Arc 7. "On the Brink of Blood."
Cylrit Vritra
I activated one of my two regalias—Pitchaverrer—and felt the decay mana pooling in my core respond, answering a call that had become more instinct than thought.
The black longsword materialized in my grip, its weight familiar as breathing, its edge humming with the particular hunger of magic that had been forged to end things. I did not remember summoning it. I did not remember deciding to fight.
My body had moved before my mind could catch up, years of survival carved into muscle and bone, and now I was here, again, always here, always fighting.
I moved fast, parrying the nightmarish jaws of the incomprehensible creature that attacked me. The impact jarred up my arm, through my shoulder, into the hollow space behind my ribs where something had been breaking for a very long time.
This was the umpteenth demonic beast of the Relictombs I had been fighting for I forgot how much time. Days. Weeks. Years. Time moved strangely in these Zones, stretching and compressing like a wound that would not close, and I had stopped trying to measure it.
There was only the next blow. The next breath. The next creature that wanted to tear me apart.
As with my right hand I clutched the handle of my black longsword and kept the creature at bay—an insulting amalgamation of wolf and ant, its fur matted with something that might have been blood or swamp water or both, its mandibles clicking in a rhythm that set my teeth on edge—I jerked my left hand backward and called on my second regalia.
Nullbash. The magic answered with the violence it always answered, black lightning—also named Rotbolt—crackling around my fist, eager, hungry, ready.
I punched hard. The black lightning enveloped my left fist as I clashed against the chitinous shell-hide of the creature, and the impact sent it crashing against the end of the room. The sound it made when it hit was wet and final, and I did not watch it fall. I could not afford to watch. There were more.
I looked around myself. More of these creatures. A pack. A colony. They surrounded me on all sides, their too-many legs skittering on the wet stone, their too-many eyes reflecting the dim light of this Zone in ways that made my stomach turn.
I breathed hard, holding my longsword with both hands, and I felt the weight of every fight I had ever fought pressing down on my shoulders.
The creatures whose name I did not know came crashing at me all at once.
I slashed the first one, severing its too-many furred legs in a single swing. The blade sang through flesh and chitin, and the creature crumpled, its mandibles still snapping, still hungry, still reaching for me even as its body failed.
I crouched, years of slaughtering in this forsaken place kicking in, and two of those creatures flanked me. Their mandibles—two black canines that protruded out of their ant-like heads—caught my arms, pinned them, held me in place.
I grunted. The sound came from somewhere deep, somewhere that had been ground down to nothing and was still, somehow, refusing to break.
Pain, anger, fatigue—they were all the same now, all one thing, all the weight I had been carrying since I watched my Master fall. Blood spilled from my arms, hot and slick, and I felt it run down to my fingers, felt the way it made my grip on my sword falter. I spat on the ground of this Zone of the Relictombs.
Some kind of far too wet swamp. More humid than the south of continental Sehz-Clar. The taste of it was copper and rot and something that might have been my own exhaustion made liquid.
I did not give these creatures time to react. Nullbash flared again, the lightning sparking viciously around my right arm, and I drove my fist upward.
An uppercut that crashed through the chitinous body of the Relictombs-creature, that shattered whatever passed for its skull, that sent pieces of it spraying across the wet ground in a pattern I did not have time to see.
My longsword had fallen. I saw it there, half-submerged in the murk, and I lunged for it before the next creature could close the distance. My fingers found the hilt, and I was moving again, always moving, always fighting, always surviving.
The ant-wolf beasts did not relent. They came in waves, endless waves, and I felt my blood boil in anger. The Vritra Blood. The gift and the curse that ran through my veins, that sang to me when I fought, that promised power if I would only let go, let it take me, let it make me something more and something less than what I was. I suppressed it.
I had been suppressing it for years, learning the shape of it, learning the weight of it, learning to hold it back even when every part of me wanted to let it loose. Just as Scythe Seris had taught me. Before... before she became whatever imposter she was now. Before the High Sovereign had turned her into something less than a slave.
But I knew also how to use the rage not of my blood, but of my own. That was what she had taught me, in those long years in that forsaken place from which she had saved me.
The training she had given me was still alive in my body, still moving through my limbs, still carrying me forward even when my mind had long since given up. It would never leave me. It was the only thing she had left me that the High Sovereign could not take away.
I was on the first creature in less than a second, driving my longsword through its body. The blade sank deep, and I felt the moment its heart burst, felt the convulsion that ran through it as it died, and I was already pulling the sword free, already swinging in a circular arc around me, already moving.
The mandibles of those wretched things clicked at the edge of my hearing, too close, always too close, but I kept them away. I kept them all away.
I was growing tired of the Relictombs. The thought surfaced like a bubble rising through murky water, fragile and insubstantial. I had been on the run for years now.
Since the day Scythe Seris was stripped of her personality and free will by the High Sovereign. Since the day the woman who had saved me, who had trained me, who had shown me that there was something worth fighting for, became something that walked like her and spoke like her and was not her at all.
Now my only objective was killing my former Master and Scythe. I had to kill her. It would be what Scythe Seris would have wanted. I knew it with a certainty that sat in my chest like a wound that would not close.
My Scythe had always known the dangerousness of our rebellion. She had calculated the risks, weighed the costs, measured the distance between what we wanted and what we could achieve. She had never faltered. Not once.
Not even when the Sovereign of Central Dominion discovered her schemes.
Not even when the High Sovereign acted by consequence.
My hand grabbed one of the too-many chitinous legs of these beasts. My muscles burned with anger and duty as I hurled it against the wall, and I grinned. I saw the green blood leaking from these creatures, saw the way it steamed in the humid air, and for a moment—just a moment—I let myself feel it.
The satisfaction of something ending. The brief, bright flare of victory in a war that had no end.
No! I shook my head while my fist found the head of another creature. I would not fall. My Vritra Blood would not win over me. Not again. I had fought it too long, too hard, too deep to let it take me now.
II had made promises. I had made vows. I had stood beside my Master and watched her choose death over surrender, and I would not dishonor that choice by becoming the thing the High Sovereign wanted me to be.
I screamed. The sound tore from my throat, raw and ragged, and I did not know if it was a battle cry or a prayer or simply the sound of something breaking that could not be fixed.
My longsword of pure decay magic found another beast. And another. And another. The hits echoed throughout the Zone, a rhythm of destruction that had become the only music I knew.
My whole body was stained with the maimed flesh of these creatures, their green blood mixing with my red, their chitin breaking against my skin, and I did not stop. I could not stop.
One after one, I felled them all.
When the last creature fell, the silence that followed was louder than the fighting had ever been.
"Next... Zone..." I breathed, and the words scraped my throat raw.
I could not use decay magic freely without risking the brink of my Vritra Blood. That was the bargain I had made, the line I walked every day, every fight, every moment of this endless, hopeless existence.
When the High Sovereign created Scythes and Retainers, he had a clear plan in his unfathomable mind: to create lessers who could use Basilisk magic like Asuras.
All Alacryans were limited in their magic by the runes that Agrona Vritra bestowed on the population. That did not apply to Scythes and Retainers. We still had our runes, but we could also use magic organically, without being limited by them.
It was a gift, they said. A blessing. An elevation above the common masses. But I knew what it really was. A leash. A chain. A door that opened both ways, and on the other side of it was something that had been waiting to consume me since the day I was born.
I dragged myself toward the portal out of this Zone.
The ground was soft beneath my feet, sucking at my boots, trying to pull me down, and I kept walking because the only thing worse than moving forward was stopping.
I wanted to use soulfire to heal myself so much. The temptation was a physical thing, a hunger that gnawed at the edges of my control. But decay magic required my Vritra Blood to sing, and that song brought me closer to the brink.
Closer to the thing that lived in my blood, that whispered to me in the quiet moments, that promised me power if I would only let it in. The song to Vritra. The song to the absolute god of Alacrya.
The song that had already taken so much from me.
I marched on. Because that was the only thing that remained for me to do.
Keep on. Keep on. Keep on, Cylrit. Do it for the memory of your master.
Her face rose in my mind, unbidden—the way she had looked when she pulled me from that pit, the way she had turned to face the High Sovereign's judgment without a moment's hesitation.
I reached the portal. The light from it was pale, thin, the color of old bone. I stepped through, and the Relictombs swallowed me again.
—
I crumbled to my feet as soon as I stepped into the Sanctuary Room.
The transition was always jarring—one moment the crushing pressure of the Zone, the next the oppressive stillness of these chambers that the Ancient Mages had built as refuges and that the High Sovereign's Ascenders now used as waystations.
But I did not care about the history of this place. I cared only that I was still alive, still breathing, still holding onto the fraying thread of whatever I had become.
A Sanctuary Room was exactly what I needed after seven Zones, one after the other, with no rest between them longer than the time it took to bind my wounds and force my body to keep moving.
I immersed my face in the fresh water of the pool at the center of the room. The cold was a shock, a blessing, a reminder that I was not yet dead. I could have held my breath for minutes, for hours—my body, empowered by the cursed blood of Vritra, was capable of things that would have seemed like miracles to the man I had been before the runes, before the awakening, before the Sovereign Kiros's architects had remade me into something that was no longer entirely human.
When I finally lifted my head—something I did not want to do, and that thanks to my body I could have postponed indefinitely—I looked at my reflection in the water.
The surface was dirtied by my body, the grime of seven Zones clinging to my skin, my hair, my armor. But the Relictombs had their own strange magic.
The water cleaned itself almost immediately, the impurities sinking or dissolving or simply ceasing to exist, and within moments the reflection staring back at me was almost unrecognizable from Cylrit Vritra, Retainer of Seris Vritra, Scythe of Sehz-Clar.
If it was not for my horns, I might not have recognized myself at all.
My black hair was longer than I remembered ever keeping it. Uneven, too—torn apart in random spots by countless fights, by claws and blades and the thousand ways the Relictombs had found to try to end me.
I had stopped caring about how I looked a long time ago.
Even my body, empowered by Vritra Blood and the mana of a white core, showed the signs of years of continuous combat. Scars upon scars, old wounds layered over newer ones, the map of a war that had no end.
A thick beard clung to my face, something I had not even bothered to cut. The energy required to use Pitchaverrer to conjure a decay blade to trim it—such a small thing, such a simple thing—was energy I could not spare.
Every scrap of power had to be preserved for survival. Every thought had to be bent toward the next Zone, the next fight, the next moment I refused to die.
I fell on the hard floor of the Sanctuary Room. It was stone, cold and unyielding, the kind of surface that should have made my bones ache and my muscles protest.
But after seven Zones, it felt like the softest mattress imaginable. My body gave out before my mind could catch up. It did not take long for me to fall asleep.
A faint noise. A step. That was all it took.
I was awake before I understood what had roused me, my body moving on instincts that had been honed through more battles than I could count.
Nullbash flared on my back, black lightning crackling along my spine, and I was on my feet and across the room before the man at the front of the group could even draw breath.
Wraiths?! My mind screamed the title before my eyes could confirm. The soldiers of the High Sovereign's private army. His secret service. His Asura-killers. It was because of them that the Relictombs was the only place I could hide.
Even if they chased me inside, they could not track me. The Zones were too chaotic, too unpredictable, too vast. But that did not mean they had not found me. That did not mean I was safe.
My right fist flared with black lightning that paralyzed the ambient mana as I stared down at the man I had pinned to the floor.
His eyes were wide, his mouth open, his whole body trembling beneath the weight of my power. But as I looked at him I realized he was not a Wraith. I knew it even before my eyes confirmed it.
He was too weak. He was just an Ascender. A tall, athletic man with blonde hair and green eyes that stared at me in shock as he took in my horns, my beard, the decay magic still crackling around my fist.
I raised my eyes, looking at the rest of his team. They were five in total, the man I held down counted among them. Five. Like the usual team of Ascenders.
"L-lord..." The man's voice broke through his fear, thin and reedy, and I felt my aura roaring defensively around me.
My power as a Vritra Blood and white core mage must have been suffocating them all—it was clear from their expressions, the way they could not meet my eyes, the way their hands hovered near their weapons but did not dare to draw.
I stood back up. I deactivated Nullbash. The black lightning faded, and the ambient mana returned to normal, and I saw the man on the floor draw his first full breath since I had pinned him.
"I mistook you for someone else," I said, reining in my aura. "I apologize."
It was rare for me to meet Ascenders. The only times I did was in Convergence Zones, and in those cases I simply hurried to eliminate whatever was inside that Zone and moved on before anyone could recognize me.
Awakened Vritra Bloods did not go into the Relictombs. They were taken by the High Sovereign to Taegrin Caelum, or by another Sovereign to their respective bastions. No awakened Vritra Blood escaped the Vritra Clan if they were discovered.
I stared at the team of Ascenders in front of me. They were keeping their distance, not daring to speak up or look at me directly. That was good. The fewer chances they had to recognize me as Cylrit Vritra, former Retainer of Sehz-Clar, the better.
I did not know what had happened in Alacrya during my prolonged escape here in the Relictombs. These people were my first and only source of information in years.
"Where are you from?" I asked.
"Sehz-Clar, lord," the man I had pinned down—surely the leader—answered, keeping his voice as polite as humanly possible.
Sehz-Clar. Good.
"Where exactly?" I pressed.
"Continental Sehz-Clar," he said.
"Is this your first ascent?" If it was, I thought they might renounce being Ascenders after being almost killed by me in their first Sanctuary Room.
"No, lord," the man said, and I heard the effort it took him to keep his voice steady. "My name is Darrin Ordin, and this is the Unblooded Party."
"Tell me something, Darrin." I did not want to sound threatening. But I could not afford to sound anything else. Darrin visibly tensed as I called him by name.
"Who is the current Retainer of Scythe Seris?"
If Scythe Seris had a new Retainer, it meant she was truly gone. If the High Sovereign had given her permission to recruit a new one, that meant whoever they were would have been granted access to the Obsidian Vault.
And the only thing Agrona Vritra took seriously about the lives of us humans was the Obsidian Vault. It was the carrot he dangled, the promise he made, the chain he used to bind us to his will.
The Unblooded Party was confused by my question. I could see it in their faces, in the way they exchanged glances, in the way they did not understand why a Vritra Blood would need to ask such a thing. But they were in no position to refuse me.
"Retainer Caera Vritra, lord,"