Achemiss seethed from within his pocket dimension. Within, Jenexa stood, gaze vacant as ever, while his other constructs–and most of his workshop’s contents–lay on the ground.
Achemiss didn’t know why Dunai was so confident he was inside this rift, but the man’s dogged determination had left Achemiss with little choice but to hunker in the pocket dimension and seal off the entrance to the workshop, collapsing it under sand while instructing his constructs to remove all traces of the disturbance.
He’d had to act fast, before Maria and Dunai’s other constructs entered the rift. But he’d pulled off the strategy, hiding himself away from any probes the duo could throw at him. All the while, with bated breath, he had Jenexa run scenarios. So far, the pocket dimension had held steady, showing no signs of breaking, but Achemiss was concerned that the Regret affinity’s usage would add up and destabilize it. While he was inside, he couldn’t use his Dark affinity to repair or keep it stable, either, putting him on a timer.
They’ll give up eventually, Achemiss thought. There are no signs I’m here. No End arrows for the lich to sense.
Time moved excruciatingly slow in the dilated space. Achemiss gradually reduced the frequency of Jenexa’s probes so that she sampled the real world only every minute–or every few seconds, relative to time in the rift.
While stewing, he pored over the sheets of paper arrayed out in front of him. Most of them had plans focusing on what he would do once Dunai’s bitch of a lich stopped sleuthing and left the rift, which, with Achemiss’s luck, might take hours.
His foot tapped the ground as he watched and considered, his elbow resting on the table and propping up his head.
His gaze became clouded as a new wave of constructs–these clearly sent in by Dunai–entered the rift. It seemed the ancient had finally sent greater numbers into the fray.
One of them went straight to the lich, offering her a small trinket. Jenexa’s scenarios were limited to what Achemiss’s constructs could see, and the lich allowed none to get close. Achemiss tried to make out what the object was–a box? Perhaps a weapon, or an explosive?
Whatever it was, it wouldn’t do her or Dunai any good unless they discovered Achemiss’s location.
It took him minutes of dilated time before he realized the true danger it posed. His foot’s tapping sped up as the lich drew closer to his workshop, angling the box as she ran.
He finally realized what it was: a compass. One that was leading the lich to his buried workshop.
He snapped up in his seat, his hand clenching and inadvertently snapping the stylus.
He looked at all the papers on the table and snarled, scattering them. How could Dunai have such an artifact? Even Achemiss didn’t have one, relying instead on his affinity to detect spatial blips in the fabric of reality.
There was only one ascendant that Achemiss knew held an artifact with a similar capability, and they were a white faction leader in the Hall of Ascension. Someone that Dunai should never have contact with under normal circumstances.
But Achemiss thought back to the period just after Ari’s death, when Dunai had just ascended. The Hall of Ascension had called a council to deliberate. Achemiss had been summoned for it, not that he’d attended–the black faction had represented him, as they always did. He hadn’t even heard of the deliberation until a week later when the news reached him.
But he could remember the name presiding over the hearing from within the Hall itself–Ascendant Crimson Teeth. A man who normally didn’t meddle, focusing instead on creating artifacts and tending to his little serpent pet. Achemiss had always held the man in quiet contempt–a Beginning affinity ascendant who had all the time in the world to pick up another affinity, one that would actually make him useful, and never did. Still, Crimson Teeth was rather hands-off and as impartial as faction members came, part of what made him a key figure in the Hall of Ascension. He wasn’t the messy emotional type. He wouldn’t have shed a tear for Ari, even though they’d worked together as members of the Hall.
With Ari dead, someone else in the Hall would have needed to orient Dunai in Eternity. Because of the deliberations, Achemiss knew for certain that Crimson Teeth had been present. While unlikely, it was plausible that the ascendant had oriented Dunai personally... and gave him the compass that now lay in the lich’s cold, dead hand.
There was simply no possibility that Crimson Teeth had anticipated all the events that had transpired, leading to this moment, Beginning affinity or not. Impossible. And yet. Dunai was equipped with the one implement that could nullify Achemiss’s ability to completely avoid detection.
Achemiss laughed coldly, his rage burning furiously in his chest. As he watched Jenexa’s scenarios, his mind felt oddly blank. He numbly followed Dunai’s minions as they breached his workshop and inspected his chair, the one where the pocket dimension was anchored.
Even with time crawling forward outside, Achemiss felt that it was passing much too fast. He needed to make a decision.
He couldn’t hide in the pocket dimension any longer. That was a certainty. What he could control was how he left. With his Regret window peeking thirty seconds ahead, he needed to carefully time when he departed to ensure his own safety and kill the lich in one move.
Achemiss assumed that Dunai also had a Regret practitioner helping him–Achemiss refused to believe that everything was going perfectly for him without such assistance. Since they both had Regret assistance, choosing an opportune time to leave the pocket dimension was an exercise in frustration.
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Especially because Jenexa’s scenarios always indicated that Achemiss succeeded. He killed the lich and survived to the end of the scenario. But that just couldn’t be true. Either Dunai didn’t have a Regret practitioner helping, which was ludicrous; his lich had a way to know when they were in Jenexa’s scenarios and adjusted their actions; or there was something Achemiss was missing.
He had to assume the latter, but he just couldn’t figure it out. As Achemiss considered his next steps, the lich slowly but surely etched out an array on the ground around the throne in Achemiss’s emptied workshop. He couldn’t tell what it was–his best vehicle of perception was the monster corpse that the lich had dropped onto the floor, almost as though she wanted Achemiss to have a window into her activities.
He wanted nothing more than to break her cold neck and shatter her phylactery. At present, the former was futile, and the latter impossible without knowing where the phylactery was. Achemiss could reasonably guess it was with Dunai–if the phylactery was far away, Maria’s first death would take her permanently out of the fight.
The conclusion he was slowly coming to, scenario after scenario, was that worrying about the lich was misguided. His true opponent was Dunai, and he needed to think offensively. How could he strike at the necromancer while still within the rift?
Achemiss adjusted his scenarios. Not to kill the lich, but to capture her and those resilient dark-robed puppets that accompanied her. Through those constructs, he’d find a way to attack Dunai’s soul. The ancient was a prodigy, but he was still so young and inexperienced. There had to be flaws Achemiss could exploit.
But if there were, Achemiss wasn’t finding them before the scenarios ended. Thirty seconds wasn’t enough, especially when he couldn’t properly convey thoughts between his scenario selves and his real self. He needed more time.
He’d delayed enough and had little to show for it. He’d have to just go for it.
Eyes flaring with power, mouth pursed in a firm line, he triggered the breakdown of the pocket dimension. Since he couldn’t rely on the timer to bring him out the normal way, he had to use the brute force exit–destroying the dimension and using his own Dark affinity to protect himself–and the space’s contents–from annihilation.
The pocket dimension would never be usable again, but that was of little consequence.
The breakdown of space from a dimensional collapse was uniquely terrifying to behold. The world cracked and bent, then exploded out, vomiting Achemiss into the workshop in a wave of pure destruction that encompassed everything–the array on the ground, the throne, and Dunai’s minions.
He knew the mannequins wouldn’t succumb to the Dark affinity wave–Achemiss would have to study how Dunai made them so tenacious later–but the lich would die if Achemiss didn’t intervene.
He swiftly drew the expelled constructs and belongings into a dimensional ring. Then, his mouth stretched into a cruel smile as he encompassed the lich in a bubble of insulating Dark while seizing control of her being with his necromancy, his will and power pitted against hers.
Unsurprisingly, a mere construct, even one imbued with a proud human soul, didn’t stand a chance.
The Dark dissipated in a moment, leaving Achemiss in the destroyed workshop with just the mannequins and the lich. With a contemptuous snort, bones and corpses appeared all around him, exiting the various dimensional storages on his person. They completely filled the space, serving as a temporary bulwark. Achemiss empowered them with decemancy, allowing them to withstand the mannequins’ furious thrashing for the two seconds it took Achemiss to tunnel through the fleshy morass and reach the short passage to the surface.
Dunai wanted a fight? Achemiss would give it to him. Now that he was out of the pocket dimension, he could personally command his army, one that was nearly endless.
A shield of flesh and bone extended out around him like a cocoon, thickening by the second as more dead materials joined the fold. From afar, it would look like a pulsating organ, but not for long. The thick, defensive hides of riftbeasts stretched and sealed together on the surface in a hideous patchwork.
With the shield established, Achemiss finally felt like he could breathe. He brought out Jenexa, the construct hovering next to him in the air. He compelled her to look ahead, to share with him the secrets of the future. He needed several questions answered. Would Dunai’s constructs breach the shield in the next half minute? Would the lich wrestle free from his control? How was his army faring both inside and beyond the rift?
He didn’t find answers to any of them. In less than fifteen seconds, the scenario ended. He tried again, forcing Jenexa to run several in the course of a second. No warning. No pain, no signs of destruction. The scenarios all just... stopped.
This can’t be happening again, he thought, his mind nearly incapacitated by fury. He grabbed the lich’s unmoving form with a flesh-sculpted limb, holding her up by the fabric around her neck and staring into her emotionless, dead, glowing eyes.
On the outside, he could hear several forms ramming into the shield. One of Dunai’s mannequins, its head completely coated in gore, punched through, only to be pulled away a moment later by one of Achemiss’s minions.
Dunai had gone for a quality over quantity approach, and Achemiss was loath to admit it, but it was working, especially when Achemiss had to split his attention between his army and the lich while trying to keep abreast of developments with Janexa’s scenarios.
Achemiss prided himself on his ability to think rapidly and decisively, and above all, his multi-tasking, a capacity that few could better take advantage of than Death practitioners. But he had limits.
Backed into a corner, he made the only choice he stomach. Achemiss still had his trump card–he wasn’t ever truly in danger of dying today–so he decided to go all in on offense. He plunged probes from his ethereal body into the lich. He sought not just to destroy her, but to usurp the bond between her and her master.
After a second of searching, he couldn’t find any obvious connection to Dunai, so he dug deeper. He tore at her being as only a necromancer could. She was conscious and incapacitated, so she should feel every bit of pain. He wished he could hear her scream. He hoped Dunai could.
And then, as the seconds before the scenarios all ended approached, he found it. A small thread, one he was certain led to Dunai. Achemiss had been intimately acquainted with the ancient’s ethereal body during the assassination, and he recognized it immediately.
Unto the thread, he leveled the most powerful soul attack he could muster.
And then, everything unraveled, his vision going dark. As he felt his soul being yanked across the planet, he gnashed immaterial teeth while lamenting his second death.
He didn’t even know how he’d died.
At least this time, he wouldn’t be unprepared when he reformed, unused to his new state of existence and stranded without items or allies. He’d need to move very, very quickly, but he would persevere. He always had, always would.
So why... did he feel such dread?