In the midst of it all, the knight held a vague confusion. While watching the grey, invasive fire track its way through the sky like a hound on a wounded animal's trail, the knight could not help but fixate on the lost expression held deep in the two keys of the soul–it was so deep and hidden yet it was almost painfully obvious. The pearlescent scales had lost their awe-inspiring luster as the mutilated fire approached like the hungry undead, Shreifaya seemed to believe that she would die in that moment–at least that's what he could perceive in the short decimals of a moment that he was given to stare into her lavender-flavored eyes before Kanaft swiped him from his previously falling situation.
Now held in an obsidian beak that was large enough to swallow him, the knight sighed in relief. The intensity in the dragon's penetrating gaze was setting off several instinctual switches in his subconscious, but before he could act on the creeping suggestions, he was pulled away.
Kanaft's slimy tongue shifted to accommodate the added weight of the knight in no more than a moment, before taking off with a violent beat of his wings. The knight shivered in something between disgust and wonder as he stared out of the bird's open jaws, and into the daylight, while feeling the appendage wrap around him. He knew it was to keep him in place, but that didn't change the fact that it was utterly appalling to his metal skin. Shuddering again, he decided to focus on the grey fire that had zig-zagged its way into the infinite tide of ashen darkness and its continued spread throughout the body. The star-like eyes of the monster shook in place at the terrible agony–swearing revenge with a furious roar that silenced the entire forest. After being toyed with for centuries, maybe even millenia–there was no telling how long–the infectious fire was the last straw.
Umor, who was still releasing his bright fire into the infinite darkness, found himself constricted by the angry ash. Tendrils the same color as the unnatural, permanent night grabbed hold the Incarnate's arms, and quickly tore the constructs of fire from the joints that connected them to the torso. No blood spilled. No screams were whisked out of the creature's mouth–not that it had a voice. The arms simply dissipated into wisps of smoke, invisible as the tendrils that had held the smoke before it was smoke.
The ilk that could barely be called a fire had merged with the supposed night sky and like the antithesis of the plague itself, began traveling like a venom shot directly into a vital vein. The cool black ash that blanketed the sky turned grey with weakness then in its hatred dispelled the lurid pain–even greater than the agony of just existing. The vision of the manmade deity traveled to the knight, and pierced through its created darkness, and the eternal darkness that his helmet cast on him with a righteous fury. In a split of a moment, the darkness was upon Kanaft, it consumed the body of Umor, and restrained the still shook Shreifaya. This was the power of the mortal god that subjugated the land of a true god in its absence. It was daunting.
A haggard breath of fear escaped his lips, then another, as he stared down the blurred darkness. Then, from the nothingness of the black sky, creatures of darkness, all grotesque beasts of some form. It was hard to make out the creatures of darkness in the visceral darkness they were born from–all disjointed segments of the greater being, but the knight did not need to see the creatures to know that they were flying towards he and Kanaft as they flew towards the floating island in the horizon. He could no longer watch passively. Umor was incapacitated for the moment. Shreifaya was but a few moments away from joining the Incarnate, too, and here he was, watching it all unfold. He had no more Bearing Beads, so the lethargic shield strapped to his arm was nothing more than a regular tower shield, which was useless to him in the current situation. He gripped his dull blade in his other hand, as he started down a bird-like ashen creation nearly the same size as Kanaft himself. He wouldn't be able to pierce it well since Rising Tide had not drank the blood of any in sometime, but throwing the indestructible sword would be a near perfect distraction, even only for a few moments. He would've wanted to wait patiently for a while, but time was not his ally at this moment–though Father Time had never been his ally to begin with.
Shaking the thoughts of that particular jar of nightmares away, the knight swiftly spoke his observations to the bird through their shared mentalscape, and thereafter began working to fix the obvious problem. Kanaft kept flying, even picking up speed a little. With the Guardians no longer being able to keep the darkness at bay, there was no telling what would happen next–although he did have an idea, though he dearly hoped that Umor would not do such a thing. Sadly, he was rarely incorrect in these situations.
Climbing out of the bird's now slightly hanging lower jaw, the tongue was carefully positioned beneath his feet, allowing him to hoist himself up far enough to rest his feet on the top of his beak. It didn't take nearly enough effort to coordinate such a precarious way of escape as it should've.
'The Soul Beast connection looks more and more useful by the second'
"Be weary, Elder. Umor has been unstable since his inception. He has been disregarded, and disrespected. I would not put it past that vengeful spirit of fire to release his divine fire, and extinguish everything in his vicinity."
Still balancing on the beak of the bird, he nearly tripped at the new information added to his already not very safe situation, so he chose to ignore the warning for the moment. He'd get back to it once he was on the back on stable ground–otherwise known as Kanaft's back. One step at a time, he shuffled closer and closer to the top of the beak, and the junction between it and the soft deep red feathers, that more often than not were preserved as black, even in the light. One wrong move, and he'd be falling, again.
'Why must it be falling every time…'
The keratinous surface below the soles of his feet was nearly slick with wet heat, yet the knight still managed a firm enough grasp to not slip off, and instead made it to the soft feathers without much effort at all. Kanaft's beady eyes focused on him for a moment, but quickly resumed their previous position, staring far off into the distance, directly at the far off island of grey and death. Breathing in, the knight blurred, and found himself on top of the raven's skull. It was a non-simple climb that he could only say he achieved through some form of luck. Or maybe it was already planned to go the way that it did far before the current moment.
Knocking the unnecessary thoughts from his mind, he glanced around the meadow of black for a moment. The striking red horns were much larger up close than he initially thought them to be. Staring back out into the black sky, the aberrant creatures of the faux-night were gaining on them, and fast. He made his first step forward, the feathers tickling his feet like a bed of flowers. Then he took a second step. Then a third. He had gotten his footing, but it was short lived. Umor's wrath spilled over the top, and flew like wisps of fire in a dry forest on a windy day. Unlike the lazy sun rising on the horizon, the darkness lit up instantly. Nothing was black anymore. Everything was–everything was turning white with heat; with anger. The black binding's, which held Umor evaporated like they never existed, and It was a split second of explosive white-light later that the knight received a grim proclamation from the bird he was still glued to, though now only barely.
"The Divine Fire… father's fire…Umor has used it. We aren't just in danger, everything in this forest, and everything beyond it. Nothing can survive the spirit's wrath now. There's a reason why only the lesser ones are able to wield it wherever they please. Hold on tight, Elder, I'll explain more after picking up speed." It was such a convoluted string of rapid words and feelings that knight had a hard time grasping even the outer layers of the overly elusive answer. The anxious chattering, and clacking from the bird's beak matched the onslaught of cryptic messages crudely.
The only thing he was sure of was that the white light would not be held back by his thin eye lids for long. He needed something to cover up with, and he needed it about three seconds prior. He felt the world slow for a moment while his eyes darted about behind his visor, looking for refuge before he was sent somewhere he would never return from. In the half instant of slowed time, he found his answer, and in the other half of that same instant, the knight found himself face-first into the back of Kanaft,after jumping off the top of the raven's head and onto his back, now clutching the black feathers lightly–they were a lifeline in the light. He was safe from the immediate danger of the white, but the victory was short lived as he felt the instantaneous difference in speed. They had been going fast before, but this–this was something entirely different. Just how much did Kanaft get spooked by it all?
Unseen from the knight and the raven, Umor stood. Now a glimmer of white that burned everything it touched. The taste of maddening power had been given back to him in his moment of greatest discontent with himself. The darkness retreated in fear from the sculpture of fire, but was still incinerated to nothing. The eyes shattered, then melted like glass. The souls trapped in them, too, were reduced to less than particles.
The once orange fire was gone, replaced with the incandescent flame of Eos himself. Umor reveled in the feeling of the fire of his creator once again burning in his fiery soul. He stared out into the infinite white abyss of fire, and remained fearless in endeavor to end this creature of ash. There was no emotion in his faceless head of white fire, there was no ambition. Just spite.
He stared the white down. Stared down the thing nothing had dared to. There was no hint of the plague anywhere, just the pure white prison realm of the deity of darkness, and the first absence of light, forever trapped in it. He had inadvertently summoned himself to that place, and, just like that, Umor disappeared from the battlefield, and the world itself.
The white took the fire, and the black dot imprisoned in it extinguished the ember.