Chapter 33 #3
Movement up ahead.
A blue-skinned monster with a tentacled head was fleeing already, but Harald didn’t give it a chance to get away.
He willed the shards of void glass to slash the monster, began drinking of its essence with the Well, even as he caused the shadow blades to appear all around the creature and shred it apart.
Another dart of lancing pain buried itself in his mind.
But the monster died with a croak. Harald clambered over it, fury making him desire nothing more than to kill it and its like.
But caution, experience, willed him to take control of himself. He stopped, took a deep breath, and focused.
Something was off.
He’d made a mistake. What?
Damn it. He’d not activated the description for his new Endowment. Forcing himself to breathe, he summoned his window once more.
Soul Needle: an assassin’s stiletto for the mind that anchors a thread to the target’s soul, creating a tracking beacon other wielders of this power can sense.
Harald exhaled angrily. His shadows must have partially obscured him from the second monster. But now with two embedded in his soul?
He closed his eyes and focused on his Well. The monsters may have embedded needles in his soul, but he was one with the abyss. They might seek to track and sense him, but his very soul had been restructured so that the abyss could flower within him. He was the abyss.
And he could consume anything and everything that sought to mess with his soul.
Harald opened the Well to its fullest extent and felt the tethers attached to him quaver. Felt their power begin to drain.
Had these monsters sought to weaken him, tag him, use his soul against him?
Fools.
The Well yawned wider. Its hunger grew more pitched. Harald felt the Needles shiver again, strain to remain embedded—and then tear free.
And just like that, they were gone, consumed.
But still the Well hungered, and Harald realized it was being fed. Slivers of vitality began to flow into him, thin and attenuated, but stronger each moment.
He cracked open his eyes. No foes were in range.
Then…?
The tethers. The conduits. Whatever had connected the Needles to the other monsters. The Well of Starless Dominion was draining them all through their own network of power.
Harald felt the web light up, strands endlessly spooling into the chasm in his soul.
More and more of them were registering, connected to each other, bound by their own power.
He was drinking from some thirty of them, now.
Thirty-seven.
Forty-two.
Harald laughed. In the choked shaft lit burning blue, Harald croaked with amusement as power flooded into him, siphoned away from afar.
He could sense their panic now.
Could feel them rushing toward him.
Converging.
They would find no release, no succor, within his shadowed domain.
Harald crawled forward, head still pounding, stomach roiling, and found a depression to one side. He booted the wall and kicked out a flagstone into the room beyond.
Staggered out, turned, backed away, Scourge held upright.
The more the Well drank, the more powerful Abyssal Imperium became.
The air darkened. Fragments of the void began to float thickly through the air.
The monsters were getting close.
He could hear their thin shrieks in the distance.
They were boiling toward him from every direction.
Some sixty, seventy of them.
Their power flooding into the Well, which in turn fed his body, his mind, his resolve.
Then they erupted from the walls and floor.
Flagstones burst aside as the tentacled horrors lurched into view, their bodies already shriveled by the drain, their purple eyes ashen, their muscles atrophied, their movements jerky.
Right into his zone of control. Both the Crown and Abyssal Imperium immediately began to drain and confuse them, twist their perceptions and warp their sense of time.
The first pulse of nauseating power flooded out, and they stumbled into each other, shrieks sounded from their mouthless heads, talons reached for him.
Soul Needles flew at him, thick and fast, only to be eagerly consumed by the Well.
But there were too many of them.
And other monsters were joining them now—warrior versions, their bodies sleek with compact muscle, their heads split by fanged maws, their movements panther-like, great tails lashing behind them. Their hides were striated with burning purple, their tentacles backswept and rising into thorned horns.
These and more kept coming.
An entire palace-worth of taloned fiends, charging him on all sides.
Swarming him now, wading through his power, bleeding essence, slashed and gauged by void shards, tripping and stumbling as they fought against his authority and will.
An endless tide.
But the power.
The sweet, overarching, ever-living stolen might.
It filled him, filled him to bursting, and just when he thought he couldn’t steal any more, just as the circle of monsters closed about him like a garotte, a message appeared before his eyes.
You are the abyss.
By the decree of the Fallen Angel, you are granted the next echelon of your destiny.
Abyssal Father 10