EPISODE TWENTY-FOUR:
TEAR IT ALL DOWN
“That’s…new.” Corwin said, taking a step back from where Zakarias continued to absorb the flesh and bones of his dead servants.
Zakarias’ body swelled, forming new, grotesque muscles. Bones fused into strange shapes, arranging themselves as a makeshift armor. Some of the bone warped and fused itself into sword-length spikes that grew from Zakarias’ arms. All the while, the ‘scholar’ continued his chant, drawing more and more mana into himself.
“Fall back!” Jabez shouted through gritted teeth. “He’s a warlock. Borrowing a demon’s powers, a fucking demon prince! We have to get out of here!”
Jabez stumbled to his feet and tried to fall back while the Hollowmound Queen was distracted. The motion drew her attention, and she whipped back around. The Queen’s scythe-claws slammed down on either side of the dwarf. “You aren’t going anywhere, little morsel.”
Corwin gave a wordless battle-cry and launched himself at the Queen from behind. A surge of mana preceded a powerful strike at the Queen’s abdomen. His sword bit deep into the bulbous, black and yellow striped pod. A gush of sticky green-yellow spider blood flowed from where his blade opened a long gash along her abdomen.
The Queen let loose a shriek of pain and rage, lashing out with one claw and catching Corwin full in the chest. Corwin’s breastplate rang like a bell, but held against the strike. The blow lifted him off his feet and flung him across the room. He slammed into a column and crumpled to the ground.
Vash’s first instinct was to rush to Corwin, to see if he could help him or at least protect him while he got back to his feet. Eth Mitaan training screamed at him to ignore that instinct.
. Iona told him and the other initiates.
Zakarias had finished remaking his body into a nightmare of flesh and bone. The stick-thin scholarly mask was gone, replaced by a ten-foot giant of bone plates fused onto an undulating mass of muscle and other tissue. Vash could see Zakarias shift towards Corwin, not moving against him yet. Waiting, prepared to strike.
Vash thought. Then Vash remembered Zakarias didn’t want him and Corwin dead. He needed them alive to complete his task.
Vash moved warily, retreating away from both Corwin and Jabez. He scanned Zakarias, really looking at him rather than reacting with revulsion. At the center of Zakarias’ new body, just above the breastbone, Vash spotted what he was looking for. A strange, gleaming stone, twin of the one in Vash’s pouch, was embedded in Zakarias’ new flesh. Cradled in a mass of bone and flesh, it reminded Vash of something.
The dungeon heart. Vash thought, taking a quick look beyond the sacrificial pit to where the heart stood upon the altar. The heart was now pulsing an alternating blue and purple sheen across its pearly surface. The heartstone crystals pulsed in sync with the dungeon heart, creating a strange mockery of a heartbeat. Vash could feel the underlying thrum of mana. The heart was affecting the ambient mana, but he could also feel it coming from the stone in his pouch. Now that he knew what to look for, he could feel the sympathetic throb. It was subtle, the same way ripples across a deep pool were subtle. The heart could access vast quantities of mana, and the stones, the heartstones, and the soulstones that Zakarias intended to make, likely could tap into that deep well.
. Vash thought, turning to face the dungeon heart.
Vash dashed across the room, moving toward the altar as fast as he could.
“Vash!” Jabez called. “What are you doing? Help Corwin and get out of here!”
“Oh, no you don’t!” The Queen hissed, moving painfully, but still with deadly swiftness. She moved away from Jabez and crossed the distance to the sacrificial pit in a heartbeat. Reaching for her spinneret, she tried to form webbing, but shrieked in frustration. Corwin’s strike on her abdomen had damaged the spinneret. She was leaking sticky web fluid and thick, mucous-like spider blood as she dragged her abdomen over the floor.
Vash didn’t stop, not for Jabez’s shouts or to face the Queen. Focus, one goal, don’t stop until it’s done.
The skitter of spider legs sounded close behind him. The warning from his Core was almost too late. Vash dodged to one side; the Queen’s claw knocked him aside instead of impaling him. Vash slid across the stone floor, realizing he was heading right for the pit. He flailed, trying to slow down, stabbing the ground with his short sword and drawing sparks. Vash slowed his momentum, but did not completely stop. His legs went out over the abyss and he felt the terrifying lurch of vertigo as he fell. With a surge of mana into Enhance Ability, he stabbed harder. The blade of his short sword finally caught in the crevice between two floor tiles, ancient grout crumbling, but finally stopping Vash short.
Clinging to his sword with both hands, Vash dangled over the edge of the pit. He pulled hard as he could, keeping his chest and shoulders on solid ground. Kicking, he tried to find purchase with his feet, but beneath the lip of the pit there was nothing but empty air. The room was built over a crevasse, and only a thin layer of stone and mortar prevented everyone from falling to their deaths.
Vash chided himself.
Vash pulled, trying to will more mana into , but he was at the limit of what he could do. The fatigue and dizziness of mana overuse was creeping in, and his grasp on his Talent was faltering.
A crash in front of him made him look up. The Queen now towered over him at the edge of the pit, horrific face twisted into a delighted grin. “Are we in trouble? Oh my, this is delightful.”
Vash scowled, trying again to haul himself up. His short sword made a scraping sound as the surrounding mortar flaked away.
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“It would be so easy just to let you fall.” The Queen said, her voice quivering at the thought. “But my prince’s Champion needs you.”
She reached down and grabbed Vash by the arms, dragging him up quickly and painfully. Vash lost hold on his short sword and it clattered to one side, coming free from the mortar. The Queen let go of one arm and let Vash dangle over the pit, hanging painfully by one wrist held in the claw at the end of a still-working leg.
V
ash looked over at Jabez and Corwin and any hope he had vanished. Corwin lay still at the foot of the column he’d been flung into. Jabez had tried to take on Zakarias, apparently. The dwarf’s hammer lay out of his reach, and Zakarias’ bone blade pinned him through one leg.
“You fought well.” Zakarias said, his voice taking on a strange echoing quality, as though multiple voices were speaking at slightly different times. “But now the game is done. I can feel that you are almost out of mana. If you push it any further, then you’re going to damage that nice little soul of yours. If that happens, then I’m afraid I won’t be able to use you anymore, and you can trade places with this one.”
Zakarias twisted the bone-blade and Jabez groaned in agony, face contorting with pain. “Believe me, you’re getting the better option. A moment of pain and then nothing. The Queen there will slowly digest you and consume you for days. It is a horrific death.”
Vash could feel that Zakarias was right. If he pushed any further, he’d begin using parts of his own soul to fuel his Talents. Mana Burn, the bane of mages and the Talented. Burn too much and you burn away parts of what made you you. There were stories of mages becoming terrible sorcerers or warlocks after a bad burn. Some Talented had even burned away their ability to use mana entirely.
Vash thought.
Vash looked at the stone embedded in Zakarias’ chest, the twin to the one in his pouch right now.
Reaching into his pouch, Vash’s fingers brushed the stone. The cold tingle of raw mana flowed over his fingers, throbbing in time with the heart’s pulses.
Zakarias tilted his misshapen head. He had obviously felt something. “What are you doing?”
“Something stupid.” Vash replied and seized the stone.
The act of seizing the stone, claiming it, felt very different from when he just scooped it up to get it out of the way. An electric cold flowed through the meridians of Vash’s body, sending throbbing pulses up his arm and deep into his chest. It was only a few heartbeats, but through the shock and pain, it felt like an eternity. The freezing tendrils burrowed their way into his Core. Vash could feel the warmth ebbing away from the center of his being, replaced by this cold flood of mana.
His fatigue evaporated; he banished his pain. Suddenly, he noticed a deep, cold ocean of mana. The power was overwhelming. It was looking into the soul of a god. All he had to do was reach out and touch it, claim it just as he had the stone in his fist, and he could do anything.
But now he could sense other things. The great abyss of power also connected Zakarias. If Vash was dangling his fingers in the water, then Zakarias had both hands shoved up to his elbows. There was something else there as well. A presence sluggishly turning its attention towards them. It felt curious, intrigued, but also vast, and hungry. Vash desperately knew that he did not want the attention of that huge, dark presence.
Vash thought.
The connection between Vash and the vast power became stronger. He felt how he and Zakarias connected to it, as well as their connection to the dungeon heart and the heartstones. He sought the channels of connection, working on instinct towards the dungeon heart itself. If he could cut off Zakarias’ connection to the dungeon heart, then they might have a chance.
There was a surge of anger and a slight twinge of fear through the connection. Zakarias figured out what Vash was trying to do. Vash felt Zakarias’ presence forcing its way into the dungeon heart, tightening his grip and denying other connections. The Queen trembled. Vash faintly felt her connection to the dungeon heart faltering, echoing how Vash felt when his Core ran out of mana. Through the connection, Vash felt the Queen’s pain as the dungeon heart stopped blocking it and healing her wounds.
The Queen’s grip faltered. Straddling two worlds—the internal world connected to the dungeon heart and everything else within it, and the external, material world where the Queen was about to drop him to his death—Vash found himself in a precarious situation.
Vash fell as the Queen’s grip slackened. With a practiced flick of the wrist, he drew his dagger from where he’d stored it up his sleeve. Driving the dagger into the thorax of the Queen, Vash halted his fall, tearing a long gash down the spider’s body. The Queen shrieked and thrashed, but Vash held tight, sinking back into his Core and the connection to the dungeon heart.
Zakarias was shoring up his total control of the heart, blocking every connection he could. Vash felt his awareness shrinking, but he could still touch the vast ocean of mana, still feel this web of connections. Now, instead of the one central node, Vash sensed several smaller nodes, all pulsing in rhythm with the dungeon heart.
Vash realized.
Vash felt his way through the smaller, more delicate connections of the heartstones. As he did, the heartstones fluttered slightly, throwing off their rhythm. One heartstone didn’t seem to affect the system much, but after he’d touched several of them, Vash noticed the beating of the dungeon heart falter.
A wave of alarm came from Zakarias. Panic.
Vash realized. He reached out to more of the heartstones, forcing his way into their delicate rhythms and disrupting them. In moments, the heartstones were beating in wildly different patterns. The dungeon heart itself was stuttering, stopping, racing, trying to find that rhythmic pulse again.
Vash opened his eyes into the material world. He hung from the Queen, her eyes bulging as she tried to contain the viscera spilling out of the ever widening wound. Zakarias had abandoned Jabez and raced to the dungeon heart on the altar. The sheen of the stone pulsed wildly in staccato patterns. Flesh and bones sloughed off of Zakarias’ body as he moved. As the dungeon heart lost stability, he lost his connection to whatever power that Rasu granted him.
Looking around wildly, Zakarias tried to piece together what was happening. The purple crystals of the heartstones pulsed out of rhythm with each other. Their structures cracked, and the crystals took on a cloudy appearance, flawed and dark.
One by one, the heartstones cracked and Vash could feel the dungeon heart losing stability. It raced, straining to maintain control as node after node crumbled away.
Suddenly, there was a booming
Vash’s senses snapped back to what he could see and hear. His left hand burned with cold and long tendrils of numbness ran up his arm, burying deep within his chest.
Zakarias stared in horror at the dungeon heart upon the altar. The crystal heartstones that surrounded the dungeon heart were cracked, cloudy, and crumbling into dull purple sand. The heart itself had cracked in the center of the spherical, shiny stone. Vash could feel the power dissipating from the dungeon heart. It’s pearlescent, multi-hued surface dulling to a flat pale gray.
The last of the flesh melted off of Zakarias, leaving him standing dumbfounded beside the altar. He turned to Vash, all traces of arrogance gone.
“By the gods, what have you done?”
Vash had no answer. Suddenly, more loud cracking sounds echoed through the room. Fissures appeared in the walls, following the lines of the corrupted Therium as it flaked away. Dust rained from the ceiling and the old stone buckled. Whatever power had held this ruin together was now faltering.
The Queen let out a last, rattling gasp, and her body went slack. The stones beneath her lost their mortar, and the very floor crumbled. Her body pitched forward, pulled by Vash and the crumbling floor.
The glowmoss in the room dimmed.
Zakarias ran for the doorway.
The last thing that Vash saw before the glowmoss failed entirely was Corwin and Jabez sliding towards him and the pit as the room tilted violently and stones collapsed into the yawning chasm below.
