Caera Denoir
The Vritra Prince remained behind in the small, moss-carpeted hollow we'd found, his brow furrowed in intense concentration as he manipulated strands of mana while he spoke with Ji-Ae. He was crafting something—likely wards or tools for a temporary encampment.
While Corvis hadn't been enthusiastic about stopping—and honestly, neither was I, my instincts screaming against lingering in this predator's domain—exhaustion had finally forced reason upon us both.
His earlier reluctance mirrored my own stubborn drive, but the truth was undeniable: we were spent. Bone-deep weariness gnawed at me, hunger twisted my stomach into knots, and beneath the surface calm, the psychic residue of near-death and core-shattering trauma still vibrated like a plucked, dissonant chord.
The physical wounds from the hallway battle were merely the punctuation on a sentence written in pain.
He was an enigma, this Corvis Vritra. The High Sovereign's own proclamation echoed in my mind, yet the young elf before me—focused, capable, haunted—seemed galaxies removed from the image of a cold-blooded Vritra prince.
And he was surely an elf. The wistful and slightly shy way he'd spoken of picnics with his sister in Elenoir… that hadn't been fabricated.
He was a contradiction wrapped in secrecy: Dicathen-raised, High Sovereign's son, bearer of terrifying knowledge and power, yet capable of a nostalgic softness that disarmed me. A mystery I found myself increasingly compelled to solve, not just for survival, but… for understanding.
Maintaining the dual-layered soundproof barrier—a technique I'd almost unconsciously copied from watching Corvis weave his intricate vibrations—I moved away from our refuge. The dense, humid air pressed in, thick with the scent of damp earth, sweet decay, and something vaguely floral.
My mission was practical: find sustenance. Those opalescent, pear-shaped fruits the monkeys favoured seemed the safest bet. And perhaps… something else Corvis, for all his vast knowledge, might have overlooked.
The Legacy hummed within my mind, a constant, unsettling presence. Frightening wasn't strong enough. Just yesterday, wind magic had been utterly foreign; now, the elements felt like colours on a palette I instinctively knew how to mix, though I dared not experiment.
The potential to draw the attention of the unseen millipede Corvis feared with such gravity kept that power tightly leashed.
Yet, the ease with which I'd layered the wind barrier… and the profound harmony I'd felt when he'd channeled that cataclysmic vibration magic through my arm… it left me profoundly unsettled.
The forest here was denser than any I'd ever traversed, surpassing even the ancient, tangled woods clinging to the slopes of the Basilisk Fang Mountains in the Central Dominion.
It felt primordial, alive in a way that pressed against the skin. The white trees, stark as bleached bone, rose like colossal pillars, their gnarled roots snaking over the damp, yielding ground.
Soft moss cushioned each step, pleasant now but a treacherous trap if flight became necessary. My eyes scanned constantly, noting deep crevices fissuring the earth—potential bolt-holes, yes, but also potential lairs.
Without my sword, I felt acutely vulnerable. Soulfire was a weapon of terrifying finality, not finesse, and unleashing it here felt like igniting a beacon screaming 'Legacy' to every aetheric horror in the zone.
Sevren would have known the nuances, the risks specific to thr flora and fauna. My knowledge felt painfully inadequate next to Corvis's, a small library dwarfed by an archive.
My gaze snagged on a promising cluster: a large bunch of the opalescent fruits, plump and gleaming with moisture, hanging from a thick, vine-like stem sprouting directly from the base of a massive white trunk. They looked identical to those the two-tailed monkeys devoured.
Perfect. I paused, extending my senses beyond the visual. The immediate area seemed clear—just the faint rustle of small creatures high in the canopy, likely more monkeys. No heavy footfalls, no scraping chitin. Just the trees, the fruits, the dripping water.
Alright, Caera. Simple extraction. I focused, drawing on the wellspring of mana within my core. The transition from rune-based casting to pure Dicathian-style core manipulation was jarring. No familiar runic pathways to guide the flow, just raw will shaping raw energy.
I pictured a sharp disc of compressed wind forming between my palms. To my astonishment, it manifested almost instantly—a shimmering, emerald-green circle humming with contained force. It felt… intuitive. Effortless.
The Legacy smoothed the process, anticipating the form I desired. Too easy. A flicker of unease warred with practicality. I jerked my hand forward, willing the disc to slice through the thick vine connecting the fruit bunch to its stem.
It flew true, a silent emerald scythe. It sheared through the vine with unnerving precision, clean as honed steel through flesh. Relief warred with triumph. I stepped forward, hand outstretched to catch the falling bounty before it hit the wet ground.
That's when the world moved.
It wasn't a sound. It was a shift in the very texture of the air, a vibration felt in the soles of my boots, then up through my bones. The ground beneath me… rippled. My eyes, locked onto the falling fruit, snapped downward.
A massive, petal-like structure, mottled in shades of green and brown to perfectly mimic the moss and detritus, peeled open with shocking speed. Beneath it yawned a cavernous maw lined not with teeth, but with rows of glistening, needle-sharp thorns dripping a viscous, clear fluid.
The air escaping it reeked of digestive enzymes and damp rot. A plant trap!
Corvis! The mental scream tore through me, a surge of pure panic. You forgot another critical detail, you infuriatingly knowledgeable prince!
Instinct, honed by countless Ascents, overrode terror. My right hand shot out, abandoning the fruit, fingers splayed wide. The Legacy surged, a torrent answering my desperate need.
Soulfire.
Black flames, cold and utterly silent, erupted around my arm, swirling like ink poured into water. They didn't roar; they consumed sound, the very air around them seeming to warp and dim. I threw my arm up defensively, shaping the black fire into a swirling shield around my body.
The plant's maw was already closing, a living cage plunging me into sudden, terrifying darkness. The violet light filtering through the purple canopy vanished, replaced by the organic gloom of the enclosing petals.
Thick, sticky sap dripped from the thorn-lined ceiling of the maw. The stench was overwhelming, cloying, threatening to choke me. My Soulfire shield flared, the black flames licking hungrily at the encroaching plant flesh.
Where they touched, the vibrant green instantly withered, desiccated, turning to fragile grey ash that flaked away. The plant shuddered, a silent tremor passing through its massive structure. It fought back, not with violence, but with suffocating pressure.
The petals pressed inward with immense force, trying to crush me, to smother the unnatural fire. Sap rained down, thick and acidic.
I felt the first searing agony then. Not from the crushing pressure, but from the acid. A drop splattered onto my shoulder, burning through the fabric of my tunic like paper and searing into my skin. Another hit my forearm.
It wasn't deep, not immediately life-threatening, but the pain was excruciating—a white-hot brand sinking into flesh. I clamped my left hand over my mouth, biting down hard on a knuckle to stifle the scream clawing its way up my throat. A sound now would be suicide, summoning worse than this botanical horror.
My Soulfire shield held, but it demanded constant, fierce concentration. The plant was immense, its vitality staggering. It resisted the entropic decay, regenerating faster than the Soulfire could consume in places, forcing the black flames to retreat momentarily before surging again.
It was a silent, desperate battle of attrition in the cloying dark. Sweat mingled with acid burns on my skin. My muscles screamed from maintaining the shield and resisting the crushing pressure. The air grew thin, thick with the reek of decay and burning vegetation.
Finally, with a final, convulsive shudder that vibrated through my bones, the pressure ceased. The relentless regeneration faltered. The Soulfire, sensing weakness, surged with renewed intensity. The thorn-lined petals holding me captive blackened, crumbled, and collapsed inward like ancient parchment.
Violet light, blessedly cool and real, flooded back in. I stood amidst a circle of rapidly disintegrating grey ash that had been the trap's inner mechanisms, gasping lungfuls of humid air, my right arm still wreathed in dying tendrils of black flame.
The bunch of fruits was miraculously intact nearby, having fallen just outside the trap's perimeter.
Then came the sound. The thunderous crash of the massive outer petals collapsing onto the jungle floor. It echoed through the dense, silent forest, a declaration of violence shattering the careful quiet we'd maintained.
Every nerve ending screamed. My senses, heightened by adrenaline and pain, snapped to razor focus. If this plant alone possessed such strength and predatory cunning, the millipede Corvis feared would be a walking cataclysm. And that sound… it was a dinner bell.
Run. The thought was pure instinct.
I reactivated the soundproof wind barrier around myself, layering it thickly, muffling even my ragged breaths and the frantic thudding of my heart. I didn't bolt directly back towards the refuge.
Instead, I scooped up the fruit bunch, wincing as the movement jarred my acid-burned shoulder, and plunged deeper into the jungle, angling sharply away from Corvis's position. I moved swiftly but carefully, leaping roots, skirting suspicious patches of moss, using the dense white trunks as cover.
Why? The question hammered in my skull alongside the pain. Why lead potential pursuit away from the refuge? We were stronger together. He could help me control the Legacy's terrifying potential. I knew this.
Logically, it made no sense. Yet the impulse was undeniable, a fierce protectiveness surging from a place deeper than strategy. It wasn't that I distrusted Corvis—a startling realization, given his heritage.
In fact, a treacherous part of me wanted to trust him, wanted to rely on that sharp mind and unexpected vulnerability. But this… this felt different. This felt like… protecting myself. Not my body, but something nascent, fragile.
The burgeoning connection, the strange synchronicity when we wielded magic together, the shared burden of impossible power… letting him be torn apart by a horror drawn by my mistake felt like it would tear apart something vital within me as well.
It was a strange, fierce, utterly illogical feeling, burning as hot as the acid on my skin, propelling me deeper into the violet-hued unknown.
Corvis Vritra
The rough-hewn wooden sword felt heavy in my hands. Not the familiar, cool weight of honed steel, but something denser, stranger. Beside it, the walking cane—a crude approximation of my lost focus, its surface still rough with the marks of my hasty carving. Leon's spectral form shimmered beside me, head tilted.
"A sword made of wood?" His voice held that familiar blend of amusement and disbelief. "Not exactly the weapon that springs to mind when facing down Relictombs horrors, my man. More suited for whacking practice dummies, wouldn't you say?"
I ran a thumb along the unnaturally pale grain.
"These branches are harder than steel," I muttered, the memory surfacing unbidden, sharp and cold. "I had to use the same diamond-edged saw Dad employed on… Sylvia's remains I stole from Taegrin Caelum."
Memories of Romulos witnessing our Dad sewing Sylvia's body flooded my mind. It was a dissonant nightmare, on one side Romulos was disgusted and terrified looking at it on the other side... he was happy.
It was one of the first 'activities' he and Dad made together: aa Agrona and Romulos Vritra, no disguises, no tricks. Sewing the body of his mother and Dad enjoyed it, be it for sadistic pleasure or genuine affection for Romulos.
Both. Both was the answer. That Agrona Vritra was even more complicated than the one of my life and the novel.
"Ji-Ae," I called out, my voice tight, needing to anchor myself in the present. The suitcase laid open beside me, the Djinn remnant's soft luminescence a cold comfort in the violet gloom. "How long since Caera left?"
"Fourteen minutes, Thwart," her chime-like voice replied, precise and devoid of inflection.
"And I'm done." I lifted the longsword, crafted meticulously to match the descriptions burned into my mind from Arthur's story—the weight, the balance, the curve Caera Denoir wielded with lethal grace.
The cane felt less familiar in my grip, a poor substitute for Accaron's focus, but its wood hummed faintly under my touch.
Then, the world roared.
A deep, grinding THRUM that vibrated up through the mossy ground, shaking the colossal white trunks around our refuge. It felt like standing beside a derailed freight train plowing through bedrock, a hundred meters away or less—distance was meaningless against that sheer sonic violence.
"The millipede entity exhibits pursuit consistent with the Legacy signature," Ji-Ae stated calmly. "Caera Denoir is being followed."
No shit, Ji-Ae. The sarcasm was a brittle shield against the surge of cold dread. I snapped the suitcase shut, its latch echoing sharply in the sudden, reverberating silence that followed the millipede's passage.
Inside, was a vial now filled with the thick, clear sap I'd painstakingly collected from the white trees. It was a potent alchemical reagent, Ji-Ae confirmed. Now, perhaps, a weapon. I shoved it into a pocket, grabbed the sword and cane, and launched myself from the refuge.
Flight wasn't effortless here; the ambient mana was thin, siphoned by the aether-rich flora. But Meta-awareness painted the currents, the eddies, the subtle gravitational quirks of the cavern. I wove my will through the lattice, not brute force, but intricate understanding.
"That," Leon's voice materialized beside my ear as I soared, his spectral form keeping pace effortlessly below on the jungle floor, "is one hell of an earthworm. Makes you wonder what kind of bait lured it out. Must have been quite the juicy morsel."
He paused, then sang softly, off-key, "If I were a millipede I'd move out from home."
Another Earth reference? The thought was a flicker amidst the adrenaline. How deep had he dug into those phantom memories?
Below, the jungle parted like water before a dreadnought. The millipede was colossal, a segmented nightmare rendered in chitinous black and deep crimson. Each leg, thicker than my torso, pistoned into the yielding earth, churning moss and root.
Its head was a battering ram of armored plates framing lamp-like eyes that glowed with cold, alien intelligence. Mandibles, large enough to shear through stone, snapped at the air. It moved with terrifying speed, a living avalanche carving a swath of destruction towards…
A bloom of utter negation erupted ahead. Soulfire. Caera's black flames engulfed the millipede's midsection, swirling with silent, ravenous hunger. I banked hard, pulling back instinctively, the heatless cold of the Legacy's fire prickling my skin even from a distance.
The flames clung, withering… but only superficially. The millipede barely slowed. It shook its massive body like a wet hound, the Soulfire sputtering, clinging to the outer layers of chitin before dissipating like smoke.
Of course. Soulfire consumed mana. This thing was pure aether, a construct woven from the Relictombs' fundamental energy. Caera's terrifying new power was useless against it without the intrinsic understanding Cecilia gained at Integration Stage over the relationship between mana and aether—the stage she reached only by draining Lady Dawn.
"Caera!" My shout cut through the residual roar and the sizzle of dying black flames. I spotted her, a flash of navy hair and crimson eyes amidst the shredded foliage, panting, her tunic torn and stained.
"Corvis!" Her voice was raw. "I was trying to draw it away from the refuge! Soulfire didn't even scratch it!"
Think, Corvis. What would Grey do? The old habit surfaced. With Grey, the impossible felt possible. The weight of calculation lifted, replaced by reckless, brilliant synergy.
"Your thoughts are trailing, Corvis!" Caera's sharp cry snapped me back. She lunged forward, not away, her hand closing on my sleeve and yanking me sideways just as a massive mandible snapped shut on the air where my head had been. In the same motion, her other hand snatched the wooden longsword from my grip. "We need to at least make it run away!"
"The lady is pissed, my man," Leon chuckled, his form flickering as he dodged a falling branch dislodged by the millipede's thrashing. He vanished as my glare promised retribution.
"Yeah, sure," I gasped, heart hammering against my ribs as Caera pulled me down into a deep crevice moments before another thunderous stomp cratered the ground where we'd stood.
The stench of damp earth and crushed vegetation filled the narrow space. Above, the segmented underbelly, ridged and armored, blotted out the violet light as the creature passed overhead. It seemed endless.
"Do you have a plan?!" Caera demanded, her voice tight with urgency, eyes fixed on the disappearing monstrosity.
"We crack its armor," I said, the idea forming with desperate clarity. "Then kill it from the inside." But without the aether core or asuran durability. "I use Accaron on a weak point. You exploit the opening."
Her crimson eyes met mine, wide but resolute. She gave a single, sharp nod. Trust. Brutal and immediate. No time for doubt.
We scrambled out of the crevice. The millipede was turning, its massive head swinging back, those lamp-like eyes fixing on us with chilling focus. It charged, a juggernaut of chitin and fury.
I planted my feet, the rough wood of the cane solid in my grasp. Not my usual cane focus, but it would channel. It had to.
I drew deeply on the white core, the mana singing with new-found stability. The memory surfaced—my first clumsy vibration spell, the Falling Down Ineptrune crackling on my skin, amplified by Romulos' nascent guidance.
I slammed the cane's end against the leading edge of the charging beast's flank, not where the armor was thickest, but where segments overlapped, a potential fault line. Not brute force, but pure, focused resonance. "Accaron!"
The cane thrummed in my hand, a high-frequency scream translated into pure kinetic fury. The vibrations weren't sound; they were disintegration at a molecular level, channeled through the aether-infused wood. A spiderweb of cracks exploded across the chitin where the cane struck.
Caera was already moving. She lunged, the wooden sword a blur in her hands. Red fire—not Soulfire's cold negation, but actual, searing, mana-fed flame—erupted along the blade's length.
It roared as it plunged deep into the fissure I'd created, biting into the vulnerable flesh beneath the armor. The millipede shrieked—sound like rending metal that vibrated my bones.
But the wooden sword, channeling that intense heat, began to char. Smoke curled from the blade where it met the creature's flesh. It wouldn't hold.
"Caera, HOLD!" I roared, the plan crystallizing. The vial. The sap.
She froze, muscles coiled, the sword buried deep, flames still licking its length. The millipede's shriek turned into a guttural roar of pure rage. Its massive head snapped down towards us, mandibles wide, dripping viscous saliva.
I felt the displacement of air, the promise of obliteration.
"Corvis!" Caera screamed, terror warring with trust in her eyes. "Whatever it is, DO IT!"
I fumbled the vial from my pocket, the cool glass slick in my sweat-slicked hand. Ji-Ae's confirmation when I collected it echoed: highly volatile. Combustible.
I lunged towards the wound, towards the sword still buried in the beast's side. Ignoring the heat radiating from the burning wood, ignoring the looming shadow of the descending head, I jammed the uncorked vial deep into the fissure, shoving it past the charred wood and into the seared, alien flesh beyond.
In that same heartbeat, Caera's hand closed on my collar. She yanked with a desperate pull, hauling me backwards just as the millipede's mandibles slammed into the ground where we'd stood, showering us with dirt and shredded moss.
We hit the ground hard, rolling.
I threw up a hand, mana surging. A dome of compressed air snapped into existence around us.
The explosion was a deep, concussive WHUMPH that punched the air from my lungs. Brilliant orange fire, tinged with unnatural violet from the sap, erupted from the wound.
It wasn't Soulfire's silent consumption; this was violent, hungry combustion. The vial's glass shattered, the volatile sap igniting instantly, fueled by Caera's lingering flames and the millipede's own biological matter.
Fire geysered outwards, engulfing a quarter of the creature's massive flank. The stench was horrific—burning chitin, seared flesh, and the acrid tang of the combusting sap.
The millipede didn't roar this time. It convulsed. A spastic, agonized thrash that shook the entire jungle floor. Its massive body bucked, segments twisting violently. Then, with a sound like mountains collapsing, it plunged its head down, not at us, but into the earth.
It began to burrow, a frenzied, desperate retreat, dragging its burning flank into the churned soil. The ground swallowed it, leaving only a massive, smoldering tunnel entrance and the echoing silence of its departure.
I laid on my back, gasping, the air shield flickering out. The smell of burnt wood, and charred monster filled my nostrils. My ears rang. Caera panted beside me, her face smudged with dirt and soot, eyes wide with shock and exertion her obsidian horns dirty too.
"It's retreating," I managed, the words scraping my throat.
Ji-Ae's voice chimed from the nearby suitcase, cool and factual. "The entity is returning to its primary nest structure. It will be fully restored in about five minutes."
Magnificent. The sarcasm was thick with exhaustion.
Caera pushed herself up onto her elbows, wincing. Her gaze fixed on the smoking tunnel entrance, then swung to me, fierce and unwavering.
"We need to follow it," she stated, her voice hoarse but resolute. "Now. Before it heals."
"Yeah," I rasped, forcing my aching body to move, pushing myself up. "We need to."