Amun.
10th of Sextrand, 1492.
07:34
***
Matron Etyl Za'Darmondiel was a crafty old drow, that was for sure. Her presence on the battlefield was like that of a fighting general. Or better yet, a necromancer, standing idly while her fodder fell like flies. Her sharp eyes and enhanced senses slowed her perspective to a crawl just like mine was, allowing her to catch every tactic, strength, and weakness displayed by my forces and spin crimson webs of experience to negate them.
Even with her prowess, however, her focus was not as wide as mine. Transformed as I was, I needed no bolstering of mana or spellcraft to study the enemy's slowed actions or to act against them, for the Supreme Void Imp I was had superpowered speed; and now, the Void Imp Consular I had become had the strength to match.
From half a dozen perspectives, I watched Kele step through the darkness to wrap her burly arms around Matron Alauran Abaeir's waist and suplex her off their platform. Cursing wildly, Alauran's spirit bloomed before her visage erupted in the crimson-violet light of hellfire. It cackled and roiled against Kele's shade-touched arms, yet the parts of emotion, body, persona, mind, and spirit Kele killed in the Trial of Five Deaths allowed her to press on with only the acknowledgment of her exposed charred bones. Minor pain. No fear. But she was not without cunning.
Screaming in faux pain, Kele shoved and kicked Alauran away, then reached behind her to manifest her great war hammer from her pocket of burning darkness. The Shadowfire within her small pocket dimension enveloped Kele's arms as her weapon fell into her hand, layering her exposed bones with draconic muscle and scaled gauntlets that swung down her hammer like a falling star.
Our enemy had centuries of experience, however. Alauran swept her arms behind her the moment she was freed from Kele's grasp. She pulled against the mana as if she were swimming before kicking an arcane platform to begin an empowered dive, all while muttering prayers and covering her rear with spells projected from her hand crossbows.
Pulled by the might of her hammer, Kele plummeted after the Matron at an off angle, herding Alauran toward the many caves and protrusions of this inverted pit while Slade, her Dragine, raced along the walls to intercept. His serpentine body writhed and wriggled as he moved, his claws silenced and his weight supported by the umbral pads of his feet until he leaped high, unfurling his great wings to lunge forth and twist its tail into Alauran.
The impact was… off-putting, however. The arcane shield Alauran produced buckled, but held beneath the force of Slade's tail. Yet she was still sent flying into the wall, churning the arcana to reorient her body and slide to a landing near a deep tunnel.
Backpedaling and flipping further inside, she continued praying without a care for the dragine and deep gnome hunting her, even when the fall of Kele's great hammer brought the entrance down behind them.
The cacophony of cascading rocks was silenced by Alauran's incantations, rippling against the ambient arcana in ways that shifted its hue from a rich azure to a fiendish red. Then it went supernova, punching a purple hue into the ambience. Space itself seemed to become corrupted by the domain of chaos, disappearing the surrounding stone to reveal a shifting labyrinth of razor sharp webs, violet fire, and demon spiders. Yet, that made little difference to Kele.
She and her mount pressed forward without a care, entirely ignoring the mostly phantasmal creatures as they swept around to her flanks. Kele stomped before her with a sweep from below, only to be parried by a wild swipe of Alauran's scimitar, giving her the momentum to swing around and slash through the dark fire she believed would erupt from Slade's maw. What he unleashed was not Shadowfire, however.
Slade's deathly wail blatantly ignored Alauran's projected slash as it washed over her, reverberating her eardrums until they shattered like the chaos domain that followed. Yet the wail persisted, spreading its energy down the enclosed tunnel's rippling walls in ways that silenced both their echoes and the throes of a matron without Lilith's favor.
Clutching her ears, Alauran remained opened to Kele's hammer swinging around and down on her head. Slade lashed out as she crumpled to the ground, clenching his jaw through her femur and running off with her leg, knowing the matron would be rendered to paste and his master would soon rejoin him in their realm of shadows.
Meanwhile, Tava, showing the predacious nature of a Vampyr graced by twilight, dove after Matron Eralyth Jusztiir, stabbing at the twilight ave's talons impaling her armor with the frenzy of an orc.
The flightless bird released its grip after the third feral slash, rising to act as a foothold for Tava, leaping forth to take command of the blood dripping from Eralyth's wound. The fluid bubbled as the iron in them congealed and solidified, adopting a black hue before shifting into daggers, arrows, and dirks that plummeted into their source from all angles.
Prayers turned to curses as the crimson blades fell past her guard. Witchcraft'd needles fell from her hands as the blades elongated into swords, bolts, and spears and fell back onto the matron. The cuts and stabs spread across her hands, face, and neck, shrouding her vision in a flurry of blades, occluding the twilight-infused rapier thrusting in Tava's hand.
Even I couldn't see the look on Eralyth's face when her armor was stabbed through. I could only hear the crack of its chitin. That, and I could feel the twilight pour into her body, filling the niche left by her drained blood with something that activated with Tava's prayer.
"Shine in brilliance and fade like the light of dusk!"
Light, unholy and screaming, poured through Eralyth's body and erupted from every orifice like the persistent beams of a lighthouse releasing a siren's howl, casting aberrant shadows amidst the sea of darkness until the bones were sundered, her flesh was burned through, and night returned to this realm of darkness.
With the destruction of Matron Eralyth Jusztiir, the ramblings of Matron Etyl pulled my attention to G'eldantaar, looking like an inverted sapling, dying and leafless. Matrons Syndyrran Illistyn, Phyrryn Yril'Lysaen, Khaless Noqutyl, and Barrdones Casia-Psellus surrounded the tree at regular intervals, their arms raised at the center of arcane inscriptions woven into the ambient arcana.
"Oh, shut up already."
Turning, I opened my shadow before stepping through the darkness, allowing my horde of undead to spread in my wake, led by Zaraxus, who ascended to destroy the gathered high priestesses.
Lana trailed me through the short tunnel of darkness and out the other side, poised several meters above the matrons. She pounced after Matron Illistyn with the same ferocity born from the devil in me, looking upon the demonic form of Matron Yril'Lysaen. But where Lana had experience, I had wits. The clawed hand of the Void Imp Consular gripped her ankle before she drifted out of reach, inadvertently crushing it while the other pushed against the darkness, swinging me back and around to fling Lana at her target like a human cannonball. Then I pounced.
Matron Phyrryn Yril'Lysaen remained focused on their ritual until the last moment, when she turned with surprising speed, one scimitar raised in a block and the other poised to stab. I floated in regardless, my left arm raised to deflect the stab while the other shot forward.
A distant pain coupled with a feeling of disgust trickled through my knuckles as they punched her mana forged scimitar. Her meek strength was overcome in an instant, however, bringing the blade to collapse onto her armor. Its chitin buckled beneath the pressure and undulated until the underlying mithral somewhat seemed to shift into webs, dispersing much of the impact.
She rocketed away from her peers like a rock tossed down a well, cursing prayers of demonic foulness while I turned to step through the shadows to intercept her. Arcana poured from my well to my sorcerous core as the darkness overcame me, flowing through every layer until the eldritch energy of the abyss flowed into my claws, sweeping up into Phyrryn's path to form a Void Shield between us.
Carried by my momentum, I drifted up into the blot on reality the moment it formed, bringing me to the infinite expanse where reality seemed like an ever-changing photorealistic nebula, morphing into Phyrryn's gaunt face and crimson eyes gaping into the void.
Placidly, I stared at her armor disentegrating into energy layer by layer, exposing undergarments, skin, muscle, and bone before that too transformed into energy and became void; leaving only the calming emptiness and the howling energies within, timeless and not.
I thrust out my palm and watched the void rise into a pillar that shot for G'eldantaar. Yet I timelessly watched Matron Syndyrran Illistyn kill Lana over and over again, spurring the matron into a frenzy of devotion.
I heard her provocations through Lana's ears as she charged, seemingly in a blind fury. "Yes!" Syndyrran howled. "Show me the might of the Nox's inexhaustible armies! You will prove to be a better blight on the Plane than even the Necro King, Eternal! Let our-"
Her words were cut short by Lana's blurred fist grazing her arm before she backpedaled, putting her scimitars into a dance that bisected and cleaved Lana into four symmetrical pieces. Yet, my arcana was plentiful. Even from the void, it poured into Lana's soul, sublimating her umbral flesh into a cloud of darkness that sank and congealed, hardening into the visage of a rugged woman stomping forward to rock Syndyrran's jaw with two devastating hooks.
The power of Lana's punches made Syndyrran forcibly look left and then right in a daze, yet the old drow spun into the second punch and flourished her blade across Lana's belly and throat. Vacated of her core muscles, Lana doubled over, freeing the matron to cast a webbed net from her back as she face about.
The web grasped onto Lana as much as it did free space, causing small spatial distortions to warp the light around the webs until Syndyrran launched herself to the tree, where they broke the three dimensions like a pane of glass, with Lana in the middle.
The tip of my Void Pillar licked G'eldantaar's violet bark and halted as Lana died again, for I ascended through the abyss, gathering its energy into an aggressive pip before I punched through reality to sow the Void Seed in G'eldantaar's bark.
The void beneath me ascended through my arm as the abyss cascaded through G'eldantaar's branches like rushing water, flowing down its roots and through the bedrock to repeat the pattern through the Underground to reach Shujen's surface.
With the void reaching above, Lana was freed to plunge from my shadow, veins bulging, eyes white with rage. Still ascending to rejoin her fellow matrons, Syndyrran whipped her scimitar with practiced ease, releasing waves of acid and webs amidst her unholy incantations. Yet Lana, blinded by rage, powered through them, falling onto her like a rabid cat that refused to let go. Syndyrran stabbed and Lana gripped her legs tighter to pummel and pound her with the unending stamina of the undead, howling maniacally as they fell to her doom.
"Too late, Eternal!"
"Is it?" I asked before fully noticing Matron Etyl's scimitar, following through a horizontal slice.
Too much arcana was packed within. And yet, it was tame in comparison to what drifted outside the void - the final remaining branch of G'eldantaar, as long as a staff and roiling with crimson-violet energy.
Turned out, it was too late; for the ritual, at least. For a moment, the staff's unholy light outshone the twilight far below, blinding me to the divine energy leaping from Etyl to Khaless and Barrdones. Something positively foul was left in its wake, with a smell like burning rubber or plastic, hot wax, and pickled meat.
"Behold the greatest glory of our beloved Lilith!" Came Etyl's maniacal voice from the radiance. "Snroeslm!"
The foul light faded to a cruel purple ambiance with the word, unveiling 16 demons snapping to attention beside their matrons; with 8 around Etyl and 4 each for Khaless and Barrdones. They were at least 6 meters in stature, tailed with the barbs of scorpions and wreathed in burning wax atop their chitin, their formless faces cluttered with mandibles and spider-like eyes.
Reeling back as a collective, the demons entered the fray with a shriek that could rival Cononthoth's roar; a fair play against mortals. Against vampyr, undead, and a shadow dragon, however, it was an exploitable opening.
The violet veil darkened as cones of shadowfire rose from above, sweeping across Barrdones and her four demons like an abyssal flamethrower built for a giant. The demons' shriek morphed into a howl amidst the foreign energy as, for what I assumed to be the first time in their existence, they burned as easily as their victims.
The darkness that soon fell gave rise to the light of dawn, ascending as a slew of snaking beams from the point of Opal's spear as she stood amidst the near-bloodless bodies of Nadra and her daughters, sinking to the Abyss. The twilight serpents lanced the screeching demons like wild things, whipping and splitting their bodies to curl back on their enemies while ducking and weaving the mana forged bolts shot by the matrons and the magical barrage cast by Lana's undying shadows.
"Do not think these things will save you, Matron Etyl! I am Opal of the Blackblood, Twilight Empress of the Brightest Night! Born and raised in the Hells! Demon slaying is child's play!" My first cleric sneered.
The wings protruding from Opal's hips glowed with a crepuscular light before they flapped, shooting her across the Dark Sky like a falling star. Blades of light, shrouded in darkness, formed and flew toward Matron Noqutyl's demons with each sweep of her wings, growing to colossal statures from the steadily increasing radiance pouring off of her armor.
"The Elven Devil is Eternal!" Opal declared, rising to levitate beneath me, her arms spread wide. "The Owl's blessings are infinite!" My spirit churned with the worship, dispensing the energies of my Divine Sea into the Brightest Night's biomechanical heart, beating louder as Opal raised her lance's point to me.
Reaching down, I gently touched its point, sending darkness radiating from Opal's armor to obscure the dying matrons, Etyl, and their demons in the comforting abyss, until Opal's movement released the point from my fingertip.
"Long may his feathers reign!"
Stellar feathers of all types and spectra filled the surrounding space, forming a nebulous ring that precipitated a radiant deluge on the demons below. Their bristles elongated into a sweeping fans as they fell, blinding the air with their radiance and enraging the winds they displaced as they fell, burning and barreling through everything in their path, leaving none for the swarms spread virtual light-years behind them.
The Snroeslm, assumed to be fear-inducing beasts of torture, carnage, and little more, were without the combat wits to evade, counter, or defend. They lashed wildly at their closest target, Cononthoth, assailing them with tail swipes and walls of shadowfire while she skittered around the wall, remaining at Matron Etyl's flanks, who was proving to be leagues above the rest.
With the G'eldantaar staff enveloped in a webbed cocoon where she left it below, Etyl's body positively radiated Lilith's crimson aura. She danced between the rain like wood elves were said to frolic around flowers, mana forged crossbow in hand and firing upon Cononthoth, Opal, me, and the growing crowd of liberated drow, far below.
Every second filled the cavern with more chaos, bringing her closer to me. Streams of flaming wax and detonating bolts of arcana rocked the cavern with increasing intensity as the demons fell one by one. Domains of unbridled madness and webs of pure chaos manifested and fizzled beneath my twilight. Infernal fires and mana forged spells battled against shadowfire and the void. And in the heart of it all, darkness loomed.
It started as an opening only Etyl and I could notice with our displaced sense of time; although she did not. An arbitrary space the rain seemed to avoid, despite its proximity to her. Being so, the ambient, smoke-like darkness aggregated into a pit, or rather, an eye that opened to reveal a shadowed realm, similar to the Darkworld, with mountains of collapsed black stone and oceans of dark ooze. Thus, Etyl couldn't sense the Shadow Realm opening up behind her; only the being of crimson eyes and feathered robes within.
Fueled by divine twilight, Tava pounced onto Etyl, sinking her fangs into her neck before she could fully react. One gulp made Tava's spirit blossom. Two gulps made Etyl shudder. Then, Tava pushed off, drifting down and out of the way of Kele, swinging her great hammer down from the Shadow Realm's skies.
"PITIABLE CHILD!"
Crimson divine mana and roiling arcana boomed with Etyl's words, deflecting Kele's hammer but sending her plummeting all the same. Canceling her spell, Opal gave chase, followed by Tava and Kele, with Cononthoth skittering down the walls, shadowfire roiling in her throat.
It was as curious as it was concerning. The last of the matrons had just fallen. Their families and Houses were sundered, and Zimysta was no more. Even their demons had been slain. Yet, here Etyl was, surpassing Imperator Opal in terms of divine energy. Even with Opal, Tava, Kele, and Cononthoth jumping her, still had the edge. For now, as a millennium of experience would tell her this was a losing battle.
For the drow beyond Zimysta Falls, however, it was a different story.
Landing along the wall in Cononthoth's path, Etyl spread her arms wide and spun on her heels, facing the dragon's breath with a thunderclap of crimson webs. They coiled and plumed from her fingertips, accelerated by the shockwave into a vortex of cutting and ripping malevolence that burrowed through the cone of Shadowfire like a hot knife through wax.
Cononthoth evaded at the last minute with an agile skip, negating the attack to a shallow groove in her scales. She slunk into the shadows as Opal and Tava pincer'd, flinging feathered bolts, stellar bullets, and blooded blades as they swept in, weapons poised low and high.
Sidestepping into a ducking spin, Etyl danced her blades around her shoulders, casually deflecting and dodging the volley until a metallic feather sank between her chitinous plates. She dipped and rolled into a handstand to launch herself off the wall while arcana roiled around her, forming a cocoon of crimson webs that shrank into a needle-thin line before disappearing.
A disturbance in the darkness pulled my attention to the opposite wall, several meters lower; my eyes and Cononthoth's. The divine dragon of darkness was on her in an instant. Her massive tail swept a large arc across the wall she hid on and the darkness shuddered against it, opening a tear in the shadows to Etyl's rear.
From Etyl's perspective, she spun to see the darkness congealing into a wall of midnight scales burning into the very air as it swept toward her. She could not block or dodge, such was the speed and scale. Thus, a dull, hardly perceptible thud echoed before her form, enveloped in dark fire, was seen rocketing down the cavern.
Etyl had more to give, however. Small shockwaves of arcana dispersed the shadowfire burning her and simultaneously faced her retrograde. Then, her blades went into their dance, projecting a flurry of slashes and spells at the evading Cononthoth, all while casting crimson webs and chaotic bursts at Opal and Tava.
The momentum reversed when Etyl landed on a pad of webs spawned from her feet. Tava and Kele engaged with divine spells and hammer swings from above and to the left while Cononthoth and Limy approached with breath and fist from below and the right; Opal faded into the gloom; I descended to that violet staff of chaos.
Perhaps in knowing she was beset on all sides, Etyl did the unthinkable and faced what she assumed to be the biggest threat with a fighter's stance. She sheathed her mana forged blades into her spirit, replacing them with knife-hands packed with arcana while she wove a many-layered clamshell of arcane wards and crimson webs to stave the other three. And when the dark flames of Cononthoth's breath filled her vision, she lunged, parting the sea of flames into a deep dale, headed by a stellar light that was her target.
Carried by her momentum, Etyl rushed into the beast's maw with arcana crackling around her hands, reforming her deadly scimitars before they lashed out like vipers. Yet, all her blades caught was darkness.
A slate black hand rushed forward from the shadows to grasp Etyl's wrist, appearing a full meter below her target. Surprised by the giantess of a drow suddenly appearing before her, Etyl hardly resisted Cononthoth's - or Sovereign Galendra's pull.
While her feet were lifted from the ground, Etyl still managed a half-assed block of the Sovereigns monstrous punch. She was only blown back by a couple of meters and rebounded immediately, wheeling around to Sovereign Galendra's rear with enough speed to produce an afterimage, twin blades poised low for a rising sweep. She caught Limy instead. The undying shadow faded into ribbons of flesh to reveal Tava in her place, blood blades spawned in a ring around her. Yet, the moment they lunged and the instant Etyl reacted, the night grew bright.
Gilded metal enveloped Etyl's frame like the sun's corona during a solar eclipse, obscuring all but the predacious crimson eyes looking down on the matron, cursing the burning radiance and the sapping darkness of the Brightest Night. Thrashing with everything she had, Etyl managed to push her off. Yet Opal's magic remained.
Streaking ribbons of blood poured from Etyl's neck and gushed through her fingers as she manifested a mass of healing webs. Tava's blades went into action before the webs could fully form, yet Etyl persisted. She leaped high and remained levitating, flipping to dodge and continue her healing while webs carried her to safety, even while keeping an eye on the blood shield forming in Opal's free hand. Yet, she was losing her edge. Blood blades clinked against her armor in places, lacerating exposed skin and adding more threats to her cloud of doom.
Through it all, I had been descending, and had just drifted to a halt before the last piece of G'eldantaar, held in place by a few crimson webs with no other protection. I connected to Limy's soul in my Under as I reached for it, guiding her resurrection to the top of this inverted pot. As my intent washed over Cononthoth, she ordered Kele to detach from the wall and plummet to the bottom of this chasm, where Reina's taproot waited.
The Void Devil's Tongue unfurled from my mouth as my hand fell around the staff, making the more wicked parts of my spirit flare in anticipation of hearing my words in Deep Abyssal.
"As is above, so is below; beset by the sky spread between them. So is Light. So is darkness. So is the Twilight to fuel the Gloom's horns, returning her essence to those realms beyond the sky. As above, so below."
Light, darkness, and nearly all the divine mana in my spirit gushed down my arm like a stampede of energy pushed into a panic by the wicked energy goading it forward. The crimson-violet grains twitched and writhed as if it were a beast, expressing its dying throes, having been slain by the divine black grains creeping down its length, illuminated from within by an unholy light.
Blinding light poured from above not a fraction of a second later, eclipsed by Tava, floating above with her wings spread wide to purify and concentrate the radiance. Simultaneously, Kele stood far below, using rising sweeps of her arms to guide my deepest darkness into a point and send it skyward like an abyssal geyser.
From above and below, dissimilar energies, material compositions, and seeds of consciousness surged toward this small portion of the Dark Sky.
The result was most spectacular.
Empowered by the light, Tava dove, thrusting out her arm to shoot a beam of solid light. Etyl sent out a thrust of her own as if she foresaw the move, releasing a roiling red wave of chaos that made the light lose its luster, fizzle, and fade into a stream of webs. Opal followed with a spear of darkness and Etyl flared with her mana forged blade, shattering the shadows from afar. Cononthoth attacked with her breath and Etyl spat her Goddess' malice, rendering a dragon's wrath moot. All were diversions, however, for I had one more curse to bestow with this staff.
Pointing its darkened point at the ancient drow, I let all the wickedness pour from my spirit and onto my ancestor's tongue, causing the staff's inner glow to shift from gold to a deeper black before it sprang forth, lashing her very soul with a mark that would persist across death's door.
"Welcome to the family, Aunt Etyl."