Chapter 483: The Colour of Blood

he point was still there. It was smaller than the head of a pin, and it was still pulling, and the world was coming apart at the edges of it.

Everything around me was gone. The strata, the doors, my pyramid... all of it, and it was still hungry.

I sighed and lay on my back at the edge of the crater and watched the sky bend. The air was drawn down out of it in a column so wide that the clouds for a hundred miles were taking the shape of a funnel.

Then beyond that shape there was a fold, as if the sky were folding into itself, and then even the stars were folding with it, and the black between the stars was flowing across the edges of them.

"Yes... Yes... Let us ininininin.... Let us in!!!!"

My eyes began to bleed. The voices I heard were those things that live in the darkness of the void, and they were coming. The heavens were folding into the shape that would welcome their return, and when it finished, the world would be theirs for the taking, gods would fall, and Terra would become part of the void... I should kneel and welcome the Ruler of the Dark, the King of Nephilim, the Hand of...

[Warning. Eldritch Breach detected... Transcendental Grade Intent encroaching on Liminal Barriers.]

Then the point flickered, and the world seemed to pause, and a scream of outrage erupted from the depths of the lowest parts of heaven as the fold snapped back, the sky unfolded, the stars went back to being stars, and the world had a shape I recognised again.

∞

I lay in the silence and tried to understand what had just happened.

Did I almost open a door for those things in the void? This power I had summoned, to control weight and gravity and see into the truth of things, even into the hearts and minds of others, was not the lucky coincidence I once believed it to be.

The truths I had glimpsed in the darkness between the stars were planted in my soul. They were the key to drawing these things into the world, and they were never lucky finds.

I coughed, feeling the stranger’s arm pull painfully inside my chest. I felt lost. How many dangers were out there? Outside Terra, was there only madness to be found?

If the point had not gone out, what would have happened? The System called it Transcendental Grade Intent, the stage beyond Sovereign, the realm of true immortals like the Pale Matron, something I suspect has no right to exist in the material world.

I was trying to fight demons, gods and sovereigns, and I had nearly introduced a new player into the equation.

Bad Elric. Playing with toys you do not really understand.

∞

I forced myself to look at the place where that point no longer existed, and I thought about why it had gone out in the end. Obviously I had lost control of it, so something else must have shut it off.

The answer was not far away once I thought about it. Essence.

The point had gone out because it had run out of fuel. Everything I built here was fed by it, and in this era the air is thick with the stuff. Ten times what I know from the future, maybe more.

Something that powerful clearly needed a great deal of it to function, and as far as I could tell, there was no more essence for miles. Who knew how far that point had to reach before everything the stranger called the Life Blood of Terra was gone.

I chuckled when I understood something else. I had drawn the Script using only a fraction of the soul power I could pull through the crack in my seal, so in many ways it was weak and malformed, almost as if I had built a ten-storey building out of twigs and plastic instead of stone and steel.

What would have happened if I had full access to my soul, and had drawn it with all that power behind it?

So should I count myself lucky that I did such a shoddy job?

I laughed. Damn, it hurt. Still, I did not care.

∞

I lay there for a long time. I do not know how long. Hours, maybe. The sun moved, the wind moved, the dust settled and the crater cooled. I could imagine how this place must look, and the thought almost made me laugh again, but I held it back. I feared any real laughter would push me over the edge.

I was going to die, but I still needed to wait. It was not yet the right time.

I lay on my back at the edge of the crater with nothing left but a stubborn refusal to die.

The Law of Blood was working. I could feel it, doing something in my veins, keeping the few drops left in my broken body alive. This was not a matter of healing. The Necromancer’s flame had burned all the vitality out of my flesh, and my soul was broken and aged as well.

I may not have looked it, since I barely had any skin left, but alongside my ridiculous injuries, I think I was also dying of old age... fascinating.

It was also odd that my blood was red. I looked at my hand, and there was not much of it left, but there was enough to see that the colour of those few drops was indeed red.

That should only happen with the Death Stone close to me, and that was impossible, since it had been in the stranger’s hand when the point took him.

Not daring to believe it, I groaned in pain as I turned my head. Damn it, everything hurt. But I turned, and I looked at the ground beside me, and I saw it.

The Death Stone.

It was three feet away, glowing with the same red light as my blood.

Ah. The graveyard of untold millions, waiting for me to die so it could record my death the way it had recorded all the others.

"What are you?" I whispered.

The Necromancer had a realm, and even if I did not fully understand the realms of gods, I knew that put her at the level of a Major God, and she was paired with a Sky Beast. I do not know whether I fought her true body, but she was many times more powerful than the blood god, and she had not been able to survive that pull.

The Death Stone had ridden through the whole of it without any trouble at all.

The stone pulsed, and I remembered the smile of that dead thing underground, the one that had reminded me of Death. Ah. Could it be that simple, that this so-called Death Stone came from Death herself?

"You want to claim my death?" I chuckled. "You will have to do better than that."

I closed my eyes and waited for the warband. I could feel them coming closer.

Before I died, certain arrangements had to be made.