The Third Portal: Chapter Sixty-Seven

While the rest of the world had their eyes locked onto the Crystal Cove, Vivian clicked down the halls of the vast tomb under the capital of Nightflock. In the nearly two centuries since she’d broken Orykson’s leash and Nightflock had become independent, nearly every single citizen of her nation that had died had been interred within this great burial mound. 

Between a quarter to a half a million people every year, for close to two hundred years. 

Admittedly, one in three of them was reanimated by either herself or one of her government officials in order to maintain their military forces and order-makers, and in recent years that number had even started to rise. Getting her old master to kill those meddlesome heros seemed to have only exacerbated the public support for the causes they had supported. 

Even with that, though, there were still tens of millions of dead within the barrows. 

While it was well known that Nightflock didn’t have any ghosts or shades of humans wandering about the way that most countries did, most had the reason why reversed. They thought that the ghosts and shades were broken apart using harvesting spells, and used to power her undead armies. 

The truth was far stranger: only those who didn’t spawn a ghost or shade were ever chosen for service in the army of the dead. The altars where the ghosts and shades were supposedly sacrificed to produce the death mana instead took them elsewhere. 

Vivian’s soul mana flowed out, unlocking a seal that she had personally placed over the deepest parts of the facility as she began to spiral downwards, through the countless halls of ancient dead, powerful magical machinery, and geomantic arrays and to the heart of the barrow. 

It was here that the death energy that each interred corpse emitted was siphoned off to. It was here that the ghosts and shades of every single dead that produced them were siphoned to. The magic kept them all here, bound within a massive spiritual circle, where they squirmed and writhed. They were trapped by her death magic, alongside the death spirits that naturally spawned in the complex and got sucked in.

And they screamed. Oh, did they scream. 

Vivian was a death, lunar, desolation, and mental mage, after all, and she’d woven her magics together into a nasty torture spell which every spirit in this trap was constantly subjected to. It took a great portion of her power to manage it, but it was done. 

She watched the tank, waiting for it to hit critical mass. It was getting close, she knew that much. The other Magi might laugh and jibe at her for being the weakest of their number, but they wouldn’t for long. 

The death energy harvested in secret from more than fifty million people, alongside their tortured spirits would produce the barrow writhemetal, the perfect natural treasure for her. 

Though she called herself the Death Queen, she knew she wasn’t powerful enough to claim that title. How could she claim to have more power than the Death Kings of old? 

It was utterly ridiculous, and she didn’t know how the Sun and Moon Queens had managed to lie to the universe and claim themselves more powerful than a Solar King or Lunar King. Vivian personally chalked it up to their strange duality bonding, and suspected that if one died, the other’s power would shatter like brittle glass.

And soon, she’d have an advantage not entirely unlike that flighty, lovesick couple. 

Her barrow writhemetal would create a channel between where her legacy resided within her soul, through the soul mana where her Title focused her resonance, through the soulself, through the well in the center of her ungated mana, and then up into her Mandate. 

The legacy was already the foundation upon which the accessible layers of soul laid. With this, her foundation would spread throughout her entire soul, empowering everything with its own might. 

And her legacy was very, very strong. The Drops of Destiny legacy was the sort of thing that could turn an average aeromage into one worthy of frequent competition in the Elysian Mastery Tournament. 

By combining her powerful legacy with this particular treasure?

She would become strong enough to crush Orykson, and any other Magi that got in her way. 

Just over two years left…

---

The leader of the Cult of the Prime groaned as she shoveled yet another mana source into her spirit. With only the mediocre mana batteries that they’d been able to produce, and without being able to find a place where she could physically store vast quantities of energy to harvest later, the best way to overload the mana-garden and advance was to just absorb high gate mana sources directly. 

Casually, she checked her estimated time for her and all of her attendants to become ninth gate mages. Gauging a person’s advancement speed in any sort of truly accurate number was difficult, but generalizations could certainly be made. 

One and a half years for her, three years for the new Lord of Time she had minted. Six years for the rest of them, who were having to construct their Titles from essentially nothing.

She wanted to slam her head against the wall. Six years? She was going to be stuck in this pathetic, tiny worldspirit for six more years? She was going to lose her mind with only these fools to speak to. 

She checked on the chaining magic that was forcing the spirit to obey their commands, then added another patch of magic from the Space King, just to make sure things were still working fine, and to make sure the entrance would not allow a trace of power outside. Secrecy was of the utmost importance if she wanted to be able to storm out of here with her army of Magi.

She couldn’t wait to see the look on all of the current traitorous Magi’s faces when more power than all of them held together emerged at once. She’d probably let Orykson kill the Space King first. She knew he would, and the Space King deserved it. Despite supposedly supporting the Cult, she’d provided the power for the prison.

Once he’d had a chance to strike, then she’d be able to swoop in and kill their great enemy, Orykson. That would be difficult, but she had some plans. 

She walked to the vault of prepared treasures, taken across the hundreds of years the Cult had hunted since the sealing of the Primes, and removed a pair of scissors, examining them. Weapons that were built to kill the unkillable man. 

First, they would use a fragment of a spell cast by an old Desolation King to kill him. That should trigger his life chest at worst, and at best, utterly evaporate his body. Either way, it would pave the way to the next weapon. 

A pair of scissors, built by Silver Tide to trace the connection to any bound parts of a soul, and then destroy whatever they were connected to. It would break the vessel he used for his lichdom. 

She knew that even if the vessel that housed his soul was destroyed, he had made certain his soul was robust enough to survive for hours, perhaps even a day, without a body before it passed on, and would fly back to the castle and possess one of his spare bodies from his experimentations with mimicfruit and bioengineering. 

Which was why the second artifact was a soul-rending needle that was left over from a Death King, one that would punch through those defenses and expose him to the cold touch of whatever it was that came after death.

But she had done her research, and she suspected, though couldn’t prove, that his legacy would allow him to return from death. It had happened once, roughly eight centuries ago, and never since then had he been in such danger. 

Which was why she’d prepared a contingency for that as well. In addition to the soul-rending needle, she had an item plucked from a sepulcher, one that was capable of suppressing a legacy for a single minute. Normally, such a feat was nearly impossible, but the sepulchers were strange, and tended to bend the rules. By loading it into the needle, he would die. 

Of course, there was always a chance that he would somehow have another trick up his sleeve. Something that would let him return, again. Some power he’d kept hidden forever, or more likely, something he’d more recently developed. 

She had countermeasures for them all. Soulburning flames that could kill those who had eaten a peach of immortality. Agewater for those who kept an imprint of themselves. Severthread for those who kept magic on a separated astral plane. 

Even if he’d done the impossible, and somehow managed to split the container for his soul into multiple different parts – a feat that should only be possible if he was the Death King, which she knew he would never allow himself to be – she had prepared a backup: a tether-destroying athame. Not as strong as Silver Tide’s scissors, but a channeled artifact that she could pass into Vivian’s hands.

No matter what trick he had up his sleeves, she’d prepared a countermeasure for it. This chest of tools was worth more than most city-states could produce in a century. 

But if all of it failed, she had one final trick to play. Once she and the others were at the peak of ninth gate, she’d no longer have any need of this worldspirit. She had prepared a tool to shove him inside, then completely sever the spirit’s connection to Ddeaer. Even Orykson couldn’t retrieve something from a shunted astral plane. 

The severing would take the better part of an hour to work, but with Idyll no longer a worldspirit, and no other seventh gate or higher worldspirits capable of using their Title to shatter the bindings from the outside, it would be foolproof. Even the Space King couldn’t quite manage it. 

“Boss, you’re leaking,” one of her attendants said. She sighed and nodded, focusing on stuffing down another mana source, holding the power in place. 

By the Primes, how was she going to survive six more years of this?

---

Orykson paused in his castle, where he was stuffing the shades from the Hero’s Party that had attacked Vivian into what Malachi likely would have dubbed a ‘shade blender’ or something equally inane. He had suddenly been struck with the most peculiar urge to sneeze – which was especially odd, as he’d not physically needed to sneeze in centuries.

Working that bit of bioengineering had been quite the hassle, as the nose was one of the more potent bundles of physical energy in the human body. 

Aerde pulsed a quick scan, just in case it was one of his winds alerting him to danger, but none of them came back with anything, so Orykson turned back to the project he’d been working with on and off for the last few centuries. Between the shades and the purge jewels, he’d recently been able to add a lot more power to the design, and thought the prototype might be ready for testing fairly soon.

---

The first spear of the first decanus smiled and nodded as the fox-tailed boy cashed in his points, projecting every bit the happy salesman, while inside, he sighed. 

Of the sixty agents of the Cult of the Primes that had been sent to Crysite, fifty had been there to cause trouble, and would try to kill Elio and Idyll. After all, nobody would suspect a cell of attackers that attacked Idyll would be linked to the group that had worked to break her free of the Flume. The perfect smokescreen. And if they managed to kill them, all the better – Orykson didn’t need more servants. 

But the fifty had failed, and used their spirit disintegration pills to ensure they couldn’t be questioned. That was frustrating, but understandable. 

Now it was the first spear’s job to lay in wait. Silent, slow, and careful, he’d infiltrate the Brighteyes as a normal man. Then, when their glorious leader revealed herself to the world, he’d be in position, along with the rest of his decanus, to shatter the bureaucracy of Orykson’s most recent experiment. He just needed to be patient.