13-3. Inhospitable
Corruption pressed in on all sides, searching for cracks in Elijah’s Mantle of Authority. So far, it had found none, but it was only a matter of time before it began to fray at the edges. And he had no idea what he would do when that happened, because it was the only thing keeping him alive.
He suspected that he could survive without it for a few hours. Maybe a day or two at most. But slowly succumbing to the toxic atmosphere would not be a pleasant experience. Physical pain would be the least of the consequences.
He knelt near the crater where he’d landed, using Eyes of the Eagle to study the area just outside the purview of his Mantle of Authority. The air itself slowly consumed the surrounding rock, eagerly absorbing the tiniest traces of vitality his presence had left behind.
More, he thought back to what he’d felt just after he’d arrived on the barren planet. It hadn’t taken him long to deploy his mantle, but what he had experienced told him all he needed to know about exposure to the native corruption of the abyss. It had invaded his soul, consuming every ounce of ethera. At the same time, it had assailed his body, absorbing the vitality within and leaving something else behind.
Something Elijah could only identify as hunger.
It was still him. He was still capable of rational thought. But the desire to consume was so overwhelming that he suspected that it would drive him mad within a few days. Weeks at most.
The atmosphere still ate at the edges of his Mantle of Authority, but he could handle that.
For a while, at least.
Soon, he would need to find some other means of survival.
That item was at the top of his list. After that came a source of water. Then food. And finally, shelter from the elements. Once those immediate concerns were taken care of, he would set out to explore his surroundings and look for a way home.
Perhaps there wasn’t one.
Elijah knew that was a distinct possibility. The word excisement possessed a certain permanence about it that he couldn’t hope to escape. But if he acknowledged that, there was a good chance he would sink into despair.
Hope was his greatest asset, and one he refused to surrender.
Pushing himself to his feet, he glanced back at Benedict. The man still hadn’t regained consciousness, but his complexion had at least gotten better. He was still pale, but not waxy. Elijah took that as a win.
Shaking his head, he retrieved his tent from his Arcane Loop and deployed it. The mundane task was cathartic. Almost as if taking that concrete step toward survival gave him a sense of momentum that he could use to push him forward.
Once the tent was up, Elijah dragged Benedict inside. The temporary structure’s defenses held up for about five minutes before the atmosphere invaded it. Thankfully, Elijah’s ongoing Mantle of Authority kept the corruption at bay, but it was obvious that he would not soon get a break.
With an undercurrent of trepidation, Elijah emptied his various storage spaces. The Arcane Loop held the bulk of his supplies, but the Herbalist Pouch had accumulated some items as well. After their long tenure inside the Labyrinth of Dead Gods, his supplies had become depressingly low, though.
Less than a hundred meals remained. A sack of grove fruits. Some of Hu Shui’s MREs. A small bag of coffee. A couple of bars of soap. And a few barrels of water. Thankfully, the latter would last for at least a year, considering that each barrel contained the volume of a swimming pool. Elijah had barely even cut into that.
Food would be an issue, though.
Elijah could survive without eating for a few months, but he would grow steadily weaker each day. And that wasn’t even considering the increased appetite of his dragon form. A fifty-foot reptile needed just as much sustenance as any creature that size. More, considering just how inefficiently it used energy.
Great bursts of power came at a steep cost.
More troubling was that Elijah needed to stretch his supplies between two people. Benedict was still strong enough to do without food for a while, but if he wanted to function properly, he needed to eat at least every couple of weeks.
A quick bit of math told Elijah that his food supplies wouldn’t last more than six months. Water would be okay for years. Elijah’s Mantle of Authority would collapse long before starvation or dehydration, though.
So, he turned to the other items in his storage.
Thankfully, he still had a few potions he’d commissioned from Biggle. A couple were meant for healing, but he was more interested in the ethereal regeneration concoctions. Most of the time, Elijah didn’t need them, but now, they could help him keep his Mantle of Authority active for a while longer.
But ethereal flow wasn’t the only issue. Exhaustion and strain were the bigger problems, and a little extra ethera wouldn’t solve either of those.
Elijah kept going, cataloguing seeds and plant cuttings he’d kept in the Herbalist’s Pouch. They were all interesting, but he didn’t think growing a few plants would help his situation. Even if he could get them to sprout, the corruption would consume them just like it had eaten everything else on the barren world.
You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story.
He did briefly consider planting the lone ancestral tree seed in his pouch. Maybe he could engineer it to combat the corruption and provide some solace against the abyss. However, after a little experimentation – with other, far less valuable seeds – he found that plants simply wouldn’t take root in the rocky ground.
With that avenue cut off, Elijah returned to the tent and continued to take stock of his inventory of items. There was the Riftseed potion he’d gotten from Biggle, but given its limitations, that wasn’t that valuable to his circumstances. After all, he still only possessed a single growth item, and evolving his Arcane Loop wouldn’t really do much to help him out.
Next was his oft-forgotten laptop, which wasn’t even charged. A journal he sometimes used to recount his adventures. A couple of photos he’d taken from Alyssa’s old house. Some other odds and ends he’d stashed away like the packrat he was.
But nothing that would solve his problems.
It was while he was looking at the one of the photos – of him, his sister, and his parents before they’d died – that Benedict finally awoke.
“W-what happened?” he groaned, trying to push himself upright. He failed.
“You almost died,” Elijah answered, slipping the photo back into the Arcane Loop. “Well, I guess it’s more accurate to say that we almost died.”
His eyes unfocused, a telltale sign that he was trying to access the system. Elijah knew from recent experience that everything still worked the way it was supposed to. He could bring up his status without issue, but it was like operating a computer that wasn’t connected to the internet. Whatever was already there was still available, but anything that required the system’s direct input was unavailable.
“Are we still in the Primal Realm?” the Warlock asked, coming to the most viable conclusion. If there was no completion notification, then it was perfectly reasonable to assume that they hadn’t conquered the Labyrinth of Dead Gods.
Elijah knew that was not the case, though.
He shook his head. “No. We were dragged through a portal to the abyss,” he said. “According to Etkatiran, we’re stranded on a long-excised planet.”
Benedict’s eyes glassed over for a second before they widened in alarm. “How are we still alive?”
“Mantle.”
It wasn’t the first time Elijah had used it to protect his companions, so Benedict was very much aware of its power and limitations. “How long?”
“A few weeks, maybe,” Elijah answered. “And that’s if I keep the area of effect narrow.”
At present, he’d limited it to roughly the size of the tent, which put much less strain on his soul than if he’d deployed it at maximum range. It was the difference between carrying a load of bricks on his back and trying to support the weight of the world on his shoulders. Neither was pleasant, though one was impossible to maintain for long.
“Hu Shui?”
Elijah shrugged, telling his companion that he had no idea if their other ally had survived. “But he wasn’t dragged here with us,” he stated. “Hopefully, he completed the realm and got back to Earth.”
Benedict glanced away, the movement slow. Deliberate. He still hadn’t recovered more than a tiny fraction of his strength. “That doesn’t help us.”
“It helps the people we left behind,” Elijah reasoned. “They still need to close the Primal Realms or –”
“I don’t have anyone.”
“What?”
“On Earth. There’s no one there I really care about,” he admitted. “Especially now that Benediction has fallen.”
Elijah opened his mouth to reply, but he cut himself short. Before the battle against Etkatiran, they had gotten a short glimpse of Benedict’s home. Freed from the order enforced by his summoned demons, the people of Benediction had turned on one another. The city itself had become a battlefield, and from that brief scene they’d been granted, it was obvious that there was no future for its citizens.
Not without Benedict’s hand on the scales.
“I’m sorry,” Elijah said. The words were hollow but heartfelt, though he knew they would do nothing to assuage the man’s grief over losing the city.
“I thought I could build something,” the man breathed, finally letting himself collapse. Elijah had given him a few pillows, at least. “Something that would last. Something that could…I don’t know…give me purpose. They weren’t all bad. They were just misguided. I could work with that. If I’d had more time…”
He trailed off.
But he didn’t need to finish the sentence for Elijah to know what would have come next. Even as Benedict drifted back into unconsciousness, he realized just how idealistic Benedict truly was. Sure, he was a murderer. Elijah knew that the man’s past was murky at best. But he’d also tried to save the people that would eventually settle in Benediction. He’d tried to guide them to a better life.
And for a while, he’d been successful.
Now, though, reality had stripped that illusion away. Those people had never really changed. They had simply ceded control to a greater power.
And now that the restrictive nature of said greater power was gone, they simply reverted to their natures. It begged the question of whether or not people could really change. For Elijah’s part, he believed they could, but with the caveat that the change had to originate within, rather than without. Otherwise, it simply wouldn’t stick.
Those thoughts gripped his mind for the next few minutes before the reality of his situation reasserted itself. He had food for a few months. Water for the foreseeable future. The tent provided some semblance of shelter, and his Mantle of Authority was enough to keep the abyss at bay – for now.
In a normal survival situation, remaining in place was the best strategy. But Elijah knew no one was coming to rescue him. Instead, he had to rescue himself. And he couldn’t do that where he was.
That meant venturing out into the excised world and searching for some way to get home. Or failing that, extend the timeline of his survival. There was no telling what the former residents had left behind. After all, if he was on Earth, there would be all manner of salvageable items for anyone who went looking for them.
That thought buoyed Elijah’s mood for only long enough for him to realize two things. First, he had no idea how long had passed since this planet had been excised. For all he knew, it had been thousands of years – long enough for anything of worth to be buried beneath mountains of rock. Getting to it would be more than just a chore. It would be borderline impossible.
But even more than that, the thought of Earth brought to mind just how bleak the planet’s future was. Without his help, their ability to conquer the remaining Primal Realms would take a significant hit. Could they still do it? Maybe. But the odds were even more stacked against them than ever now that he was gone.
And that led him to another issue that had been needling the back of his mind since he’d arrived. He couldn’t feel his grove anymore. Not really. There was a vague awareness of its existence, but beyond that, there was nothing.
That left him feeling even more isolated than before.
With a sigh, he pushed those thoughts aside. He couldn’t focus on things like that. Only tangible strategies for survival matter now. Everything else was just superfluous distraction, and the sort he simply couldn’t afford to indulge.