Gods of Myth and Midnight: A LitRPG Novel (Seeds of Chaos Book 3)

by Azalea Ellis

  I tried to fling myself around to face Pestilence, but his hand pulled faster than my body moved, and it was too strong for the muscles of my neck to resist. I felt it, as my spine cracked apart at the force, severing the nerves.

  Light flashed and lightning crackled, and his hand disappeared.

  I fell to the ground, completely limp. I blinked, and waited for death with a mental cry of anguish, but it didn’t come.

  Pestilence dropped down to straddle me.

  Though I couldn’t feel his body atop mine, I could see him out of the corner of one eye, and I could still sense the whole battlefield with Wraith.

  He pressed his hand to the side of my face, grinding my head into the ground.

  I could feel the Sickness, as it burrowed into me. It overpowered what resistance I had left, and, somehow, I felt it as I started to rot apart.

  Chapter 46

  Be careful when you cast out your demons that you don’t throw away the best of yourself.

  — Friedrich Nietzsche

  Someone screamed. It wasn’t me, but I almost wished it was. That would have been some sort of outward resistance, at least.

  Instead, as my team went crazy with their attacks, turning Pestilence into an empty space once again, I lay on the ground and lost the battle of wills.

  I was still, as something else filled the space where the thing that made me, me should have been. Hunger and pain and hatred pushed me out.

  Zed came into my field of view, and our eyes met.

  The piece of me that was still aware, from somewhere in the back of my consciousness, saw it as he realized I was gone.

  His eyes deadened, and he said my name, though the word was lost in the chaos of screams and attacks around me.

  Some of those attacks were hitting me, I was pretty sure, but I knew if I were myself, I wouldn’t care as long as they could save me from the Sickness. But I wasn’t myself, and so if they didn’t save me from the Sickness, I knew I would kill them. They had to die, because I was hungry.

  But the Other Place sucked even that from me, and, since the madness was not my own, I did nothing to try and keep it from being devoured. I wasn’t pleased, exactly, to see it go, but I felt somewhere deep inside that it was a positive change.

  Zed screamed something to the others that I didn’t quite catch the meaning of in my distraction, ending with, “I’ll tear it apart!”

  The attacks stopped, and Pestilence reformed above me.

  Maybe that was the plan, because as soon as he did so, he was gone. Jacky had tackled him. She wrapped her limbs around his own, arching back and immobilizing him, even as she began to scream, her blood curdling and turning rancid in her veins, under the force of Pestilence’s will.

  I frowned, the tiniest twitch of my eyebrows, as I watched them with Wraith. Within me, something tiny sparked, and caught, and I remembered hatred. It filled me up, a comfortable sensation, spreading warmth through my limbs and giving me the energy to keep fighting. Strength poured out of me as I resisted Pestilence’s influence, and the hatred just gave me more.

  One of Adam’s arms was bare of ink, the fractal tattoo that he’d worked so painstakingly to rebuild wrapped around Pestilence like a living thing, pulsing tendrils grabbing at any part that tried to wiggle away and squeezing them back into the center.

  Why weren’t they attacking him? Just a little more, and he would lose the power to maintain the connection. Just a little more, and he would be banished forever, back into the nothingness from whence he came.

  Torliam’s blue mist crushed Pestilence, and Jacky beneath him, into the ground.

  Pestilence jerked spastically against them, bugs falling off as he spent his power against my own. His limbs began to crumble.

  “You are no part of me,” I mouthed silently, and yet the words still weighted down the air with my will.

  Zed was there, then, screaming raggedly. He plunged his hands into Pestilence like his chest was an empty space. Then he began to rip. I could feel it, as Pestilence tore and snapped, whatever was holding him together breaking apart. Not just the bugs, but the space where he existed, the locus where the thing beyond met the world here.

  I caught one last glimpse of Pestilence’s shocked face, and then he disintegrated. He did not reform. Where he had been was not an empty space, but an ink-spill patch of darkness, unlike any of the other rips Zed had ever created. I averted my eyes, lest they be tainted.

  The otherness left me, and I felt stretched out and deflated, like a used balloon.

  Zed stumbled back, turning to look at me.

  Jacky rolled over and crawled away from the oil-spill of darkness hanging in the air, more than a little beaten up, but free of the Sickness.

  I looked back to the darkness, maybe by accident, maybe by instinct. Once I did, something wouldn’t let me look away, as if my gaze was magnetized.

  Zed’s voice filtered through to me, strangely loud without the sounds of battle. “Are you alright?”

  Before I could answer, if I could even answer, the world shivered. Not physically, like an earthquake, but like reality experiencing a glitch.

  Zed turned back to the rip, following my gaze.

  It bulged.

  He reached for it, probably to close it.

  It was too late. It exploded outward, as something else reached back through.

  I lost my sense of space and time. I looked upon the eye of something not meant to be seen. Something changed. Something moved. Then it was gone, along with the jagged, black rip in reality. Had Zed closed it?

  I was relieved, for a single moment, until the world began to shriek and swirl as it collapsed in on us.

  Adam snapped out a huge ink shield, and, as it crumbled inward, he used the other sleeve of tattoos, letting the fractal surround us. It pulsed against the pressure, and then it crumbled, too.

  Sam dropped to his knees beside me, his hands on my neck. His own bones crunched as the injury transferred to him. He started to slump over, but caught himself even as his bones slotted back together and the nerves reattached themselves. “Can you move?” he screamed to me, the sound almost lost to the hunger of the cosmic whale as it sucked at us and everything around us.

  I could, but the pain of my ruined body held me back from doing so, now that I could feel it again properly. Whatever they’d attacked Pestilence with while he was trying to kill me—it felt like I’d been crushed by a stampede of demon-buffalo while being flayed by angry wasps. I tried to ignore it, reminding myself that I was a godling and could remake as many bodies as I needed. Pain was temporary. It was hard to convince myself of that, while experiencing said pain.

  Zed stumbled toward me, his hands flailing at the air but not finding purchase, as the cold drove him to his knees.

  Torliam pushed against the edges of the blackness, but his glow was consumed even as he released it.

  Gregor pulled Kris’ tiny body to him, curling around her in his corporeal form to provide her protection.

  Birch screamed out a ball of Chaos that burst into a single instant of colorful, illuminating flame. It was absorbed almost immediately, but the feeling of it as it alleviated the deadness in my chest gave me an idea.

  I let what power I still had burst out of me, exploding into flame as I set the air afire. “Wait!” I screamed, the sound deadened by the near-vacuum.

  The swirling around us slowed as the cosmic whale turned its eye on me, though it still sucked at the warmth and color and power I produced, almost faster than I could create it.

  My lungs heaved.

  I felt the echo of its anger at us. “Please,” I whispered. “I will bring you fire, in exchange for our lives.”

  “What could you give, that would be worth your lives, when this has been done to me? All that I have gathered, the fruits of aeons of hunger and struggle, gone in an instant!” Despite the rage in its words, it pulled back a little, and my flames expanded.

  The heat spread farther, a little more oxygen making
it to me. “Our lives, taken now, are worth less to you than the energy and heat I could bring. I will give a thousand Earth-days of fire.”

  It drew back, still circling us predatorily.

  Time stretched on interminably, and my heartbeat started to stutter.

  “Agreed.” Its single word held a depth of meaning, and it drew away.

  The fire petered out, but it lent enough heat to the world for Zed to stumble to his feet and open the Veil.

  I felt arms, more than one set, wrap around me and carry me out.

  Chapter 47

  Having become a god, he became a demon.

  — Ilium Troia

  The warmth of the normal world burned, but it returned life to my limbs.

  We lay in the crater where most of the mall parking lot had once been. There was a strange distortion hanging in the air above us. Not like an opening to the Other Place, and not like that jagged blackness that had appeared when Zed tore Pestilence apart. Looking at the new distortion felt like hearing the taste of purple, and that’s about as much sense as it made.

  Once Sam had regained some of his energy, he healed the worst of my injuries, sobbing tearlessly with each new hurt absorbed. He had to throw up a couple times, but I didn’t say anything, because a few tears slipped down my own face in grateful relief for the cessation of pain.

  Our healing factors were similar, actually, but my power was exhausted. He could have left me to fix my body on my own, one way or the other, but it would have been a long wait filled with agony for me. He couldn’t even use Black Sun to mitigate his response, because it didn’t work in conjunction with the healing part of Harbinger, not if he wanted the person he healed to remain non-suicidal.

  I was grateful.

  When I was healed enough to function on my own, he did the same for the others, but we stayed in the crater for a while longer. Exhaustion made the climb to the top edge seem impossibly daunting.

  Kris sobbed, crawling over to me and wrapping her tiny arms and legs around my scaled torso. She buried her face in my neck, and I patted her back soothingly as I stared up at the sky.

  Birch sat in Adam’s lap, and, for once, didn’t do anything mean to the boy.

  Torliam lay back and fell asleep, and he looked totally and completely at ease.

  Jacky fussed over Gregor, and he smacked her hands away when she tried to ruffle his hair, but then held her hand and tucked his head into the dip of her stomach. “We’re safe, now,” the boy murmured.

  Adam, hands trembling and his face set in a scowl, made an ink parrot and sent it out to ask for help.

  Not long after, a group of Estreyans peeked their heads over the edge of the crater, glancing warily up at the distortion hanging above it.

  “We won, you idiots,” Adam said. “Hurry up and get us some stretchers or something. I’m too tired to walk.”

  They returned soon after, exclaiming about the sudden absence of the Sickness in everyone who had been infected. There was no need for healing, no period of lag. One moment, they were rotting apart and attacking with crazed disregard for their own safety, and, the next, they were whole.

  They had waited, hoping for our return, for some sign that this was permanent.

  People squeezed my fingers in thanks as they lifted me onto the stretcher, bowed so deeply to us their noses almost touched their knees, and murmured about the end of the Sickness as if afraid talking about it too loud would break the illusion.

  Was it over, then? I searched inside myself as they lifted us out, flying us to the island of the Remnants for recovery. I wondered if I would be empty. Instead, I found my rage unspent, coiling inside me like a sleeping animal. Yet now, there was nothing to expend it on.

  Time passed.

  Not all was well, though things were on the mend. Many of Earth’s leaders were angry, bickering with each other and the Estreyans. Some angled for more reparations, others to destroy any goodwill the civilians of their countries might feel toward me or the Estreyans. Others were just afraid of something like the attack and the Sickness happening again, and handling that fear poorly.

  In turn, the Estreyans had little respect for the humans, and made it clear.

  Despite this, both worlds seemed to be healing, and I thought the chance of total separation between Estreyer and Earth was unlikely at this point, as was further war.

  People from both worlds visited the other using the Shortcuts. The transfer could not be permanent, and would forcefully return what had been sent after an alignment or two had passed between our worlds. Still, it was enough to allow people to gain a greater understanding of the other side, and with understanding came acceptance and, if not camaraderie, at least a lack of fear.

  Word spread quickly that the Sickness was gone for good, and Pestilence was dead. Reporters from both species were rabid to know how we did it.

  I wondered, too.

  Zed sat beside me and explained, as best he could one day. “His center was all wrapped up with these connections to somewhere else. Just like there are cracks in the world. But when I reached into them…I didn’t open the cracks. I tore them apart. Like, if there was a line drawn on a piece of paper. I tore the line in two. I destroyed the cracks, and I guess it destroyed Pestilence, because he didn’t have a real body, anyway. He was only a manifestation of the power those connections allowed him to draw on.”

  I didn’t quite understand. That worried me, because I thought something more may have happened, beyond the destruction of Pestilence. The strange distortions scattered around both Earth and Estreyer weren’t normal, though they didn’t seem to be malicious.

  They were places where physics was broken. The more learned or the incredibly stupid of both our species had been examining them with a combination of rabid scientific fascination and fear. A couple people had died, or disappeared, walking into them, and one man who’d been drunk and touched one on a dare from his buddies claimed to have gained the ability to communicate with fungi and bacteria.

  The military had blocked most of them off for the safety of the population, and to study them. Some people claimed they were a sign of the end of times, and blamed me and my team.

  Time passed.

  Jacky laid her head in my lap and told cheesy, dirty, stupid jokes till I choked on laughter, not at the jokes, but how amusing she found them.

  “These are good jokes!” she insisted. “Here, how about this one, yeah? ‘My dog used to chase people on a bike a lot. It got so bad, finally I had to take his bike away.’” She snickered, then continued. “‘What's orange and sounds like a parrot? A carrot!’ ‘What does one saggy boob say to the other saggy boob?’” She paused dramatically, then answered herself. “‘If we don’t get some support, people will think we’re nuts!’” She clutched her stomach and guffawed in my face.

  I pushed her off my legs and she fell to the floor, still snorting through her laughter. “You’re really not funny,” I said, unable to hold back a snicker.

  She pointed a finger up at me. “You’re laughing! I am funny!”

  I tried to deny it, but I couldn’t, because I kept giggling when I looked at her flushed face.

  Time passed.

  We went back to our old base at Blaine’s house and had an informal remembrance-ceremony-thing for our dead teammates. It had rained, and as we stood at the edge of the forest, where the air smelled green and fresh, the world was beautiful for once. I cried, and tried to hide it, and Adam rolled his eyes and told me to get over myself, but he wrapped an arm around my shoulders in a hug and sniffled more than a bit himself.

  The nightmares grew less frequent.

  We returned to Estreyer and were lauded as heroes. Our faces adorned every screen. People had donated so much wealth to us that we would still be rich if we lived for ten lifetimes. Queen Mardinest wasn’t exactly pleased about it, but she simply sniffed when she saw us for the first time after our return, and said, “I am glad you were not frauds.”

  We searched for an answer
to Kris’ diminutive body, and thought we’d found it, only for her to throw herself across the room to avoid the pain as she started to grow. She said something in her heart, which was now really just a floating Seed core inside her chest cavity, had felt like it was tearing. The Remnants said they would research to find a solution, now that both worlds were connected again and they could go home, but no answer had come from them yet.

  We dealt with a few less-than-pleasant people, even on Estreyer. Someone tried to steal the Oracle’s third gift, which still lay unsolved. Though I kept it a secret, in the back of my mind, I knew that some part of me wanted to need the third gift. Some part of me wanted another enemy, something to bring me purpose, to connect me to life in such a vibrant way again. The rest of me, the smarter part of me, hoped it lay as a loose band of sparkling loops for the rest of my life.

  Zed’s eyes started to crinkle at the edges again when he smiled.

  Still, there was a sort of separation between us and the rest of the world. To the humans, we were alien. To the Estreyans, we were godly.

  Time passed.

  I took time every day to visit the Other Place with Zed’s help, burning anything the whale wished, till my power was exhausted, only to return the next day and do it again. At the rate I was going, it would take me many years to pay back the debt of energy I owed it.

  One day, as I played with the flames as I created them, shifting an orange bloom into a bright purple flower, only to have it devoured by a crashing wave of blue, the cosmic whale of the Other Place laughed at me.

  When I had first returned to it, the space on the other side had been reduced. Before, I might not have been able to tell the difference between the Other Place and the real world if only judging by how big it was to my normal senses. Now, it stretched only a few meters in every direction before abruptly dropping into darkness.

  As I fed it flame, the ash-like snowfall would grow heavier, dissolving into the ground and the environment. Ever-so-slowly, the Other Place grew again, each little flake formed from the absorbed energy and replacing some of the lost mass.