Book 6: Chapter 31 - Cataclysm [RAW]

The Black Flame will come when the once-innocent breathes its name. It will destroy those of the Green from root to crown, a devouring wind made fire. The heavens will burn like oiled night silk, the land drowning in ash. Pray to stone and river; neither hears. Only the coming blaze listens for judgment.

- Attributed to the Wrack Witch before her execution circa 245 AC.

I watched one of the last Goblins crawl toward the treeline, its limbs trembling, its movements sluggish with fear. It dragged itself like some wounded beast, hoping for mercy in a world that had given me none. So none, I would give it. 

In those moments, I followed behind at a canter at no more than twenty paces, and I fancied myself a god. One of the cruel ones, the old kind. The sort who watched men suffer not for justice, but for amusement and sport. I would let the thing live if it could withstand the spell I meant to loose upon it. A test. A kindness, perhaps, wrapped in the trappings of a need to inflict torment.

Theodore, ever eager, snorted and stomped, his armored bulk quivering with the urge to crush. It took a firm tug at the reins and a sharper word to keep him from simply trampling the creature into pulp.

Instead, I reached inward, toward the cold whisper of a spell seldom used, Decay. It was an odd thing, brittle and strange, less a spell and more a whisper of finality. Still, I wondered if, pushed, it could be honed into something sharper, something deadlier. So I layered it with Overboost, and when the spell reached its fullness, I pointed. A gesture, simple, almost lazy, and yet it struck with the slow force of a storm uncoiling.

Decay did not rush from me like flame or thunder. It surged, unseen and silent, a pall of rot and ruin. I felt it hit. Felt it hit resistance, but the spell would not be stopped. Not this time. As if it were a river being forced through a straw, it continued to flow into the target. And then, so suddenly, the resistance broke. The thing that had denied my spell before, when cast on still living targets, shattered like cheap glass. The spell had found itself and knew joy.

For a heartbeat, nothing happened. Then came the smell.

It was the stench of a grave cracked open too soon. Flesh browned, sloughed, and split, peeling back from bone in strips. The goblin screamed, its voice high and alien, shrill as a kettle boiling water. It thrashed and shrieked as its body withered, as if rot had grown impatient with time and devoured the meat while it still lived. Then, just as suddenly, it ceased. Then, without its life as a ward against my magic of endings, the thing crumbled into so much gray ash, its death a whisper against the wind coming from the faraway sea.

You have slain a Goblin. 17 experience gained.

This little engagement, though to call it little would be a lie, had earned me several thousand experience points. Most of the killing had been done not by my hand, but by the wide sweep of my spells and Theodore’s relentless, thundering rampage. We were overleveled for this region, far beyond what the local monsters and NPCs could hope to challenge. And in that knowledge was a very dark kind of joy.

What I had done felt wrong; using my spell in such a way had felt so very antithetical to nature, to balance, to the laws of existence. And yet, it also felt right. As though I had breached some sacred law and found, not guilt, but pleasure in the violation. Like a man who tastes blood or a woman’s struggles for the first time and discovers he enjoys the flavor.

Theodore grunted in irritation, stamping the earth hard enough to send up clods of the black soil. His prey had perished too swiftly, and worse still, had turned to dust, leaving nothing to eat. I looked down and noticed where once his flanks had been splattered with Goblin offal and sticky strands of gut; now only ashes clung, falling like gray snow from his armor. Dust fell from me, too—less than from him, but enough.

Then I heard it.

A sound, faint at first—a low, mournful wail rising from the deeper reaches of the wild jungle. But it did not stay faint. It grew. Rose. Swelled until it became a terrible keening, a cry that slipped past the ears and pierced straight into the skull.

Theodore groaned, stumbling a step, his great head shaking in pain. I felt it too, a slow drain, subtle but steady. My Health dipped, tick by tick, despite my Holy Aura and my passive regenerative. I turned him from the sound, spurred him into a lurching trot. The effect lessened with distance, but not enough. I knew in my marrow that we could not outrun it. Not like this. Not on legs so heavy.

It had been long since I had felt magic like this. Not since the Elves. Not since their moonlit rites and killing songs. Even my Improved Entropic Aura failed to fully dampen it. The spell that assailed us did not come with the roaring heat of fire or the slicing edge of wind. It was slow. Insidious. There was not enough energy in it to trigger the arcane shield that fed on raw Mana—no dramatic surge, no flashy flare. Just steady, engineered harm. Death, by precise and slow degrees.

Had I been alone, perhaps I could have outrun it. Left it behind, escaped its creeping tendrils. But I was not alone. Theodore was mine—my mount, my beast, my blood-soaked companion—and I had poured too much of my resources into him. I would not abandon him now.

So I did what I could.

I cast Heal—first upon him, then upon myself. A brief reprieve. A moment’s delay. We had bought ourselves time, but not enough. And all the while, my mind raced, scraping for options. There were few. Much too few.

I was near to tearing my hair from my skull, such was the depth of my frustration, when I saw her my word. She raced toward me with reckless speed. For an instant, I knew only anger. I had told her to retreat. To protect the others. And yet here she was, defiant, her Lirkud gliding across the earth faster than any common horse.

But as she drew near, my fury faltered. The jungle’s dark spell, that keening, unseen wound in the world, seemed to ripple around her but not through her. She was untouched. Or nearly so. Her skin glistened with a sheen of sweat, but there was no pain in her eyes, only grim determination.

Her mouth moved, lips shaping a chant—words woven to an old melody, half-forgotten yet maddeningly familiar. The words tugged at something buried within me, a thread of memory I could not place.

I cast Sage’s Sight, and the words’ meaning unfolded in color and whisper: Dur-Tiamati, the Shield of Chaos. Her spell enfolded me, cloaking me in a ward that shimmered with strange and ancient hues. Her magic wove itself around my limbs, and the malignant pulse of the goblins’ sorcery retreated before it, hissing like steam upon steel.

“We’d best get out of here, Gil!” she shouted over the sound of the jungle’s fury. “Come on! The Goblin Shamans—they’re casting something huge!”

Sweet child, I thought to myself. One does not greet insult with acceptance. 

“Better reasons to stop them now. Launch your black flames, let us disrupt them. We must also think of Damien’s men. They are counting on us, Larynda,” I told my ward. 

Honor demanded nothing less of me.

“No, we've got to go, Gil!” she cried. Larynda blinked, then grinned. “That’s… actually, you might be right! If we cast something together! Fire against fire! Let’s give them a spell to remember,” she beamed with a wide, joyful smile.

For a moment, I saw not the battle-hardened mage she’d become, but the girl she once was.

Her chant deepened, slowed. No longer tentative, but sure, bold, hungry. The pooled might of the Goblin Shamans’ spell beat against our wards like fists against a door. Our mounts trembled beneath us, but we held firm. I matched the rhythm of her incantation with my Overboost, threading my power through hers, careful to reinforce each part of her spell construct.

This was no ordinary calling of the Black Flame. I felt it in the hollow places of my soul. Her words lengthened, swelled with meaning. It was a great magic she summoned now. A true working. This was to be not merely destructive, but almost sacred in its violence. 

There was something new in her eyes—something sharp, ravenous that reflected the very spell she was bringing into the world. As though she had dipped her hands into the primordial well of the world and liked the taste of what she found. She cast her gaze beyond the veil, to places not meant for mortals, and for a moment that stretched like the long breath between seasons, she touched upon the sublime.

She lifted both her staves toward the sky, and the heavens seemed to open in answer.

And so the sky split.

A streak of shadowed flame tore across the firmament, blacker than pitch, trailing a wake of roiling midnight embers. It moved with the fury of a god’s wrath made manifest. The very air shuddered as it passed overhead, and the jungle trembled beneath it, trees bending, beasts fleeing. Even the keening halted, the Goblin Shamans faltering in their wicked rites as they no doubt turned their eyes upward.

A meteor of the Black Flame struck the ground like punishment.

Far beyond the line of sight, past the coiling ridges of the jungle canopy, there came a flash—not of light, but of chaotic darkness. A sphere of pure black swallowed the world, devouring sky, and for a moment, there was only absence. Then came the sound.

The impact roared like the sundering of the world. A concussive wave exploded outward, flattening trees in an instant, destroying great swaths of jungle. A pillar of black and violet flame surged from the point of impact, climbing endlessly, devouring clouds, reaching for the stars like the accusing finger of a forgotten god.

Then came the wind.

Not a breeze. Not even a gale. A force. The blast slammed into us with the weight of mountains, a wall of air made murderously solid. Theodore reared, bellowing, struggling to remain grounded. Though shielded by my mount’s bulk, the Lirkud screamed, almost lifted into the sky by the fury of the blast. Dust, ash, and shattered debris washed over us in waves, thick enough to darken the sun.

And just like that, I realized, the goblin spell was simply gone.

Snuffed out. As if a blade had sliced through a string. One moment it pressed against our magical defenses, and the next… nothing. Silence. An unnatural hush, the kind that follows great catastrophes. The world had gone still, stunned by what had been wrought.

Nothing could have survived that.

Even now, from across the horizon, a vast column of smoke and black fire boiled upward. The edges of the flame glowed with unnatural colors—amethyst, blood-red, and something else that defied the eye’s grasp. Somewhere in that direction, the jungle burned. It would not stop burning. These flames were hungrier than anything half-elven girl had conjured into this world before.

Larynda’s breathing was ragged beside me. She swayed in the saddle, both hands still clutched around her staves as if afraid letting go would shatter her. Her face was pale, but her eyes… her eyes burned.

“Did… did we do that?” she asked, voice hoarse, cracked not by awe and fear, but something else—excitement. 

Her hands gripped her staves, knuckles white as she repeated herself. I saw with eyes enhanced by the magic of this world that the girl had become more solid, become stronger. “More,” I thought I heard her whisper. No doubt she had just gained a few levels.

“No,” I said softly, almost to myself. “You did.”

And in that moment, I knew something terrible and wonderful: the girl I had once sworn to protect was becoming something else entirely. I saw now why the elves had sought the life of my ward, why they had crossed the seas to try and end her life.

Larynda had become death, become Cataclysm, destroyer of worlds.

And she would do anything I asked of her.