Czar took off his burnt out, dreary, leather boots and left them to melt in the toxic green pit behind.
'If Toril and Julius are supposed to be working together, like Jordan had told, then why would Julius join hands with the Necromancer...?' Czar's thoughts ran a mile a minute.
'Then...Julius did mention something about Necromancer promising him a new scent. But—' Czar scoffs, 'there is no way Julius would out Aningmoon under the bus. There is no way—'
He sucks in a conflicted breath.
With blistered feet he paces down the staircase to find a broken car door, curved into a ball at odd angles, gracing his path. He jumps over it, only to find Rosetta's body slumped in between the empty bricked path.
Nettie Maely had overpowered his Rosetta. Toril Maely was getting on his fucking nerves. Julius had still not got his shit together. Aningmoon was under red alert and Edith— she's still at the Aningmoon Castle!!
His teeth clench, sharp vision zoning on his pet's bleeding forehead and defeated form. He could not smell Nettie Maley's scent in proximity.
Edith was sent to the East Wing. There was no way she would live to see the fall of Aningmoon. Unless...unless...well fuck.
Pulling out his phone, Czar dials a number.
"Rima Suzuno?" He questions as soon as the line gets connected.
"The very beloved. The very expensive."
"Brickery County, Lane 4, there is an injured black panther."
"You don't waste your time in small talk anymore," Comes a slurred voice behind him. Czar turns to see the small figure of the ancient witch of Anubis standing behind him.
"You lost that privilege a long while ago," Czar dryly replies, walking up to his bike and putting on his helmet.
She was an ally from the Anubis Hollows, a beautiful and feisty witch of Japanese origin. Born with a natural beauty that connected her magic-core with the ethereal eternity of nature, she aged every second. Most powerful in summer, brilliant in spring, drowsy in autumn and tough in winter.
Her lush grassy hair cascade down her back, ending a little before her ankles. Barefoot, she walked upto Rosetta's body. Her sharp features contoured in a frown, meticulous purple eyes narrowing at something ambiguous.
Uncertainty laced her green eyebrows in a frown.
"This is a very serious case," Rima speaks, placing a pale green hand on Rosetta's head and other pale yellow hand over Rosetta's heart. The weak lub-dub of the panther's heart echoes in her ears.
"Then make it easy before the week ends."
He revs up the engine, accelerating rudely loud in Rima's face, and races out of her sight.
"It's not a magic from Earth, Czar Castellanos. This is not something I tamper with," Rima replies to no one in particular, standing up and soundlessly disappearing from plain sight.
<3
Pristine Maley's pale hand was about to clutch the doorknob on the basement door when the silence around her shattered.
Quite literally.
Her heightened senses caught a small hum at first, which magnified into collective footsteps, hollow, rough, racing together, as if galloping.
But before she could ponder, the wall behind her blew up.
All Pristine felt was an overwhelming force thrusting her forward and knocking the air out of her lungs.
"In the back?!"
Something burnt. Ashes flew.
"That's real shitty."
Her chin crashed against the door, cracking, teeth cutting through her tongue and the metallic taste of blood invading in her taste buds. She groans on the beat of ticking clocks, cracking walls and incomprehensible communication.
Guttural voices hissing out words she couldn't understand.
Her head hit the debris two walls beyond the point of attack. She inhales blood from her nostrils and chokes on ashes. Broken, sharp, stones fall over her, impaling her hands, back and legs.
"Therapy for betrayal costs a lot these days...and..."
One of them pierces her nape.
There's a deafening beep ringing in her ears as she coughs up blood. She is numb to the pain; pulling out her hands through the impaled stones she tries to raise her head up.
She pulls out another stone from her nape and clutches it in her palm.
The beep subsides.
The sound footsteps fall back on her ears.
"...I'm at a very impressionable age."
Pristine turns her hurting neck to look behind at the coward's attack.
It's nothing. Darkness has consumed everything. Her heartbeat flickers.
It was Necromancer's darkness.
All she sees inside, apart from a thick veil of black, is floating grey ash and firey embers.
And them. Her pupils dilate.
Skeletons. With flames burning inside their ribs.
Leisurely walking up to her. Grunting out unintelligible noises.
Pristine's gut drops.
Her heartbeat picks up pace, red eyes widening. Panic makes her impaled limbs grow cold. Where were Toril and Nettie when she needed them the most?
Impressionable age or not, this would be very traumatic if it came to play.
Her mind can connect the dots together. Her father has opened hell over their head...what did he sign with the Necromancer?
Her bloody nose and injured tongue have already healed themselves. She throws the stone in her palm, at them, but nothing happens.
It just...disappears. Into ashes.
She gulps, gulping blood from her bleeding cheeks as her body involuntarily crawls her further away from these creatures' reach.
Her dragging fingers against the floor leave a white glowing line of synergy. Broken debris around her levitates above, gravitating towards each other in their original place. Wherever they were meant to be.
She's creating walls again. Barriers to stop the darkness from consuming everything. But she's a little too late.
A flaming scythe flies at her head.
With a quick gesture of her hand, Pristine manipulates the debris to protect her like a shield. The skeleton's weapon breaks through her barrier, burning the stones to ashes. The flames had burned through Pristine's synergy within the bricked wall.
"I see you aren't biased by my cuteness—" Pristine whispers to herself before the Scythe can plunge her eyes out.
In the haste of the moment, Pristine takes her chances. She pulls at the particles around and gravitates it downward, increasing the gravity inside the hallway.
Her synergy was not working directly on these creatures, so she tries to manipulate external forces to affect them, hoping, desperately, that it would work.
The scythe falls to the ground along with flaming skeletons, broken physically but still going ahead individually. Pristine increases the force in her fingers, before breaking into sweat because of all the heat around them.
But the flaming bones kept crawling towards her.
And the void kept coming for her.
It was not worth it.
"These are creatures of hell, my magic of mortal existence would be no help here," Pristine mumbles. When one cannot tackle a problem, running away is the best choice.
In a split second she lets go of the pressure on her fingers.
Gravity normalises itself.
The void gets faster.
The bones stack into skeletons again.
And Pristine runs.
Purple flaming weapons hurl at her retreating figure while her heart pounds in her ears. If any one of those touched her skin, it would take more than her own magic to heal.
Her speed isn't fast enough because she was injured.
But it happens quick.
She's evading arrows, manipulating the floor and the walls to rise and take a hit when hears the sound of a gunshot.
Resonating through her heightened senses.
She doesn't see it though.
Pristine immediately sits on the ground and manipulates the walls to extend around her and pulls the ceiling down over her head. She cages herself like a coward.
Her heart is racing as she pulls her knees to her chest, sweaty hands hugging herself. She cannot zone out those horrifying noises around her.
"Inhale and exhale, you can do it, it's alright. It's quite fine. Don't worry, you have to make it big in life. You are built for a better purpose," She chants to herself. Her voice is breaking, throaty, all her senses are faltering, she is scared.
What did Toril Maely sign on?
Because anyone engulfed by the void or devoured by the flaming skeletons ceases to exist in all mortal realms.
Pristine fears being forgotten but her last thoughts still remain, "I hope people will start taking global warming seriously."
Before she is consumed by the darkness.
<3
The Necromancer struts through the dingy halls of Czar's Aningmoon Castle with his party wrecking chaos around him— Pushing flower vases, twerking their dead butts over ancient books and licking the walls because the wallpaper smelled nice.
"So this is the infamous epicenter of rebellion. Lame. I expected...more exuberance in one of Czar's works," Necromancer drawls out, craning his neck at the sad and dull maroon wallpapers of the hallways. He, for one, was a lover of aesthetics and clearly Czar wasn't one of them.
Pity.
One of his men poke his laptop's edge in his back. Necromancer turns to look at all those green lines on his screen going up and up. He grins widely with his charcoal teeth.
"Blimey, da lines doin' real fine, my fam, yer gon feat tonide!!" He cheers to his party of undead lurking around him. They make noises of pleasure somewhere inside their mouths and scatter around to lick better places of the castle.
Or so Necromancer guesses.
"Today's turning out real lucky," Necromancer breaths out a smile. His stock investment was raging higher by the minute and his deal with Toril Maely was going to be real profitable.
Toril Maely. Hm.
Necromancer's mind reels back to today's afternoon when he had his hands on Toril's head, reading his mind.
— It was foggy and messy, a whirlwind of haze but it started with Toril being led to a door by a beautiful woman.
— "This is the experiment room," She had informed in her husky voice just a few octaves loud enough to be heard by Toril.
— She had stopped in front of a door and opened it with a key. "You'll find him inside," Was her last whisper of information before she flew past him like a gentle spring breeze.
— Toril had gulped. He was nervous. He was scared. But, he twisted the doorknob anyways.
— Curiosity always got the best of him.
— He saw a boy, lying on a wooden table right in front of the door. His head was hanging off the edge while his hollow grey eyes stared through Toril's soul. His silver hair were hanging off his head, swaying with the boy's breaths.
— Toril felt eerie and uncomfortable. The room was cold and unmoving. As if everything around them had stopped. But it was not deliberate.
— Birds in cages and insects in boxes were all voluntarily still. The windows were bolted shut, dust laden, so the only source of light was the hanging light bulb over the boy's head.
— "I'm Toril. Who are you?" He had initiated a conversation, still clung to the doorframe so that he could run away easily.
— The boy blinked. The only motion inside the room was too big to be missed.
— "I'm Marlin," His voice was squeaky, youthful and fresh unlike his appearance. He rolls to his right and falls onto a dusty couch and then to the floor.
— Toril had a mental kneejerk reaction to walk upto the small boy and help him up. But, somehow, his foot remained plastered to the ground.
— "Are you the alchemist I'm supposed to work with?" The boy had asked, voice rough.
— Toril nodded.
— Marlin nodded.
—The silver hair boy pulls a spoon out of his loose grey shorts and starts scratching the ground.
— "Where do we start?" Toril had broken the sinful silence over them, burying the scratching sounds in the back of his head.
— "We kill a man," The boy had replied.
All of the following visions were hazy, blurred together in a mush of words. As if Toril had tried remembering them but someone wanted him not to. The memories of Necromancer's making were all gone.
But there was one, of the 'presentation day'. The day the Necromancer was unveiled in front of the Blood Empire.
— Toril dragged a white coffin behind which was sitting elegantly on a trolley. Marlin was walking beside him and the beautiful lady in front.
— "It's impressive how Marlin mastered life and death and manifested it into a creation. His Highness is going to be so proud of you," The lady had spoken in her husky voice, as soft as a duck feather.
— "Yes," Marlin had replied, turning his hollow eyes to stare at Toril. In that split second, Troil had witnessed the boy's chapped lips curling up while his hollow eyes stared him down.
— The strange pleasure in Marlin's breath had Toril's limbs growing cold before he felt something hit his head.
And it all went black. Muffled hoarse words echoed through his head.
— Then he opened his golden eyes in a brand new century. With victorian curls on his head and ruffles around his neck and wrists, he took a pale maiden's porcelain hand in his and breathed out sweetly, "Nettie, my beloved, let us create a child."
Then on, Necromancer could see nothing of this "child" of theirs. But he was hit with a tornado of words.
— "She is Pristine."
— "She is the beginning."
— "You have no future."
— "You have created the beginning and the end and they will cease to exist individually."
— "Your creations will have no future."
Necromancer's eyes had flung open at that statement. He would see no more. If Pristine was the supposed 'beginning' and he was the supposed 'end' then he would need to put a full stop to this beginning.
All beginnings must be forgotten for the End to prevail.
Necromancer's heart fluttered, in exhilaration, just like it would when he would see his stock prices rise.
"I bare no grudges against you, Czar Castello," Necromancer whispered out, playing with the black sparkles on his fingertips, "You're just trying to play a game of lost and found," He thrusted his hands out and lets the black glittering dust of magic surround the small hallway and make way for itself, "But in a bigger picture, you are irrelevant."
Head held high and floating on a cloud of dead souls, the Necromancer inhales the scent of power.
"The only one who will be irrelevant today is YOU!!" Comes a sudden shout.
Towards him ran a small woman, hurling kitchen knives which depreciated into nothingness as soon as they came in contact with the sparkling black dust.
"Hear ye, 'ear ye, a brave lass is out 'ere do be squished," The Necromancer laughs out loud.
"I am the Dame of this Castle and I will protect this place till my last breath!" She screeches again before sucking in a breath and begining to shapeshift into a wolf.
Necromancer presses his lips in a thin line and raises an eyebrow at her antics.
"Granted," He sighs with a flick of his arm.
Before Sabrina could even complete her shift a black hole opened beside her and sucked her in.
"Well that happened."
Pests.
The Necromancer dusted his hands against his breasts and regains his smile.
"Go on, my cosmic luster and tell them, the Void is on its way."
And he floats his way to place where he could feel the aura of an immense magic.
The only place where the void won't be.
Because he would be.
The East Wing.