MAGUS INFINITE

At this moment, I did not even know how I was still alive. My heart seemed to be revolving. Every inch of my body was stretching, compressing, living, dying... and above it all was a cold hum that was the Link!

When Vrakth died, the thing that had bound the Moon Fox to him, a leash of blood and longing thousands of years old, did not die with him. It came loose and cast about for a heartbeat, blind, looking for the nearest soul that was most compatible with its previous home... and as it turns out, I just consumed Vrakth’s soul, and it found me.

I had Vrakth’s soul in my channels. I had just become, in the fox’s reckoning, whatever Vrakth had been to it. The link that had belonged to the demon for who knows how long snapped its loose end into me, and I felt it sink in, cold and deep, a hook in the soul I had not asked for and could not pull out.

The fox felt it too, and its red eyes went wide with what I thought was shock and recognition as it felt a new bond slot into my soul so cleanly as if it was always meant to be there... and then the shock curdled into something I had never seen on Vrakth’s face even at his most bestial.

Rage. Pure, ancient, betrayed rage. At this moment, I knew that this was because the link was not supposed to move. Whatever bound the fox to Vrakth was meant to die with Vrakth, to set the fox free after forty-three thousand years of slavery... I was not supposed to know this, but I did... the damned link.

The Moon Fox had endured years of torture to either escape Vrakth or simply outlive the demon; instead, a boy had killed the demon and taken their place, and the leash the fox had been straining against for an age had only changed hands.

A long mournful howl emerged from the fox as it howled towards the red sky, the light of its moon tearing through the haze above, showing hundreds of three-horned Narghul Sorcerers who were watching us, and I thought they were beginning to descend when the pyramid sent a second warning that rippled through my chest.

”Warning. Sixth Seal Loosened. The Pale Matron stirs.”

I sensed a shockwave that passed more through my soul than my body, and I looked to the side, a mile away, a massive white tentacle burst out of the earth, resembling a white segmented worm that, for its incredible size, did not even seem real.

A part of me began to place the eruptions into the stages that it arrives. The first warning released the Khaaz, Khaazim, and the Narghul Sorcerers. The second warning leads to one of the tentacles of the Pale Matron being released, and perhaps those pale translucent creatures that seemed even more powerful than the Narghul Sorcerers.

If there were seven seals, then it seemed that each seal was not only releasing the Pale Matron but releasing higher-order demons as well. I would never win if the seals were broken; I could only stop it before it began.

Although these thoughts were running through my mind, the Moon Fox had other things running through its head. Its sorrowful howl ended, and its red eyes fixed on me,

”You,” the half-moon above its head screamed into my soul, and it was the first thing it had said that sounded like hate. ”You take his death AND his leash? You will not hold me as he held me.”

And it came for me again, and this time the link came with it.

And my status screen, choosing the worst moments to give out its notifications, sent me this.

[Stored Essence: 1980 → 45,000 / 500,000]

∞

I felt the link deepened as it charged; it felt like hooks sinking further into my soul, and I knew that if not for the fact that my soul was a mutated combination of a celestial and a mage, this hook would have sliced my soul to pieces.

Yet it felt so cold, and in that cold I could feel something passing along it in both directions. Vrakth’s memories, maybe, or the fox’s, or some blurred thing that had been both of theirs for so long there was no telling them apart: a flash of a sky that was not this sky, a hunt that ran for a thousand years, a moment of catching and a moment of something that was not quite killing, a binding made in a language that predated the demons.

It poured into me along the link faster than I could shut it out, and I understood, in fragments, that Vrakth had not simply killed the Moon Fox, maybe because he could not, and so he had bound it. Caught it and chained it inside his own blood and carried it for all these years, and the fox had spent every one of those years straining to be free, and the only freedom it had ever been promised was the death of the thing that held it.

And I had just become the thing that held it.

I raised my hand, trying to explain that I did not want whatever this link was when the fox reached me, and I knew that I could not reason with it anymore.

My entire right arm expanded as I threw a storm between us and pulled Mortal Shell closer to me to brace for the impact.

”Boom!”

At the moment of contact, the link flared, deepening again, and reaching toward the place in my chest where Cor Telluris spun, and the Lightning Law Shard sat.

Then I realized with a growing horror that the Moon Fox wanted to bind me and reverse the leash, the way that Vrakth had done all those years ago.

And I knelt there in the rubble of a ridge I’d watched sunrises die from, ten thousand and eight channels full with a thing made of blood and old night sinking a hundred-thousand-year hook into my soul... I thought, with the strange clear calm that comes at the bottom of everything:

’Fuck, I really should have let it have him.’

Then the fox’s jaws closed on the link, and it pulled, and the deepening became a tearing, and the world went silver and then black and then somewhere far away a woman sighed on a breeze I could no longer feel,

I sank into the deep, and the Hollow Avatar came out.