Having warded off the attack of the mechanical beetles, King and Emilia had continued their trek across the nigh boundless nightly sea of sand. Once in a while, they could see the possessed beetles keeping their distance among the dunes but still following them quietly. Whether they did so to wait for an opening or simply to observe was impossible to tell.
As an untiring mechanical being, King wasn’t too bothered by the burdensome journey through the sand. Even if his feet kept sinking into it and the dust built up in his joints, cracking and popping as he marched on to find Anastacia.
On the other end of the spectrum, Emilia was beyond exhausted by the experience. Her hands and feet felt limp and ached like never before, but somehow what strength was left in them was enough – or alternatively, she was being puppeteered by the fiend inside her to an increasing degree. Her motions were still hers, but the power behind them came from elsewhere. The constant trail of blood she left behind showed no signs of ending either, nor did the vile songs of Pyria that echoed from the back of her mind. Yet over all of this, the priestess overwhelmingly felt the very base feeling of something being off about the whole desert. She had no way to explain it other than it possibly being related to the original unease the corruption in the machine fortress caused her, but ever since the beetles had attacked the pair, it felt somehow altered or disguised as if someone was trying to suddenly hide the corruption.
They had long since lost count of the number of dunes they had passed, but after what must have been at least half a day, the exit was within sight. A massive black wall of stone that blended perfectly into the false night sky above them, with the entrance to a familiar-looking tunnel a mere handful of dunes away.
Overjoyed by the sight, Emilia flung herself over the top of the mountain of sand she was trudging up at the time but had to bury her heels into the sand to stop herself from sliding all the way to the bottom on the other side. At the valley between two dunes, there were the scattered remains of more than a few of the simulacrum beetles, not quite as many as in the pile they had found earlier and certainly not as many as they had left behind, but not all that far off either. Immediately she could tell something was different from the previous encounter. The machine carcasses were thrown around on the ground instead of being in a neat pile like before. Many had been buried in the sand by the winds and there were likely even more hidden under the nearby dunes.
“Did they fight someone else here?” Emilia asked and picked up one that had been crushed and mangled beyond recognition.
King walked around what seemed like a field of from some time ago, carefully inspecting the remains and looking for clues about their opponent. He used his spear to turn one of the beetles over and began indicating something in its sharp claws to the priestess. Emilia could see a thin coat of dry blood at the very tips of the metal feet, like they had been jabbed into someone’s skin. Just as she was about to comment on it, her vision was distorted and blurred for a fraction of a second by a brief spot of migraine that made her ears ring and head hurt as well. As she regained her sight, she could see that King had been affected much the same as he made a disgruntled mechanical screech while looking around for the culprit with his weapon ready to strike.
“That’s probably not a good sign…” The priestess turned scion sighed. Without the cause of the disturbance immediately in sight, she returned to inspecting the small, destroyed simulacrum, but to her surprise, the blood on the tips of its claws was now completely gone. She tried rubbing the points with her only somewhat white cloak to see if anything came off them, but as far as she could tell, the machine was now spotless. She knew for certain what she had seen before, and the oddness of the whole situation made her sure something was up.
“Interesting…” The fiend in her head commented “It would appear as if some poor fool is working very hard to deceive us into seeing something that is not there… or hiding something that is. The nature of their powers is unknown to me, but it is of the same ilk as the corruption we are facing. The weave of the world itself writhes in its presence.”
“What? Like an illusion or something?” Emilia asked. She had no intention of trusting Pyria and was half convinced that if anyone was trying to fool them into anything, it was the fiend herself. “For what reason?”
“To trick us into complacency? Or to keep up an act for someone else? There is no telling what these inexperienced little villains have deduced to be of any worth while furthering their goals.” Pyria suggested and laughed derisively, obviously not thinking much of the party’s opponents. “One matter we can be certain of: the façade has begun to crumble. Perhaps our group splitting in twain has caused strain on the works of the illusion, perhaps our little necromancer is overworking its caster. From what I have heard, she is accidentally resourceful quite often. The potential havoc to be caused by her hands makes even someone like me tremble in delight. I would so like to meet her…”
“You’ll do no such trembling anywhere near her. What you will do is tell me how we can get rid of this illusion. If you’re even remotely as great as you claim, it should be easy for you.” The priestess spitefully responded.
“As I have mentioned, its nature is foreign to any form of magics I have witnessed, but all illusions are the same in the end. A flimsy fabrication to cover the truth. Pathetic lies to cover stories, wily charms to hide feelings, deceitful masks to alter the visage of things. No matter how intricate or well plotted, there is always a seam that gives in under even light scrutiny.” As Pyria spoke, the blood pooling under Emilia’s feet started spreading in the thin air along what seemed like a gap between tiles that weren’t there at all. “Curiously cast, this one; A layer of reality added over ours. Rewritten part of it, but without erasing the old. A road not to be walked by mortal feet, it comes as no surprise that the caster struggles to maintain their art.”
With the fiend’s final words, the area around the seam collapsed and revealed the one spot of the desert they apparently weren’t supposed to see. In the sand, roughly in the middle of the swarm of dead simulacra, were two things Emilia couldn’t have expected less. One of them was a corpse dried by the sand and dry air to a point of mummification. Clad in the stone armor of the fort’s custodians and with an orange crystalline horn jutting out of its forehead, the corpse undoubtedly belonged to one of unit twelve’s colleagues. Not being remotely as knowledgeable about dead bodies as Anastacia, Emilia had no clue how long the custodian had been there for, but it couldn’t have been very recent. Beside the corpse was a kneeling lifeless frame of a knight of stone. Its armor had been chipped away and the metallic parts had been polished by the sand. Though the frame itself wasn’t severely damaged for the most part, what seemed to be its own sword had been driven through its core, more or less deactivating the sturdy simulacrum for good.
Emilia quickly turned to King, who was simply staring at the revealed bodies quietly. Though he didn’t move a mechanical muscle, the priestess could hear his fingers tightening around the shaft of his spear. “Do you need a moment? I don’t really know any of the rites of your people, and in the condition I’m in, I’m not fit to bless anyone.” She asked and was about to grab his shoulder reassuringly but pulled her hand back at the last moment to not get any of the blood on him.
King stuck his spear into the sand and leaned his shield against it before approaching the bodies. Wasting no time, he pulled the sword out of the other knight’s chest and took a long look at the weapon. He then thrust its blade into the ground and carefully wrapped the deactivated knight’s fingers around the handle. For the custodian he spared considerably less time and effort, simply snapping off most of the crystalline horn and storing it with the luggage he hauled. He then returned to his weapons, picked them up and started marching onwards to the exit.
“Alright then, I guess.” The priestess shrugged and followed him.
From then on King held a pace that was hard for Emilia to keep up with, even with Pyria’s assistance. By the time the two finally made it to the exit, she had to ask for the simulacrum to slow down or they would get separated. She understood the knight’s haste but letting him run off seemed like it would end badly, considering at least one other knight had already been killed. Not even taking the time to shake off the sand that had found its way into every nook and cranny in their equipment, the pair pressed onwards into the new tunnel.
With the illusion around them shattered, even the plain corridors of the fort felt different. Previously they had been in pristine condition and simply aged, but now the walls and the floor were full of marks where great weapons had scraped them. The floor was littered chipped pieces of stone and metal armor, broken weapons and other debris. Several spear-like arrows were deeply embedded into the walls and the patterns of light on them malfunctioned at times, either dimming prematurely or flickering every few seconds. Eventually they ran across a second deactivated knight that had similarly been broken by jabbing one of the simulacra weapons through their chest. King repeated the process of placing the weapon into its arms before continuing the journey without a second thought.
The corridor they were in joined to another one from the side, and according to Emilia’s hazy mental map of the fort’s interior, it might have been the one that had ran through the water reservoir they were separated from Anastacia and Leggy in.
“Hold up.” Emilia suddenly exclaimed and pointed into the darkness ahead of them. “There’s an open door over there.”
King slowed down as well, and they started creeping towards the faint yellowish light coming into the corridor from an open door. Emilia tried to organize some kind of a surprise entrance just in case there was someone inside, but King decided to waltz in without a delay.
“What the…” The priestess uttered when she followed the knight inside. She was mentally prepared to see many things, but an entire orchard wasn’t one of them. Trees full of ripe fruit and lush green leaves, all flourishing in an underground chamber. As soon as the shock wore off, she spotted a second corpse of a custodian and two more knights by a fountain in the middle of the room. The custodian’s body was in a considerably worse shape than the dry one in the desert, but Emilia still lacked the skills to estimate how long they had been dead.
While King proceeded to repeat the rites he had done with the bodies so far, Emilia used the time to look around for signs of the missing necromancer and simulacrum.
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“The necromancer has been here. Their pure, heartfelt delight lingers in the room, someone is quite smitten with her.” Pyria confirmed shortly. “Were these the days of yore, seeing this feeling drain from the faces of mortals was among the greatest of delights, so you can trust me to know it well.”
“If My Lady can’t purge you from my mind the second we’re out of here, I’ll find a way to dig you out with a spoon or something.” Emilia decided as her disdain for the fiend grew. Suddenly, she noticed something on the floor that brought a smile to her face. “Besides, I don’t need you to tell me she was here.”
The priestess picked up a lime from the floor and squeezed it. By the softness of its flesh and the bite that had been taken straight out of it without even peeling it, she could theorize that someone unfamiliar with limes had tasted it and found out how bitter they are. As a revenge of sorts, they had then thrown the uneaten fruit at the floor. Knowing a bit more than most people about Anastacia and the inn they lived in, she knew that Rosie had lamented over the lack of limes for months, and that the necromancer had never seen one because of it. She shared her evidence with King, and so, revitalized by the knowledge that Anastacia was out there and in a good enough shape to eat limes, they departed from the orchard. Emilia would have wanted to take a few fruits with her, but the feelings of hunger or thirst had left her at some point while crossing the desert, and everything she touched would have ended up drenched in blood anyway.
The next few kilometers of corridor provided little in terms of new things to be found. More signs of fighting littered the ground and five more defeated knights rested against the walls. Despite his hurry, King made sure that every single one of his kind they passed had a weapon in their hand. Emilia didn’t really feel like it would have been pertinent to inquire for a reason, so she simply assumed it was the extent of some kind of a bare minimum funeral rite. She was also preoccupied by the thought that there sure were a lot of supposedly peerless warriors that had fallen against something. She herself knew how capable King was, but even if he was somehow unique and the other knights didn’t quite match up to him, the party was in some considerable trouble.
Though the path forked a few times, King seemed to know where he was going, and all Emilia could do was pray that Leggy was able to decipher the map given to her and guided Anastacia in the same direction. Eventually their path brought them to an open door at the end of the tunnel, which opened up to a massive chamber that rivaled the first one they had seen in size, but unlike it, was not even nearly empty. It housed a field of grass that sounded what had no doubt at one point been a rather charming town but was now only the ruined remnant of one. Many of the buildings had collapsed or had been burned to the ground with only a few of them still standing to their full height. What seemed to have been an artificial sun of some kind, now had a large hole punched directly through it and the light it shed was tainted by the same disgusting shade of violet that had plagued the adventurers ever since the elevator. If all of this wasn’t dire enough, swarming the streets between the ruins, were countless simulacra that shared much of their appearances and behavior with the hollow ones aboveground.
“Friends of yours?” Emilia asked, hoping that the situation wouldn’t turn into brawl for once, but King readying his weapon answered the question for her. “Of course.”
“I would much like to partake in what is about to ensue.” Pyria suddenly said and stopped singing. “To further limber my presence after several millennia of waiting a brief confrontation might be of aid. Consider it an opportunity to conserve your own strength and allow us to close in distance to one another. After all, why even take the risk of fighting these flimsy dolls of clay yourself when you have the favor of someone such as I? All I ask is that you walk through this wasted abode, and I will grind these feeble things of tin into dust.”
“I’d rather not… but there are an awful many of them…” Emilia pondered and hated herself for even having to consider the idea of letting the friend reign free.
“But my dearest scion, would you instead waste precious time dealing with such rabble? Postpone the search for the necromancer for this? Might I suggest counting the leaves of grass upon this field if our time is suddenly limitless? Can you even imagine the perils she might have encountered yet, or will encounter as you maul pointless toys out of nothing but stubbornness?” Pyria mockingly spoke, as if knowing that the priestess couldn’t refuse her with good conscience.
Emilia took a deep breath. As much as she hated the idea, the ancient fiend had a point. The less time they spent on obstacles, the faster they would catch up to Anastacia. “I hardly think there’s anything more dangerous than you here for her to find, but fine. Just get us through here quickly.
Without delay, an insane cackle filled Emilia’s head and blurred her thoughts as the slow ebb of blood from her hands and feet turned into a tide of crimson that washed into the town as they began their approach. The flood caught the attention of the simulacra swarming the area and they began rushing towards the pair, as well as their own unavoidable demise. Before any of them even had the chance to get anywhere near the priestess, great iron spikes forming from the blood ended their journey by impaling them and leaving them hanging as some kind of a macabre display. For a while, King still kept his guard up just in case Pyria let one of the simulacra slip past her, but quickly understood it to be redundant.
Street by street, they waded through the town in almost knee-deep blood. King led them through a slightly winding path to cover as much of the destroyed town as possible in case they happened to run into Anastacia. For the entire time, Emilia had to endure the maddening laughter of the fiend who was finally allowed to freely crush her enemies after her long dormancy. For a while she didn’t actually know which was worse, the laughter or the ever-present corruption it kept at bay.
In the town square, they found the remains of five knights in total, as well as two more dead custodians who had died on the steps of the town temple, which was one of the only remaining intact buildings in the town. King collected their horns and gave weapons to his fallen brethren while the priestess tried to remain sane as Pyria’s powers grew along with the carnage she was causing. She had become deaf to all other noises without even noticing it and could hardly focus on anything besides the copious volume of blood draining from the gaps between the armor plates of her gauntlets. Whether King actually understood anything that was going on was anyone’s guess, but he did notice Emilia having trouble with the voice inside her head. In his typical manner when it came to dealing with people other than Anastacia, the knight grabbed the collar of the priestess’ armor and shook her until the light returned to her eyes and she looked up.
“I’m sorry… Are you ready to move on?” Asked the priestess, still disoriented and having trouble releasing herself from whatever Pyria was doing. It was impossible to say whether it was intentional, but clearly the differences between having a connection to a god and having something almost comparable inside her head came with some drastic downsides.
King didn’t have time for such issues and started dragging Emilia across the rest of the town noticeably faster than the first half. By then, most of the other simulacra had managed to end themselves by stepping into the blood somewhere around the thoroughly flooded town, and Pyria only needed to get rid of a handful more before the pair exited the town.
As soon as they passed the final destroyed buildings, the flood of blood subsided, and the fiend’s laughter ended with a wistful sigh. “A pact fulfilled, though a joyous occasion, I can not help but to wonder if our opposition was fragile even by mortal standards? Does such weakness not sicken the inhabitants of this glorified cave?”
“What are you doing to me?!” Emilia demanded to know as she stared the slowed flow of blood from her hands. “I feel like a… a puppet hanging from strings someone else is pulling on – and what possible reason is there for the constant bleeding?!”
“But are we not all puppets that someone else makes dance? Here to do our part in whatever play that was written for us?” Pyria answered without actually answering.
“Answer me, fiend!” The priestess kept demanding.
Pyria chuckled. “Very well, I may as well admit that my intention with this show of force is to leave a mark. A brand burned into your being that permanently affixes us together. As I have promised, it will gain me no control of your actions and the stupor shall pass in time. The purpose of this admittedly invasive process is to prevent anyone, be they gods or worse, from tearing us apart. Undoubtedly, upon her return, Sylvia will flick this fraction of my being back into what nook of your mind I slumbered in, but with this you may still contact me if the need is dire enough.” She explained in what was more than probably the most genuine tone possible for her.
“Why on earth would I want that? If Sylvia can rid me of you for good, why would I ever let you stay?” Emilia questioned the idea vehemently.
“Why dear scion… because the opposite is me being somewhere else.” The ancient fiend sighed. “There is a reason this part of me was not destroyed in the past and will not be destroyed even if you somehow force us apart. I may be something you despise more than anything, but the truth is that within you I have found myself content. I no longer desire what I once did and instead simply wish to… be. You do not yet see the cards at play, so do trust someone with millennia of experience of the game that is being played – this is the lesser evil. Whether it is to your liking or not.”
Something about the way Pyria spoke made Emilia consider believing her for a second. The fiend was clearly annoyed by how little say she had in the matters she spoke of and, had no experience as a pawn in someone else’s plans. However, what really won Emilia over was the first argument. Inside her head, the fiend was under lock and key and unable to do harm, the priestess didn’t really know what ‘somewhere else’ meant, but it was highly unlikely that it would improve things.
While the priestess ran the complicated explanation through her head a few more times, Pyria continued. “Soon enough, my mark upon your soul will stain it for life and the magnitude of these effects you claim to dislike will lessen or stop. Once complete, our beings will remain inseparable even upon your inevitable death in whatever minute time mortals of the time remain alive. As I am a part of you, for better or for worse, this part of me shall follow you to the bitter end. Were we not inseparable then, my essence could be claimed from that of yours and used for things distasteful even for me. This temporary intimacy of ours shall work to prevent that.”
“Wait. I’m the chosen one devoted to My Lady. Once I die, my soul is only for her to claim. No one suspicious will get their hands on it anyway.” Emilia pointed out.
Pyria chortled smugly. “Mighty convenient for her, is it not?”
“I do not care for your implications, fiend.” The priestess grumbled. “Do what you must, at least you’re not going to harm anyone if you’re stuck in my head.” Immediately, she could feel Pyria’s grasp on her tightening.
King was done waiting for the conversation he could only hear one half of and started heading for the closed door at the end of the road leaving the town. He hastily marched up to it and was about to press his hand against the plate in the middle to open it, but suddenly stopped.
“The door is closed.” Emilia voiced out the same realization that stopped King. “Has Anna not gone through here yet? But she wasn’t in the town either.”
The simulacrum stared back at the ruined town for a moment, but eventually decided to open the door and head into the corridor that slowly lit up before him to reveal more signs of battle.
The priestess shrugged. “Maybe she got through and closed the door so the simulacra out there wouldn’t follow?” She suggested. Emilia followed King into the tunnel for a few meters before stopping and asking the knight to do the same. Staring at the blood still bubbling from within her armored gloves, she waited for a bit of it to pool up in her palm and began smearing the thick red mess into the wall of the corridor until the words ‘Anastacia, follow the blood’ were inscribed on it. “There. If she’s messing around somewhere out there, now she’ll know what to do.” She stated proudly, still unaware how much she would come to wish she had signed her work, instead of leaving behind a vague phrase written in blood on the wall.