The Legend of Randidly Ghosthound

Randidly’s eyes widened as Neveah’s image filled the sky in a billowing explosion of sharpened bone. The projection unleashed a baleful roar, a body of darkness and rotten feathers, a behemoth of mist and death that played at being a bird. Its eyes were a brilliant gold as they swept side to side, the ambush party of Nether Warriors completely frozen before it. Its heavy body filled the sky with all the subtlety and implicit threat of a guillotine.

Weirdly, as Randidly looked up at the dragon, even he felt a pressure building in his chest. The thing radiated a certain sort of pressure. Almost instinctively, despite the continuing agony of the Stillborn Phoenix’s degeneration within his Soulspace, he barred his teeth in the approximation of a smile. His body responded.

A split second later, he froze. Neveah’s image is based around fear… is this sort of vicious grin really my response to fear…?

Maybe everyone has had a larger point about my problematic habits than I’ve admitted…

However, while Randidly swelled and straightened underneath the blast of oppression from Tiamat, Mother of Fear, the Nether Warriors surrounding them clearly flagged in the image’s shadow. They took steps backward, wavering before the concentrated blast of her force. The massive bone wyrm beat its wings once, twice, and before it the warriors scattered like curled up and dried leaves.

Behind them, Nether spun together to form the beginnings of a Nether Ritual.

His chest burning, Randidly wrapped the Cloak of Utter Night more tightly around his body, plucked Neveah off the ground, and vanished toward the horizon. Behind them, Enmya’s powerful, monolithic Nether bulged and erupted. Different resonances curved toward them. But Randidly snorted in bloody amusement.

Maybe before, this would have been enough. But no longer.

Behind him, the Cloak of Utter Night stretched and stretched. It covered his body and Neveah, but also a huge portion of the sky. An enormous cloud that was the inscrutable color of black ink screened their passage. The fabric was slippery and fluttering, a piece of the primordial abyss descended into the modern era. When the notes landed against the edges, the cloak pulsed with arrogant rejection. The noises fell away, rebuffed.

Randidly suppressed a pained tremor running through his body, relying on the Dread Homunculus to keep up the Skill, no matter the strain.

Congratulations! Your Skill The Cloak of Utter Night (P) has grown to Level 976!

…

Congratulations! Your Skill the Cloak of Utter Night (P) Has grown to Level 980!

“Nether King Hungry Eye! It is not enough to run. You must answer for your transgressions!” The Sovereign of the Breathless Vigil roared. Nether in the surrounding space began to stir in a way that Randidly had only witnessed through an Authority in the past. Yet as he glanced over his shoulder at the tide of energy, Randidly couldn’t help but be impressed. He can manage all this just with patterns…? What a monster.

Just as Randidly prepared himself to mobilize one of his uninjured images to deal with the problem, those massive eyes of Tiamat swept sideways. Its massive head lifted itself over the edge of the ink cloud and pierced through the pursuit. Under its overwhelming gaze, even Enmya’s Nether Ritual shivered briefly in fear.

With the distraction, Randidly kicked off the air with all his might. A heavy follow-up blow from Enmya cracked open his Cloak of Utter Night and pierce through Neveah’s image, but all he found within was their thunderous departure. From the abrupt congregation and tightening of significance, Randidly felt Enmya’s seething fury.

The wind whipped past their faces as he stepped again and again, building up enough momentum to break through the sound barrier and blast apart miles of clouds. Part of it would leave a path to follow, but Randidly doubted many could move as quickly as he could.

Randidly pushed them up past the cloud layer, using the radiation of Pine to escape any tracking attempts. He began to feel a little bit of intimidating resonance from Pine, but they made good enough time that Randidly could pull down from the sky by the time it had become problematic.

They came down in Nether Lands, in a shifting sea of sand dunes. A quick scan revealed only a few extremely young and old Nether Warriors were nearby, and not likely to notice their presence, based on their strength. Randidly had intended their landing to be light, but a particularly badly timed chunk of agony saw him crash face-first into the sand. The small particles sliding around him as he pried his skull out were surprisingly cool, almost refreshing.

“If it’s as bad as it feels through the Soulbond, I’m not sure how you are even upright at the moment,” Neveah observed, sliding down the side of the dune to sit next to him. The sun had begun to set and they were on one of the shady sides, all of the colors of their hair and skin cooled by the darkness.

Wincing, Randidly flipped himself around and pressed a palm to his chest. “It’s definitely bad, but I don’t think-”

Obviously, it was the wrong time to try and minimize the situation. As another piece of the Stillborn Phoenix became unstable, a huge burst of image power manifested around Randidly’s body. The horrific heartbeat that Randidly had crafted echoed out across the dune; the nearby sands were immediately frozen and pressured. And in that strained moment, the heartbeat settled into a more solidly honed aspect of the image: Diffracted Corruption from the Avarous Impossibility.

Which meant that the squeezing stillness imposed by the heartbeat quickly transformed the sand dune into a crystalline mound next to them, filled with undulating, alien illumination. Randidly groaned as the Skill activated, affected the environment, then shuddered into a messy collapse.

Congratulations! Your Skill Diffracted Corruption from the Avaricious Impossibility (P)(U) has grown to Level 880!

…

Congratulations! Your Skill Diffracted Corruption from the Avaricious Impossibility (P)(U) has grown to Level 910!

“Doing some light redecorating?” Neveah tried to joke as her eyes flicked sideways, but he could read the fear in her expression. She reached out and touched the massive crystal. At the points where her skin brushed the strange substance, cracks spiderwebbed outward. She moved away her finger quickly and the flaws began to heal themselves.

…probably still won’t be noticed, so long as this stuff doesn’t spread. Randidly forced a smile and leaned back against the strange crystal he had created. For his skin, the cracks didn’t form. He could already feel weird energy radiating out from its surface, but it wouldn’t negatively affect him. Just everything else in the area. “Give me a bit to get a handle on this. In the meantime… why don’t you tell me about your image? That was certainly a persuasive display. Do you just bluff the Nether Leader? Shit, I knew you were an ally and it still felt stifling to stand before that dragon.”

“Did you think I was just experimenting with Engravings the entire time while you were training? I’ve managed to pick up a thing or two, watching you make mistakes.” Neveah kept her voice light, but the intensity of her gaze didn’t waver. She examined him minutely, inch by inch, tracking every undulation of his energy. Essentially, his attempt at a distraction wasn’t quite as successful as he hoped.

Randidly closed his eyes and focused on the seething core of agony in his Soulspace. It whipped and turned, shredding itself to pieces with its mixture of seething rage and disappointed pain. Before anything else, he needed to prevent it from self-destructing. No need to keep lashing out. You are not broken. You are not banished. You might have failed this time, but there will be other chances in the future.

Someday, the world will witness your birth.

Yggdrasil came along with Randidly’s soothing thoughts, stretching its golden roots toward the Stillborn Phoenix. However, bolts of dense emotion crackled outward, sinking into Randidly’s flesh and ripping through strips of his muscle.

With his carefully honed body control, he covered up the twitching as a scratch of his chin. One benefit of the Stillborn Phoenix going wild was it definitely interfered with her awareness through the Soulbond. The strange radiation it wielded seemed to be the one aspect completely unaffected by this damage, for better or worse.

He fought to keep the tension out of his shoulders as his body healed and after a long moment Neveah pursed her lips and turned away. When she didn’t look directly at him, Randidly risked upping the presence of Yggdrasil. Beneath his skin, his veins glimmered with motes of gold. Within his Soulspace, golden roots gently inserted themselves into the broken image, healing the problematic areas and prying apart jagged edges that were worsening the damage.

Neveah reflected for a few seconds before speaking. When she began, it took a few seconds for Randidly to remember his question. “...you are aware of my… limitations. When I think about the risks through which you put yourself… I know I cannot follow, Randidly. And for a long time, that filled me with shame.” She paused and turned to him. She reached out and drew her finger across his cheek. “There is no one in the world I care about more than you. Shouldn’t I be able to push past my fears and help you, if you really needed it…?”

“If I needed it, you would help me,” Randidly said confidently. The kind energy of the World Tree finally seeped into the whole of the lashing-out Stillborn Phoenix, preventing it from worsening the damage. Those tendrils swelled, almost like airbags, creating a soft buffer to absorb force. Almost imperceptibly, tension flowed out of him; the damage to his image had been done, but at least now it wouldn’t completely break.

“In an extreme situation, I will not deny it. I have been connected to you long enough to have a very visceral response to the concept of ‘necessity’,” Neveah gave Randidly a wry smile. “However, these days you don’t need me as much. I’ve just seen you succeed on your own so many times, it’s hard to believe that you won’t continue to do so. Which leaves me to struggle in the grey area with my fear.

“For a while, the guilt and ambiguity were difficult to bear. But when you started facing all the negative emotional cores you had let develop within yourself… I was inspired to do the same. Mine were very different, but my fear turned out to be the big one.” Neveah leaned back and stared up at the sky. “I stood in front of my fear and was petrified. But I didn’t retreat. For the longest time, I lingered there, simply viewing the behemoth my fear had become. It never grew easier. Each moment was a mental onslaught. Proving yourself you could endure to the next moment didn’t matter, because more moments were coming.

“In a way, I think my long-term thinking harms me. Because while you would see it moment by moment, as a threshold you are able to clear, I see the breadth of all those moments lined up, heading infinitely into the future,” Neveah idly reached out and flicked the crystalline dune, creating an even larger web of cracks. Then she smirked at Randidly. “But I learned. With my image, I nudge the viewer into that line of thinking. The image itself isn’t so powerful… but it promises consistency. A viewer feels almost out of time. You felt it, yes?”

“Yea.” Randidly frowned, but his mind had moved beyond the image. After a brief hesitation, Randidly reached out and put a hand on her shoulder. “Neveah… do you ever feel out of time?”

“Of course I do, Randidly. Compared to most of the people I know, we are unique, yes? Able to accomplish so much, because of our bond. But we learned a bit about it with Wick; what we have is very rare. Until we no longer need the power we’ve gained… better not to dig too deeply into this passing feeling.”

Better not to dig too deeply into how unhappy you are to live like this, you mean, Randidly sighed inwardly.

Some part of him wanted to push for a more definitive answer, but he agreed with her. For now, he set the issue aside and continued to heal his image.

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