The Beginning After The End novel Chapter 505

Chapter 505: Echoes of the Fallen.

For a moment, the mountainside dell seemed frozen, time unmoving.

The focus of our hunt loomed above me, now truly colossal in size. Four craning necks extended upward sixty feet or more from a bulbous, distended body. Six trunk-like limbs supported the creature’s bulk, each one ending in a webbed, clawed foot. A pair of fleshy, avian claws reached forward from its chest, wicked talons two feet long clenching and unclenching at their ends. Uncountable tentacles sprouted in place of a tail, each one tipped with a blade, bone bulb, hook, or claw, writhing and snapping around the huge body.

Atop each long neck was a head like that of a transformed dragon, long and reptilian, each one almost identical to the others. Their horrible jaws ran vertically between their eyes, splitting the heads down the middle.

And burning between long, jagged teeth, the violet flames of Destruction danced in their gaping maws.

The scene surged back into motion, and the endless yipping, barking, and howling of a thousand beasts sounded through the wooded dell again.

A spear of bright white mana tinged with purple aether lanced through the air and struck the monstrosity square in the chest—or at least it should have. The flames of Destruction jumped, clawing in the mana and burning it away. The spear didn’t so much as touch the black scales.

“Keep your distance!” Riven was shouting. He’d drawn the other three basilisks to himself, and they were working together to form a gusting barrier of black wind that danced in dark shapes. The one-armed basilisk conjured a swirling storm of void wind and blood iron, but his spell burned away to nothing wherever Destruction touched it.

The monstrosity’s huge wings beat, stirring up a hurricane that toppled trees and flung the members of our hunting party backwards. I tracked Ellie with one thread of my consciousness; she was safe on Boo’s back behind a conjured barrier supported by both Vireah and Sylvie. Separate threads tracked the movement and spells of the others.

I withheld my own attacks. The Destruction-infused aether blade was clenched tightly in my fist, but using it against the monster’s previous incarnation had only made our situation worse.

The violet flames around my sword exploded outward into the shadow-wolf form of my companion. He shook his head, growling deep in his chest, then bolted away. The Destruction godrune emanated a powerful radiance from within him, and as he ran he began to transform. His torso broadened and swelled, his fur hardened into spikes down his back, and his burning mane became jagged saw blades of purple fire.

Each beat of the monster’s wings splashed Destruction across the dell. Violet fire ate rocks, trees, and the very ground. Regis dove into the path of a surging torrent, and a matching jet of violet flames spilled from his jaws.

Destruction devoured Destruction.

An involuntary shudder ran down my spine.

We need to end this battle quickly.

The hunting party was on the move. They fell back in groups, each race coming together to protect and support their clan mates. For a moment, everyone focused on collecting themselves and avoiding the beast’s attacks. Gone were the excited shouts and jeers, the crowing, the battle cries. Every asuran face was set in concentration. This was no longer a hunt, but a fight for survival.

The four-headed monstrosity had risen thirty feet up in the air. It whirled about and crashed back to the ground among the dragons, its claws slashing and teeth snapping. Conjured shields broke under the beast’s strength. Asura hurled themselves away at blinding speeds.

Thirty-foot claws of fire raked through the air, tearing through the wreath of violet fire and scoring thin scratches down the monstrosity’s side.

The spell barely left a scratch through Destruction’s flames.

Regis slammed into the beast from above, his jaws closing around the base of one neck. The nightmarish baying of the horde contained in the monstrosity’s belly intensified, and the fire of its Destruction expanded. All over its body, fissures appeared between the scales and fleshy patches of fur.

Its body is barely able to control the Destruction. It’s eating itself alive.

Even as two heads spun around to attack Regis, two others struck like snakes toward the asuras with a speed incongruent with its size. It spun and bit out at Naesia and one of her people both at once. Caught off guard, Naesia’s dodge was too slow, too late.

God Step carried me across the battlefield. I appeared inside the shadow of a set of vertical jaws as they closed around the phoenix. My hand took hers, and we melted back into the aetheric pathways. Jolts of bright purple energy ran down my arm and across Naesia. Her jaw was set, her lip curled up in a determined sneer, her eyes still focused on teeth that were no longer there.

The ground heaved, and dozens of giant blood iron fists reached out of the mountainside. They took hold of tentacles and legs, even one wing, trying to hold the monster down. Destruction ate away at black metal fingers and fists, but the monster was flailing.

“If we can pin it down—” My words died in my throat.

In the distance, I watched one of the beast’s flailing limbs descend toward Boo and Ellie. They were going to be crushed beneath it. The mana of the silver shield that had protected her was already dissipating.

My fingers released Naesia’s hand, and God Step flared again. The godrune seemed to take an age to activate. Already, my feet were digging into the soft, scorched soil as one part of my mind told me to run while another struggled to find the aetheric paths again.

Finally, God Step carried me away. I appeared at Ellie’s side as Boo attempted to lunge out of the way of the rapidly descending claw. Aether raced into my muscles and limbs as I braced myself.

The rough pad of a clawed foot longer than I was tall struck me. My body trembled against the incredible weight and impossible force. My core clenched, forcing out even more aether.

Boo was already moving, trying to carry Ellie away, but coiling amethyst flames licked down from the claws like whips, lashing the air and ground with fatal Destruction.

I reached for them. As my arm stretched out, a lash of Destruction wrapped around it. The material of my armor popped and cracked, melting away under the unstoppable consumption. My flesh and bone lasted no longer, and the limb fell away, burning.

Silver flashed between me and Ellie, and the weight bearing down on me lessened.

Silverlight hovered between us. It was once again in the shape of the sword as Aldir had wielded it: lithe and ornate, glowing so bright it was almost hard to look at. A spherical shield of pure mana had erupted from it, knocking the monstrosity’s descending claw aside, where it dug a long furrow through the rocky soil.

The blood iron fists were no longer grappling it. Regis was struggling to extricate himself from a pile of lumber where he’d been thrown, bringing several trees down on top of him.

Silverlight shifted, becoming the unstrung bow as it fell back into Ellie’s startled grip. Boo swung out wide, moving to keep Vireah and her dragons between Ellie and the Destruction-wreathed monster.

Aether constricted in the air, and our opponent trembled, suddenly slow. I felt Sylvie’s concentration as she struggled to bind it in a fist of withheld time.

Regis was in the air again. He slammed into the quaking creature, gripping it just beneath one head and pulling the neck back, revealing the deep wound he’d made during his last attack. His control over Destruction was keeping him safe, letting him linger within the monstrosity’s aura.

Zelyna had organized her leviathans. They were huddled together, working to conjure some mana art; the dell swelled with water-attribute mana, making it suddenly smell like the shore. Their focus was the exposed wound. Across the battlefield, Zelyna’s eyes met mine. There was no fear there, no chaos of muddled thought. She was in control, both of herself and her hunting party.

She recognized that we couldn’t kill it, not yet. We needed a plan to prevent it from continuing to spawn new and stronger incarnations of itself first.

Conjuring a new aetheric blade in my remaining hand, I adjusted my footing.

One of the dragon-like heads bit down on Regis. I felt his fear and fury, but also his hunger—for pain, for blood, for Destruction. The godrune sustained him, and his mastery of its edict countered that of our opponent’s.

The sky darkened above us, gray and black shot through with the red of fire-attribute mana. That mana swiftly condensed into balls of white-hot fire and fell as meteors, bombarding the monstrosity one after another. Most dissolved in the Destruction, but a few punched ragged holes in the expansive wings or exploded against its armored back, eliciting blistering cries of pain and rage from the creature.

As one, the leviathans lunged and spun in a kind of dance. A wave of mana swept forward, but the visible manifestation of the spell was so subtle that I almost missed it even with Realmheart and King’s Gambit.

A wafer-thin crescent of mana carved toward the exposed, wounded neck. Violet flames leapt up to reach it, but the wave of surrounding mana battered the Destruction, unable to douse it but feeding it while protecting the crescent. The spell sliced through the fire, and then through the neck.

I swept my weapon upward, from my hip to my shoulder. The aetheric pathways opened, and a bright purple line of aetheric light cut through several points at once.

Burning blood erupted from a dozen wounds.

Two of the four long necks and heads collapsed like fallen trees. One small wing fluttered away from the bulbous body. A leg buckled, limp and dragging.

Time returned to normal.

The two remaining heads roared. The creature reared back on four of its six thick legs, its avian claws digging at the air, the many tentacles snapping around it furiously.

Sylvie was flagging, her repeated use of her aevum arts draining her power. Regis flew in circles around the wounded monster, countering its Destruction as best he could. Chul hung back, flinging spells with the others, unable to risk approaching for a physical strike. Ellie fired golden arrows of protective energy at any asura who was caught in the waves of gusting Destruction fire that were still devouring the mountainside, giving them a moment to escape.

With one layer of my mind, I tracked the efforts of the asuras to keep the monstrosity pinned down with spellfire while avoiding its Destruction. Zelyna and Riven led the effort, shouting orders and ensuring the attacks didn’t kill it—though I was uncertain if that was even possible. With another, I kept myself moving, helping however I could without dealing any more direct damage to our opponent.

The rest of my mind turned to the problem of these incarnations. I was reminded of the Relictombs, where the aetheric beasts could be respawned indefinitely. If that was by design, where had this creature come from? It seemed possible, though unlikely, that the ancient asuras who created Epheotus manufactured this questing beast, seeding its potential in the magic of this place. Also possible was the fact that our quarry formed here from the interplay of asuran mana and the aether pressing into Epheotus through the barrier, out of the aetheric realm. The shape of it, its grotesque and tortured nature, was like a physical manifestation of the anger aether carried, which Fate had described.

Simultaneously, I considered two other sparks of new insight that were potentially relevant to the battle.

First, Destruction.

I needed to be able to separate the endless consumption from the asuras. My arm was still regrowing, but even the asura couldn’t match my own healing abilities. It was only a matter of time before the monstrosity’s Destruction began to consume them, one by one. It was essential that I cordon it off somehow, limiting its capability to continue shedding the violet flames.

It hadn’t been long since I came up with the plan to avoid Agrona’s notice inside a pocket dimension, and that idea hovered close to the surface of my many-layered thoughts. I’d formed such a pocket dimension twice now: first, almost by accident, inspired by the djinn’s runic magic in a moment of pure desperation; second, more purposefully, to hide myself inside Sylvia’s lair between the Beast Glades and the Elenoir Wastes. This second pocket dimension hadn’t been placed there out of sentimentality, however.

The mark of Sylvia’s will still existed inside her hidden refuge. I no longer had her will inside my core, and so I’d need her spark, that indentation she’d left in the mana through her months-long teleportation ritual and time-stop spells, to form a second pocket dimension.

I had no piece of Sylvia here to use as a catalyst to conjure a pocket dimension to cage the beast, which meant I needed another way. But we were close to the barrier that separated Epheotus from the aetheric realm. I’d felt that barrier in Everburn at the fountain, and again along the shore of the leviathan village, Ecclesia. Here, too, on the phoenixes’ ever-climbing mountain. Epheotus was itself—in some way—a pocket dimension. Still connected to the physical realm in which my world existed, but protected by a barrier that affected reality itself, containing space and time and life all together.

It was then, between one moment and the next, the many layers of my mind working together like the toothed cogs of a complex machine, that I understood what to do.

“Fall back!” I shouted. To me, I thought directly to Regis. Sylv, stay with El. I need you outside the barrier. Both my companions shuddered as they were inundated with many thoughts at once, but I withheld the worst of the effect, focusing my message and intent.

While I was offering direction, I was also pouring out purified aether and molding it.

The hybridized monstrosity beat its remaining wings and threw itself into the air. Twin mouths drooled burning black spittle as they roared, and the baying of hounds grew so loud it threatened to overwhelm King’s Gambit.

Mana, heavy and warm as a blanket, settled over me, deadening the horrible noise. I glanced back, looking at Ellie: she was focused on controlling the mana around me, forming a sort of buffer to absorb the sound. I winked at her, then stepped forward.

The world began to ripple and run, like I was standing inside a glass globe as the glass was still hot and being blown into shape.

The strain was intense, but I was ready for it. The first time I’d formed such a pocket dimension, it had killed me, or would have if not for the sacrifice made by Sylvie. The second had taken hours of careful manipulation as I plucked through the threads of Sylvia’s leftover magic. Now, I had only seconds.

Sylv, I need time.

Through our connection, I felt Sylvie reach for the aevum arts she had been practicing since returning from death. She was tired—the strain of her abilities was significant—but she pushed into the fatigue, drawing insight and inspiration from the lethargy of her own mental faculties and putting that feeling into the aether, which shivered and bucked as it clamped down.

The surging beast slowed, its wingbeats suddenly sluggish. A bright spear of light was forming above it, and the mana seized, its flow like grains of sand through an hourglass that had been tipped almost horizontal. A flock of darting, fiery birds of prey went from flitting swiftly toward the beast to a lackadaisical cruise through the air.

But Regis winged across the battlefield at speed, transforming as he approached, and the aether continued to swarm, picking up speed instead of slowing down. The globe solidified just as Regis, now little more than a shadowy wisp, passed through my flesh and into my core.