# Chapter 461: The God in the Machine
The air in the ritual chamber was thick enough to chew, a suffocating soup of raw magic and incense that smelled of burnt sugar and cooling iron. The space was a perfect sphere, hewn from the same black, seamless stone as the antechamber, but here, the walls were covered in intricate, glowing runes that pulsed with a slow, deep crimson light. The light bled from the central object, a crystalline heart the size of an oxcart, suspended in the air by nothing at all. It beat with a rhythmic, thunderous pulse, each contraction sending a shudder through the floor and a fresh wave of oppressive energy washing over them. The sound was a physical thing, a pressure against the eardrums and the soul.
And in the center of it all, floating a few feet above the floor, was High Inquisitor Valerius.
He was no longer a man. His body was a silhouette carved from pure, white-hot energy, his Inquisitor's robes burned away, leaving only the core of his being, a vessel being filled. Tendrils of crimson light, thick as pythons, snaked from the crystalline heart and plunged into his chest, his back, his head. His limbs were thrown wide, his head tilted back, his mouth open in a silent scream that was somehow more terrible than any sound. The transfer was nearly complete. The artifact was dying, its frantic, fading beats fueling his apotheosis.
Soren's body, the one controlled by the Unraveling Rune, stepped forward first, its movements unnervingly calm. Nyra and Finn followed, their faces pale with shock and dread. The sheer scale of the power in the room was staggering, a weight that made every breath a struggle. Finn clutched his side, where a bruise was already forming from being thrown against the wall, his eyes fixed on the terrifying spectacle. Nyra's hand went to the daggers at her belt, but she knew they were useless here. This was a battle beyond steel.
"By the Concord," she whispered, the words swallowed by the humming drone of the artifact. "He's actually doing it."
The figure of Soren—no, the entity wearing Soren's skin—tilted its head. "A flawed vessel. He sought to contain power, not become it. A fundamental error." The voice was Soren's, but the cadence, the cold, analytical tone, was utterly alien. It was the voice of the rune, a tool of pure logic assessing a failed experiment.
As if it heard the critique, the figure of Valerius convulsed. The last of the crimson tendrils withdrew from the heart, which gave one final, shuddering pulse and went dark, its light fading to a dull, angry red like cooling embers. The energy flow stopped. For a heartbeat, there was silence. Then, Valerius slowly lowered his arms and lifted his head.
His face was gone. Where his features should have been, there was only a smooth, featureless mask of blinding white light, a miniature sun that hurt to look at. The shape of his head remained, but all humanity had been scoured away, replaced by pure, radiant power. He was no longer floating; he stood on the ground, his posture perfect, radiating an aura of absolute control.
He turned his head toward them, the mask of light somehow conveying a sense of focus, of attention. When he spoke, it was not one voice, but a thousand. A chorus of ancient, resonant tones, male and female, young and old, all speaking in perfect, terrifying unison. It was the sound of a forgotten age, a legion of souls trapped within a single, god-like form.
"You are too late," the chorus echoed, the words vibrating in the air and in their skulls. "The vessel is mine."
Nyra instinctively stepped back, her hand flying up to shield her eyes. The sheer pressure of his presence was a physical assault, making her skin crawl and her breath catch in her throat. Every instinct screamed at her to run, to flee this abomination before it noticed her. But she stood her ground, forcing herself to look, to analyze. She saw the way the light of his form interacted with the runes on the wall, not disrupting them, but commanding them. They dimmed in his presence, as if bowing to a superior authority.
Finn was frozen, a statue of pure terror. He had seen Soren's power, seen the might of other Gifted in the Ladder, but this was something else entirely. This was not a Gift; it was divinity, stolen and corrupted. The hope that had buoyed him, the desperate belief that they could still win, curdled into ice in his veins. They were insects before a god.
The entity in Soren's body, however, did not flinch. It took another step forward, its posture unchanging. "The transfer is unstable. The host's consciousness is fragmented. The power is unrefined. You are a god in a machine of glass."
The chorus of voices emanating from Valerius let out a sound that might have been a laugh, a discordant, overlapping cacophony of amusement. "And you are a ghost in a shell of flesh. A clever trick, but a trick nonetheless. You thought to use this power for yourself, to rewrite the world in your image of order. You are no different from him."
Valerius raised a hand, not toward Soren's body, but toward the empty air. The runes on the walls flared, not with crimson, but with a blinding, holy white. The temperature in the room plummeted, the air growing thin and sharp. The entity controlling Soren stiffened, its head tilting as if listening to a frequency only it could hear.
"Your connection to the host is being severed," the chorus stated. "Your authority is nullified. You are a passenger again. And now, the car will be crushed."
Soren felt it. A tearing sensation, not in his flesh, but in his soul. The cold, logical presence that had hijacked his body was ripped away, its control shattering like glass. He was back. The sudden return was a violent shock. The pain from the Unraveling Rune, the exhaustion from breaching the door, the phantom agony of his burned-out Gift—it all crashed back into him at once. He gasped, his knees buckling, his vision swimming with black spots. He was himself again, and he was broken.
He looked up through a haze of agony at the being that had once been Valerius. The mask of light was fixed on him. He could feel its attention like a physical weight, a pressure that threatened to pop his eyes from their sockets and crush his bones to dust.
"You," the chorus of voices said, the sound directed solely at Soren now. "The anomaly. The stubborn spark. You have been a thorn in my side for months. Your defiance, your very existence, is an offense to the new order I will bring."
Soren tried to push himself up, to stand, to face this monster on his feet, but his body refused to obey. His muscles were shredded, his Gift a silent, dead void within him. He was just a man, wounded and helpless, at the mercy of a god.
Nyra saw him falter. "Soren!" she cried, taking a step forward, her daggers finally in her hands. It was a futile gesture, an act of pure defiance, but it was all she had.
Valerius, or the thing that was now Valerius, ignored her. Its focus was absolute. It raised a single hand, palm open, toward Soren. There was no grand gesture, no incantation. Just a simple, effortless movement.
And then, the world vanished.
Soren didn't feel the impact of the wall. One moment he was on the floor, the next he was slammed against it so hard that the stone itself cracked around him. The air was driven from his lungs in a silent, violent gasp. His body was pinned, spread-eagled, held fast by an invisible, crushing force. It was not just pressure; it was negation. The force that held him didn't just press on his skin; it pressed into his very being, into the place where his Gift should have been. He felt a cold, hollow void open up inside him, a sudden and absolute emptiness. His Gift, which was already burnt out and silent, was now actively suppressed, erased, as if it had never existed. He was not just a man without power; he was a man with the very concept of power torn from his soul.
He struggled, a desperate, futile writhing against the inexorable hold. His vision tunneled, the edges blurring into darkness. The last thing he saw before the world faded to grey was the featureless mask of light, and the chorus of a thousand voices speaking a single, final word into his mind.
*Obsolete.*