It wasn’t.
Nor was the next wave, or the wave after that. It was as if the True Heart had heard Alarion’s estimate and set out to spite him. Perhaps the eldritch being thought it could win a moral victory by infuriating them.
After all, the alternative—that Alarion had actually been wrong—was patently absurd.
Still, the True Heart was only a Rank II, and a weak one at that. It had more fiends lurking in its den than was typical, true, but a hundred toddlers trying to fistfight a bear led to the same result as fifty. Alarion and Anastacia cut, stabbed and smashed their way through the seemingly endless horde, moving ever closer to the True Heart’s inner cloister.
It was never a question of if they’d find it, only when.
You are deceived! Impure! Be of me!
“Nngh...” Anastacia murmured from only a few steps behind him. When Alarion turned, he found her halfway across the threshold, her eyes narrow, the ivy filigree of her rapier’s hilt rubbing small circles over her temple. He could sympathize. Even with high attributes, the mental assault of a True Heart was nothing to scoff at.
“Take a moment. Breathe,” he told her.
“I am fine,” came an instinctive rebuttal, followed by a shallow sigh, then a laugh. “I think taking a deep breath will make it worse.”
“Fair point. May I?”
For a few heart beats, Anastacia studied his outstretched hand as if it were a foreign, insidious thing. Discomfort had her defensive, and a scowl was just beginning to form when his meaning finally clicked into place and a flush of embarrassment replaced it. She’d read his dossier, she knew what he was capable of.
Or at least she thought she did.
“Oh. Yes. Please.”
With a nod, Alarion took a step forward and touched his hand to her bare forearm. She flinched momentarily as the pinprick sensation of foreign mana sent goosebumps along her skin, then stayed still as it pulsed and flared, washing over her in incomplete, messy waves.
The silence stretched—five seconds, ten, then twenty. The spell lurched between them, a volatile mess of energy that Alarion was struggling to direct. In some spots, the enchantment solidified into a neatly organized weave, but in others it was little more than a jumble of barely connected and rapidly fraying threads. Alarion’s jaw tightened as he felt the spell buckling; but rather than allow the attempt to fizzle and start again, he redoubled his efforts by flooding new mana in to shore up the weaknesses.
“Is everything al—”
“Shh,” Alarion instructed through clenched teeth. He couldn’t afford the distraction, or the embarrassment. Besides, the spell was almost there, he just had to—
“Ivor’s Whispered Ward,” he said, the grip on her arm tightening on instinct as the words sealed off the edges of the annoying magic.
The effect was instantaneous, the relaxed slump in Anastacia’s shoulders just as much a notification as the one provided by the System.
Due to the effects of [Ivor’s Whispered Ward] your END has been decreased by 35%.Due to the effects of [Ivor’s Whispered Ward] your ally’s WIL has been increased by 45%.
The spell was originally Bergman’s, and therein lay the problem. Like the overwhelming majority of spellcasters, Bergman cast his spells using a bound field—a complicated spell formula of gestures and words that produced a structured field into which he could easily pour mana. Alarion’s major flaw, [Splintered Mana Circuits] made using such magic impossible, but he’d learned back at Carling Hill that a spell that bolstered willpower like [Whispered Ward] was an absolute necessity for Heart subjugation. When he’d been unable to locate, create or even buy such a spell, Alarion had turned to Bergman for help.
Over nearly a month of trial and error they’d managed to slap together [Ivor’s Whispered Ward] a bastardized, unbound version of the much more common [Whispered Ward]. Difficult to cast, with lower benefits and higher penalties, it was a pale imitation of the original that irked Alarion every time he needed to cast it, but it did the job.
“Thank you,” Anastacia said as the worst of the pressure and intrusive thoughts subsided. “I apologize, I thought I would be more prepared for it.”
“The first time is not something you can prepare for. But it gets easier with time.”
“Like the smell?”
Alarion scoffed. “Yes. Like the smell.”
The levity of their exchange vanished as a wet gurgling noise drew their attention back toward the Outer Chamber in which they stood.
The room was a vast, distorted oval, its proportions too symmetrical to be natural but still deeply wrong in some indescribable way. The floor sloped steadily downward from every side, drawing the eye and the body alike toward a pit sunk into the chamber’s center. Alarion could not see its bottom from where they stood near the entrance, but he knew the pit presented a sheer drop into darkness, deep and hungry.
This close to the True Heart the growth was everywhere. It clung to the walls in thick swaths of tumorous purple flesh, glossy in some places and matte in others. It spread in thinner films across the stone floor and ceiling, skin and muscle atop stone bones. The stuff pulsed at irregular and unsettling intervals he knew would match those of the Heart in the inner cloister beyond—a heartbeat that would end when they put the monstrosity to the blade.
All of this Alarion was familiar with from previous subjugations. But that sound was something new.
And it was coming from the Inner Cloister.
“Something is not right,” Anastacia said, already in step beside him, the pair giving the pit a wide berth on their path toward the Inner Cloister.
“Several somethings, actually,” Alarion confirmed.
There was no point in denying it any further. Alarion had his suspicions since Ashad-Vitri, and they’d only deepened since. A boil this close to a major population center wasn’t unheard of, and it had been discovered early as one would expect—but it was Rank II. This close to Ashad-Vitri, a subjugation force had arrived within hours of the first report, which meant the boil hadn’t been able to bolster its strength by feeding on the local wildlife or population. A boil that formed on a particularly potent place of power could certainly have skipped a rank, but that wouldn’t account for the hundreds of fiends it had thrown at them in the last few hours.
Not unless someone was feeding it.
The first membrane separating the inner and outer chambers was as flimsy as it looked. Stretched taut across the passageway, it tore itself nearly in half with a wet ripping sound the moment Alarion punctured it with one of his knives, revealing exactly what he’d feared.
Alarion barely even stopped to register the disturbingly familiar sight. Eight bodies of mixed gender were pinned to the walls, their wrists crossed above their head and pinned through with spikes. Their mouths were open in a perpetual, silent scream, their nude corpses drained of life and dignity by the foul sorcery used to bring life to the True Heart beating its foul life in the chamber ahead.
“Sweet Mothers—”
“Void Crush!” Alarion’s spell chant overrode Anastacia’s prayer as a wave of darkness consumed and obliterated half the desecrated remains. Yet when he lifted his mace to launch a second strike at the remaining bodies, he found Anastacia standing in his way. “Move Lieutenant.”
She didn’t turn to look at, or even acknowledge Alarion. Her eyes were fixed on the bodies, wide and incredulous.
“I said move,” Alarion demanded, reaching for her arm.
Anastacia evaded his grasp, but only by accident as she raised the point of her rapier toward the bodies and said, “Spirits of fire, Dance.”
You have suffered minor fire damage. HP -87.You have suffered minor bludgeoning damage. HP -22.
Alarion struggled to keep his footing against the force of an explosion in such a confined area, and Anastacia fared little better. Her uniform sleeve was singed and a bit of debris cut a nasty gash beneath her left eye, but she acknowledged neither as she repeated, “Spirits of fire, Dance!”
There had been nothing left after the first blast, but even with his ears ringing from the second, Alarion understood the impulse.
They had to be sure.
“Spirits of fire—”
“Enough,” Alarion said, catching her arm with an unsettling sense of déjà vu as she tried to wrench it free. How often had he been on the wrong side of such stubbornness. “Lieutenant, you have done it.”
The mention of rank brought some slack to her arm, and after a breath, Anastacia relaxed. “That was...”
“The same ritual used by the Bones of Ashad,” Alarion confirmed. “The fourth I have run into and the sixth that has been found this year.”
“I—” she hesitated, looking at the smoldering corridor as if seeing it for the first time. “Why did I...”
“The markings on the bodies cause the same sort of revulsion as a Revenant. Some people react more strongly than others. Some very strongly.”
Anastacia laughed darkly, then looked toward the scattered bits of charred bone. “The bodies. We... we should have—”
“No,” Alarion said, foreclosing the conversation before it could even begin.
The True Heart at Carling Hill had exploited his disgust for the ritual victims as part of its psychic attacks, but without that pressure weighing down upon him Alarion was fully capable of ignoring his natural urge to destroy the bodies. He’d just chosen not to. These bodies needed to be destroyed, and no argument about evidentiary or research value would sway him. Bad enough that someone was still capable of creating such foul places—Alarion refused to let the knowledge spread.
To her credit, Anastacia appeared to come to the same conclusion as adrenaline waned and the reality of the situation asserted itself. Or at the very least, she had the good sense not to argue. The bodies couldn’t be unburned, and they had more pressing matters.
“I want this thing out of my head,” she said, gesturing toward the Inner Cloister. Her tantrum had blown a hundred holes in the final wall of flesh separating them from the True Heart, and though it was too weak to cripple or kill them with its psychic attacks, the Heart’s demands were a perpetual scream in the back of their minds.
“What, you don’t want to be of it?”
Anastacia snorted and the two advanced side by side down the final slope toward the Inner Cloister.
The Heart hung in the center of the corrupted room, a black and green mass of corrupted flesh tethered to the floor and ceiling in half a dozen places by stretched tendons and thick, pulsing veins. Wet flesh glistened under enchanted light and the room smelled of death and offal. It was a disgusting sight to be sure, but one Alarion was sadly familiar with—save one small detail.
It wasn’t alone.
Cloaked in shadows, Alarion would have mistaken the thing as just another distortion in the chamber’s diseased anatomy if not for the single, massive cord that connected it to the Heart. But once he saw it, he couldn’t look away.
The fiend was colossal, twelve feet tall if it ever managed to stand straight, though for now it remained curled in upon itself, half-swallowed by the wall. Like so many of the monsters they had seen, it was clearly unfinished, but it was so alien that he found it difficult to discern what was incomplete and what was merely wrong. One leg was complete from hip to talon, thick with muscle and plated with a dark, shell-like hide; the other was covered with tufts of fur, its joint human rather than avian, as though the Heart couldn’t decide.
Its chest was broad and heavily built, but split down the middle by an uneven seam of swollen, diseased flesh. Black fluid seeped from the gap in syrupy threads with each beat of the Heart, leaving a large pool on that side of the chamber.
There were four arms, though only three were usable. The highest pair were strong and dangerous, tipped with hooked claws longer than daggers, but its lower arms were not so fortunate. The one on the left was a malformed stump studded with cancerous bone spurs, the other a boneless, serpentine mass topped with a gaping, tooth filled maw.
The massive umbilical cord—for what else could Alarion call it—fed directly into the beast’s spine. It pulsed and rippled with the Heart’s erratic rhythm, and each pulse caused some part of the fiend to twitch and shiver. And grow. A claw lengthened, then a fang pushed through raw gums with a disgusting squelch.
Then its eyes opened and the snake-like limb struck at them from the other end of the chamber.