Chương 226: Chapter 222: Terror

Solan had been abandoned by her god. She struggled to comprehend why it left her. What did it mean to be a Seed, sprouted or not? Why did she suddenly feel like the entire world was looking down on her as she peered into the sacrifice's eyes. At least, what should have been a sacrifice. Her sacrifice. All she now knew for sure, was that this was no simple child. That word seemed so wrong now. How could this be a child barely past her Naming and Trials? It couldn't be human at all.

Not when it had scared off Solan's god. Solan felt her soul encased and bound to the vicious Seed before her. As far as she could tell, it did not harm her. It did not interfere with her in any way different than the cursed soul. Clearly, it was not directly harmful. But why had her god refused its contact the moment it began to settle over her soul? The situation had changed.

Solan had already suffered immense losses, but nothing would ever be a shock to the system as powerful as her god — the one she'd worshipped for centuries — showing reluctance. She dare not even think it was fear. As painful as it was to have everything slip through her fingers at the last moment, the only thing that remained important was her life. And she was not about to lose it here. Solan pulled herself out of the Pink realm.

Her primary chain scraped against teeth, and the jaw immediately tried to slam shut on her before she could fully leave. It sliced through the side of her battered body, cutting off an arm and sinking into her hip. The transformation her god had force her to undergo now left her concerningly vulnerable with the absence of the power it was supposed to host. Her body was slowly trying to revert — bone, muscle and sinew chains trailed off her form as it shrunk back to her humanoid shape — but the progress was slow.

What were once parts of her body had now been confused with her other weapons. Bits of herself were mixed inseparably from the chains of her Invowed. At least now, she was out of that Pink realm. Countless tendrils of the black hole were grasping at her, pulling her down to an end likely unpleasant, but she was not yet past the turning point. Solan still had her ways. Through the same connection to her Invowed, Solan reached K'Noirus. Her most devoted. The woman immediately responded.

K'Noirus' soul flared like a beacon, and Solan could feel the impression of the woman's body changing. K'Noirus became a winch for Solan's chains. It had taken years to guide the woman's name in the way Solan desired. In the early days when her cult first reached prominence, K'Noirus was the only reason Solan had survived the many assaults of the other cults trying to crush her rise. Back then, that was all it was good for. Now, the woman might as well be considered an extension of herself.

A central focal point necessary for Solan to activate the culmination of all her progress. But for now, she just needed the escape. She needed to return to Coral before that Pink maw opened again, and the full breadth of those galaxies came for her. Solan let out a relieved breath despite the lack of lungs in her current form. She felt the links of her body grow taut. Even her largest chain — which was half unresponsive from crossing the phantom — tensed under an unseen pressure.

The long tentacle silhouettes of the Darkness strained against the sudden force on her body, but soon enough, they would let her slip free. She would be summoned by K'Noirus no matter how deep in the grave she'd fallen. It was how she'd survived Zoaul. But… as the strain continued to mount… nothing happened. The world didn't fold away before her eyes as she appeared before K'Noirus. There was no warping. Solan simply remained. And as she narrowed her eyes and looked inwards, she felt dread pool in her gut.

Her means of escape had been severed. Not individually, nor by any means of overpowering, but rather a sheer smothering of the concept of escape itself. This was why her god had abandoned her. It was a shackle, she realised. What surrounded and linked both their souls was a shackle. Solan's god had not wanted to be tied to this sprouting Seed. But the more pressing issue was that it had not been able to break the binding. It had only slipped the shackles by leaving before they could settle.

If her god couldn't break this death pact, then Solan had no chance. A renewed crack of Pink light above shoved Solan past the horrific discovery of her own mortality. She nudged her connection to K'Noirus. The loyal servant had been pushing herself to do as Solan requested, to the point of self-harm. Still, it hadn't worked. But so long as she understood the shackle correctly, K'Noirus should have no issue so long as she didn't warp Solan away. She was quickly proven right.

Good thing too, because Solan hated trying to attempt what she was about to do without a comprehensive anchor. Solan unleashed the full worth of her name. Her craftsmanship and herself became one. In an instant, her human form crumpled into a freeflowing mass of steel and flesh. Her consciousness bled through all the chains in her vicinity, both those formed of her skin, bone and flesh, and the massive masterwork of the fleshforge. The screams silenced.

The whimpers of thousands of victims quieted as their mouths became hers. As powerful as this state was, Solan hated ever having to take it on. Not only did it risk Madness if she stayed shapeless for long enough, but it also messed with her sense of self. Without an anchor, she was all too likely to lose herself as her mind split a thousand ways. It was not a natural state for the human mind. And Solan could only wonder how Ta'Stralanov'r had managed to keep it up for a millennium.

The cursed bollards were still there, causing lumps where the chains knotted, but without a body for the uncontrollable bundle of serpentine creations to get stuck to, they were manageable. She tried to avoid the opening maw as she shot the lighter, less Darkness-held parts of herself up to Coral. Each chain shot around the mouth. It didn't try to bite them, as it was already far too busy sinking its teeth into the bulky masterwork that was still half-limp. Solan couldn't pull herself out of the way fast enough.

Solan was ready to feel the impenetrable steel be severed. She was surprised when it wasn't. The single moment settled her disturbed mind. No matter what this 'Seed' might grow to become, she was still only a fifth evolution for now. Even as she told herself that, there was no discarding the knowledge that her god — an entity so far beyond herself — had fled because that Seed was sprouting. Just what did it fear?

But just because the fangs didn't sink deep into the corrupted ironwork didn't mean they weren't a threat. Solan struggled against the grip the mutation held on her. There was no slipping free. It had — whether intentional or not — clasped on one of her limp sections, so there was nothing she could do but scratch at the edges of the teeth as the maw dragged her closer than ever to the black hole.

Even with all of her power thrumming directly through the chains themselves, Solan discovered the teeth had grown strong enough that she could no longer shove them open to free herself. They had been gradually strengthening through the encounter, but this was far too great a variation from the base strength. She couldn't believe any name below the fifteenth evolution could provide this much empowerment. Finally, her chains impacted the underside of Coral.

She wanted nothing more than to pull herself back up, but so long as the maw kept its teeth locked around her, her time was running out.

"Let me go now, and I'll forget all about this." Solan internally grimaced. Why did that have to sound so much like pleading. The leader of the Fleshsmiths did not plead.

"I will let you walk away." Again, that overlapping voice echoed a laugh out from deep in her Pink realm.

"I told you already. I'm not leaving until you are dead."

"Then death will find you as well," Solan said.

"If you kill me, then I will drag you down to deepest pits of the black hole."

"You already have." The girl's words seemed nonsensical.

"Well, you threw me down after stabbing me last time. You and the other cult leaders. Back then, I would have gladly accepted mutual death. Not now. Not any longer. You will die, and I will relish as your life slips away." Finally, it all clicked. Solan had already sacrificed the Seed — or would have at some point in the future — but now she was back. The Eidolons had sent her back. Instead of accepting the sacrifice, they favoured her and returned her to the past.

If you spot this narrative on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation. It made no sense at the same time it was the only thing that made sense. The Eidolons wanted something from the Seed. If they had already interfered, then no wonder her god had left. She was lucky to have gotten the explanation she did before it sealed off all connection. The last scraps of hope that she'd be able to use this girl-shaped entity as a means for all she desired slipped from Solan's mind.

If it had happened once before, who was to say the Eidolons wouldn't interfere again? Whether to send their Seed back once more, or to punish the one who killed her. And Solan was now in a forced fight to the death with that Seed. She wanted to scream. She wanted to cry in a way she hadn't for so many years. There had to be a way out of this somehow. Solan had faced countless challenges in her time, but never had she expected this was how she would fall. No. There was still time.

So long as she could return to Coral, she could figure a way out of this dilemma. Even if it required some sacrifices. Solan destroyed her greatest creation. She felt the pain intimately as the huge mass of steel and forgotten souls fractured into a billion parts. Some were swallowed by the Pink maw, but most were immediately latched onto by the black hole and pulled downwards. Acting quick, Solan forged the broken steel to tattered strips of flesh. Many more chains took shape.

They were a poor imitation of anything she usually created, but with so many pieces and so little time, it was the best she could salvage. With nothing between its teeth, the jaw clamped shut again. Solan immediately began hoisting herself up, but it was too much to hope for the mouth to stay gone. Pink light cracked through a new broken fissure in space, and the Seed stepped through, clinging to her teeth. She looked down upon Solan. The girl stood at the edge between the Pink realm and their world, taunting her.

She tempted Solan with the possibility of reaching a few chains out and grasping the sacrifice for herself. But Solan didn't dare. A hundred thousand chains bloomed across space. They reached for Coral as the black hole tugged from below. Only the girl and her maw did they avoid. The Great Iris wasn't in view — blocked by Coral — but the downpour of solar wind burned bright enough to cast shadows from her chains. The rushing metalwork and shifting lights scattered dark patches all across the underside of Coral.

And in that darkened underside, that unnatural Pink washed everything in its unsettling, sickening, enchanting colour.

"You can feel it, can't you?" a hundred voices sang down at her.

"There is no escape." The Seed opened her soul and unleashed another Dark Star with all the stored corruptive power of her cursed name. Something that should have been impossible. Even for their supposed perfect sacrifice. Solan didn't want to go near the maw. She didn't want to give the entity above her any other opportunity to pull her back down. But allowing a Dark Star to form in her path to survival was by far the worse option. A dozen chains coiled in to smother the growing sphere of blackness.

She did exactly as she had not five minutes ago… but it didn't work. The Dark Star bulged against its binds, shattering them and the thousand Invowed they were formed from. She immediately sent more to stop it, increasing the power of the containment by a factor of ten, then a hundred. Nothing worked. Solan was powerless to stop it. The Dark Star swelled around the maw, swallowing it from sight, yet the Pink glow remained. In fact, it seemed to emanate from the Dark Star itself.

The black sphere grew to a significant size before hanging still. It was larger than the ones that destroyed her Fleshsmith operations, but not so large as to consume her chains that now hung from Coral. For that, Solan was relieved. She could still pull herself up and around the edges, avoiding the corrupted space entirely. Then the Dark Star began to bleed. The first drop splashed across her lowest chains, and sprayed into the black hole below.

The second missed, but her attention was pulled towards the drooping mass on the lower half of the Dark Star. All that blood pooling around the base made the sphere look like an inverted water droplet. It was the third that was the problem. When it fell, so too did the gigantic amalgamations crawling out from the blood. The beast crashed against her metal and flesh before she could move out of the way. It clung to the rope-like strands while the rest of the blood tumbled into the abyss.

The amalgamation weighed a hundred tonnes at most. Not much, considering the total weight of all her current form. She struck out at it with another length of steel and flesh. Solan growled in irritation when the beast latched onto this new chain too, making use of one of the bollards to make her life difficult. The next whip killed it, but that was no longer the problem. Amalgamations fell by the thousand. All immensely heavy. All doing their best to tie her up and deepen the pull of the Darkness.

And those she wasn't able to get rid of in the first few seconds soon found themselves with dark tentacles from below coiling around them. It would have been convenient had those gravitic leashes ripped the pests from her. Instead, they held on desperately. It only ever increased her burden. Solan's rise was already drastically slowing when the Pink maw reappeared, allowing the Seed to fly through and her mouth to close behind her.

She should have been shocked by the ease with which the being had escaped the Dark Star. Solan wasn't. At this point, she simply expected the impossible from the Eidolons' favourite. The Seed hung in open space from large wings that swept out from mid-torso. She seemed to float. An act of effortlessness that stood in the face of Solan's struggles. It was still not done. The floating visage of what Solan and every other cult leader had been chasing for centuries gestured its arms wide.

Shade cast by Solan's chains and the Pink that filled the gaps began to swirl around the girl-faced entity. It was slow at first; clearly the same ability that she'd been using to hide herself earlier. But now… it seemed to be reaching into the very nature of the world itself. Solan could do nothing but watch as that slow spiral of Pink and dark churned into a storm. The spiral touched the Dark Star and — with another impossibility to add to the pile — the pure corruption was pulled into the spiralling hurricane.

Pure corruption that should not be movable unless the Dark Star's heart was destroyed. Along with the Dark Star, all that amalgamation spawning blood was pulled into the mix. As the storm grew, there was suddenly not a bit of flesh or link of metal able to avoid being drenched in the manifesting pools. In a matter of seconds, the force of the Darkness became overwhelming. Her chains never broke, but her points of contact did. Solan was forcefully ripped from Coral's underside, and was now in freefall.

Solan, through desperate force of will, abandoned ninety nine percent of her soul to the black hole so even a speck of herself could remain. But even that wasn't enough. So she narrowed herself to a single link, which she flung with all her power. She should have sliced through the bottom of Coral, landed in the midst of the reconstruction site for her fleshforge, where she could reshape herself, then rebuild her strength.

It would take decades, maybe even centuries for her soul to recover from being shattered to one ten-thousandth, but to live, it was her only way. Instead of that, instead of fleeing with her tail between her legs and coming back another day, Solan saw a pink maw opening in her path. Momentum powerful enough to vaporise solid steel for an entire metre in each direction vanished. A second later, she was held casually in the hands of the Seed as they looked down on everything that was left of Solan.

The parts she had cast aside in a final vain hope of survival. Solan watched the ninety nine and nine nine percent of her soul flail in the chains she'd left them. They were still technically her, but lacked the true weight of her name. If she were to die, it was possible her mind might recover in them, but not guaranteed. As a single chain link, Solan had no way to kill herself even if she were to consider the possibility that she could escape that way.

She was forced to watch the rest of her body flail semi-mindlessly as it fell into the Darkness. Until a Pink mouth opened below. The instant her former self noticed the arrival, it latched on for its life. One after another, chains hooked into the single point in space that wasn't falling to a fate none wished to receive. Without eyes, it wasn't exactly the same, but Solan had enough sensory names to see the sinister, satisfied expression on the Seed's face.

Her attention wasn't on the mass of Solan's discarded form below. It was on the single bit of metal in her hand. That same touch that had unleashed Solan's curses now rested on her core name, as if trying to see into her mind. Down below, each part of the chain not within the 'safety' of Pink grew increasingly heavy. Even as Solan watched, there were ropes that gave up from the strain, and dove into the mouth. This Seed… this monster was making Solan watch as her own soul chose to be eaten.

That was the only reason she wasn't dead yet. Solan tried to look anywhere else besides the mountain of her former body now desperately forcing itself inside the maw that would digest it slowly. She tried to focus on how strong the wings must be to keep them aloft despite the hooks of the Darkness sinking into them both. Of course, she failed. It was impossible not to see how she threw herself into the obvious trap. Though, with no other option, she would likely make the same mistake.

"I have been waiting so long for this, you know?" the Seed said.

"It was something I always wanted, seeing you ripped to shreds or prostrating yourself and begging while I sliced you apart, piece by piece." Solan was a single chain link. She could say nothing.

"This isn't something I ever thought I would achieve. It was a dream for listless nights and dull days. I had a lot of time to think about how I would kill you. How I would kill everyone who wronged me. I never thought it would happen. Even arriving back in time, after you killed me, it was hard to conceive that you could ever actually die." Solan did not want to listen to this. This girl was supposed to be her sacrifice. She was the one who was meant to be standing over Coral as a higher being. This was wrong.

Where had things gone so wrong?

"But here I am! Here you are!" She raised Solan as if she were a celebratory glass.

"And I have to say, this has been far more satisfying than I ever could have imagined in all those agonised nights. To see you reduced to little more than Tarchon's fingernail. To be the one to consume your soul. To watch you die." Solan screamed internally. This couldn't be happening. Not to her. She had worked for too many centuries to reach where she was. She hadn't survived battles with each of the pinnacle cult leaders to be cut down by some upstart younger than first creed whelps. Eidolon interference or not.

But… there was still a chance for her. So long as she was eaten as well, Solan could reconnect with the rest of her soul. She wouldn't be digested for a few weeks, at least. It was plenty of time to figure a way past the death pact and escape the Pink.

"I am not going to eat you." What!?

"Not like the rest of your soul," the Seed continued.

"No, I have a more fitting death for you." No No No No No No! The Pink jaw below vanished. Not a single chain had resisted the urge to throw themselves into the entity's stomach.

"I hope your death is a lot more painful than mine was." With that, Solan slipped from the former perfect sacrifice's fingers. The Darkness tendrils pulled on her metallic form instantly. She fell faster than she'd ever moved before. A strain of unquestionable magnitude overtook her, stretching her hard steel as if it were putty. Before the pain became mind-numbing, Solan noticed the creatures of the Darkness shift restlessly. They did not welcome her with veneration.