Chapter 72: Ashes in Loom, IV
The air convulsed.
Arbiter's fractured hand lifted, trembling with faint golden fissures glowing along her wrist and palm. Her breath pulsed once, shuddering against the silence, and the world responded with a deafening groan. Cracks spiderwebbed across the castle walls, violet thread-light leaking from the seams as if the very foundation of time was bleeding.
Shadows peeled from the walls. Shapes. Hunched silhouettes, flickering as if glimpsed through shattered glass, their forms bent and smeared across fractured space. They dragged the walls, the floor, even the air with them, distorting reality like wet paint smeared across stone. Fingers lengthened into tendrils, legs bent and reformed mid-step. No two shapes held the same outline for more than a second.
I braced my feet, blade crackling with green thread-light, the glow coiling up my arms like veins of living fire. My heart hammered so loud it almost drowned-out the screeching noise the shadows made as they crawled forward.
Konrad dropped into a low stance, golden sword glinting faintly. His breath was slow, measured, but his hands were wrapped so tightly around the hilt that thin trails of thread-light pulsed from his skin.
Erich shifted, barely visible as a blur of blue motion. His daggers spun once, twice, leaving arcs of sharp golden light in the dense mist. He flashed me a sharp, quick grin.
"Ready?" he murmured.
I barely nodded. I didn't trust my voice to say it out-loud.
Then—the first wave surged.
The creatures lunged forward in a wave of writhing limbs, dragging shards of space and time in their wake. Where they passed, the ground pulsed, stretching and crumbling at once. The nearest wall flickered between ancient stone and fresh marble. The ceiling arched high, then collapsed inward, then vanished altogether into open sky. Time convulsed, bending forward and backward, reality folding in on itself.
I roared as I plunged into the gray, blade arching in a wide, sweeping slash. Green thread-light blazed along the edge, hissing as it met the nearest creature. It tore apart with a ripple of distortion, its body splitting into threads that scattered like sparks, its death collapsing the stretched space around it with a violent snap.