it flipped upside down and grew a bottom half as well. It had no legs, only a tail akin to that of a genie’s, a thin, wispy frame that converged on a single point. It was an undine, a water spirit bound to the leech by contract.
Having fully absorbed the squid’s attack, the undine opened its jaws and charged the caster. Despite her dwindling reserves, the queen focused her mana, forming a whirlpool at the tip of her maw. It was a hundred meters tall at first, but it soon shrank into a tiny orb that swirled toward her foe. Impact was not its trigger. It exploded before it reached the princess and enveloped her in its raging tides.
The water ran red.
When the jetstreams dispersed, Arciel emerged without a scratch. Her body was guarded by a pair of massive, bloody hands clasped tightly around her frame. The undine had lunged towards the cocoon, ready to break it with a knife in hand, but it was caught midcharge and bound within a shadowy, tentacular web.
Though it was thoroughly bound, the princess didn’t dare approach. She walked around the creature, her eyes resting on the dagger held between its fins. The proxy was armed with nothing but that single tiny blade, but it was precisely the weapon that made it so deadly.
“Do you know its name, Arciel?”
“There is no world where I would not,” The squid took a deep breath as she raised her wand and weaved her mana. “Even if it was not mine to inherit.” Arcerula’s blade had always been passed from mother to daughter, sister to sister, and aunt to niece, the transfer of its ownership handled in place of a crown. It was not Arciel but her sister that was meant to bear it next. But Arceleste was dead, slain by the whore in one of the night mother’s fallen temples. “But with no others left in line, I shall take it upon myself to bear the burden.”
The glimmering white relic had its length marked by a crimson cross and its handle adorned with the first queen’s unmistakable crowning gem. Its name was Grimswald’s Thirstquencher, and it was a Vel’khanese relic of almighty renown.
A single stab, regardless of where it landed, would drain all the blood in its target’s body. The vital fluid would pour from the open wound and leave the victim as shrivelled as a corpse.
“If you think it a burden, then why not relinquish the throne?” asked the water mage. “Vel’khan has changed for the better under my rule.”
Arciel scoffed. “It was never the throne that I was after.”
Though words flowed between them, neither mage stood at attention. Both were focused on casting under their breaths.
Priscilla was the first to finish. Unleashing a torrent of raw mana, she called the sea into the sky. There were a hundred million litres of water, every drop overcharged with lightning. The spell was absurd; the sheer amount of magic required was twice the kraken’s maximum capacity. And the queen had pulled it off with her pool already drained.
The entire mass bore down at once, but Arciel faced it with a blatant scowl. It was no ars magna—there was no refinement or technique, only brute force haphazardly applied.
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She completed her spell right before she was struck. With the bloody throne formed behind her, she sat down and crossed her legs, not only to haughtily display her confidence but because it was a necessary part of the procedure. A massive shadow formed beneath her, with a dozen blood-born leviathans emerging from the depths. One by one, they charged, splitting up in all different directions with the queen as their aim. And one by one, they were swallowed, taken by the waves and washed away.
It was the expected result, the reason she had needed to deplete the leech’s mana. If Priscilla could really cast it twenty times as computed, there would be no chance at victory.
Still, the usurper’s confidence remained. The leviathans had never been intended as a solution to the problem at hand; even without an ars magna, the queen was guaranteed to crush her in a contest of raw power. Her eternal minions had only been summoned to test the waters and stall for time.
As the elin cleansed her two-headed turtles, the vampire squid clasped her hands and prayed. She entreated the goddess for her aid, offering the very blood that ran through her veins. Just a few weeks prior, it would have taken several minutes for her benediction to demonstrate its effect. But with her priestess class finally evolved, it was a five-second affair.
A massive beam descended from the sky and swallowed the floating ocean. The moon’s light did not evaporate the water, nor did it kill the sea life still stuck within. It only relinquished it from the mage’s control and accelerated it toward its natural, destined state. Because that was the moon goddess’ power, the concept of the guiding light.
A torrential downpour fell upon the city, washing away the unwary and flooding the unprepared. The damage was almost impossible to measure, spanning from one end of the city to the other.
“Relying on borrowed power,” Priscilla shook her head, “it is always that with the likes of you.” She was deathly pale. Her naturally black body was a faint grey, much closer to white than any other shade. For elin, it was a clear sign of mana deprivation. Her body was completely without the magic it needed to support all its functions.
Her undine, on the other hand, was in perfect form. Having finally broken free of its prison, it charged at Arciel with its blade held high. Only to be tackled out of the air by a trio of crimson shades. They all had familiar shapes. One was a large insect with a pair of reverent scythes, one was a young lady with a cat-like tail and the last was an abomination of a serpentine moose.
They were all copies, but each had supplied her with such a copious amount of blood that they could use most of the originals' skills. Matthias' clone was the first to strike. He crossed his scythes and slashed at the air in front of him. There were ten meters between the mantis and his opponent, but the gap was easily closed by the echo that accompanied his attack. It followed right after his sweep, a blast of pure energy with no definite shape filled the space and sliced right into the spirit of water. It was the ars magna that had come with his knight class, performed with eighty percent of its power.
Had the undine been a beast of flesh and blood, it surely would have fallen. But the liquid that made up its form bubbled and regenerated. Just in time for the other two to take the stage. Claire's clone used its magic to pry the royal blade from the undine's flippers and passed it to Natalya’s, who mauled it with a thousand slashes.
Still, the spirit regenerated. Unaging, undying, and eternal, the oathbound servant was not so easily removed. It lashed out with its body half-formed and cleaved straight through the copies with its watery whips. Having been given no orders to retreat or prioritise self-preservation, they remained exactly where they were and took the attacks head-on. But it was no matter. More blood rose from the shadows and patched their wounds. And they began the cycle anew.
Priscilla gritted her teeth. She needed time, time to stall for mana. Time to cast a spell. But she had none.
Arciel approached with slow, deliberate steps, chanting under her breath as she walked. The surrounding shadows gathered at the tip of her wand. Every last patch of darkness was sucked into an infinitely small point. For an instant, the city was fully lit, free of its blackened stains. The various objects that lay scattered around the world almost seemed to lose their definition as they were embraced by the same global illumination. Where their colours matched, it was almost impossible to determine where one ended and the next began.
In the next moment, as the world returned to its usual self, the squid’s spell was unleashed. The ars magna known as the Waning Light took a simple form. It was a tiny, black spec with no particularly outstanding properties. It moved at an average speed and contained an average amount of magic. It didn’t distort the air around it like an arcane bolt, nor did it interfere with any of the world’s natural properties like one of a wilder origin. At least not until it reached its target.
Priscilla’s shadow swelled to ten times its previous size as the spell landed square on her chest. It rose from the ground with its silhouette distorted. Massive, claw-like hands grew from its midsection, and holes were drawn into its head with blood seeping out from within them. The eyes were in the same places as Priscilla’s but of a completely different shape. Their round silhouettes were replaced by almond-like holes, and their pupils had runes inscribed within. The shadow twisted and flailed as it raised its hands to its face and plunged its fingers into the sockets as if to stop them from leaking their crimson plasma. Then and only then was there a change in the spell’s target. A pair of padlocks appeared in the queen’s pupils, weaved from the moment of darkness stolen from the night.
And so went her vision.
It was not just her eyes that were affected. Darkness was effectively a denial of light, and it was precisely around that concept that the spell was formed. Its targets were sentenced to a reality where the very notion of light was rejected, a world where none of its effects could be observed or manifested. Sight was merely one of the many facets bound by a forced shift in the victim’s worldview.
Had Priscilla been a wood mage, she would have been immediately disabled, for with no light from the sun, there was no energy from which the plants could grow.
Had she been a mirror mage, she would have found her kaleidoscopes dysfunctional, for there were no patterns to be reflected in the infinite abyss.
And had she been a light mage, she would have found all her powers sealed, for her very element would have been outright deleted.
But Priscilla was a water mage. It was only by the blindness that she was affected.
Groaning, the elin flailed, firing spells everywhere there were steps to be heard. They were weak, elementary blasts of water, blades too weak and deprived of mana to cut through the squidgirl's bloody shields, too weak to stop a tentacle from kicking her to the ground.
“Have you made your peace, wench?”
She twisted her lips into a condescending smirk. Her men had spent years, decades, gathering information on the queen’s abilities. She had honed her own classes and skills in response, showing the utmost restraint in the methods that her shadow magic was applied so that she could acquire the perfect countermeasure. She had refrained from rescuing her fallen kin, even after seeing the state of the vampire queen’s farm. All so she could guide her growth and choose her ars magna. And in the end, finally, it had all come to fruition. She was only a flick of the wand away from returning the blasphemer to the flow.
“What will you do with this nation?” Priscilla’s voice was quiet, barely audible.
“That is none of your business,” said Arciel.
“The people will not accept your rule,” spat the leech. “My beliefs are already ingrained into their subconscious. The old ways will never be restored exactly as they were. Not while the nation pines for freedom.”
The squid frowned briefly before waving her wand and summoning a bloody guillotine. There was a loud crack as she dropped the blade, and then, silence.
Arciel waited for a few moments, her eyes scanning her logs, before she finally tucked her wand back into her hat and turned away. “I had never planned on reinstating the old ways. Nor do I have anything against yours.” The words were spoken to the corpse, so as not to give the whore the satisfaction of hearing them. “Some of your policies, especially the economically infeasible, will be undone. But your dream, your hope for a better Vel’khan, has not ended with your life.”
A hand on her hat, the princess-turned-queen gazed up at the moon. And prayed for success in fulfilling her duty.