Ersia: Raven Dawn

“P-Please don’t hurt her… I will… I will give you anything you ask!”

Verbal is the summit of intent. To every creature gifted with reason, words are more than sounds shaped by the tongue; they are vows given form. An intention becomes tangible once spoken, for the universe recognizes will through language. Civilizations have risen from whispers, and the course of history has been altered by promises made in a single breath. Speech is an instruction imposed upon causality itself, binding the unseen to the material world. Every voice, every inflection, every language carries an echo of something primordial—a key capable of stirring the laws of nature, summoning spirits, and reshaping the consciousness of those who listen.

Syamrin’s smile widened until it became utterly inhuman. A circle of magic appeared upon his brow, enclosing an inverted pentagram whose lines seemed to writhe beneath his skin. Then he began to recite a forgotten incantation, a spell whose name had long since vanished from the surviving records of theology and sorcery.

Ars Sanguinis.

The blood dripping from the knight’s body began to rise.

It gathered around Syamrin in thick, suspended globules before merging into a single mass. He guided it with little more than his will, drawing a second magic circle upon the ground with blood instead of ink. With every drop that left his vessel, the knight’s flesh grew paler and more withered.

Syamrin lowered himself onto his knees and raised his face toward the heavens as if to make a mockery. His expression approaching ecstasy. For this sacrifice was not merely a component of ritual, it was a language of disdain and recusancy, and blood happened to be one of its oldest words.

Then Viena moved. Even though she had not told herself to move.

Her body carried her toward the knight who had become Syamrin’s vessel, each step occurring without the slightest permission from her conscious mind. She remained awake throughout it, painfully aware of every movement, every sensation, every violation of her own will. Her body no longer answered to her, yet her consciousness remained trapped inside it, forced to witness what Syamrin was making her do.

She could do nothing except tearing in silence.

When she reached him, her body knelt.

Her hands moved on their own, removing the garments that covered her until nothing remained between them. Viena could see everything. She understood everything. Her mind screamed against it, but her flesh belonged to another will now, and Syamrin's command passed through her nerves as effortlessly as thought.

She bowed before him.

Syamrin began to speak.

His voice came through the knight's throat with a strange feminine quality, yet it carried an unnatural resonance that seemed to reverberate beyond the physical chamber. There was something faintly reminiscent of Lady Morwenn in its tone, although Syamrin's voice was sharper, more seductive, and not utterly devoid of human tenderness.

From blood unto dust.

From dust unto nothingness.

From nothingness unto Me.

Your soul is incense.

Your flesh is the vessel.

Offer them both,

and let nothing remain but My Will.”

Viena tilted her face toward the heavens as the mass of blood above her continued to swell. The knight serving as Syamrin's vessel was being consumed from within, his body drying and collapsing as the primordial demon extracted everything he required from it. His armor remained upright only because there was still enough flesh inside it to hold the shape.

Soon, there would not be even that.

Viena's mouth opened.

Her tongue extended as the accumulated blood descended.

It poured over her in a torrent.

She was forced to swallow as blood ran across her face and entered her mouth. It soaked her hair, her skin, her throat, and every inch of her exposed body until she appeared almost sculpted from crimson. The ritual circle drank whatever spilled onto the ground, its symbols growing brighter with every drop.

Viena gagged.

She tried to resist.

Her body ignored her.

Pain erupted across her tongue as a symbol began to carve itself into the living flesh, the inverted pentagram appearing first before a circle formed around it. The mark was identical to the sigil inscribed within the blood ritual beneath her. The sensation was excruciating, and Viena nearly lost consciousness beneath it, yet even as her awareness began to fracture, she remained aware enough to understand what was happening.

She was being branded, not as a servant but as a vessel.

Her eyes changed next. The color drained from them until their appearance became disturbingly similar to Syamrin's own. Through Viena's altered eyes, something that was no longer entirely human seemed to look back at the world.

“Aah~… I knew it,” Syamrin said through her voice.

She sounded delighted.

“This power is extraordinary,” The satisfaction in her voice was unmistakably divine in its arrogance as she was tasting a new vessel and discovering the power she had neve thought existed.

In the midst of the eldritch and grotesque view, something suddenly descended upon the ritual.

A luminous green magic circle appeared in the air with astonishing speed. It was equal in size to Syamrin's blood-red formation and positioned directly above it, perfectly symmetrical. The two magical structures pressed against one another, and the collision of their opposing forces sent crushing pressure through Viena's body.

“Ack! T-This magic?! Impossible…!”

Syamrin looked upward.

“WHO ARE YOU?!”

A man hovered above the ritual site.

“My master sensed something very unusual about the girl and sent me here,” he said. His voice remained remarkably composed despite the violent magical pressure surrounding them. “To my surprise, however, I have never encountered such an overwhelmingly sinister aura.”

His gaze settled upon Viena.

“Who are you? And what are you planning to do to that child?”

The man raised one hand and the green formation expanded.

A second geometric structure unfolded around the magic circle, forming a vast triangle whose three sides enclosed the entire spell. The symbols appeared with mathematical precision, locking together into a configuration that seemed less like conventional sorcery and more like the execution of a carefully calculated theorem.

"Aaaaargh!!"

Syamrin screamed.

The green formation bore down upon the ritual with such force that Syamrin could scarcely maintain her hold over Viena. Her borrowed body convulsed beneath the pressure, every muscle tightening as though the spell were reaching past flesh and grasping directly at whatever bound her consciousness to the mortal vessel. Pain, unfamiliar even to such an ancient being accustomed to inflicting it upon others, tore through her; she clawed instinctively at her own body.

As the pain overwhelmed her, her fingers sank beneath Viena's skin and brushed against something that did not belong there.

Syamrin's attention sharpened. Buried within the girl's flesh was a thin, translucent sheet, scarcely thicker than onion skin. It carried a magical structure she did not recognize, and yet its purpose became apparent almost immediately as her perception passed through it. The spell was designed to track Viena's whereabouts, maintaining a persistent connection between the girl and whoever had created it. Someone had taken an unusual interest in this child before Syamrin had entered her body.

The foreign spell should have been insignificant.

Instead, Syamrin found something bundled together within its structure that made her pause. A protection spell.

Syamrin now understood how foolishly useful that curiosity had been.

There was something deeper within the spell than a mere tracking function. When her divine perception pressed against its structure, she sensed a thread extending far beyond the ritual chamber, a connection that did not terminate with Viena's body but continued toward its creator. Argenis had left a portion of himself behind when he fashioned the manifestation—a spiritual imprint of protection from imminent danger so intimately bound to the spell that, to a being like Syamrin, it was indistinguishable from a fragment of the man's own soul.

A smile slowly returned to Syamrin's face.

The opposing magic was still tearing at her, yet the discovery had given her something far more valuable than an escape. Through that tiny fragment, she had found a path to Argenis himself.

She seized it with her newfound power in Viena.

The connection tightened, and Viena's body became the conduit through which Syamrin reached across the distance. Argenis's strength began to pour through the spell, not as mana alone but as something far more fundamental—the vitality that sustained the mage's body and the spiritual force that anchored his consciousness to it. Syamrin drew upon both without hesitation, devouring the connection with the instinctive hunger of a demon god reclaiming an offering that had wandered beyond her reach.

Far away, Argenis felt the theft before he understood its source.

A sudden weakness seized his body, forcing him to stagger as though the ground beneath his feet had shifted. His breath grew shallow, his limbs strangely heavy, and beneath all of it he sensed something much more alarming: a foreign will tugging at the boundary of his soul, pulling his strength away from him through a connection he had never imagined could be turned against its creator.

The realization came quickly;

Viena, the kid whom he just sent Rudan to check upon just now.

The spell he had placed within her was being used as a bridge.

Argenis did not waste time wondering who had discovered it. Whatever had taken hold of that connection possessed a nature sufficiently sinister to make the magic he had sensed earlier seem insignificant by comparison, and remaining where he was would only give it more time to drain him.

He gathered what remained of his strength and invoked one of the highest forms of sorcery at his command.

Teleportation.