“What do you mean, you can do it?” Cat asked, eyebrows furrowed as she stared at her grandfather. “Your ghosts can’t resist the dimensional forces any better than we can.”
“Yes, but I can.” Damon met her gaze, his expression peaceful, “I can burn the souls I’ve collected to enhance myself. And then I can carry the hole, if you can contain it with the Wraithstone.”
“Wait, what do you mean, you can burn the souls? That sounds dangerous.” Cat objected.
“It is. I will not survive.” Damon acknowledged.
“Then you’re not doing it!” Cat crossed her arms, glaring at everyone as if daring them to try and contradict her. “You’re not killing yourself, we’ll find a better option.”
“Kitten, I’ve been dead for several thousand years.” Damon chuckled. It was an empty sound.
“Wha-”
“How do you think I can physically slip into the Soul Plane? Not even a shroud can do that.” He shook his head. “I died in the same battle that took your grandmother’s life. But I used my shroud as I was dying to claim my own soul and shove it back into my body. I’m essentially possessing myself.”
“So what?!” Cat shouted. “Undead are alive in every way that counts! That’s not an excuse.” Dave nodded at that from where he was standing behind her.
“It’s not. But dear, I’m tired. I’ve been tired ever since I lost my wife. And every time I use my shroud, a little bit more of me stays on the Soul Plane. Because part of me doesn’t want to come back. I’ve been staying here because of your father and you. Neither of you could protect yourselves, and my enemies would not leave you be if I vanished. But now…” He looked at Cat for a long moment. And to everyone else standing around her. “You can stand on your own. You don’t need me to watch over you. And if what’s left of my life can protect you, that’d be a great use of it. I can leave with pride, instead of slipping away a thousand years from now.”
“...I don’t want you to go.” Cat wouldn’t look at him.
“But I have to. It’s the best chance. The only real one we have. And I know I can make it. I’ve covered that much distance a dozen times over. I could make it in under a week if I give it everything I’ve got.”
Caeden’s eyes widened. He hadn’t brought it up yet, but speed was the other issue. The hole wouldn’t stop eating space just because it was moving. But the closer they got it to the Pillar, the less effect it would have. Getting even a tenth of the way there would buy them several days. Halfway there and they’d have weeks. But stopping wasn’t really an option at that point. That close to the Pillar and any landmass would be inhabited. Setting the hole down would mean killing millions. And that would be without guaranteeing a better option than letting Damon do as he’d said.
He really was offering the best option, Caeden just couldn’t bring himself to say it. Not after looking at Cat’s face. Rather, he just left things be. If anyone could convince Cat, it was Damon.
“How long do we have before he has to start?” Cat asked, looking at Caeden.
“A few hours, tops. And he can’t stop once he starts, not safely. Setting it down on land would likely kill a lot of people, and putting it in the Starry Sea… I don’t think we could get it back out again. This is going to be a marathon we’re taking at a sprint.” Caeden felt bad even saying it, but it was true. If they were going to save any of this universe, Damon wouldn’t have a moment to pause.
“We can’t even stop when we get closer to check if the Pillar closed the hole?” Caeden could hear it in Cat’s voice. She was starting to accept what was happening. But she was also stubborn enough to look for any way out regardless.
“Cat…I ran the numbers on this. I’ve checked the Hearthhome’s readings. After all the time I spent with Kendr hearing him ramble on about dimensional physics, combined with my personal experiences and new senses, I’m probably the most qualified person in this universe when it comes to judging what that hole can do. And I’m genuinely not sure if sticking it straight into the Pillar will shut it. I’m betting everything on the dimensional stabilization intensified exponentially inside. Otherwise, we’re still screwed.” And even then, he might have to do some things he didn’t want to do. But he didn’t bring that up. It wouldn’t help Cat.
“Fine. Fine! If this is what you want, Gramps, fine. I’m not your keeper. And… I can’t hold you back.” Cat threw her hands up, turning away from everyone. She stomped out, leaving everyone looking after her.
Caeden turned to Damon. “You have four hours. That’s all I can give you. I’d suggest you take every second of it. I think you’ve had enough regrets, right?” He looked meaningfully at the door Cat had left through.
Damon nodded heavily. “I’ve left enough unsaid with those I care for the most. Not this time.” He went to follow his granddaughter. At the door, he paused. “And Caeden….Thank you. For letting an old ghost leave with some dignity. I thought…Well, nevermind. Thank you.”
Caeden understood. If Damon was fading every time he used his shroud to traverse the Soul Plane, eventually he would have just…slipped away. Cat and her father might have never even known why he vanished. Now, he had a chance to spend the dregs of his unlife on something worthy of his legacy, and he even got a proper farewell. Caeden imagined neither was something he expected to receive.
“You’re the one saving us all. This is the least I can give you.”
Damon only took three of those hours, most of that time being spent talking to Cat. Caeden didn’t pry into what they talked about, but Cat at least looked like she was more at peace with everything. That alone was worth the delay. Plus, Caeden needed that time to construct the containment for the dimensional hole. Wraithstone was not a friendly material, so he had to do most of the work with his Cosmic Smith hand and his Soul Anchor, both of which were immune to the negative effects of the material. Three hours was barely enough time.
At the end of it, there was a oblong sphere of Wraithstone sitting in a blank section of the continent. The effective range of the hole was roughly a hundred meters, so he had to encircle the entire thing. Luckily, the hole wasn’t affected by gravity, so going under it wasn’t a problem. It wasn’t like it would fall on him. The sphere was reinforced with an infused material matrix that let it put pressure on the dimensional force the hole put off. That partially contained its effects, and let the Wraithstone push the hole through space.
It was a bit like a ball sitting in a pool of water. The Wraithstone was bagging up all the water, so the ball moved with it, even if the Wraithstone and hole weren’t actually touching. Except every element in that analogy was actually a force strong enough to turn a shrouded into red mist. Caeden would readily admit that he had a waterfall of sweat running down his back from working on the Wraithstone cage. Especially since his enhanced Cosmic Smith senses fed him detailed information on just how he would violently die if he slipped up and touched anything he was working on.
“Is it done?” Damon asked, looking at the massive construction. It didn’t look pretty. Just a sphere of rough stone with bits of metal and crystal embedded at seemingly random spots. Caeden had to rush to get it done before the hole got out of hand.
“Yes. It’ll hold for… Seven days, fourteen hours, and a handful of minutes at the current rate of degradation. Getting closer to the Pillar will buy us more time, but likely only a few hours, even when we get closer. The hole has almost reached the threshold where its exponential growth would surpass the rate at which the Pillar could suppress it, even as we get closer. If I’d figured out what it would do before it started eating dimensional forces… But I didn’t. Are you sure you can make that time?”
It was an absurd task. Even the fastest etherships would take a month or more to reach the Pillar from where they were. Caeden was already aware that he was going to have to do some work with the Hearthome to get that kind of speed. If Damon couldn’t make it…
The True Shroud just laughed. “Son, you’re a real wonder, all you kids are. But you’ve never once seen me fight like my life was on the line. I’ve got plenty of kick left in these old bones. Just watch, I’ll show you something amazing. And make sure to keep up.”
Unauthorized duplication: this narrative has been taken without consent. Report sightings.
Everyone quickly gathered back on the Hearthhome, watching through the monitors for Damon to start. Caeden had no idea what it was going to look like when he started burning souls, but he figured it would be pretty obvious.
He was right.
Damon was a small figure next to the immense mass of Wraithstone as he stood in its shadow. But between one moment and the next, his presence swelled to a hundred times the size of the ovoid, dwarfing it in the waves of power he radiated. Several miles away, the Hearthhome rattled as the raw and wild Ki swept over them.
“Damn,” Erik whistled. “Who knew he could do that.”
“He can’t.” Cat snorted, sullenly leaning against the wall in the corner of the room. “He’s not just burning a single soul. I can see it. That’s dozens of souls combusting at once. The only thing keeping him from burning up with it is the power he’s getting from the process. The second he stops…That’s why he’s never done this before. Because he was never fighting like he was going to die. Now that he is, I don’t think there’s a single thing in the Starry Sea that could fight him.”
Caeden nodded solemnly. His eyes could see how much power Damon had compacted into his form, and he could have flicked the Magma Titan with his little finger and shattered it as he was now. It was a frankly absurd amount of power.
“He’s going.” Lily spoke up, pointing everyone back to the screen. Damon had dug his hands into the Wraithstone container and lifted it up above his head. Then, he vanished. Caeden’s eyes widened as rainbow light trailed from them. Even with his Cosmic Smith senses, he’d barely caught Damon leaving. His shroud seemed to shunt off most of the limitations that came with traveling so fast. The air didn’t even ripple as he left.
“How are we going to keep up with him?” Erik stared blankly at the screen.
“Let me handle that.” Caeden left the monitor room at a sprint. He had underestimated how fast Damon would be. It only took him a moment to reach the engine room.
The ether engine of the Hearthhome was a marvel. It was smaller than some of the larger models he’d seen in bigger warships, but it was orders of magnitude more powerful. Even after all the time he’d spent in the Blade Forge learning more about ethertech and trying to fix his soul, he still didn’t have a full grasp of the engine’s construction. It was even better than the Founder’s ethertech.
Luckily, he didn't need to know how it worked to do what he needed to. Because he wasn’t going to be doing anything with the engine directly. Rather, he grabbed hold of the energy output of the engine with his star-covered arm. At the same time, his Soul Anchor shifted, resonating with a unique spatial signature. The one that the dimensional hole emitted.
With his enhanced senses, Caeden caught hold of the wake left behind by the hole traveling through space, ripping it apart as it went. That damage might threaten the universe, but it would help them now. Feeding spatial energy into the Hearthhome through his arm, an aspect inherent to his Cosmic Smith Domain, he attuned the ethership to that wake.
Immediately, the marvel of a vessel caught hold of the energy waves and lurched into motion. Space folded around them as the Hearthhome shot forward at physically impossible speeds. In the damage left by the hole’s passage, the laws of reality were…Suggestible.
Caeden was using his unique advantages to offer the universe an alternate suggestion to fill in the gaps. It was actually helping reality stabilize a little, if not enough to truly restore the damaged areas. If a side-effect of those repairs was that there was a strip of space where things simply moved faster…Well, Caeden wasn’t going to tell anyone.
Days passed. Despite all their impossible speed, the distance between the continent they’d started on and the Pillar was still immense. Damon continued to burn, expending tens of thousands of souls he’d collected over millennia. The presence he radiated started to slowly diminish as he tore away chunks of his own power as fuel.
Caeden remained in the engine room, Lily keeping him company more often than not as he kept the Hearthhome as close to Damon as he could. At least he was rapidly becoming more familiar with the nature of the Cosmic Smith aspect of his new shroud, having to use it constantly. He had a sneaking suspicion that every ounce of capability might end up being useful shortly.
When they eventually reached the islands and, consequently, the more populated portions of the Starry Sea, Damon truly started to flag. His presence was falling away faster and faster. At the same time, the Pillar’s stabilizing force was reducing the impact of the dimensional hole even faster than Caeden had predicted, lessening the strain on Damon. As far as Caeden could tell, Cat’s grandfather would make it all the way, if just barely.
It was when they were passing over the truly small islands that barely qualified for the name that something finally went wrong. Caeden had expected something, but that didn’t mean he was ready for what actually happened.
A gong-like ring echoed out from ahead of the Hearthhome, the sound seemingly rippling not just through the air, but through the ambient Ki and even the dimensional fabric. It didn’t take someone with Caeden’s eyes to notice where it came from. The Wraithstone was ringing like a bell.
“Caeden, what-” Lily asked, sitting next to him in the engine room. She was cut off by another echoing ring.
As for Caeden, he saw with eyes bleeding rainbow light as cracks formed in the oval Damon carried. Pieces of the incredibly caustic stone flaked off as the whole mass continued to vibrate. “It’s coming from inside.”
Of course, as soon as he spoke, the Wraithstone mass burst apart around a fist even larger than itself. Rather than wait to see what was happening, Caeden let go of the energy conduit and twisted the space around him with his Cosmic Smith arm. The next moment, he was next to Damon.
The sheer force radiating from the dying True Shroud was far from gone, and being this close felt like Caeden’s entire body had been placed in a vice. But Caeden could tell that he was all but gone. Damon’s own soul was in tatters, barely hanging on through sheer force of will.
The fist in front of them wasn’t alone, as more mass was disgorged from the dimensional hole than the space it occupied should have allowed. It was disorienting to watch, to say the least. The body that followed the fist was just as massive, and made of a golden metallic rock that shone like the Pillar itself. It was a Titan, of that Caeden had no doubt. But comparing this new monster to the Magma Titan they fought before was like setting an ant next to a dragon.
More and more of the Titan pushed through at a rapid pace, filling the sky and dwarfing islands with its sheer size. Despite that, Caeden could feel that this new monster was essentially a baby, it wasn’t anywhere near its true strength. He was starting to wonder if throwing it into the Pillar would be enough to end it.
“I couldn’t make it.” Damon’s voice no longer resembled anything human. Rather, it was a subtle whisper that slid across Caeden’s soul.
“That’s not your fault. I never would have guessed that the Heartstone could reconstitute the Titan under these conditions. We just need to get it the rest of the way there. We’re close.” And they were incredibly close. A day's travel on a faster CA ship, an hour at the pace they’d been going. Maybe less.
“I can open a path, but you’ll have to take care of the rest. I’ve nothing left to burn.” Damon whispered. Before Caeden could even respond, the Titan seemed to finally notice their presence. And despite all the changes it’d undergone, it was just as hateful as every other monster on the Starry Sea. It attacked, roaring loud enough to send ripples across the dimensional fabric that rattled Caeden’s bones.
A fist swung down, radiating power born not purely from Ki or a domain, but containing something Caeden had never experienced before. The power burned at his senses with sharp, stabbing pain and lingering, oily pressure.
In response, Damon raised his own hand. It was a shadow of fingers and flesh, more transparent than opaque. “Last Gasp…”
The Titan’s fist flared, golden flames covering its surface and rapidly burning up the ambient Ki, replacing it with searing force and even more of that oily pressure. Caeden felt his own shrouds slipping in his mental grasp, like they were being covered in grease.
Damon continued, seemingly unaffected. “...Of A Dying…”
Caeden gripped hard onto his Soul Anchor, drawing up more power from the Cosmic Smith as his body started to fall into the flame corona of the approaching fist and burn away. Just the edge of it was enough to sear him to the bone without the protection of his newest shroud. Just a touch of those flames was enough to soak his soul in oily, greasy force that made it even harder to use his shrouds. It was all he could do to protect himself.
“...ghost.” Damon let out a final sigh as his soul drifted away.
For a moment, nothing happened, and Caeden feared that the Titan had absorbed whatever Damon had done entirely unaffected, invalidating the man’s final effort.
Then a wind picked up, and Caeden noticed that the approaching fist, which had seemed, only a moment ago, to be moving too fast for him to even dodge, had fully stopped. That was also when the wind turned into a screaming gale force that sheared through his defensive efforts and stripped his soul to bone before passing over him, leaving only impressions of uncountable dying screams behind. He was unharmed.
The same could not be said for the Titan.
The fist, before so overwhelming, crumpled in front of the wind. A million years of erosion occurred in an instant, rendering the Titan’s stony flesh to dust, which then vanished. From one second to the next, an island-sized monster was there and gone. Only the dimensional hole itself was left, and even that look frayed at the edges.
Caeden was left with only a single impression. Damn, Cat’s Grandpa was a badass.