Chapter 479: Nineteen Marks

When I came to the past, I thought for a while that this age was less dangerous than the present I had left. That safety turned out to exist only inside Dorrik’s mountain, and when I left it, the madness began.

If I had known, while I was eating a warm meal in the hall of that god, that I would be fighting a Necromancer under the bones of a god the size of a mountain, I might not have believed it… but my life was so damned strange, and one thing was for sure. As I grew stronger, my deaths were becoming more interesting, because the things that could kill me were becoming stranger.

The god took a step and the floor of my pyramid dropped four feet under it, and a pale golden aura erupted from it, and for a moment it was as if the dawn was rising inside my pyramid.

My feet went out from under me and I fell into a trench, and in a second hundreds of the undead filled it. With an irritated swipe I turned them to ash and climbed out the other side, while the stranger’s claws nearly took my legs off in the distraction.

Forty-five.

I made the mark on the underside of a tilted slab as I went past it, upside down, with my left hand, which was missing most of its fingers. It did not matter that it was ugly. None of them had to be beautiful. They only had to be in the right place and in the right order, as I followed the exact shape I had in my head.

By all the lights in heaven… living on the edge of life and death. I fucking love it.

Forty-six, on a shard of broken floor I kicked behind me.

Forty-seven, on a dead woman’s shoulder blade while she had her hands around my throat.

Forty-eight was on the hull of the stranger’s own shell, and I ended up missing a part of my liver for that move, but it was worth it.

∞

I want to tell you about the void.

This could be the only time I talk about it, and there may not be much time later. I did not know if this would work, but I thought it would… maybe.

When my sight was dragged into the void, my soul nearly came apart, and what I brought out of it was Eldritch Perception and a great deal of knowledge I could not read. I have described it before as glimpsing random sentences from a tome with a billion pages. That is accurate, and it is also too kind, because a sentence implies a grammar, and most of what I saw had none.

But I saw one thing more than once. I saw places where everything was going to the same destination.

There was no up in those places and no down and no out, and the reason was not that direction had been forbidden. It was that every direction had been pulled towards one absolute point in space, and nothing would ever be able to get out.

I did not understand it then. I do not understand it now. I have maybe one truth out of that billion pages, and it is this: size, mass and gravity are three words for the same argument, and if you make the argument lopsided enough, the world stops having a shape and becomes a point.

There was no way for me to be sure this was its name, but I believed it was called a Black Hole.

∞

From the beginning, the pyramid was never the weapon, and neither was Crush. Every column I dropped taught me how much of that collapse I could spend, and where it would land, and how fast the structure would answer.

Maybe one of those columns would have killed the Necromancer. Clearly it did not, and if that was the case, I needed something more, because my real weapon was the mass.

The structure I had created should have collapsed the moment it stood. Twelve miles of rock, a freaking trillion tonnes of weight, held up by my magic. The entire building had been straining towards the floor since the second it rose, and every Script in it was an argument against that, and I had spent all night shaving slices off the argument.

I did not have the power to make the thing I saw in the void, that Black Hole, and I wondered whether there was anyone who could casually wield magic on that scale. I thought of the Celestial figure made of stars that I glimpsed when I opened my fifth Earth Gate, and I thought a being like that should be capable of it. In fact, maybe part of his body was made from Black Holes.

What I had was a soul I could only reach through a crack, a pen that used to be a sword, and essence I was stealing out of the air, the thing this pair called the Blood of Terra.

But I did not need to supply the force. The force was already here. It had been trying to happen all night. All I had to supply was the destination.

The eighty-one marks I was scattering across the twelve miles I had sealed off made no sense from any direction except one, because the thing they described was a single point in space, broken into many smaller pieces and hidden in the dark.

That is why the Necromancer could not read them. There was nothing to read yet. To be honest, even I did not fully understand what I was making, but if there was any mage who could perform such drastic experiments in a time like this, that mage would have to be me.

Fifty-two, in the glass of a trench wall.

Fifty-three, on the chest of a dead Stoneborn as I went under its arm.

Fifty-four, on my own forearm, because I had run out of surfaces and there was nothing else within reach, and then I tore that piece of flesh off and let it drift away.

∞

The god, which had fully risen, reached for me. A hand the size of a town square came down through the falling dead and closed on the floor where I had been, shattering the earth and crushing countless dead to ash.

I was already moving. This god could crush me easily, but it had to touch me first, and I was too fast for it. The only problem was that it was not the only god in that land, and if I was not wrong, more would be coming.

If I had not finished making my move before more of them entered this place, then even if I succeeded, there would be too much interference. I was on a clock.

Fifty-five.

“You draw pretty lines,” said the odd voice from the fused abomination. “A pity I will not give you the chance to finish them.”

Of course it had noticed. It would have been a fool not to see me etching lines across the battlefield. It had seen the glowing runes on the walls of the pyramid and understood they were responsible for the destruction I could wield, and it believed that if it stopped me completing a rune, I would lose.

It was watching for a shape, for one great working to appear somewhere on the floor, so that iyt could just tear it apart. Well, that is a shame, it was guarding against something that was never coming.

I mean it had a very good plan. It was simply too far in the past to understand how far mages had carried Inscription in the future.

Sixty.

Sixty-one, on the lip of the largest door, while the dead poured out of it past my face.

Sixty-two, on the bone of the god’s own heel, which I reached by climbing up a dead man and jumping, and which cost me my right arm below the elbow when the stranger took it off on the way down.

The Law of Flesh had stopped keeping up. It was still correcting, and it was simply losing, because there was green fire in every wound I had, and the fire was ageing the flesh faster than the Law could make it new.

I had perhaps four minutes left in me. Maybe five.

I needed nineteen more marks.

sorry for slow updates, the chapters are longer and a bit technical… so I usually take time to make it come out well, and give the magic a sort of logic that ties everything together and would directly link to elric’s future power sets.