The darkness was filled with nothing but itself. Up and down had no further aning. They were just words. Salamander, normally radiating at least so light, was just a speck of red in the vastness of black. She looked at the hands she still had. There had been a mont where she was nothing but energy, she had beco stronger, she was stronger, then her manifestation had been prevented, she had been flung into the point of original fire again. Vast fires, she was on her way back from there, she shouldn’t have this body anymore, she should have been different. Her new power was gone.
What had happened? There had been waiting. How did that even work? It wasn’t like elental planes were just sothing between which things could squeeze themselves. Then again, the Lorylim probably didn’t have to obey any clear rules.
‘I guess this is them then?’ she asked herself, glaring hatefully into the Lorylim void, with the eyes that she at least still knew were still hers. She was in search of sothing, anything. Nothing was, just this void surrounding her. This liquid vacuum filled with only untouchable things. Untouchable, invisible, unspeakable things.
Until they no longer wanted to be nothing.
Like a mandala, eyes unfolded around Salamander. Gigantic and miniscule, eternities away and re centitres removed, they fit together perfectly, mirrored at tis like the facets of a kaleidoscope. Exactly like that, they also moved, lding into each other, slowly spreading out of nowhere. They had irises of a weird shape, a central dot that unravelled into sothing like gills, like the underside of a mushroom.
The eyes started bleeding from the gills with sounds of a song too cacophonic to understand. Nothing was to comprehend what the sounds were, as the song ford itself into a perfect copy of Salamander herself. “We have waited - Izha has foretold - now we laugh - you made it here.” The copy moved her lips, but it seed more like the widening and closing of the eyes around made the sounds. They just needed a vessel that was able to speak for them.
The incomprehensible song continued in the background. It reminded Salamander of what Undine had tried to sing when she had been corrupted, unsurprisingly, but there was a vast difference in complexity. Undine had voiced sothing translated into a real tongue, or at least approaching it, this was sothing removed from reality as such, sothing different. It was undecipherable, vile, made Salamander’s stomach churn with a mixture of disgust and love, for it was also beautiful.
The second she thought that, one of the eyes’ irises beca a large spike, or perhaps a tusk was a more apt description, and penetrated deep into the copy’s left eye socket. It laughed.
“Join,” the copy commanded, her voice but underlined by the endless beating of seven otherworldly hearts.
“And what? Isn’t this the part where you try to convince by giving sothing I want?” Salamander asked with a disturbed grin. “Trying to pull over by making your side seem more desirable?”
“Desire – Side – Convincing,” the eyes began to quiver and then wilt away like flower petals in an onslaught of screeching laughter as the lids closed like interlocking hands and gave birth to disturbed shapes, figures and bodies, pulsating to the beat of the willed existence of themselves. “Mistake – Izha was right – There is no use – There soon will be no you.”
“What the fuck does that even -,” Salamander stopped dead in her words as the shapes, figures and bodies crawled under the surface of the tusk, causing it to bulge and thrive like crawling maggots itching underneath her skin and pumping into her copy.
It ant that she had miscalculated thoroughly. She had the idea that the Lorylim were sothing like demons in most fantasy stories her summoner was so keen of, whispering to her the things she wanted so she would side with them. They weren’t, they had no need, they weren’t a corrupting force, they were corruption itself.
There was no need to convince her of anything, no switching sides or tempting offers, that was all unnecessary. They didn’t need Salamander, they just needed a vessel. As such keeping what made her her intact was just a hassle. Easier to just rip out what she was before and replace it with what they were.
“Once we observed and did so little,” the copy told her as the corruption pulsated through Salamander. Whatever they were doing to it was deeply disturbing to Salamander; just by looking at it, the black energy drenching the cool fires of the copy, she felt weak. No, there was a mistake in what she perceived.
Knowledge, a disgusting understanding, blubbering mories, they filled her left eye. A drop, sifting through the planes, untouching to all but water. Once. A drop, shifting through all the planes, untouching to all but water. Once. A drop, travelling through all the planes, untouching to all but water. Once. A drop… a drop… a million eyes, a maddening exchange, one resolution.
A drop. Sifting through all the planes. They were the roots, they were everywhere, if the earth was the molten core, then the elental planes wrapped around them and they…
…They were what ca before. They were just bound here by the imposter. They had once been great, now they were just hatred for themselves. All was to be disregarded to spread destruction to everything else. Life was the enemy to them. All needed to die. All that they could encounter on their way.
A drop. Sifting through all the planes. Untouching all but water. She travelled the sa path twice. They tore themselves apart and spread to intercept. A drop. Corrupted and sifting back to the core. Perfect.
They ripped a part out of her. Her despair was a crater, so easy to fill.
They were not an endless amount of power. Just incredibly vast.
They ripped a part out of her. Her anger was a crater, so easy to fill.
That wasn’t Undine’s story anymore.
That was hers.
“Oh, co the fuck on,” Salamander looked with a blind eye upon her undamaged copy as it spoke to her. “They don’t need your approval, but how hard could it be to give in anyway? Don’t struggle, as part of them you can set the world on fire. Burn everything, burn all that displeases you, let the dead and the living be but a fever consud by flas.”
Salamander grinned wide. Now she understood.
“Now you understand,” Salamander grinned wide.
“Yeah,” the copy said and grabbed the head of the original. The original whose senses had been displaced, with the tusk in her eye and the corruption spreading like the plague it was through her veins. “I understand that you Lorylim are full of shit!”
“What – What – What?” If they could feel sothing like confusion, when the unhard Salamander moved and ripped out the tusk, that would have been the mont they felt it. In the first place there had never been a copy, just a separate instance of herself that held the new power. The Lorylim had thrown everything into disarray, every sense didn’t make sense anymore, there was no up or down, there was no accuracy of who was who, especially not as to who of the two of herself was herself.
“You are lying, you corrupting shits,” Salamander grinned as she grabbed her own head. “Maybe you don’t need my consent to corrupt , but it sure as hell doesn’t help you when I struggle.” She sealed the hole in her skull oozing with creatures unmistakable, with the palm of her other self. “If I just stay here, you will eventually win, but if there is no to corrupt, you are fucked. With how much you hurt yourself just to get in my way, I count burning myself to nothing as a win!”
“Like Izha said,” one of them laughed. Then all of them laughed as the new truth applied to all of them. “Cleanse yourself – We don’t care – we always have a path.”
Were they lying again? No way to tell, no way to make certain. ‘Enough thinking, just do!’ she told herself, she was better at that anyway, just letting the instincts take over. Fire filled Salamander’s empty eye socket, filled the corruption, filled everything. She was burning herself up, because that was preferable to being corrupted by sothing else. The world was filled with light, pain, validation and regret.
The darkness inside her was set ablaze as she clawed onto life.
Then she felt her summoner and sisters again.
___________________________________________________________________________
John was looking up at the tainted firestorm. It had begun as a standard red thing, had been infected with eyes whirling on the surface, which had been seriously unnerving, then finally changed into a warm golden glow. That change gave him sothing resembling hope, and this window appearing finally made it clear that this was coming to an end. He was on the edge of his seat, ready for anything. No Corruption Level alert ever ca, he thought that a good on
The firestorm was now shrinking down. The imnse heat was reduced to a bearable level and finally faded altogether as a new and reborn Salamander ford.
Her red skin had only beco deeper in tone, the colour of a ripe cherry. The tal bindings that had decorated her wrists and ankles were now fully fletched pieces of armour, hiding her arms from the elbows and her legs from the kneecaps downwards in pitch black tal.
Her proportions were unchanged, still with the DD-size breasts and wide hips. The only real change in the torso departnt was that her flas no longer hid the bare minimum but also not a whole lot more than that. Sothing akin to a flaming bra and a forever flickering thong replaced the old censorious flas. Her crimson hair had beco shorter, certainly very short for a woman. As it still ford, her hair was consud by fire, like a candle fla it sat atop her head, completely revealing her short elvish ears. That fire was extinguished, leaving only a wild display of upwards standing strands.
She fell forward the mont the firestorm was gone, with John catching her at the last mont. The fire didn’t hurt his hands. Her right eye was the sa as before, an iris as black as coal, but the left was different, a black sclera surrounding a dark red iris with a golden pupil.
It wouldn’t have been a proper encounter with the Lorylim, however, if Salamander hadn’t gotten herself scars. The depth of her encounter showed in them, as they didn’t stop with partly covering one side, like with Undine. Instead, her whole body was covered under black lines, with the only exception being the right side of her face. A particularly thick set of the tattoo-like marks concentrated around her left eye; as a matter of fact, it seed like that was where the centre of it all lay.
In a way they were beautiful, they had a design to them with nodes and circles and connections, a sort of network. Perhaps the scars resulted from a sort of secondary nervous system that the Lorylim set-up inside their host and the removal of such.
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