Chapter 24 A Sepulchral Cathedral #2
The apparitions crowded her, sensing her presence but unable to latch onto her. Their translucent muzzles surged inches from her face, their screams a discordant harmony of a thousand deaths.
They howled, a sound of tearing lacunas and broken nebulas, but as their spectral claws raked at her, they found no purchase.
‘Fokk off!’ Sheba screamed, her voice cracking as she swung the star-gem dagger in a frantic arc.
Because her biology lacked the divine spark they got programmed to devour, their essence passed through her like smoke, leaving only a coating of crystalline frost.
Hell, I probably didn’t even need the diamond stealth mask, she thought as she ploughed on.
Behind her, Idan and Molan breached the chamber doors, their forms wreathed in the incandescent fire of Sacran fury.
‘Keep moving, Sheba! Focus on sinking that blade into him!’ Idan roared, his blade severing the torso of a towering spirit.
Sheba scrambled over the altarium and, with a shudder, bent over the fetishized, hexed monarch, dagger in hand.
She recited the Paladian incantation Zavier burned into her memory, preparing to plunge the hilt into her mark.
The chant seemed to awaken the sleeping, half-skeletal King.
He stirred, thin-skinned eyelids flinging open, his maw, with rotting teeth, opening into a scream.
Saitoni lunged upward as far as his chains permitted, his jaw unhinging to release a roar that carried a concentrated hex drenched in glowing spectral flames.
The blast hit her hard.
Her mask changed form, heated by the spell work gust, melting, not off her face but into it.
Sheba gasped as it dissolved, the diamond particles absorbing into the pores of her skin.
She braced for agony, but strangely enough, there was no pain.
Moments later, her reality fractured, and her consciousness expanded.
Her mind became a hyper-processor, parsing time in a nonlinear rush, viewing the fall of empires and the birth of stars in the space between heartbeats.
It also heightened her senses; she perceived the trajectory of a falling dust mote and the echo of a scream from a century ago.
Sheba sagged to the ground, still clutching the short blade.
Her vision turned a milky, pearlescent white, her eyelids fluttering in a rapid-fire trance as the entire bloody history of the Sacran lineage downloaded into her brain.
She discerned the second Idan jolted as she fell to the rocks and stones below.
‘Sheba?’
His roar echoed through the mausoleum as he fought wave after wave of wights to get to her.
Breaking through, he dropped to one knee beside her.
Molan appeared seconds later.
‘What in Devansi hell?’ Mo muttered.
Idan’s fingers grazed her cheek, tracing the final shards of the diamond mask as they dissolved beneath her skin.
She was slipping away, pulled into a deep, visceral trance, a descent into archaic memories and ancient incarnations so primal they predated the stars themselves.
‘It’s the Draquis visor, it’s melding into her!’
‘Fokk.’
‘Sheba! Suhunka ya so bakc suwa sare! Return to us now!’
Idan’s growl cut through the cacophony, the Sacran incantation vibrating in his throat to anchor her soul to the present.
She blinked, and the pearlescent glow withdrew as the wild echoes, continuum, and time-jumps in her mind subsided.
She collapsed into Idan’s arms, her breath coming in ragged, shallow gasps.
The sound like that of an impending storm caught the trio’s attention as another wave of wights descended on them.
Molan leaped back into the fray, sending bolts of energy and glimpsing their spectral spines, giving the pair behind them cover.
Not sure how much more I can hold them off, he growled into their neural nodes.
‘Salkia, this is your moment,’ Idan rasped.
With an inhale, Sheba knifed up and staggered to her feet, still clinging to the dagger.
She bent over the sarcophagus, staring at the shackled King Saitoni whipping against his bonds, his undead limbs clicking like dry wood.
Idan gripped her shoulders, his gaze a steady, burning light that fought back her terror. ‘Finish it, salkia. Grant him the silence. Take the handle and drive it home.’
Idan lunged forward, using his divine mass to pin the thrashing king on the altar.
Sheba stood, her hands trembling, but her grip on the dagger was tight.
The shiv, hungry and sensing the old King’s soul, thrummed with a rhythmic, greedy thud-thud in her palms, growing hotter until it was like she was holding fire.
With an inhale, Sheba drove The Shadow-Drake’s Tongue in, burying the blade deep into Saitoni’s chest, right through the heavy, ancient links of his armor.
With a gasp, she let go, and the dagger buried itself deeper.
For a heartbeat, the world went dead silent. Then, the dormant violet pulse in the hilt exploded.
A sound like a thousand glass bells shattering at once tore through the room, followed by the guttural, subterranean roar of a dragon’s ghost, and Saitoni’s phantasmic shrieks.
The dirk freakin’ irradiated, as a violent fire that bled out from the puncture, tracing the veins across Saitoni’s gray skin in glowing, electric purple.
Sheba’s breath hitched as the ‘shackled king’ arched his back.
The shadow-drake’s energy began to inhale his essence.
There was no blood, only a swirling vortex of motes, black smoke, and lilac sparks being sucked into the crystal blade.
With a final, agonizing hiss that sounded like steam hitting dry ice, the light in Saitoni’s eyes flickered and died.
His massive frame began to crumble into fine, obsidian ash, eviscerating all of his body, until the heavy clatter of his empty shackles crashed to the floor.
The dagger remained in Sheba’s hand, the violet pulse now satiated, luminous with a smug, dark shimmer.
A vertical pillar of white-hot light erupted from the altar, incinerating the shadows and leaving only the glowing, heavy Chains of the Old King coiled on the stone.
The temple groaned, the structural integrity failing as the protection hexes inverted into a vortex of imploding energy.
‘Chains! Now!’ Idan shouted.
Sheba sheathed the lethal blade as Molan abandoned his defense against the wights and seized the incandescent links, the heat of them charring his gloves.
Idan scooped Sheba into his chest, and the brothers ignited their Sacran god-energy.
They launched themselves toward the crumbling roof, tearing through the obsidian ceiling as the sepulchral cathedral collapsed into the lava.
They leaped into the toxic sky in a desperate arc of flight.
Above them, Mirage held the Máashìi in a vertical hover, the rear deck yawning open like a hungry maw.
They slammed onto the metal-plated floor just as a fountain of pressurized magma erupted from the volcanic storm below.
The molten rock almost seared the ship’s outer hull and sensor arrays, but they managed to veer away.
The Corvette roared, its engines screaming as it fought the gravity well, racing out of the atmosphere and into the cold, silent mercy of the stars.
As their sleek ship leveled out and astral bodies elongated into the infinite white streaks of hyperspace, Mirage nursed the trio in the med bay.
Once Molan got bandaged and clean, with Idan’s hands having healed the gouges in his torso, he strode out with a curt nod to pilot the ship.
Idan sat on the edge of a hover cot.
He ignored the deep lacerations on his forearm and thighs, as the dark aureate furrows wept golden motes of Sacran blood.
‘Sheba first. I can take care of myself, my wounds will heal soon anyway,’ he growled when Mirage asked to see to his injuries.
A massive, plum-colored hematoma bloomed across his woman’s temple, victim of a basalt rock collision.
Mirage worked with clinical precision, applying a debriding solution to cleanse the microscopic volcanic grit from the wound.
She then waved a med-wand over the lesion.
The edges of the broken skin pulsed with a faint amber glow as the device began to knit the tissue back together.
More arresting, however, were Sheba’s eyes.
Idan stared at them in fascination.
The pupils appeared as a kaleidoscope of spectral diamond dust, shimmering with a crystalline light.
Mirage adjusted a sensor sweep, her brow furrowing with concern.
‘The Draquis mask’s diamond lattice has integrated with your neural architecture,’ Mirage concluded, her holographic form flickering as she analyzed the data.
‘The mask did not dissolve; it grafted itself into your frontal lobe. You’re no longer just wearing the Draquis relic, Sheba.
Your mind has melded with the artifact.’
‘Fokk me,’ Sheba breathed, her voice a fragile rasp.
She leaned back into the pillows, her breath hitching as she gripped the edges of the cot until her knuckles turned white.
‘My visual spectrum is changing. I can see hues that have no names and strange frequencies of light vibrating beyond them. I’m picking up so much noise and the friction of distant atmospheres. I hear whispers from worlds that shouldn’t exist!’
She choked, her palms flying to her ears as a wave of sensory overload crashed through her skull.
Idan moved to her, pulling her close with a protective instinct so violent it made his hands tremble.
She moaned, and a spike of raw agony surged in Idan’s chest.
Seeing his queen, his fierce, beautiful Sheba, shattered by a burden only meant for gods, was severe, intense torture.
‘It’s called the Ssignakht, my love,’ he murmured, gliding his touch over her back. ‘An all-senses perception more profound and far-reaching than you can imagine. Your mind is now a lightning rod, your consciousness is a prism, overflowing with the white noise of the heavens.’
‘What if I don’t want it?’ she growled, her forehead pressing into his nape. ‘What if I just want my mind back without this freakin’ intrusion?’
‘Then we consult Zavier,’ Idan growled, his eyes dark with a protective fire.
‘Can we do it now?’ Sheba insisted, her fingers digging into his tactical vest. ‘Please. It’s too much.’
Idan glanced at the demi-urge who stood by waiting with an arched brow. ‘Mirage, please organize a secure link to Enia.’
The synth complied in seconds, and the holo-connection flashed up on the holo display she summoned.
Zavier Phanos shimmered into view, his jewel-scarred face filling the projection.
‘How did you go? Success?’
Idan didn’t waste time on formalities; he apprised the Dragon Lord of the chains’ retrieval. ‘They’re in a safe onboard. However, we have a slight problem.’
He outlined Sheba’s mask and mind fusion, his timbre graveled with concern, and tight with the desire for answers.
‘A moment,’ the Draquis Domini muttered.
Closing his eyes, Zavier tipped his head back and then straightened it again.
When he opened his eyelids, his irises let out flaming energy, which burned even through the holo display.
His copper-gold eyes narrowed as he projected his psionic potency all the way from Enia, conducting a visual inspection of Sheba’s eyes and the trauma at her temple.
He remained silent for a long minute, his jaw working as he parsed the spectral data.
‘There is nada I can do to reverse the fusion,’ he rasped in time. ‘The Old King’s death-curse acted as a catalyst, soldering the diamond lattice into your gray matter. To excise it would be to lobotomize you. You’ll have to live with it.’
Sheba shuddered, a sob breaking from her throat as panic hit and her pulse rate surged.
She caught a glimpse of herself in the mirror in the med bay.
Mother-of-pearl flames flared in her eyes, and her trembling amped up.
‘Nada! How do I make the storm inside stop? The grief, the sorrow, the pain of a billion souls is crowding me. I can hear people laughing on planets I’ve never seen, and it’s all screaming at once. Please, help me.’
From across the great distance, Zavier’s eyes blazed with even more heat as he extended his consciousness.
Sheba gasped as his heated psionic touch pressure slipped into her mind.
Relax. I’ll teach you the mental blocks to construct neural walls that’ll control the flow.
Zavier’s psychic reach carved three distinct anchors within her mind. He guided her to tether the chaotic noise to these points, creating a dam against the flood of galactic static.
He then, in seconds, showed her how to mute the chaos and redirect it.
In time, her breathing leveled.
The pearlescent luminescence in her eyes dimmed to a steady, diamond-bright glow, then faded, so that her dark hazel eyes returned.
‘Sante,’ she whispered, the silence in her head a sudden, beautiful mercy.
The Dragon Lord pulled out of her mind.
His gaze shifted to Idan, his expression grim.
‘She requires more practice. If she doesn’t learn to suppress the Ssignakht at will, or filter the relevant signals to discard the debris, it might incinerate and flay her consciousness.’
‘I’ll guide her,’ Idan stated, his grip on Sheba tightening. ‘Molan can help, and we can use our Sacran warrior protocols to assist her.’
‘I’ve laid down the foundation, so build on it,’ Zavier replied. ‘Remember, she now holds the memories, history, as well as the darkness of Sacra. Do not let her drown in the utter suffering your predecessors wrought on this galaxy, including on us Paladians.’
Idan’s jaw tightened, a shadow of profound sorrow crossing his features.
The might of his lineage, the centuries of conquest, the cold-blooded massacres, and the arrogance of his kin now dwelled inside the woman he loved.
The shame of it flamed his soul.
‘Sante,’ he rasped to the Domini of the Draquis Order. ‘We are in debt to you.’
Zavier’s mouth twitched. ‘Indeed, you are. You can count on us to collect, very soon, Son of Sacra. I await news of Sulfiqar’s final demise. Fare thee well.’
With that, the call terminated, as Idan pressed his lips to his woman’s hair.
Sheba slumped in his arms, sighing, the adrenaline fading, replaced by a crushing, bone-deep exhaustion.
He glanced down at her, his heart lurching as she surrendered to sleep.
Fokk, he adored her.
Idan gathered her into his clasp, her head tucked under his chin, and carried her through the ship’s corridors to the guest quarters.
He laid her in bed, placed a duvet over her, and crouched beside her, unable to shift his gaze from her as his spirit overflowed with a profound, aching awe.
Her courage was wildfire.
She’d faced off with Wights and raced into a god’s tomb to obliterate an ancient, potent king’s shackled soul, for a cause that was not even her own.
He reached out, his thumb tracing the line of her bruised temple, thanking the stars for the day she dropped out of the sky into his world.
All the while, swearing to the dark heavens that he would be her shield for eternity, now and forever more.