Unbound

Bloody, crimson Mana surged all around them as Lhel breathed it out like steam. Sickly and rotten, it made Felix gag even from a dozen feet away. It clouded his senses for just a moment, and when he could see her again, Lhel's face had...cracked, splitting along her cheeks as two extra rows of teeth populated in her mouth, with more coming in behind them. Her hands lengthened into spindly claws, their tips darkening to a rusty, blood red.

"I thought you were Nymean. You're...what are you?" Felix and Pit backed away, putting another twenty feet between them and the creature that was once Lhel.

"I am perfection! I am a terror beyond time, primordial and everlasting." She laughed, and even with the teeth it was as sweet a sound as he'd ever heard. His Bastion resisted however, shrugging it off a little easier than a few minutes ago. "Frankly I am disappointed, Felix! That you would believe one as wondrous as I could possibly be a weak, pathetic Nymean."

Pit squawked in terror. Between one blink and the next, the creature was inches away from Felix, and he could see that the blue-green in her irises had expanded to fill the entirety of her eyeball.

"I am far more than anything this fallen world has seen in ten thousand years. The Nym were nothing, a delicious light snack at best followed by two thousand years of indigestion. I am all that is left of Lhel, for I have consumed her, Body, Mind, and Spirit." She reared back, mouth agape and howling into the sky. "I am the Unending Maw, Last of the Three, Survivor of Ruin!"

"Consumed...?" Felix felt his stomach clench, his aching gut burning all the more with her proximity. Despite her shifting appearance, a part of him still yearned for her, somehow.

"Oh yes, dear one. And she was so very delectable. As were her colleagues she had attempted to save by submitting to me," a burbling laugh danced from her ruinous throat, still so close that Felix could see the barbed thorns lining her glottis rattle. "Such a fool."

"You ate them?"

"Mhmm, all that I could find. Practically did the Ruin's work for them." Another throaty, rattling laugh, another piercing buzz in his guts. It felt like a ball of razor blades spinning within, ripping him up from the inside. Felix felt something wet drip drown his ear, and he reached up to find it was blood.

Felix backed up again, pulling Pit along with him, but he knew there was no where to go; the only exit was the dark hallway ending in a locked vault door. He looked up, toward the sunlight.

The windows....

They were easily two hundred feet up, and last he checked, he couldn't fly.

"I smell your fear, your despairing calculations. They are the same as all my prey, wide-eyed fawns too terrified to pose much challenge. You smell....delightful, dearest Felix, all the more so since you became a Nym. But I do not want to kill you, my dear." She spread her arms wide, her limbs slightly too long, the claws of her fingers too dark and corroded. "I am a monster in truth, but I come in good faith."

Her mouth pouted, teeth hidden for the moment. "I did not lie to you, Felix. The Geist were at first my allies...for it was they who dug deep enough to uncover my tumultuous skein of flesh beneath the endless earth. I was trapped there, hibernating after the War, sleeping so long that I had all but forgotten myself. Lhel and Ssev woke my Mind, and I will always be grateful for that." Her pout turned hideous once more, teeth sprouting further along her jaw. "They also betrayed me, them and all the traitorous Races who fought needlessly against my wakening.

"They needed only to submit. That is all I asked. Submit and be devoured.

"For I was so very hungry."

While speaking, Lhel had become a horror, her pale skin cracked and scaled, colored like dark rust. Her limbs lengthened, stretching to twice their size as her torso sagged and pulled, contorting into a parody of a humanoid spine. Muscle piled upon muscle as her once slender frame thickened and filled in, until her body resembled the agile grace of a panther mixed with the heavy, plated chest of a rhino. It was her mouth, however, that had the direst change: widened and elongated, her jaw hung open, ten feet wide and filled with six rows of sharp teeth. Those teeth grew bigger as the transformation continued, until several curved out and upward like great tusks, and others went down like vicious fangs.

A monster...

Analyze...

Analyze Failed.

The stone flooring creaked beneath its sudden immense weight, for the creature was now twenty feet tall at the shoulder and twice that in length. A long, serpentine tail whipped behind the creature, it's length capped with more tooth-like spikes that descended from its back. A frill of ivory tusks sprouted from its head and neck, as if its mouth split all the way around its skull.

Felix stumbled further back, heart humming it beat so fast, and his mind raced.

Grimmar smiled, standing tall and looking proud to the far left of Felix, his gruesome teeth a faint echo of the Maw's own. He raised his voice. "Mother! How could any be so foolish as to fight you? Even the ancient, pathetic Nym and their calamitous traditions were not so blind as to ignore that."

"You question me!?" The Maw let out a screaming roar, the sound overlaid with a thousand voices of all timbres shrieking in unison. Grimmar folded like a house of cards, his legs going limp as blood poured from his eyes, ears, and nose.

"For-forgiveness, hon-honored Mother," he gurgled.

Shaking it's toothy mane, it continued to speak, its voice once more Lhel's. "The Nym were fools, through and through, but not without their wiles. Lhel, researcher that she was, claimed curiosity and submitted to my clear superiority. But it was a trick! A dirty, underhanded trick by a dirty, underhanded Race! She attempted to wrest control from me! Me! I am unending, untiring, eternal and everlasting. It was a game Lhel was sure to lose...and she knew it!"

The Maw whipped its tail to the side, narrowly avoiding Grimmar but crashing into one of the pillars somehow. The pillar shattered, parts of it pulverized instantly while the rest tumbled down noisily. Grimmar paled and gurgled again.

Felix gaped. The Maw was over a hundred feet away from where the pillar had stood. The aftershock of its lashing tail was enough to shatter stone.

Everything about this is bad. Felix looked down at Pit, who had his wings spread, feathers fluffed, and tail bushier than ever, as if he could fool a primordial hell beast. He could feel the terror the tenku was experiencing; it was an echo to his own.

The hunger pains redoubled, pushing a wheezing gasp from Felix's lungs. How do I stop this?

The Maw kept speaking furiously, heedless of Felix's agony. "The crafty Nym stalled me long enough for the cavalry to arrive. The Herald, you see, had come to call."

The Herald? Felix hadn't heard that name before. In the corner of his eye, Felix could see even Grimmar tilt his bloody head questioningly at the title.

"You question the title, Grimmar? Good!" The Maw laughed as the giant flinched. "Lost and Ruined, a fitting fate for those who would challenge me!

"Bold as you please, she strode from her skyhold and into Shelim, her blasted armies following behind. But I defeated them all, oh yes, yes I did! Consumed them, blood and bone! Muscle and sinew and guts and fats! Such delicacies had been denied me too long as I slept in the dark earth, and I dined with relish! Oh the glory! Oh the MANA!"

Another screaming roar echoed out into the chamber, its sound too loud for even that huge space. It reverberated from the walls, bouncing back and forth like white noise, a terrible static that set Felix's teeth on edge and incited his hungry core once more. Felix screamed, but the sound was lost in the cacophony of the Maw's ecstatic rage.

"Glorious battle turned to glorious feasting, but I was opposed! The Night-cursed Herald withstood my attacks, her Skill besting my power in the short term, but I knew--I knew!--that it was only a matter of time. I am the Unending Maw, and I am relentless and inescapable. I am the hungry gullet at the end of all things!" The Maw paced, its lashing tail scoring the flooring with each swing. "Yet while the Herald and I fought, vile trickery was afoot. Ssev, the repugnant beast, had devised a trap. When the Herald had me distracted, they caught me in it! Lashing me to this wretched Anchor and sealing me in this prison."

Like a physical embodiment of its rage, crimson Mana vapor poured off of the Maw's back, wafting up and to Felix's right. He could taste it, just as he had with the blood beasts, rotten and corrupted and coppery, blood gone bad. Then Felix saw the vapor get pulled faster and faster, the vapor stretching thin and spinning around the room as if circling a drain. Within two seconds it was swallowed by the Essence Anchor, and the golden scripts flared.

It's a power sink, Felix suddenly realized. It eats the power of the Maw, somehow keeping it trapped here. How?

"Ah, but we have gotten off track," the Maw murmured in its soft feminine voice. "You have not submitted, nor agreed of your own volition to be my Champion." A grotesque, simpering smile creased the Maw's face, and it turned to view a kneeling Grimmar. The giant was no longer bleeding, but his dark blue blood had pooled around him like spilled paint. "Make him submit, Grimmar."

The giant was on his feet instantly, all fear banished and a wild, savage glee overtook his face.

"Your will is my pleasure, honored Mother."

Felix started, looking from the Maw to Grimmar who had started to advance on him, drawing his huge ten foot long greatsword. "What happened to acting in good faith!"

The Maw laughed and Felix winced. "I am not trying to kill you, Felix! In fact, I truly hope you survive!"

Grimmar started to run, his face growing darker and uglier at the Maw's words. His huge gait ate up the distance, the giant's body twisting as he brandished his immense greatsword. The blade swung out horizontally, but with the tip dipped at an angle, a strike clearly designed for smaller foes.

More instinct than plan, Felix blasted down with Reign of Vellus, launching himself thirty feet straight up into the air. He wasn't close enough to the walls to do that trick again, so instead he tried to activate Relentless Charge. He'd never used it mid-air before, but the Skill engaged, and the world blurred so fast Felix barely had time to lift his hands up.

Corrosive Strike!

Felix aimed a left-handed punch at Grimmar's remaining eye, but the giant had a warrior's reactions and tucked his chin, causing Felix's fist to impact the crown of his skull. Acid burst in all directions as the blow landed, but the thickness of the giant's skull blunted much of the force. Even still, Grimmar's head rocked back, the Risi's balance disrupted by the sheer mass behind the attack. Felix's new weight was a surprise for both of them, and as the giant's head tipped backward the Nym toppled up and over his skull. Two steps Grimmar stumbled back, time enough for a falling Felix to latch onto the back of the Risi's fur collar and summon his new spell.

Wrack and Ruin!

Grimmar threw himself to the ground and rolled. The fist sized orb blasted forth with a roar, ripping a dissolving trench in the giant's right pauldron but otherwise missing. Felix released his grip and pushed off, barely avoiding getting steamrolled by the massive warrior.

"Haha! Delightful!" Laughter trilled through the air, and Felix had to fight through the agony in his guts again. He rolled to his feet, watching his Health tick down by a percentage point each time the Maw laughed.

What is going on with that?

"You're abilities and Skills have only grown, dear boy! So much stronger now than when you arrived, weak and mewling upon the gray sands of the Bitter Sea. I had bet your pathetic weaknesses would burn away in the crucible of combat, and I was right! What remarkable foresight to have placed my hopes on you."

"How?" Felix growled, backing carefully away from Grimmar who was climbing onto his enormous feet. "How could you know I was coming here? Did you...did you bring me here?"

"No. I merely capitalized on your arrival, genius that I am," the Maw grinned. "The Unbound have not been seen in Ages, far longer than I have been imprisoned here. To be aware of your arrival alone was a fortuitous boon, one that I could not deny." The Maw ran its barbed and hooked tongue along its yellowing fangs.

"So I sent my child for you."

Felix looked at the Maw, brows down in confusion. Then his senses screamed, just in time to notice a wave of malignant Mana plowing toward him. Felix threw himself to the side, tucking his shoulder into a roll. Spikes of ice as hard as steel punched up through the ground, tearing through the left leg of his pants and scraping an inches long furrow in his calf.

Grimmer rushed forward at the same time, greatsword leading the way. Felix was barely to his feet when the giant thrust his weapon at his chest. But a powerful Windblade knocked the sword out of true, just missing the Nymean and shearing it's length along the ice-coated floor. The sword clanged against the rock beneath, and stopped.

Grimmar yanked on it, but the sword didn't budge.

Felix grinned as Pit screeched a challenge at the blue Risi Chieftain.

Shadow Whip!

The tendril of shadow bludgeoned the giant's right forearm before latching on. With a mighty haul, Felix yanked back, twisting Grimmar's hand and causing him to release the weapon. Grimmar looked over at Felix, black eyes wide with disbelief as his arm quivered with the effort of resisting the Nym.

"How did you gain such strength?" Grimmar tensed his arm again but was held fast.

"Killing--Ungh," Felix grunted, pulling back. "Killing giants is great for power leveling."

Grimmar roared, and his featureless black eyes suddenly burned with bloody Mana. The chieftain's ruin of mismatched fangs opened far wider than ever before, and he inhaled. The ambient Mana in the air swirled and was sucked directly into the giant's maw, and even the Shadow Whip dissolved in Felix's grip. A swirling maelstrom of crimson rot surged through the giant's already corrupted aura, pouring out toward his extremities like a cancerous growth. Grimmar tore off his beaten iron armor, revealing a blue chest covered in heavy slabs of muscle and countless scars. Suddenly, ivory spikes erupted along Grimmar's arms and shoulders, his ribs and abs, and his legs and feet. Three foot claws emerged from his uncovered hands, yellow and almost infected looking.

Felix blanched, the corrupted Mana and visceral sight almost too much for his senses. The giant had become even more monstrous than before, and he reveled in it.

"Thank you, Mother," he crooned, the sound like three overlapping voices, both similar and inferior to the Maw's own voice. Felix also realized that the spikes and claws weren't either of those things: they were teeth.

Oh, that's gross.

Grimmar positively dripped with bloody Mana, his muscles twitching with its power. Ready as he thought he was, Felix didn't even see the blow coming.

Caught in the chest and left shoulder, Felix was hurled into flight before crashing hard into a shadowed alcove. Everything was white with pain, searing across his nerves until his resistance kicked in, muting it to an agonizing roar. He tried to stand up twice, not managing it until the third attempt. Something felt...loose inside of him. His Health had dropped 30%.

"Tsk tsk. I said submit, Grimmar." There was no mistaking the warning in her tone, and Grimmar paled.

"Yes, honored Mother." He stomped toward Felix.

"Where was I? Oh yes. My child. I saw you questioning that, but it is easily answered: you are not the first to hear my call." She smiled as Grimmar appeared before Felix and grabbed him by the arm. He was spun and slammed into the wall, cracking a pillar that had likely been there for thousands of years. Felix gasped. Something definitely burst.

His Health dropped another 20%.

"You see, when the Geist began to guard my prison, they erected only cursory wardings to keep me isolated. They trusted their wretched family to honor the laws of my incarceration, as passed down by the Nym and their blasted Herald." The Maw contemptuously tossed its mane of toothy spikes, and they rattled like chattering bones.

"But my song, it finds the cracks. The gaps in the wards and minds of those Geist foolish enough to guard a living god. I claimed them, turning them against their wicked brethren by showing them how to achieve true power." The Maw exhaled and a crimson mist coalesced into a shimmering, oblong stone the size of an apple.

"I gave them a piece of my core, my true power. Most died, my power too great for their flesh, even diluted, and the cores came back. But a few...ahh yes. A few proved they were worthy." With a quick inhalation, the stone dissolved into mist and was sucked back into the Maw.

"Those worthy few were broken by my touch, their flesh mutating with the power of my blessing." The Maw shifted its blue-green orbs to Grimmar, who still held Felix in an iron grip. "Their change was obvious and the Geist reacted exactly as I knew they would.

"Sentiment!" The Maw hollered, its thousand voices howling. "Sentiment is what dooms this world, compassion and mercy the blade above your necks. It ended the Nym, and it ended the Geist. They were too broken with grief to execute their family. Most were cast into the wilds to live or die, acting as monstrous buffers against the outside world. An extra layer to their devious fog. Two were even kept close, collared and leashed, set within the Labyrinth they built as further security against my might.

"Guardians, if you will."

Felix's eyes widened and he gasped for breath, Grimmar squeezing him ever tighter. Oxygen was getting hard to come by, but his neurons sparked rapid-fire.

The Bloodtainted Guardians. Giant blood beasts collared with small Essence Anchors. And they...they looked exactly like...like the Orit.

"Yes, you begin to see. I'm quite surprised to find that you encountered nearly every one of my failed progeny," the Maw cooed in bloodthirsty delight. "You tore them apart with blade and acid and fire. Quite vicious for such a little thing."

SCREEEEEEAAW!

A dog-sized projectile slammed into Grimmar's leg, and Felix could just barely see the fire covered form of Pit slashing and biting furiously against the giant's exposed heel.

"Yaaa!" Grimmar shouted, pulling up his leg. "You little monster!" With a savage glance at Felix, he punted the tenku into the distance. Felix's eyes widened in rage. He saw Pit land and the Poisonfire wink out. Pit didn't get back up.

Felix vision was starting to turn colors, flashing blue and gold at the corners, and veins in his neck strained as he pressed against Grimmar's new, colossal might. Memories flashed behind his eyes of the Guardians attempting to speak only to emit a rattling buzz, of the Orit choking out vile words, of Grimmar soaked in the corrupted Mana he wielded even now.

All touched by the Maw.

All of them remade.

"But the Orit was not the first of my children you met. I told you, did I not, that I called my child when you arrived?" The Maw smiled wide, an impossible amount of teeth on display, and its thick, barbed tongue lolled. "My child answered from the deep, swimming from hideous depths to find you walking upon a spit of sand."

A vision of countless orange eyes in the green-black water, of barbed tentacles grabbing and tearing, pulling Felix into the water.

"Oho! He knows! He's figured it out!" Grimmar crowed before throwing Felix across the chamber. He flew nearly forty feet before he hit the icy ground like a ragdoll.

Felix's Health bar started flashing, dangerously close to empty.

The Dread...impossible. Felix pulled himself up haltingly, feeling gashes on his legs, arms, chest, and back along with contact burns from the ice itself. Pit...Pit are you..?

He could feel a faint warmth through his pact, so he knew the tenku still lived. He brought up his Companion's status.

Health: 23 / 311

"Do you submit, boy?" Rumbled the tri-voices of the transformed Grimmar, already stomping toward him. "Please say no."

"F-fuck off, mama's boy," Felix grunted, then let loose two concentrated orbs of acid. They barreled outward, smashing into Grimmar's shins and knocking the massive Risi onto his face. The ground shook so hard Felix was thrown to his feet. He immediately started running for Pit.

"STOP!"

Between one step and another, Felix felt nearly every muscle in his body seize. He was just feet from Pit's side.

In his peripheral vision, Felix could see a rust-red shape slink towards him. A sense of terror welled up from within, and all along his Bastion he felt the scraping tendrils of those segmented monstrosities, swimming, crawling, clawing their way up his walls. He was there, reeling in fright from their advances.

"You have such SPIRIT in you, Felix Nevarre," the voice whispered in his ear, so close he could smell the fetid stink of its breath. "You are the same as when we first met in the brackish Bitter Sea. Devoid of hope, devoid of the possibility of victory, yet still you fight until the last."

Images of grasping tentacles and toothy maws filled his mind, the creatures pressing tight against his mental fortifications. Vicious howls pierced the dark, a terrible resonance that shook the air. Shavings of stone fell from his Bastion's walls, chunks that plunked into the rising waves of an acidic ocean. Felix huddled himself farther away, pulling up from the horrors beyond the walls. The Maw's soft voice found him there, just the same.

"My Dread marked you, branded your Spirit for my purposes. And then you did us one better! You bit him back!" The voice crooned in pleasure, and Felix's walls shook as if an earthquake had hit. "Imbibing my child's ichor let me help you, mold you into what you needed to become."

Images flashed across the sky and Felix looked up, seeing himself as if from a distance, while green waves sloshed in the foreground.

"You were marked before the System could claim you. Mine. And so I did some...editing, you might say." Scrapings outside the walls and the howling increased in volume and intensity. "I chose your Race. The Nym are near perfect Vessels for me, and there you were, ripe for the picking!"

Felix's Bastion was rocked, the very foundation shuddering and dropping several inches. The Maw chose my Race?

"Mmmm yes, your precious, special Race. It was your destiny to find me, to serve me," the Maw's purr turned into a growl. "I would have altered your damnable Omen too, but the Omen...fought back. Magician. Fah! A minor setback, nothing more."

The rust-red monstrosity paced around Felix, always just out of view to his frozen eyes. Felix strained against whatever Skill the Maw had laid on him, to no avail; it was like breaking through a steel wall with his bare hands. At times it was as if the massive hell beast was there, at others he felt the soft touch of a dainty hand along his back and shoulders.

"With the remnants of my power coursing through your veins, you were far more susceptible to a few minor alterations. I know you've enjoyed them as you've eaten your way across the Foglands. Bite by delectable bite, your hunger growing bigger by the moment. Your body craving the blood and guts and meat of monsters, of your enemies, even your friends." A laugh, soft and throaty and buzzing his inner ear. "Titles and Skills aren't my usual forte, but for you I made an exception.”

As if to illustrate the Maw's point, two blue windows appeared before him: the Title and Skill windows for Gourmand and Lessons of the Past.

Rumbling shook the air, dust pluming from below as waves crashed over the battlements. The tower, only a story above the crenelated walls, shuddered and listed to the side.

It all made sense. Felix could envision the moment he had received both Title and Skill, how exciting and strange it was to gain a Title for simply biting a monster and living to tell the tale. The thrill of gaining new Skills and abilities from eating the blood and Mana of other creatures. The...the rush.

There was more howling, and for the first time, Felix realized that it wasn't from the abominations in the sea.

It was his hunger. And it was coming from inside the walls.

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