Artorian's Archives Omnibus

by Dennis Vanderkerken

  He could just see that Dawn was raging mad, like the Blight had exploited a weakness she thought had been foolproof. On second thought, that’s likely exactly how the Blight must have been feeling this entire time: stripped naked as its protections were explained and peeled away like the skin of a fruit.

  Without the ability to talk, he couldn’t rescind the rule in place that was preventing the Blight from true harm by Dawn. Even an S-rank can’t defy a ruling that was being upheld by a Heavenly. He would have said it sooner if he’d put the abyss blasted dots together! He thought of it, and had immediately turned his sentence to declare the change.

  His throat wasn’t healing internally. Why did it have to be infernal that dealt this damage? It was significantly more difficult to heal since he relied on celestial involvement. It wasn’t his fault he’d only focused the best one for the job! Okay, fine, perhaps it was. Artorian had a backup in mind, it just wasn’t one he wanted to use. It carried terrible… side effects. He soundlessly bashed on the inside of the shield. Unable to make sound, and still not being good enough on Essence to cause a sound effect, he was down to just trying to get Dawn’s attention the old-fashioned way: wild flailing.

  The damage an S-ranker could do was the kind of thing stories were written about. Her first punch into the Blight-mass drilled a hole so deep into the ground that only her shield had protected him from the viscera it churned out. One needed an awful lot of room to store a city’s worth of dead bodies… and it turns out that blood is still a liquid, and doesn’t accept being squished.

  He wasn’t going to get her attention in time. Artorian pulled free his hidden pouch on the small of his back, nestled neatly under his robe. He opened it fully and desperately dug around in it. Armor. No. Weapons? He hissed at himself, his throat still not allowing words to form, “No! Vellum, paper! Give me something to write on!”

  Artorian had nothing. A scribe and scholar, and he didn’t keep so much as scratch paper on him? “You fool, you’re going to be a laughingstock!”

  He glanced at his robe… it was material. He had no ink to write with, but his orb-shield was covered in… red. Red that was oozing into the tiny openings meant to let him keep breathing. Ah, no wonder Dawn was so mad. He fished around in the spatial pouch. Not a single quill? Artorian felt the bundle of Sequoia’s bow. He’d never had the heart to unwrap it, but he pulled it free now. For with a bow, comes arrows! They were thorn arrows, fine tipped, and perfect for impromptu delicate applications.

  It would do!

  Hastily throwing his outer robe down, he scraped up a red line from the inside of the shield, and carefully got to writing. That it was written in blood… surely it wouldn’t affect anything. It’s just a medium, yes. Don’t overthink it, old boy. Just a medium. Just ink. Don’t think of where it comes from. Focus. Focus…

  Dawn was deep underground by the time she’d even slightly calmed down. She brought her might to bear upon any part of the phantom she could find, and even bedrock was but brittle sand that burst apart if she moved through it. Her greyscale flashed on and off underground; her unchecked rage not as caring what overbearing effects she let free upon ‘the real’.

  The entire time, the Blight mocked her. “Is that all? Harder, oh yes, harder! You pitiful worm! Even your grand-forebear struck me with more force… and still accomplished nothing!”

  She beat him to ash and dust, her surroundings a living inferno. It was to no avail. It made no difference. The phantom reformed, reshaped, and returned to mocking her, spurring her on. Her fist stopped an inch in front of the next iteration of the Blight. The sheer force behind it still evaporated buildings worth of space, but the strike itself halted as her mind caught onto the situation. Spurred her on? It wanted her to hit him. It was doing nothing but mocking, but was still pulling her far away from—abyss!

  Artorian belched out blood. The raw amount of infernal Essence pouring into the shield orb was overwhelming his flickering sunlight Aura. Raw amount was all the Blight needed. With the ability to be in several places at once, a little distraction was enough. Left vulnerable, that shield did nothing. The convenient blood to write with dissolved, and a very hunched over Artorian had needed to find… alternative sources of ink. This was the work of folly.

  Putting the final touches on the robe, he felt weak and pale as his lifeblood ran down his arm. Unable to use the blood falling from his mouth as it boiled away, he’d stabbed the arrowhead into a place without a great many nerve endings. This didn’t mean it did not hurt. To his great displeasure, his Aura was also healing him up as much as it was rebuking the smothering infernal cloud. So when he needed more ink… there was more pain. “Finished!”

  He pulled the robe close to his chest and curled up into a ball, protecting as much of the written text as possible while making himself as small as could be. Less Essence was needed to protect a smaller object, but the amount he gained was barely enough to keep staving off the death plane. Each slammed strike from within the shield wasn’t harming him directly… yet. It was still driving him ever closer to complete Auric failure. Once that went down…

  Blue fire washed across both sides of the Soul-shield as Artorian’s Aura flickered. He was tired. So, so very tired. Everything was heavy, and dark, and cold. Fire or no, he was cold. His vision was hazy, and as light once again filled the bottom of the ravine he peered up with tightly squeezed eyes. Dawn. That shape reminded him of Dawn. It could be the Blight, tricking him with a fake body?

  Blue fire? Enough information to make him risk it. Dipping his finger on the bloodied arrow as it once again drew ink, he wrote ‘Sign’ on the inside of the shield, in reverse. His arm dropped to his side in the middle of writing the ‘n’.

  The soul shield dropped, and a barely breathing academic hung limp in Dawn’s arms. She’d seen what he was writing. She’d gathered the gist of it and pulled free what he’d been holding close. Part of his robe? There was text on it. She grit her teeth after reading it. Yes, yes that would definitely solve the problem… with significant cost.

  She bit her finger without a second thought, and pressed the dot of her energy to the cloth. There was no blood. Apparently, S-rankers lacked that, in favor of a damage resistance that made Mages look squishy. The contract was signed. It was done; he’d done well getting this ready. The fight wasn’t over, and Artorian was still breathing.

  Wrapping him in a field of grey, a single step took her from the deep ravine in barren, flattened wastes to the top of the Skyspear mountain like it was nothing. She lay him down, wrapped in a foggy grey mass that dispersed as the body within was ‘fixed’, and acclimated to the change in elevation. She unfurled the contract, and read it again.

  “By my power of land ownership, I, Artorian, hereby grant my title and land-claim to Dawn, Soul of Fire. Undersigned thusly.” His signature was messy, but there. Next to it there was a spot with ‘Dawn’ and a line beneath it. She’d placed her dot of energy there, completing the transfer. An extra line caught her eye, a line that didn’t have anything to do with the contract.

  ‘Under the mountain.’

  She wondered what that could mean for only a moment. It was the location of what must be the Blight’s Core. He’d written it with his lifeblood, and wouldn’t have done so if the detail wasn’t crucially important. Her friend would rest here in safety, so she declared a changing of the rule as land owner.

  “I, Dawn, owner of the Skyspear, hereby declare that I revoke all prior protections that this land might have granted.”

  The mountain shuddered. Lightning cracked in the sky as her revocation was checked, measured… and approved. For it was the purview of the land owner to make such changes. Dawn folded up the cloth and pressed it into Artorian’s hand. He was out cold, but when he woke would be able to see she’d signed it. He’d know what that meant for both of them, after this fight was done. She also saw her old spatial pouch, and dipped her fingers in to retrieve a single item.

  Now she could do something she�
�d wanted for a century: Dawn could kill the Blight.

  Chapter Eighteen

  The Blight didn’t like feeling stripped of protections. Literally stripped as entire swaths of Runes were ripped from its cultivation Core beneath the mountain, peeled away like layers of cloth as intricate patterns faded, popped out of existence, or crackled with electricity and shattered completely.

  “No. No!” Oozing its prior charismatic voice once more, the amalgamation roiled against the changes, trying to hold the Runes together. In place. Something. Not only was it vulnerable, but now, without the Runes stolen from Dark Elves. It was…

  “Found you.” Dawn’s burning voice quaked forth as if a furious volcano was speaking. The ground around her melted. She scanned the underground with Soul-energy-fueled vision, and had seen so much more than basic Essence combinations ever could. The tremor that her words and movement caused finally made an undead trip down the ravine. She had traversed from the top of the mountain, down to next to the Core in a single straight shot, melting a literal hole right through the earth to arrive in exactly the location where she wanted to be.

  The undead tumbled. Fell. Broke. Shattering before it could zip all the way down at terminal velocity. The Blight saw a ray of hope, and lunged for it. The mind connected to the skeleton was something that, if strong enough, the Blight could piggy-back all the way back to the caster. There would be a personality battle for control, one it couldn’t lose. Or prior to this point, wasn’t able to lose. Now it was going to have to take the risk; risk that it could absorb the caster’s mind, and that it was a Mage rank or higher. Preferably higher.

  An infernal claw shot to the sky, planning to snatch the skull conduit from midair. It was so close! Then the world turned grey. The undead conduit stopped falling, and so did any movements the reaching infernal hand was making. It watched in horror, as the skeletal body dissolved into particles of ash. With the connection severed, and the remains useless, the world of grey dropped away, allowing the residue to harmlessly fall to the ground as soot, where it then started to melt and boil.

  “Tut, tut, tut…” The void in Dawn’s voice carried over vast underground distances. “When I’m done with you… nobody will remember you ever existed.”

  The Blight shrieked in fear. It had to retreat. It had to flee. How could it have been such an idiot? This was all going to be for naught if…! The sound of space warbling, or tearing, reached the Blight’s ears. It was an awful sound, and the worst part is that he’d actually heard it. Not with a gimmicked body, but with its real one. Dawn had located his core.

  Dropping the perspective from the cloud, real eyes opened after centuries of being closed. They were orbs of pitch-black tar, but they saw the burning god before them all the same. Dawn’s voice caused rumbling earthquakes. “That is the single largest piece of honeycomb opal I have ever seen. Believe me when I say that I have seen some big rocks in my life. I’m going to enjoy squeezing the life out of it.”

  The Blight’s real body didn’t have a chance to speak as a combination of pressure and solar heat melted away the gathered layers of infernal protection. It was pulling together all its infernal gas, tendrils, and anything else it could get ahold of at a prodigious rate… just to collapse everything around it as a shield to stave off the torrential, cosmic heat for just a few more seconds. It needed to think of something…!

  Like lightning, an idea struck its elemental brain. It was going to perish here; it was too late for anything different to happen. Still… dark laughter filled the area. “Even if you destroy me, here and now, I will return! So long as the Skyspear stands, I will come after you, and all you care for again and again! An elemental cannot truly die, I am bound to this land! You will not wrest me from it! I curse your lineage, and the lineage of Artorian, to be fouled by Blight!”

  Dawn swung her arms outwards, as if grasping the piece of mammoth-sized opal from far away. Heat rolled out from empty pockets of space where her Soul-energy was condensing. “So long as the Skyspear stands. I promise that you will do no. Such. Thing.”

  The Blight madly cackled at her. That had been so easy! His assailant was so wrapped up in her fury that she hadn’t noticed his last, cruel little ploy. It had no power now; it couldn’t actually curse her! But words had power, and promises even more so! “I accept!”

  Dawn felt a cold shiver in her soul as the vow she’d unwittingly made clasped around her heart. She would die on the spot if she broke it, and realized too late what the infernal elemental had done. She was trapped! Even if the elemental was gone, she had promised against the possible threat of his return. Even as land-owner, this was not something she could simply overturn. A promise against a possibility was a no-win situation for her. While Skyspear stood, she could not leave the territory it occupied.

  Dawn screamed dark vengeance, burning away the last of the defenses with ease as the Blight’s main, actual elemental body became visible. It was person-shaped, of all things, with one ear shorter than the other. It was as black as the abyss, and spewing out infernal energy at a relatively stable pace. Had an infernal cultivator gotten ahold of this… they would have had unimaginable power. “Abyss you!”

  She pulled the item nicked from the spatial pouch off her back. Grasping it firmly, she squeezed the grip on Sequoia's bow. A string of Soul energy sprung into being between the ends, allowing the wood to bend taut as an arrow of similar make particulated into being between her fingers. The arrow sprung to life as it took on the Incarnation of the sun, and became fueled full of identity meant purely to erase.

  Dawn took a deep breath, and for a moment regarded the memoriam bow as she opened up a connection. Distance was nothing to an S-ranker, and she was pouring energy into this effect just to uphold it for a few seconds. A few seconds was all she needed for a reply. “Call it.”

  Across vast distances, a grove of roaming Wood Elves felt a knock on their forum doors. The familiar warmth that radiated through made several of them toss the connection wide open. Rosewood, Snowbell, Oak, and more held open the strained passageway that was trying to slam closed from the demanding new connection that burdened their communal mind space.

  The congregation present looked at what was being shown, saw the reality, and heard the call. The answer was swift; all were in agreement. To gain retribution for untold centuries of anguish. To wreak vengeance upon an ancestral foe. To remember their loved, and fallen.

  The will of the grove poured through the connection, and the shape of her arrow burst full of meaning into a new shape as it took on the conglomerate will of an entire people. The answer was clear.

  “Lance him.”

  The arrow pierced the defiantly screaming elemental and punched right into his cultivation core. Not the little fake double it had hastily made to try and trick Dawn; such minor obfuscations no longer functioned. Not against an Incarnate. She saw clear as day that the Blight’s actual Core-cultivation technique, along with a myriad of others, were all painstakingly carved inside of the monster-sized opal.

  She wanted it. It was so pretty… unfortunately, not even a speck of dust would be left since she was now fighting against the possibility of the elemental’s return. So it had to go. All of it. Every last speck of crystal would break down from a fully physical thing, to matter, to corrupted Essence, and then she would burn even that to cinders.

  Sure, she could grey-zone the entire area and ‘place’ the opal elsewhere, but that wouldn’t destroy it. Just displace it. She needed it gone. Permanently. The Blight shrieked its last vile laughter, pleased even in its last moments before it forgot entirely who and what it was. The luminous erasing effect spread through every connected Essence particle of its being. The elemental vanished with a pathetic *pop.*

  Sequoia’s bow sprouted a single, victorious leaf. The last, and only acknowledgement of vengeance completed before the entire bow crumpled to ash, utterly overtaxed and overburned by a category of energy it had no business handling. Dawn plucked the leaf and gently s
et it behind her ear as one would a prized feather. With a snap of her fingers, a makeshift simulacrum of a sun exploded into being, surrounding the entire opal and hastily reducing the object to protomolecules from universal-scale oppressive forces. It took but a few moments, the release of her fingers extinguished the sun as quickly as she’d sprouted it into being.

  Even as she ceased emitting light, her surroundings were luminous with sizzling heat. She closed her eyes and expanded her senses. Everywhere the Blight had touched. Everywhere it reached. Everywhere it tried to crawl to… it either burned, or forgot what it was and returned to being base Essence. She ensured it.

  Dawn exhaled, the first released breath of relief. A gust of air that could knock a tornado from its path whooshed through the tunnels. This S-rank level was… insane. She was so powerful… it was going to take her decades of time to comprehend herself, and everything she had to watch out for. The worst part was that she was going to have to do it alone. Or at least without the direct presence of her friend. They needed to talk about that. She remembered that Artorian was going to be forced to leave the mountain as soon as he woke up, so she addressed it without pause.

  “I, Dawn, under authority of land ownership of the Skyspear mountain, allow Artorian and his family to remain without repercussion.” Even being deep underground, she heard the lightning of confirmation. It might not be enough, but it was a start. She flew upwards, leaving the vast open cavern of molten slag and terrible memories behind her.