Ash 61, 124
The Sunsinger gave the thing which the soul-scribe had called a ‘Disciple’ the side eye, searching for any signs of its strength. The last one had gone down pretty easy, but the Scribe seemed certain that the next one wouldn’t.
Unfortunately, she had to admit that there was no real mechanism for her to gauge this one. It was floating in the air, which was a reliable sign of power, but the the fact that it was made of living shadow didn’t help. Everything seemed to be made of living shadow here, in the void. There was every possibility that as soon as she nailed this thing with a good ray of sunlight, it would disperse.
Still, no harm in being prepared, especially when you were trying to get wrecked. Imogen slowly crouched, not taking her eyes off the monster’s rictus grin, and passed the trinket she’d prepared with Aurin over to her familiar.
”Remember,” she told the cat, ”Wait until the last moment, don’t freak out if I’m getting mauled. But do use it before I actually die, please.”
Kitty took the mirror gingerly between its small, pin-sharp teeth, and mewled plaintively at his master, though the sound was somewhat blocked out by the piece of silvered metal in his mouth. Imogen gave the cat’s head an affectionate tousle, then rose to her feet again.
”Sorry to keep you!” the witch told the Disciple, earnestly, ”Let’s start with the same check, shall we?”
The wind shifted throughout the street as Imogen summoned her Arsenal, calling forth tens, dozens, hundreds of weapons in a half-dozen configurations. Swords, greatswords, partisans, ranseurs- they blossomed into being around her, scooped out of her recently-recovered pool of aether, then flung themselves at the grinning shadow figure.
As before, the sound of the Arsenal on the move echoed down the city street for a thousand paces in all directions, sounding in alleyways and reaching the sky as a dull roar. This time, Imogen focused on quality over quantity, taking the time to bathe each of the summoned weapons in a nimbus of flickering silver fire; after all, if there was one thing nova-flame was exceptional at, it was destroying shades.
From the outside, the whole affair probably looked like nothing so much as a great rush of silver light and fire. From Imogen’s perspective, however, she could observe the attack’s fallout in some detail. Her eyes peered out of every one of her Pact weapons, and she could feel every impact as the rapidly-accelerating weapons tore into the walls and cobbles of the street, wincing a little as each one erupted.
And so, she could clearly see when not one of the blows struck home.
The witch had seen many, many sorts of personal magical protection in her days. There were physical shields, there were shields of force, and barriers of every kind of element; that was the sort of defensive magic she often used. This, however, was very different. The weapons seemed to stop existing as they got within a meter or two of the figure, pact weapons simply shearing in half and disintegrating in bursts of sparkling aether. Exploding masonry rained down throughout the street around Imogen, but not one of the falling stones touched the Disciple. Ten long seconds after Imogen had unleashed her Arsenal, and there was not a scorch mark within three feet of the thing.
”Ah. Well, that’s new.”
The Disciple tilted its head at Imogen, then darted forward, as though it meant to tackle her. Though the Sunsinger was quite confident in her melee capabilities, the strange field around the corrupted creature had her hackles up. What if that were more than a defense? She could find herself planting her heels, only to have her whole body disintegrated as it neared.
So Imogen waited until the last second, then Blinked, relocating herself to the side and behind the Disciple, trusting that it would take a few precious seconds to reorient itself. She took the opportunity to bring Uncertain Death around in a lazy arc at it- after all, if it did somehow disintegrate her Pact Weapon, at least it would take the damn curse with it.
Thankfully (?) the field did not prove capable of disintegrating a Pact proper, but it caught the ranseur with casual ease. Purple light limned the edge of the strange field as she struggled against it, trying to use the mystical weapon to peirce or cut the ward. This was not merely vanity, either. The Sunsinger magics had been developed to cut through all manner of impediments, and she should have felt the point begin to bore through… whatever this spell was. But it didn’t.
The Disciple finished turning and lashed out, but Imogen stepped back through Slipspace, giving herself twenty feet of clearance. This was a tricky one, and no mistake. If she couldn’t figure out how this thing was protecting itself, she couldn’t possibly defeat it, and she’d never even heard of a ward like this.
If Imogen had imagined that staying away from the Disciple would solve the battle, she was rudely awakened a moment later when the creature shrieked at her, the scream shattering the shadow-tainted windows of the empty buildings down the entire length of the street. The witch’s vision grew blurry as she felt her brain literally rattling within her skull. With little other recourse, she dematerialized her own body, plunging herself partway into the Slipspace so that she could no longer hear or be heard, risking precious seconds hovering in the abyss between worlds as she tried to clear her vision.
The Disciple took immediate advantage of this, darting into one of the side alleyways as Imogen recovered and carefully returned her body to solidity. Head pounding, she forced her eyes to remain open, peering around the suddenly-empty street. She didn’t believe for a second that it had given up the chase; no doubt, this was some manner of new assault.
She was proven correct moments later, when the plentiful shadows filling the broken windowpanes and doors of the buildings around her began to shift. The thing’s bizarre eyes and jagged grin appeared in a dozen different spaces, all around. They leered at her, giggling in eerie silence.
”Illusion, eh?” she muttered to herself, ”Bad choice.”
Swords blossomed into being in the air around Imogen and each burst into silvery flame, the power which destroyed illusion. Each reoriented itself on a different instance of the leering face, tracking it with minute precision- and then, once again, they shot forward at eye-watering speeds. These would cut through every one of the fake Disciples, and reveal to her the location of the real thing.
And then each and every one of them ceased to be.
Realization rushed in on Imogen, just ahead of the veritable sea of grinning shadows. Not only were these not illusions, that damnable ward covered the whole beast. By making itself larger, the Disciple had made itself vastly more dangerous. Deeply unfair, she thought.
Imogen let herself drop through a sudden hole in the world, landing ungracefully atop the rooftop of the Pfenning’s shadow in this realm. Hundreds of feet up off the street, the Disciple would have to rush her in the open air, which would give her another chance to catch her breath and come up with a plan, but she could feel her aether beginning to dwindle. Between the ritual, taming the vessel, and the two invocations of her Arsenal, her newly-returned energies were rapidly depleting- and she still hadn’t figured out how to actually harm that confounded thing.
That was going to need to be the first thing, she resolved. It was dangerous–the soul scribe would probably be horrified, if she were still watching–but Imogen reckoned that she had one thing which might do the trick.
Shadows began licking at the sides of the Pfenning, slowly climbing up the sides of the theater from all sides. Imogen advanced slowly to the lip of the roof, staring down at the rising darkness as she rolled the ranseur gently in her palm… then jumped off the roof, plummeting down the side of the building.
As she descended, Imogen let the tip of Uncertain Death fade into immateriality, then plunged it into the shadow. Or rather, the shadow’s shield.
Once the spear’s translucent tip made contact with the invisible ward, the witch could suddenly feel the entire shape of the magic, the information simply filtering into her soul. Like a flash of understanding, Imogen felt the knowledge of the magic’s function cohere within her: the Disciple’s magic, perverted and strengthened by its master…
(She couldn’t have told you anything about its master, but she got a distinct impression of enormity)
…yes, it was a plane of nothingness. A meniscus upon the fabric of space and time in which nothing could exist. For lesser constructs, it simply swallowed them whole, but even her strongest weapons and magic wouldn’t be able to pass through at all.
That tallied with what she’d seen so far, and immediately suggested a possibility. Clearly, the nothing-shield did not consume light, or else she wouldn’t be able to see the Disciple. She suspected that, as a shadow-being, it might not be able to do that at all without killing itself, for shadows could not exist without light. (Probably? Who could say for sure.)
To test her theory, Imogen summoned Ysandre’s Smile next, letting the sunlit bow form itself in the air behind her as she jogged away from the tide of darkness. It sighted at the Disciple without further input, letting loose a volley of arrows of sunlight.
Just as the witch had hoped, these projectiles slipped through the nothing-ward without difficulty… but they did little more than dispel little puddles of the creature’s shade-flesh. The smiling Disciple was now almost the size of the Pfenning itself; she’d need to pour all of her remaining aether into a blast if she wanted to illuminate so much.
But worse, she had a sneaking suspicion that the light would simply not do what she wanted it to do. Here in the nyxus, that much power of light would be tricky to generate in and of itself. But perhaps she was thinking about this wrong-
Imogen’s train of thought was interrupted as three copies of the Disciple leapt out of an alleyway in front of her, cutting off her retreat from the wave of shadow the original monster had become. Now confident in her Pact Weapons’ ability to take a few hits, the witch conjured forth her partisan in her left hand, interposing them in an X-shaped guard.
Each of the new Disciple bodies grew their own weapons–a sickle, an axe, and a mace–and struck as one, but the Sunsinger’s block was perfectly placed. Violet light blossomed around her as the weapons scraped against the creatures’ wards.
She flexed, pushing as hard as she could, and was gratified to see that the laws of inertia still applied. Though neither spear could peirce the creature’s shield, the force she levered against them was sufficient to toss the Disciple’s puppets, giving her space to duck ahead of them.
This was no good. Who could say how many more little surprises this Disciple could pull out of its shadowy asscrack? She was going to need a plan, and fast.
No, actually, what she needed was a time-out.
”Oi!” she shouted at the monster, ”Give me a minute, please!”
It didn’t stop, of course. She hadn’t actually expected it to, that was just the sort of bravado she found helpful for dealing with nerves during times like this. Instead, Imogen Blinked one final time- this time, downwards, back into the rooms deep below the Pfenning’s stage.
She’d noticed that the Disciple, as fast as it was, had gotten increasingly slower as it had grown larger and larger. That was intuitive enough, but she had also noticed that it wasn’t simply phasing through walls, but rather squeezing through existing openings. That meant that the best way to delay it was to force it to slither through the maze of rooms and stairs, navigating its way back down.
This, of course, gave her time to use the one Rune she’d kept dormant thus far. The one Rune which, thanks to peculiar circumstance, she had easy access to aether for. Imogen wasted no time; as soon as she appeared in the bottom room, she melted.
By the time the Disciple’s lifeless grin arrived in the shadows of the basement, Imogen’s transformation was complete. A gigantic snake, ten meters long, burst upwards through the ceiling, smashing a hole in the dark stage above, hissing.
This particular chimera was mostly a hydra in composition, but she’d added several sets of wings near the head; not sufficient to fly, not with so much bulk in the body, but helpful in maneuvering. Silver fire limned the snake’s mouth, trailing from behind it in small bursts and gouts as it struggled upward through the crumbling ceiling, wings flapping a few times to help it gain height. With much thrashing and flapping, the white hydra managed to get traction on the stage floor above and slithered upward into the dark theater, tail just clearing the lake of shadows forming on the floor below.
Grinning shadow pooled in the basement room. As she’d expected, the thing had a hard time reversing its own inertia- it couldn’t just double back up the stairs and galleries it had flowed down. It was going to need to drain into the basement and then build back upwards at her. Except, of course-
A humanoid figure jumped up out of the shadows, the Disciple spinning up another puppet-body to chase after its quarry. The figure leapt through the stage, through the hole Imogen had just made, right towards the huge snake. Almost instinctively, the snake snapped at the figure, mouth easily closing over the humanoid shadow in one bite.
This, of course, was an agonizing decision.
The Disciple’s ward melted through the snake’s mouth, evaporating teeth and gums and filling her mouth with blood. It would doubtlessly have cut through the huge snake like a knife through butter, except that the serpent’s tongue proved to be wrapped around Uncertain Death, the ranseur stopping the creature’s descent.
Imogen spat the puppet out, coating the stage with her own blood as she did so. Below, through the hole, she could see that the pooling shadow constituting most of the Disciple’s main body had begun building itself slowly upwards, like a pole rising out of a swimming pool, extending towards the hole in the floor. Below her, the puppet body stood up, entirely untouched by either her hydra saliva or blood, and began to advance anew.
Unfortunately for the Disciple, this was all according to plan. The enormous snake inhaled sharply, gathering in all of its remaining aether. The fleeting lights throughout the ruined reflection of the Pfenning dimmed and died, pulled into Imogen’s gullet- and then were released. Not as a gout of fire, nor even a beam of light, but as an invisible ray of the Disciple’s own nothing-ward.
The translucent fire poured down over the puppet-body, causing it to vanish in an instant as it was overcome by All Worlds As One, the breath weapon varnished with the Disciple’s own negatory magic while it was in the hydra’s mouth. She adjusted the angle of her neck, aiming it down into the basement, sweeping it from side to side as it simply erased the shadowy liquid in an instant. Each of the Disciple’s rictus grins disappeared, one by one, as her spell and its copied magic unmade the thing.
After perhaps thirty seconds, she could see no more smiles, no more movement in the darknes below. The hydra’s spell dissipated, and Imogen heaved a sigh of relief, collapsing to the stage with exhaustion.
There, that ought to do it. And she’d even defeated the beast, after all! Aurin was going to be put out that he didn’t get to-
The walls around the hydra exploded as more grinning shadows came rushing in from all directions- backstage, down the seats, out of every private box above. The Disciple, now as big as the entire Pfenning, rushed in at her.
Imogen tried to flee, of course, but it was impossible to evade the thousand shadowy tendrils, each one eating instantly through her flesh wherever it closed in. She darted up through the galleries, slithering and fluttering through every familiar hallway, aiming for the ones which seemed to have the least amount of Disciple coating them, but every movement ended with more lacerations.
Thankfully, Hydra flesh was famously regenerative- even as the Disciple tore her open, the witch’s wounds knit shut. She painted the inside of the theater red with blood and grey with the gore of the snake’s unique viscera, but such injuries were not fatal. No, the only thing which would prove fatal is if it managed to swallow her… and that certainly seemed to be its goal.
The witch flung herself through one of the great stained glass windows at the top of the upper reception hall (the good one, meant for the well-paying members) smashing through the colorless panes reflected in the Nyx and rolling across the window onto the huge balcony outside.
From here, Imogen could see the street below, where the Disciple was pooling and clumping, waiting for her to try to jump. The thing had grown from the size of a man to the size of a Primal, maybe even as large as the thing she and Destyn had faced below the World Tree’s roots, and every meter of it was populated with more of that same grin all focused on her.
Behind her, shadows bubbled up the broken window pane, oozing through the cracks. She felt more lacerations as the Disciple began to close in for the kill, tearing chunks out of her hide, bit by bit. She hadn’t enough aether to cast All Worlds As One again- even if she could, she’d never be able to catch this entire thing in the blast. Even if she leapt from this rooftop now, it was only going to result in the Disciple hunting her through the shadowy streets of Zaichaer at its leisure.
”I give.” the enormous snake told the shadowy abomination consuming the Pfenning, her voice more than a little raspy and tortured as she forced it through a Hydra’s throat. ”Fight’s done.”
Again, she hadn’t expected the Disciple to react, but this time it did. The advancing shadow-stuff stopped, still close enough to burn her skin, and the nearest face seemed to twist, puzzled. She wondered if it somehow retained enough sense of self to understand her words, or if it was simply unsure why she kept trying to talk to it.
In fact, she wasn’t talking to it. Up on the roof one level above, Kitty growled in agreement and jumped down, hopping onto the balustrade behind her and walking quickly across the balcony until he found a patch of snakeflesh well away from the puddles of shadow growing below. With a coughing noise, he pushed the mirror she’d given him several minutes earlier to the front of his mouth- then smashed it against Imogen’s flesh.
Aurin’s magic, negotiated for weeks ago, took hold of Imogen. Though she was across planes and time, she felt his power pull her into Slipspace; and the instant she crossed the Veil, the shadow’s magics faded. Sleep beckoned, but she refused it, forcing herself to remain awake as the Traversion magic drew her from the Nyxus and across the miles, back to the Sanctuary of Dawn.
Unfortunately, she had to admit that there was no real mechanism for her to gauge this one. It was floating in the air, which was a reliable sign of power, but the the fact that it was made of living shadow didn’t help. Everything seemed to be made of living shadow here, in the void. There was every possibility that as soon as she nailed this thing with a good ray of sunlight, it would disperse.
Still, no harm in being prepared, especially when you were trying to get wrecked. Imogen slowly crouched, not taking her eyes off the monster’s rictus grin, and passed the trinket she’d prepared with Aurin over to her familiar.
”Remember,” she told the cat, ”Wait until the last moment, don’t freak out if I’m getting mauled. But do use it before I actually die, please.”
Kitty took the mirror gingerly between its small, pin-sharp teeth, and mewled plaintively at his master, though the sound was somewhat blocked out by the piece of silvered metal in his mouth. Imogen gave the cat’s head an affectionate tousle, then rose to her feet again.
”Sorry to keep you!” the witch told the Disciple, earnestly, ”Let’s start with the same check, shall we?”
The wind shifted throughout the street as Imogen summoned her Arsenal, calling forth tens, dozens, hundreds of weapons in a half-dozen configurations. Swords, greatswords, partisans, ranseurs- they blossomed into being around her, scooped out of her recently-recovered pool of aether, then flung themselves at the grinning shadow figure.
As before, the sound of the Arsenal on the move echoed down the city street for a thousand paces in all directions, sounding in alleyways and reaching the sky as a dull roar. This time, Imogen focused on quality over quantity, taking the time to bathe each of the summoned weapons in a nimbus of flickering silver fire; after all, if there was one thing nova-flame was exceptional at, it was destroying shades.
From the outside, the whole affair probably looked like nothing so much as a great rush of silver light and fire. From Imogen’s perspective, however, she could observe the attack’s fallout in some detail. Her eyes peered out of every one of her Pact weapons, and she could feel every impact as the rapidly-accelerating weapons tore into the walls and cobbles of the street, wincing a little as each one erupted.
And so, she could clearly see when not one of the blows struck home.
The witch had seen many, many sorts of personal magical protection in her days. There were physical shields, there were shields of force, and barriers of every kind of element; that was the sort of defensive magic she often used. This, however, was very different. The weapons seemed to stop existing as they got within a meter or two of the figure, pact weapons simply shearing in half and disintegrating in bursts of sparkling aether. Exploding masonry rained down throughout the street around Imogen, but not one of the falling stones touched the Disciple. Ten long seconds after Imogen had unleashed her Arsenal, and there was not a scorch mark within three feet of the thing.
”Ah. Well, that’s new.”
The Disciple tilted its head at Imogen, then darted forward, as though it meant to tackle her. Though the Sunsinger was quite confident in her melee capabilities, the strange field around the corrupted creature had her hackles up. What if that were more than a defense? She could find herself planting her heels, only to have her whole body disintegrated as it neared.
So Imogen waited until the last second, then Blinked, relocating herself to the side and behind the Disciple, trusting that it would take a few precious seconds to reorient itself. She took the opportunity to bring Uncertain Death around in a lazy arc at it- after all, if it did somehow disintegrate her Pact Weapon, at least it would take the damn curse with it.
Thankfully (?) the field did not prove capable of disintegrating a Pact proper, but it caught the ranseur with casual ease. Purple light limned the edge of the strange field as she struggled against it, trying to use the mystical weapon to peirce or cut the ward. This was not merely vanity, either. The Sunsinger magics had been developed to cut through all manner of impediments, and she should have felt the point begin to bore through… whatever this spell was. But it didn’t.
The Disciple finished turning and lashed out, but Imogen stepped back through Slipspace, giving herself twenty feet of clearance. This was a tricky one, and no mistake. If she couldn’t figure out how this thing was protecting itself, she couldn’t possibly defeat it, and she’d never even heard of a ward like this.
If Imogen had imagined that staying away from the Disciple would solve the battle, she was rudely awakened a moment later when the creature shrieked at her, the scream shattering the shadow-tainted windows of the empty buildings down the entire length of the street. The witch’s vision grew blurry as she felt her brain literally rattling within her skull. With little other recourse, she dematerialized her own body, plunging herself partway into the Slipspace so that she could no longer hear or be heard, risking precious seconds hovering in the abyss between worlds as she tried to clear her vision.
The Disciple took immediate advantage of this, darting into one of the side alleyways as Imogen recovered and carefully returned her body to solidity. Head pounding, she forced her eyes to remain open, peering around the suddenly-empty street. She didn’t believe for a second that it had given up the chase; no doubt, this was some manner of new assault.
She was proven correct moments later, when the plentiful shadows filling the broken windowpanes and doors of the buildings around her began to shift. The thing’s bizarre eyes and jagged grin appeared in a dozen different spaces, all around. They leered at her, giggling in eerie silence.
”Illusion, eh?” she muttered to herself, ”Bad choice.”
Swords blossomed into being in the air around Imogen and each burst into silvery flame, the power which destroyed illusion. Each reoriented itself on a different instance of the leering face, tracking it with minute precision- and then, once again, they shot forward at eye-watering speeds. These would cut through every one of the fake Disciples, and reveal to her the location of the real thing.
And then each and every one of them ceased to be.
Realization rushed in on Imogen, just ahead of the veritable sea of grinning shadows. Not only were these not illusions, that damnable ward covered the whole beast. By making itself larger, the Disciple had made itself vastly more dangerous. Deeply unfair, she thought.
Imogen let herself drop through a sudden hole in the world, landing ungracefully atop the rooftop of the Pfenning’s shadow in this realm. Hundreds of feet up off the street, the Disciple would have to rush her in the open air, which would give her another chance to catch her breath and come up with a plan, but she could feel her aether beginning to dwindle. Between the ritual, taming the vessel, and the two invocations of her Arsenal, her newly-returned energies were rapidly depleting- and she still hadn’t figured out how to actually harm that confounded thing.
That was going to need to be the first thing, she resolved. It was dangerous–the soul scribe would probably be horrified, if she were still watching–but Imogen reckoned that she had one thing which might do the trick.
Shadows began licking at the sides of the Pfenning, slowly climbing up the sides of the theater from all sides. Imogen advanced slowly to the lip of the roof, staring down at the rising darkness as she rolled the ranseur gently in her palm… then jumped off the roof, plummeting down the side of the building.
As she descended, Imogen let the tip of Uncertain Death fade into immateriality, then plunged it into the shadow. Or rather, the shadow’s shield.
Once the spear’s translucent tip made contact with the invisible ward, the witch could suddenly feel the entire shape of the magic, the information simply filtering into her soul. Like a flash of understanding, Imogen felt the knowledge of the magic’s function cohere within her: the Disciple’s magic, perverted and strengthened by its master…
(She couldn’t have told you anything about its master, but she got a distinct impression of enormity)
…yes, it was a plane of nothingness. A meniscus upon the fabric of space and time in which nothing could exist. For lesser constructs, it simply swallowed them whole, but even her strongest weapons and magic wouldn’t be able to pass through at all.
That tallied with what she’d seen so far, and immediately suggested a possibility. Clearly, the nothing-shield did not consume light, or else she wouldn’t be able to see the Disciple. She suspected that, as a shadow-being, it might not be able to do that at all without killing itself, for shadows could not exist without light. (Probably? Who could say for sure.)
To test her theory, Imogen summoned Ysandre’s Smile next, letting the sunlit bow form itself in the air behind her as she jogged away from the tide of darkness. It sighted at the Disciple without further input, letting loose a volley of arrows of sunlight.
Just as the witch had hoped, these projectiles slipped through the nothing-ward without difficulty… but they did little more than dispel little puddles of the creature’s shade-flesh. The smiling Disciple was now almost the size of the Pfenning itself; she’d need to pour all of her remaining aether into a blast if she wanted to illuminate so much.
But worse, she had a sneaking suspicion that the light would simply not do what she wanted it to do. Here in the nyxus, that much power of light would be tricky to generate in and of itself. But perhaps she was thinking about this wrong-
Imogen’s train of thought was interrupted as three copies of the Disciple leapt out of an alleyway in front of her, cutting off her retreat from the wave of shadow the original monster had become. Now confident in her Pact Weapons’ ability to take a few hits, the witch conjured forth her partisan in her left hand, interposing them in an X-shaped guard.
Each of the new Disciple bodies grew their own weapons–a sickle, an axe, and a mace–and struck as one, but the Sunsinger’s block was perfectly placed. Violet light blossomed around her as the weapons scraped against the creatures’ wards.
She flexed, pushing as hard as she could, and was gratified to see that the laws of inertia still applied. Though neither spear could peirce the creature’s shield, the force she levered against them was sufficient to toss the Disciple’s puppets, giving her space to duck ahead of them.
This was no good. Who could say how many more little surprises this Disciple could pull out of its shadowy asscrack? She was going to need a plan, and fast.
No, actually, what she needed was a time-out.
”Oi!” she shouted at the monster, ”Give me a minute, please!”
It didn’t stop, of course. She hadn’t actually expected it to, that was just the sort of bravado she found helpful for dealing with nerves during times like this. Instead, Imogen Blinked one final time- this time, downwards, back into the rooms deep below the Pfenning’s stage.
~~~
She’d noticed that the Disciple, as fast as it was, had gotten increasingly slower as it had grown larger and larger. That was intuitive enough, but she had also noticed that it wasn’t simply phasing through walls, but rather squeezing through existing openings. That meant that the best way to delay it was to force it to slither through the maze of rooms and stairs, navigating its way back down.
This, of course, gave her time to use the one Rune she’d kept dormant thus far. The one Rune which, thanks to peculiar circumstance, she had easy access to aether for. Imogen wasted no time; as soon as she appeared in the bottom room, she melted.
~~~
By the time the Disciple’s lifeless grin arrived in the shadows of the basement, Imogen’s transformation was complete. A gigantic snake, ten meters long, burst upwards through the ceiling, smashing a hole in the dark stage above, hissing.
This particular chimera was mostly a hydra in composition, but she’d added several sets of wings near the head; not sufficient to fly, not with so much bulk in the body, but helpful in maneuvering. Silver fire limned the snake’s mouth, trailing from behind it in small bursts and gouts as it struggled upward through the crumbling ceiling, wings flapping a few times to help it gain height. With much thrashing and flapping, the white hydra managed to get traction on the stage floor above and slithered upward into the dark theater, tail just clearing the lake of shadows forming on the floor below.
Grinning shadow pooled in the basement room. As she’d expected, the thing had a hard time reversing its own inertia- it couldn’t just double back up the stairs and galleries it had flowed down. It was going to need to drain into the basement and then build back upwards at her. Except, of course-
A humanoid figure jumped up out of the shadows, the Disciple spinning up another puppet-body to chase after its quarry. The figure leapt through the stage, through the hole Imogen had just made, right towards the huge snake. Almost instinctively, the snake snapped at the figure, mouth easily closing over the humanoid shadow in one bite.
This, of course, was an agonizing decision.
The Disciple’s ward melted through the snake’s mouth, evaporating teeth and gums and filling her mouth with blood. It would doubtlessly have cut through the huge snake like a knife through butter, except that the serpent’s tongue proved to be wrapped around Uncertain Death, the ranseur stopping the creature’s descent.
Imogen spat the puppet out, coating the stage with her own blood as she did so. Below, through the hole, she could see that the pooling shadow constituting most of the Disciple’s main body had begun building itself slowly upwards, like a pole rising out of a swimming pool, extending towards the hole in the floor. Below her, the puppet body stood up, entirely untouched by either her hydra saliva or blood, and began to advance anew.
Unfortunately for the Disciple, this was all according to plan. The enormous snake inhaled sharply, gathering in all of its remaining aether. The fleeting lights throughout the ruined reflection of the Pfenning dimmed and died, pulled into Imogen’s gullet- and then were released. Not as a gout of fire, nor even a beam of light, but as an invisible ray of the Disciple’s own nothing-ward.
The translucent fire poured down over the puppet-body, causing it to vanish in an instant as it was overcome by All Worlds As One, the breath weapon varnished with the Disciple’s own negatory magic while it was in the hydra’s mouth. She adjusted the angle of her neck, aiming it down into the basement, sweeping it from side to side as it simply erased the shadowy liquid in an instant. Each of the Disciple’s rictus grins disappeared, one by one, as her spell and its copied magic unmade the thing.
After perhaps thirty seconds, she could see no more smiles, no more movement in the darknes below. The hydra’s spell dissipated, and Imogen heaved a sigh of relief, collapsing to the stage with exhaustion.
There, that ought to do it. And she’d even defeated the beast, after all! Aurin was going to be put out that he didn’t get to-
The walls around the hydra exploded as more grinning shadows came rushing in from all directions- backstage, down the seats, out of every private box above. The Disciple, now as big as the entire Pfenning, rushed in at her.
Imogen tried to flee, of course, but it was impossible to evade the thousand shadowy tendrils, each one eating instantly through her flesh wherever it closed in. She darted up through the galleries, slithering and fluttering through every familiar hallway, aiming for the ones which seemed to have the least amount of Disciple coating them, but every movement ended with more lacerations.
Thankfully, Hydra flesh was famously regenerative- even as the Disciple tore her open, the witch’s wounds knit shut. She painted the inside of the theater red with blood and grey with the gore of the snake’s unique viscera, but such injuries were not fatal. No, the only thing which would prove fatal is if it managed to swallow her… and that certainly seemed to be its goal.
The witch flung herself through one of the great stained glass windows at the top of the upper reception hall (the good one, meant for the well-paying members) smashing through the colorless panes reflected in the Nyx and rolling across the window onto the huge balcony outside.
From here, Imogen could see the street below, where the Disciple was pooling and clumping, waiting for her to try to jump. The thing had grown from the size of a man to the size of a Primal, maybe even as large as the thing she and Destyn had faced below the World Tree’s roots, and every meter of it was populated with more of that same grin all focused on her.
Behind her, shadows bubbled up the broken window pane, oozing through the cracks. She felt more lacerations as the Disciple began to close in for the kill, tearing chunks out of her hide, bit by bit. She hadn’t enough aether to cast All Worlds As One again- even if she could, she’d never be able to catch this entire thing in the blast. Even if she leapt from this rooftop now, it was only going to result in the Disciple hunting her through the shadowy streets of Zaichaer at its leisure.
”I give.” the enormous snake told the shadowy abomination consuming the Pfenning, her voice more than a little raspy and tortured as she forced it through a Hydra’s throat. ”Fight’s done.”
Again, she hadn’t expected the Disciple to react, but this time it did. The advancing shadow-stuff stopped, still close enough to burn her skin, and the nearest face seemed to twist, puzzled. She wondered if it somehow retained enough sense of self to understand her words, or if it was simply unsure why she kept trying to talk to it.
In fact, she wasn’t talking to it. Up on the roof one level above, Kitty growled in agreement and jumped down, hopping onto the balustrade behind her and walking quickly across the balcony until he found a patch of snakeflesh well away from the puddles of shadow growing below. With a coughing noise, he pushed the mirror she’d given him several minutes earlier to the front of his mouth- then smashed it against Imogen’s flesh.
Aurin’s magic, negotiated for weeks ago, took hold of Imogen. Though she was across planes and time, she felt his power pull her into Slipspace; and the instant she crossed the Veil, the shadow’s magics faded. Sleep beckoned, but she refused it, forcing herself to remain awake as the Traversion magic drew her from the Nyxus and across the miles, back to the Sanctuary of Dawn.
