The black eye in the sky stared down at me for one long, terrible moment, and the cross at its center pulsed once, twice, as if it was taking my measure, weighing the thing I had become against the thing it had been sent to destroy.
Then the eye closed, and collapsed into itself, the black clouds compressing into a single point of absolute black that hung in the air above the camp for a heartbeat before winking out of existence.
The silence that followed was the loudest thing I had ever heard as I came back to myself slowly, the way you surface from deep water, and the first thing I understood was that the body I was surfacing into was not the one I had died in... so many times.
I held my hand up against the grey morning light and did not entirely recognize it. The skin was unmarked and flawless, as though I had just been born anew, a man born from the storms.
Beneath it, where there should have been the ordinary architecture of a hand, there was a faint moving brightness, like a lamp seen through frosted glass. My channels. I could see my own channels through my skin, threaded with something that caught the light and kept it.
I turned my hand over to look at my palm, and I saw it was smooth, and I no longer had any lines on my palm. In the old folklore of my village, a palm without any lines meant that either you are not far from this world, or you are no longer bound by this.
Before now, I had always dismissed these stories, but after seeing the lidless eye of my Academy Sigil rain down tribulation upon me, I was no longer eager to dismiss any stories of the past that I have heard. In a world filled with magic like my own, perhaps there was always an element of truth in every story told, no matter how outlandish it was.
As I peered at my hands, a strand of hair fell across my eyes, and it was white, bleached clean of every other colour. I caught the strand between two fingers and stared like a fool, and I began, very quietly, to be afraid of myself, because I had read about this.
White hair on a young head, in the old accounts, meant the soul behind it had been changed past the body’s ability to keep up. White hair was the most visible sign of transformation, for a mortal and a mage, and mine glowed like the moon.
I got to my feet, and the movement was wrong; it was too easy, as though I weighed nothing, and I had the sudden vertiginous sense that if I were careless, I would put a fist through the world.
When I breathed, the breath went down and met something vast and cool and deep, an ocean held in a boy, lapping at the inside of my ribs. It was as if I could inhale the world... this was the closest way I could describe what I was feeling right now. Is this what it meant to be an Adept?
I had never wanted to be powerful; I was not the most talented or the bravest. I like to think of myself as a chill guy whose mouth sometimes moves faster than his thoughts.
There was never a time when I thought I would be anything other than an average mage, who would most likely return to his small village and create a Magus Tower to find and train kids who may be talented in that region.
I think I would try to be a healer and a farmer, maybe I would have a pet or two; however, my life had changed so drastically, it was almost as if I was dreaming.
Then I did the thing I had refused to do for longer than I could stand to remember. I braced myself, and I opened the status screen.
∞
[ Name: Elric Voss ]
[ Age: 16 ]
[ Title: Demon Slayer (Epic) — Ascendant Earth Gate(Third Gate Open)]
[ Available Titles: Death-Touched, Lightning Adept, Storm Bearer(Legendary)]
[ Anima Depth: 70 (Adept) — Broken-Celestial ]
[ Disciplines: ]
Lightning Edict — Legendary — Broken-Celestial
The Loom of Lightning — Epic — Broken-Celestial
Lightning Tribunal — Legendary — Broken-Celestial
[ Attunement Skills: ]
Lightning Resonance 81 (Adept) — Rare
Staff Resonance 64 (Adept) — Rare
Force Resonance 31 (Acolyte) — Rare
[ Auxiliary Skills: ]
Endurance 91 (Arcanist) — Broken-Celestial
Concentration 72 (Adept) — Uncommon
Observation 70 (Adept) — Uncommon
Anima Sensitivity 66 (Adept) — Uncommon
Meditation 64 (Adept) — Uncommon
Marksman 61 (Adept) — Rare
Demonology 62 (Adept) — Rare — Registered
Inscription 21 (Initiate)
First Aid 18 (Initiate)
Cooking 16 (Initiate)
Cartography 6 (Initiate)
[ Celestial-tier skills: ]
Mortal Shell 89 — Broken-Celestial
Hollow Avatar 56 — Broken-Celestial
Lightning Incarnate 51 — Broken-Celestial
Soul-Forge 38 — Broken-Celestial
[ Cor Telluris — Channels: 1,450 / 10,008 ]
[ Laws: Lightning Law Shard (1/9)]
[ Stored Essence: 0 / 100,000 — Fourth Earth Gate ]
[ Blessings: Anansi Web(Consumed)]
[ Soul: Welded — Condition: Strained ]
To say I was shocked at these changes was an understatement, and like a man who had just seen something that was beyond his comprehension, I looked away from my status screen, thinking that I would slowly go through it one at a time for all of the new changes, when I finally noticed the camp around me.
I stood in the center of a crater. The ground beneath my feet had been vaporized down to bedrock, and the bedrock itself had been fused into glass by the heat of the golden lightning from my tribulation. The glass was still glowing, red and orange and gold, cooling slowly in the red light of the pyramid’s pulse.
The camp was gone... all of it was simply not there. In their place, a circular scar in the earth, three hundred metres across, rimmed by the shockwave’s blast radius where the edges of the camp had been torn and thrown.
With my new and powerful eyes, I could see that there were no bodies, just faint impressions of bodies, as they had been vaporized so fast that only the shadows of their bodies were left on the edge of the crater, like paintings made from charcoal.
At the far edges of the blast radius, hundreds of meters away, were broken bodies, some of them were still intact enough to recognize, most were not.
They were all dead; the tribulation had not discriminated. It had come for me, and the camp had been in its way.
Suddenly, I no longer felt like celebrating, and I was beginning to realize that, like the demons who tore the world apart, I was slowly becoming something like that.