Unbound

“The Ruin burns away those that reach too high.

Yet we do not require the Ruin to set our histories ablaze.

Power seizes power, and in that clawed grasp we find excuses and rationalizations.

Skills that are too much for the weak, Titles that cannot be utilized by ignorant peasants, inventions too grand to be trusted to just anyone.

They call it consolidation, but I have studied Dragons.

I know a hoard when I see it.”

-Miera Dayne

dive!

Atar coughed and hurled himself through the dissolving wall just as a beam fell from the rafters. It plunged toward him like a maddened wolf, unmoored by stone or steel, as the violet tower fell apart around him.

A blue shell wrapped around Atar only seconds before impact, and the beam shattered upon its surface.

"I've got you, love," Alister said, standing over the fire mage. "We need to watch our step. Everything is coming apart.”

get on your feet! run!

“The Urge is right. We need to get out of this tower immediately.” Alister looked to the side, while helping Atar to his feet. The others were around them, Tern and Elowen leaning against one another, with Zara leading the way.

"We should-" Atar started, but was interrupted by a screaming roar. A creature rose from the clouds of luminescent smoke. It was a hulking mass of muscle and scale, its back wider than the tower they stood within. It was clearly twisted and incomplete. Half-formed, the midnight creature ended in tatters just below its chest, where its purple-black form faded into insubstantiality. Lacking legs, it twisted upon massive arms that were far more defined than any other part of it, including the strange, eldritch head.

There, like a specter of power, the half-formed flesh wrapped around a figure hovering at its center just below the maw, where fangs crowned them like thorns. The maw spread, and once more that voice roared into the sky.

“Gah!” It gripped something vital in Atar's chest and yanking at it, hard.

“That feels awful,” Alister gasped.

Outside, the remnants of a broken fortress—the one that had surrounded the Vent of Levantier—it crumbled. Thick fortifications burst into black, greasy smoke that flashed with luminous streams of Mana.

“Is he trying to eat us?” Atar asked through the pain.

that's what i've been saying! Flame squawked, flaring fire through all of their channels until the pressure loosened its hold on his core space. Atar took a deep breath and reached out to Alister with white flame upon his gray hand.

i suppose i can save him, too.

The force mage grunted in pain as fire wound across his arm and palm, but soon his face eased. He smiled wanly. “Thank you.”

you’re still useful.

“Shut it, Flame. Zara are you—” Atar began, but needn’t have bothered. The Naiad Chanter stood with the other two and held them fast in a barrier of ethereal water. The liquid burst into smoke here and there, but it was swiftly replaced as she resisted whatever it was Felix was doing. Ꞧ

The ground beneath them, however, did not. It burst apart, streaming past them and dropping them all once more. Atar slammed hard, landing on his back on a wide, wooden beam below.

"EUGH! We need to get off this blighted tower!”

He's trapped." Atar frowned up at Zara. Unlike him and Alister, the woman was still on her feet, poised at the edge where the ground vanished and the tower opened up. The water barrier was gone now, but she was still supporting the limping form of Elowen and Tern, keeping their bloody bodies still standing. The deer mage looked far worse off than any of them.

"How is he doing this?" The antlered lady asked. "That isn't magic."

"It is." Zara swallowed. "But it is far older than I have ever seen. We need to get him out of there."

i'm not going anywhere near that thing.

"Flame has a point," Alister said. "Felix told us to run."

Tern, the old Elf, straightened his bloodied robes, and leaned against a wall to support what looked like a swollen ankle. "Let's focus on us first. If we can reach my skiff, then we can flee. From a distance, we can assess the boy's situation far more easily."

Atar stood. "Where's the skiff?"

"There, by the gatehouse. Your man set this Tower down, but it looks like the weight of things started collapsing the outbuildings. It's close, but not nearly enough." The Elf fished out a small, finger-width stone wand. It was set with a monster core at the end, and inscribed with a dizzying network of sigils.

“Remarkable,” Atar said, intrigued despite himself. “What’s it do?"

"Modified summoning. I can pull the skiff to us from a distance. Or I could, if there weren't all this interference." Tern gestured angrily in the clouds of swirling smoke. They were forming now into a large funnel, slowly spinning around the distant monster. "We'll need to get closer, and quick, before the boy eats our getaway."

The behemoth roared again, and the stones around them began to smoke.

run away!

Felix found himself in a quiet place. The last thing he remembered was standing before his friends, telling them to run. Now, he was alone. His body was present; he could see his hands and legs. However, the rest of the world was empty, save for the streamers of luminescent smoke that surrounded him.

"Hunger!" he called into the darkness. "What's happening to me?"

Felix heard nothing back, felt nothing from his dark companion. Frowning, he reached outward, grasping at the power streaming around him. Although he could tell it was pouring into him from somewhere, it slipped through his fingers like oiled glass. He flared his willpower, honing his intent into claws to seize the darkness. Yet as he reached out, puncturing the black and feeling the smoke slide across his intent, something else pressed back. His will was taxed by a force that felt familiar yet vastly different. Like hunger, but terrifying. It roared in his mind, a presence larger than anything he'd ever felt.

Hold…Fast…

The narrative has been illicitly obtained; should you discover it on Amazon, report the violation.

Hunger?

Your…Aspects…They Run Riot…

It’s not my Aspects! It’s you! What are you doing to me?

The Cardinal…It Wakes…

That can’t be good. Felix had heard about the Cardinal Beasts more than a few times, most recently from the gods. Both the Pathless and Siva had called him a Cardinal, or something like it. But what were they? And how was one waking up?

Felix blinked. Around him, the smoke spun faster as the timbre of vibration shifted upward. A pressure within him and without, driving his spirit forward in his chest, as if something were striking a spark against wet kindling. At any moment, he knew he’d burst alight.

He was Tempering.

Of course he was—he’d just fought and devoured Siva, Goddess of Fortune. Felix shook his head, feeling like it was stuffed with cotton. That fight, vicious as it was, was hazy as if it had happened weeks ago. But he could still feel the echoes of pain across his Body; remnants of Siva’s brutal assault. A memory encased in flesh that had been broken and reformed without end. The battle had pressed him beyond his limits, and his Body was already Tempering.

He could feel his Spirit was next.

“I can’t escape this place as I am.” Felix glared at the darkness, his eyes burning blue and red. "Grandmaster Tier should fix that.”

Notifications hovered just beyond his awareness, separated from him in the same way he was separated from his real body. Felix strained, pitting his Will and Authority against the strangeness hemming him in. With an exaggerated slowness, a fitful, buzzing window appeared before him.

Astrum Ascendance is level 117!

…

Astrum Ascendance is level 125!

Grandmaster Tier!

You Gain:

+400 WIL

+300 INT

+...

Divine Essence Detected During Formation!

[Essence Of Silver Webs]

ERROR!

Essence Has Been Altered!

Do You Wish To Restore Its True Nature?

Y/N

Yes.

A bell tolled, resonating with a place deep in Felix’s chest; a place he found very familiar.

Unite the Lost?

The Skill activated within his chest, threading through his pathways and out like a wave of blinding music.

Felix folded, breath driven from his lungs as the dark twisted. System notifications flickered and buzzed, their outlines breaking down and shattering. Significance streamed out of him, torn from the smoke in all directions like a veil of unlight—invisible yet textured, like a cloth as heavy as a mountain.

Divinity Has Been Shed!

True Nature Restored!

He shook his head once, clearing it of clogging, tinny notes just as new notifications appeared.

Primordial Essence Detected During Formation!

[Essence Of Resurgent Bonds]

Broken Path and Fatebreaker Titles Found!

Grandmaster Tier Bonus Added!

Primordial Nature Resonates With [Essence of Resurgent Bonds]!

Unbound Nature Resonates With [Essence of Resurgent Bonds]!

Calculating Effects…

Choose A Feature:

Renascence - Wake The Sleepers

Covenant - Hold The Dream

Clarion - Sing The Night

Felix blinked, and the darkness unfurled.

A whisper crawled across his ears. Renascence - Wake The Sleepers.

He stood within a chamber laid with glazed green tiles and festooned with tapestries from every towering column. A layer of water rushed across his toes, moving with the faintest of currents between the polished legs of a thousand beds of unalloyed gold. Men and women of all races lay upon the beds, their arms crossed over their still chests, and silver coins laid over their eyes.

"They're dead."

Felix stepped back, his eyes bumping into the corpse behind him.

"What the heck is this?"

Without warning, the corpse before him shifted, coins falling off their eyes with a great clattering ring as milky irises stared upward into the sky. All at once, the corpses took a great breath, sounding like nothing more than creaky, wheezing bellows. Felix turned, watching all of their chests inflate before they gave a groaning exhalation, and magic poured from their mouths, flowing upward before collecting across the facets of a Belais crystal a hundred yards across, set into the vaulted ceiling. Power was there, released from the corpses, who even now clawed ineffectually at their funerary cloths as the beds rattled in the water.

Understanding struck him as he stared at the power.

Renascence is to waken that which is dormant. A magic of awareness.

Water sloshed, and Felix stepped back, but this time there was no bed behind him. He turned and found himself in a different room, though perhaps in the same structure judging by the slick green tile on the floor. The beds were gone, as were the sleepers. Instead, centered within the vaulted chamber, there was a pool.

The water was dark, lapping against the tiled edges with a soft, relentless beat. Felix stepped closer, despite the fissure of unease that settled across his spine. He lifted his chin, arcing his neck just a bit to peer into the depths where an eye stared back. Felix jerked away, but the thing down below did not move, though its pupil contracted as it regarded him.

The features of it were hazy and shadowed, broken up by the rippled surface as it reflected some sourceless light in the chamber. Whatever was below was immense, too large to even fit out of the pool's twenty-foot diameter. Felix shifted his feet, fists clenching tight and ready if it tried anyway…but the eye only closed.

You…aren’t threatened by me at all, are you?

Almost immediately, magic spilled into the water like an iridescent oil. Clouds of it spread within the liquid, rising to the top where it slicked the waves before radiating upward in a sheet of shifting greens, purples, and pinks. Shapes moved through it, not so much projected upon it but rising up from within the colorful magic.

The whisper returned, bubbling as if from a great depth. Covenant - Hold The Dream.

“Dream, huh?” Felix peered at the beast, which seemed to be sleeping now. "May I take some of this?"

The creature didn't answer, but a song rolled through the chamber. It spun with a buzzing tone that rose and fell between jeweled notes. Harmony, Dissonance…and approval.

Felix reached out to the magic, flaring his Will and Intent until a ribbon of greenish purple spun out into his hands. He molded it in much the same way he'd used his shaping magics, and it folded into a small winged tenku. A tiny version of Pit danced in his palm, cavorting across his fingers before lifting its beak up, as if shouting in joy.

"A power in dreams,” he muttered. It was nascent and unformed, like a mountain that spat out streams of lava, yet with his Will and Intent he could make use of it. "A Covenant. It means to bind but not in chains. A…bridge between the willing. A choice made manifest."

The little tenku spread its wings and lowered its head in a tiny bow. Felix nodded, and when he lifted his gaze again, he was somewhere else.

The ground sloped beneath him, and Felix snapped his hand around a copper spike that had risen beside him. He stood atop a copper dome, mounted at the apex of a tower. Below and to the side, he spied windows into another building, where slick green tile still prevailed.

Whatever structure these visions took place in, he was still there, just on the outside now. The odd buildings sprawled at least a half mile in every direction—perhaps further, but it was hard to tell in the dark. A vague suggestion of trees and perhaps mountains loomed in the great distance, but the night was a moonless one.

Yet above…

Felix looked up. Stars wheeled above him, as if hours were passing in seconds. Greenish-pink auroras sparked along the horizon in a haze that streaked across the shifting sky.

Clarion, the soundless voice whispered. Sing In The Night.

Harmony and Dissonance returned, spinning around him like a furious gale. It was warm, but it had frigid teeth that bit into his exposed arms before it swept upward. The sky clarified, the black turning into something beyond dark. Nebulae resolved among the distance—deep purples, bright crimson, and dusty smears of ochre, green, and blue. The stars intensified between them all, drawn forward as if the heavens were under a lens.

The song. This one is easy to understand.

Felix lifted his arms, letting the resonance of Harmony and Dissonance coil around him. He cradled them both within his will, not holding them, but allowing them to flit in and out of his grasp.

Clarion is reaching beyond this place, a song that leaves this earthly palace to sail the stars. I see.

Felix's dark hands clenched tight, and a deep bell tolled.

"I choose Clarion."n/ô/vel/b//in dot c//om