Chapter 22
The mud flew from beneath his boots in thick, freezing arcs.
Riven Cale did not look at the colossal size of the nightmare bearing down on him.
He focused entirely on the heavy, matte-black haft of the Abyssal Cleaver resting in his hands.
It felt like an extension of his own pulse.
The massive anti-magic gravity of the blade drank the volatile, burning heat of his runaway bio-aether, maintaining a flawless, terrifying equilibrium that kept his heart from exploding inside his chest.
He was not a soldier. He possessed none of the fluid, martial perfection that Vael displayed in the colosseum. His charge was sloppy, driven by pure, desperate momentum and the absolute refusal to die on his knees.
The Leviathan roared. The sound lacked the sharp crack of thunder; it was a deep, wet reverberation that tasted of stagnant trench water and rancid marrow.
The beast dropped its massive, eyeless head, opening a cavernous maw lined with jagged, broken obsidian teeth, intending to scoop the tiny, glowing anomaly directly out of the muck.
Riven dropped.
He didn't try to stop his momentum. He threw his weight backward, hitting the freezing, blood-soaked mud on his shoulders, and slid directly beneath the snapping, acidic jaws of the beast.
The stench of the monster’s underbelly was suffocating—a suffocating wave of hot dust and oxidized iron from the rusted academy metal bolted into its flesh. Riven slid across the slick stone, looking up at the pale, calcified hide rushing past him.
He didn't swing the halberd. Hacking at a biological mountain with a blade was a fool's errand; he would only lodge the weapon in the blubber and be crushed.
He gripped the haft of the Cleaver tightly, angling the massive, pitch-black crescent blade upward. He didn't use the edge to cut. He used the razor-sharp tip of the crescent to carve.
As he slid beneath the beast's chest, Riven drove the tip of the Abyssal Cleaver directly into the Leviathan's calcified armor.
He channeled his mortal aether down his arms, through the dark iron, and into the tip of the blade.
He dragged the heavy halberd through the monster's flesh, acting as a living, sliding drafting pen.
He carved a massive, twenty-foot-long geometric vector straight down the center of the beast's torso, intersecting it with a harsh, rigid circle that burned with searing, crimson-gold light.
Extract.
He didn't target the beast's heart. He didn't try to stop a pulse that was larger than a house.
He slid out from beneath the Leviathan's tail, tumbling wildly across the jagged rocks of the basin. He hit a massive, bleached ribcage, the impact jarring the breath from his lungs.
He scrambled to his knees, spinning around to face the colossal anomaly.
The macroscopic rune he had carved into the Leviathan's underbelly flared to a blinding, solar intensity. The architectural command did not attack the flesh. It attacked the parasitic foreign objects that the academy had driven into the creature’s biology.
High up on the beast's massive, eyeless skull, the thick, rusted iron brackets that anchored the Spireheart aether-cables began to violently vibrate. The Eldric command recognized the iron as a localized corruption of the mountain's foundation.
The rusted brackets exploded outward.
The sound was a deafening, metallic shriek.
The massive iron staples, some as thick as a man's torso, were violently ejected from the Leviathan's skull, tearing chunks of calcified bone and pale flesh with them.
The heavy, severed blue cables whipped wildly into the dark, completely disconnected from their living battery.
The Leviathan froze.
For three centuries, the beast's nervous system had been artificially stimulated and agonizingly drained by the academy's parasitic graft. The sudden, violent cessation of that torturous input sent the colossal organism into catastrophic systemic shock.
The beast let out a low, pathetic whine—a sound entirely devoid of its previous monstrous fury. Its massive forelimbs buckled.
The mountain of flesh and petrified wood collapsed.
The Leviathan hit the basin floor with an apocalyptic impact that shattered the remaining ancient skeletons around it and sent a tidal wave of freezing mud washing over Riven’s boots.
It lay there, a twitching, unmoving heap of flesh, its cavernous breathing slowing to a deep, dormant rumble.
The immediate threat was silenced.
Riven stood in the mud, his chest heaving. The sheer, intoxicating rush of the combat adrenaline immediately began to evaporate, leaving behind the hollow, crushing reality of his mortal limits.
The golden veins pulsing along the dark iron of the Abyssal Cleaver sputtered and went entirely dark. The anti-magic gravity of the weapon deactivated.
Without the blade actively siphoning his excess energy, the equilibrium broke.
The true gravitational weight of the massive halberd rushed back into the haft.
It felt like holding an anvil. The weapon tore from Riven’s exhausted grip, the heavy crescent blade slamming into the mud, burying itself six inches deep.
Riven’s knees gave out. He collapsed beside the weapon.
The excruciating physical toll of the battle rushed into the void left by his fading magic.
His muscles screamed in protest, twitching with micro-spasms. He turned his head and violently dry-heaved, spitting a string of black, metallic-tasting bile into the dirt.
His healed collarbone ached with a deep, throbbing pressure. He was completely, utterly empty.
But the silence of the cavern was a victory.
He rested his forehead against the cold mud for a long, agonizing minute. He listened to the quiet. There were no Inquisitor boots. There were no academy scrying-wards. There was only the distant, steady drip of subterranean water.
Get up, he told himself.
He forced his trembling arms to push his torso off the ground.
He grabbed the haft of the Abyssal Cleaver and leaned his entire body weight onto it, using the heavy weapon as a crutch to haul himself upright.
He dragged his heavy, iron-toed boots through the muck, turning back toward the faint, flickering violet light in the distance.
He staggered past the unconscious, mountain-sized bulk of the Leviathan. He ignored it. He had eyes only for the dark shape lying near the crushed basalt slab.
Riven reached Carys and Vael.
The Lore-Keeper was kneeling in the mud, her hands hovering helplessly over the Vanguard. Carys was completely silent, tears cutting clean tracks through the thick layer of grey ash and monster drool coating her face.
Riven dropped the Abyssal Cleaver. He fell to his knees beside Vael.
The situation was worse than catastrophic.
The massive basalt slab had crushed her pristine, runic armor entirely flat against her lower spine and pelvis.
The metal was mangled, twisted into sharp, jagged barbs that had driven deeply into her own flesh.
The pool of dark, thick arterial blood soaking the mud around her was expanding at a terrifying rate.
Vael was looking up at the pitch-black ceiling of the cavern. Her face was chalk-white, drained of all color, the golden-blonde hair clinging to her cheeks. Her breathing was incredibly shallow, a ragged, wet flutter in her throat.
"Architect," Vael whispered, not turning her head.
"I'm here," Riven rasped, leaning over her, his hands hovering over the mangled armor, terrified to touch her and cause more agony. "The beast is down. The sector is quiet. We have time."
"We don't," Vael replied, a faint, bitter smile touching her pale lips.
She slowly turned her head. Her golden irises were dull, the fierce, aristocratic fire almost entirely extinguished.
"My spine is pulverized," Vael stated. Her voice was clinical, devoid of panic.
She was assessing her own fatal wounds with the cold pragmatism of a soldier who had spent her life studying anatomy for the sole purpose of destroying it.
"I cannot feel my legs. The internal hemorrhaging is massive.
If the blood loss doesn't kill me in the next ten minutes, the marrow infection will take me by morning. "
"Carys has a restorative field in the Sanctum," Riven argued, desperation making his voice crack. "If I can get you back up to the geode, the ambient aether can—"
"The Sanctum knits what is there," Vael interrupted gently. She reached out with a trembling, gauntleted hand and gripped Riven’s leather sleeve. "You cannot knit dust, Riven. My lower half is gone."
Riven stared at her, the reality of her words hitting him harder than the Leviathan's tail. She was right. He had experienced the brutal, agonizing limits of the restorative field when she had set his collarbone. The magic didn't regrow bone; it only sealed it.
"I cannot be moved," Vael continued, her grip on his sleeve tightening with the last remnants of her fading strength. "If you try to drag me to the Sanctum, I will bleed to death in the aqueducts. And I will slow you down. Morne is sending an army. You cannot fight a war while carrying a corpse."
"I'm not leaving you down here," Riven snarled, the anger returning, hot and fierce. "I didn't break the academy's shield wall just to leave you in the dirt to be eaten by scavengers."
"I know," Vael whispered.
She let go of his sleeve. Her hand drifted across the mud, her metal fingers brushing against the cold, dark haft of the Abyssal Cleaver lying beside Riven’s knee.
"Which is why you are going to use this," Vael said, her golden eyes locking onto his with absolute, terrifying clarity.
Riven froze. The blood drained entirely from his face.
"No," he breathed, instantly recoiling away from the halberd as if it had turned into a venomous snake.