I gasped back to hell. If this agony, this livid torture eating through every bit of my being, wasn’t an integral experience of eternal damnation, then I wasn’t sure what was. I couldn’t move, could hardly breathe, could only feel unendurable agony writhing through every single cell of my body.
“Stay still,” soone said. The female voice was vaguely familiar, sounding like it was underwater in my injured ears.
Slowly, ever so slowly, awareness shifted away from agony. I realized I was being healed, that there were a couple of people nearby kneeling next to and working on whatever terrible condition I was in. Dim sights of a few people moving around, vague murmurs, slls that flitted in and out of my nose… that was all I could get with my limited senses.
I wished I could have asked them how bad it was, but I couldn’t talk. As far as I knew, I didn’t even have a mouth to talk with just then. My thoughts started to spiral a bit. The calming hand on my head helped.
Maybe it was a blessing I couldn’t move my head enough to look at my body. Whatever I’d see would no doubt just cause my pain-focused thoughts to spiral that much more.
It took a while before I could even reroute my mind into thinking about anything beyond just my painful existence. I realized that I should be grateful that I was being healed. Flesh was knitting back together, new cells were taking the place of the destroyed ones, tendons were reattaching to bones, which themselves were being slowly reconstructed…
I needed to stop thinking about my body. Why couldn’t I have regained consciousness after the healing was done and complete?
“Focus on the world, Cultist Moreland,” the healer said. “On your friends, on your accomplishnts, on everything… on everything you believe in.”
She was right. Maybe I could focus on anything but . Maybe I could take the ti to see how the last remnants of the Beyond was raining all around us. The cosmic sky had broken into a rain of dark dots and tiny, starry glimrs. But everything else that had been summoned remained.
I felt like I had stopped the Vaunted and her plans, but much of its effects were still visible. The Nether Vein’s manifestation still remained. Walls made of that strange tal, floors like iron grates, the darkness that felt like it ca inherent with the Nether Vein now.
They were all still there. Still present. A reminder that things wouldn’t be fixed so easily.
Even the summoned god wasn’t gone. It seed Arl was right. My Aspect of Sacrifice couldn’t destroy the infinite.
Although, that didn’t an it was free. The glowing golden power was re-manifesting, but Councillor Wargrog had risen high into the air to create so kind of translucent black box around it. But even from where I lay on the ground, I could tell he was rely containing it.
He couldn’t destroy a divine manifestation either.
Hmm…
I wondered if that scar on the world was still there—that permanent, crystallized energy blast from where Starburst had t the Vaunted’s cot. Could I Sacrifice that too, at one point?
“You did well, Ross,” Hamsik said, coming to stand by my recovering body. “You’ve done more than enough.”
I hadn’t regained enough of my ability to nod or even reply. Pretty sure I still didn’t have a mouth yet. But I tried to send a look of gratitude all the sa.
“You…”
The Vaunted’s voice growled through the air like that of a dying panther. My mind went on high alert, but I wasn’t imdiately set on edge because even in that anger, the weakness was all too evident.
Plus, she wasn’t rising either, which confird that she was in about as terrible condition as I was in.
“Stay quiet, fool,” Hamsik said. He left my side, probably to stand over wherever she was lying. There probably wasn’t much of a need to bind her down. Not if she was as weak, as damaged, as her voice sounded. “You’ve done more than enough. That you’re not dead already is more rcy than you deserve.”
The Vaunted ignored Hamsik’s words, trying to speak anyway.
“You…”
Sohow, it almost felt like it was directed at , even though I had no way of being sure. I couldn’t see her looking at . There was no way to tell if she could see at all any longer. Thankfully, I rediscovered my voice as my larynx was healed back up with the combination of the external healing and the work of Reverence Everlife.
“,” I said. Unlike her, my voice was growing stronger as I recovered. “Which one of us won in the end, Vaunted?”
“Ross,” Hamsik warned. “Take it easy.”
He hadn’t been in the fight. Pits, he hadn’t even been inside the fake-Beyond like I had been. Otherwise, he’d have known how hard it was to take it easy.
“You…” the vaunted eventually said.
“That’s right,” I said. “.”
“…to… end this…”
I blinked. Finally, I could actually close my eyes. It had been an incredible experience to have eyes to see but no eyelids to stop seeing. Strength wasn’t returning as fast, though, nor did I feel particularly inclined to grant rcy to whatever state my enemy had placed herself in.
That changed when I finally gained enough strength—and reconstructed my skeleton, nerves, and musculature enough—to move my neck.
Another gasp. She had beco an abomination. All her limbs save the right arm had been blown apart, bloody stumps sticking out of flesh that had been frozen over. Her chest was caved in, molten tal pooling and sizzling her innards even as her burning ice tried to fight against it. That she was still alive through her current torturous state was unbelievable.
Maybe I did need to end this. Even if the others clearly saw no need to do so. None of the healers were close. None of the other cultists had even entered the temple. Hamsik was scaring everyone else from getting closer with little glares.
More strength returned, and my intentions evolved. Slowly, I got up.
There were protests from others. The healers counselled to keep lying back. Hamsik shot one of his glares at , despite praising monts ago.
They had good reason to warn . My eye twitched, my muscles spasming. I had lost my mace sowhere, finally. I missed it more than I thought I would. But first, I had a certain business I needed to take care of.
“Ross,” Hamsik warned.
“I’m alright, Hamsik,” I said. It was hard to believe I already sounded normal. Then again, the churning power within , within my twin mana cores and everything of the Weave I had unlocked—and everything beyond the Weave I had touched on—had given the kind of power and potential I couldn’t just squander. “I have a job to do.”
“You’ve done enough. Let the rest of us handle what’s left. There’s not much…”
His voice faded as he looked up. I did the sa. Beneath us, the Vaunted laughed weakly.
The Councillor wasn’t having much luck in containing the manifestation of a god. His box of smoky, glassy blackness was cracking. Eternity. That was what Arl had said. That was what the Vaunted had summoned.
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I recalled the warning from Shubratha. Whatever you accomplish, its consequences won’t die easily.
That was why she was still laughing, through the unrivalled agony, through her own imminent death. However much I’d have liked to think I had stopped her, she had left her mark. Nothing any of us did would ever truly remove it. Probably just like that fractured energy over the destroyed volcanic side-event.
But even then, Arl said I wasn’t without options. All he had said that Sacrifice wasn’t going to work on sothing that was boundless. Sure, I could have tried setting Conditionality in such a way as to endlessly keep Sacrificing that bit of the summoned fake-god.
Did I want to do that, though? Did I want to forever be filled up with so much energy it made my hair set afire, made inhale and exhale pure radiance, forced to watch every single motion forevermore because even the slightest miscalculated touch would cause the mountainside to collapse?
Or did I want to complete a different sort of power?
Desire. Arl had said to rember that.
Now, who else had said sothing similar…
“Why are you smiling like that?” Hamsik asked.
“Just wanted to say thank you,” I said.
“Now? What in the world for?”
“For reminding of the power I need to stop this.”
He looked at quizzically, but I ignored him because he’d see soon enough. Instead, I turned to the misshapen ss that was the still-alive Vaunted.
“Don’t die,” I said. For all that she looked horribly deford and agonized, I found it hard to summon sympathy for soone who had unleashed this over Ring Four. “Because I’m going to prove you wrong. Again.”
I rose straight up. There were shouts and warnings, and Hamsik even reached out like he was going to haul back to the ground personally, but I was too fast for them all.
In monts, I was next to Councillor Wargrog.
“You can release it, Councillor,” I said.
His eyes widened as he saw , his long beard ruffling as he turned in my direction. “Mage Moreland! You rise already.”
“Literally.”
He blinked. “What do you intend to do?”
“What did you intend, Councillor? Because you’ve probably figured out that you can’t stop this yourself by now, haven’t you?”
His voice darkened. “I’m afraid my assessnts suggest none of us can truly stop it.”
“Right. That’s what I thought. So let try an alternative.”
“Which is?”
I didn’t bla his scepticism. Even after everything I had done, even after I had been the one to finally end the Vaunted’s idiocy, I wouldn’t bla anyone for thinking I could stop a god. For real.
Which was why I wasn’t going to try and stop this manifestation any longer.
“I think even a remnant of a god isn’t sothing we can just destroy,” I said. “You might not believe , but the real god did manifest for a…” I wasn’t sure I could call it a mont since ti had been frozen. “Well, he manifested. And—”
“If the god of the sun had been here in truth, then this city would no longer be standing, Mage Moreland.”
Wargrog said it with absolute certainty. Again, I didn’t really bla him.
“I’m not lying,” I said. “But anyway, I learned sothing that I only just realized. We can’t end sothing that’s eternal. The best we can do is harness it.”
“Harness?” His frown grew sharper. “Was that not the Vaunted’s plan? To harness the gods’ power? And look what she did—the manifestation of the Beyond itself. I don’t know if we can ever heal the marks it has left on the land.”
“ neither, but we have to try.” I looked squarely at Wargrog. “We’ve co this far, Councillor. You’ve trusted to handle this up till now. Can you trust one more ti, please?”
His gaze was critical for a mont. I couldn’t recall if I had ever seen him this serious. Then again, I had never seen him this involved either. It was always Se-Vigilance on the frontlines, or Lassikhio if things got overly violent. I wondered if this was his stressed face.
Wargrog sighed heavily, beard ruffling enough to bare almost the entirety of his tusks. “I’ve been leaving it all for the younger ones for over a decade now. This is no ti for to start throwing myself headfirst into things. Age hasn’t been kind.” Yet, his following smile was kind. “You’re right, Mage Moreland. You’ve gone above and beyond what even Escinca could ever have hoped, than even your old master, Kostis.”
He nodded at . There was the go-ahead I needed. Smiling back at him to show my confidence, my determination, and my gratitude, I turned to the manifestation of a god again.
Wargrog removed his barriers. And then recreated them in a far larger box so that I was trapped inside his prison with the god’s power burning stronger right in my face. Just like the ti I had tried Sacrificing it.
It wasn’t an eye any longer. Wasn’t a skull either. I wasn’t sure I even recognized its form any longer. Just an amorphous blob of volatile energy spreading outwards.
Maybe that was what I had really Sacrificed. Maybe a big part of the Divine Essence I had offered up as tribute was the shape that this divinity was supposed to take. But that was alright. I had a new shape for it to take.
Tangentially, my mind was thrown into a recursive loop. I had been ironically bent on Sacrificing a god’s manifestation… when I had always assud I was Sacrificing things to that god. So then, who had I sent that last Sacrifice to? I had always assud the Weave was just rewarding for the act of giving up sothing that was my own, more or less.
Not that any of it mattered right at that mont. I focused. Desire. What did I desire, beyond the simple wish to protect my ho from the deleterious effects of this energy?
You… cannot…
The Vaunted’s words began haunting for whatever reason. No, not for whatever reason. Her desires had burned hot and bright, had led her to a path where she had taken such desperate actions, damn the consequences. Consequences that Shubratha had warned about.
A power that only gods could claim. A potential that the Ascendants had stolen from us. An appeasent in the form of the selective Weave, handed out as agre recompense in return for the enrichnt of the Ascendants themselves. People who had long, long ago abandoned this world to their servants, to the survivors of the Rupture, and in the end, to us.
To .
Intrinsically, I realized she wasn’t wrong. At a very deep level, when I looked at the matter through an overly holistic lens, she was rely trying to unlock the boundlessness of humanity. Because it was that boundlessness that the Ascendants had used to rise to the level of the gods.
Evil neighbours, Arl had claid in that little mont of connection we had shared.
I couldn’t. She was right. I couldn’t grasp it. I had been so focused on the here and now, on the cult and my neighbourhood, on the little corner of my world assailed so often from so many directions, I had suffered from tunnel-vision.
Not that I could be blad. So many tis, it had beco a question of survival. Who could think beyond the regularity of one’s life when the stakes were so existential?
But that was what I needed now. Because even if I couldn’t think of what I wanted…
…I knew what I didn’t want.
I reached out a hand. I let my Icon manifest. A translucence sphere of gold surrounded the roiling energy, each wave of fire and light impinging on my sphere’s surface. Each hit produced another silver spike stretching outwards, as the energy slowly twisted, bent, and reshaped into the helical spirals that I had originally started my Icon with. The surface was reforming too, bright scripts scribbling themselves onto the translucent sphere.
The world started folding in. For a second, a panicked part of believed the Councillor was closing the prison for so reason. But no, even outside the cage of dark panes, he was being dragged in too.
I closed my eyes. Hardened my will. Focused on my desire. I might have identified what I didn’t want, but that was nowhere near enough. What did I want?
A question resurfaced from the past. Almost ancient, it felt like just then.
Do you also want to be a god?
Fuck it. I knew what I wanted, then. I knew what I needed. What I sought was to beco more. What I hoped to be was enough to not just stop others from targeting and mine, but to grow beyond just the limits that this diminished society could provide . That this hollowed out world could grant.
And if that ant becoming a god in the end, then fine, I’d be one.
That didn’t stop reality from crumbling into the massive spike of virulent energy frothing out where a fake-god had been. If anything, I might have made it worse.
But I refused to think of it that way. So I channelled my Aspects. A Gravity Orb ford in the exact sa space that the core of energy occupied.
Adding Flare and Illumination seed contradictory to my goal of stopping it. But that was the thing. I wasn’t seeking to stop it, just as I had told the Councillor. This energy—I needed it to be mine, so I wasn’t going to let it diminish like everything else on Epheroth.
Entropy went in too. Frawork created curling horns that stabbed into my Icon’s manifestation, and though I feared it would start tearing it apart, nothing of the sort happened.
Even Entropy was absorbed within.
In fact, the silver rays of my Icon grew stronger, lengthening and spiking farther. One even stabbed right into my chest to connect with my very first mana core, and through it, to my second one that spun right against the first.
The link was like a lightning bolt shooting through my soul. My vision wavered. My senses recalibrated a thousand tis in a thousand milliseconds. I found myself using Ignition Charge on all my other Aspects too. This had never been about making sense of what I used. This was about . All of . I was channelling threads of Sacrifice, wondering if I could fit in Ritual and Leadership sohow as well.
With violent cracks, a thousand silvery white spikes speared out into the world, every single one missing my body. Going by the lack of a pained cry, it had missed the Councillor too, thankfully. And they hadn’t expanded far enough to hit Zairgon itself.
Nevertheless, the expansion had sent out a shockwave that had flung through the air, my body twirling a few tis before I righted myself.
By the ti I managed to stare back at the blindingly incandescent orb of cosmic power, my vision was shaded by a blue screen. One whose words, though hard to make out with the glare, still left a powerful impression.
[ Icon
Icon Manifestation: 100%
Icon: Icon of the Lifegiving Sun]
And now, I just needed to use an Ascension Charge.
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