Slumrat Rising

There was a brief moment of ecstasy. The sheer joy that came with crushing the little tormenting imp was convulsive, rising from the depths of his soul and the most resentful corners of his psyche. It was all the taunting. All the “A real mage would-” crap that it spewed. The fact that it trained him, like a dog it trained him! to despise others as weaker and lesser. To ignore other humans, to avoid human companionship. To seek power for the sake of dominating others.

Enlightenment poured into Truth’s mind like a waterfall. Why the System? Why just roll it out to employees? Because each nascent soul was made up of the interplay of spells and understanding about the spells that filled your apertures. A Starbrite Employee, someone recruited immediately after they broke through to Level One but before they learned a spell, would have empty souls. They would only be shaped by the System, raw soul stuff stamped with Starbrite’s ideology.

The world really was Starbrite’s pill farm. All those components refining themselves, with his thoughtful guidance. Then they just threw themselves into his mouth in a nice, steady stream. Perfect. The waterfall of revelation had a bit of a glitch, and the smile ran from his face. How did the global rollout of the System fit in, then?

Because he was running out of time. He needed more souls, and couldn’t worry too much about purity anymore. Which meant that his soul was in a very rough state. And Truth just crushed a tiny part of it, while the whole thing was dealing with a literal world’s worth of stress.

Whoops.

If he wasn’t here to kill Starbrite, this would be terribly embarrassing.

There was a high pitched shriek, one that ran on and on and on without pausing for breath and Truth realized he wasn’t hearing it with his ears. He was hearing it with his soul.

On a certain mountain outside of Xandre, Merkovah stood and watched the stars. His fingers flicked at an inhuman speed. Calculations and magic spells, most forbidden since the settling of the world, rushed from him like a hot desert wind. Merkovah knew why these spells had received a divine ban- they worked. No boss liked being snooped on by their menials. That observation was supposed to be one-way only.

Merkovah could smell the change in the air. He could taste it, shivering across his palate. Feel it wrapping around his fingers, scratching at his fingertips. His eyes were fixed firmly on the heavens. He had waited more than half a millennium. Watched every human he loved and cared about die over and over again. Watched his world slide into the most unbearably mundane ruin.

He had always been a romantic at heart. When he was offered a life of chivalry, of boldly charging against unholy forces anointed by the blessings of God and in the company of true companions, he didn’t hesitate to say yes. The shine had come off the dream a long, long time ago. But he’d do it again in a heartbeat.

The prisoner next to him started shrieking. Not with his throat, that had been torn out weeks ago. No, it was the soul itself screaming, hammering wildly against the jar it was sealed in.

God had forbidden a wide variety of necromancy too. But since God had broken their contract with Siphios, Merkovah literally did not give a damn.

“NOW!” His voice roared, a lion in the thunder, an avalanche on a clear day. A meteor ripping across the sky.

Behind him the massed teachers of the Orthodoxy bent over and began to chant. Their students provided the power, filing ritual circles with white and gold filigree. The runes, holy symbols, infernal sigils, the names of beings both blessed and rebuked were inscribed, as vast wheels of green flame and black water turned. Slowly turned, feeding something intangible into the heavy millstones positioned according to numerical formulae and certain, once forbidden, observations of the stars.

The teachers were there in their thousands, their students in the tens of thousands, and the laity were present more than a million strong. They thought it was a prayer rally, and they were right, sort of. A great raising of power in the face of the end of the world. A million voices called out, reciting terrible names and invoking awful powers with the easy fluency of a lifetime of experience. This was Siphios, and they walked with angels and demons every moment of every day of their lives. If this was to be the final flower of the old world, they were determined to bloom bloody and bright.

In the Royal Palace, barely sixty kilometers from the ritual site, the King of Siphios sat with the High Priest in what was once a ballroom. By absolutely no coincidence, the King and the High Priest were cousins. They smiled wryly at each other. They could hear the screaming too. They had made a point of lining every surface of the ballroom with the trapped souls of C-Tier and above Starbrite employees.

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“I went into seclusion to avoid exactly this kind of thing.” The King groused, coming to his feet. His arches ached. It was a petty detail to notice at a time like this, but they did ache. It seemed unfair.

“I entered the Clergy for the same reason. Well, that and the money, the power, the fancy house-” The High priest agreed, pulling out his sword.

“You ever realize that you want something, but it’s in a different part of the house and it’s so damn far away you can’t even be bothered to send a demon to fetch it?” The King stood and faced his cousin, his own sword loose in his hand.

“Yeah, daily. Still wouldn’t swap the Manor for a two bedroom economy, though. They don’t come with a private grotto.” They lined up their swords against each other's chests. “I liked that poem you wrote. The one about watching the dawn.”

The King smiled. “Liar. Thank you. Goodbye cuz.”

“Goodbye.”

There was a crack of lightning, and they stabbed forward. The swords flashed with golden script, snuffing the light from their wielder’s eyes instantly. Extinguishing decades of resentment and hate. It was like a spark was lit, igniting all the trapped souls. The souls thrashed, smashing themselves against the walls of their glass tombs. They would have begged, if there was enough in them left to beg. The fire spread out from the ballroom and engulfed the palace in far less than a second.

Respected servants and ministers, honored for their decades of loyal service, collapsed, clutching their chests as blue-green flames shot from their mouths and eyes. Decades of loyal service, yes, but not to Siphios. The fires spread out into Xandre. Block after block, kilometer after kilometer, the fire raced out, burning out the souls of those loyal to Starbrite.

Some of those incinerated would have defended themselves strongly. They weren’t Starbrite employees. They didn’t have the System. But tonight was the product of Merkovah’s patient malice. The grand ritual wasn’t so limited. The victims had Starbrite in their hearts and minds. The old exorcist did them a favor, and made sure the rot was cleaned out of their souls.

It wouldn’t have been possible if Starbrite was at his old strength. Wouldn’t have been possible even yesterday. But that terrible soul was badly wounded, and Merkovah had been scheming for this very moment.

The more people the ritual burned, the faster it spread. It covered the whole city in less than a minute. It covered the whole country in less than ten. Then it crossed the national borders, and the chaos truly began. It wasn’t just going after living souls at this point. The ritual had accumulated enough power to burn them out of the air. All those souls called back to Starbrite, all the fragments of divine self, all those mutilated chunks of System-ridden humanity, were ignited. Siphios was once again the torch that lit the world.

Siphios had, understandably, not adopted the System to manage its citizenry. Neither had the Free State, on account of there not being an actual government. Their other neighbors, though, had been eager to adopt the next big thing. Prompted, subtly and otherwise, by Starbrite’s agents. A lot of people had gotten very rich making sure the new System reached as many people as possible, as quickly as possible.

The money didn’t seem to comfort them now.

There was barely enough time for long range systems to notice a problem. For oracles to wake up screaming, for nation guarding bells to start tolling frantically. A lot of questions were being asked, but no one had any answers to share.

The rollout had been far from total in any nation. Even in Jeon, the System was a long way from universal. Other countries were far behind. But Starbrite had been on this world for centuries, and his reach was very long. A scallop fishing boat ran onto a shoal when their captain lit up like the starboard navigation light. A woman screamed for help, for the fire department, as her wife thrashed and burned. Not noticing that the pillows weren’t even singed. Not noticing the way green light was pouring in through the window from a half dozen apartments across the street.

Over and over and over, each death harming Starbrite and fueling the spread of the ritual. And watching it spread was Merkovah, tracking its awful progression through his divination. Keeping a weather eye on his assembled Teachers and celebrants, making sure the ritual stayed on track. Force of habit, at this point. He had so many lifetime’s worth of watching plans collapse at the last moment.

All these deaths were necessary preludes to the death he really wanted to see. And it wasn’t here yet. His fingers kept flicking out, making their calculations as his voice rolled on, every inflection on every syllable perfect. Every word of the spell was memorized before Truth’s parents were born, and diligently rehearsed ever since. Just in case God really had abandoned them, and it turned out to be needed. Some nights, it was the only way he could fall asleep.

He was a romantic at heart, but that heart had been torn again and again. It had never managed to go completely dead, and the fury never stopped accumulating. There were days when he admitted to himself that he was probably no longer sane. That the stress and pain of the endless centuries of struggle had broken him.

It became a talismanic thought- once he killed Starbrite, he could rest. Once he finally, finally, brought an end to their long war, he could put down his burdens and leave the tidying up to someone else. Anyone else. He wouldn’t, didn’t, care. He just wanted to rest. To lie down in the mountains and dream of his lost loves, old friends, favorite students, and the sweet smells of the magical forests of his childhood.

The spell swept across the world, burning up Starbrite’s feed and gaining in fury and power as it went. Jeon wasn’t on the exact opposite side of the world from Xandre, but the ritual was well controlled. The world was bathed in blue-green fire before the flaming tide came in at last.

Merkovah was smiling. He didn’t know he was, but he was. His lips had pulled back in a mad rictus of ecstasy, showing all his teeth. Truth’s magic was utterly profound and his blessings were moreso, but Merkovah was the one who provided them to him. The student couldn’t completely evade his teacher’s divination. He might not know exactly what was going on, but he knew Truth was exactly where he needed to be. Ready to kill a false God.

When they told the story of tonight, he would make sure Truth’s name never appeared. There was no hidden assassin. Hell Prince was a lie invented by Starbrite. The real monster, the true Hell Prince, was him. Merkovah. King-killer, apostate, liar, thief, false teacher, terrorist, and the greatest murderer to ever live. That would be the story they told. He was big enough and ugly enough to hold up that title. His student couldn’t even hang on to one name.

Truth didn’t know why the screaming was getting louder and louder. Why the air suddenly had an itchy feeling to it, then started burning blue-green. The color of toilet cleaner, he thought. It was harmless, but alarming. The painful screaming started ululating and shaking, the wandering harmonies vibrating the walls of the hidden temple. It started feeling a lot less harmless when the blue-green flames started melting their way through the purple-red coffin lid. It didn’t feel harmless at all when the lid exploded off the sarcophagus, and something terrible arose from within.

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