Guild Mage 135

Chapter 135: Torrent

Liv met Commander Jagan’s eyes without looking away.  She had the sense that the slightest show of weakness, of hesitation, would invite an immediate attack.  Silently, she pled with the man to just go away.  The only person she’d ever deliberately killed was Karis, the Antrian, but he’d been a willing servant of Ractia.  This wasn’t a line that she wanted to cross.

With a deep breath, and then a deliberate exhalation, Liv deliberately stirred Cel to wakefulness.  Puffs of breath steamed from the mouths of everyone around her as the temperature in the room dropped immediately, and frost began to crack out across the stone floor, even covering the frozen waves of bone in rime.

Jagan barked an order in Dakruiman, and began to back away with his men, all three of them maintaining their line, shields raised.  “You are meddling with things no mortal should,” the ksatriya snarled.  “I pray to the trinity you do not doom us all with what you do down here.”

Liv held her wand steady, pointed directly at Jagan, until he and his soldiers had passed back into the outer rooms, beyond her sight.  “Wren,” she said, lowering both her wand and her voice, “could you make certain they leave, please?”

“Make certain?” Wren asked, raising her eyebrows and motioning with one knife.

“No, just - I don’t want him to come back and take us by surprise,” Liv explained.  Wren nodded and slipped out of the room, moving as silently across stone as the huntress had on the forested slopes of Bald Peak.  Liv’s floating disc of mana rotated at her command, and carried her back over to the frozen tableau at the center of the room, where a mortal spear pierced the body of a goddess.

“What are you going to do?” Arjun asked.

“I can feel the mana pouring out of her,” Liv said.  “I think it’s feeding this rift.  It may even be the reason all of those corpses keep rising.  I’ve never heard of any other rift doing something like that -  only twisting animals into mana beasts.” She glanced back at Arjun, and saw that the veins along the sides of his forehead were beginning to darken.  She’d expected it: there was just too much mana here for him to handle, not without a real chance to practice the Elden techniques.

“I want you to go back out to where the mana is less dense,” Liv said, making up her mind.  “You’re already starting to be affected by mana poisoning.  I’ll meet you out there in just a little bit.”

“I don’t like the idea of leaving you alone,” Arjun protested.

“And I don’t want anyone else to die today,” Liv countered.  “Not if we can prevent it.  Please.  I won’t be long.”

For a long moment, she thought he would refuse.  If he did, Liv decided, she wouldn’t force him to leave.  There was a difference between turning away someone who’d shown themselves to be untrustworthy, and a friend who was making their own decision.  It was the same reason she’d let them all go north with her, when her grandfather died.

“Alright, Liv,” Arjun said.  “But be careful.  Please.”

“I’m careful,” Liv protested, and her friend barked out a laugh, then turned his back on her and left the room.

“I am, though,” Liv said, lowering herself down until she could find a place to stand and dismiss the disc of mana.  She was making certain that her focus wouldn’t be split, for instance.  She sheathed her borrowed wand, as well, while she got a closer look at the frozen figures.

This close, she could see the inscriptions on the shaft of the spear.  “Bones will break when I strike,” Liv read out loud, then moved around to the other side so that she could see the next inscription.  “I cut with the strength of nine men.”  She reached out to trace a finger across the smooth bone of the blade, and wondered whether it had been bone originally, or had once been made of wood and metal.  She thought that she could detect a trace of faded grain in the haft, but she couldn’t be completely certain.  There was an inscription on the blade, as well.  “The wounds I inflict will never be whole.”

Liv couldn’t help but shudder at the thought of what such a weapon could do.  If she was understanding the enchantments accurately - did that mean that even healing magic would fail, she wondered?  If she would to break the ossified hands of the ancient woman off from the shaft, and bring the spear with her back to the world above, who could she even trust to wield it responsibly?

Keri fights with a spear, Liv thought to herself.  She could bring it to him.  He would use it to fight Ractia, of that she was certain.  But would the Dakruimans let her take it away?  Someone like Jagan would probably claim that it was theirs by right, and he was the last kind of person she wanted to have it.  Come to think of it, now that he’d been down here once - even if she left it, what was to stop him from fighting his way back with dozens of men and simply taking the spear?

With no small amount of trepidation, Liv traced her finger back down the haft of the spear and onto the hand of the woman who had used it to kill a goddess.  Ksatriya.  “You must have been someone to see,” Liv told the dead woman.  She felt for any sign of life in the bones of her hand, but there was nothing.  Oh, the statue had been infused with a great deal of mana over the long centuries it had stood here, at the bottom of the Well, but there was no feeling like that she’d sensed from the slain goddess.

Liv steeled herself, then reached over and placed her hand on the cheek of the impaled goddess.  It was like touching her mana to a waystone: the power inside the corpse leapt forward, trying to force its way into her.

Rather than fight it, Liv leaned down over the woman’s face, opened her mouth, and deliberately inhaled.  A torrent of raw power flooded down her throat, into her lungs.  It reminded Liv of when her father had first taken her to the edge of the Bald Peak rift, to teach her how to exist in a place of such dense mana without dying.

And yet, that wasn’t quite right.

Liv’s mind flicked to the culling under Bald Peak, when she’d reached out and sucked in every bit of power she could find, and then been desperate to contain it.  This was just like that, only worse.  

Brilliant waves of mana surged out through her body, filling her down to the toes and up to the top of her head in an instant.  She’d had just over half her mana, before touching the goddess, and in the space of a single breath Liv had recovered every bit of the power she’d lost.  She felt full, overfull, stretched to the point of ripping in an instant of glorious, ecstatic pain.

Like she had beneath the mines, Liv instinctively tried to use up the magic flowing into her.  Words poured from her mouth, in gasps and screams, and she hardly even knew what she was saying until dozens of soldiers, each carved of ice, arose in a ring around her, facing outward with their shields and weapons.

From the doorway, she was dimly aware of running footsteps, and then Wren and Arjun yelling at her, but the frozen guardians that she’d created set their shields into a ring, standing between Liv and any interference.  Next to Cel, her other two words awoke as well.  Wisps of blue and gold mana swirled about her like clouds, lit through with arcs of lightning that skittered across the floors and the walls, only barely restrained  by the part of her that didn’t want to see her friends hurt.

Just like when she’d imprinted Aluth, or when her mind had flown on the winds to Varuna, Liv’s awareness expanded, and she took in the entirety of the rift at once.  She could see and touch the corridors, the rooms, more easily than her own body.  

In that moment, she grasped at a shadow of understanding how each strange metal cradle, abandoned for centuries, had once fed an Antrian with mana to preserve their artificial life.  How the small waystone was connected to the same channels of mana, woven through the earth itself using lines of branching mana-stone that flowed in currents like rivers and streams.  How even that was connected to the ring above.

She felt the last spell of a dying goddess, still echoing through the rift after over a thousand years, set to the eternal task of raising every corpse within reach, until the end of time, and sending them to kill the enemies of the Lady of Bones.

And Liv saw Jagan taking a hammer to the wall of ice she’d used to block off the long passage that led to where Isabel had been pulled down into the Well.

Magic threatened to split Liv apart, and she had to do something with it, so she did.  Wailing incantations that were as much screams of pain as they were spells, she sent her intent to the broken wall of ice, and reshaped it into soldiers that would do her bidding.  Only vaguely humanoid, great hulking things, they seized Jagan’s hammer in their hands, caught up the three men, and bore them to the waystone, struggling the entire length of the hallway.  The moment her servants had thrown the men onto the disc of white stone, Liv touched off the magic, carrying them away on a column of light to the surface.

Then, she turned her attention to the horde of corpses that had broken through the outer wall, and now rushed down the corridor toward the intersection.  With no one to see it but her, Liv sent coruscating waves of lightning crashing through the bodies, followed by crystals of ice that grew out from the floor and the walls, and then spears of mana.

No matter how many spells she cast, no matter how much mana Liv threw out of her body, there was always more, an incomprehensible amount, beyond anything human.  She was transported, not entirely aware of her own body any longer, simply riding the endless torrent and trying not to lose herself completely.

Dozens upon dozens of animated skeletons and corpses were shredded, crushed, and blasted apart in an instant.  She pushed them back all the way to the edge of the shaft itself, where a dark haired young woman, her head askew on a broken neck and a guild-ring on her finger, was just crawling up over the metal fence.

“-not feed the wicked,” Liv choked out, and felt a tear trickle down her cheek.

Then she blew the body of Isabel Tanner apart with lightning, sending a spray of blood and burnt flesh back with such force that it splattered across twenty feet of stone floor, leaving only blackened bones.  A fist of ice slammed down onto the skeleton again and again until nothing recognizable remained, nothing that would ever be able to stand back up and try to kill the living.

When there were no corpses left, Liv reached for the spell itself.  She could actually see the moment in time, like a dream or an eternal echo, when Ksatriya thrust her spear through the body of the Lady of Bones.  She could see the white lips moving, hear the curse that would afflict the people of Lendh ka Dakruim for the next thousand years, spoken in perfect Vædic: “Arise, all things of bone!  Arise, fight, and kill!”

The hateful intent of that dying spell had lingered ever since.

And yet, it was only the intent of the dead.  Liv felt for any trace of Costia’s Authority, and found it entirely absent.  The corpse of the goddess was a shell, a casque of bone containing the last of her power, but nothing more.  The mind, the spirit, was long departed.

Liv seized hold of the spell, taking control of the strands of mana that worked the goddess’ will, and just like Jurian had that day in class when the students had flung their spells at him, she rent it apart.

On the floor of a long, grizzly corridor, scorched by lightning and half frozen with ice, a clutching, skeletal hand, already separated from the corpse it had once been a part of, fell silent and still.

Halfway up a crumbling stairway, clutching hands of bone that protruded from the wall, and snapping skulls of bone, ceased to move.

At the bottom of the Well of Bones, corpses that had just begun to rise tumbled over and lay still.

Around Liv, the ossified corpse of the goddess began to shed dust.  Like dry sand on the beaches of Freeport or Coral Bay, trickling out between the fingers of her outstretched hand, it fell off the crumbling form of the dead goddess.  The bleached and yellowed lips, the sightless bone eyes, the curls of finely sculpted hair, all of it crumbled away and fell to the floor.

Ksatriya, too, and the waves of solidified bone, they all crumbled to dust, leaving only Liv at the center of it all, and a bone spear that clattered down to the ground.

The torrent of power ended, and finally it was enough that Liv could contain it.  She still felt overfull, painfully stretched and even burned a bit from the inside, but she no longer felt the need to throw mana back out into the world lest it kill her.

As the roar of her magic died down, Liv found that she’d screamed her throat raw.  No longer held rigid by the power of a goddess, she collapsed down onto her knees, only just managing to get her hands down onto the drifts of dust to catch herself.

“Liv!” She heard Wren and Arjun calling her name, and was aware they’d been doing so for some time.  At the merest whisper of her exhausted intent, the soldiers of ice moved, standing aside in ranks, now straight and at attention, allowing her friends to pass.

“Let me see you,” Arjun said, taking her hand in his, checking the veins.  Liv saw that, not only were they black, but there was something moving beneath her skin.

“Blood and shadows,” Wren cursed.  “What is that?  I can see it moving along her back.”

“It’s her bones,” Arjun said.  “They’re not stable.  The magic must be twisting them.  We’ve got to get her up to the surface where I can work on her.  What did you do, Liv?”

“I got rid of it,” Liv said, aware that she was babbling.  “The last of the goddess.  No more corpses, Arjun.  I got rid of Isabel, too.  Get the spear,” she told Wren.  “We can’t leave it here.”

Wren scooped the weapon up in her left hand, and each of her friends threw one of Liv’s arms over their shoulder, carrying her between them.  “Can you get us to the surface?” the huntress asked Arjun.”

“I know the sigil,” he said.  “And I have enough mana.”

Whether it had been exhaustion, or the last aftershock of that surge of divine power that had kept the worst of the pain away, it was no longer enough by the time they’d gotten Liv out into the corridor that led to the waystone.  She ground her teeth against each other in an effort not to scream, but the crawling of her own bones inside her body, catching and tearing against tender flesh, was finally more than she could take.  Her pain escaped her lips in a whining moan, like nothing so much as a kicked dog.

Liv couldn’t hold her head up any longer, and it was all she could do to make herself breath, so that she didn’t pass out.  It would have been a comfort, to no longer be aware of what was happening, but she had one more thing to do, and she had to make sure it happened.

“Put the spear on the stone,” she gasped out, when they got to the waystone.  “And get my spellbook out of my bag.  I need a quill and ink.”

“Liv, we need to get you up to the fort,” Arjun said.  “You need to let me try to stop this before it kills you.”

“Just one moment,” Liv begged.  “That’s all I need.  We can’t send the spear up to someone like Jagan.  It’s too powerful.”

Wren dug through her bag, and pressed a quill, already dipped in ink, into her hand.  Arjun ripped a blank page out of her spellbook, and Liv scrawled a quick note, then signed her name.  “Put it with the spear,” she said.  “On the waystone.”

Once they’d done it, Liv crawled out onto the white stone, looking for a particular sigil.  There.  She reached out her hand and slipped a trace of mana into the waystone, activating the sigil of the Tomb of Celris.  Then, with Wren and Arjun’s help, she scrambled back off the stone.  It ignited in a column of white light, and when the magic passed, the spear and the note were both gone, carried far away to the north, where she hoped that her family would find them.

“Alright,” Liv said.  “Good.  You can take me back up, now.”

They dragged her back onto the stone, and Liv kept her eyes open long enough to watch Arjun touch the correct sigil.  

When the light carried away her body and her pain, Liv slipped into the dark between with relief.