Chương 135: Chapter 68: Magnor the Purified

There was no time for horror, for pain, for mourning Astrid. There was only room for pure, instinctive reaction, carved through weeks of training and a visceral desire not to end up like that thing. As the mass lunged once more, Selena opened her mouth.

It was a silent verb, a command forged from the deepest recesses of her will, a quiet word that resonated within her being and throughout the surrounding air, appealing to the memory of moisture in the atmosphere, in the stone, and in the very blood soaking the floor. The corridor suddenly filled with water. It did not fall from the ceiling, nor did it gush from the walls.

It was simply there, as if it had always existed invisibly, now materializing in a sudden torrent that trapped what had once been Astrid, enveloping the entity in less than a second. The creature thrashed, its bony appendages flailing beneath the surface. Selena did not stop. She moved her lips again, uttering another mute verb, a colder, more definitive order. The temperature shift was brutal, a drop of a hundred degrees in a single heartbeat.

The water surrounding the creature, and only that water, as if obeying a precise perimeter, solidified with a crystalline, echoing crack. In the blink of an eye, the mass of flesh and bone was trapped inside a block of translucent ice as thick as the trunk of an old tree. Within, the purplish form writhed in impotent fury, its appendages striking the frozen prison with dull thuds that made the entire block vibrate. It was strong, terribly strong. The ice groaned, cracking slightly. It would not hold.

Magnor, his face contorted with pain and blood loss, had managed to tear a piece of his cloak and tie it around his ankle with brutal force, crude tourniquet that reduced the torrent to a dark trickle. Selena, pressing her left hand tightly over the burning, empty socket of her eye, crawled toward him. Hot blood leaked through her fingers. Upon reaching his side, without a word, without even looking into his eyes, Selena opened her mouth once more.

Another soundless word, another surrender of her own future: a verb of restoration. On Magnor's bleeding stump, the flesh began to move. First, out of nothingness, as if sprouting from an impossible dream, bone emerged. The fragments of the metatarsal elongated and knit together, forming a perfect, white structure.

Then, like a fast-forwarded film of divine creation, nerves extended like silver roots, tendons wove themselves into strong, elastic threads, pink and living flesh amassed around the new skeleton, and finally, pale, scarred skin closed over the new foot. In a matter of seconds, it was there, complete, though bare and covered in dried blood. There was no time for astonishment, nor for questions.

Because the moment the regeneration finished, Selena felt it first, a strange sensation, a void where weight, pressure, and existence used to be. She looked down. From the middle of her left thigh downward, her leg was gone. There was no blood, nor immediate pain; the shock numbed it. There was only a clean stump, far too clean, as if the limb had been erased from reality by the stroke of a divine eraser.

The creature, in its last, desperate struggle within the ice, had unleashed a final attack, an expenditure of pure energy meant not to wound, but to undo. The blast had struck her, scattering every piece of the flesh that had been her leg in all directions. Magnor, his eyes locked on the purplish shadow that was now crawling away, parted his lips. It was a silent expulsion of pure will, a verb forged from the iron of his spirit and focused on the most primitive concept.

In the damp, cold air before him, fire was born. But it was no ordinary flame. It was a dark, deep red, intense like arterial blood, and it did not dance. It materialized as a liquid, ravenous smudge that, instead of falling, hurled itself toward the creature with the intelligence of a predator. Upon contact, it did not spread. It adhered. It clung to the throbbing mass like a second, igneous skin, melting into its surface and sinking into the abnormal flesh.

The stench was instantaneous and foul: charred meat mixed with a nauseating sweetness of burnt sugar and red-hot iron. A shriek erupted from the creature, though it bore no trace of an animal or monstrous sound. It was a sharp, torn noise, fluctuating between a human moan of agony and the screech of an organic substance splitting under heat. The entire mass convulsed, shaking with spasmodic violence that made its bony appendages grind against the stone.

Magnor, his face transformed into a mask of cold determination and accumulated pain, inhaled to unleash another verb, the final blow. But then, he heard it. —Why… are you… attacking me…? The voice rose from the heart of the flames, a dragged, shattered sob imbued with a confusion so deep it was more heartbreaking than any curse. —You are… my companions… This narrative has been purloined without the author's approval. Report any appearances on Amazon.

It was, without a doubt, the last echo of Astrid, the residue of her consciousness trapped and twisted inside the nightmare of flesh, distorted beyond recognition but unmistakably hers. It was a moment of hesitation, a crack in the armor of his resolve. A moment that the creature, even in its agony, did not waste. While this occurred, Selena, propped against the cold wall, fought her own battle against dissolution.

With her mind clouded by the phantom pain of her absent leg and the heat of the blood still welling from her stump and eye socket, she acted out of pure self-preservation. She plunged her fingers into the warm flow pouring from her thigh, soaking them. Then, with that crimson-painted finger, she traced shapeless forms in the air before her, letters that never seemed to follow any standard path.

As her finger moved, the blood on her fingertips vanished, absorbed by the gesture itself, consumed like ink by the invisible parchment of reality. The effect on her body was immediate. On the stump of her leg, the throbbing, raw flesh calmed; the edges drew together and closed with unnatural speed, leaving a smooth, pale scar that looked years old. The warm flow on her cheek stopped all at once. The wound in her eye, though not healed, ceased bleeding, sealing itself into a painful but stable stillness.

Looking up just in time, she saw the scene reach its climax. The creature, in a final, terrible surge of will, had exploited Magnor's hesitation. It had launched itself at him, not with its bony appendages, but by splitting wide open. From its central mass, two extensions resembling thick, dark, venous umbilical cords erupted, driving into the giant's shoulders with the force of a longbow, impaling him against the cave wall with a dull impact.

Magnor screamed, a sound that began human and ended as the most animalistic cry anyone could utter. The cords did not stop at the flesh. Upon contact, they disintegrated into extremely fine vascular filaments that, like the roots of a parasitic plant, burrowed beneath Magnor's skin, climbing up his neck and torso, visible as a black, pulsing web expanding under his complexion. The giant convulsed, his massive muscles rippling in uncontrollable spasms.

His cry was no longer one of physical pain, but of absolute, metaphysical terror. —It's inside me! —he screamed, his voice hoarse and broken by sobs. His wild eyes stared at Selena with terrifying lucidity. —It's INSIDE me! —he repeated, growing more desperate by the second. Beneath his skin, the black network shifted, bulging here and there as if something were trying to reshape his flesh from within. His body began to warp. Small protrusions formed and vanished along his arms and neck.

It was as though his flesh had become clay in the hands of a mad sculptor. It was then that Magnor, through a superhuman effort of will, locked his gaze onto Selena. His trembling lips formed another silent word. But this one was not directed at the creature, nor at the fire. It was directed at her. A verb of restitution, of return, laden with all the force of his agony and his desperate resolve. Selena felt a sudden heat, an electric tingling that burst from the stump of her leg.

Before her incredulous eyes, flesh and bone began to regenerate. It was vertiginous, an accelerated, unnatural growth. First the femur, then the tibia and fibula, the muscles weaving themselves like living skeins of yarn, the skin stretching and closing. In seconds, she had a leg again. But it was not the same. It was thinner, paler, with less muscular definition, like the limb of someone who had been bedridden for years.

At the same time, a similar pressure flared in her right eye socket, and then light returned, though the vision was blurry, like looking through a fogged pane of glass. The price of Magnor's echo, the gift of the Purified, had been paid in the quality of the restitution. He had returned her form, but not its fullness. Magnor, after casting that last spell, seemed to exhaust the final spark of his endurance. The black network beneath his skin writhed with renewed fury.

With a final effort that strained every muscle in his neck, he, who had healed others with silent words, screamed with the full force of his lungs, a clear, lucid command laden with fierce mercy: —RUN! Selena ran. Not with the grace of a huntress, nor the agility of a duelist, but with the brutal desperation of a cornered animal. Her new leg, thin and strange, betrayed her balance. She tripped, striking her knee against a stone outcrop, scrambled back up panting, and ran again. The echo of Magnor's scream — Run!

— throbbed in her ears louder than her own heartbeat. She did not look back. She knew what she had left behind: a giant with an invaded soul, a friend reduced to a throbbing horror, and a red fire demanding a final sacrifice. She ran until the burning in her lungs turned to fire, until the muscles of her uneven leg protested with needles of pain.

When she believed she was far enough away, a distance measured in agony, not steps, something deep and primal within her forced her to fling herself to the stone floor, flattening herself against its cold hardness. It was then that the world behind her, in the depths of the cave's heart, transformed. A light, at first white and pure like a lightning bolt, then turning golden and orange, illuminated the tunnels behind her as if a sun had been born in the bowels of the earth.

It was not a flash, but a sustained eruption, an inverted dawn bursting from the deep. With the light came the heat. A wave of hot, dry, purifying air reached her even there, curled up on the ground. Selena understood it immediately, with certainty that froze her blood despite the heat. Magnor the Purified had summoned not a spell of destruction, but one of total purging. He had turned his own body, invaded by the corruption of the Astrid-creature, into a living crucible.

A purifying fire that would consume both parasite and host alike, a funeral pyre that was simultaneously martyrdom and redemption. His final act of healing had been to annihilate the infection, even if the price was his own life, reduced to ash and light in the perpetual darkness.