Chapter 37: Thank You
Far below the dungeon, where Freya’s plan was quietly running its course, another fight altogether had begun some time ago, and little remained of what had stood there only minutes earlier.
Of the tower, nothing was left but a crater a hundred meters across, gouged into the frozen plain, its edges still steaming. The walls, the staircase, the bodies caught in the ice, everything that thing had accumulated over centuries had gone off in shards and vapor, and the snow itself had been blown so far that bare rock showed for dozens of meters around.
At the center of that hollow, two silhouettes faced each other.
Artalia stood straight, the wind pulling at her white hair, a thin cut running across her cheek just below the blindfold, from which a thread of blood ran slowly down to her jaw without her making the slightest move to wipe it away.
"Tell me." Her voice carried across the crater without effort. "Aren’t you a little too emotional, for a servant?"
Across from her, Aria hadn’t shifted an inch, six black tentacles undulating slowly at her back, while the two butterflies and her own familiar hovered nearby, each protected by its small barrier.
"Isn’t that, on the contrary, a servant’s foremost quality?" she answered. "To share her lady’s feelings, her joy, her anger, and everything else besides."
"A fine definition." Artalia tilted her head slightly. "But a servant who feels too much always ends up dying before her mistress. Or so I suppose..."
"Dying before one’s mistress — isn’t that precisely what everyone wishes for?"
Aria took a step forward, and beneath her sole the frozen rock split for several meters, which was enough to tip the air between them.
Around Artalia, the vapor rising from the crater froze in midair, turned back on itself and hardened, and out of it came blades, hundreds at first, then thousands, then far more still, a forest of ice swords suspended in the void that spanned the whole width of the hollow and climbed out of sight above them, every one of them aimed at the same target. Nymeria’s golden light passed through that mass and shattered inside it, until the entire crater turned white.
"Then show me."
They came all at once, and Aria didn’t give a single centimeter.
Her tentacles unfurled in an instant, split, split again, and became a black forest that closed in front of her as a shifting wall, against which the blades burst in whole clusters. Ice sprayed in sheets that came down like rain, and the din drowned out absolutely everything, that unbroken shattering of thousands of shards every second without ever letting a silence settle in between.
The black wall held without faltering, but neither did it advance, and Aria understood very quickly that this was exactly the point, since her opponent wasn’t trying to break through her, only to tie up her arms.
She triggered her Analysis in the middle of the chaos, turned her attention to the blindfolded woman, and ran straight into nothing.
[ Analysis — Failed. ]
[ Appraisal — Failed. ]
[ Target exceeds reading threshold. ]
Naturally.
Rather than press it, she switched to something else, something no panel could deny her, and read the soul in front of her instead of its power, except that what she found there made no sense and cost her half a second of focus.
A soul carrying centuries of war did not beat like that, and this one was calm, almost gentle, like someone who has been waiting a long time for something that never comes.
She filed the question away for later, wiped the tentacles aside and let herself drop backward beneath the volley that passed through empty air, rolling over her shoulder to find her footing thirty meters away, her left hand grazing the rock along the way.
Then the swords stopped all at once, and the plain rose in their place.
Ice erupted from the ground on every side, taking shape as it climbed, and what came out of it were not beasts but things that should never have walked, six-legged wolves as tall as houses, serpents whose tails could not be seen, four-armed silhouettes whose joints cracked and reset with every movement. The whole horde surged toward her from all edges of the crater at once, without a cry, without a breath, in a silence that made it far worse than if they had howled.
"Demonic magic."
Aria raised a hand and closed it, opening the ground beneath the horde in one long black sigh from which thick smoke burst, already taking the shape of birds before it had even finished rising.
They fell upon the pack in entire swarms, slipping into joints, into jaws, anywhere the ice ran thin, before bursting from inside. The creatures came apart mid-charge, ten at first, then a hundred, then all of them together, and what came down onto the rock was nothing more than smoking rubble that skidded several meters further before settling.
It was as she straightened up that Aria noticed it for the first time.
Artalia hadn’t moved from her position for the whole assault, exposed, without a scrap of guard, standing in the open in the middle of her own horde, and any one of those birds could have peeled off to open her throat. A being of that caliber did not leave her guard down out of distraction, and if she had left one, it was because she had chosen to.
Aria filed that away with the rest, because Artalia was already tracing a half-circle with her fingertips, and the cold came down over the crater.
It was neither a wave of snow nor a gust, but something far more fundamental, a thing that took the air itself and crystallized it as it advanced, so that the light slowed inside it and the roar of the previous exchanges cut off dead, as though the whole world had stopped vibrating for a hundred meters.
Arcane circles.
Three discs of white light opened in front of Aria, overlapping, each covered in lines that turned in a different direction from the last, and the wave struck them head-on before splitting in two, sweeping around the demon on either side to die out far behind her, leaving in its path a plain so hard that the rock had cracked into plates.
Without letting the silence settle, Aria pushed her three discs forward, and they went out in a straight line, passing through one another to accelerate each other.
The first caught Artalia at the precise instant she raised her arm, tearing her off the ground and hurling her from one end of the crater to the other, where she plowed through the frozen rock for some fifty meters, throwing up two walls of debris on either side of her path, before finally pushing herself up onto one knee.
Her left sleeve hung torn to the shoulder, and blood dripped from her fingers onto the ice, where it froze before it even landed.
She was smiling all the same, and it was not the smile of someone taking a hit while waiting for her turn.
"How long has it been..." She rose without hurrying and brushed off what remained of her dress. "How long since anyone last forced me to get back up?"
"Do you remember?"
"No..."
She snapped her fingers, and the entire crater closed in on the demon.
It was no wave this time but a dome, ice climbing from everywhere in the same second to meet above her head and seal itself in layers meters thick that kept adding to one another.
Aria struck the wall and got only a fissure that closed before it had finished spreading, then she struck again, with ten tentacles this time, and the ice reformed faster than she could break it.
That was when the cold found her.
It didn’t bite at her skin, it went straight through, and it went looking for the mana circulating inside her to slow it down, thickening every flow the way a river is frozen at the source. Her tentacles lost speed, then volume, then withdrew against her back on their own despite everything she ordered them to do, and for the first time in a very long while, the demon of knowledge felt her own body disobey her.
The dome tightened further, until barely two meters of space remained around her, where the air itself turned solid as it neared her lips.
Concealed presence.
She erased everything, her magic, her warmth, her breath, down to her very existence in the eyes of the world, and the cold lost her for a second and a half.
A second and a half was all she needed.
She slid along the wall where the ice ran thinnest, came out of the dome through a fissure barely wider than her arm, and rolled into the snow on the other side coughing frost, her dress burned away by the cold along one whole hip, her right hand planted in the ground to push herself up.
The black mark she left there was the eleventh.
Behind her, the dome shattered on its own, and Artalia was already coming, walking without haste, ice growing beneath her feet to receive her with every step. Aria wiped the blood running from her lip and got back up, and neither of them said a word, because there was nothing left to say that the next few minutes wouldn’t settle.
What came next no longer resembled a duel.
Artalia raised both hands, her sightless face turned toward the golden sky, and the entire plain answered her, because this was no longer shaping magic but Nymeria itself rising. All the snow for kilometers around, all the ice, every block where the Faceless Devourers had slept since forever tore free of the ground in one single rumble and climbed above the crater, clumping together as it rose, until it formed a mass that cast a shadow across hundreds of meters and in which the silhouettes of the frozen beasts could still be made out, caught inside.
Far off, on the endless sea, the creatures as tall as mountains slowly turned their heads toward the crater.
Mana manipulation.
Aria opened her arms, because the air of Nymeria was saturated to the point of being heavy, gorged with mana so dense that no being from the surface could have withstood so much as a mouthful of it, and she had only to reach out her hands to take it.
Everything floating around her came to her at once and poured into her palms, her tentacles coming back to life to go from six to thirty, each one thicker than a tree trunk, just in time to catch the mass with her bare hands.
What followed resembled an earthquake and lasted a dozen seconds, during which the ice broke against the tentacles in entire blocks, the demon gave ground centimeter by centimeter with her heels carving two furrows into the rock, and the golden light vanished completely behind the curtain of debris flying in every direction.
She held to the end, but she held on her knees, and when the last block crashed down beside her, all thirty tentacles dissipated into the air at once.
Artalia stopped ten paces away.
"You cannot win this fight." She had said it without a trace of satisfaction, almost gently. "You are the strongest thing that has climbed up to me in centuries, and it changes nothing, because I have no bottom, whereas you do."
"I know."
Aria raised her head, and her violet gaze had lost none of its edge.
"Which is why I never intended to win this fight."
Close combat.
She was on her before the words had finished forming, faster than any of her earlier attacks, and the first blow came up from below to catch Artalia under the chin. The goddess sailed twenty meters through the air, and Aria was already there when she came down, taking her again on the ground, launching her again, hounding her across the whole crater in a sequence where magic played no part at all.
Every time she touched down to shift her footing, her hand grazed the rock.
Twenty-fourth.
Every time she rolled clear of a spike of ice, her fingers dragged a fraction of a second too long.
Thirtieth.
Artalia let her do it, absorbing without ever truly striking back, until a spike bursting from the ground forced the demon to throw herself aside, and it was at that instant that one of the butterflies lost its barrier.
Aria caught it out of the corner of her eye, that small blue thing beating its wings in the biting cold, and she knew at that precise moment what was about to happen, because a blade of ice was already streaking straight for it.
She moved without thinking, closing her left arm around the butterfly, and the blade went clean through it before spreading.
The cold traveled up her forearm in one second, then to the shoulder, whitening the skin, freezing the sleeve, turning the whole limb into a dead weight hanging at her side.
"Ah." Artalia let her hand fall. "There it is. Your emotion."
Aria didn’t answer straight away, first opening the fingers of her right hand to let the butterfly go beating off, then rebuilding its barrier with a gesture before deigning to look at her own arm.
"A servant who feels too much always dies before her mistress. I told you as much."
"You did, indeed."
Aria rolled her dead shoulder, as though the limb no longer belonged to her, and her other hand came down flat against the ground.
"And you let me do it thirty-eight times."
The crater lit up.
Black lines stretched from one point to another, met, crossed, and within seconds drew an immense circle spanning the whole hollow, with symbols inside it, and further circles inside those, an entire construction traced right under her eyes since the very first exchange, a print at every footing, a line at every fall, while the world came apart around them and nothing about it ever showed.
[ Seals and contracts — Structure complete. ]
Artalia made no move to interrupt it, and Aria finally understood what her soul had told her an hour earlier.
"You knew."
"From the very first line you drew."
The wind blew between them, and there was nothing else left to hear in the whole plain.
"I have watched things climb that staircase for centuries, and not one of them had what it took to kill me. I killed them instead, because that is the rule, and because there was nothing else to be done." She turned her sightless face toward the circle turning beneath her feet. "You are the first to bring something else."
"And if I hadn’t been enough?"
"Then I would have killed you, and waited for the next one."
Aria laid her second hand, the one that no longer answered, at the center of the design, and began to speak.
It was no incantation as the world knew them, for the sounds that came out of her mouth belonged to no living tongue nor any dead one, and among them were things that were not sounds at all, breaks, signs, symbols no throat should ever have been able to shape.
"Zar’kheth ~~ ith\vanor // esh-XIII... okhran %% seth’ma..."
By the third syllable Artalia’s head came up sharply, and for the first time since the fight began, something moved across her face.
"... | ahn·kereth vas-VII... zul’maghren ~~ ..."
The air above the crater tore open along its whole length, and behind the tear there was no sky, no earth, no light, only something far older than all three.
"So you even know the Ancient Tongue..."
She had said it softly, almost to herself, before turning her head toward the horizon, toward that endless sea and those creatures as tall as mountains she had been guarding for so long she no longer counted the years.
"So this is it." Her voice cracked slightly. "I’m finally free of this life of imprisonment..."
A tear slipped from beneath the blindfold, ran down her cheek and mingled with the blood already drying there, while a smile came to her lips.
"Thank you..."
The circle closed over her and the tear swallowed her whole, without a sound, without a cry, without so much as a stir of displaced air, so that where the youngest child of the demigod Myrphès and the dragon-queen Ōgami had stood, there soon remained nothing at all, no body, no trace, not the slightest proof that she had ever existed.
The circle went out, the tear sealed itself, and silence came back down over the crater.
Aria stayed standing in the middle of it, her left arm hanging against her, staring at the empty spot for a long moment, before turning toward the butterfly still hovering beside her and speaking in a perfectly level voice.
"Mistress. It’s over, I’m coming home."
She got no further, because two silhouettes now stood at the crater’s edge, where a second earlier there had been no one.
Two strictly identical men, tall, their skin a dark blue and their heads circled with gold, each bearing eight arms that moved all together with a perfectly synchronized slowness, as though they obeyed one and the same mind.
"It seems our sister served some purpose after all."
"She wasn’t entirely useless, then."
Damn it! I was far too focused on the fight.
Aria wheeled toward them, but the sixteen arms had already risen in a single motion, palms turned toward her, and the two voices rose in unison.
"Ashtapasha."
"Damn..."
She raised both arms to counter, except the left one, still caught in the ice, answered only halfway and dropped heavily against her side before it could trace anything at all.
Eight rings of golden light burst from the ground around her, climbed turning one inside another, and closed over the demon in a rush of air that swept the snow to the far ends of the plain.