13-2. Dissolution
Elijah landed with a bone-breaking thud, kicking up a cloud of rock and dust upon impact. The resultant crater was only a few feet deep, though not because of a lack of force. Instead, the ground was far more durable than expected.
Nearby, there was a second impact a second later.
But Elijah was far more concerned with the abyssal corruption eating at him. It sapped his energy and fouled his flesh. His veins blackened, and he gasped for vitality that just didn’t exist. Finally, he pushed ethera into his Mantle of Authority, shoving the alien atmosphere aside.
Even as the black veins retreated, Elijah took stock of the situation.
The second his mind settled on recent events, he found himself reeling. Not from the reality of his circumstances. Rather, from his memories. Falling into that well of corruption was enough to give anyone nightmares. Impenetrable blackness, tentacles, teeth, and fangs.
Elijah had fought through them all, but the resultant wounds were both serious and lasting. And finally, after what had felt like an eternity, he’d been spat out.
Now, he could see where he’d arrived.
The landscape was just as alien as the atmosphere. With towering pillars of corrugated rock, it looked almost like he’d been stranded in some mockery of a forest. Yet, there were no trees. No vegetation of any kind. No animals, either.
No one except Elijah and a faint pulse of life he assumed was Benedict.
And a mass of rubbery, mucus covered tentacles that had once been Etkatiran.
Benedict was the first priority. Elijah gradually crawled to his feet, only to realize that the vast majority of his bones were broken. Some were compound fractures, but thankfully, he maintained enough mobility to climb out of the crater. The terrain was just as alien from that vantage, and Elijah couldn’t help but notice the black sky streaked with purple.
It might’ve been beautiful if he wasn’t in so much pain.
Not just from his injuries, which were so extensive that he knew he should have already been dead. If he’d been in his human form, that would have been the case. Thankfully, he’d fallen into the abyssal well as a dragon, which was probably the only reason he’d survived.
Despite Elijah garnering the bulk of the attention from those creatures in the well, Benedict was in even worse shape. Elijah could feel the man’s life faltering with every passing second. His ethera flowed in starts and stops, evidence that his soul had been shattered. Elijah dragged himself across that rocky landscape until he reached the other crater.
It was shallower than Elijah’s, though that was probably less because of force of impact and more due to the incredible difference in size. At the bottom was Benedict, broken, battered, and bloody. His arms and legs were bent out of shape, suggesting multiple dislocations and compound fractures, but most troubling was that his skin had turned almost entirely black from corruption.
Elijah crawled over the lip of the crater, then tumbled down the slope. Benedict let out a subtle groan when Elijah hit him, but he was on the verge of unconsciousness. So, his reaction was less than pronounced.
But he was alive.
And Elijah intended to keep it that way.
The first step was already underway, and beneath the sheltering boughs of Elijah’s extended soul, the corruption within Benedict dissipated. Even so, the man’s body was already so bruised that his skin had turned almost entirely purple. On top of that, he sported multiple jagged wounds, one of which threatened to spill his intestines all over the ground.
Elijah cast Blessing of the Grove.
And he was surprised when the sense of vitality felt subdued. Almost as if it had been sterilized. Thankfully, the potency of the spell was unaffected by that odd feeling, and within a few moments, the resultant healing had already begun to take effect.
It wouldn’t be enough, though.
Rather, Elijah intended it only as a means to give him more time to treat his companion. And himself, eventually. It would keep them both alive, at least.
Over the next few hours, Elijah was forced to return to his human form. That cut the effect of his spells by a significant degree, but it was incredibly difficult to set a bone with a dragon’s claws. He worked as quickly as possible, but he knew that if he made a mistake, he’d just have to rebreak and reset the bones. So, he maintained care born from plenty of experience.
Still, Benedict remained mostly unconscious. A blessing if ever there was one. He didn’t want to hear the man’s screams.
In the end, it took nearly an entire day before he finished his task. Or at least that was as far as Elijah could tell, given the lack of any way to track the passage of time. There was no sun. The sky wasn’t entirely static, though. The violet streaks swirled continuously. But Elijah had no idea what they meant.
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Once Benedict’s wounds were mostly on the mend, Elijah turned his attention to his own injuries. And they were even more extensive than his companion’s. What’s more, the ongoing healing from Blessing of the Grove had fostered exactly the situation he’d hoped to avoid with Benedict.
So, with great effort, he was forced to break poorly mended bones, then reset them.
It wasn’t the first time for Elijah, but the pain of it wasn’t something anyone could ignore. It soared from one leaf to another within his mind, overwhelming his attempts to keep it quarantined.
But as he went about his unenviable task, he maintained a stoic façade. For whom, he didn’t know. It wasn’t as if Benedict was conscious enough to see. Maybe it was just for himself.
Because if he truly let the pain and panic settle in, he might not survive.
Mechanically, Elijah went about healing his body until, at last, he was as whole as he ever would be. He’d picked up a few new scars – mostly on his torso – but that was a small price to pay for survival.
Finally, he allowed himself to truly study his surroundings.
And he came away with one simple conclusion.
“I am so fucked,” he muttered to himself, his voice oddly subdued amidst the silence of the world.
Given the atmosphere of corruption, held at bay by his ongoing Mantle of Authority, his location was obvious. Somehow, he’d fallen through that well of corruption and into the actual abyss. However, instead of being spat out into true nothingness, he found himself on a rocky landmass. Probably a long-excised planet.
Which did not bode well for his future.
Elijah picked himself up and stretched. With everything that had happened, he felt remarkably healthy. His body still ached, but he recognized that pain for what it was. It was just an echo. Something akin to phantom limb syndrome, and the result of his body not quite adjusting to rapid healing.
It was a familiar sensation, and one that would fade within a few days.
Troublingly, Benedict remained mostly unconscious.
Elijah hefted his companion onto his shoulder, then climbed out of the crater that had been their home for the past couple of days. That was when he saw what was left of Etkatiran.
The pile of tentacles and djinn flesh had already begun to dissolve. Motes of ethera danced around the body and swirled into the sky. But to Elijah’s immense surprise, he still felt a note of life in the djinn.
He approached cautiously, though the creature did not even twitch until he was within a few feet. The djinn’s eyes – all three of them – snapped open, then bored a hole into Elijah.
The thing tried to move, but aside from a few subtle vibrations, it was impossible.
“I knew I was a resident of a Primal Realm,” Etkatiran breathed. This time, the voice came from the corrupted djinn’s mouth. “I did not want to believe it, but the signs were all there.”
“What do you know of this place?” Elijah asked.
“An excised world,” the djinn stated. “Devoid of all uncorrupted life. Beware, for you will soon be hunted.”
“By what?”
The djinn coughed, the fit lasting for a few moments before he took a wheezing breath. “Everything. An excised world is no place for an ascendent,” he stated. “Whatever life remains will be driven to madness by hunger.”
“Hunger for what?” Elijah asked, though he knew the answer.
“For everything. That is the nature of the abyss. It ever hungers. It seeks to consume all, and its denizens have been infected by that nature,” Etkatiran explained, though his voice had dropped to little more than a whisper.
“Is this part of the Primal Realm?”
“No.”
Elijah had suspected as much, but he’d not received a completion notification either. Then again, the abyss was not subject to the World Tree or the system – at least as far as Elijah knew. So, that made sense.
“It’s real.”
“All too real, little dragon,” the djinn said. “Come closer. Your Mantle of Authority provides some relief.”
In most cases, Elijah would have never complied. But the madness that had gripped the djinn seemed to have faded with his defeat. Besides, Etkatiran only had a few more minutes of life left in him.
“Are you dying because we beat you? Or because you left the Primal Realm?” Elijah asked as he came closer. His Mantle of Authority spread out, sheltering the djinn beneath the canopy of his soul. Etkatiran sighed in relief, but the pace of his body’s dissolution increased by no small degree. If before, he had minutes, now he had only a few more moments.
“I do not know,” he answered. Then, his eyes flicked past Elijah. “It is beautiful. Terrible, but beautiful, in its way.”
Then, without another word, the djinn dissolved into motes of ethera that joined the column drifting into the sky. It continued for a few more seconds until there was nothing left but a vaguely djinn-shaped puddle of bubbling black sludge. It dissolved under Elijah’s mantle, though it hung on for long minutes before it, too, was gone.
He watched it all, his expression impassive. Inwardly, he was screaming, though.
Being stranded on an excised planet in the abyss came with a host of problems. Excisement implied that it was entirely cut off from the system – a supposition supported by Elijah’s lack of reward from conquering the Primal Realm. That, in turn, told him that returning to Earth would be no easy feat.
There was a good chance that it wasn’t even possible.
Sure, deities and transcendents were said to spend long stretches fighting in the abyss – usually against the Ravener and his followers. But Elijah was no deity. He wasn’t even a demi-god yet. As such, his odds of survival were incredibly low. If not non-existent.
That thought brought with it the weight of his new reality. And a crushing sense of hopelessness that threatened to overwhelm him.
He couldn’t even endure the atmosphere without his Mantle of Authority. And though he could keep it going for quite some time, he would eventually grow exhausted. What would he do then?
Succumb to the corruption?
What about food? Shelter? And protection against doubtlessly powerful creatures?
The list of problems went on and on, the resultant despair gripping him in its claws and threatening to strangle him into inaction. He wasn’t certain how long he stood there just staring at the site of the djinn’s death. Hours, at the very least. Most of it was spent cataloguing the desperation of his situation.
But then he remembered something very important.
It wasn’t really that long ago that he’d found himself in equally dire circumstances. Worse, even. Dying of cancer, barely alive after a plane crash, and with crabs making a meal of his legs – he’d had no reason to expect survival. And yet, he had. Sure, he’d had help along the way. That was irrefutable. Without people like Nerthus, he would have succumbed.
But this time, he had real power at his disposal. He was a Druid, but before that, he was a survivor. And he intended to make good on that identity.
With that in mind, he began a list of things to do so he could give himself a chance at persevering through what was undoubtedly a difficult situation.