She sat up as straight as she could and tried to take in the bigger picture that was her damaged skull; there was some serious damage right in front of the piece of her brain that had been replaced by Issi before she learned how to do it herself, multiple perfect squares of missing bone that she couldn’t find any matches to, and countless shards that had fused to the wrong places and would have to be removed.
But she couldn’t do that safely while her entire head was Issi-less. She grimaced and bit down on her lip, willing her Issi to saturate her brain without a single drop touching her skull. Once more, it came easily. She almost laughed at how simple it was, and wondered if this was the norm for practitioners. If it was, then it made perfect sense why everyone wanted to be powerful. The ease of use was addicting.
Ninety-four shards ground down to dust and sent down her bloodstream, to be sieved out by her Issi. Five perfect squares filled with Issi that perfectly mimicked bone in every way but their appearance. And the malfused bone re-shattered and set before the anomaly of Issi in her brain. Sechen leaned back in her chair and let out a long breath, staring at the ceiling as her Issi dulled the pain. Two corrections left. And she picked the one that could kill her to fix first.
Unfortunately, her brain didn’t need any fixing. Any more fixing, she corrected herself, as she metaphorically stared at the patch of murky Issi. Thin lines of Issi traced all through the organ, a complex maze of existence that would have taken her decades to consciously trace. Yet there it was in all its glory. Taking away decades of excuses.
“I’m not ready for this.” Sechen laughed, her voice trembling as it came out. “Why in the hells did I start doing this now? I don’t have to… I don’t…” She trailed off, the image of Paui working herself to the bone to get a bond she already had. Of Metea/Irric’s continuous breakdown, and Prisoner putting his own plans on pause to try and help her. She looked down at her manifested hand, and wondered if she could have done more, if only she’d pushed through sooner. Wondered what else she would run into that she could fix if she just took that next step. And the consequences that would come if she stayed the same.
“Damn it.” She mumbled, closing her eyes and clenching her fists. “I won’t let it be my fault.”
Reality melted away as she retreated to her headspace, a wave of vertigo washing over her as the ruined building came into focus. Unlike her Issi, this place didn’t feel like her. It felt like a dark cloud hanging over everything else, shrouding her future in shadows that had been cast from her past. Cast from Ensche. She shook her head and slapped her cheeks, psyching herself up for the inevitable confrontation between herself and… herself, she supposed. Her foot slammed down on a piece of debris that puffed to dust, then crunched against something spindly and intricate. As if she was pressing down on a thin spring, barely pushing back at her yet pushing nonetheless.
Sechen raised an eyebrow as she shifted her foot to the side, a small golden coil springing up from the ground with two filigree leaves and the start of a flower bud at the top. Once it had risen to its full height Issi began to well up from the ground, a column of murky light that rose through the coil to create a solid stem while filling in the spaces between the golden filigree on the plant’s leaves. It created a comforting glow in the relative gloom of her headspace, a sole point of comfort among the destruction that had lived in her head for so long. As her Issi rose up the flower bud in thin lines it began to shudder, growing and shifting until it peeled itself open to the dusty air with the impact of a pickaxe striking solid rock.
The ‘flower’ seemed to be created completely of Vault’s crystallized greed, and it didn’t look anything like a flower whatsoever. Three concentric rings radiated out from a solid gold sphere in the middle, beginning to rotate and spin so that they barely didn’t touch the stem in their travels. The sphere in the center lifted off the stem on a fountain of Issi, falling to the leaves below before splattering to the ground and being sucked back into the ‘plant’ to continue the cycle. She raised her arm and looked at the plant through her fingers, cracking her knuckles one by one until she had one minuscule halo ringing each of her fingers. The plant now contained eight concentric rings, the Issi fountain sending the sphere higher and higher until it now rested in the middle of everything once more.
It was the inverse of everything she’d been told a focus was. It didn’t help her create a new technique, but it reacted to her using her base Issi. She opened her Issi senses and looked around, finding countless golden seeds resting underground, inert but waiting. Anger welled up at the sight of her Issi struggling to help the golden buds press through the ruins, cementing a theory she’d pushed aside ever since she felt her Issi change. Maybe even further back, if she was honest. Because this place never felt like hers. Even if she was the wisp that supposedly created this place, it didn’t feel like her. She might have been a nameless murk wisp at some point, but she was Sechen now. A practitioner. A person. More than a container for someone else to use for their own ends.
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Her fingers traced along the plant’s outermost ring, feeling it nip hungrily at her Issi. She smiled to herself and let it eat just a little, a band of murky light shooting across the outermost ring as the plant devoured her Issi.
“So you’ve come back.” Her voice echoed from behind her, but there was a slight strain as it spoke. Like it almost hurt to speak. “Everything you’ve done, and you have the gall to show your face? Leave me be and live your life like you deserve, monster.”
Sechen stood slowly, the feeling of vertigo slowly pushing its way into her mind. She smiled with teeth; it wasn’t coming in fast enough to stop her. “You know, Ensche, I think I’m done with you.” She turned on her heel, coming face to face with the person she used to be. Gaunt, weak, fragile, and a hand shorter than she was. “You always called me a monster. Told me nobody would love me, and Revel helped you push me into the awful mindset I’d lived with for years.”
“Because you are a monster.” Ensche said without flinching, standing on her toes to be nose-to-nose with Sechen. “Get the fuck out of my headspace. You don’t deserve to be here, freak. Go live out the rest of your pathetic life in fear and loathing of what you’ve done.”
Sechen laughed, stepping forward and sending Ensche stumbling back. “I was scared of you? Eternals, I was pathetic..”
Ensche finally noticed that Sechen had changed, panic bleeding onto her face. “What in the hells did you do to my body?”
“I made it better.” Sechen smirked, her halos of murky light bleeding into reality. Ensche looked on in terror, and Sechen’s smile grew wider. “I made my Issi better, too. This is a little more fitting for a monster like me, don’t you think?”
The debris rumbled as Ensche’s face twisted into rage, spouting incomprehensible gibberish as the vertigo thickened around Sechen’s mind. What was left of the luminescent brickwork crumbled into dust, spinning around the ruins as it picked up more and more debris, a colossus of stone and wind whirling into view as a thundering blow sundered the ground between Sechen and Ensche. The stone floor shattered into shards that joined the storm-like figure, countless streams of debris funneling into it as its Issi grew. It reared back and roared, twin rings of stone shards blossoming into clawed hands with too many fingers, the storm settling down as its spawn towered over everything.
Ensche was nowhere to be found, but Sechen had a feeling she was somewhere in the monster that now stood before her. Her hatred boiled off the colossus in waves, and along with it came a stone rain. Countless sharpened pebbles filled the sky, and Sechen shaped a dome of her Issi to keep them from running her through. Luminescence flashed through the murk with every pelting stone, barely draining her container as her halos worked to absorb most of the burden. She waved away the barrier as the rain let up, dashing backwards to avoid one of the colossus’ detached stone hands sailing directly down at her.
The hand crashed into a transparent floor, rumbling Sechen’s headspace and sending a jolt of pain into her mind. “Shit.” She grumbled, falling to one knee as her vision blurred for a handful of seconds. Even if Ensche didn’t hit her head-on, this place was still Sechen. Attacking it hurt her as well.
“How in the hells did she get stone Issi?” Sechen muttered, wobbling to her feet as her headspace stopped spinning. Ensche was winding up for another blow to the ground, both stone fists raised high in the air with knuckles pointed down, the main body of the colossus staring unerringly at Sechen. “I never had stone Issi.”
Sechen tried to call on the same feeling she’d had when she summoned that giant claw back when she was fighting Brynn’s glass knight. Her container grew warm with effort and her thoughts came just a little slower as she focused intently on the mental image, but slightly altered. She didn’t want the luminescent portion of her Issi leaking out like it had then, leaving her Issi-less and helpless against Ensche. With a rising fist she summoned one claw, a wickedly sharp piece of dark Issi that stretched into the sky and pierced one of the colossus’ fists perfectly down the center.
And yet the technique still felt incomplete. Sechen grimaced as Issi began leaking through luminescent cracks that shone through the murky darkness, the fist pressing ever onwards as if the massive claw was a mere thorny annoyance stuck in its palm. It screamed downwards, slowing as the claw grew wider, more and more Issi leaking out of the construct as Sechen struggled to keep it under control. But she’d forgotten something.
The colossus had two hands.