The void iris of a deity observed her; no curiosity, intrigue, fear or adoration. The eye was simply an eye, a makeshift sensory organ that retreated as fast as it appeared, once again swallowed whole by the fathomless pit of repeating worlds.
Evalyn made her stand, for that was all she could do.
She rapid-fired several arrows into the abyss, each more potent than the last, and watched them erupt in the illusionary distance. Great, blinding flashes of gold streaked across her vision, the physical force of them doing indisputable damage; damage Evalyn could not see.
A scream—one of anger rather than anguish—forcefully weighed down her body as though her armour had suddenly gained a thousand tonnes. Paralysis from her extremities to her core organs, the Aether inside her was locking everything in place, turning her into a yet-living statue.
Evalyn resisted, but she could feel her consciousness fading as the blood in her body began to coagulate.
Then she was flying. Dragged by the sentient smoke, the infinite worlds before her rapidly regressed into the ash storm. Vague silhouettes of city blocks sped past her, already overgrown by the city’s Spirit trees, their branches spreading rapidly like painful tumours and mutations. The lanterns in the sky flashed through the haze, their light vivid, blinding, frantically flickering as though seizing.
Evalyn’s vision cleared as she met fresh air once again. The cloud began to grow smaller as she lost her momentum and plummeted towards the ground. Her body was once again under her command as she re-started her internal rhythm, waiting until she was close enough to the ground to encase herself in a sphere, the golden material decentralised enough to take the full brunt of the impact.
She felt herself tumble across the snow-covered ground of a farming paddock before a fence stopped her momentum. Shedding her protective layer, she looked for the city in her view and found it behind her.
The great visage of the capital remained obscured by Colte’s smoke cloud, but even under the foggy veil, Evalyn could surmise the destruction underneath. The great shadows of the Lipia Spirit trees, their growth running amok, the Blue Stormer electricity towers burning as the Spirits who produced the energy overloaded the grids.
From such a distance, the screams weren’t audible but were undoubtedly there.
The perpetrator reared itself once again, this time through the smoke and into fresh air. With its presence followed a surge of intoxicating Aether which the entire world around her seemed to react to. A force of nature, something Evalyn had been compared to in the past, a comparison she had always scoffed at. Now she knew how wrong those who called her such were.
Good or evil, its presence would destroy the place she called home, burn it by just being there.
What good was she if she could not protect her home and use the wish she asked for?
Her inaction before the war of Aether and Diesel had brought the city close to destruction once. She wouldn’t let it happen again.
“Act IV: Climax.”
She let the Aether in, traded her own Mind Palace for reality and surrendered herself partially to the surge around her. Exhaling outwards, the trees of her inner domain followed, taking root in the real world and flourishing in the sheer abundance of nourishment.
The branches and vines littered with golden maple leaves rapidly radiated in all directions, diving in and out of topsoil like dolphins as saplings became trees which, in turn, became giants. A forest grew from the tips of her boots, and she could already feel the Spirits of Spirits vying for control.
She raised herself high above the treeline on a golden spire as her bow sprang from her gauntlets. Priming her back muscles, she pulled another arrow from her invisible quiver and notched it. Taking aim, she fired again and again, altering each arrow as it flew to divide into thousands, each warhead as powerful as its original.
She showered the Spirit of Spirits with lethal rain that drilled into its flesh without mercy as behind her, she formed the outlines of ten gargantuan spears, their size rivalling the constellations themselves.
She forced them forward with both her arms, their points directed squarely at each fern-like limb of the deity. Without her input, the ten spears burst into flames mid-flight; sudden flames, eternal ones that burnt and consumed until nothing was left but ashes.
Evalyn found its source in her peripheral vision. Kilometres away was a hellish circle of fire and smoke, flanked by two skeletal hands cloaked in ancient red robes. Colte had once more asked a favour of his patron Spirit, and the benevolent hands of the Spirit of Hell had answered.
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The spears struck the Spirit squarely in every limb, the fire transferring like a parasite from the golden weapons to the pearlescent flesh, eating away at it in an attempt to slow it down.
The Spirit screamed once more, the blistering sound able to penetrate further into her head than before. But opening her mind palace was an act of give and take, a trade-off for more power at greater risk.
Her daughter was putting her everything on the line, so why wouldn’t she?
The forest at her feet grew taller, denser, and wider than before until it coated the surrounding landscape, teetering on the border between reality and Mind Palace.
She raised her arms, morphing and lengthening the spears into cables that stretched from the Spirit to the Earth. Their ends became anchors that speared the ground with a will of their own before contracting, pulling the Spirit from its heavenly disposition. Colte lit the ropes ablaze to make sure the Spirit was pulled all the way to hell.
The silent scream that drilled into her head was deafening. Sensory overloads her body desperately interpreted as sonic despite there being no sound. Some primordial sensation her mind could not comprehend.
Her ropes weakened even as she continued her barrage; the well-defined shapes degrading into a desperate assortment of mass, given kinetic energy. Even the flames were growing weaker despite Colte’s efforts to hold on.
There was more Aether than ever, but her enemy had its hands around her throat, throttling her intake, strangling her of energy. Even then, she had to keep on going until her breath gave out and her armour was nothing but faint lines in the air.
Physical attacks, that was all she could ever muster. Bigger weapons with sharper edges, shapes that could cleave a building in half would strike its skin and run deep through its flesh, but never enough for it to even flinch—if it could flinch.
Over and over, until half its body was burning and the other half was butchered and bruised. Yet the screaming refused to cease, the throttle around her throat tightened and tightened until she could feel it around her throat, clawing away at her as her armour faded along with her consciousness.
She stood upright and severed her spire into segments, sending one discus at a time from her vantage point towards the living god. Their speed and strength were everything she could muster, and they shattered on impact, leaving nary a scratch.
She fell through the sky, plummeting towards the ground only for a golden maple tree to catch her and break her fall. It was the last one standing in her forest—the last bastion that cast a small, shielding shadow over her.
The god looked down on her, not even unimpressed by her performance. No emotion to its concept, no consciousness to its existence. A force of nature that the modern world had never seen.
Evalyn felt her eyes slowly closing, unable to feel the heat or see the flames of Colte’s lake of fire. The first line of defence had failed, leaving little hope for the ones that came next.
Evalyn raised a fist, unarmoured and trembling, and swung it at the thing.
An explosion. A bright flash of light that erupted into a blistering shockwave. Then another, directly into the base of a limb and threatening to tear it from the body.
Evalyn looked to her right as another explosion burst from the Spirit’s flesh, and found a thousand cannons pointed at it.
The full brunt of the Steel Whale’s broadside, half its armaments trained on the single enemy. A sight not seen since the war of Aether and Diesel resurrected in an equally dire moment.
The Aether engines roared with vigour as though they were operating for the first time again, mocking the god with all the hubris the mortal humans and Spirits could muster. A spit in the face in the form of thousands of tonnes of firepower.
Evalyn watched the barrage unfold above her like a grotesquely misshapen fireworks display, each impact rumbling the earth and her very core. Fighter jets took off from the bow’s runways and peppered the Spirit with gunfire enough to tear any human to pieces.
The eruptions beat like drums, the smoke they expelled from each shell formulating its own weather event. Drums of war that either rang in a welcome end or signalled to all a dire beginning.
“A horrible way for a Thursday to unfold,” a cold, regal voice observed from beside her.
Evalyn turned around, already guessing that a set of flowing blue robes and a pair of magnificent antlers would be there to greet her.
“Your Majesty.”
“Once again, I find myself indebted to you and your mentor, Wishbearer,” she said, offering a hand. Evalyn took it and felt herself being hauled upwards with the grace of a feather, landing on her own two feet as her body stabilised.
“You’ve held out long enough. But when it comes to my capital, my forces and I bear the responsibility.”
Evalyn only then realised that the snow had stopped, and in the place of brooding grey clouds had come black ones, rumbling with the might of nature itself.
“Soon the Army and the Air Force will descend on the enemy. Thanks to you both, their attacks will be unhindered by fear of collateral damage.”
In its rage, the Spirit of Spirits whipped one of its limbs across the landscape, thrashing out against the physical assaults with one of its own. It came hurtling towards her, but a shimmering blue barrier prevented it from crushing anything further.
Evalyn watched as the limb retreated mere metres away from her face.
“I have stabilised the city, but I must ask you to deliver the final blow.”
“Do you know where Iris is?” Evalyn asked, the leaking adrenaline unclouding her mind. “Is she safe?”
“I don’t know,” the Queen admitted, “but considering how powerful she is, I hesitate to say she is dead. That Spirit wouldn’t stand for her being harmed.”
“Then you know what she is?” Evalyn asked desperately, “do you?”
“No. But considering the circumstances, I wouldn’t be surprised if she has already found out.”
A lightning strike cracked through the cannon fire, striking the Spirit in an ear-splitting show of might. The cacophony reached further heights of sound and light, with the Spirit at its centre retaliating through macabre screams and primitive thrashing, but the Queen’s voice was clear.
“I must be getting old,” she chuckled. “Everything will change again, and I couldn’t help it until it was too late.”
The unchanging monarch uttered those words of defeat and turned to Evalyn, a forlorn look in her eyes. An apology wrapped in a doubtful promise to do better.
“Your daughter deserves better than this.”
Another bang as the sky lit up with fizzling electricity. The Queen herself disappeared in that flash of light, and a godly pair of antlers took its place.