The threads in my hands went slack, and I looked at Dara’s body that lay twenty metres from me, her chest opened, her Threadwork still trailing from her fingers like pale blue spider silk. Her eyes were open, and she was looking at the red sky.
It was not the fact that I had seen so many people die in such a short time, but the mental anguish of seeing them die over and over again. I had held their bodies, closed their eyes, carried their names into the next reset.
But Dara was different from the rest. She had looked at me with hatred in one loop and had died to protect me in another. Dara had secrets she had carried her whole life, and she had chosen to share them with me in the moment of her death, and even up to this moment, I did not fully understand why she trusted me with them.
And now she was gone, just like everyone else, and for a while, nothing moved.
The demons at the edge of the net were still struggling, but slowly, as if they too were processing the absence of the woman who had bound them.
The threads in my hands began to vibrate. At first, I thought it was my imagination, my hands shaking, my grief manifesting as tremors. But the vibration was real. The threads were humming, and the humming was growing louder, and the demons in the net were beginning to thrash.
[Demonology 59 → 62 (Adept — Rare — Registered)]
The notification slipped through the fog of my grief, and with it came understanding. The threads were not just Anima and blood. They were Dara’s blessing. Her god’s gift. And she had given it to me when she put the threads in my hands.
"Hold my threads," she had said. "See how I wield my blessing. That may be the only way you survive."
She had not been asking me to hold them. She had been giving them to me.
Dara did not know about the loop, but she knew I was different, and she had blessed me with her powers so I could survive; she gave me a fighting chance.
The threads warmed in my grip. The pale blue light deepened, becoming silver, becoming white. The humming became a song; it was not audible, but I felt a vibration that resonated in my chest, in my core, in the hollow place behind my soul.
It was different from magic, and my body was like a basket filled with holes that would have allowed the threads to fall through, but parts of me were different, my marrow, my Anima Depth, my transformed channels... all these part of me that was no more a mage, grabbed the threads of power, and I felt it sink inside them, where they became absorbed.
I may not have received the full inheritance of this blessing, but I had been able to grab something that was equally important.
I brought both of my hands up and ran a thin stream of Anima through my channels, and lightning burst out of my hands, creating webs of electricity between both my arms.
Holding this lightning was easy as its discharge rotated between both my hands, and the lightning web was extremely stable. From a distance, someone would think I was wielding Threadwork, but this was just lightning that had somehow gained the properties of Threadwork.
My status screen was vibrating, and I did not have to check to know that Threadwork had vanished from my mind, as I felt it merge with my lightning. Something new had been given to me, and although this may not have been the intention of Dara when she gave me her Blessing, these changes would serve me even better.
Dara had not just shown me where things come apart. She had made me part of the mechanism. Her threads were now my threads. Her blessing was now my blessing. And somewhere, in the blue filaments that still bound the demons, and the silver white threads of lightning around my arms, a fragment of her consciousness remained.
"Thank you," I whispered.
The threads pulsed once, warm, and then they were quiet.
The demons in the net had stopped thrashing. They were watching me. Thousands of them. Khaaz and Khaazim, packed together in a web of blue light that should not have been able to hold them, but did. Even in death, Dara’s last spell still held them; it would not hold forever, but it would hold long enough.
I raised my hands, and the threads answered, as I instinctively cast the new magic I had been blessed with.
I did not need to touch the threads binding the demons. The blessing had made them an extension of me, the way my channels were an extension of my soul. I felt every filament, every knot, every point of tension. I felt the Khaaz where they pressed against the web, their chitin scraping against the strands. I felt the Khaazim where they strained, their Abyssal shields flickering. I felt the places where they were already coming apart.
Threadwork is not about tying things together, Dara had said. It’s about finding the places where things are already coming apart.
However, I was different, my lightning was now the threads, and the threads were my lightning, and even though I could find weakness, just the fact that my threads were lightning meant that everything it touched became weak... I did not need to find weakness; I could goddamned well create my own!
The blue threads holding them together were Dara’s, and when I raised my hands, they became silver-white.
I could feel them burning the demons they were binding, tearing deeper and deeper grooves into their bodies, and I pulled.
The threads tightened, and the demons began to scream as they were taken apart. Something about the way I was killing them disturbed the cold mind of a demon, and this cy was a recognition of their own unmaking.
With Demonology, I knew this. Every Khaaz and Khaazim were meant to be fearless butchers, but my thread cut them off from the connection that gave them purpose, and when their minds became whole for the first time in their lives, the last thing they saw were my threads.
The Khaaz came apart; their chitin could as well be made from soap bubbles, their tendrils snapped, and their limbs separated from their bodies. The Khaazim followed, their armoured plates were shattered, their internal organs exposed, their Abyssal shields collapsing.
[Stored Essence: 26,320 → 38,000 → 41,000]
The essence streamed into me in a flood, and my title drank it greedily. Soon, my Third Gate would be blasted apart.
Before Dara had died, she had killed two Narghul Sorcerers, taken them apart, and I had not forgotten that these were my primary targets in every loop until the reforging of my channels was completed.
I could feel the place where the threads took them apart, and I reached for it, and two threads of lightning emerged from my palms and grabbed all the materials from the sorcerers and brought them to me, and the moment they reached my hands, Soul Forge activated, and I brought them close to my chest, where they burned their way into my heart.
The pain did not make me flinch; in fact, I welcomed it.