Chapter Four Hundred And Fifteen – 415
The whirlwind of obliterating grime tore at him, shredding his battlerobes, and Atar was nearly thrown from his feet. Instead, he fetched up against the piling ash and bones of those that fell before him and he gasped, once, his mouth filling with soot and dust. At his feet, where the flask had shattered, his boots withered and broke apart.
The curse!
Atar kicked off his boots, shoving his feet into the burning ash with a strangled crybut it wasn't enough. The curse had already seeped into the flesh of his heels, and veins of its dark influence crept steadily up his calf muscles. The pain was far worse than the burn of the ash and metal basin. Wherever it traveled, his skin and muscle and even his clothing withered away. His trousers unraveled, their color bleached by the curse's touch, all of it turning to stiff, crumbling dust.
ATAR.
All at once, the pain stopped, as did the horrific winds and creeping pestilence. Atar hung above the basin in a bubble of quiet, lifted bodily by flaring tendrils of pure, unadulterated flame.
I SHALL CLEANSE YOU, PACTBEARER. DESPITE YOUR TREACHERY.
Those tendrils of flame delved into him, stopping his breath and scorching his channels as they went. An awful, somehow healing pain seeped through his Body, coiling around his burning core before pushing deeper. An intense smoldering ripped at his legs, and Atar's legs below the knee caught flame. Dark corruption hissed and steamed, attempting to push beyond the delving fire, but at each turn it was burnt away. All at once, the pain vanished.
Atar gasped, lungs unlocked. He took in huge, greedy mouthfuls of air before hacking it back up. Spit-wet dust flung from his lips, and Atar glared at the plume of flame before him. The pain had vanished, but the fiery tendrils had remained within his channels, lurking as the curse tried again and again to spread. Instead it was burnt away...but never completely.
"You can't eradicate the curse?" he asked. He was still held aloft by the Urge's power, but Atar saw no reason to be polite. "Cleansing suggests you remove it completely."
The Flame twisted. Only a small piece of it stood outside the whirling maelstrom of the duststorm, and it flickered repeatedly. As if it were on the edge of extinguishing. THE FLESH CURSE OF A PRIMORDIAL IS NO SIMPLE THING...AND YOU BROUGHT IT TO ME, ATAR. A FOOLISH CHOICE.
"You're killing people! Did you think there weren't going to be consequences for that?" Atar demanded.
DEATH IS BUT A FACET OF LIFE. THE WEAK PERISH TO PRESERVE THE STRENGTH OF THE MIGHTY. BUT YOU HAVE BROUGHT TO ME AN ABOMINATION OF CREATION. A CURSE THAT I CANNOT END. NOT AS I AM. I NEED YOUR AID, ATAR V'AS.
Atar squinted at the Flame. "No." The flame shuddered backward, as if surprised. Atar said it again, more forcefully. "No."
The tendrils within Atar's channels flared to an excruciating degree, searing him from the inside. Atar screamed.
THE STORM CANNOT BE BORNE! THAT WHICH WAS SHACKLED MUST REMAIN! YOUR ALLIES DIE EVEN AS WE SPEAK! I AM TRYING TO AID YOU!
"You're simply trying to survive," Atar gasped. "And if you do, those people will die anyway right?"
The storm around them howled and lightning sheathed them in a blinding shell of yellow radiance. The Flame flickered, thinning and thickening in a gale Atar couldn't feel. What he could feel, however, was when the tendrils of power pushed inward. Into his core space.
"What are you doing?" Atar demanded, and doubled over as the tendrils stabbed into the liquid fire of his core ring. Atar convulsed, the orange fire flaring until it dominated his core space. Skills flickered, their altars creaking from the force of it all, while indescribable agony lanced through Atar's being. He opened his mouth, but neither breath nor scream could escape.
THE STORM WILL RAGE, AND THE BEAST BELOW WILL AWAKEN. RIGHT NOW THE TERROR OF HUNGER CLAWS AT ITS CAGE! THE BEAST BELOW IS WAKING! THEIR DIRE CHOICE HAS ALREADY BEEN MADE, AND OUR ONLY CHANCE FOR SURVIVAL IS TO WORK TOGETHER.
Atar could see nothing but dust and fire, hear nothing but the crooning voice of the Urge. His Skills frayed, their altars and flames guttering beneath the Urge's potency.
SAVE ME! SAVE ME SO THAT THE LIGHT OF THE SKY NEVER FAILS. FOR IF IT DOES, THEN RUIN WILL BESET US ALL.
"Hhow...?" Atar forced the words through shallow breaths and a cracked and bleeding throat.
IT WAS WRITTEN, IN AGES LOST TO TIME AND MEMORY. A TRUTH I GLIMPSED IN THE VAST FIRMAMENT. THE BEAST BELOW, THE TERROR, THEY SEEK TO TWIST THE FABRIC OF WHAT IS, ATAR. TO TURN ASIDE THE LIGHT OF THE SKY. ME.
IT WILL NOT HAPPEN. JOIN ME AS YOU MUST, FOR OTHERWISE ALL IS DOOMED.
The grip of fire on his core lessened slightly. Enough to give Atar the space to breathe. The Flame waited, watching him.
"I cannot accept what you have done," Atar said.
IN THE NAME OF SURVIVAL, WE ALL DO AS WE MUST.
"No. No you don't get to use that excuse," Atar hissed. He shook his head and lifted a trembling arm up, placing his hand just above his navel. He could feel the excruciating heat even through his flesh. "You don't get to decide who lives and who dies, Urge!"
YOU FORGET WHO GAVE YOU YOUR BLESSINGS, CHILD. WITHOUT ME, YOU WOULD NOT BE.
"Maybe, and without people like me, you'd have guttered out. No. No I'm done here. In the words of a friend," he said, clutching at his belly. "Fuck off."
You Have Rejected The Blessings Of The Highest Flame!
WARNING!
Skills Tied To the Highest Flame Will Be Sundered And Lost!
You Cannot Undo This Choice!
Continue?
Y/N
STOP! STOP, YOU FOOLISH CHILD!
"Yes! Cut Her off!" Atar spat, just as the Urge pulsed its wicked tendrils. Fire burst and surged within him, an inferno under his skin, and his voice turned to wordless torment. A scream that felt like it was tearing his lungs apart.
THE SKY MUST NOT TARNISH! IT MUST NOT!
"Shut! Up!" Atar howled.
The pain mounted as Atar's core space began to founder. Altars of flameSkillsbegan to sputter and fail while orange sigaldry broke apart. The ring of flame flared one last time, spreading outward in a destructive explosion before collapsing inward.
The charred earth and sky tried to crush everything that was Felix into paste, driving him to his knees and bursting blood vessels across his Body. Nightmarish figures stood in the heavens, a moon among their tangle of limbs and joints. An aura of dark power hung around them all, restrained by its unseen chains but mighty regardless. Yet Felix's Will was not so easily dominated.
Title: Born of Will is active!
You Are Your Own Maker!
Title: The Call of Defiance is active!
+25% Willpower Against The Divine!
Beneath the collective glare of the gods, even he could not force himself to his feet...but that did not mean he couldn't give them a dour stare right back.
"You should not be here, child," said a calm voice. It sounded as if it was whispered into his ear, but it radiated from the sky like a proclamation. A silver moon shimmered and burned in the dark Void. As he stared, it flickered, turning from a moon to a vast and endless bundle of woven threads. A spider at the center of its web. "You should not have seen this."
"He should not exist," scoffed a second voice, this one a harsh, guttural hiss. He could smell a fetid stench from its breath, for all that it spoke to him across an endless horizon. A bronze moon hung low, pock-marked and wan and...not a moon at all. But an infinite bog of boiling foulness and withered plants. "A Primordial Unbound is not allowed!"
"Primordial, Nym, and a touch of the Divine," chortled a deeper voice. It sounded like nothing so much as a kindly old man...and it came from nowhere at all. No moon shuddered in his strained Affinity, and there was no figurative, godly hallucination.
Who, then? Felix wondered, his Mind beginning to fray under the pressure these beings exerted. His limbs trembled, but he maintained eye contact with the barely visible figures.
"Quiet, troublemaker," said another, voice. Two voices, actually, low and high overlaid atop one another while chains the size of planets rattled. "The Remnant desires this one's death."
"The Remnant can go rot." A dark moon filled with swirling darkness manifested between the others. It was hidden and then not, phasing through existence like a ghost, and at its heart hovered a blood-red crescent that was all too familiar. The voice that accompanied the ghostly moon was hard and sharp, a bared blade. "This time, at least, the Coward has the right of it. This thing should not be allowed to live."
"Hold thyself, Noctis!" said twin voices, pitched in fury.
Violence cascaded across the vault of cold stars, and the shape of nightmares unravelled and stretched toward him. The blackened sky writhed at the approach of endless shadow, and the blasted earth churned and ripped apart. All of everything pressed in upon him, a vice forged of reality itself to make his head and heart pop like overripe fruit.
"No no no," Felix gasped. "Not doing this!"
He had stuck his head into a hornet's nest, and he could sure as shit pull it back out again. As a god's Willpower neared him, he desperately engaged his own and tried to slip back. His Mind shook and his Spirit quaked as Noctis' frigid Will bore closer, but he could feel the trick of it, the twist of Affinity that drew him into that blasted landscape. He grasped it and heaved backward.
Title: Voidwalker is active!
+10% Willpower And Alacrity!
The unreality of the strange, god-nightmare vanished into mercurial darkness as Felix's Willpower swelled once again under his active Titles. Felix lost his sight, but the tendrils of wild Mana still danced all around him, within him, and his fingers flexed atop the fleshy surface of the Primordial core.
"Thief!" A soul-shaking cry followed him back into the darkness, spiking into his everything and slamming Felix to the ground. Yet that was all it did, as he felt the claws of a foreign Will scrabble at his own...and achieve nothing. "Thief!"
The voice faded just as Voidwalker, Born of Will, and The Call of Defiance deactivated. His Willpower reduced, and a deep, abiding ache settled into his Mind and already ragged Body. He was back, blind as before and sprawled next to the throbbing heart of an undead Primordial. In spite of his pain, his blindness, and the increasing certainty that his Body was going to fail him, Felix still rode the sharpened edge of revelation.
They were surprised. 'You should not have seen this,' they said. Felix gripped his skull with his hands, feeling the Primordial resume its deadly attacks against him and could only hunch against the onslaught. I saw the curse. I saw the curse and saw them. Ideas whirled through his Adept Mind, formed and discarded in the same breath, replaced by two, four, eight more. If the flesh curse is Divine, then it's foreign to the Primordial. I can fix that.
He just hoped he had the significance to spare.
The Primordial of Withering Dust seemed to glean his Intent however, and the attacks strengthened by an order of magnitude. A porcupine of jagged ribs and broken vertebrae stabbed inward at him, closing on the strange, empty space around them like a hundred disassembled jaws.
Relentless Resolution!
He moved, flowing between sharpened bone and serrated ligaments. Felix forced himself forward, but received savage wounds to his forearms as he tried to approach the core again. Each movement he made was countered and reacted to, every conscious decision preempted and defended against. It can sense my Intent! he realized, ducking below the razor edge of a foot-thick femur. He grabbed at his skull again, feeling like the thing was tearing apart. If it can read my Mind, then I can't think!
Felix flared the Skill again, sounding its pattern with Affinity and shaping the thrust of its effects with a weary Intent. He tried with all of his might to empty his Mind, to keep his Intent as innocuous as possible, but the Primordial preempted every movement he made. A dash and strike met by an impenetrable wall of human-sized teeth, an overhand chop of his Blade of the Fang split the wall only to have shoulder blades the size of wagons fall in his way.
So he shut off his Manasight. True darkness fell, and the Primordial attacked.
Relentless Resolution!
He stopped thinking, refusing to get lost in plans of attack and defensehe simple reacted, letting the Skill sing of its own accord. How close was he to the core? He hadn't a clue, but he refused to dwell on it. Each step led to another, and another, all while weaving a net of defense with his greatsword. His Mind ratcheted into higher gear, the ache and heat of his thoughts redoubling as they diverting toward a far more dire problem.
Fiendforge!
Never forgotten, Pit's struggles ceased as Felix gripped the Chimera's Evolving core with the pincers of his power. He pressed, holding the shifting, morphing shape of his core in abeyance for a time. It would not last long, but Felix was done playing. Felix's friend was in danger, Pit's core already cracking under the strain of its aborted Evolution. Hold on, Pit!
Jolting to a stop, Felix became aware that he'd fallen. Pain lanced across his shins and hips, the latter pierced by rotating claws in the shifting environment...but he'd fallen atop an orb of bone. The Primordial's core.
Corrosive Strike!
Felix put his fist through the gruesome shield, striking four times in rapid succession before he was able to thrust his hand onto the pulpy flesh of its true core. He gripped it, feeling waves of Dissonance that came off it like a tsunami...as well as the stinging burn of the flesh curse. It tried, and failed, to latch onto Felix but he paid it no mind. Pit was failing and his own Body wasn't going to last much longer. I hope I'm right!
His potent Willpower rushed from his channels along with what Essence he could spare. The core flashed in his hampered senses, a bright, impossibly dense construction packed with Essence and enough significance to drown a city. Focused as he was, he could feel more than ever beforeknow more. Flesh was clay, an element to be molded and shaped into what nature demanded of it. It was complex, even labyrinthine in design, but the interplay of vessels, muscles, and fatty deposits flickered across Felix's understanding. Flesh was clay.
And he was the sculptor. The Sovereign. Of his...and all others.
Sovereign of Flesh!
Title: The Call of Defiance is active!
+25% Willpower Against The Divine!
He Chanted, sounding his Skill and shaping its form before backing it all up with the might of his Willpower. It ran on Essence, however, and he had precious little from his attempts at feeding...so he seized the Essence Motes that dangled within his Divine Tree. Each brilliant Mote of light was packed to the brim with Essence, honed with Features that he could use to Temper. To lose them would put his advancement in jeopardy, and Felix's heart clenched as he sacrificed them anyway.
WARNING!
The Primordial Of Withering Dust Defies You!
You Are Entering A Battle Of Wills!
Bring it on. The scattered sea of the Primordial's consciousness focused, slowly drawing together into a force that made Felix clench his teeth to keep them from clattering. Oh. Oh, that's not good.
He bore down on his Skill, pushing deeper and deeper into the Primordial's heart. Mapping it, seeking the crevices and fissures that riddled all flesh whether you were mortal or Divine. Dissonance tore at him, interrupting his progress and becoming increasingly vicious as the Primordial gathered itself, but Felix opened himself up to the song that rang in his own heart. Harmony and Dissonance, gathered together into something new. The song of it, his song, it pressed back the interference even as it resonated deeply with his [Cardinal Beast Core]. A dire caterwauling tore from that resonance, of a creature overcome and furious about ityet Felix ignored his Hunger. That dark passenger was not important, not now. You had your chance to help!
Above his cores, the Divine Tree rustled. Each Mote lost from its branches seemed to drive it to greater disruptions, until the vein-like branches were trembling violently. They grasped at nothing, at everything, and the entirety of the Tree rang with a faint music that whispered across his core space. His Hunger thrashed below while his dual cores spun with greater and greater ferocity. Yet all of that could not command Felix's attention, because the flesh curse went from homicidal to frenzied rage.
Bone and scale and ligaments collapsed against him in a tide of jagged edges and restraining bands, pulling at him, trying to force Felix to lose contact with the Primordial's core. He grunted and dug in, shoving a second hand into the breach and grasping a fistful of pulpy gristle even as a wave of revelation assaulted him. Of a sudden, bone and scale and sinew all turned aside, unable to touch Felix's form let alone pierce him. Essence Motes burned, fueling his Sovereignty, and he saw it bundled in a cage of bone and shimmering, multi-hued Mana.
The origin of the flesh curse, the seed that formed the roots of the Primordial's withering undeath.
His Divine Tree grasped, the song of it growing more insistent as Felix grasped at the bone cage. His hands burned, skin and tendons dissolving as he handled the vile thing, but the Tree within his core rang out. Cords of blue-white and red-gold light unravelled from Felix's palms before snapping tight around the cage. Willpower trembling, pushed to the edge of what he could endure, Felix reached out with his Fiendforge and clamped it tight around his cords of light.
"This is mine!" he declared, and his Sovereignty stood over the Primordial's heart, demanding fealty. The cage flickered and shone, trembling along with his Divine Tree, but it was under his sway. His Will. "All of it is mine."
So Felix ripped it apart.
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