The Restored: Chapter Twenty-Six

Not sure I'll be able to get a chapter out tomorrow as a heads up. I'm still settling in after moving.

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Alyphize walked down the street in the direction of the Central Aura Depository, and struggled to stop herself from smiling. A demon walking down the street wasn’t unheard of in Elderglass, but an unnatural smile would make her seem slightly too suspicious. 

It had taken her the better part of two and a half centuries to pull her plan together. 

Five beastkin lifespans, those short lived races. Even among the longer lived beings like the faerie blooded elves, two and a half centuries was enough time to grow from an infant into the start of their senior years. 

Her own servant, the Soulwitch some called the Arenamaster, had only been able to retain her middle age thanks to some of Alyphize’s own powers traded away to those angels that were amenable to her cause. 

In that time, Alyphize had seen the world changing, both in the city of Elderglass, and the Fallen Void. 

Elderglass had gone from a small city that was constantly sinking into the groundwater flooded moors of wet volcanic ash making up their foundation to the largest economic power in the world. She couldn’t claim credit for that, of course, but it had been fascinating to watch their star rise. 

The Fallen Void’s changes had been subtler. Quasi-immortal beings like angels, demons, faeries, elementals, mind spirits, and djinn were not prone to changing easily, but of them all, it was the demons who changed the most. She had seen much: the toppling of her father’s Throne of Gambling, the transfer of power of who sat on the Throne of Pride, the bright star of Ayzler rising from fresh spawn to the Heir of Pain, and a hundred other more besides. 

For all of the change that she had experienced in the centuries since she’d found the tomb, she knew that none of it would even come close to rivaling what she was doing now. 

The thought of the tomb caused a twinge of annoyance to run through her. As far as she was aware, she was the only person across all of the Fallen Void to find the burial site of one of the ancient Impartiates to one of the Sundered Thrones. 

She’d planned on using those materials in her vast, city-spanning ritual, but after the destruction of the primary vault that her servant had been maintaining, nearly half of those materials had been lost. 

If she didn’t still have the athame, she’d have needed time to fabricate better connections, and might even have needed to walk out into the Void’s wastes in order to search for another tomb containing Soulstuff connected to the ancient throne. 

The artifact seemed to buzz in her soul as she thought about it, its sharp power just as happy to rip from her as it was from others. Alyphize closed her eyes for a moment and quieted the magic in it, before drawing it out into existence and stepping into the Depository. 

As she did, she ran the edge of the blade along the edge of the doorframe, and drew from the power of her tethered enforcers. She used the connection to Zone to stop the wards from reacting, then used the power from Deepwater to drain power from them, channeling the aura directly into her own magic, then used the power from the Soulwitch to transform it into soulstuff. 

The ward wasn’t directly hooked to the central crystal, but her action gave her a touch more power, and stopped the wards from preventing her from detecting her as she entered, which in turn should stop most of the other wards from activating on her. 

She stepped into the lobby and checked on everything, just to make sure there was no problem with her plans. 

Sixty-three demons moved through the tunnels, where they had laid in wait since before the day that she and her servant had been banished from the city. 

The Soulwitch was building her own ritual circle, channeling her power through the magic and activating demonic boons. 

Mist was in the tower, standing there obediently, which sent a touch of annoyance through her. 

She had expected him to rebel and search the White Rooms, where she’d laid the traps for him, and when he’d flown right there after an hour of contemplation, she’d had to shuffle her forces around rapidly. The boon she’d needed to force into him in order to allow him to see her and the Soulwitch’s magic had also been absurdly expensive, costing more than buying an airship outright. 

Mist had been described as a rebel in the wall murals, but it still irked her. 

Zone was in her room, as was her demonic guardian, still under the effect of the soulrend gas from the Void, enhanced by some of Alyphize’s own curses. 

Deepwater was in the White Rooms. He looked uncertain, glancing around nervously, but he was there, channeling his aura into the ritual that the Soulwitch had laid down. 

Firefright was in Zone’s old grocery store, laying down his own ritual obediently, setting the ritual artifacts she’d given him out. 

They weren’t in perfectly optimal locations, but it was good enough. 

“Ma’am, I’m sorry, but you can’t go through here,” a human man said, stepping up in front of her, attempting to bar her from entering the back rooms. He had a wand in his hand, glowing with threatening magic. 

She gave him a smile and spun magic around her. 

Demons were soul magic masters, to the point their very bodies were made of soul stuff. People often didn’t think of it that way, but it meant that reinforcing their bodies with their soul magic was far more effective than a human using a ritual, with humanities’ strange, warped souls. 

In the quarter of a second that it had taken him to raise his wand and activate it, she had spun across the distance between them with the grace of a dancer, slit his throat, and leapt towards the second guard. She stabbed him in the heart, then whipped her athame into the wall, where the node of the ward was, draining it until the power limiters on the ward shattered, stopping the alarm from raising. 

Others were panicking, screaming and running, and guards were rushing her, but she twisted her hand and cast a complex spell. 

Mastery over portals and teleportation like this was only possible recently. The spells were so complex that she would have needed hours or days to build a portal, and would never have been able to teleport between planes. 

But thanks to her connection to the Sundered Throne, she was able to offload much of the complexity. 

Six demons rippled out of the portal, and she pushed through the doors, walking deeper into the complex. 

There, she saw it. The crystal was perfect, more than thirty feet tall, and ten feet across, perfectly clear, letting her see the swirling mass of a city’s worth of auras flowing through it. Three different Catwalks ran around the massive crystal.

The gemstone was covered in a hundred different spells and rituals, including the lines of magic that connected to the rest of the power grid, and the four others that were scattered around the area. Ritualists bustled around the suspended copper walkways, tending to the spells. 

Alyphize took it in and sucked in a deep breath. The air of this world was different. It tasted like victory. It tasted like power.

She raised her hands and prepared a messaging spell to her demons, when a hand fell onto her shoulder. She whirled around, slashing out with her athame, but the figure blurred further back in the hallway. 

She lowered the dagger and glared at the man who had interrupted her. 

“Uncle.” 

“Alyphize,” the Contractor said, stepping forward. “You do not need to do this.” 

“How did you even get here?” Alyphize demanded. “How did you know my plans?”

“It took me a bit of time to arrive, but you were the one who cut the wards open for demons to pass through.” 

“That does not answer my second question, old man.” 

“I know.”

They stared one another down for a moment, before Alyphize asked a question. 

“Will you become a kinkiller?” 

“I have before,” he said. “I have been many things. Kinkiller. Failure. Broken One. Wasted. But I would prefer not to kill you.” 

“Do not try to make yourself sound pathetic. You have also been called other things. Throne. Impartiate. Heir. Aspirant.”

“Which is all the more reason you should listen to me.”

They both began to draw on their auras, and infused them with soulstuff, tasting one another’s power. 

Alyphize couldn’t help it, she shuddered slightly as she tasted his soulstuff. 

It carried the weight of age, measured not in centuries, but in millenia. When the humans had first domesticated the goat, her uncle had been wandering the wastes of the Fallen Void, battling against the threats lurking there. When the humans to the far south had first discovered the casting of bronze, he had been bartering deals with humans on the mortal plane. When the humans had first wandered into this land of volcanos and rivers, he had ridden out with them, the familiar to one of the explorers. 

He was not the oldest being in all the planes, but he was old. 

It carried the weight of greatness. She had said it herself. He had sat upon a Throne at the right hand of Greed, and stepped away to become an Impartiate. He had challenged the Throne of Battle as an Aspirant, and not only killed her, but sundered the Throne. He had loved and been loved by the now-dead owner of the Throne of Love. 

He was not the greatest being in all the planes, but he was great. 

But more than anything else, his soul carried the mark of failure. Over and over again, his own soul had failed him. For every enemy he had conquered, there were five he had been forced to run from. For the Throne he had constructed and abandoned, he had nearly died in failing to construct three others. His human friends had all died. His lovers among demons, fae, and djinn alike had all died. Even among his family, he only had those scant few who had clung to the Throne of Gambling after its sundering were still alive. Less than five relatives. 

He was perhaps the single greatest living failure in all the Planes. 

It forced Alyphize to take a step back, but her own soulstuff sang its own song back at him. 

She was Alyphize, discoverer of lost knowledge. She alone in all of the Fallen Void had found information forgotten by even those as old as him. 

She was Alyphize, a master of magic, who had learned from demons across the entire Void, from humans across the south and north alike, from faeries and djinn and dreamscape spirits, and even angels. 

And most of all, she was Alyphize, restorer of sundered Thrones.

No. 

She was Alyphize, restorer of a Sundered Throne. 

Her connection to that Sundered Throne allowed her to offload magic of such complexity that each of her tutors would have broken under the weight of even attempting it, that allowed her to tap into reserves of Aura and soulstuff that would dwarf the much grown Throne of the Gambler even in the Sundered Throne’s broken state. 

The power and skill with which he could wield power was great, she could not deny that. 

But hers was far greater. 

Like a candle next to a mighty bonfire. 

He was nothing.

But he stood there anyway. 

“This is your last chance, Aly,” he said, using a nickname she had not heard since the days after her spawning. 

“This is yours as well,” she said, dropping into a fighting stance. 

He moved into one of his own, and both of their bodies were suddenly burning brightly with red aura. Spikey runes twisted into forty-nine different spells at once in her own aura, weaving soul empowerment and curse magic together. 

Sharp threads of magic rushed up the Contractor’s body, combining his own soul empowerment spells and tethering magic.

Then they exploded into battle. Not sreu