LEVEL 0 IMMORTAL

The roots of the flower did not stop spreading as they threaded through the Void Womb like veins of black fire, branching into every chamber of that impossible anatomy, and wherever they touched, the flesh blackened and sloughed away in ribbons.

Elias hung from the finger; it was still impaling him despite the damage being suffered by the Void Womb, although its trashing was making him leak the smallest trickle of blood through Crimson Vein's stubborn grip.

His vision had begun to grey at the edges, but the Passenger was quiet now, and the quiet was worse than the laughter, as Elias knew that the Passenger was watching the scale tip.

The yellow eyes of the Void Womb contracted as the poison ate them from the inside out.

"Thief of gold," the voice came again, lower now, almost intimate. "Mother is gone, but I am still here. Do you think a stolen flower is enough?"

Elias did not answer. The first time the yellow-eyed boy had met him in the dream, he had said words similar to these.

Even if he wanted to speak, at the moment, he could not. The spikes through his chest had made a ruin of his lungs, and even the Vein Completion numbers at the edge of his vision were flickering like a candle in a dying room.

The Void Womb's flesh was weakening, the great body's grip on its own form was failing, and the thousand mouths no longer screamed in unison but in a staggered, dying chorus.

The finger that held him began to tremble, its muscle fibers snapping one by one like over-taut bowstrings.

"Enough," the yellow eyes said. Then they smiled. This expression did not belong on a mass of mouths and eyes. "Have you begun to understand what the future holds for both of us?"

The yellow irises narrowed into crescent slits, and the central mouth, the one into which Elias had driven the flower, curled upward at its edges.

"I have to admit… thief. You could have won this time, but you forgot," the voice whispered, "that I am not the only one who hungers."

Above the rim of the pit, in the sky that had been silent since Tarian's storm bled out, a single point of light appeared.

It was not lightning, since it was too slow and deliberate. It fell like a star made of judgement, and it did not strike the Void Womb; instead, it came towards Elias, and under the laughter of the Void Womb, the light struck Elias.

The impact drove through his back like a spear of sunlight, punching through the remnants of his stone armor, then through his shoulder blade, and the fragile architecture of ribs that had already been splintered by the seventh finger's spikes.

The force of it lifted him off the finger as it tore him free of the impalement in a spray of dark fluid that finally, finally escaped Crimson Vein's hold, and hurled him forty, eighty, hundred feet deeper into the temple.

He struck a column, and the column cracked; he did not stop. He tumbled through a rank of spawns that disintegrated on contact with his passing, and came to rest against a fallen statue of a winged figure whose face had long since been scoured away.

Elias' broken body rested against the statue, and he was like a fallen angel.

The light that had struck him did not dissipate. It clung to him, crawling across his skin in branching filaments, and Elias recognized it with a clarity that surfaced through the fog of broken bones and burst vessels.

"Tarian's lightning."

As it turned out, Tarian could not just call down the wild, indiscriminate storm from before; he could also aim and shape lightning.

This move must have been held back, hidden, nursed like a grudge, while the prince of Stormfall bled himself dry to clear a path.

And it had not been meant for the Void Womb, but for him.

All of the moments that Tarian spent getting closer to Elias, his entire sacrifice from before, were just to clear the way for him.

Far above, where the rim of the pit had become a distant circle of grey light, Tarian hung in the air. His body was a ruin. The blue of his hair had washed out to white, then to grey, and the grey was beginning to flake away like ash from a log that had burned too long.

His arms were still spread, but they were no longer spread in offering. They were spread in aim.

Tarian's eyes were the color of lightning again, a color that should not exist in a human face, and they were fixed on the place where Elias had been standing.

"You," Tarian said, and the thunder carried the word down into the temple. "You were never the answer. I am the Prince of Lightning, and the storm will cleanse this world of everything that falls short of my grace."

The lightning that had struck Elias had not finished. It coiled around him now, snapping at the edges of his broken armor, and Elias understood that Tarian had not collapsed from blood loss. Tarian had been waiting for the right opportunity to deal the final blow.

The storm had been real, and the sacrifice had been real. But the corridor, the path, the slow, agonizing crawl toward the Void Womb, all of it had been a net, and Elias had walked into it because he had believed that the prince's desperation meant the prince's honesty.

Foolish. His master would have been ashamed.

Behind Tarian, the cloud that had been thinning began to thicken again. It drank from the air, from the ash, from the last reserves of whatever Lumina Construct Tarian had anchored to his dying body.

The cloud turned white, then blue, then the same impossible color as his eyes.

The Void Womb's yellow irises tracked the lightning above, and the smile did not fade.

"Yes," it breathed through its thousand mouths. "Yes, even the heavens want my victory. You understand, Thief of Gold, what it means if I die by his hands."

The roots of the flower were still spreading, and the poison was tearing the mountain of flesh apart. But the Void Womb had stopped trying to fight it and had accepted its death, and in that acceptance, it had found a different pleasure.

Tarian's voice came again, carried by thunder, and something older than even the stones of Stormfall.

"I am the prince of this ruin. I am the heir to the storm. And I will not let a thing like you shed its darkness on the world. I cleanse you of the darkness of your destiny."

The Passenger screamed inside Elias's head, "Someone should shut him up… Argh!!!"

The lightning that had been gathering over the pit fell, and unlike the scattered storm from before, what fell down from the clouds was a waterfall of white fire that came down on the Void Womb's body, and it followed the places where the flower's poison had opened channels in its flesh.

This lightning was not only aimed at the Void Womb but at the Divine Vestige of Elias, who, at the moment, did not understand the importance of this flower, but Tarian did, and as much as possible, he would deny Elias access to this power.