Chapter 61: A Meager Price
Valens blinked wearily as the outside influence forcefully severed his connection with the Lifeward and flung him back into the giant hall, the surroundings a blurry mess of wavering lines, golden lights shining, and outlines of armored figures taking form. It took him a painful moment to feel the solid ground underneath his feet—a painful moment and a sudden slap of a cloud of poison still lingering in the air.
Uh…
His insides were turned up and twisted about through the mad journey he’d experienced in just mere seconds. It left him with a sharp pain stabbing at his brain and soreness around his muscles as though he’d wrestled the tendrils of the Weeping Horror with nothing but his arms.
A meager price.
Meager indeed, to his thinking. He’d take soreness around muscles and some pain in the head to being ripped apart from the inside by the insidious needles of the creature any day now.
Seems like that’s the sort of deal I’d get in this world from now on. What happened to the creature, though?
He looked up with one hand pressed over the side of his chest, Lifesurge threads sprawling almost intuitively about his body, and saw the giant creature that covered most of the hall with its fleshy limbs.
It was burning. Ashes drifted off from where the holy lights of the Templars set the creature aflame, swept away by a furious wind that flapped the tails of Valens’s coat to his back. Tap. Tap. Tap. Was the rhythm of the uncomfortable coat, but there was relief in its simplicity. A relief and fresh air that was being cleaned by that wind.
Interesting.
Valens perked up when he tapped into the Resonance to feel the frequencies of the Terror. There was nothing. That giant body and the burning tendrils, the eye underneath the lid… None of them were there over the Resonance, as if the sprawling form of the creature was an… illusion.
So that’s what happens when you cut the connection off. The real Terror was still… there in the Spiritum. Its reflection, however, has been erased from Haven’s Reach.
There were many things strange about that land of frequencies, but one thing was made quite clear to Valens. If he were to face the Terror in its true form, his soul would’ve been torn apart before he could even begin to think about mounting a resistance.