In the pit, something had become aware.
It had been aware for some time, in the way that a growing thing is aware, more sensation than thought, more hunger than purpose, but it had been learning.
Its creator made it into endless produce, and each generation of spawn that crawled from its body was the same as the last.
After consuming the hundreds of thousands of souls inside this district, the creature finally had the fuel to follow his creator's order, and every soul in his grasp could be split three times three times three times three… and these were the souls of weak mortals.
When the soul touched the power of Lumina, the rules of their soul changed, and there were no longer any limits to the number of times it could split a soul before it became too small to be split, but before that happened, its spawns would have delivered more fresh souls to it to consume.
The template it had to work with belonged to Luka, the pitiful scribe, but it had been accumulating tens of thousands of molds, and its creations could be twisted into the new molds; its creator had not given it any permission to change the template.
Besides, there was no need to change the template, because it was hardly losing anything, and yet the number of souls it was getting for the price being paid was so minimal that it was almost zero.
That is… until there was a disruption. Something was draining its strength, and what it was sending out was not returning to it.
It had sent more of the tide toward the source of disruption, and the tide had not returned, and it could feel what that meant in the way that the body feels a wound.
Something out there was consuming its children, and not in the way that fire consumed them, burning and dispersing their essence to the wind.
No, this was different; it was almost as if they were being eaten.
The Void Womb that had been the unknown man who had lived a life of depravity was now pressed against the walls of its pit, its body filling the space from floor to ceiling, its thousand mouths open in the direction of the disruption, and it tasted the air.
Its massive body shuddered as the taste was familiar. It was the same taste as its creator, the same bottomless emptiness, the same hunger that was not hunger but absence.
It had been built from that absence, and it recognized it when it moved through the world above.
It was not the taste of a thing that feared… It was the tasting of a thing that wanted.
The Void Womb contracted with panic, and it pushed everything it had towards the surface, and the pit erupted again.
It began sending panicked cries to its creator, pleading that other templates should be used, but it was only met with silence.
Ⓔ
Calyx Arathor stood on the wall with his hands clasped behind his back, and he was doing the same mathematics that Tarian was doing far below him, arriving at the same answer.
The other observers on the wall had gone quiet as they watched something that was slowly exceeding their ability to categorize.
Calyx eyes traveled to the pit. He looked at the column of bodies it was producing, observing both the width of that column and the rate at which the creatures were spewing from it, and he felt something that he very rarely felt.
It was a fear that came from understanding that a plan had encountered something it was not designed to encounter.
He had known the infestation would be large and would undoubtedly be dangerous.
Calyx had accounted for losses, had built the mathematics of acceptable sacrifice into the architecture of this trial, had made his peace with the number of young Siphons who would die so that the ones who survived would be better for it, but how could he account for this?
"How many?" he asked. He did not specify what he was asking, because everyone on the wall knew what he was asking.
A Formation specialist standing at his left, a lean woman with eyes that resembled a hawk answered, "At the current rate of emergence, and accounting for the time elapsed…"
She paused.
"Say it," Calyx said.
"The pit has produced no fewer than four hundred thousand spawns since the wall came down," she said. "And the rate is increasing."
The wall was very quiet as everyone here heard what she had just said.
"The upper bound," Calyx said.
She swallowed. "We cannot establish an upper bound, Lord Protector. The rate of emergence is still accelerating."
Calyx looked at the armored figure in the distance that was now covered by bodies, but he knew they were still fighting because his son and the rest of the candidates here would already be long dead.
He should stop this trial; the Commander had already won, but Calyx did not want to, not yet.
Then Elias erupted, and the many eyes closely watching this battle, from Veyris, the members of the Order in the Asylum, to the millions of people all around Stormfall who had found ways to watch the trail through certain sneaky links, all went silent.
Ⓔ
At his core, Elias thought of himself as a predator, and so he was always attracted to creatures who were the embodiments of those traits, and so it was not strange that the first fusion of his abilities took the form of blades that were reminiscent of a spider's legs.
These legs rose up glowing with a red light that shone through the haze, and they descended, not hacking in the way his blades had been doing for hours, nor did they coil and drain the way his blood whips had done.
They simply moved through everything.
Each leg was perhaps twelve feet long, curved at the joint and tapering to a point that caught the dim light of the perpetual twilight, and there were six of them, and they moved with a precision that Elias's arms, heavy as lead and burning at the joints, could not have managed anymore.
They did not tire, and there was no hesitation in their motion; they were connected to his will, and his will was the one thing in him that had not diminished.
The first leg swept outward in a horizontal arc and cut through a column of spawns with a sound like a blade drawn across a whetstone, continuous and high and very clean.
Like a song, this sound was beautiful in the way that iron was beautiful when it shed blood, and only men who knew the sound of slaughter would understand what this sound meant.
The bodies of the spawns simply ceased, their forms parting along the path of the cut and collapsing into ash that the second leg was already sweeping toward him.
The ash did not fall.
It flowed into him. Drawn by the void in his chest, they curved through the air in thin ribbons, each ribbon a tributary feeding into the hollow space where the Hollow Monarch's scripture lived, and the scripture drank.
Vein Completion (Void Scripture): 15% → 15.4%
The third and fourth legs were working in tandem, moving in opposite directions, overlapping their arcs so that nothing in a thirty-foot radius around him could exist for longer than a fraction of a second. The fifth anchored itself in the stone beneath his boots, and the earth cracked outward from the point of contact in a ring, and the spawns that the ring reached stumbled, and stumbling here meant dying here. The sixth rose above his head and worked the air, cutting down the bodies that were still falling from above.
In the center of this, Elias stood still.
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