MAGUS INFINITE

I had fallen farther from the city than I expected, but I did not fly towards it in order not to attract attention from the Arcanist fighting in the sky. I used Stormstep to cross hundreds of meters with each step I took, so I was moving faster than most Adepts would be able to track.

As I moved closer to the city, the smell of death hit me before I saw it, and although I had smelled some very terrible things in my life, this one was worse than all of them... combined.

It was then that I came across the major road that led into the city, and I paused, shock and horror filling me to the extent that I almost stopped breathing.

The road in front of me was lined with the dead, and they had not been left the dignity of dying, as their bodies had been worked on afterward. The bodies were deposited on both sides of the road, as if they wanted to ensure that the road was not blocked, and at a glance, the bodies should be in thousands, maybe even more, but I did not want to count.

There were moments I wished my sight was not very good, and this was one of them. I could see men, women, and children; they were mostly naked, and a long cut had split them from the throat to the belly, and everything inside them had been taken.

For a moment, my brain wanted to deceive me that what I was looking at was not real. ’Look here,’ it was saying, ’See, they have no hearts or organs, and that means they could not have been alive. Also, can you not see that there are no flies... these bodies have been here for days, maybe even weeks; where are the carrions?’

However, that voice became silent when I looked at the eyes of the bodies. I paused near where a mound of bodies was placed, and I looked at them, noticing that whoever harvested their organs did it very cleanly, obviously the work of magic.

I stood over the empty bodies, and two things came to mind; the first was more grim, and it made me bend down to sniff the bodies. Underneath the smell of rot, I perceived the familiar stench of corruption.

The first time I had met a Narghul Sorcerer, it had killed me with a wave of corruption that caused my body to mutate, and under the influence of corruption, I had reached into my own chest and presented my heart to the demon.

All of these bodies, they had been sacrificed to a demon, and I knew that the demons did not just want the organs of these people; what they should be after was something more precious, and that would be the soul.

As Mages, we were able to develop our souls to the extent that we could wield them to change the world, but that did not mean that everyone else did not have the potential of every mage; it was just that their souls were not strong enough to move the world.

Every Mage had a strange soul, because our soul could grow stronger to the extent that it could change its state as more power is accumulated by us, and from what I was seeing here, the demons must be feasting on the souls of people.

I shivered, and I was glad that the Moon Fox was still sleeping; I would not want her first sight of the surface to be something like this.

∞

I closed my eyes, and I was shocked that beyond the horror was a rage that I thought was buried inside of me. I pushed through this feeling and began walking towards the city.

There were still faint screams carried by the wind reaching my ears, and my mind recorded every one of them. I soon reached the gates, and saw that it had been shattered from the inside. The metal was twisted outward, and I could see the marks of claws on the stone.

I placed my hand inside the deep grooves, and it was deep enough to fit my hand. Whatever demon had entered this city had not been stopped by walls and was a massive beast.

I stepped through the gap, and the world became a painting of horrors. Oh, foolish me, thinking that the horror I had seen outside the gate was the worst of it.

I fell on my knees, and I almost felt like vomiting; a scream wanted to emerge from my soul, but I forcefully swallowed it, even when it felt like I was swallowing razors.

Gasping as if I had exhausted everything inside me, I forced myself to look up, even knowing that my face was now wet, and I pushed myself to walk into the city.

The main street was a river of blood, a literal river, flowing down the cobblestones toward the city’s lower districts, thick and dark, carrying fragments of clothes, flesh, and bone. The bodies of the dead were piled against the buildings, stacked like cordwood, some of them still twitching.

I walked past a woman who had been impaled on a broken cart, her arms still reaching toward a child who lay a few feet away, crushed beneath a collapsed wall. The child’s hand was still outstretched, and her fingers were frozen in the shape of a grasp.

I walked past a man who had been crucified against a door, his chest carved open, his ribs pulled apart like the petals of a flower. His face was frozen in a scream, and I could see that he had been alive when they did it, because the wounds were still wet, the blood still seeping.

I walked past a group of older men, with long white hair and beards, most likely the elders of this city, their hands bound behind their backs. They had been lined up against a wall and executed, one by one. The wall behind them was painted with their blood and brains, and the bodies lay in a heap where they had fallen, the living and the dead tangled together.

This city was massive, and the number of bodies that were executed and stacked here was in the hundreds.

I walked, and I counted. At first, I counted the dead, but the number grew too large too quickly, so I stopped. I counted the streets instead, the blocks, the neighborhoods that had been reduced to ash and bone.

It was then I realized that the bodies I saw outside the gate must have been the ones with the potential for magic, and so their souls and all their organs had been scraped away, but for everyone else in the city... they were fair game, and they could be butchered in every sick and inhumane way possible.

A child was crying somewhere. I followed the sound and found a girl huddled in the rubble of a collapsed house, her mother’s body draped over her like a shield. The mother’s back was gone, torn open by something that had torn through her to get to the child, and my heart nearly stopped because for a moment, I thought I was looking at my sister.