Considering this was likely the last time Ike was ever going to fight for anything, considering who was at stake, all Ike could hold onto was the fact that he was fighting.
The stage was set for a duel. Wailing monsters acted like peasants in a crowd, surrounding them in a broad circle held back by the Judicator’s strangely encompassing power and clawing over themselves for a better look. Nerinai was still on the ground holding on to a rock. Ike looked back at her occasionally for a reminder.
Him and the Judicator took opposing points in the circle. Ike struck first, and for a little while the Archon spirit let him.
Ike ran at him shouting and proud. He aimed for the leg’s. The Judicator was a massive thing and Ike could only reach the beast’s abdomen standing on his tip toes. Therefore he hit the only thing he felt confident striking at.
Unfortunately, the Judicator deflected every single blow.
Even the clever ones. Ike put everything into his assault, swiping and jabbing, using both sides of the spear like a true spear as he fought for an opening, but that indomitable sword kept him consistently off balanced. When Ike tried to dig himself in the earth and thrust forward the parry sent him dancing to the left. When he came back, aiming for the Judicator’s right side which seemed thoroughly unguarded, the shadow swiped out and sent his weapon flying up to the sky.
After every attack and deflection, the Judicator returned to its natural position. Standing stock still with its hands on the guard, watching Ike with those ashen eyes.
The thing didn’t even move most of the time, like it was ignoring him, like he was nothing but a mosquito too dumb to avoid detection. Worse, Ike knew those things were true. No matter how hard he tried he was never going to be clever or strong enough.
Then he’d look back at Nerinai. Blind. Dying.
With her in mind everything came back into focus. He stopped worrying about how god damn weak he was and started focusing on his hands. On the way he was holding the spear, the leather straps between his fingers, the weight of the metal head at its end.
He started to control his breathing and watched the Judicator. The horror looked back at him, cocking its head in curiosity at what he could possibly be thinking. Ike wasn’t thinking anything. Just feeling.
Anger over envy, duty over submission. Her over Him.
Like a cat leaping from shelves, Ike sprung forward and made for the left knee. This time, when the Judicator’s reflexive deflection sent Ike spiraling he used the momentum to keep pushing forward and brought the spear spinning back around. Those runes carved into the meral flashed, just a spark.
Then Ike stuck the point into the Judicator’s groin with all his strength and pierced flesh.
Ichor sprayed over the weapon and the ground, black as nerinai’s blood and shamanic power. Despite himself, Ike burst out laughing and looked up into the Judicator’s invisible face hoping to see pain contorting his eyes.
Instead, the Judicator stared. Like the shovel jutting out of its leg meant nothing.
Then with the hand not touching its sword, it grabbed Ike’s neck and sent him flying all the way back across the arena floor.
His face smushed up against the gurgling mud on the ground and Ike could feel several things breaking throughout his body.
Everything in Ike’s body flashed. Every nerve seemed to flick on the warning signs that something was wrong. The only thing louder than his own body’s suffering was the screaming approval of the demon crowd, the nightmarish screeching that drowned everything out with a special fear.
Ike tried pushing himself off the ground and found that his left arm was broken. He coughed. There was something in his throat, and then after choking for what felt like forever he puked out a chunk of blood and bile.
This is the end, he thought.
Suddenly he smiled and started laughing. Laughter came out chortled and broken but Ike could hardly stop it. He rolled back onto his side, feeling pain in every part of his soon-to-be-corpse and alternating between laughing and coughing and choking on his own lungs. The muscles in his back spasmed. After another fit of involuntary laughing, he pushed up using his right arm to support his body, hoping to see the Judicator suffering even a little.
Of course, the Judicator was perfectly fine.
“EVERYTHING COMES TO ONE PERFECT ENDING,” the Judicator proclaimed to him.
Moving felt like dying, but Ike still fought for control of his body again. When he tried getting back up to his feet he found his legs were too weak to do anything but slip on the moist mud below and sent him falling right back on his ass.
“YOU FOUGHT HARDER THAN MOST.
I HAVE BEEN WATCHING.
SINCE THE VERY BEGINNING.
DON’T MOURN FOR HIM,” the Judicator said, and then Ike realized he wasn’t even being spoken to. The demon was talking to Nerinai.
Ike’s own vision was getting blurry, but he could see the Judicator begin moving. Instead of walking towards the guardian it slowly lumbered towards Nerinai, taking its time, savoring its words, enjoying the moment. She was crying.
“THE GUARDIAN WAS ALWAYS GOING TO DIE.
AND YOU,
JUST BECAUSE YOU WERE STRONG DOESN’T MEAN YOU COULD HAVE FOUND VICTORY IN THE BLACK PALACE.
I HAVE BEEN GROWING FOR SIX HUNDRED YEARS.
YOU ARE NOTHING BUT ONE MORE MEAL.
STRONG BLOOD FOR MY ETERNAL TONGUE.”
Ike froze again, his body regrouping under the banner of a forming idea.
Strong blood. There was something in those words, something about blood. Ike filtered through his memories of the Black Palace and Nerinai’s lessons of magic and history. He remembered her using blood magic. He remembered how the guardian was always meant to be a blood sacrifice to open the seals and let the Raveness finish the job.
There.
After six hundred years, not a single guardian had survived long enough to walk into hell. They were keys, but only because there was something that made them strong. That made their blood strong.
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Suddenly everything clicked and became clear. Despite the pain in his legs and his limp arm hanging on his side, Ike shoved himself up and started running. He needed to get to Nerinai before the Judicator did. There was nothing between them but he still found himself collapsing a few inches from her legs.
“Ike?” she called, her voice breaking with emotion.
“Still here,” he croaked out, and this time the pain kept him from laughing.
He fumbled himself forward, reaching for her hand. She took him and brought him up, held him close enough that he could feel her breathing on his neck.
“Nerinai…” he tried saying, but his tongue felt fat in his mouth.
“Don’t say anything. You did what you could.”
“No.” Shaking his head, Ike pushed back, reaching up and stroking the tear’s on her cheeks. “There’s- there’s still something else I can do, I think.”
Nerinai’s unfocused eyes squinted at him. “What?”
Ike couldn’t explain anything. He’d never been so good with words. Instead he decided to let his actions do the talking for him. Staring into her eyes and focusing on the pain burning inside of him, Ike bit into his cheek with all the energy he had left until blood was spurting into his mouth and filling up the space between his cheeks.
“Ike-”
He leaned forward and pressed his lips against hers, drowning in the kiss and feeling her reciprocate. Then her mouth opened, tongue searching for tongue, and he pressed all the blood from his mouth to hers.
She jerked back and he collapsed on the ground, staring up at the bleak sky.
He squeezed his eyes shut and focused just on Nerinai, his love, everything he’d been fighting for. He didn’t want the last thing on his mind to be the sky. Dying in this shithole with his mind lingering on how much everything around him sucked was no way to go, so instead he started thinking about Nerinai, and giggled in fitful bursts, thinking only about how he’d finally gotten to kiss the most beautiful girl he’d known, and how she kissed him back.
Ike died listening to her laughter in the back of his mind and dreaming of the love all gone.
He kissed her.
In that long and frozen moment, all Nerinai could think about was that with Ike’s dying breath he decided to kiss her. That fucking idiot. That gremlin puppy dog, that buffoon peasant, that lovable and completely ignorant fool died trying to pull off a cheap romantic stunt to earn her temporary and meaningless affection.
Nerinai didn’t spend her life loving Ike from the top of a monastery tower just for him to die like this.
Whenever she wasn’t listening to the Judicator whispering in the back of her mind, an ever present black shadow of deep power and even deeper terror, her mind would drift to the little boy she’d saved from certain death in the monastery. She would imagine him happy in the village down below, having a long and happy little life with good people who wouldn’t sacrifice his blood to keep hell in its cage.
Of course, that was a lie. Everything she had been working for was a lie.
Breaking the seals and throwing herself into the gate had all been one long and unsteady gamble. Of course she’d done research, piled through every text the Black Monastery owned twice looking for an answer. Now the gate was shut, but she was still going to die here. What if the Judicator used her to break it open again? Would just those three Crows be enough to stop it?
No.
But then that sweet and stupid kiss turned bitter in her mouth. Suddenly his blood spurt inside, and she felt it burning between her cheeks. She pulled back in recoil but thankfully her first instinct didn’t make her spit the gift onto the rocks.
She heard Ike collapse next to her, and then something clicked inside of her mind. That stupid, stupid genius had given her the last key to sealing the gate forever.
Even though Nerinai was close to dying and entirely blind, her magic gone and her body slowly decaying, she still had her mind. Without the Judicator’s constant supervision, that meant she was free to work on the rituals and rules of blood magic, twisting her tongue around the iron liquid before swallowing everything. Ike’s gift burned going down her throat.
Nerinai whispered words ripped from ancient papers, and inside filled the black ichor gap with Ike’s red blood, still warm, the power fleeting.
The Guardian’s blood had been a key all along. When she was born, the shamans fused her soul with the Judicator to keep it bound and make her strong. To make her the perfect sacrifice. When Ike was born they took him from his mother’s hands and mixed blight with his milk. They tainted his blood, keeping him weak but making his blood strong. Power unfocused and untapped.
Until now.
There was an explosion inside of her. Not just filling the gap the Archon spirit’s power left behind, but then surpassing that, a supernova of red light. The power restored everything. Her muscles regenerated, the fog cleared from her mind, and she could see again. Everything came into perfect focus.
She had precious few seconds to bask in that moment. Ike’s heart was fading- she could feel it thundering next to her own- and once he was gone she would fall right back to hell.
The crowd of twisting and living augmentations howled from the edges of the circles, bleating like sheep as their shepherd came closer to its prize. The Judicator held up its arm stoking the fire of the unliving crowd and held high its glorious black sword.
Nerinai stood. The Judicator was quick and strong in its own realm but Nerinai wasn’t playing by his rules anymore. Before he could do anything Nerinai held up her arm. Glaring white light beamed out, scorching ashes through the crowd and turning everything to dust. One shot up into the sky and burned through like the sun shattering clouds.
Then the Raveness turned her palm to the Judicator and washed away his shadows. Beneath was nothing but a small, featherless bird. A spirit from a long gone era full of greed and hunger and engorged on the fat of its clever schemes. To make a meal of men, to corrupt the land, everything that had come out of its little black hand inspiring power and respect.
But there was nothing beneath the mirage, and Nerinai snapped the little beast’s neck with a snap of her fingers.
While the Judicator had never been anything but a congregate for the power it consumed, all of those ancient shadows needed some place to go. Something to hold onto. Thankfully, Nerinai had plenty of space, had worked the container for magic inside of her like a well grown muscle, and sucked in everything.
Six hundred years of collection, every Raveness soul that had been smitten and ground into nothing but raw power, all of humanity's suffering rolled into more than she could even begin to pick apart. There were memories and oaths and truths and lies and everything was bursting at the seams.
She looked away from the tiny dead Archon spirit and back to Ike. He was still dying, heartbeat gone, spirit walking out of the door.
“Not yet,” she said, and touched him.
The same black magic pulsing inside of her, spilling over the edge of her pool, then poured into Ike. It was nothing he could use, he wasn’t becoming a shaman, but more like giving his body a kickstart and a second chance.
The pull was terrifying. His body wanted more and more, thirsting for power, scrambling for life.
And then Ike opened his eyes and gasped. He sucked in air and then rolled over to puke out something disgusting.
“It’s time to go,” she said, knowing he was probably so distraught by coming back from the brink of death that he’d understand nothing, and carried him off of the ground. His weight felt like nothing in her arms. Even after feeding so much into him, there was still so much left.
In fact, it was starting to burn.
All that magic was turning into too much. It demanded movement, extraction, action, and a course to flow. She wasn’t strong enough to hold everything inside and keep it maintained, but she could focus just long enough to give it another place to push. To let everything overflowing spill over the top and have its last combustion.
She carried Ike away from the screaming demons of hell and to the highest point she could find, then with sparks coming off her skin, she drew lines in the mud and a ritual circle. Something new. She could just whisk herself out of hell, but all that power began speaking to her, giving her instructions, details, picture and images of the next rune to sketch on the ground and once everything was finished she smacked her palm in the middle and let everything extraneous boil over and pop.
A new gate split open the sky in front of them. White, tearing through the seam of a reality, a portal back into the Black Palace. Nerinai could barely see through the white haze but she knew where it was going. The rest of the power remained inside of her, adjusting to the parameters but no longer overflowing.
She pulled Ike back up to his feet and stared at him.
“You’re filthy,” she said.
“You can see?”
Nerinai laughed and wiped the mud from his cheeks and his eyes. He wasn’t focusing on anything, probably still reeling from the near death experience she figured.
“It’s time to go home,” she told him, then pulled him through the next gate.
Behind them, hell wept.