Sen’s eyes glossed over. He channeled all the energy he could through his aura, blasting it around him without prejudice. With newfound iron rank power, he felt it was easier to manipulate, as if the aura had more magical handholds for his spirit to dig into. Unfortunately, this meant his enemies had more handholds as well.
Uladin shifted his head ever-so-slightly, his axe held at his side. He pushed his own aura into Sen’s and they collided like a physical force. Sen’s tunic pushed against his body from the release of energy, and Uladin’s tattered rags swayed in the wind as if he were standing in a storm. Their powers were not equal.
Sen could feel his aura being pushed back. His muscles tensed and his stance lowered as he focused on holding the line. He was able to slow Uladin’s aura assault, but not stop it, but that was all he needed. He was testing Uladin’s power, and as long as there was at least a little bit of slack, there was a chance he could persevere, and somehow kill the lich. Sen withdrew his aura and was hit by the full brunt of Uladin’s aura attack. He felt a mix of emotions coming from it, but it was dominated by the emptiness that Sen recognized from his own. He also felt a wave of force smother his entire body, pushing against him. He leaned forward to maintain his balance until Uladin withdrew his aura in kind.
The two locked eyes. When Sen began slowly walking to his left, Uladin followed suit. His old bones clanked against the black chrome plates of his armor. Sen’s armor made no sound. Their monotonous strafe circled inward, the radius tightening. The lich’s pure size gave Sen a disadvantage in reach, and as they slowly circled toward each other, the impending clash was all but certain.
His whole life Sen had been a southpaw. He couldn’t remember his name from when he was back on Earth, but he could remember the fistfights he got in as an unruly teenager. He always felt he had an advantage over the right-handed kids simply because his stance was mirrored to theirs. This fight was no different, save for the stakes.
Uladin’s axe mirrored Sen’s sword. If Uladin chose to swing at him, his sword would already be in position to defend. Given Uladin’s reach advantage, that’s exactly what happened.
When Uladin reached a distance that allowed him to strike before Sen, he struck. The black-bladed axe swung upward from his hip at an angle. Sen was surprised at how easily he could manipulate his blade with his iron rank strength. He shifted his sword so the when the axe collided with, its edge ran across the length of blade and over his head.
The pinpoint lights shifted from looking at Sen’s face, to the armored fist covered in primordial flame rocketing toward his chin.
Sen had to hop into the air, but didn’t activate his armor’s weightlessness just to test out his reach. Even without a good crouch before the jump, he was able to reach Uladin’s chin, but Uladin was faster than he seemed, and was able to maneuver a step back, away from Sen’s attack.
A discourteous laugh bellowed from the lich’s aura. His perpetual smile of open teeth seemed more sinister from the bellows of tempered glee.
“It is good to see you again.”
Sen’s lips pursed, and he readied his sword toward the lich again, and their circling continued.
“You seem to know me, but I do not know you.” Sen replied. “Why does it feel like I do?”
“I thought I might not have known you.” Uladin told Sen. “But it is you, billions of years later.”
Uladin crouched down to make a massive leap toward Sen, a barbaric charge with his axe held with two hands overhead. Sen raised his sword to block, but it proved not enough of a defense. The axe crashed into Sen’s sword, pushing it down on his face and slicing his cheek wide open as he reactively pulled his face away from the point of impact. The axe pushed his sword down, luckily stopping any more damage by falling onto his chest and shoulder armor. The force of the impact took him to one knee, but he still held limply to the hilt of his sword. Uladin's weight was heavy, but Sen was iron rank, and he was realizing with every clash how strong he was now.
When Sen felt the pressure of the axe lift the slightest bit, he tucked and rolled away from Uladin, getting some distance. He felt he wasn’t far enough away, and he activated his weightlessness to jump back even farther.
Uladin put both his arms out to the side, noticing Sen’s retreat. It seemed the fight was ramping him up.
“Do you not love it brother!? The violence?” The lich boomed out from his aura.
Sen pulled the hilt of his sword to his face so he could use a finger to feel the cut in his cheek. His hand recoiled when he felt the sting and the depth of the wound. It was painful, but invigorating.
“I do.” Sen said. “Combat. I’ve always loved it.”
“Combat.” The lich scoffed. He began walking toward Sen. “No. Violence. Savagery.”
Sen’s eyes narrowed at the lich.
Slow steps of old bones and rattling armor echoed in the bleak nothingness. The void consumed the blood dripping from Sen’s face.
“Yes. You wish there to be order in it, but there is none here. Embrace it. The violence.”
Sen could feel his relation to the lich somehow. It felt like the memories he had before he was born were trying to come back to him. It felt uncanny, like he wasn’t supposed to be understanding what he understood. The rules that governed the cosmoverse could be unraveled on the ground which he stood, and his own self was being unraveled in turn. He didn’t like it, and it fueled his fury. But the lich was right, he didn’t want combat; he wanted violence.
Sen summoned entropic energy into his sword using his Primodial Transfiguration ability and swung it at Uladin. After a moment, he noticed that Uladin’s pace slowed to a crawl. The entropic effect took him by surprise, but it seemed his entropic attacks always would, the effects were limitless and completely random. Not wanting to waste any more time, he forced his open, armored hand toward Uladin and promptly pulled it toward his chest, using his Unreal Grasp, combined with his weightlessness, to rocket toward the lich as he had done before.
Uladin was stuck in a slowed time stream and unable to defend himself against the sword that plunged into his skeletal frame just above his black chrome chest armor. White flames spewed from underneath his plates as Sen, who was mounted on top of the lich’s chest, stirred his sword, and the primordial flames that erupted from it, into all the bones he could.
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Sen’s attack was violent. It was savage. It was final.
Uladin fell to his knees once his timestream caught up to Sen’s. His eyes looked up to Sen’s who still held the sword inside his empty chest cavity. The primordial flames singed his bones, freezing them, while bits of them shattered and fell into the maw of the void.
A large skeletal hand reached up to grab Sen’s leg, and with Sen’s moment of weightlessness still partially activated, Uladin easily wrenched Sen’s body from his mounted position onto the ground. Sen landed with a thud and looked back at the lich with a sense of genuine fear when he saw the lich standing and his leg still grasped in the skeletal grip.
Uladin pulled, heaving Sen upward over his large skeletal body, swinging him in a long arch and bringing him crashing down into the floor like a meteor.
Sen made an agonizing, blood curdling wheeze as he impacted the invisible floor, all the air leaving his lungs, passing through his flattened cheeks and lips. His back had compressed into his chest from the immense impact of his entire body being swung overhead and spiked into the ground. He didn’t have enough time to try and refill his lungs when he was lifted into the air, swung overhead, and flattened against the floor again. The impact dazed him, and his vision blurred, combined with cracking bones and crushed and bruised flesh. His armor did nothing for him against the brute force of being swung like a ragdoll. He saw nothing in the void except for Uladin’s arm in his peripheral vision as he felt the floor come crashing into his body again. He lost his vision completely, his eyes failing, seemingly disconnecting from his brain. His arms turned to mush as they flailed every time Uladin swung him overhead. He could only feel the wind against his aching skin, and the bones in his body, especially in the leg in Uladin’s grasp, fragmenting and shattering. Eventually he couldn’t even tell what was happening when his entire nervous system felt foreign, like the pain exceeded human potential. With each swing he could feel his life force fading, his weak body breaking down more and more.
Uladin’s attack was violent, savage, and final.
Uladin checked the damage of his onslaught. Sen’s limbs were twisted the wrong way at the joints, the leg Uladin held onto was flaccid in every place it was meant to be rigid. He tossed Sen’s limp body away from him.
Sen made minor twitchy movements, but his ability to even take a breath was taken away from him. He lay on the surface of the void, a puddle of ravaged flesh and bone, wishing for nothing more than a sweet release from his pain. It finally caught up to him. He didn’t take it seriously. He overextended. He cared more about using his magical powers than protecting his life. Now he felt every bone in his body was broken, his chest caved in with no hope of ever taking a breath ever again, leaving him with the incapability of letting out an agonized moan. It all happened so fast. He wasn’t sure how much damage he could do with his primordial flames against something without flesh, but it wasn’t enough. He didn’t realize the gamble he made. He thought about Zulli. He was glad she wasn’t here, to see his shameful existence come to an end.
Uladin positioned himself in a crouch over Sen, the blade of his axe strung across Sen’s neck.
“Not enough.”
Primordial flames engulfed Uladin’s axe, and the blade severed Sen’s head from his body like butter.
***
“I cannot tell you what the void is. I am unsure of its magnitude, but the people who built this place, the prophets of Calamity’s Tide, believed it to be the beginning and end of all things.”
August sat on one of the raised platforms peering past Arty and watching Zulli and the new mysterious woman, Jenessa, who sat cross-legged facing each other under the archway Sen disappeared into.
“They thought someone would bring the void to this world. Like a kind of messiah?” Zulli asked Jenessa.
Jenessa shook her head, her pale face still mostly hidden by the lacy black veil she wore. She offered no other answer.
“Sen isn’t the end of all things.” Zulli finally said.
“No, I don’t believe he is either.” Jenessa agreed. “These are just the words of a deranged cult, after all.”
“So, you’re not a part of the cult?” Arty spoke up, directing his attention from the crystal dais to the woman.
“Arty.” Zulli exclaimed, putting her face in her hand.
“Does she not look like she belongs to some cult called Calamity’s Tide?” Arty rhetorically asked, shrugging his shoulders and putting his attention back into his measuring instruments.
August could see the woman’s eyes check him through her veil. His attention was rapt on her, unmoving, but he allowed her to speak with Zulli if it meant he could fulfill his contract in a timely manner.
“I am simply a knowledge seeker.” Jenessa said to Zulli as she looked back at her.
Zulli looked down, resting her hands on her knees. She studied the woman who asked to sit with her. “And I am too.” She said quietly.
“I believe you are, yes.” Jenessa agreed.
“I don’t want to leave…” Zulli said, looking back at the archway.
“You don’t want to leave… what?” Jenessa asked.
“I don’t want to leave him. He said he’ll be back.”
“He will be. Waiting for him will do nothing.”
“How do you know?”
“The lich told Garrus. The boy has a trial to face. And he will return.”
“And what if he can’t handle it? If we can get in there, we can help him.”
Jenessa put on a genuine warm smile behind her veil. “I know what you are feeling. Many years ago, I had felt it-”
“No, you didn’t.” Zulli interrupted her. “I have an ability that gives me universal knowledge. The connection I have with him is not understood by that ability. It’s not something that I believe you can understand.”
The warm smile on Jenessa’s face did not falter. “I see.” She replied. “And that connection, you do not feel it now, do you?”
“…No.”
“And you will when he comes back, no matter where you are. The void is not something that you, or this young man-” Her eyes flicked at Arty. “-Can understand or penetrate, not yet. He told you he would come back. You should trust that he will.”
“I was so close. I was in there with him.”
“And that is very curious.” Jenessa’s eyes wavered over to August. “What did you feel coming from the portal, Khepri?”
August kept a stern face as he considered even answering her. “It didn’t feel like a portal. It felt like a suppression field.” He said after a moment.
“And what’s the one thing that suppression fields don’t work on? Zulli? Care to guess?”
“Non-magical entities.” Zulli answered.
“As astute as I had presumed.”
“My body is completely magical. I shouldn’t have been able to enter it then.” Zulli argued.
“There is still much you don’t know. About yourself and about the void.”
“And you do?”
“I didn’t say that.”
“You implied it.”
“She’s been speaking in half-truths this entire time, Zulli.” August exclaimed. Arty silently nodded his head in agreement as he fidgeted with a tool that looked like a small set of dowsing rods connected by a brass spring.
“There is much you must understand before you can begin to understand. Too much. But if the boy is to keep moving forward, you have to let him, Zulli.” Jenessa told Zulli in response to August. “Stay then, if you wish. But do not destroy the crystal. If you have any hope of reaching into the void, the crystal will be your catalyst, no doubt.” She said as she stood up from her cross-legged pose. “Would you accept another gift from me? Like the wand I allowed Garrus to give to you?”
Zulli thought back to the priestess of Knowledge who gave her a gift as well, and felt a familiar sense of distrust from a gift being given for no reason other than as a test. “A gift is not a gift in the form of a bargain.” She replied.
Jenessa smiled again and produced a small circular stone from behind her back. “No strings attached.” She said, handing it over to Zulli. She was short enough that she didn’t have to crouch for Zulli to reach it.
Zulli took the stone, a black sphere matching the black glossiness of her skin. She lazily stood as she watched Jenessa walk away from the archway toward the set of stairs leading out of the sanctum.
“August.” Jenessa said, calling him by his name for the first time. “You hold great promise.” And she unhurriedly left them, walking up the stairs with a sultry gait. August’s only response was a glance from the side of his eyes.
***
Sen’s brain allowed a few moments of life before the rest of his feeble life forced was eked out into the void. A final dialogue box opened in what he thought was his vision but now seemed to be a projection in his dying mind.
- You have died
- The Usurper cannot reach you. Your soul is unable to be led to its predetermined resting place.
- Your magical matrix will be imprinted into your [Soul Core]
- Over time, your physical, magical, and antimagical forms may be reconstituted from your [Soul Core]
“We plead and order, request and command. Once more unto the breach, dear friend, once more.”