Chapter 455: The Weight of Blood

Even after gaining three points in Adamantium Titan, I was still in incredible pain. It told me that without that growth, killing this god would have killed me too, and perhaps I would only have had the satisfaction of seeing the serpent die before I followed it.

I could not sleep, even though I wanted nothing more than to collapse and sleep a thousand years away. Every part of me that could still ache was asking for it. But the notification had not gone away when I closed my eyes. It sat on the inside of my eyelids the way the sun does after you have looked at it too long.

This question would not go away until I answered it.

[Claim Natal Weapon?]

I opened my eyes and looked at the blade, standing in the side of the mountain where I had slapped it. From here it looked like a red crack in the rock. The evening light was on it, and it was still moving inside itself, liquid and solid at once, like a vein under skin.

I knew almost nothing about it. I had heard the words Natal Weapon exactly once, when the System granted one to the god, and nothing I knew from the future mentioned anything like it.

But natal meant birth. Anyone who had sat through a single lesson on old Imperial roots knew that much. A birth weapon, then. A weapon that belonged to someone the way a hand belongs to them. And the System had not called it a gift or a reward. It had called it an entitlement, and it had revoked it the moment the god was dead, as if the right to it had died with the holder, and now it was offering that right to me.

Nobody in my time had ever mentioned Natal Weapons. Which meant that either they had stopped existing sometime in the ten thousand years between here and there, or they had never been something mages were allowed to know about.

I found that I wanted to know which, very badly.

The sensible thing would have been to wait. I was exhausted, my soul was a raw wound, and the last time I had touched that blade it had cut me in half. A sensible man would have closed his eyes, slept for three days, and thought about it afterwards with a clear head.

But I have never once been accused of being sensible, and curiosity has killed me before. Several times, actually. It is practically a tradition at this point. Besides, the System had never given me anything that I regretted... much.

"Yes," I said.

∞

The world answered the same way it had when the god called for its weapon. It was quieter this time, or perhaps I only noticed it less, since I was so tired. But Eldritch Perception shivered, and for the length of one breath I was looking at something that was not in the valley at all.

It was not a picture, exactly. The closest I can come to it is a ledger, a vast one, with no paper and no ink and no edges, only entries, more than anyone could count, running away from me in every direction. And close by, very close, there was one entry that had a name beside it.

The name had just been crossed out. It was a long name, and it tasted of blood and deep water, and I did not need anyone to tell me whose it was.

Beneath it, something was writing mine. Except the name it was writing was not Elric Voss. It was something else, and when I tried to peer deeper, my sight ran into a wall.

Then the breath was over, and my Status Screen was burning.

[Eldritch Perception: 50 → 53 (Acolyte)]

[Natal Weapon claimed.]

[Bearer: Elric Voss]

"Well," I said. "That was easy."

It was not.

∞

The blade tore itself out of the mountain. I heard the rock scream as it came free, and then it was coming towards me across the valley, low and fast, turning end over end, and I lifted my hand to catch it like a fool, because, I mean, why not?

However, the blade came apart in the air a hundred feet from me. During the fight, the two-thousand-foot blade had shrunk until it was just over seven hundred feet in length, and when it dispersed, it became a red wave of blood.

Before I could close my hand or write a single line or do anything at all, it hit me, but there was no impact, because it went into my body through every wound that had not yet closed, and I still had a great many of those.

I have been burned alive, folks. I have been dissolved, flayed, drowned, and once, in a life I try not to think about, slowly erased by the lightning of a Tribulation. This was worse than all of them, because it happened from the inside, and every bit of me, and I mean every bit, could feel it.

My veins and channels lit up red under my skin. I could see them, a map of fire running up my arms and across my chest, and wherever the red met my own silver blood, the two of them fought. It was not a metaphor. I could feel them fighting, the god’s blood trying to eat mine and mine refusing to be eaten.

The pen fell out of my hand. I did not notice until I heard it hit the glass.

I tried to write something, anything, Hold or Halt or Sever, and I could not lift my hand. I tried to reach through the crack in the seal for my Anima, and there was nothing there to reach for, and I remember thinking very clearly, in the middle of all of it, that I had just survived a god and was about to be killed by its sword because I wanted to know what the word natal meant.

It would have been a very stupid way to die. I have had stupider, but not many.

∞

[Natal Weapon: Unborn]

[A Natal Weapon is born of its bearer.]

I read that through a haze of red and did not understand it, and then, slowly, I did, and what helped me most were the tribulations I had survived.

The blade had not come to me to be held, as I had foolishly believed at first. It had come to be born again, and anything that is born has to be born out of something... does that make sense?

You see, it had belonged to a god of blood, and it had been made of that god’s blood, and now it was inside me looking for something to be made of. It was not fighting my blood to destroy it. It was trying to become it.

I had learned long ago to surrender myself to the lightning in my veins, and it is with me even as I breathe, so I used the same philosophy and stopped fighting.

And still, it was very difficult to do. Every instinct I had, every life I had ever lived, told me that when something is eating you, you fight it.

It was like watching a fist come at your eye and not letting yourself blink.

I let the red in, fighting against the instincts of my body, and I felt the god’s blood stop pushing against mine and begin, very slowly, to change.