Jace leaned over a smooth metal table that occasionally pulsed with blue light. His eyes were closed, his brows furrowed, concentrating on some unseen machinery. The room was dark, save for the blue pulses, which spread from Jace’s table, flowing across the whole room from floor to ceiling before vanishing into a point in the center of the dome’s floor.
The three stood behind him, silent, observing.
“Well, there is good news and bad news,” Jace said suddenly, removing his hands from the console, which went dark.
Lights began illuminating, two at a time, in a ring around the room's center. The floor sank slightly before sliding in six separate pieces toward the outer rim of the room, vanishing into the immobile parts of the floor. A dark pit was revealed, and fog immediately began rising from it, covering the outer perimeter of the floor from console to wall in a knee-high layer.
“The good news is that the Well still has power—some, anyway,” he said, walking out over the pit, a small walkway extending from the same lip that the floor previously retracted into. When he was directly over the center of the pit, a thin rod extruded from the edge of the walkway, stretching to just over waist-high.
Jace placed his hand on it, and another blue light pulsed from his hand into the rod, and down down down into the dark depths of the pit. After several seconds, a blue shine emerged, quickly coating the entire room and making the Well seem filled with unusually blue water.
“The bad news is that it was automatically placed in cold storage to conserve energy. This is not the worst-case scenario, however. It is what plan B is for,” Jace explained with a shrug.
“What is plan B, boss?” one of the three asked.
A green pulse raced across the room, originating from Jace as he turned around, his back toward the group, staring down into the abyss. The three retched and gagged, all falling to their knees, spittle running from their mouths, and their bodies shaking.
Jace raised his arms, and green flames ignited around his body, burning harmlessly, as if he himself were the wick.
“Gentlemen and gentlewomen, the future thanks you for your sacrifice. It will be more than enough to move the Well out of cold storage, and once that is complete, the Conductor awaits,” he declared, arms outstretched grandly, still with his back to them, but now looking toward the ceiling, as if receiving divine approval.
The three rebels’ mouths opened wide, their jaws snapping as they unhinged. A small light, no larger than a pinky nail, but brighter than sunlight, emerged from their cavernous mouths slowly and in stages, as if tugged repeatedly by a rope.
Their corpses collapsed, blood running from their eyes and noses, their skin pallid, and the three lights rocketed down into the blue abyss.
“Long live the Rennet,” Jace said calmly, clasping his hands behind his back and watching the lights as they descended. “Or whatever.”
——————————
Nephthys stared at the city before her, wondering where the creature and his people could have gone, when a sickening feeling overcame her. Her skin crawled as a wave of magic washed over her, nauseating and viscerally wrong.
She vanished and reappeared before the building she had descended originally, the feeling of despair and nausea originating far below. She blinked rapidly through the building, unwilling to risk teleporting directly into the middle of whatever the filth was.
She passed through sublevel one, a massive maze of narrow corridors attached to wide open warehouses, with barely a glance.
After what must have been less than five minutes of searching, she was unable to find the stairs leading down and, figuring they were hidden for security reasons, blinked near the center of the disturbance she felt. She reached a hand out, as if gripping the ground below her, and pulled.
The floor, apparently made from some amalgam of intertwined stone and metal, screeched and roared as it was rent asunder. She peeled back two panels of flooring that rained stone debris, falling from the metallic cables that supported it, reminding her of rebar and concrete, though this material seemed far more integrated.
As she floated down through layers and layers of stone, metal, and dirt that kept uprooting and tearing itself apart to allow her passage, a blue glow began to fill the space. It coated the walls and seemed to stick, as if it had a physical presence, far more potent than mere light. She began to hear voices, though that was not the descriptor she would use.
They were laments.
She glided down from the top of a domed room, the perimeter of which was a pathway that ringed an abyss of blue magic. It looked so dense she might be able to swim in it, though the thought repulsed her. It was horrid and wilting, a concentrated miasma of despair and ill fates. It wafted up to her in wisps of blue, carrying with it the last cries and lamentations of doomed souls.
Doomed souls. Though they were deteriorated, as if missing parts of themselves, and screaming without knowing why.
Nephthys’ feet touched the ground, and only now did she notice a figure standing within the miasma. A thin walkway stretched out over the void, with a small circular platform at the end. Jace stood atop it, his eyes closed, a small smile twisting the corners of his mouth.
The flicker of his sickly green soul resonated with the wailing morass below. Thankful that her stoic body did not feel the nausea her mind experienced, she approached the pit slowly.
“Soul energy, yes? How many people fill this tank?” she asked calmly.
“Oh, only dozens by this point, I suspect. Even this storage, our most advanced specimen, was never a perfect vessel. Indeed, soul storage was my specialization, so it is both a shame that my work was ended so prematurely and an unprecedented opportunity to restart,” Jace explained, not turning.
“A researcher, then? Interesting. You do not strike me as the ‘rule the world’ type,” Nephthys remarked, reaching the edge of the pit and glancing down.
Only her bodily disconnect prevented her from recoiling in horror, for this ‘vessel’ he spoke of was an aberration unlike anything she had seen before.
A luminous crystal star with five points seemed speared into the gigantic, bulbous head of a man. The head must be larger than her entire body, and it was swollen, as if inflamed. Its eyes were uneven and drooping, with no pupils or irises. A tongue lulled out of its agape mouth, and it seemed to grip the crystal tip with tendrils and ribbons of flesh.
Each point on the crystal star, a prismatic thing with a slight lean toward the blue end of the light spectrum, was decorated with some sort of appendage or viscera: a swollen head, a hand with only three fingers, what seemed the quadricep portion of a thigh, a whole liver, and a heart, which beat regularly, sending out pulses that vibrated the blue miasma.
The fumes leaked out of every opening on the thing, out of the mouth, from vessels and arteries, and every orifice or opening. It was unmistakably the source of the filth, both its concentrated mana and the stink the mana possessed.
“Ah, young one, make no mistake,” Jace chided playfully, clicking his tongue as he turned around to face her. His eyes were green and glowing, and his smile stood in contrast to the atmosphere of sorrow and misery. “Every researcher contains within him unbridled ambition.”
“Every researcher wants nothing more than to continue his work, and if the world around him strives to prevent it, he must change the world itself so that he might continue.”
A green pulse spread out like a shockwave from his body, passing over Nephthys.
[Frkselskjadfoidj;lkaenksjdfo]
A blue window popped up, garbled and illegible, flickering like an image failing to load on a screen.
Fascinating.
She shifted her gaze from the window to Jace, who seemed to have immediately written her presence off after the pulse. He now stared down into the pit, as if gazing at a newborn child.
“So, a researcher from the Praxic Empire…this complicates matters. Your kind is vanishingly rare,” Nephthys muttered, more thinking aloud than speaking to him.
Jace turned, his eyebrows raised.
“Interesting. The lessers I have encountered thus far were easily cowed by…” he started, trailing off as he gazed at Nephthys, squinting.
“Huh…your soul…it is…why do I have such trouble wrapping around it…” he muttered in return, clearly also thinking aloud.
His eyes suddenly widened and glistened with new life, as if he had just witnessed a miracle.
“Oh, oh ho ho! Yes! This is it! You, young lady—your soul! It will power this city—nay, this nation—nay, this world for ages to come!” he declared, his body igniting with green flames.
He reached his hand out to her and squeezed it closed, as if gripping her heart from a distance.
Suddenly, Nephthys sat atop her plinth, the ceiling debris above twirling to some unheard music. The cold light of the moon shone down, mixing with the light from the myriad stars above, painting her audience hall in shades like light through stained glass.
This was her world.
She sat atop a throne she did not recall making, her disguise shed, gazing down at a withered creature. It stood at the foot of her throne, as if in supplication. It was a sunken thing of pallid skin stretched across bones, individual hairs spotting its skull occasionally. Only its glowing green eyes signaled its identity as the creature possessing Jace’s body.
Nephthys gazed at the thing, watched as it withdrew its hand from its attempt to grip her, and stared at it as if seeing it for the first time. It shifted its gaze up to her, eyes widening, the skin around them already stretched tightly, tearing in places.
Nephthys retraced her steps to see how she had ended up here, and the most surprising thing happened.
“Ha, haha—hahaha!” she laughed, filling the space with her mirth and causing the creature to recoil as if it was struck.
I see now.
The creature isolates people from the Words by surrounding their souls with its pre-Words magic. Not a complicated concept, but Nephthys had to give it to him: the execution was spectacular. However, he had miscalculated, despite having every reason not to.
Nephthys' soul was not solely bound to her body. It existed here—here was her, part of her. Trying to wrap its magic around her soul was like trying to grip a mountain with one’s bare hand. He should have immediately become wary when his attempt failed, yet discovering this reality had only encouraged him, thinking he had found a new, better power source for his empire’s soul infrastructure.
The maniac then tried to wrest the soul from her body, yet it had overcommitted. A rebound hit him when he yanked, much like pushing a heavy object can make the pusher move instead. His own soul was dragged from his body and into Nephthys’ world.
In other words, he had placed himself at her mercy.
Nephthys giggled, her laughing fit slowing, and whispers of thoughts bubbled to the surface of her mind. Soul magic, its possibilities, presented themselves to her. She could see him—his very soul—within her own world. She could see who he was. She could probably even probe his thoughts, his feelings, his memories, should she so desire.
His soul was as naked to her as a newborn.
“You were a fool to come here, Mirka’lech. Your insatiable avarice has led you astray once again,” Nephthys chided, still wearing a smile, her voice echoing throughout the hall, overlayed with another, a chorus of other voices, yet she did not notice, nor did she question why his name supplied itself to her.
“...Rior’rath?” he muttered, as if recognizing someone else, his voice the rasp of wind through a graveyard.
Nephthys raised her hand, her palm facing him. He used soul magic to isolate people from outside influence, including the Words. Well, she could turn that magic, that isolation, into true chains.
She closed her hand, making a fist that covered Mirka’lech, and he screeched a wail to compete with banshees. Chains of purple, laced with cracks of green, shot up from the ground, wrapping around his body and constricting him like snakes. He fell to his knees, breathing heavily, and Nephthys snapped her fingers.
Suddenly, they were back in the dome, the sickly blue light surrounding them. Nephthys stood before the walkway over the pit, her disguise still donned. Jace kneeled, his hands on the ground. He breathed as if he had just sprinted for miles, and sweat dripped from his face.
“What. Have. You done. To me,” he gasped between breaths.
“This is my first attempt, so it was sloppy work,” Nephthys replied, calmly striding out onto the walkway. “Those chains will squeeze and squeeze. Now, you are lethargic. Soon, you will be unable to move at all. And, eventually, you will be unable to so much as breathe unless I give you explicit permission.”
“Stay away from me!” he screeched, spittle flying, a string of it hanging from his open mouth to the floor.
The blue miasma swirled toward him, covering his arms as he raised them and pointed them at Nephthys. A torrent of green death energy spewed from his open palms like firehoses, slamming into Nephthys’ body. Jace bellowed a roar, which grew in volume as the firehoses doubled and then tripled their output of the death energy, fed by the soul energy from the Well.
And still, Nephthys approached.
After mere seconds, Jace fell to the ground, unable to even assume his previous kneeling position. He lay prone, his face turned so that he could just see Nephthys' boot as it hit the ground next to his head. Green energy swirled around her, twisting all across her body.
“I am unsure if such magic existed during your time, but are you familiar with counterspell?” she asked, her voice a near whisper.
Jace’s eyes widened in horror, but he was unable to move. The most he could do was bellow in anguish.
“Don’t!”
Nephthys’ counterspell activated, unleashing the same fury that Jace had just aimed at her in triplicate. She aimed it down into the Well, and the magic slammed into the unsightly creature at the bottom, crisping its flesh and crystal into black flakes, which floated away like ashes from a snuffed fire.
The blue haze faded slowly, replaced by a sort of heat haze, though Nephthys knew it to be fragmented souls finding their way out, passing on to whatever comes next.
Drool poured from Jace’s mouth as he gasped, now unable to even speak. He saw Nephthys’ knee land beside his head, and her whisper wormed its way into his ears like a parasite.
“I have so many questions for you.”
Yet she suddenly stood, all thought of the current situation fleeing her mind. She vanished with a fwump and no preamble, wasting no time.
Aka had unsummoned.
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