Metaworld Chronicles Chapter 551 — Apotheosis

In less ti than it took for a thought to take shape, Lei-bup, his mistress and her boy-Dragon were caught in a blood-dimd tide.

The rman’s gills reflexively flared, welcoming the water, only to find that what enveloped them was blood. It was honest god blood, torrents and torrents of the sanguine elixir, exiting a Goddess that should have been the size of one of his mistress’s skyscrapers.

Topiltzin, if that was indeed the High Priest’s na, had opened his Goddess’ throat with a motion that was absolutely practised, like he had done this many tis before over the countless years an Elf could call life.

There was a viscosity to the liquid, punctuated with flecks of gold, thick enough to displace them before Slylth could act.

The Dragon had sworn in Draconic, then a perfect spherical space had ford, separating them from the tide even as the gory glory remained upon their bodies. Lei-bup envied the Dragon’s will, imnse and purer than his own, to part the red sea within which they were now entombed.

His Pale Priestess did not respond.

She was levitating in a dream trance.

“Is Gwen—” The Dragon’s hand was faster than Lei-bup could follow. Two Mandalas, both beyond his mistress’s comprehension, ford instantly above and below her.

“No. No Mind Magic.” The Dragon looked around them, then at Lei-bup. “Any ideas? Is it safe to teleport out?”

Lei-bup felt a little pleased. It was incredible that he understood this mont more than a creature so noble, so beyond Lei-bup’s mud-like flesh, that in another life, Lei-bup would not have made a worthy al.

“Do not fret, Son of the Sumr Fla,” he told the Dragon, his face breaking into a maniacal grin. “Our Pale Priestess is rely undergoing apotheosis.”

“Apotheosis?!” Slylth held his mistress with both hands. One on her shoulder, and the other respectfully placed under her thighs. “You an to tell —”

“Yes…” Lei-bup gestured to the sides of their empty sphere. “All of this will soon be hers.”

As he spoke, the instrunts of his faith stirred, reacting to the very apotheosis he had remarked upon. From his jewelled and robed body, tentacles of midnight erupted from his corpulent, unbothered bulk.

These were Lei-bup’s pretties, fragnts of the Shoggoth, nurtured inside him from the first day he had seen the Pale Priestess’ true power. Mucus poured from his wounds, mixing with the brine.

“SHAA—” The creatures, each independent, snapped at the air, catching the dew drops of psychic energy. “SHAA— SHAA—!”

“SUCH PURITY!” Lei-bup shouted over the din in his head, even though there was no sound but the rush of blood and silence.

His beautiful babies, nourished by the Pale Priestess’ gifts, lifted their necks at once, straining toward the gold-flecked blood of the Quetzalcoatl. It was said that nothing on the Pri Material, not even Aristotle’s perpetual body, could nourish his mistress’s Void Fiends.

Yet, they were feeding now, like the tendrils of barnacles, snatching motes of invisible energies from the air.

“Faith…” the Red Dragon seed to realise sothing. The blood. The gold flakes in the blood. “All of this is Faith? Congealed and materialised?”

“What else can it be?” Lei-bup gurgled, and his voice ca out as a hollow, echoing baritone. “Oh—yes, this is faith. Master Slylth, can you taste it? It is the nectar of the Gods. What our mistress is receiving is distilled causality, pre-digested devotion—four centuries of certainty and worship caught in a magic bottle, blessedly unstoppered by a true devotee.”

Lei-bup wept as his body wept.

The Faith ca to him through no mouth and no stigmata, but through his Priestess, through her love. For half a decade now, a period that could either be a breath or an eternity in the life of a rman, he had perford breeding rites in his Goddess’ pale na. He had presided over orgies and executions, sacrifices and sacrants.

He had thought that he understood devotion.

But he was wrong.

THIS was devotion.

To take a God that one had raised for four centuries, to subjugate an entire middle continent. To build a whole civilisation—and then give it away to the Pale Priestess.

THAT was devotion.

Yet even among all of this, Lei-bup, sowhere in the golden roar of blood, rembered to look for the Elf, his fellow devotee.

He was not there.

Topiltzin Quetzalcoatl was gone after his good deed was done. There was now only blood and stone and this solemn, throbbing temple, which had, until a mont ago, held a Feathered Goddess.

“Should we move her?” Slylth held the corporeal body of his mistress, his eyes no longer human, but golden slits reading the flow of magic around them. His horns had grown out. He was not a happy lizard.

“I don’t think it makes a difference,” Lei-bup gave his honest opinion. “Whether she wills it or otherwise, when she wakes, she will be the being our people always knew her to be—the Pale Goddess of Shalkar.”

The blood burst lasted only a thought—perhaps, less than that even, yet Gwen still found herself in the dark.

She cursed herself a little.

She knew Quetzalcoatl might be a trap; she even told Slylth, and yet, she had fallen for it.

Worse still, after all these years, after all that practice, she still couldn’t manage a split-thought counterspell.

And now…

Gwen cald herself.

I am a Magister.

I am the Regent of Shalkar.

“Ariel! Caliban!”

Her Familiars did not respond. Her body was insensitive to the sensation of mana.

Gwen now felt less calm.

But she did not panic.

She was too experienced, too pragmatic, and too jaded to act irrationally.

“Okay,” she said to the dark. “You got here. Show yourself.”

She was in the dark, but it wasn’t the absence of light. There was no flooded dungeon here, no fingerless dark of the Murk, or the textured darkness of sorcery. The darkness here was more… taphysical, like in the realm of Phyr Quar-Tath.

Was this the Void? Had she sohow co to the Quasi-Elental Plane of the Void?

The second she thought of light, she could suddenly see.

“Oh, dear…” Gwen swallowed, then regretted swallowing. She was soaked to the bone in gore. Her hair, her dress, the inside of her dress. Every inch of her skin was drenched in sacrifice. Quetzalcoatl’s sacrifice, if the last thing she recalled was not an illusion.

“Where am I?” she asked the darkness beyond her spot of light, watching the gore drip from her hands. Strangely, the sensation wasn’t unpleasant. It was more akin to being dipped in a warm spring than anything else.

“You are awake,” said a voice from the dark, a voice she already knew. “You are inside Quetzalcoatl, or the Land God that was Quetzalcoatl. This belly, specifically, does not belong to one who nourishes you now. It belongs to a being who was older, who had died in the sa way, and whose corpse ford the temple interior of the Serpent Mound.”

Gwen turned her attention to the source of the voice.

Step by step, the space between them lit up. Then, as cognition dawned, the darkness faded.

They were inside Teithuacán, under the Temple of Quetzalcoatl.

But where were Slylth and Lei-bup?

“Your companions are guarding your body,” the Elf said. “We are in a space they cannot reach, at least, not without imnse sacrifice.”

Gwen willed herself free of the gore.

A split-second later, she was once more her spotless self.

“How quickly you learn,” the Elf said. “How dangerous.”

The mask, as before, was gone. The being who spoke to her was gangly and tall, with impossible cheekbones, pale lips, a high-ridged Roman nose, and eyes that looked like iridescent, golden scarab shells. The ears were what gave the race away almost instantly.

She willed for Caliban.

The space trembled.

“I would ask you to refrain, for now,” the Elf made a small gesture, and the tearing of space ceased. “I want to talk. The Devouring Dark is not conducive to persuasion, alas.”

Gwen regarded the Elf with suspicion.

Void. She thought. Lightning.

“We are perfectly safe from each other,” the Elf shook his head. “There is no magic here to answer either of us, because there is no ‘here’ in the sense of space. We are not in a place. We are in a mont—the mont Quetzalcoatl died, stretched as wide as I could make it, so that you and I might have a conversation neither of us can afford to have anywhere else. A liminal space. A private space. In this mont of transference—the transfer of Faith, of causality, we are truly alone. Of course, you are my captive audience, as I am yours. This, I shall not deny.”

“You sacrificed Quetzalcoatl,” Gwen found her accusation projecting in all directions. “She was… just a child.”

“She has consud more children than there is hair on that head of yours,” the Elf chuckled. “You know, for a deity, you’re awfully sentintal.”

“I am not a God,” Gwen growled.

“You will be.” The Elf said sothing insane and incredible. “Whether you will be a responsible one—that’s for history to judge, but the Mageocracy’s classification doesn’t change.”

The Elf shrugged.

It was only now that Gwen realised the Elf wore overly familiar clothes. She had seen the cut and hue before. In fact, she had just visited the very tree that produced the sa fashion.

“If you think cruel, don’t.” The Elf continued. “I have killed every Godling I ever raised, eventually. I promise you, a quick exit is the kindest thing that can happen to a God. Don’t believe ? Just ask the Kirins.”

“What the hell are you supposed to be?” Gwen still felt adrift. She had to find a way to get out of this… wrinkle in ti.

“What am I?” the Elf cocked his head.

“I am your Spectre.”

“I am Lilibird’s saviour.”

“I am Solana’s scion.”

“I am the one your Mageocracy has nad Malakath, and I am your Master's co-conspirator. It was I who made the spell that found your dear Caliban.”

The titles ca in waves, bowling her over like an unwary kid picking up seashells. Gwen had braced herself for a lie, for so piece of it to ring false the way n and won in power always did. Yet, in this liminal space, the words landed in her chest like a key turning a lock. As to what they unlocked—Sydney, Auckland, Tianjin, she knew it all to be true.

“So you’re my Prospero,” she couldn’t help but remark upon the Elf calling himself Spectre and Malakath with snark. “Your high charms work, Dear Duke, and we are all but knit up in your power.”

The Elf regarded her strangely, then moved his mouth as if trying to reorganise the contents of it.

Then, he snarked back.

“And you are but one of my actors, while this world, like the baseless fabric of this place, your cloud-capped Towers, gorgeous palaces and solemn temples—the great globe itself—shall dissolve as this insubstantial pageant faded…and leave not a rack behind.”

This ti, Gwen’s world erupted.

She stood very still. She could hear herself breathing—panting, even.

The Elf spoke English.

He was speaking Shakespeare.

“How…” she said quietly. “Could you possibly know that?”

Mind Magic? It must be…

“Because I have seen the fragnts of worlds, Gwen Song, Consultant to the Consultants. Not this one—yours. That strange place of burning artifice. I have watched it the way a forlorn poet watches the sea from a clifftop he can never climb down, in visions that co to unbidden and uninvited. You have ruined everything, Pale Priestess—”

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He tilted his head, and for the first ti, sothing that might have been pity crossed the scarab-gold of his eyes.

“And now you will complete it.”

Gwen shuddered from the vertigo.

The tide of blood-dimd light receded the way a breath was upheld, and the temple interior went with it, walls and altar and god-shaped absence dissolving into sothing that was not quite mory and not quite vision.

They were standing on the dais, at the heart of Teithuacán.

Beneath them, the bronze city of Neo Tenochtitlan unrolled like a map. The Sierra Madre's grey spine, the lake-threaded valley of Teithuacán, the green sar of the Yucatán bleeding into two oceans at once. And above all of it, where the sun should have been, hung sothing that was not the sun: a vast, swollen disc of red bleeding into black at its corona, pulsing with a slow and terrible rhythm, like a heart the size of a hemisphere.

The Black Sun.

Sobel’s signature spell.

“The hell are you doing?” Gwen whipped around, finding that she could, if she wanted, kick or punch the Elf. She did neither, of course, because as the man said, she was a captive audience while… whatever this was… ran its course.

“Transference,” Malakath said, beside her and yet nowhere, his voice arriving inside her skull. “From Quetzalcoatl to you. Four centuries of faith, accumulated, compounded, and pure. Accumulated for a singular purpose.”

“Why ?” she asked. “And for what purpose?”

“Because that was always your role, Gwen Song. Not you, as I am sure you understand. But the wling mind that once inhabited your body.”

Gwen ca closer, just in case she could sock the Elf and open a portal. She looked at the Elf properly and noted that, indeed, this was a Ljósálfar. Malakath had said that he was from the line of Solana, aning he was older than the Hvítálfar of Tryfan. He was from the bloodline that existed in the Primordial Age, from when the surviving Dragons sought out their flower wives.

Malakath did not look sadistic, as Sobel might, or triumphant, as Percy might. He looked… aggrieved. Was it for the Precious Feather? She didn’t know. Surely, having spent four centuries with Quetzalcoatl, he must be feeling sothing.

“Is that Quetzalcoatl?” she pointed at the Black Sun. “Or what’s left of her?”

“That was always going to be,” Malakath answered starkly. “That’s her fate. It’s causality, your Paleness, and no one is free from it—unless…”

The Elf looked upon her, and Gwen found herself in the midst of a terrible mont of comprehension.

“Unless it's soone who shouldn’t exist in this world…”

“Yes,” Malakath’s lips curled. “You really are far more quick-witted than your original self. You will make a good Guardian.”

“I am already a Guardian,” Gwen felt her insides blend. There was too much information happening at once, and she needed ti to digest it.

“Not a Guardian, but THE Guardian, as I was,” Malakath corrected himself, gently, as though the distinction mattered to him more than it had any right to. “Soone who could hold this much devotion without curdling it into the thing your friend Sobel beca. Without becoming like the Kirins—comfortable and complacent, until, finally, they too beca faith batteries for the Dragons. I have been looking for soone like you for a very long ti.”

The red-black sun pulsed, vast and slow, and Malakath was quiet long enough that Gwen could feel the changes to her Astral Body. Sothing was happening to her. It wasn’t bad, but that didn’t an it was desired.

The Elf regarded her incomprehension, then read her dismay.

“I must apologise,” he said to her, his tone neither hostile nor deaning. “I’ve seen so much of what should have been that I have forgotten how little you know, how quickly you’ve accumulated everything.”

He turned to face her fully, and for the first ti since the mask had co away like a bloody glove, Gwen saw sothing in his ancient, beetle-gold eyes that looked almost like kindness, the terrible, patient kindness of soone about to carry out an imasurably cruel act.

“I am going to give you a chance to ask so questions while the apotheosis takes place. About your withered self, and your Master, Henry Kilroy.”

The dying sun bled lower, painting the whole sprawled continent the colour of an old wound.

The city below was in turmoil. Fires were breaking out everywhere, as they ought to do in monts of existential upheaval. Blood was pouring out of the temple in gory, arterial gouts, filling the canals.

“Would you like to know the truth?” the Elf asked. “Or shall we enjoy the serenity while you ascend?”

Gwen touched the Elf’s arm.

The act was intentional, but she presud the Ljósálfar would not mind. Underneath her fingers, the Elven flesh was taut and hard, like that of a devoted hermit. It was also slick, like that of beetle shells.

“Did you think I was a vision?” Malakath actually looked amused.

“Yes,” Gwen said. “As for the truth… they say curiosity killed the cat.”

“So you do wish to know.” The Elf walked away from her toward the temple steps. He sat, his back exposed to her burning malice. “Sit.”

Gwen sat half a ter away. “Talk.”

“To understand truth,” Malakath’s eyes made her spine crawl. “You must first understand the lies. The little lies, then big ones, and then, finally… sothing resembling truth.”

Gwen searched herself while the Elf seed to load up a file. The Gwen who wasn’t the Regent of three realms would be full of questions. Questions like: Who am I?

But not herself.

I am the Regent of Shalkar, the Liberator of Deepholm and the restorer of basic human decency to the Tenderloin. Since Shalkar, never once had I doubted that I was making my world a little better. For that, nothing the Elf said would change her mind, her mission, or the persona she had cultivated for so long.

What she felt for was the question of her Master. Henry Kilroy.

So much of what she was doing was tied to Kilroy’s lessons.

She had made a promise to him, almost ten years ago, in a Tower that no longer existed.

“I do not wish to be rely a pacifist, Master. I wish to be a Militant Pacifist. I am willing to fight for my pacifism. For the only way to end violence is for our enemies to refuse violence themselves.”

Bloody hell… She felt her Astral Soul shudder.That was a LIFE TI ago.

“I t him a few centuries ago,” Malakath said. Above them, the sky itself folded inward like a page being turned, and where Neo Tenochtitlan had been, they were now sharing sothing from the mindscape of Malakath.

She saw a boy-Mage climbing the side of a mountain, which she could only presu to be the Scottish highlands. He was fair-haired, grey-eyed, dressed in a fashion that looked more like a Gregorian monk in Mage-silk than the old man who always wore his English suits. He was in his teens, but he looked smaller in the robes.

“How exceptional he was, your Master, the son of Arch-Mage Morden, potentially the greatest Human Mage Morden’s line had produced, or would produce for a very long ti. He ca to on this mountain, alone, having walked three weeks through territory that should have killed him a dozen tis over. He asked a question no Human had thought to ask Tryfan in all its history.”

“He asked you to give his people fire,” Gwen said. She had heard as much from Solana, but she had not imagined that it was Malakath who had answered.

The boy. Henry, her Henry, the gentlest, wisest teacher she had ever loved, opened his mouth, and Gwen heard his voice for the first ti, young and unbroken and utterly certain of himself.

“Elental magic, Elf Lord,” young Henry said, to a Malakath she could not yet see in the vision, only feel, a presence the mountainside bent around like water around a stone, for the mory was from his eyes. “Give it to humanity, and you will get your freedom. You said that we’re unpredictable, that we skirt the flow of causality. If you give us knowledge, then I will show you a great experint. If you are as tired of the cycle as the old stories say you are, then I will break that cycle. Will you do it?”

The vision held there, suspended, Henry's challenge hanging unanswered in the air four hundred years gone.

“I agreed,” Malakath said. The simplicity of it landed like a Magic Missile to her chest. “I betrayed my own people for the word of a twenty-year-old human I had known for an hour, because he was the first being I had t in over a millennium who truly desired change. That said, in my own defence, my mother also saw everything. She did not stop from teaching him. And I have never been entirely certain whether that was rcy, or strategy, or simply her allowance for a stupid boy.”

Gwen thought of Solana.

She thought of Tyfanvius.

So this creature was their child?

“You gave him Elental magic.”

“I gave him a way to allow Humans to divorce themselves from the God-worshipping instinct. I codified our unique thods into Human Arcanistry, a structure he called the Imperial Magic System. Your IMS. The thing every child in every Tower on your Earth learns by touching a magical stone with origins no one questions, and not one of them has ever wondered who, no other human in history had discovered how the masses could tap into the Pri Elental Planes.

“The Awakening Stone was… a part of that?” She recalled her own Awakening. The sheer irrationality of it. The fact that she accepted it without question.

Every Tower. Every Mage. Every Magister who ever looked down their nose at a NoM for not Awakening. It all traces back to a deal an Elf made with a twenty-year-old on a mountain.

“And the Towers,” she said slowly, already half-knowing she would not like the answer. “We always called them defences. Shield Barriers. The thing that kept the Wildlands out.”

“That is what they beca. It is not what they were built to be.” Malakath's voice did not change, but the vision did. The mountain dissolving into the ghost-image of the first Tower she had ever seen rise from bare earth, scaffolded in crude lighting, its foundation sinking through soil and bedrock into sothing that pulsed in ti with the dying sun above them. “Henry and I designed them as anchors. World Trees, in function if not in form—fixed points binding your Pri Material to the Elental Planes, to stabilise the tectonic shifts of the Axis Mundi. We did not build them to keep the Wildlands out. We built them so my people would no longer be tasked with the sa thing. I thought…”

Malakath shook his head. “So… What do you think of the lies?”

“They were close enough to the truth,” Gwen said.

“Indeed,” Malakath closed his eyes again. “And now, let’s talk about you.”

The vision shifted again, like a Penny Arcade picture show. Ti began to blend, and the story's pacing grew impatient. A procession of Towers rising across centuries, a montage of trials and Awakenings, until it slowed and steadied on a single, smaller scene: a battlefield long since gone quiet, smoke still rising from sothing that had once been a regint, and a still youthful Henry kneeling in the mud over a woman who should already have been dead, surrounded by his companions.

Gwen knew the face instantly. There was no one more conventionally beautiful. In her head, she had never known Sobel as the lady with the ridiculous plunge line, wreathed by the devouring light from the Black Sun, draining her Master dry.

Here was a young woman, soaked through by sweat and sick, barely moving, one hand gripping her teacher’s, white knuckled, her face equal parts snot and tears.

“We had seen Void-Affinity humans before. They tend to manifest during tis of strife and despair, tapping into an Elental Plane that not even the immortal races understood. What made Lilibird special was that her Patron, the sa as yours, is sothing called the Devouring Dark.”

“She should have died, like all the rest, but Henry knew what he had found. He kept her alive with the Golden ad, a technique of Essence distillation derived from my instruction.”

The vision moved forward in lurches, the way mory does when the remberer cannot be bothered to dwell on it, because of how pedestrian it seed to the observer. Next, they saw a sterile room, unfamiliar instrunts, Elizabeth strapped into a chair not unlike the one Gwen had imagined for so naless Void-attuned stranger a mont ago, except the eyes that turned toward the watching mages were not naless at all. Tubes were connected to her in various ways, themselves connected to others.

Healers. Connected to Sobel via Sufina.

They were all frightened. Young. All of their eyes were achingly human, in a way Gwen had never once associated with the word Sobel.

“Henry studied her,” Malakath said. “To try and learn about the Devouring Dark. They had no frawork yet for what they were looking at, so they did what frightened, curious people have always done with sothing they cannot classify. They asured it. Recorded it. Asked it to do the thing again, and again, so they might write down what happened with greater precision the second ti. It was the most Human thing I’d ever seen Henry perform.”

Gwen felt sick.

She recognised the room.

The Cognition Chamber.

It was the room her Master had taught her how to run the Void Mana through her conduits so as not to kill herself in the process. He had been so precise. He had known exactly how much mana, for what spell, to keep her hale.

The Healers died.

Sobel’s head lolled against Henry’s palms while he caressed her bloodless face. Gwen watched Henry kneel beside the chair, watched him fold both hands around hers and murmur sothing the vision did not carry sound for, watched Elizabeth's face crumple against his shoulder, rolling like a doll’s.

“He invited to watch. To ask if I had any insights that I could share. We were both very invested in the Devouring Dark, you see.”

“What were you after?” Gwen fought for breath, not just because of the vision, but because she shared the Elf’s feelings through the vision. What Malakath’s POV showed her was just how little he cared for the woman strapped to the chair. “What did the Devouring Dark do that made you… Do this to Sobel?”

“Look at how she clings to him.” Malakath turned his head to regard her. “We Elves do not love as you Humans do, nor do we engage in reproduction for carnal instinct, but you can see it on your Master’s face. His resolve… was softening.”

“I allowed it because it was more convenient at the ti. We needed her alive, and if the thing keeping that wretched thing alive was a sensation we Ljósálfar did not comprehend, then so be it.”

“So that’s how Master built Elizabeth Sobel,” Gwen sighed. A part of her already knew the shape of the answer before it arrived. There had been so many clues. This was just the confirmation.

“Yes,” Malakath nodded. “Now, for your earlier question. What made Sobel so precious to us was, as I’ve said, her Patron. The Devouring Dark. Even now, we do not know it in its entirety, not after Sobel fed upon a million souls. What Henry and I did discover was that it does not rely devour—it usurps causality alongside the substance. I believe it's older than my people, older, I suspect, than my mother, older than Tyfanevius and perhaps, older than your Almudj.”

Malakath’s vision held on to Henry’s face for a little longer. The Elf was only marginally interested in how Henry had used his wife, and what little was there was rely the next two decades, when Sobel beca a hero, then a villain.

“Your Master and I made a plan,” Malakath said, and for the first ti, his ancient voice carried sothing that was almost, almost regret. “A plan of cloud-capped Towers replacing World Trees. A plan that involved an insane tool who could not differentiate right from wrong, night from day, because she was bound by a re spider thread to the causality of this world.”

“I was intrigued,” Malakath continued after a pause, and there was, for the first ti since the mask had co away, sothing like anger in his ancient voice. “I think I was born because Mother wondered if I could be the one to disrupt the causality of our cyclic world. I had been the perfect scion for longer than most races had existed, and then I had done terrible things, set mountains on fire, World Trees and continents afla, just to see if sothing would break…”

The dying sun above them flickered, just once, as though so internal fuel was finally burning out.

“Lilibird was the thing we found that would mask our actions from Mother, but…”

“Master didn’t follow your plan,” Gwen grinned at the Elf. “We humans are unpredictable, after all.”

The Elf snickered. “I fear your sharpness. Indeed, in the countless tis Henry dragged Lilibird through your eschatological notion of hell, so feeling had anchored itself. Sothing in him broke quietly during those years, Gwen Song, long before he found you in Sydney, long before Elizabeth truly beca what we made her, and the rest was history.”

Malakath turned, at last, to look at her directly, his scarab-eyes catching the last red light of a sun that was no longer entirely a sun, and said the words that she knew were coming.

“And so…” Malakath’s teeth were more pointed than any Elf Gwen had ever had the pleasure of encountering. “I had to find myself a new Sobel.”

Gwen felt her innards contract. “And you found .”

“Henry found you,” the Elf said. “I was rely carrying out his plan.”

“But Master refused,” Gwen felt her fists ball. “He rebuked you.”

“He did,” Malakath’s lips were thin, pale, a re line. “And so, I reunited him with Sobel.”

She slapped the Elf’s flawless face. Her hand was moving before she knew it. It struck flesh with a satisfying thwack— and ca away with a speckle of blood. Malakath’s head snapped back an inch, then he stared at her with eyes devoid of all emotion.

“Don’t be impatient,” the Elf said with nonchalance. He allowed the blood to trickle. “You will be doing much more than that, given ti.”

“I guess we’re in agreent,” Gwen said, nursing her wrist. It felt like she had slapped a brick wall.

The world around them shifted once more, revealing the temple, the Black Sun, the burning city below.

“Our mont is at an end,” Malakath smiled at her dryly. “I guess four centuries only buys so much.”

“I will find you,” Gwen said to the fading figure, already half-swallowed by darkness. Never had she felt so much conviction course though her conduits than now.

“You won’t have to look far, I’ll—” the voice was lost before the rest of the words were said.

She looked up.

The Black Sun had opened its lid. She saw an enormous eye, its iris erald and green and flecked with specs of gold.

She really did have the most beautiful eyes.

It saw her, just as she saw it.

“Hey, Shoggy…” She felt the vertigo once more, signalling that ti was once more starting to flow. “Would you mind if you just—”

Went ho?