The Innkeeper

By now, Lex had seen the characters at work over a hundred times. They hardly ever worked with a bang. Instead, the array would dissipate into the environment, correcting the wrongness as it did.

This time, however, the characters weren’t correcting a wrongness. No, they were making a change forcibly, even if the method was designed to be as smooth as possible. As such, it was inevitable that as soon as the array started working, its effects would not be inconspicuous.

Flashes of red and orange filled the sky, cutting through the darkness of the night. Various colors began melding into the black lightning bolt that was frozen still, not only disrupting its existence, but interfering with the portal hidden within it.

The icy glacier beneath their feet, too, began to change. It remained solid, but instead of the hard and impenetrable, the ice became soft and wobbly. The ceiling of the cave entrance began to droop, pushing down some of the chimera at the mouth of the cave who were attacking Lex’s barriers.

Lex had anticipated that he would face great resistance to initiating a change, even possibly attracting the wrong kind of attention from Abaddon. Instead, it seemed that Abaddon found the state of change that Lex initiated perfectly normal.

In a way, Lex really was correcting a wrongness, for Abaddon was a place of flux, and forcibly creating portals was temporarily ceasing that flux state.

It seemed to have detected the change that Lex had initiated, but It did not seem too bothered by it. Instead, the countless bodies It possessed merely smiled in an even more horrifying way.

Lex could not help but feel like It was studying him, and revealing more about himself seemed like a bad idea. Even so, it wasn’t as if he could simply ignore an attack on the tavern either. It was an open conspiracy, and one he couldn’t do much about at the moment.

Lex, however, wasn’t really one to allow an enemy to gain the upper hand. Since It preferred the route of an open conspiracy, he could take the route of a hidden one. After all, just as It was studying him, he was also studying It.

Gradually, the two portals changed so much that they ceased to work, finally alleviating a huge burden that the entire mercenary group was under. But while the threat of more chimeras was gone, the existing ones were still a threat they hadn’t dealt with.

Lex thought of a few different solutions, but before committing to one, tried to use the state of Flow to study the chimera. They truly presented themselves as an unstoppable force, with no apparent weakness for them to exploit. Even so, with the guidance of his instincts, he studied his surroundings before arriving at an answer that made perfect sense, but that he would not have thought of on his own without Flow.

Lex could not help but sigh as he exited his Flow state. He wondered how much easier his life would have been if he’d been using his Flow state properly from the start.