by Sean Davies
Before Genevieve followed Constance out of her apartment door, she stopped briefly by Annabelle’s bedroom door, placing her hand on the painted wood.
“Thank you, Annabelle,” Genie said earnestly, closing her eyes and suppressing the urge to cry. She didn’t understand her late lover’s cryptic message, but Genevieve knew in her heart that it would help her and Constance somehow.
Chapter 12
Revelations – Part 2
In Chloe O'Kelly’s dreams, she was a young teenager trapped within the stone halls of Fort Dominia, still under the gilded thumb of the Golden Fangs gang.
Their leader, the long dead Seth Goldfang, was shoving her back and forth between his high-ranking mates; Scythe the glamourous melee frost Mage, the brutish Vampire Ironfang Archie, Chaz the fiery Mage, and Gaius the cunning, manipulative and sadistic Werewolf.
Something stirred within Chloe that had never been there before, a new kind of power, frightening yet so incredibly inviting. She allowed it to course through her veins, turning them black, along with her eyes.
The young Book Wielder unleashed hell on her tormentors, ravaging them with black nail-talons and her new maw of bloody fangs, but suddenly she realised that her goal wasn't to kill and eat them; it was to infect them.
One by one, she pinned them down and vomited black bile into their screaming mouths, spreading the blessing of corruption given to her by Corriztis.
Someone tapped her on the shoulder, someone who was already altered—someone she had known from what felt like a lifetime ago. It was Lewis Thorne.
“You don't want to be like this—believe me,” Lewis Thorne said sadly. “Fight it, Chloe, Alice is in trouble!”
Chloe felt cold metal brush her cheek, and she opened her black eyes to find herself sprawled on the floor, her mechanical mount Biscuit nudging her face with its own. She groaned in agony and looked down at her arms, seeing that her veins were black and bulging. Chloe forced herself to focus her erratic thoughts on Alice, and her screaming and snarling squad mates on the ground beside her.
Chloe fought her desire to stalk around, seeking targets to infect or devour, and concentrated on the Gloom-based venom infecting and mutating her body. She used her magic to isolate every particle of whatever Corriztis had gassed them with, and violently expelled it from her body. After a whole minute of continuous vomit emitting from her mouth, Chloe O'Kelly was once again herself.
“Fuck, fuck, fuck!” she cursed loudly, as she moved over to the three infected troopers to repeat the cleansing process on them.
After a repugnant display of vomiting, the troopers were cured, and were looking up at Chloe like she was their saviour.
“Ergh... oh my Goddesses, that was foul!” a female Justiciar groaned, as she re-tied her short black hair into a stubby ponytail.
“Chloe, I love you even more than before,” a middle-aged trooper with short brown hair said appreciatively.
“Snap—I didn’t even know Book Wielders could do that!” a bald man in his fifties said, as he doused his own personal pool of corruption with the Sanctium-laced purifier spray.
“Just a little something I’ve been working on. Save the thanks for later, though,” Chloe groaned as she scanned the room with her eyes. “We've still got to find Karamo and Singarus.”
“They can't have gone far—” the bald man began.
“Look out!” Chloe shouted, catching a blur of motion out of the corner of her eye.
A heavily corrupted black-eyed Karamo came speeding towards them, his metre-long finger claws raised ready to strike. Thankfully, the redhead Book Wielder negated most of his powers just in time, and the corrupted Vampire Nightclaw stumbled into the troopers, who fought to keep him contained.
“Hold him down!” Chloe shouted. “This ain’t gonna be pretty!”
The Book Wielder managed to cure her Vampire comrade, just in time to shield the squad from a blast of shadowy energy flung at them from above.
“Shit, look at Singarus!” the female trooper yelled.
The dark Mage was suspended in the air by a vortex of black and purple shadows. During the exposure to Corriztis’ Gloom poison, Singarus had grown two black horns on his head, and a spiked tail had sprouted from the rear of his power armour.
“Oh, fucking hell...” the Book Wielder sighed, prepping another barrier.
Chloe shielded her team mates from a dozen bolts of black energy and some shadowy scythes that lashed out from the ground, before gaining the opportunity to shut off the altered Mage’s power, dispelling the vortex keeping him suspending in the air.
Karamo leapt off the floor, dashing to catch and detain the falling Mage, and Chloe apologised before ripping out every last essence of taint from Singarus’ twisted body.
Once recovered, the shadow Mage touched his head to check that his horns were gone. “Goddesses bless you, Book Wielder!”
“Don't mention it,” Chloe replied nonchalantly, as she surveyed the test-site city for more trouble.
“Why isn't Corriztis attacking us again?” the brown-haired man asked.
“Because he's busy with the Lord Imperator,” Karamo replied gravely as he removed his power armour.
“Which is good for us, but not so good for Alice,” Chloe said, also pulling off the useless armour weighing her down. “We've got to go after her.”
“Want us to blast the doors down?” the female trooper offered, pointing at the short square elevator building.
“Nah, we’d better keep as quiet as possible. You can pass some healing and energy potions around, though; that fucking Gloom-gas did a number on me.” Chloe’s eyes remained on the elevator room, wondering if there was an easy way to get in there without creating too much racket.
“I’ll get them open without any trouble,” Singarus said, moving to the doors without waiting for approval.
The Mage held his arms out in front of him, and dark purple shadows formed around the elevator building. The murky mist quickly seeped into the near-invisible seams around each doo and Singarus gradually moved his arms apart, slowly but surely pushing his magic outwards and forcing the golden doors open.
“Good work, Singarus, you horny devil,” Chloe said, patting the Mage on the shoulder. “Let’s see if I can crack these controls.”
“Since when could you understand that ancient chicken-scratch?” Singarus asked with a surprised look in his purple eyes.
“It ain’t chicken-scratch. It’s actually sort of cool,” the ginger Book Wielder replied defensively. “Each character is more like artwork than text. Alexander the Art taught me the basics, so be sure to buy him a drink or two if we get back to Central Isle in one piece!”
“Screw that, I’ll buy him a whole keg,” the shadow Mage joked.
“We need to keep an eye out for traps,” Karamo advised. “Even if the Demon is occupied with the Lord Imperator, you can guarantee he’s got his HQ littered with safeguards.”
“We’ll move quickly and cautiously,” Chloe said, tapping a few metal buttons on the elevator’s control panel delicately. “Together we should be able to sense, disarm, and fluke our way through…” A pleasant chime sounded in the room, and its crystal lights flashed green. “Sweet. Guys, you’d better get in here. Biscuit—keep the mounts in line.”
The kill team quickly assembled in the room before the metal elevator began to descend, and Biscuit the Raptorkor mount waved with one of its mechanical claws as the golden doors slid shut once again.
✽ ✽ ✽
Alice let out a confused murmur as she opened her tired eyes, and had to force herself not to flinch when she registered her threatening surroundings. The Lord Imperator was in the middle of a dark laboratory filled with a mixture of modern equipment, computers, and monitors, along with the ancient Archmage equivalents that glowed with magical energy. She was restrained with thick bands of metal that cut into her wrists and ankles, completely unable to move, and the rest of her half-naked body (along with the sides of her face) were
surrounded by a thin cage filled with disturbingly long syringes hooked up to black pipes.
The Lord Imperator grunted as she slowly tried to break her restraints, a feat that should have been feasible with her superhuman strength, but either the metal was too strong or she was too weak to make them budge in the slightest.
“Save your strength, Alice,” Corriztis spoke through Theodore Miller’s mouth. “I’m going to need it for when I inhabit that lovely body of yours, which will be very soon—I just need to make a few adjustments to my device. We don’t want you using any of those pesky Book Wielder tricks to keep me out, now, do we? And to think, I was so distraught, so aghast, so mortified by my defeat on the Gallant and the disappointment that was Daedrian Darkheart… I was out of options and out of luck, and then my new vessel just comes wandering into my lab on its own volition!” the Demon laughed happily.
Alice tried to look around, but she couldn’t move her head much without touching the viciously sharp tips of the syringes. “Go to hell, Demon scum! If you think I’m going to let you end this world then you’ve got another thing coming!” she spat.
In her mind, though, Alice feared that she’d finally met her own end, and thought longingly about her husband Jonathan and how he would deal with her death (or worse). She also worried about Chloe and the rest of the kill team, and sadly accepted the fact that they were most likely dead. Despite facing her impending end, Alice knew that she had to buy as much time as possible for her back-up forces, so that the Demon could be caught in the inevitable and catastrophic bombardment that would follow her lack of contact. If she had to give her life to rid the world of Corriztis, then it was a sacrifice worth making.
‘Sorry, my sweet Jonathan,’ Alice thought, hoping he’d understand in time.
“End the world?” the Demon replied with exasperation. “Don’t you people listen? I am going to save this world, and your half-Archmage brain cells are going to help. You should feel honoured, not angry!”
“What do you mean? How does anything you do save people?!” Alice asked incredulously, hoping to lure the Demon into a time-wasting dialog.
“You’ll see soon enough,” Corriztis replied whimsically.
The Lord Imperator’s brow furrowed, and she tried again. “You might as well tell me—unless you can’t talk and work at the same time? I understand that might be a little difficult for a puddle-brain like yourself…”
Alice heard a grumble from behind, followed by a little chuckle.
“Very well,” Corriztis began. “This world is under threat from the Creator, the lingering essence of the being that created Mydia, who resides at the heart of this world—”
“If it created this world, why would it threaten us?” Alice interrupted sceptically.
“Because this is no longer the world it made, is it now?” Corriztis replied in a snooty tone. “Ripped apart, put back together again, no more Archmages, a host of Gloom-dwellers… the planet, in its current state, couldn’t be further away from the original design of Mydia if it tried, and that doesn’t bode well for any of us, my dear Alice.”
“So what does a bunch of viruses and chemical weapons have to do with this ancient being?” the Lord Imperator asked doubtfully.
“I was trying to tell you, before you rudely interrupted me,” Corriztis chided. “The Creator is drawing energy from the planet and the lifeblood—or ‘Deep Vein Oil’, in your primitive tongue—that runs through it. When it tests its power, the ground shakes, and the magical energy is so overwhelming that it weakens the barrier between our dimension and the next, causing spirits to appear. Imagine what I could do with all that potential…” the Demon mused with a satisfied sigh.
Alice gasped, deducing Corriztis’ grand scheme for herself while the corruption Demon was busy daydreaming, “You want to infect the Creator?!”
“No, but close,” Corriztis giggled. “I want to infect everything! I’ve said it before: I found my incarceration within the Gloom a humbling and inspiring experience, despite being little more than a pool of black bile. I enjoyed the simplicity of the power structure, you see, and the insidious nature of its water, plants, and poisons—all of which were very useful to the adaptations of my original work from my fully-fledged Archmage days.”
Alice scowled. “So you cover Mydia with your taint, and corrupt the Creator as it draws power from the surface and the DVO, halting whatever the hell it’s up to in the process, and you end up as the top dog in your very own Gloom.”
“Pure genius, right?” Corriztis asked proudly.
“That’s not the phrase I would use,” Alice said slowly, testing the restraints again, just in case. “You really think you can infect this being? It sounds like a god.”
“It is like a god, but not a real deity. Once my work is complete, it will be just as susceptible as everything else.”
“You really think you’re that good?” Alice goaded, hoping to keep the conversation going.
The Demon chuckled for quite some time before replying. “My dear Alice, I was once head of the Omni’s department of Scientific and Magical Research and Development. I was considered to be the greatest scientific mind on the planet before they cast me out—”
“Not good enough?” the Lord Imperator interrupted.
“Not good enough for the task that buffoon Omniultrix set me,” Corriztis corrected bitterly. “He wanted a virus that would quickly wipe out anyone unworthy of his presence; anyone below a certain level of… magical proficiency. During the genocidal process, the dire imbalance would, in theory, reveal the access point leading to the Creator’s Mantle, allowing the Omni to obtain limitless power.”
Corriztis, in Theodore’s body, walked into Alice’s line of sight and wagged his finger at the Lord Imperator.
“The idea seemed simple enough, but devilishly hard to implement correctly,” the Demon divulged, reminiscing on his past work. “The problem was that everyone had some level of arcane exposure—in the original Mydia magic was everywhere, you see, and even if you couldn’t do magic you still had a touch of it in your body—so I had to program my test viruses to seek out smaller traces of it. In theory, they would only select the lowest of the low. Engineering the viruses to seek out non-magical humanoids was completely off the cards, because there simply weren’t any…”
“It went out of control, didn’t it?” Alice assumed in a grim tone, as she studied her old comrade’s gaunt, greying face.
“Only a few cities worth of humans and Archmages were killed; nothing that drastic on the grand scale of things,” Corriztis shrugged. “It was quickly contained, but the other members of the Omni blew it completely out of proportion!” The Demon shook his head as if to clear it, and seemed to remember what he was doing. “Like I said, you’ll soon know my history as well as I do, my lovely new vessel.”
“What about Theodore?” Alice asked. “Will you free him?”
Corriztis laughed. “Of course. I’ll have no need of him once I have you— but I’m afraid the very concept of freedom won’t have a place in the world I plan to create…”
✽ ✽ ✽
In the dreamscape’s version of the Gloom, deep inside of Winston's divided mind, the Reynolds watched on in startled silence as the representation of Lewis Thorne opened the Conclave curtains in the Archmage’s tower, revealing what was hidden around the sides of the room. The blonde Book Wielder left the curtains directly behind the throne closed, however.
The noble Archmage Winston stood with an amused expression on his sculpted face as he watched regular-Winston’s and Veronica’s reactions intently.
Lining the walls were beautiful figures, suspended by silver wires that had pierced every available area on the back half of their bodies. There was an even mix of males and females, none of whom Veronica and Winston had ever seen before, but they could tell each one was an Archmage by their smooth shimmering skin, attractive faces, and bright multi-coloured eyes. The wires sprouting from their backs ran upwards, travelling along t
he ceiling and down into the rear of Archmage Winston’s marble throne.
“What—and who, are they?” Veronica asked, completely unnerved by their unveiling.
“The Archmages that make up Omniosis,” her Winston replied in shock.
Archmage Winston clapped his hands together patronisingly. “You're correct, as is your assumption about Omniosis taking root inside our mind—of course, it didn't stay that way for long.”
“What happened?” the normal Winston asked eagerly, desperate to discover what was happening to his head.
Archmage Winston smiled sadistically. “Omniosis’ psychic suggestion worked like a charm at first, convincing us ever so subtly to take his word as gospel, but without altering or corrupting us to the point where our mind was completely different, which would've severed us from our Fate-given destiny to complete the merger and removed a decent portion of our power. However, Omniosis didn't consider the fact that we were a human-Archmage hybrid, and his psychic suggestion grew in power, developing a mind and form of its own inside our subconscious. There, it did what any good Archmage would've done; it sought more power.
“Disregarding our human attributes—in other words, you,” he said, pointing at regular-Winston, “—the psychological version of Omniosis tried to defeat and absorb our Archmage side—which, of course, is me—and he lost. Quite dramatically, as you can see.” Archmage Winston paused to gesture to the detained Archmages around the room. “Victorious, I turned the mental-form of Omniosis’ plan against him, separated all of his parts, and began siphoning their great power and knowledge, combining it with our own incredible Book Wielder skills to become the most powerful being on the planet. Then, I turned my attention to you... and things, infuriatingly, did not go how I had planned.”
“You ended up becoming trapped in your own prison,” Veronica concluded. “This dreamscape is holding you both until one of you gives in.”