Chapter 333: The Calm Between Storms
I sat in the air, cross-legged, and I waited for the eruption to grow before I harvested. My mind flashed back to hundreds of deaths ago, when I was a desperate and broken Acolyte, measuring every bit of power... breaking my body and soul against a tide of demons that seemed endless. Now the scars I carried in my soul could drown those below by an order of magnitude.
The Narghul Sorcerer’s remains were still drifting down through the red haze, and the fragments of its core and shadow essence were feeding my channels. The sensation was familiar, comforting in a way that I had not expected.
I looked down at Commander Rel’s body. She lay in a pool of her own blood, her eyes still open, her face frozen in an expression of shock and pain. I did not feel satisfaction at her death; not until everything was truly over would I smile at the deaths of these people.
The Khaaz were still emerging from the fissures, thousands of them, and their sharp legs tore through the remains of the Commander, and I was noting that they did not eat her remains. It would seem that demons did not need flesh for sustenance, and if they ate something else, I did not know.
I had slaughtered enough of them to find the presence of stomach-like organs inside their bodies, but it was always empty, as if it was just fleshy storage instead of a place to digest food.
My mind was wandering as I watched and felt the way that space was operating, and the demons pouring out of them in waves, and soon the first of the Khaazim emerged; then there were dozens, and that number was ballooning to hundreds.
More two-horned sorcerers were emerging, and I decided that now it was worth a bit of my attention.
∞
I did not move from my seat in the air, since I had spun my web wide while I waited, threads of the Loom laid out across a quarter-mile of sky and ground, thin enough to be invisible, and as each wave rose to the desired number, I closed the parts of the web that mattered.
It was usually with a small finger’s motion, and hundreds of Khaazim, dozens of sorcerers, and tens of thousands of Khaaz would perish, sliced into pieces.
I drew what I needed from the sorcerers to me through my threads, and my channels devoured them. I sat up a bit when I noted that the faint pressure I could feel in my channels from acquiring so many Resonances was beginning to slowly loosen.
[ Stored Essence: 75,030 → 76,210 ]
Three finger flicks and I had killed tens of thousands, and the result was not very good; in fact, I think it might be worse than what I acquired when I was an Adept, and perhaps this was a result of me being an Arcanist, and killing demons that were far below my power.
Still, it was not as if I had not expected this; I was waiting for the fifth seal to fall and the real prey to arrive, but before then, I turned my attention to the thing that actually interested me, which was the portals.
∞
The portals were not doors in the way I had assumed. To my understanding, a door connects two places that both exist. Yet what I was glimpsing from these portals was that they connected a place that existed, which was here, to a place that my Space Resonance insisted did not quite exist, or existed in a way that the two points of attunement I had could only register as an absence with a pressure behind it.
It was as if these portals were linked to something that did not exist, and yet the presence of all these demons was the evidence that my senses were somehow right and wrong at the same time.
The more I studied these portals, the more I could see that the demons seemed to be extruded by them, and if I was right, then the number of demons arriving through the portals was far less, and some of them may have been destroyed by the transit.
The portals were not stable, as they flickered, expanded, and multiplied, each one a little wider than the last, as though something on the far side were pressing harder as each seal loosened.
I thought about Adept Fenara, drawing tears in the air with her staff, and these tears were openings into the absence of place, and she had deleted demons into nothing with them.
I had not understood it then, and I wondered now whether Fenara’s spellwork and these portals were the same grammar read in opposite directions: she pushed things into the absence; something on the far side was pushing things out of it.
If that was true, then the spell she used and the Law that made these portals were relatives, and I may be able to acquire more knowledge of these portals if I had access to that spell, coupled with my Space Resonance, and with the aid of my Temporal Anchors, I may answer a burning desire in my mind.
Could I enter one?
The question would not leave me. If the demons were extruded from the not-place, and if a portal was a thinning of the cloth between here and there, then could I follow the demons back to whatever was pressing them out? Take the fight to the source instead of standing at the drain catching what fell out.
I sighed in frustration; this desire would not happen in this loop. Adept Fenara had been sent away, and I would need that spell of hers. Perhaps I may be able to make something new out of it.
With this thought in mind, I waited, and I occasionally flicked my fingers, killing tens of thousands at a time, and for the moment, I was almost content. Strange, isn’t it?
[ Stored Essence: 76,210 → 78,695 ]
∞
The sky changed, as more red bled into the cloud. I felt it before the pyramid announced it, via Space Resonance again, as the portals seemed to bend outward as something leaned in.
The red light on the black face of the pyramid pulsed, and the foghorn note sounded, lower this time, and the words wrote themselves across the inside of my eyes.
[ Warning... Fifth Seal Loosened... The Pale Matron Stirs. ]
I uncrossed my legs, and I stood on the air. I let the web go slack behind me, because the trash was about to stop mattering entirely, and the entirety of space seemed to freeze as a massive white tentacle broke out of the earth.