Chapter 505: Echoes of the Fallen.

For a moment, the mountainside dell seemed frozen, time unmoving.

The focus of our hunt loomed above me, now truly colossal in size. Four craning necks extended upward sixty feet or more from a bulbous, distended body. Six trunk-like limbs supported the creature’s bulk, each one ending in a webbed, clawed foot. A pair of fleshy, avian claws reached forward from its chest, wicked talons two feet long clenching and unclenching at their ends. Uncountable tentacles sprouted in place of a tail, each one tipped with a blade, bone bulb, hook, or claw, writhing and snapping around the huge body.

Atop each long neck was a head like that of a transformed dragon, long and reptilian, each one almost identical to the others. Their horrible jaws ran vertically between their eyes, splitting the heads down the middle.

And burning between long, jagged teeth, the violet flames of Destruction danced in their gaping maws.

The scene surged back into motion, and the endless yipping, barking, and howling of a thousand beasts sounded through the wooded dell again.

A spear of bright white mana tinged with purple aether lanced through the air and struck the monstrosity square in the chest—or at least it should have. The flames of Destruction jumped, clawing in the mana and burning it away. The spear didn’t so much as touch the black scales.

"Keep your distance!” Riven was shouting. He’d drawn the other three basilisks to himself, and they were working together to form a gusting barrier of black wind that danced in dark shapes. The one-armed basilisk conjured a swirling storm of void wind and blood iron, but his spell burned away to nothing wherever Destruction touched it.

The monstrosity’s huge wings beat, stirring up a hurricane that toppled trees and flung the members of our hunting party backwards. I tracked Ellie with one thread of my consciousness; she was safe on Boo’s back behind a conjured barrier supported by both Vireah and Sylvie. Separate threads tracked the movement and spells of the others.

I withheld my own attacks. The Destruction-infused aether blade was clenched tightly in my fist, but using it against the monster’s previous incarnation had only made our situation worse.

The violet flames around my sword exploded outward into the shadow-wolf form of my companion. He shook his head, growling deep in his chest, then bolted away. The Destruction godrune emanated a powerful radiance from within him, and as he ran he began to transform. His torso broadened and swelled, his fur hardened into spikes down his back, and his burning mane became jagged saw blades of purple fire.Each beat of the monster’s wings splashed Destruction across the dell. Violet fire ate rocks, trees, and the very ground. Regis dove into the path of a surging torrent, and a matching jet of violet flames spilled from his jaws.

Destruction devoured Destruction.

An involuntary shudder ran down my spine.

We need to end this battle quickly.

The hunting party was on the move. They fell back in groups, each race coming together to protect and support their clan mates. For a moment, everyone focused on collecting themselves and avoiding the beast’s attacks. Gone were the excited shouts and jeers, the crowing, the battle cries. Every asuran face was set in concentration. This was no longer a hunt, but a fight for survival.

The four-headed monstrosity had risen thirty feet up in the air. It whirled about and crashed back to the ground among the dragons, its claws slashing and teeth snapping. Conjured shields broke under the beast’s strength. Asura hurled themselves away at blinding speeds.

Thirty-foot claws of fire raked through the air, tearing through the wreath of violet fire and scoring thin scratches down the monstrosity’s side.

The spell barely left a scratch through Destruction’s flames.

Regis slammed into the beast from above, his jaws closing around the base of one neck. The nightmarish baying of the horde contained in the monstrosity’s belly intensified, and the fire of its Destruction expanded. All over its body, fissures appeared between the scales and fleshy patches of fur.

Its body is barely able to control the Destruction. It’s eating itself alive.

Even as two heads spun around to attack Regis, two others struck like snakes toward the asuras with a speed incongruent with its size. It spun and bit out at Naesia and one of her people both at once. Caught off guard, Naesia’s dodge was too slow, too late.

God Step carried me across the battlefield. I appeared inside the shadow of a set of vertical jaws as they closed around the phoenix. My hand took hers, and we melted back into the aetheric pathways. Jolts of bright purple energy ran down my arm and across Naesia. Her jaw was set, her lip curled up in a determined sneer, her eyes still focused on teeth that were no longer there.

The ground heaved, and dozens of giant blood iron fists reached out of the mountainside. They took hold of tentacles and legs, even one wing, trying to hold the monster down. Destruction ate away at black metal fingers and fists, but the monster was flailing.

"If we can pin it down My words died in my throat.

In the distance, I watched one of the beast’s flailing limbs descend toward Boo and Ellie. They were going to be crushed beneath it. The mana of the silver shield that had protected her was already dissipating.

My fingers released Naesia’s hand, and God Step flared again. The godrune seemed to take an age to activate. Already, my feet were digging into the soft, scorched soil as one part of my mind told me to run while another struggled to find the aetheric paths again.

Finally, God Step carried me away. I appeared at Ellie’s side as Boo attempted to lunge out of the way of the rapidly descending claw. Aether raced into my muscles and limbs as I braced myself.

The rough pad of a clawed foot longer than I was tall struck me. My body trembled against the incredible weight and impossible force. My core clenched, forcing out even more aether.

Boo was already moving, trying to carry Ellie away, but coiling amethyst flames licked down from the claws like whips, lashing the air and ground with fatal Destruction.

I reached for them. As my arm stretched out, a lash of Destruction wrapped around it. The material of my armor popped and cracked, melting away under the unstoppable consumption. My flesh and bone lasted no longer, and the limb fell away, burning.

Silver flashed between me and Ellie, and the weight bearing down on me lessened.

Silverlight hovered between us. It was once again in the shape of the sword as Aldir had wielded it: lithe and ornate, glowing so bright it was almost hard to look at. A spherical shield of pure mana had erupted from it, knocking the monstrosity’s descending claw aside, where it dug a long furrow through the rocky soil.

The blood iron fists were no longer grappling it. Regis was struggling to extricate himself from a pile of lumber where he’d been thrown, bringing several trees down on top of him.

Silverlight shifted, becoming the unstrung bow as it fell back into Ellie’s startled grip. Boo swung out wide, moving to keep Vireah and her dragons between Ellie and the Destruction-wreathed monster.

Aether constricted in the air, and our opponent trembled, suddenly slow. I felt Sylvie’s concentration as she struggled to bind it in a fist of withheld time.

Regis was in the air again. He slammed into the quaking creature, gripping it just beneath one head and pulling the neck back, revealing the deep wound he’d made during his last attack. His control over Destruction was keeping him safe, letting him linger within the monstrosity’s aura.

Zelyna had organized her leviathans. They were huddled together, working to conjure some mana art; the dell swelled with water-attribute mana, making it suddenly smell like the shore. Their focus was the exposed wound. Across the battlefield, Zelyna’s eyes met mine. There was no fear there, no chaos of muddled thought. She was in control, both of herself and her hunting party.

She recognized that we couldn’t kill it, not yet. We needed a plan to prevent it from continuing to spawn new and stronger incarnations of itself first.

Conjuring a new aetheric blade in my remaining hand, I adjusted my footing.

One of the dragon-like heads bit down on Regis. I felt his fear and fury, but also his hunger—for pain, for blood, for Destruction. The godrune sustained him, and his mastery of its edict countered that of our opponent’s.

The sky darkened above us, gray and black shot through with the red of fire-attribute mana. That mana swiftly condensed into balls of white-hot fire and fell as meteors, bombarding the monstrosity one after another. Most dissolved in the Destruction, but a few punched ragged holes in the expansive wings or exploded against its armored back, eliciting blistering cries of pain and rage from the creature.

As one, the leviathans lunged and spun in a kind of dance. A wave of mana swept forward, but the visible manifestation of the spell was so subtle that I almost missed it even with Realmheart and King’s Gambit.

A wafer-thin crescent of mana carved toward the exposed, wounded neck. Violet flames leapt up to reach it, but the wave of surrounding mana battered the Destruction, unable to douse it but feeding it while protecting the crescent. The spell sliced through the fire, and then through the neck.

I swept my weapon upward, from my hip to my shoulder. The aetheric pathways opened, and a bright purple line of aetheric light cut through several points at once.

Burning blood erupted from a dozen wounds.

Two of the four long necks and heads collapsed like fallen trees. One small wing fluttered away from the bulbous body. A leg buckled, limp and dragging.

Time returned to normal.

The two remaining heads roared. The creature reared back on four of its six thick legs, its avian claws digging at the air, the many tentacles snapping around it furiously.

Sylvie was flagging, her repeated use of her aevum arts draining her power. Regis flew in circles around the wounded monster, countering its Destruction as best he could. Chul hung back, flinging spells with the others, unable to risk approaching for a physical strike. Ellie fired golden arrows of protective energy at any asura who was caught in the waves of gusting Destruction fire that were still devouring the mountainside, giving them a moment to escape.

With one layer of my mind, I tracked the efforts of the asuras to keep the monstrosity pinned down with spellfire while avoiding its Destruction. Zelyna and Riven led the effort, shouting orders and ensuring the attacks didn’t kill it—though I was uncertain if that was even possible. With another, I kept myself moving, helping however I could without dealing any more direct damage to our opponent.

The rest of my mind turned to the problem of these incarnations. I was reminded of the Relictombs, where the aetheric beasts could be respawned indefinitely. If that was by design, where had this creature come from? It seemed possible, though unlikely, that the ancient asuras who created Epheotus manufactured this questing beast, seeding its potential in the magic of this place. Also possible was the fact that our quarry formed here from the interplay of asuran mana and the aether pressing into Epheotus through the barrier, out of the aetheric realm. The shape of it, its grotesque and tortured nature, was like a physical manifestation of the anger aether carried, which Fate had described.

Simultaneously, I considered two other sparks of new insight that were potentially relevant to the battle.

First, Destruction.

I needed to be able to separate the endless consumption from the asuras. My arm was still regrowing, but even the asura couldn’t match my own healing abilities. It was only a matter of time before the monstrosity’s Destruction began to consume them, one by one. It was essential that I cordon it off somehow, limiting its capability to continue shedding the violet flames.

It hadn’t been long since I came up with the plan to avoid Agrona’s notice inside a pocket dimension, and that idea hovered close to the surface of my many-layered thoughts. I’d formed such a pocket dimension twice now: first, almost by accident, inspired by the djinn’s runic magic in a moment of pure desperation; second, more purposefully, to hide myself inside Sylvia’s lair between the Beast Glades and the Elenoir Wastes. This second pocket dimension hadn’t been placed there out of sentimentality, however.

The mark of Sylvia’s will still existed inside her hidden refuge. I no longer had her will inside my core, and so I’d need her spark, that indentation she’d left in the mana through her months-long teleportation ritual and time-stop spells, to form a second pocket dimension.

I had no piece of Sylvia here to use as a catalyst to conjure a pocket dimension to cage the beast, which meant I needed another way. But we were close to the barrier that separated Epheotus from the aetheric realm. I’d felt that barrier in Everburn at the fountain, and again along the shore of the leviathan village, Ecclesia. Here, too, on the phoenixes’ ever-climbing mountain. Epheotus was itself—in some way—a pocket dimension. Still connected to the physical realm in which my world existed, but protected by a barrier that affected reality itself, containing space and time and life all together.

It was then, between one moment and the next, the many layers of my mind working together like the toothed cogs of a complex machine, that I understood what to do.

"Fall back!” I shouted. To me, I thought directly to Regis. Sylv, stay with El. I need you outside the barrier. Both my companions shuddered as they were inundated with many thoughts at once, but I withheld the worst of the effect, focusing my message and intent.

While I was offering direction, I was also pouring out purified aether and molding it.

The hybridized monstrosity beat its remaining wings and threw itself into the air. Twin mouths drooled burning black spittle as they roared, and the baying of hounds grew so loud it threatened to overwhelm King’s Gambit.

Mana, heavy and warm as a blanket, settled over me, deadening the horrible noise. I glanced back, looking at Ellie: she was focused on controlling the mana around me, forming a sort of buffer to absorb the sound. I winked at her, then stepped forward.

The world began to ripple and run, like I was standing inside a glass globe as the glass was still hot and being blown into shape.

The strain was intense, but I was ready for it. The first time I’d formed such a pocket dimension, it had killed me, or would have if not for the sacrifice made by Sylvie. The second had taken hours of careful manipulation as I plucked through the threads of Sylvia’s leftover magic. Now, I had only seconds.

Sylv, I need time.

Through our connection, I felt Sylvie reach for the aevum arts she had been practicing since returning from death. She was tired—the strain of her abilities was significant—but she pushed into the fatigue, drawing insight and inspiration from the lethargy of her own mental faculties and putting that feeling into the aether, which shivered and bucked as it clamped down.

The surging beast slowed, its wingbeats suddenly sluggish. A bright spear of light was forming above it, and the mana seized, its flow like grains of sand through an hourglass that had been tipped almost horizontal. A flock of darting, fiery birds of prey went from flitting swiftly toward the beast to a lackadaisical cruise through the air.

But Regis winged across the battlefield at speed, transforming as he approached, and the aether continued to swarm, picking up speed instead of slowing down. The globe solidified just as Regis, now little more than a shadowy wisp, passed through my flesh and into my core.

The rest of the world vanished.

Inside the pocket dimension, it was only me and the beast. An island of crushed and disintegrated ground floated in a sea of colorless and lightless energy and an open sky reflected across the inside of a plain steel sphere.

The monstrosity slammed against the border of my pocket dimension, shaking it. The flames of Destruction spilled across the steel surface, but there was no physical matter to devour. It was simply an end, and that was where Destruction itself stopped. The beast clawed its way across the interior, frantic. One head lashed out, biting at nothing. The other turned toward me. Its wings beating and pushing its body against the interior of the pocket dimension, the beast roared and unleashed a jet of purple fire.

Violet fire erupted across my body; within my core, Regis connected the Destruction godrune to me, conjuring an aura of Destruction through my flesh.

The Destruction surrounding me chewed on the Destruction attacking me, and the two opposing forces devoured each other.

I flashed across the small pocket dimension a second later as the beast crashed down on me, its remaining claws and teeth rending and tearing at the charged air I left behind.

"It’s just you and me now,” I said, doubtful that the horrible conglomeration of parts and pieces would hear me over the baying echoing from its distended belly.

Realizing my flesh was not under its rending claws, it hesitated, the necks swiveling to look for me. Eyes blazing with Destruction narrowed.

I gazed up at it from the ground. Its heads hovered over sixty feet above me, swiveling back and forth. Through Sylvie’s eyes, I saw the outside of the pocket dimension as well: suddenly quiet, the flames of Destruction going dark. The mountain was in ruins, among which the rest of the hunting party stared around in wonder. Sylvie was my tether beyond the pocket dimension, and I was hers within.

She felt my probing, heard my needs inside my mind.

"Let’s finish this hunt.”

The creature hissed, its wings flapping as it drove itself forward. Then, as suddenly as closing a book, the light inside the pocket dimension went gray, and the beast froze, and the baying of the monsters in its belly went blessedly silent.

‘It’s…easier, a bit,’ Sylvie thought through her concentration. ‘The space is so much smaller, and it’s just the three of you. I can hold this…for a minute. Maybe two.’

It wasn’t long, but I knew she was doing everything she could.

I turned my King’s Gambit-enhanced faculties fully to the second new point of insight.

The previous evening, when sitting before the fire after everyone else bedded down for the evening, I’d made progress on a long-lingering idea. With God Step, I’d opened one of the points through which I could step to travel the aetheric pathways, leaving it open. Aether had trickled through, turning our campfire purple.

I had, effectively, poked a hole directly through from this reality into the aetheric dimension. Unknowingly, I’d been using the aetheric pathways to travel through the aether realm for some time. After learning about this connection, I’d theorized I could open my own pathways into the aether realm, but last night had been my first step in that direction.

Now, I needed to go much farther.

With time stopped within the bubble of my pocket dimension, I began.

Theoretically, something inside the monstrosity was conjuring or generating these new incarnations. Out of its death, an even stronger version of itself was born. With each rebirth, it not only grow stronger but seemed to take on mutilated characteristics of its hunters—us—even including a mastery of Destruction when I used the aspect to kill it.

Even after everything I’d learned, I didn’t understand how this was possible, but I hadn’t dedicated much of my processing power to figuring it out. More important than how it happened, was how I could stop it.

Returning to the night before, I reached for that feeling I’d had in front of the fire, before Sylvie’s dream interrupted me.

Again, with God Step showing me the individual points connected by the aetheric pathways, I imagined a hole between the aetheric realm and my pocket dimension. This time, I searched for a point of connection within the distended guts of the horrid, frozen beast. I probed for the point, feeling and listening as Three Steps had taught me, more confident now but knowing that time was running out.

Faint and distant, barely sensible through Sylvie’s aevum art stopping time and the motionless flames of Destruction, a hole opened. Before, aether leaked into Epheotus from beyond. Now, with the beast itself acting like a cork, something else tried to move out, into the aether realm. The hole wasn’t big enough yet, and so I pulled harder, forcing it wider.

The fabric between realities resisted.

A dark amethyst flame flickered. One wing twitched. A pair of eyes refocused on me.

Outside the sphere, Sylvie trembled; her mind was beginning to fracture.

So much of my consciousness was dedicated to other things, thoughts operating parallel to my primary focus. I remembered what Zelyna had said. Thread by thread, I realigned the branching layers of my mind, emptying my head of any thought except absolute focus on the hole punctured between realms. It widened slightly.

The beast loomed, inching forward, fighting against Sylvie’s control.

Cold realization hit me. There was one other thing I was focused on, and I lacked the power to do both. Taking a deep breath, I released my hold over the pocket dimension.

The sphere containing us burst, and we slammed back into the real world. Sylvie’s hold over her spell shattered, and the beast clawed across the ground, its twin heads descending toward me.

It lurched to a stop as suddenly as it had started moving again.

Both of its heads craned back and down toward its bulging torso. Suddenly, it slumped over onto its back and began clawing at its own belly.

Inside it, the baying continued, but it was dowsed, dull. Distant.

I held the point open inside its body. I couldn’t see what was happening inside the beast, but I could feel it clearly.

The portal was drawing the stillborn future incarnations through, ripping them out of this world. Each one burned with the spark of Destruction that I had put in its flesh when the last incarnation had died. Weak and without their potential, these potential future beasts burned. One by one, then by ten, then by the hundreds. A thousand, then thousand. It was impossible to tell.

But Destruction ate them all in the cold void of the aetheric realm.

Around me, the asuras were shouting. Ellie was shouting. But I couldn’t process their words.

My entire mind was focused completely and perfectly on a single task: holding open the hole between realms.

The flames of its Destruction had turned inward and were now devouring the beast itself. And still, with a portal in its guts and Destruction underneath its scales, it seemed as if it couldn’t or wouldn’t die.

Its claws reached for me. Tail-tentacles lashed and cut in every direction. The jaws of its two remaining heads stretched out toward me.

Basilisks, phoenixes, dragons, and leviathans alike surged to my defence, slamming the monstrosity with everything they had. Bolts and bullets and shapeless manifestations of complex mana cut, burned, and burrowed into its flesh, widening the beast’s growing wounds and forcing it away from me.

A leviathan was caught beneath one huge foot, crushing the man to the ground beneath Destruction-infused claws. Zelyna’s twin shortswords melted as they carved through the beast’s leg, severing it and sending it crashing down the slope. Regis jumped into the leviathan’s flesh, shrouding him from the Destruction that would have consumed him.

Vireah conjured a curved shield that separated me from the beast, but a barbed tail hooked her through the leg, slamming her to the ground and sending her spinning into a cliff. Her body vanished into the rubble.

Dozens of blood-iron crescents rained down on the beast, severing tentacles and pinning one of its necks to the ground. The remaining claws dug great furrows as the second head snapped closed right in front of me, spraying me with Destruction-flecked spittle.

Chul rushed forward, heedless of the violet flames spilling from the beast’s skin. His round-headed maul blazed with phoenix fire as he drove it down and through the pinned head. The beast’s skull broke open and shattered, spilling out a black mush in place of brains.

The last remaining head pulled back, letting out a tortured scream even as violet fire jumped to Chul’s skin. His chest and arms were ablaze in an instant.

A golden arrow flew past me, aimed at his back. When it struck, a shining barrier wrapped around him, momentarily giving the Destruction something else to burn and pushing it back from his flesh. I tried to form the aether and mana to draw it away from him, but I couldn’t spare any concentration, could barely move or I’d risk losing control of the portal.

Destruction devoured the black scales and flesh, revealing dark muscle and bright bones. Another incarnation clawed through the meat, bursting its belly, but the portal, a pulsing disk of black and purple, had already consumed the incarnation's lower half. Before it could rip its way free, it was gone.

The bones broke down, devoured by purple fire, and then the musculature. Incarnation after incarnation flowed into the portal at its center, crowing with rage and dismay, the cacophony growing softer moment by moment.

And then it was silent. The last stillborn horror had been pulled away. Destruction consumed the last of the beast, and then, with no more fuel for its endless hunger, the flames died too, even those surrounding Chul and the wounded leviathan.

I released my godrunes with a ragged gasp.

The portal faded, and my senses dulled. I sagged to my knees and took long, slow, shuddering breaths. My ears felt clogged, as if I were underwater. Or like it was so silent, my brain was inventing noise to fill the emptiness.

Then…

Insight sparked in my mind, and I came fully awake again. The bright burning eagerness of new knowledge stung my skin.

A huge hand took me by the wrist and dragged me to my feet. I found myself looking into Chul’s exuberant face as he looked me over for wounds, his attention settling on my severed arm. A golden glow bathed his face and reflected in his eyes, one blue, one orange.

I grinned as the new godrune made itself known, connecting to the newly formed insight.

Seeming confused by my grin, he stepped back. “Are you well, my brother in vengeance?”

As the golden glow of the newly formed godrune receded, I refocused on my surroundings.

The mountainside was destroyed. The once idyllic dell was a torn and churned pit. Rock, trees, and soil alike had been devoured by Destruction, erasing even the signs of the asuras’ mighty spells.

The first face I found was Sylvie’s. She was sitting in the dirt, caked with sweat and muck, her shoulders rising and falling as she struggled to catch her breath. There was a concerning lack of focus in her eyes, but through our connection, I felt her reach out to assure me.

Next, I glanced at Ellie. Her mana signature was greatly diminished; the elixir from Lord Avignis had been spent, but my sister was in surprisingly good shape, considering the battle she’d just lived through.

Naesia was approaching the spot where the beast had burned away. There was a small patch of white on the ground. The rest of the asuras—it looked as if everyone had survived, although most bore injuries, some severe—gathered in a loose circle around her. She knelt and picked up a small white form. A fiery arrow still stuck out from behind its left shoulder.

The young phoenix touched the arrow, and it extinguished in a haze of cinders.

Slowly, as if thinking deeply about something, she approached Chul and me. The eyes of every asura present followed her in patient silence.

Looking at me with a complicated fusion of reverence and dread, Naesia held out the small corpse. “To the victor, the trophy.”

I saw her same expression reflected to some extent on the rest of the asuran faces. We’d passed through fire together; when we left Featherwalk Aerie, I had their respect due to my title. Now, that feeling was something much more real and honest: belief.

A head rested against the back of my shoulder. I knew it was Sylvie without looking. On my other side, Ellie ran up and took my arm, hugging it to her. Regis stirred within me, hovering near my core as he absorbed aether from it. Chul crossed his arms and beamed.

Kin clasped hands and battered backs with tired fists. Leviathans draped their arms around the shoulders of basilisks, while dragons and phoenixes fell together in tired heaps, their triumphant voices ringing across the mountainside.

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