"Winter alone shall soon hold sway over Highrock. Hundreds of frozen corpses will soon decorate the keep's windswept halls, even as their souls twist and writhe to our pleasure, screaming for our amusement, here, in blackest Shadow!"
Ubel spat his contempt. "By rights, Mord should savor this victory with me. Yet ever did he balk at true darkness. Plaga Coward! Such power I earned, simply by having the boldness to seize it! Power claimed by showing no fear, no weakness, no hesitation, as I grasp ahold of this path to greatness!"
Jess's limbs trembled with fear no longer. It did not matter the choking terror that had numbed her swings, left her badly on the defensive. It did not matter that it was her body bruised and battered before this monster, he all but inured to her blows. Never had she wanted to embrace the killing frenzy like she did at that moment, limbs trembling not with fear, but with hottest fury.
"Greatness, Ubel? You, who have been forgotten by the outside world entire? You stride no halls in glory, you damn fool! You are now nothing but a rotting corpse, lost in these chambers of twisted dream and nightmare!" Her laughter was cold. Mocking. "Tell me, Ubel, how many of our classmates do you think would swoon to your touch now?"
“You know nothing, foolish wench!” Ubel roared, charging Jess with a fierce overhand blow. “You know nothing of the power I’ve gained!”
Her nemesis uttered a hideous curse then, fearsome energies twisting through the ether, a ball of shadowy flame streaking across the massive chamber, headed right for Jess. Black death given sentience and form.
Jess seized the Vor as Ubel uttered his curse, no longer letting fear choke her initiative, no longer letting the horror all about her prevent her from drinking deep of the vile potency flowing through this tower of hideous rites, tasting as it did of the hot wrath that roared through her every time she charged her foes in battle, butchering bandits and slavers as a child of the High Hunt, accepting at last just how dark and terrible a role she, Malek, and all her fellow Squires had played.
It wasn't just that only two score Squires of War had dared the hunt, had dared to ride under the banner of a man they worshiped as fiercely as any god, dodging mortal peril over and over against fiercest odds, as if Eloquin's own blessing pushed them on, blackening their daggers for an endless summer Jess realized in that moment truly had lasted for countless seasons over countless years that somehow all blended into one, as if they had somehow stepped outside of time itself.
Many noble scions knew of the legends. Knew who summer truly blessed. Many had come before her first step down that eldritch path. And many since. And all those who had failed to comprehend what they truly embraced had slipped free of those eldritch magics, dazed and lost, never to dare Highrock again.
The abyssal spell flashed over Jess's darting form, exploding in a flash of light behind her as she seized the Vor and pummeled the hideous revenant with her sword. Strike and void, slash and parry, their blades wove together in a fearsome, terrible dance.
Jess felt the rage roaring through her as never before. Focus. She forced herself to stay focused. To use her hate as a deadly weapon, not let it use her. It was not time to sink into the sweet madness. Not quite yet.
“And yet you fell!" Jess taunted after they sprang back from one another once more, each coldly circling, measuring the other. "Your master cut you down before my very eyes! You and Glist and Tarron, all forgotten. All of you lost to Shadow!"
“Yes, damn you!” Ubel cursed. “And I was the head of our coven. Those Velheim sorcerers you dared to cut down were sworn to me, foolish bitch! We strove for greatness, we had no fear. And when the opportunity came for us to become one with the blackness, to become one with true power, we alone had the courage to embrace that dark twisting path! Those we left behind lacked the will to follow.” His smile turned cold. “But fear not. Even cowardly Mord knows what he must do.”
Ubel then turned to gaze mockingly upon the wards being desperately maintained by the panicked students and Master Rens, all struggling to keep their magics firmly in place. Jess shuddered to think how easily those students would perish here, in this terrible realm, even as Josie's desperate wails tore into her soul. “Don’t worry, little Jess. As soon as I am finished disemboweling you, I shall take exquisite pleasure in devouring these fools who fell so perfectly into our trap!”
Ubel charged once more, his face a picture of unholy glee as he lashed out with his awful blade.
Jess drunk deep of the hideous madness all around her. A catalyst to unleash the boiling rage welling up within, desiring with every ounce of her being to cleave Ubel's vile head from his body and send his soul plummeting to the very depths of Hell.
His blade shrieked through the air as it crashed down from overhead. Heart racing, Jess waited half a beat before countering with a Zwerchhau strike, dancing to the side as her longsword struck not his body but his blade, knocking his weapon askew as she pivoted and slammed steel into his throat.
Ubel stumbled back, off-kilter, even as Jess's heart lurched, her killing blow only disorienting her foe, yet drawing no blood, not even cracking bone as hard as granite. He was more resilient than any living thing had a right to be. In as much fury and panic, she slammed her blade against his helmet with a furious barrage of killing blows.
Ubel grunted under the force of her onslaught, helmet crumpling under the storm of steel, but she could not bring him down, could not even stop him from rightening himself once more.
His rotted lips curling into a hideous smile. "And now you see, foolish bitch, what you are truly up against. Oh, how I will make you pay, Jess. How dearly I will make you pay when I crush your bones and swallow your screams for eternity!"
"Jess!" Twilight's voice. So much said with that one word.
Jess shuddered, understanding at last how it was that Ubel lived still, no longer drawn in by his awful words, registering instead the dark strands of magic entwining body and soul.
Recalling how she had bested the first abomination they had stumbled upon.
It was not merely embracing the nightmare she found herself within. It was mastering it with the taste of her own will.
Blood to command and bind, but an extension of herself, her essence, her will.
A hot sting as Ubel regained his feet, sword held at the ready once more, precious seconds twisting his face into a smile.
Before he lurched back and snarled, catching sight of Jess's equally savage grin, and her blade freshly coated with blood.
Her own.
Ubel roared a guttural curse that echoed through the air like the wails of a dozen tortured souls, webs of inky blackness pulled from the bowels of Hell now streaking through the air straight towards Jess. Impossible to dodge. A single touch and it would not just be her flesh that was seared and pinned, but her very soul.
Instantly cut in twain, bursting in crimson fire with a single slash of her blade.
"No!" Ubel lurched back and hissed. "You do not have such power!"
Jess laughed, mocking him with her smile. He roared and charged, Jess matching him blow for blow. Matching and besting him, her strikes never stronger as the stormy seas of Shadow roared through her, carrying her aloft, each step effortless, as if she all but floated in dream.
Like the most savage of artists, Jess brushed the canvas before her with stroke after stroke of her bloody tool, ancient steel shredding like fine parchment with each strike that pierced her foe's increasingly panicked defenses, worms and maggots flooding out of savage wounds that would have spurted blood and entrails, were Ubel still among the living.
Hideous yellow-grey eyes widened with fear.
Never before in realms living or dead had Jess ever seen Ubel afraid.
"No. You are not the master's disciple. You are not one of us! This is but a test. You will fall before me!"
Jess laughed before Ubel's desperate words, a hot, terrible exultation roaring through her veins as she tasted his fear, time seeming to slow as she roared forth and charged, a blisterin
g series of Zwerchhau strikes overwhelming her stumbling foe, her smoking blade twisting past increasingly frantic parries before morphing into a vicious lunge, plunging into his skull. Then she yanked her sword savagely free.
Ubel began to shriek in inhuman agony as the blood upon her blade smoked and consumed him from within, searing through the armor that had once protected him so well. Jess grinned in fierce joy even as her foe managed to raise his blade and charge her, their swords crashing together one final time, Jess maneuvering to catch his sword near her crossguard, her blooded blade now controlling the bind, effortlessly pivoting around his defenses to slice through his neck, feeling but the slightest resistance as rusted steel, suppurating flesh, and brittle bone parted like wax before her blade.
Jess caught sight of Ubel's final expression, one of utter shock and inconceivable agony, before his cleaved skull rolled away. Her old foe's screeches of suffering echoed through the ancient necromancer’s lab, even as his body smoked and twisted and boiled away to nothingness. For they were screams not of the flesh, but of her enemy's very soul.
Jess felt no pity for Ubel, captivated as she was by a sudden fierce and terrible exhilaration, a climax of power pouring into her with the fury of a flooded river fed from massive falls, roaring and crashing down into the dark depths of her soul.
Jess’s laugh was one of ecstatic triumph as she sprinted with inhuman speed to Malek’s aid, his opponent’s back to her own. Effortlessly she cleaved through the unprotected neck of her shieldbrother’s foe, who collapsed instantly. A rotting marionette of dead flesh, strings now cut.
And the remaining revenants howled, gazing at Jess and Malek both with hate-filled, rotting eyes, charging the pair as one.
Never had Jess felt such heady euphoria as she did during those moments, fighting by her shieldbrother's side as they wove and dodged past rusted swords that arced through air so slowly, even as Squire blades cleaved through rotted flesh and corroded armor with a butcher's grace, hideous foes collapsing before their onslaught, fallen corpses boiling to ash at their feet.
A furious, mad melee lasting but a handful of seconds, a lifetime of savagery, steel, and death; her re-blooded bladed seeming almost to burn with the fires of her wrath as it tore through the few revenants remaining, until all their foes had crashed to the ground.
A hearbeat's stillness, as Jess and Malek faced each other over their final kill as it crumpled to ash at their feet. Her shieldbrother’s gaze locked with her own, equal parts wonder and terror. "By the gods above, Jess, did we just consume those creatures? Their power? Their very souls?"
Jess felt a cold slithery whisper in the back of her mind. A chill of uncertainty. She instantly clamped down on the sweet rush still tingling through her limbs, understanding at last her peril. Jess clenched her fist in a warrior’s signal for silence and focus.
“Hush, Malek! Our foe, he seeks to hide from us. Can you not feel him?” For Jess recalled that they were not alone. Another foe, far more terrible than his once mortal minions, master of the hideous undead abominations Jess and her brother had just defeated, was the true source of the threat.
“Jess! Malek! You must defeat that Lich, or find the source of its working! He is holding us here, in a pit of darkest nightmare. If we let down our spell for even an instant, we shall all fall in, and for those of us lacking the Delver's gift, it will be a horrific nightmare of a death!”
Jess turned to the sound of Rens's voice, tinny and faint as it was; distorted, no doubt, by the shimmering ward he and his students maintained even now. For those exhausted looking mages were but feet from Jess, yet worlds apart, and desperate to maintain that distance.
“Please, you must hurry! My students and I cannot hold for much longer."
Jess grimaced and nodded as Rens called out to them yet again, realizing as she sensed the panic in his voice that he and his struggling students were truly in peril. Carefully she took in her surroundings, ears ringing with the sharp whine of Malek’s magic balls spinning close to his head. She breathed deep, reigning in her battlefury, dampening her dark euphoria, all her focus simply on sensing the flow and pattern of shadowy energies swirling all about.
Jess gasped. She felt it. Something dark, crimson, and vile. A harsher magic than any of the ephemeral strands of azure power that resonated through the weavings and magical constructs of all the casters she had known at the college, stranger than even the tainted spells Ubel had cast. Magics that throbbed with a potency and power, a tangibility, that was both loathsome and strangely seductive.
Sword raised in Ochs, hilt held to right cheek with the blade pointed at the flickers of power she could just barely discern, Jess did her utmost to feel out the exact nature of those dark pulsating chords, striving to sense what was truly before her. She burned with the need to glimpse that wondrous tapestry of magic, dream, and reality in all its terrible beauty.
Suddenly, as if a veil had been abruptly lifted, the matrix of power was laid bare before her.
Her breath hitched as she sensed the web of crackling energies cloaking the dark, wraith-like figure even at that moment approaching them. Where others would see nothing but gloom and shadow, she saw the sparks of its hellish magics flickering bright as a crimson moon, its ebony scythe raised up high for a killing blow, as if it was some hideous avatar of death itself.
Grimacing, Jess sliced her cheek open with her blade once more, noting all earlier traces of gore had been burnt to ash, and her blade smoked fiercely as her blood gently trailed the edges. She grinned, reveling in the power of her flesh and her resolve to control the fate of her own dream. And by the power of her blood, her blade would serve as an extension of her will.
“There!” Jess shouted, directing Malek with a frantic nudge, pointing with her longsword so he wouldn’t be caught flatfooted as she roared her challenge and charged, blade raised high, instantly ready to meet the startled attack of the surprised Lich who had so expected her to be caught unawares.
As if they were but moves in a well-orchestrated dance, Jess dove under the sweeping strike of the deadly scythe, slipping under its guard. The hideous apparition hissed its surprise as Jess charged full on in sudden close quarters, slamming her pommel into the putrid face, shattering ancient bone with a brittle crack. The lich stumbled back, spitting out broken teeth while desperately attempting to whisper foul words of terrible power as Jess pivoted and struck once more, tearing cleanly through the Lich's left arm as the vile creature twisted away, voluminous robes now smoking from contact with her freshly blooded blade.
The hideous wraith-like creature was now completely visible, Jess's sword having severed the crackling crimson chords of power that had concealed its presence. It shrieked in disbelief and outrage even as its scythe morphed into a rapier-like blade of shadow, and the creature hissed.
“What are you, Delver, to see through my abyssal magics and cause harm to me? No mortal arts can triumph over the realm of the dead, any more than ephemeral air can overcome the mighty force of the wave! Does the tainted blood of power flow through your veins? Then I command you, obey my summons and submit to me!" The lich's every word still resonated with the stench of rot, the gurgling screams of broken men choking to death on their own blood. Yet Jess found herself now curiously unaffected, strangely certain that this creature only played at powers far darker and more potent than even it could possibly comprehend.
Its eyes glowed crimson with a fierce hunger, and it laughed madly as the floor of the ravaged library suddenly lit up a fiery red, multiple hexagons and pentagrams now glowing brightly with the residual power of blood and ancient magics.
Jess sensed, somehow, that the sigils lining the pentagrams served as both anchors and traps for whatever infernal creatures the lich before her had no doubt striven to summon.
“Ah, I give you pause, don’t I, demoness?” It laughed. “It all falls into place, in the end. No mortal could tear through my undead minions so easily, let alone cleave through abyssal enchantmen
ts! Your blood burns with the hot fires of Hell. Your very blade smokes from it! All these years, working my wiles to summon this school and its ripest prizes to the heart of my power, and soon the tormented screams of my prey shall reach even the lords below, as I savor the succulent souls before me!”
The gloating lich gave a satisfied nod, grinning through shattered teeth. “It pleases me that the broken fools I have damned for your mistress's pleasure have at last made their way to your courts with my offerings to your queen. At last! Accords shall be reached, and true power shall be mine.”
Gesturing grandly, the hideous creature scribed shimmering sigils into the air with the rapier he used as a wand, dark enchantments that Jess instantly understood were set to bind and compel, his horrific whisper the death rattle of countless souls as the air wreaked of putrid blood and rotting entrails. “I command you, dark hellion, servant of the queen I would serve in turn, reveal to me your name and rank! For you are my first test, and in the mastery of you I shall earn the right to truck with your queen, and together we shall forge such an unholy alliance as to send all of Erovering crashing to its knees!”
The gloating lich hissed a dark curse, and the brooding pentagrams underneath Jess's feet began to pulse and throb, glowing a rich burgundy hue that Jess found oddly soothing. “Tell me your name and rank, servant, and bow before your new master, for then my dominion over you shall be complete!”
Twilight hissed, having adroitly leaped to Jess’s shoulder once the wards had blazed to life. “Answer not its summons! It has no power over you.”
Jess, bemused, just smiled and proceeded toward her foe, blade casually allowed to scrape the stone tiles, sparkling and hissing as it did so. The ancient fallen mage, face a rotted caricature of the wizard it once was, still managed to gaze in horrified awe as Jess proceeded to walk through the numerous bloodstained wards throbbing with such potent and terrible magics before her.
Jess felt the eldritch spells burst and rupture as her sword tip scraped the stone-tiled floor. She almost fancied she could hear the magic wards she had so effortlessly abjured shrieking in discord as they strove to flee her presence, imagining too that those strangely sentient spells were helpless before her, sucked into her shimmering, bloodied blade, feeding her with their power, sparkling upon her tongue like the most succulent of fruits.
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