BT IV - Chapter 37

It charged a second time, swinging its sword wildly but with such force and speed that Micah had no choice but to dodge.  As heavily enchanted as his spear was, it had no chance against the bolt of frozen soul power that the Prince was somehow using as a weapon.

His body was battered and weak.  The battle against the luoca flock had been taxing, and the attack from the daemon’s flames had ravaged muscle and scorched bones.  His hit points were at around half of their total, but Micah could feel that it was something more than that.

Every minute he fought inside the Elsewhere aura put off by the gems, the great runes that governed Karell seemed further away.  It was like the entire castle was slowly descending into the mists themselves.

The Prince roared in triumph, an uncontrolled slash forcing Micah to dodge into a pinwheeling backhand from the creature’s free arm.

His jaw shattered, and Micah was sent twirling through the air, his vision narrowing as he tried to combat the pain.

Just as he was righting himself, Micah saw the monster’s puppet body charging toward him, greatsword held in both hands like a spear as he sought to impale the flailing spearman.  Frantically, Micah looked for a way out.  A place he could dodge, a way to parry the attack that would leave his spear intact.  There weren’t any good options.

Instead, he grabbed his spear in both hands and swung it with all of his force, shattering the heavily enchanted length of wood against the flat of the blade and using the momentum from his strike to send himself rocketing free.

The Prince rocketed past him, overshooting Micah’s battered, bleeding, and now weaponless body as he flew up into the air.  It spun around snarling at him and lifting its sword in a double handed grip over its head to finish the job.

It was an eyeblink too slow.  Micah could feel the parasite he had implanted into the Prince’s body eating away at it, sapping the creature of its strength but at too leisurely of a rate to level the playing field.

The daemon charged toward Micah, and as he prepared for another frantic dodge, a futile attempt to delay the inevitable, a blast of fire came raining down from above, surrounding the enraged monster.

Micah gasped for breath as the Dragon, Gwen on its back, swooped down out of the sky and into the dissipating flames.  The Dragon’s long neck darted forward, and as the dragonfire cleared away Micah’s eyes widened as he saw the Prince’s human body wriggling in the Dragon’s massive reptilian jaws, the daemon’s emerald sword falling toward the castle below.

“Micah!”  Gwen screamed, her eyes wide with fear.

The Prince’s green sword burst into existence once again, punching through the lower jaw of the Dragon and levering sideways as the Prince cut through tongue, bone, scale and flesh with equal ease.

“It can’t hold the Prince for long!”  She continued, tears beginning to stream down her face.  “The daemon is weakened by its time on Karell, but it is still royalty.  Remember your promise!  You need to find a way!”

With a sickening squelch, the Third Prince ripped itself free, blade in its right hand and a significant portion of the other daemon’s jaw in the left.  Blood streamed from both of them, as black as night and with the viscosity of mud.

A second crystal arrow struck the Prince.  This time, whatever defenses it had erected at the beginning of the battle were weakened.  Whether by the Dragon’s attack or the steady progress of Infect, it didn’t matter.  The projectile sunk a full handspan into the monster’s armored stomach before coming to a stop.

It let out a bellow of rage, the flames that comprised its wings going wild as unnatural blood flowed freely from its wounds.

Micah bit his lip, ignoring the pain and the rich taste of iron as he tried to think up a solution.  Gwen was right.  He needed to stop it, but how?  It was stronger than him at full health, but he was unarmed and all but crippled.  He would be lucky for any battle to last a full minute.

Despite all of Micah’s preparation, he had underestimated the Prince.  His true abilities lay in the tricks and mysteries of time travel, something that the daemon could just ign-

His thoughts screeched to a halt.  That was it.

He smiled, reaching up with the stump of his broken spear toward the empty sky.

“Blessed Return”

It was a little early.  Technically the blessing wasn’t fully charged yet, and Micah could feel the great runes that governed Karell’s timeline trying to reject his request, so he pushed.

The sun in the sky flicked out, replaced by the eternal night of truth.  He reached up with his mind and grasped the rune of time and changed the flow of willpower and sigils feeding into it.

He was not requesting to go back 5 years.  He was demanding that change.  The rune tried to resist, after all Micah’s magic was trying to change the natural order of the world.  Time was meant to run smoothly forward.

But as broken as Micah’s body was, his mind was still clear and strong.  He grabbed hold of the primal magic and twisted it to his will forcing time itself to stop and begin to rewind.

“HOW!?!” The Prince screamed in confusion and rage, ignoring the bleeding Dragon as its green wings beat against the thickening air and it launched itself at him.  “THIS IS NOT POSSIBLE GODLING.  YOU ARE INSUFFICIENT.”

“Evidently not,” Micah replied through gritted teeth as the artificially accelerated blessing began to take its toll on his body.  He could feel the strain on his organs, the internal bleeding as muscles and veins began to rupture and leak.  There likely wasn’t a path to surviving this, but the Prince didn’t need to know that.  In the end, so long as the daemon was eliminated, all else was secondary.

It dropped its sword, once again reaching toward Micah with both of its hands as it fought against the steady rushing current of time.  He obliged, dropping the shattered remnant of his own spear and spreading his arms wide to wait for the daemon’s final touch.

When it locked its fingers around his neck, Micah’s eyes sprang open, a mad grin upon his face, and he wrapped the creature into a bearhug.

For the first time in the battle, the Prince was frozen in shock, unable to comprehend what Micah was doing.  After all, the concept of sacrifice was so alien to such an individualist creature that explaining his actions would be like trying to describe the color red to a blind man.

Then, they sank into time together, and Micah willed his soul to open, reaching out with tendrils of white and yellow energy to grab hold of the green flames that represented the Prince.

He opened his eyes once again, and Micah found himself in an empty place.  Formless chaos, both bright and devoid of all life and light simultaneously filled the space around him.  He avoided looking directly at it because the mere thought of it began to burn at the corners of his mind.

Instead Micah grinned at the shapeless roiling monster of mist that floated in front of him, frozen in shock as it tried to sort out what was happening, how and why Micah was foolish enough to challenge such an ancient being to a contest of souls.

He dove into the daemon’s side, tearing at it with his mind as he tried to shred his way through the corded mass of power, anger and hunger.

It shook itself.  Waves of inchoate wrath beating down on him, as real a weapon in this space as any sword or mace on Karell.  The daemon tried to overwhelm him, to drown his consciousness in its endless might, but Micah wouldn’t let it.

He couldn’t.

The images of his friends burned bright in his mind.  Trevor, his brother, ever a goofy playboy that meant well underneath everything.  Drekt, the parent of their group, smart and kind and the only force keeping them on track.  Eris and Esther, his sister and niece, as thick as thieves and practically twins in their mischievous desire to become stronger and join the family business.  Telivern, his only friend and moral touchstone for so long.  Ravi, the childlike companion that only sought fun and companionship.

Even Gwen and that beautiful full Adrian Harris.  They were all counting on them.  To save their lives or honor their sacrifices.  He was their only hope.

Micah tore deeper, ripping apart the Prince’s instincts and thoughts and taking them into himself as he sought to find the very core of the being, the thoughts and essence of what made it something rather than nothing.

It shuddered, pulsing red and green as it sought to compress itself downward and crush Micah.  Mist melted at his skin, trying to dissolve his sense of self so that he would become nothing more than another wellspring of power in the ocean of rage and gluttony that he sought to consume.

His fingers were the first to go.  Micah didn’t know how or when, but he forgot what they looked like.  One minute, his self-image was whole and complete, and the next its borders were blurry, extremities merging together.

Frantically he redoubled his efforts.  It was eat or be eaten.  He could feel his power growing as he consumed the primal forces that made up the Prince, but at the same time, bit by bit he was beginning to lose himself as it tried to destroy him in turn.

Micah’s forearms were gone.  He was little more than a torso with flippers sticking out from it as he thrashed and devoured his way into the Prince.  It was weakening.  He just needed a little longer and he’d be able to save Trevor and Esther and Telivern and…

His thoughts trailed off, and Micah recoiled in horror.  Who?  WHO?!  There were others he needed to save.  It was dreadfully important, but why?

A fever gripped him.  Micah’s entirely limbless torso thrashed madly inside the belly of the daemon.  It was eating him and he knew that was a bad thing, but he couldn’t put it to words.  After all, it would be so much simpler to just let the timeless being consume him, to become part of a greater whole and-

He felt a cool hand on the back of his neck.  That was all there was of him.  A head floating alone and confused in the depths of an ancient evil.  Another hand touched him, then another.

“Destroyed and then remade,” a woman’s voice remarked, a hint of awe in it.  “That was the other part of the ritual I was missing.  Of course.  This is it, this is how we do it.”

Memories rushed back into him.  Andres, Kylie, Kirin, his childhood, all of them hit him at once and Micah let out a wordless scream of pain and rage, reaching up with both of his hands to grasp his hair as his legs kicked freely.

He reached out with his right arm, the skin bright pink and new from where he had spun it into being from nothing and grabbed hold of something in the mist.  The Prince quivered.  For the first time he felt a hint of fear running under the anger and hunger, but Micah didn’t care.

It should be afraid.  That was only natural.

He grasped the squiggling ball of mist in his hands and ripped, unleashing a burst of dark green liquid that he gathered easily with his mind.

He could feel Dakkora behind his eyes whispering his next step to him.  He could feel Andres standing proudly behind him, lending him the boy’s senseless confidence.   Most importantly, he could feel Kylie in the distance, watching on approvingly as she granted him a sense of purpose and grace.

Micah took the green liquid and threw it up into the misty canvas of the Prince and began tracing a rune.

The anger and hunger were gone.  All he could feel now was fear, and as the daemon lost control of the emotions that powered it, the being diminished.  It didn’t grow smaller, just lesser.  Less important.  Less fearsome.  Less powerful.

It assaulted him with everything it had as Micah finished the broad outline of the rune, but it was like the rain trying to destroy a lake.  He simply absorbed its attacks into himself, growing as the Prince faded.

It was frantic now.  He could hear the being’s voice now.  Begging.  Pleading.  Beseeching him for mercy.

But Micah was in a place beyond conscious thought.  Trancelike, his index finger traced glyph after glyph in subordinate positions around the rune, defining its majesty and terrible purpose in a way that would have eluded him in a thousand lifetimes.

He could feel Karell in the void now.  It wasn’t above or below him, more to the side.  Like he had stepped through the idea of space itself into some other realm.  He was both a pace and a league away simultaneously, but despite that he knew exactly where his home was because he could feel the great runes that had created him.

Most importantly, he could feel the rune that was the younger sister of the one he was drawing.  Karell had time magic but it was incomplete.  Soft and permeable in a way that something as essential as a primal magic should not be.

So Micah completed it, ripping hunks from the squealing and fleeing Third Prince and converting them into the burning liquid ink that created the massive working of magic.

A moment and an eon passed, the difference was meaningless in this space, and the rune was done.  Micah looked up at it with a rapturous smile on his face.  The Prince was long dead, converted into raw power both for himself and the rune.  Now all that was left was for Micah to activate it.  To empower the final ritual.

He cut his palm, willing a line of crimson blood to appear, and he touched it to the nearest portion of the leagues of intricate runework that made up his casting.

He shattered, and reality along with him.