MAGUS INFINITE

The sheer desolation in Vrakth’s voice was haunting; in this moment, it was as if he had forgotten that he was about to die, and his focus was on this fox.

The Moon Fox did not answer Vrakth’s question. It simply stood there, its blood-and-shadow fur rippling in a wind that did not exist. Its red-pinprick eyes moved from Vrakth to me, and I felt something cold settle in my chest.

Its red eyes went from the kneeling demon to the beating heart in my threads, and the silver half-moon above it pulsed, and the meaning of the pulse arrived in my chest the way demon-speech did, except this was older than demon-speech.

”Mine,” the Moon Fox said, without words. ”The hunter is mine to finish. Give him to me.”

Vrakth’s four dim eyes were still fixed on it, full of that disturbing longing, and for a moment I thought he wanted it too... wanted this fox to be the one that took him out of the world.

I should have let it, knowing it would have been easier. The fox would have had its kill, and I could have stepped back and let two ancient things settle a debt that had nothing to do with me.

But I had not bled through eleven loops to hand the last of Vrakth to something else. I had fought this demon while giving him the chance to attack with everything it was capable of, and I was not giving my victory to this fox.

”No,” I said.

The demon’s heart was still in my threads, and his soul was still half-melted in my forge. The harvest was not finished, eight thousand seven hundred channels, thirteen hundred short, and every one of those channels was waiting on the soul I was holding.

The Moon Fox was scary, no doubt. This creature did not seem like something that should even be found inside a world, but something that was meant to roam the heavens. But I was too tired and too much in pain to care... I had seen enough monsters to give me nightmares for the rest of my life; what was one more?

I straightened and squeezed my hand into a fist, tightening the thread that binds Vrakth’s heart, causing the demon to groan. ”He’s mine,” I told the fox. ”I earned him.” Then I added, ”You can have whatever’s left when I’m done... that’s the best I can give you.”

The half-moon above the fox flared, and the beast came for me, and it came fast, faster than anything I had faced up to this moment, its massive shape of liquid darkness crossing the crater without seeming to move, the ground cracking and blackening in a line that chased it.

I had a quarter-second, maybe less, but I had no fear.

∞

My threads came up, the Loom weaving a barrier, but the fox went through it as if they did not exist. The threads were lightning, and they should have burned shadow, but the fox was something older and more terrifying.

I knew that this would not hold the fox, but I needed any delay it could buy me here as I poured everything I had left down the threads into Vrakth’s heart and soul at once, the Edict and the forge together. There was no elegance or mercy in my actions; I just wanted to end him before the fox reached me.

”Die,” I told him, the word going straight into the failing heart in my hand. ”I’m sorry. Die.”

The stubborn remnants of his soul finally gave out, and the crystalline ocean of it, already melting, finally broke its surface tension and ran up my threads, and the last of Vrakth poured into me as the fox’s jaws closed where my head and torso had been.

I had moved. Lightning Incarnate, with the Anima I’d banked expecting such a thing, a half-second of becoming lightning, and the fox’s bite shut on the afterimage I left behind, and the real me was already gone...

...except I wasn’t gone. The fox’s jaws closed on nothing, and the fox turned its head and found me anyway, instantly, even Vrakth had never been able to track me this quickly, and I understood with a cold drop in my stomach that this thing did not hunt with its eyes alone, as the strange light from the moon above it seemed to be shining on my location.

The thoughts had barely passed my head as the fox slammed into me.

∞

I want to tell you what being struck by the Moon Fox felt like, because if anyone had ever been hit by a falling mountain, they would be able to understand what it felt like.

Up till this moment, the being who had hit me with the greatest force had been Vrakth. The demon hit like a massive brick wall falling on you, with force and mass. The fox, on the other hand, hit like a tide going out.

Its body of liquid darkness passed through my storm of threads without resistance, no redirect, no friction, as if my lightning was not there, and its shoulder caught me across the chest, and I felt two things at once.

I felt an impact, and something being pulled out of me as I flew across the ground as if I had been launched by a massive catapult.

I went across the crater and through a ridge and out the far side hundreds of meters away, and I lay in the rubble and took stock, eh, it was bad.

My Anima was nearly gone, my marrow was spent, and I had only one arm, a leg that didn’t work, ribs I’d lost count of. And something else, something new and wrong, a thread of cold reaching into me from across the basin where the fox stood over Vrakth’s emptied body...

A link.

∞

Vrakth died as I hit the ground. I felt him go as the last of his soul finishing its pour down my channels, and the heart in my threads crumbled to ash.

The harvest completed in the same instant the fox’s blow landed, both things happening at the same time.

[ Cor Telluris — Channels: 8,700 → 9,400 → 10,008 ]

The last channel closed, and something was stretching itself awake inside me, as Cor Telluris began to revolve inside my heart, and every rotation it made, it went faster, and a weird sound began to echo from my body, but drowning it was the link.