Unbound

Chapter Seven Hundred And Sixty Three – 764

Felix literally flew up the stairs, ascending on a tether of crackling lightning until he burst through the doors of the Eye and into the Crafting Hall. As he reached the Crafting Hall, however, apprentices were streaming out of the Glyphworks, hustling away around the Beacon in a panicked stream of robes and discarded styluses. A few clustered near the door, afraid, but all too curious.

"What's happening?" Felix asked.

The apprentices started. "A burning monster walked into the Glyphworks. They just started sitting at the Glyphmaster's workstation. Can you believe—?"

The apprentice looked back and paled when they realized who they were speaking to. "Sir!"

Felix didn't have time for that. "Has anyone been hurt?"

"No, sir, it didn't touch us. It just…started working."

"What? All of you, go. I’ll handle this." Felix pressed past them just as Pit in puppy form raced into the Crafting Hall. Karys and Zara weren’t far behind.

“Felix, wait!”

He ignored them and slipped into the Glyphworks.

The Crafting Hall had been taken apart. Pieces of metal scrawled with sigaldry were welded into a large, concave shape—the sigils were rough, but they all had to do with generating heat and fire. A makeshift furnace? No, that array is entirely too big. That's more like an incinerator.

To the side of the welded monstrosity, a burning skeleton was at the Glyphmaster's workstation, leaning forward with a dark Leviathan bone stylus in hand. Within the flames that shrouded it, the skeleton was charred, and its ribs were black against a pulsating orb of Mana that glowed white with streaks of orange and red. It beat like a living heart, sending liquid trails spiraling out across its limbs and head.

"Atar?"

"He's not himself," Alister said, stepping in from the side.

"I can see that." Felix flared his Emperor's Vigilance.

Name: Atar V'as

Race: Elemental*

“I followed him up here. He just woke up, then flew across town. Straight here." Alister was still breathing hard, and his forehead was slick with sweat. "It took everything I had to stay on his trail. He hasn't touched anyone, let alone hurt them, but it’s not Atar."

Felix frowned. When he focused on the little asterisk next to Atar's race, he came up with something interesting.

Elemental (Urge of Undying Flame)

"The Urge, it's—" Alister floundered, unable to find the words before shoving ahead anyway. "It's piloting him like a Manaship. It won't talk to me. I've tried over and over."

Felix stepped closer. The heat from the skeleton’s aura was incredible. Many times more than what they'd felt at the hospital. "Atar, are you in there?"

The skeleton didn't look up from its work. Its hand moved steadily on the countertop.

"Urge! Talk to me."

The skull, streaked with blackened char, snapped up toward Felix, and pinpoints of white flame burned in its sockets. we are busy.

It returned to its work, which Felix suddenly realized wasn't some slab of metal or stone. The skeleton was inscribing its own bones.

"It said ‘we,’" Alister pointed out. "Atar must be in there somewhere."

"Good point," Felix edged closer, and his boots started melting into the superheated stone floor. He banished them, leaving his scaled feet bare. "Urge, I need to know if Atar is all right."

The stylus scraped against bone, and it was an awful tooth-grinding sort of sound. the mage lives.

"Then release him. You don't need his Body."

he will die. i do not wish for that.

“What are you doing?"

atar lives. his thoughts infect me, press upon me. i have healed him as much as i can alone, but he requires more.

"So you're inscribing his bones. With what?"

there is a skill within us. it is nascent and unformed, but our trials have shifted things within. i sense its potential, but we need more power to activate it.

"I can take a look," Felix offered. "If you'll let me."

The Urge wearing Atar's skeleton hesitated, pausing its sigaldry before nodding. i will not cease my inscriptions. the mage’s voice grows dim now that i am moving.

"I'll be fast," Felix promised. He stepped closer into the flames themselves, his Garment burning away from his Body. With a pinch of his Will, he cast his Mana forth, sending his awareness along the Link that connected him to Atar.

He fell, dropping into a dark landscape punctuated by the spark of burning braziers and rivers of molten flame. The dark temple that was Atar's core space still existed, mostly intact save for pieces of obsidian that seemed to have burst from within. Those chunks of midnight rock floated within those rivers of white and orange flame, like suspended ribbons of power connecting his broken bits.

Felix's nose wrinkled. The core space reeked of a strange power. It was different than Atar’s own. Brighter. Sharper. The pieces of broken obsidian glittered like razored edges in the eternal night, surrounding obsidian spires chased with cracks that leaked a fitful light. The architecture of the temple was busted, splintered here and there as if by a ruinous meteor shower, and the broken bits were floating, barely held together by flame. In the center, the bars of what was once a cage had been burst asunder.

Atar stood there, no longer aflame, but not human, either. He remained a skeleton, though it was charred until there was not a speck of white left on his bones.

Felix grappled with his friend, pulling him into a fierce hug.

"Oh, hello," Atar said. Clearly surprised, he tentatively lifted his arms. "I'd return the hug, but I'm delicate.”

Felix pushed Atar back until he held the mage at arm's length. Pieces of Atar had crumbled, leaving trails of ash on Felix’s shirt. “You scared the hell out of me, man. Alister, too. You've been in a coma for days."

Atar's skull deformed into a grimace, mimicking his living, fleshy expressions perfectly. "I know. I could hear him next to me, but I couldn't speak. I'm weak and getting weaker, Felix."

"Even if you weren't a walking skeleton right now, I'd have figured that one out." Felix looked around. The fires flared as more of the Obsidian Temple splintered, like an explosion in slow motion. "Did this happen when you pulled in that fire Mana?"

"It did," Atar said. "Even now, I'm holding everything together as best I can, but it's falling apart. At best, I can slow it down, giving the Urge time enough to do what I told him. I hope."

Felix narrowed his eyes and flared his Perception, trying to catch each piece of the bursting temple within his senses. "I can help," he said.

Fiendforge!

His Unique Skill spiraled out of him, clamping down on the core space. Immediately, the splintering stopped. Nearest to him, a few pieces of obsidian stone re-merged into a single piece again.

Atar sagged in relief. "Thank you. The pressure isn't so bad now."

But it’s getting worse. The core space trembled against his hold, and despite all his power, it was still rattling against itself. "It's going to fail if we don't do something more."

Enjoying this book? Seek out the original to ensure the author gets credit.

"I know." Atar stepped toward a piece of obsidian on the ground. "We have a plan."

Alister stood a distance away from the burning Urge, unable to draw closer. "Urge," he said. "How can I help Atar?"

leave me to work. The Urge inscribed another symbol onto Atar's femur, digging deep enough that white showed between the charred bone.

Alister gritted his teeth. It hurt to see Atar harmed. "That…that won't work unless you're accounting for the bleed from the tertiary sigils."

White flames and dark sockets lifted to flare at him. what?

Alister took a step closer, craning his neck to see. He felt the fine hairs along his jaw and the back of his hands begin to singe and smolder, but he held still. "I see the siphon array, but it’s modified by several of Atar's signature developments. You're drawing these ideas from him. Is he speaking to you now?"

1. we melded for a time. his echo remains in here. The skeleton tapped its head. i know what we must do.

“Why are you making those markings? A connection between mirror and refraction shouldn't pass through secondaries. That's a primary relationship."

The Urge was silent for a moment, staring at the stylus and its stolen bones. when I awoke, the images were so loud. the mage could not be silenced. his voice has quieted more than I anticipated.

Alister started. "What does that mean?"

we are running out of time.

Alister swallowed and then stepped away, swiftly walking to a nearby workstation. He rifled through the drawers until he came to a set of enchanted leather sleeves, gauntlets, and an apron. They were heavily inscribed to protect against extremes of temperature, acid, and the occasional burst of lightning. He recalled when they had made them, Alister and Atar both, developing them for transporting specialized materials so that their apprentices could handle things beyond them, at least for a time. He put them on.

The Urge eyed him. those will not protect you from me.

"They'll help." Alister walked closer, clad now in protection, only slowing slightly as he entered the zone of intense heat around the Urge's skeleton. His boot leather sizzled. "Hold out your arms. We've got work to do."

"You're telling me there's a Skill here?" Felix asked.

"Yes. I can feel it in the core space like it's a... tooth waiting to emerge."

Felix looked closer at the floor. There was some deformation happening and some cracks, but there were cracks everywhere. He could feel them all through his Fiendforge and there were too many to count. Still, he trusted Atar. "So, this Skill. It’ll help?"

"Yes, it will. But I've yet to figure out how to pull this Skill into my core space properly. It's evading me like soap, too slippery in the hand. The sigaldry that Flame is using is going to work with it, I think.”

“You think?”

Atar grimaced. “The idea came to me while I was unconscious after the attack. It's an adaptation of the siphon array that you developed, but narrowed. Focused. I gave Flame instructions, and I'm hoping that he's following them."

"He seems to be," Felix said. "He has a stylus, and he's going at it."

"Good. That is good. The real problem is, it's a sympathetic binding. The only way I could make this work was to do it so that it would pull at the Skill. Feed it. But to complete what he needs to make, I need information from this Skill.” He jabbed his finger at the hump in the ground. “I need this Skill properly into my core space, and it just…isn't…happening."

Atar turned his dim eye sockets on the man. "Can you help me coax this Skill into being?"

"That's what I'm here for."

Together, they focused, honing their Intent and Will upon the Skill itself. Felix couldn’t feel it at first—everything was Atar—but as the mage’s Intent sank into the ground, it described the bare edges.

“Holy shit, it’s there.”

“I told you!” Atar gasped.

There was an obsidian pillar buried in the stone. It was whole, mostly. Bits were vague, but their paired Intent sharpened them bit by bit—and Felix leaned on his Fiendforge in a way he hadn't expected.

Fiendforge is level 117!

…

Fiendforge is level 120!

Guided by Atar's knowledge of himself, Fiendforge made a sudden, intuitive leap. The opaque morass of Atar’s core space clarified, and Felix could feel the pieces of Skills all around him as if he were reaching out his hands. They were scattered and amorphous, chunks of unformed potential lingering just beneath the surface. The most potential was gathered in the obsidian pillar before them, and sudden lines of white-orange fire creased the floor, spreading outward at right angles. Below, the potential shifted, over and over, as if the Skill were still trying to determine what it should be.

"Atar, fix the Skill in your Mind! What you need it to be! What you want it to be!"

Atar frowned. "Why? We're trying to pull the Skill in, we're not..."

"Trust me, this isn’t what you think! You need... Choice matters," Felix said, the words only making sense to him as they came to his lips. "And what you choose now will determine what happens next. Focus. Focus on what you need."

Atar, for all his bluster, wasn’t an idiot. His eye fires dimmed into darkness, and he bowed his skull as he marshaled his Intent one more time. The potential shifted once again, flickering across its center like static against his Fiendforge.

This time, they held.

“I-I’ve got it!” Atar shouted as crackling flames licked up from the glassy floor. “We need to pull it free!”

Felix flared his Will, shaping his Intent into claws that wrapped around the hidden pillar and pulled. It fought back, kicking against his power…and it was stronger than he anticipated. Perhaps because it was someone else's core space, or perhaps because it was not entirely realized, it slid from his grasp.

No, you don’t!

Fiendforge is level 121!

He redoubled his efforts, firming his hold across the entire core space even as he stretched down beneath its surface. Inch by inch, he hauled back, dragging the pillar as if it were miles beneath the earth instead of a scant few feet. Pressure from Atar’s core tore at him, crushing at his thoughts until they were a narrow tunnel, fueled only by his indomitable Will.

Before that, the core space could only fail.

An angled stump of darkest obsidian burst through the surface, erupting in a geyser of molten rock and veils of white flame. Atar screamed. His blackened bones shook, crumbling to ash at the edges.

Felix paused. The pillar had only partially emerged, perhaps half a foot from the ground.

"Atar, you're falling apart. If we push for the rest of this, I don't know if you can hold it together.”

“Just hold it!” Atar said through clenched teeth. Two of his molars turned to ash.

“ I'm clamping as hard as I can against your core space! It's not a matter of it blowing outwards. Your core space is vibrating against itself! I can't stop that. If we try this, you could die."

Atar’s skeletal face twisted, and somehow Felix could tell he was grinning desperately. "Either I die now, or I fade away. This is my choice."

“Fuck. Alright!”

The mage reached out. Felix met him.

Together, they heaved.

All around them, the temple crumbled as the tremors increased by an order of magnitude. Obsidian turned molten, dripping across the floors. Swirls of white flame erupted from the walls, spitting up into the endless night sky. The flame burned across the firmament, looping around them like the contrails of a diving bird, not giving off light so much as burning the darkness.

Atar’s ribs crumbled to ash, his legs turning to dust as fire rose around him like a cloak. It scorched Felix, too, forcing a surprised gasp from his lips as he held tight. Molten stone rolled across his bare feet and up his legs, scorching his nerve endings, but he forced his attention away—and onto Atar.

Boon of Bonds! C’mon!

He reached inside of himself, trying to initiate his newest Title and give Atar a burst of power…but there was something wrong. There were layers of resistance between him and Atar, like a shroud hung across their Link, muddying it. A presence was there. Not something aware, but it was potent regardless. A presence of flame.

"Atar, you need to ask—"

The mage screamed, and fire consumed the world.

Alister reached up and wiped the sweat from his brow. His arm was marred where his sleeve had burned through, and his face was red and splotchy.

"Here, we need—" He swallowed, but there was no spit left in his mouth. "We need an anchor glyph."

yes.

Atar's skeleton was covered in white inscriptions, though they barely showed through the growing curtain of incandescent flame. Felix stood in that inferno, standing senseless, his Garment almost completely burned away. Alister himself had been pushed back ten full strides by the Urge's heat already, yet still he put up his other arm to shield his face and stepped closer, pointing to another patch of sigaldry.

"Here!" Alister shouted above the roar of flames. The Urge was growing hotter by the second, and Alister had no clue how long he could continue to keep his eyes open, let alone stand nearby. "Smooth! Keep the stroke smooth, or else the Mana will lose cohesion!"

i am aware!

The sigil flashed, and the inscriptions across Atar's body surged with sudden, molten light.

step back, mage! the Urge commanded.

Alister stumbled back, his boots sliding across the scorched floor. The leather was almost melted through. "What's happening?"

step back! he does not wish you to die!

Alister retreated, the heat growing beyond incredible to truly life-threatening for even his Adept Body. The floor sagged, melting beneath the Urge's feet, same as the workbench. Fires burst alight, catching across stone and metal like kindling, and Alister's gut went cold.

He'll burn down the entire Glyphworks! Alister reached out and slammed the nearest emergency array, triggering a sudden cataclysm from above. Mithril and Leviathan bone dropped in massive cages, one after the other, slamming onto the burning skeleton. And Felix.

Sigaldry flared, spitting sparks as it fought against the sheer power the Urge put out. But it was done. The cages sealed themselves. The heat cut out.

Until they exploded.