Three Means, What End?

Mercury screamed, shaking Blade from his hardened focus. And immediately turrets of varying sizes and placement erupted into existence and began to bludgeon the landscape. The two creatures that had emerged in the wake of the prior’s destruction were peppered with explosive blasts, fragments of flesh and gore spraying across the sickly black ponds and deathly gray ground. Their cries of death and agony were so loud and frantic that it almost scraped against the eardrums of everyone around. Mercury never let up, leaving nothing but bloody pieces and ash in the wake of her broken reverie. And then everything went deadly silent as the roar of her cannons came to an end.

It was just a feeling at first but Blade felt even more terrified than he had before. Even in the wake of the nightmare that had been forced upon him, something deep within him was screaming to run. In fact, the scratching, clawing voices that had been locked away in his head had also gone quiet. He wasn’t sure what it was that directed his gaze upwards but his eyes shifted from the landscape before them to the black sky above, the endless, textureless roof of the realm that seemed to lack any kind of definition. And in the vast darkness he saw… movement. It wasn’t clouds or something moving just above, hidden in the shadows. The actual sky, the black mass, was shifting and began to stretch down towards them.

The fear of realizing that even the ceiling of the realm was dangerous should have been enough. But what made it worse was the sudden, overwhelming sensation that would hit them all. It would feel like an overwhelming pressure, pushing down on their entire forms, freezing them in place. Then the feeling of icy claws reaching in and grabbing hold of them; not their body but something else, something that could only be considered a soul. The sheer amount of terror that would fill them all would be irrational, even as the black mass began to molt and take shape. A clawed hand would emerge from the darkness, descending down at them and showcasing its immense size even from afar. They were barely large enough to make an impression on a single finger and yet the entire hand was falling towards them, as if it was aiming to scoop up the entire section of Omothol and crush it.

They were out of time. Whatever the monster was that had now set its sights on them, no amount of power was going to kill it. At best they could cause miniscule damage to its hand before it caught them. And Cillian was fully entombed in his own magic mixing with the knowledge of the realm. There was no hope… which meant that Blade would have to make a sacrifice that he’d hoped to avoid. Activated via a neural connection, his ocarina floated up from his back and his sword wrenched out of his grip. The two floated close together in front of him, with the ocarina hovering just below the pommel of the sword. Bright, white light surged up from the ocarina and into the sword, creating a sword-shaped beacon of pure energy. Now freed from his fear, if only temporarily, Blade grabbed the handle of the sword and thrust it up and towards the center of the descending palm, even as he reached up and ripped off the eye patch with his other hand. A blood red eye opened and stared up at the hand, analyzing its every feature and encompassing its information within.

There was no classification but the details of it were as clear as day for Blade in his mind’s eye. Even attempting to put into perspective the sheer scope of the monstrosity would have broken down the walls in his mind. And worse, there were no weaknesses that he could exploit. So the only thing he could do was hold it off and hope that Cillian was close enough to completing his task. Mercury’s light shield was swallowed up into the Blade’s sword as he grabbed it with both of his hands. Closing his eyes, he focused everything he had into the weapon and then thrust it upwards, pointing it skyward and towards the terrifyingly close hand. A beam of light emerged from the tip of the blade, rushing up hastily and crashing into the palm, bringing it to a stop. The light spread out and formed a countering hand, a construct of light energy, that pushed back against the descending one with slightly less than a matching force.

He was still not holding it fully in place but he’d slowed it down immensely. He grunted and groaned as energy funneled out of him into the sword, powering the construct above. His focus was so dead set on protecting them, on keeping the clawed grip from capturing them, that he couldn’t even hear anything else. He couldn’t have known that the ritual had finally reached its pinnacle and Cillian would be freed from the dark miasma. Smog rolled in from all around them and pooled into the Necronomicon, the book forcefully whipping open and pages fluttering as words were etched onto the pages.

Now it was up to Mercury and Cillian to commit what they saw to memory. The cursed, billowing words that spoke of a time past and the ruling monsters that had conquered the Time Before, known only as the Ancient Ones. Erased during the culmination of their reality, fragments of their existence could not be erased. A handful of the remnant pieces proved to be the origin for the corrupted power that would need to be sealed off from the rest of reality. But one such fragment had been forcefully brought into the world by sacrifice, a crystallized creation that had been forced into existence by the machinations of one selfish man. Omothol remembered the name; one called Eriladar. A man of reality that had stolen from Omothol beyond comprehension, for nothing could materialize a piece of the Ancient Ones power without direct intervention of a living Ancient One.

The words on the page would burn away just as quickly as they had appeared. Blade was down on his knees, his arms shaking violently as he continued to hold the sword aloft. But the hand had gotten much closer and the constructed hand was losing its glow. Within seconds, it would break and they would all be completely covered in shadow of the approaching palm.

Coded by d3571ny of ADOXOGRAPHY V2

There was nothing Blade could do to stop the descending hand. All the power he had summoned to him, siphoned and released, had been merely a temporary stopgap and not a great one at that. The clawed fingers still approached, even as Cillian finally managed to complete his spell and call out for them. He couldn’t even look away for a second, so astutely focused on keeping his concentration fully on the hand. They were robbing themselves of another pair of eyes on the book to memorize but had he taken that opportunity, their lives would be forfeit. They very well seemed to be anyways, as the last remnants of his creation began to break apart and the overwhelming darkness fell upon them.

But just before they could fall victim to whatever was coming for them, they were pulled out. All three found themselves on the ground. Blade was able to release the remnants of his power, dropping down to his knees and nearly falling completely over. He managed to put down one arm to brace himself, his fingers trembling and his entire body weak and sore. The vestiges of madness were disappearing and within seconds, the Terran had all but forgotten their terrible pressure on his mind. But there was no forgetting the sacrifice he’d been forced to make to keep them all alive.

Ten years. He didn’t need to use any of his abilities to get an exact measurement of the amount of lifeforce he’d expended. With no other alternatives, the Terran had called upon the forbidden technique to turn the latter end of his life force into pure energy, granting him a boost beyond his limits while he burned off his later years. When most people used it, they were burned off a few months, perhaps a year, for one burst of power that would tip the edge of a trial. Blade had only ever heard of one person that had used up the entirety of his life force against an enemy, draining himself into nothing but a husk. But that had been the example of why one shouldn’t use the sacrificial power for an impossible task and he had broken the first taboo. He didn’t regret it; had he chosen otherwise, they would all be dead right now, or at least disincorporated in Cillian’s case, he assumed.

Yet it was more Terran life that had been lost due to Maker. He couldn’t help the bubbling anger from rising up inside of him as his hands pressed hard against the frozen cemetery, cracking the solid frost, even in spite of how weak he felt and, in fact, was. He could barely hear the Lich King addressing them, their savior explaining why he had brought them back when he did. Cillian went over a portion of their findings, stating that some kind of power had been taken from the Time Before due to a sacrifice. Blade didn’t need an explanation to what sacrifice it was, especially when Mercury spoke a name he’d long since buried in his memories. “No,” Blade hissed as she asked if it was Maker’s true name. “He is Maker. He lost the right to call himself that name when he sacrificed our people. Eriladar is dead… if he was ever truly alive in the first place.” He couldn’t bring himself to look at her, still too angry over the matter.

But he listened as she explained that Omothol had made a note of his name, as he had created a crystal-like object that was never meant to exist. That was their goal; finding that crystal. Of course that was easier said than done but at least they had a clear path now, rather than grabbing blindly in the dark for something, anything, to give them answers. Mercury thanked the Lich King for his help and he lamented her thanks, as he believed he had created more danger for her than benefitted her. He didn’t provide any kind of insight beyond that, wishing them luck and hoping that the misery that had endured, both in the present and in the future, was worth the trouble. And then he was gone, without pomp and circumstance, fading back into the ethereal. All three of them were left there with their thoughts and feelings before finally forcing themselves to get up and head back to Silver Wolf. Whatever excitement there should have been for making progress was lacking and Blade excused himself to get some rest without much explanation.

He would sleep; his body wouldn’t allow him to stay awake. But it was not restful. Despite the events of Omothol having been muddled in the back of his mind and the horrors they endured descending back into the darkness of their innermost thoughts, the nightmares came. Memories of his people flooded back, breaking through all of the suppression he had done over the years. Walking through the silent halls of buildings on his planet. And his people… petrified in their places. Turned into ashy, barely solid monuments to the living, breathing person that once was. Glowing veins of lime-green light ran a course of their limbs and bodies, creating an eerie glow. In his dreamscape, he approached the statue-esque forms of his father and mother, clutching one another in their final moments. Slowly he reached up and out for them, though he knew better than to touch the near-crumbling monuments.

But it didn’t matter; hands burst through the statues, destroying them in puffs of dark ash as Maker reached through and grabbed Blade, pulling him down and towards him. “You’ll join them, brother,” Maker hissed cruelly, as his mouth opened and revealed thousands of sharp, ichor-soaked teeth. “And then you’ll see what I saw when I opened the window.”

Coded by d3571ny of ADOXOGRAPHY V2