Arkk staggered back, slumping against the wall. The fingers of his recently regrown draconic arm twitched and jittered. Sparks of lightning jumped from claw-like fingernail to claw-like fingernail despite having been interrupted before he could fry the Empress. At least he hadn’t blown the arm off this time. He wasn’t sure if that was because he had been more careful, the talisman that Zullie gave him that was supposed to redirect any backlash into a depleted glowstone, or if the draconic-looking arm was just that hardy.
“Claire… Claire!” Kia said, kneeling on the ground where she lightly patted Claire’s cheeks.
“She’s alive,” Arkk said, shoving off from the wall. “I can feel it.”
Kia’s afterimages turned to him, worry riddling her face, but her actual real head never turned. “She isn’t waking up.”
“If I’m right about demons draining magic, it is very likely she is suffering the same thing that happened to the two of you when you accidentally broke the contract with me.” Arkk drew in a breath, holding his other hand to his chest as if that would help with the palpitations. “The two of you were unconscious for an extended period of time until Zullie got the idea to charge you up with glowstones.”
“Then—”
“That ritual isn’t set up here. With that other avatar running around, I’m sorry, but there isn’t time.”
He was able to monitor the avatar running through his halls. Despite what happened to her ship, despite the fight with the demon, and the distance she fell, she hardly looked ruffled. Her black militaristic dress did have a few cuts and scrapes, but nothing large. There were no wounds on her skin. Even her hair, long and blonde, was straight and well-kempt. Which, in Arkk’s eyes, should have been impossible after that fall. A halo of miniaturized swords, all attached to a thin golden ring, floated just behind her head as she moved.
Even had Arkk not been aware of her, she would have been impossible to miss with the constant Tybalt-like abilities she was using to break through his reinforced walls. Each one set off intruder alarms in the back of Arkk’s mind. And he wasn’t quite sure how to stop her. A snap of her fingers and large sections of the fortress were just gone. Tybalt, at least, hadn’t been immediately hostile.
Arkk tried teleporting in Dakka with her blade already out, ready to slice the woman’s head from her shoulders. But the woman was both quick and strong, able to avoid, dodge, or simply block whatever he tried to throw at her. Even with Dakka’s blade at her neck, she bent backward, letting the scythe blade skim just above her nose as Dakka swung. A twist of her body righted her, facing Dakka well within her guard.
The avatar reached up, grasping Dakka’s helm. Even with Dakka being one of the shortest orcs, she still stood a head taller than humans. The avatar didn’t have any trouble dragging her down, slamming her knee into the shadowy helm’s faceplate. Her knee didn’t break the metal, but Arkk could still feel the pain as she rang Dakka’s head like a bell. A quick step forward, linking her foot behind Dakka’s foot, and an almost casual shove had Dakka falling on her back.
She raised her hand, snapping her fingers…
He barely managed to teleport Dakka out before one of those voids opened up around her.
Dakka was one of his most skilled warriors. Even with her blade already around the throat of the woman, she hadn’t scratched her. The avatar was prepared, waiting for more people to appear around her. Blocking her path with soldiers would only see them obliterated or detained or whatever those voids did.
The avatar couldn’t possibly stand up to everything. Six orcs, teleported in, all with their blades trapping the woman’s neck. A single step from her, a single pull from the orcs, and she would lose her head.
He saw the muscles tense, he watched those shadowy scythe blades move, he saw the blood start to drip from the woman’s neck.
The halo of swords flashed a bright white light. It lasted barely an instant. Not even the time it took to blink.
The orcs pulled their scythes, slicing through nothing.
The woman stood, unharmed, several steps backward. Her fingers were already snapping.
A great void opened and collapsed, only slightly slower than that flash of light. With it, six orcs vanished, their links cutting off as one.
Arkk grimaced, ill feelings digging into his stomach. “She can teleport too,” he hissed, annoyed. “How many powers does she have?”
All of them, it felt like. Tybalt’s void magic, strength that had to be enhanced in some manner, the ability to control wind and air, teleportation, and probably more that he had yet to see. At this point, Arkk wouldn’t be surprised if she started breathing icy air or igniting flames with a wave of her hand.
It was a small consolation that they had fallen far on the outskirts of Fortress Al-Mir. With the size of the Cursed Forest, traveling all the way to the Heart could take hours at a walking pace, especially if Arkk found a reliable means of slowing her.
“I’m sending you and Claire to the infirmary,” Arkk said. “Let Hale know that Claire is suffering from the same thing she was last time and she’ll be back on her feet before you know it.” Hopefully. “However, I may be teleporting you on your own. That woman…”
Arkk pursed his lips.
“I need to speak with Sylvara,” he muttered.
That void magic was by far the most dangerous aspect of the woman and Sylvara had the most experience with it through Tybalt. Assuming it was the same Jailer magic. Beyond Sylvara, Lyra Zann might have information. Given that Lyra was the self-admitted reason the avatar was at Fortress Al-Mir in the first place, Arkk wasn’t really sure how far he could trust her. Especially since she said she wanted the avatar to remain alive.
Arkk didn’t think he could abide. Even if she hadn’t been killing his men, both through the war and now personally, capturing someone of her capabilities without killing her didn’t seem feasible.
Without another word to Kia, he teleported the two dark elves to Hale and himself straight to Sylvara.
The inquisitrix jolted, startled by his arrival, but composed herself in short order. She stood from the targeting seat, drawing herself up. “Ready to take down the other ships?”
Arkk couldn’t help but grimace. The other whale ship was the only thing in the air at the moment. It was not idle. Eggs rained down upon Fortress Al-Mir without pause, as if enraged by what happened to its counterpart—or the avatar. From its height, it seemed able to target just about any spot in the entire Cursed Forest. Agnete, Priscilla, and a squad of orcs were on cleanup duties, but they were starting to fall behind.
Taking it down was a priority.
“Unfortunately, there is a slightly more pressing issue at the moment,” Arkk said. “The avatar is inside Fortress Al-Mir.”
“We killed… Not the Golden Order’s avatar,” Sylvara said, frowning to herself. “The Eternal Empire?”
“She seems capable of using the same magic Tybalt used, albeit with a snap of her fingers instead of making a window with her hands. I was hoping you had a way to nullify it.”
Sylvara closed her red eyes, drawing in a short breath. “Last I saw of Tybalt’s Binding Agent, it was around his wrists in Elmshadow. As he almost certainly got someone to remove the manacles, they are likely still there.”
“Would he not have destroyed them upon removing them?”
“They were made to resist his power. I suppose it might have been possible. It isn’t something we ever really tested.”
Arkk’s mind jumped to Elmshadow. Despite the tower having moved, the entire land was still under his control, both above ground and below it. Every part of the city had been claimed by his lesser servants. The homes built atop it were made through the power of the fortress magic. He scanned through it all with his near omniscience of his territory. He had seen the manacles before, back when he first met Tybalt. They hadn’t looked like anything special. More like a bracelet than actual binding chains. When equipped on Tybalt’s wrists, runes glowed along their edges, but otherwise, they were just cuffs of metal. It wouldn’t surprise him to find that Evestani had found them and tossed them aside, not realizing what they were. Or even for him—or one of his employees—to have sequestered them off in some storage box in ignorance.
“Can they be remade in short order?” Arkk asked, even as he continued searching.
“How short are we talking?”
“Ideally five minutes—”
Sylvara laughed in his face.
He expected that.
Quite intimately familiar with the size of the Cursed Forest, both from living in Langleey Village all his life and then his occupation of it through the fortress, it was fairly trivial to guess a few numbers. “She doesn’t appear to be in any rush. As long as I can do it safely, I’ll throw whatever I can at her to slow her down further.” Perhaps flooding her path with molten metal from the Iron Mongers would force her to detour. Collapsing a few areas might help as well, though she could probably tunnel through if she never tired of using that void magic. “I think… six hours at most?” And that was assuming he could slow her.
That was only before she reached the populated section of Fortress Al-Mir. Not that the Heart was far away from there.
“Six is still too short. You remember what it took to make that effigy for the Heart of Gold’s avatar?”
“A month or so of research and development, yes. But I was hoping that since you had already developed one set of manacles, you’d be able to develop a second much faster.”
“I didn’t develop those manacles. But you’re also forgetting the excursion to another realm, which won’t be easy since the portal was damaged.”
Arkk ground his teeth. It wasn’t impossible to visit another realm at the moment if they used the highlands portal. But with the unknown dangers that came from visiting such places, it likely wasn’t any more feasible than simply getting lucky with killing the avatar with what they had on hand.
“I’ll keep looking for the manacles in Elmshadow,” he said. “If you have any other bits of advice, I’m all ears.”
Otherwise, it might be time to speak with Lyra Zann.
“The magic utilized by Purifier Tybalt was exceptionally potent. Outside the Binding Agent itself, which was specifically designed to counter him, I have never seen anything caught within the borders of his spheres survive intact. He always referred to it as detainment, but as far as I was concerned, he may as well have been obliterating everything he came across.” Sylvara paused, frowning. “There was no known way to block the effect. Even other purifiers couldn’t interfere, their abilities vanishing into oblivion when the spheres collapsed.”
Half that, Arkk already knew. The rest was… not good news. He had considered using Agnete to block the avatar’s path. It was a good thing she was busy with the remaining eggs. Kia and Claire might be fast enough to stab the avatar before she could teleport, but Arkk could see in her movements just how wary and cautious she was being. He could try to keep up with her teleports, constantly teleporting his own people to match her movements, but that moment she teleported had blinded him. Brief though it had been, it had been just enough time to miss the void opening around his men.
It was a risk.
For now, lesser servants were collapsing large swaths of the path before her. That should buy a little more time to properly plan.
“You think you’re good to take down that last whale ship?” Arkk asked. The eggs were still a problem. The sooner they were dealt with—and the sooner he lobbed one of those eggs into the approaching Empire army—the better he would be able to concentrate solely on the avatar. “Actually,” Arkk said before Sylvara could respond, “with the main ship out of commission, it probably doesn’t matter. You aren’t in danger of a counterattack. I’m sending you and Abbess Hannah up there. Take it down at your leisure.”
Arkk teleported in a perfectly normal set of manacles to ‘capture’ Sylvara. The inquisitrix held out an arm, staring at the chains for a long moment, before she a little note of epiphany.
“Ah! Tybalt, Chronicler Qwol, and I were on the lower floors of the Elmshadow keep when that ray of gold struck. He slipped away while we were concerned with evacuating personnel. When later tracking down his movements, we came across a detained segment of the keep’s inner wall.”
“That means he removed those bracelets somewhere within the keep,” Arkk said, immediately narrowing his search area. It was still a large chunk of the burg which had seen two separate occupants and a great deal of fighting, but it was better than having to search through the entire city. Unless, of course, it had been moved out into the rest of the city—but there were a million what-if scenarios. No sense in bothering with them.
Either he would find the manacles or he would find another solution. Given that the manacles could have been melted down for scrap at any point, he was leaning toward the latter. He had no other options.
Failure was not an option.
Arkk teleported Sylvara to the surface, along with Hannah and the aim-assist chairs. He didn’t stick around to watch their work. Hannah could alert him once they were done. If she ‘captured’ Sylvara, he wouldn’t even need to return for them.
Once they were settled, he teleported himself down to the temple.
The statue of the Holy Light had its arms crossed, looking like it had been waiting impatiently. Looked like he wouldn’t need to light one of the candles to get Lyra’s attention. Before approaching, however, he took a quick survey of the room, making sure nothing had changed since his last visit. The empty pedestals were empty and the filled pedestals were filled. None of the statues save for the Holy Light had moved.
“You’re back. Good,” the statue said, perking up as he approached. Again, it shifted from its impatient waiting pose to an interested lean forwards without crossing the intervening space. Quite the contrast from the way Lyra acted when he returned from the Maze. “I believe there is merit in your theory. Precautionary note: My findings are hastily done and tentative. I would need a demon to examine—”
“The demon that has been harassing me is dead,” Arkk said. “But I didn’t come to discuss that.”
Arms crossed in disappointment, the statue glowered down at Arkk. “Oh?”
“The avatar. The Eternal Empire’s avatar is inside my fortress. If you want me to keep her alive, I need options. And I’m going to need them quick. No long drawn-out research projects. I need a solution I can implement in less than three hours.”
“That… might be a problem. I do not know the true scope of the Almighty Glory’s granted powers.” Lyra sounded upset with herself, her tone turning almost embarrassed at the end of her sentence. “The few conflicts that happened between us over the centuries ended with my utter defeat. I can hold off Evestani given some time and preparations, but not the Empress. The only reason I still exist is because it is in the prideful nature of the Empress to display compassion toward her defeated opponents. Given the threat you represent to the Calamity and the mark you’ve made on her pride, I doubt you’ll see much compassion.”
“So there is no point in attempting to convince her to stop and no tools you can provide to de-escalate the situation.”
“Arkk, please try to avoid brash actions,” Lyra said, now with a warning in her voice. “I cannot yet predict how long this solution might take to implement, assuming our reasoning is not flawed. If the existing solution fails further and we cannot replace it in time, this world will wither.”
“Then you better start working faster,” Arkk said, teleporting away without another word.
He reappeared next to Agnete, who was still containing the egg he had asked her to keep neutered. It was clear that she hadn’t been fully successful. The egg had grown since he last saw it, bulging and pulsing in unpleasant undulations. But it wouldn’t need to be kept for much longer. Who was already here, working on attaching some metal machine to its side. Arkk didn’t question how the machine was supposed to work, trusting that Who would have made it correctly.
“You recall Purifier Tybalt?” Arkk asked, making Agnete frown. “I have it on authority that your powers will not affect the type of magic he used, but I’m likely going to need you and the dark elves to… do something dangerous for me.”
Agnete flicked a finger, slicing off a thin, freshly grown tendril from the egg as it reached out toward Who. She didn’t turn to look at Arkk as she spoke, maintaining concentration on the egg. “Can it wait until Who has finished?”
Arkk turned his head, watching Who screw a large rod of metal into the egg. The mechanical lifeform seemed utterly unbothered by both the tendrils and the lances of flame that sliced them apart. She simply worked, siphoning worms from within the egg into a small bucket. “As long as she finishes soon,” he said.
“We have an avatar to kill.”