RE: Monarch

I approached the forest, trying to keep the direction the woman fled in my mind. My thoughts wandered as I jogged towards the clearing. Demons were immune to the flame. Its only real practical use was to seal them after they were felled. The creatures of the sanctum lived in a mana-rich environment and maintained some resistance to magic.

My time in the enclave, and subsequently, the sanctum, had skewed my perspective on the demon flame. It was a harrowing weapon. Effective, but harrowing. Gaining a reputation as the prince who burned his enemies alive at the slightest provocation wouldn’t win me any allies.

When there was more time, I needed to reconsider the best way to use my magic.

Something seized the strap that fastened my armor to my thigh, halting me mid-stride. Kerai stared up at me, his mouth full of leather.

“I’m coming back.” I tried to reassure him.

Leather strap still clenched between his teeth, Kerai shook his head in a gesture that was almost human, urgency radiating through his golden eyes.

“What…” I trailed off. Erebus clearly stated that abyssal panthers were intelligent. If Kerai was trying to stop me, there was a reason. I scanned the treeline, wary.

Nothing was visibly out of place. No ambushers lying in wait, no fallen trees or stirring in the mana threads. Which—now that I thought about it—felt entirely wrong. The Everwood paled compared to the sanctum, but it was still a hotbed of magical activity where monsters thrived. I should have felt something.

Further down, there was a corpse. Something had sheared him in half—expensive looking shoes and pants, and the remains of a silk shirt that was sodden with blood and entrails. And a top half that was nowhere to be seen.

Likely a noble that had attempted to flee the battle. If Kerai hadn’t warned me, I’d assume he had died in the chaos.

I drew closer and inspected the body. Whatever dealt the fatal blow was impossibly sharp. I immediately discounted the possibility a person had dealt this wound. Even a monstrously strong swordsman couldn’t make a cut so clean, so perfectly symmetrical. My first thought was a monumentally powerful mage with an air affinity—Saladius, for example, could use compressed, tightly focused arcs of air to slice through boulders and chunks of stone, though I’d never come close to being able to recreate the feat myself.

Kerai was growling, hackles raised. I frowned. The forest was still clear, exterior trees not nearly thick enough to fully hide behind. But Kerai was acting as if the danger was imminent.

Unsure of what else to do, I picked up a small clump of earth and tossed it towards the tree line.

It disintegrated in mid-air with an audible sizzle.

Elphion.

That was why I wasn’t feeling anything from the Everwood. There was a magical barrier. A nasty one. The maimed noble had likely run headfirst into it, dead before he hit the ground. And if Kerai hadn’t stopped me, I would have followed in his footsteps and triggered another reset without the slightest clue of what finished me.

I backed away slowly.

“Another barrier?” Maya asked. She’d apparently noticed the detour and caught up to me, Eckor in tow.

Though he was obviously still shaken from the battle, Eckor moved forward, fear losing to fascination. “I’ve seen nothing like this,” he mused.

“Guessing I already know the answer, but any chance we can go around?” I asked.

Eckor reached a hand towards the invisible barrier, his arm glowing violet. The barrier became visible, its surface an angry, translucent red. Slowly, the red faded as Eckor dropped his arm to his side. “It’s not perfectly straight. There’s a slight curve. I’m guessing it encompasses the clearing, no point otherwise. Still, the amount of mana required to do this…”

Maya’s eyes widened in realization. “I’ll warn the others.”

I nodded. “Go.”

Grass crunched as her footsteps grew further and further away.

Eckor probed the barrier again. “Too big to void. Too much surface area. Maybe I can punch through it?” The barrier grew visible again as he focused his magic on it. A small hole, no larger than a pinprick, grew wider until it was almost the size of a fist. The hole trembled, then immediately refilled as the held back barrier rushed in to fill the gap. Eckor grimaced, then looked over at me. “That’s the best I can do. It’s not anchored to anything, so the mage will run out of mana. When that happens, the barrier will drop. Eventually.”

I clenched my fists in frustration. Every second we wasted made it harder to track my quarry.

Suddenly, the memory of attempting to resurrect the rabbit in the sanctum popped into the forefront of my mind. The experiment had failed. I hadn’t really expected it to work, considering how harsh Veldani had been on the subject. It wasn’t possible to bring something dead back to life. With enough familiarity with the object I was disassembling, however, it was possible to recreate it.

How far could I take that concept?

“If you keep the diameter small, can you breach the barrier and hold it?” I asked.

“Probably. I’m not sure what good that would do, unless you intend to get a spark through and set the Everwood on fire.” Eckor laughed, then looked at me in sudden stark concern. “Are you going to set the Everwood on fire?”

“Wouldn’t be the first time, but no.”

“What—” Eckor sputtered.

I focused inwards. This situation was far from perfect. If the idea I was entertaining was even possible, it was high-risk enough that I’d prefer weeks, maybe even months, to test it in a vacuum.

But if we gave the drephin a chance to rally, death would follow.

If this killed me, I’d find another way.

Eckor held both hands out, his face a mask of focus as he breached the barrier. The opening was small, barely large enough to look through if the surface had been solid. It was enough. It had to be.

I sat cross-legged. The spark of absolution blazed on my fingertip. I maneuvered it carefully, keeping the end result in mind. The pain started small. It was novel, in a way. This was the first time the fire had hurt me. Sensitive skin beneath my nail screamed as the nail slowly turned black and vanished.

“What are you doing?” Eckor shouted, his face twisted in horror.

“Stay focused on keeping the breach open,” I said calmly, giving him a smile I didn’t feel. The spark disassembled muscle, then bone. Motes of violet light, each carrying a tiny blueprint, floated through the breach in the barrier to the other side.

The pain was exquisite, all-encompassing, as my hand slowly disassembled. My right arm followed. Then my left leg.

How delightful. A feast.

It was the same voice I’d heard after I’d taken Veldani’s elixir, when I repaired the gate. I toppled over, no longer able to sit upright.

You bare your neck with hubris, kingspawn.

If it spoke, I could reason with it. I tried to talk evenly, but my voice warbled as the pain crescendoed. “Surely you want something grander than a simple death.”

I do not want. Nor do I intend anything more than the cessation of your damnable existence.

“Do you know what I am?”

I know all.

“Then you’re fully aware that my end means nothing.” I lowered my voice to a whisper, careful not to inflict Eckor with the miasma that encompassed anyone who heard me speak of my previous lives or resurrections. “If you want me gone definitively, you’ll need to get creative. Wait for an ideal moment to strike.”

Hubris.

The fire sped up as more and more pieces of myself fell away, carried through the hole by motes of flame.

“Either way, you’re stuck here. Same as me. So go ahead. Stonewall me and accomplish nothing, or aid me so we can both move forward to what we truly desire.”

It was a gamble. The only card I had. And if my gut was wrong, and the presence could harm me on a more permanent level—such as reopening the soul-wounds from before—I was in a world of trouble. My vision blinked out, along with the pain. I brought to mind every time I’d been reborn, the strange undoing of death in the void, and commanded the flame I could no longer see or feel to follow that same pattern.

The void called to me. My grip of the flame felt loose, intangible, so weak I wondered whether it was actually there. Fingers of doubt wrapped around my heart and squeezed. An infinite distance away, in the darkness, the silhouette of the black beast loomed over me. He drew closer, his presence heavy, all-encompassing. I clung to the loose tether of magic tightly, praying to Infaris that it wasn’t already too late.

The beast spoke, his rumbling voice uncharacteristically irritable.

“And so, the corruption finds you, yet again.”

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