The 13th God (The Cycle of Galand Book 8), page 56
Seeing this, Wessen's smirk inverted. "You miserable, selfish creatures. You never deserved your own world. We should have kept you as slaves!"
"Not true," said the lich. "For if we prove on this day that we have become powerful enough to kill a god, then we prove that we are your worthiest creations."
His hands came alive with ether. He shaped it into a weapon—one that resembled his old glaive. The Chained God began to scream. Blays winced at the sound of it. Dante knew he wanted more than anything for this to be over, for the sooner they could return to their world and resume the war for it there, the sooner they could begin to forget about this place: its dazed, zombie-like people; the god holding it together with his body at the center; and everything they had done to all of it.
The White Lich hoisted his shining blade and threw it into Wessen's heart. The god arched his back and screamed again. The blade bit deeper but it was going to take several more. Dante had the fleeting and half-deranged notion of suggesting the lich pick up Blays and hold him over the heart to let him go to work with the spear, but without the momentum of the onas behind it, he wasn't sure it would be any more effective than what the lich was doing. Besides, if Nolost came for them, there was no way Dante and Gladdic could hold off the entity by themselves.
Nolost was still hanging off in the distance, growing new limbs, acting like it had all the time in the world. The lich forged another light and stabbed it into the god's heart. Nolost sank several feet in the air, then bobbed back upward. Dante had left a few of his smaller cuts open after the tentacle had grabbed him and when he called to the nether it came hungrily.
"What happens if the lich manages to kill Wessen?" Blays said. "Do we ask him to carry us over to our portal and toss us through it?"
"He might," Dante said.
"That's a little optimistic."
Dante tried to come up with something to refute that, but the lich would probably find it very funny to leave them hanging there, helpless, while Pholos and Olastar collapsed around them. Doing so wouldn't even violate their agreement in any way.
"Nolost will probably kill us before this place falls apart anyway," Dante said. "But if he doesn't, we'll just have to figure out how to move for ourselves."
This was punctuated by another scream from Wessen. A scream that sounded more agonized than the others, and more hopeless.
"Why does it not come for us?" Gladdic said.
"You almost sound like you want it to," Blays said.
"Because it is waiting for something. I fear whatever that might be."
Dante frowned. Light flashed behind them, followed by another scream.
"What," Blays said, "is that?"
He was staring past Nolost, but Dante couldn't see anything else there besides the portal they'd come through. As he opened himself to say as much, though, he glimpsed movement. Something stirring in the darkness. No: it was the darkness, pouring forth from the portal, a flood of something like thick, heavy smoke.
Even before it moved to join Nolost, Dante's blood froze in his veins. He understood immediately. They had only been dealing with a fraction of the entity. It hadn't known the lich was with them, or the extent of his powers, and had only dispatched enough of itself to contend with Dante, Blays, and Gladdic. And that fraction still would have been more than enough—if not for the fact they were also traveling in the company of Rale's greatest living sorcerer, possibly even the greatest of all time.
"Get ready," he managed to get out. "It's coming."
33
Blays angled his spear forward. Gladdic, stone-faced, surrounded himself in ether. Kelen was still unconscious. Dante prodded him with a nethereal pin, but it didn't stir him.
One of you carries a weapon of the gods, Nolost said. Another of you carries the power of the gods. The darkness continued to pour through the portal. It won't be enough.
He flew towards them. What they'd previously thought of as "him," the squid-shaped thing, was now no more than its head, or possibly even its hand. Its new body sailed along behind it, already immense, and still growing larger as more of it emerged from the portal. Most of its new mass was too dim and amorphous to make out any specific features, but Dante could see many more tentacles—and mouths, too. Not just the small ones on the tentacles themselves, but door-sized ones gnashing their teeth on the flanks of the body.
Blays pulled the spear more tightly to his side. "I think we're going to need the lich."
"He has to finish killing Wessen," Dante said. "We don't have to defeat Nolost. We just have to hold him off long enough to save Rale."
He brought even more nether to himself. So much he wasn't sure he'd be able to wield it all without hurting himself. He threw a bit of it at Nolost—he couldn't say why, maybe to make sure they weren't dealing with an illusion of some kind, or maybe out of simple defiance—but it sank into the entity's head without a trace.
You gave more of a struggle than I expected from your kind, the entity spoke to them. Thank you for that. Looking back, I would have been disappointed if it had been over too fast.
It was so large that it looked like it was barely moving forward. Yet it fell upon them with the speed of a falling rock. When it was still just far enough away for Dante to summon a second round of nether before it could reach them, he launched his shadows.
Gladdic followed his lead, a flock of lights zipping just behind the nether. Dante strongly doubted Nolost had any significantly vulnerable parts to target, an equivalent of the head or the heart (or the crotch), and even if such things did exist within the entity, Dante didn't have any idea where they might be. So he directed his attack into the original body of it that was still leading the charge.
Black vapor shot forth from the entity as the shadows shredded into it and the light pierced it like the arrows of a legion of archers, until a cloud big enough to rain hung in the air. Something bulged from the middle of this cloud, pushing it aside: the head of Nolost. It was as ragged as a shirt too threadbare to mend, and tatters of it fell from it in heaps, but it streamed ever toward them, tentacles snapping around it in anticipation.
The attack had left Dante light-headed, but he called for more nether. Even with his mind lost in fog and his heart thudding in his ears, he was still able to shape the shadows into bolts and unleash them at the same target he'd just struck. His vision dulled as he guided—more through instinct at that point than conscious thought—the horde of missiles home.
He could vaguely make out a storm of light pounding into the head as well, expelling a dark mist from the head much like the one hanging over his own eyes. Nether rarely made more than a hissing or sizzling sound yet Dante's ears were filled with a steady roar.
"Dante!" Blays shouted from somewhere underwater. "Snap out of it!"
He couldn't, though. In fact it was almost kind of funny how much he couldn't. His hand tingled, kind of like it had been burned, but cold.
I arrive, Nolost said. And I deliver the gift.
The sound—rather, the sense—of his voice inside Dante's head scraped it clean like an oyster getting shucked. Tentacles were flying toward him, little mouths clacking. He had just enough time to gather more nether and form it into crude blades, chopping into the reaching limbs. Some dissolved into ash on a wind that wasn't there, but others kept coming.
Light flashed on both sides of him, Gladdic with the ether, Blays slashing the Spear of Stars through a wriggling mass of tentacles. The spear looked capable of cutting the limbs apart as fast as Blays could stab or swing it. But Nolost was no longer hanging back, and more and more of his appendages reached out as he loomed closer.
Gladdic yelled out: one of the limbs had gotten past him, wrapping around his leg and dragging him toward the entity. Dante slung some of the nether in his hands toward the limb, severing it with a puff of dust. Yet several of the arms were reaching for him, too, and when he laid into them with the shadows, he found he didn't have enough to cut them all down.
Two tentacles poked through the fading embers of nether and grabbed him around the middle. They both bore thorns and mouths and Dante shouted as these dug and bit into his skin. He shaped a black scythe and swept it through them, cutting them away, yet there were even more behind them, and even more behind those, and they grabbed him again, compressing his chest and groping for his face. The touch of them felt like he was being dissolved from within and he found himself struggling and writhing like Wessen on his chains.
He freed himself with a wild slash of nether and found himself gasping at the air like he'd been drowning. Another group of limbs groped toward him and he tried to kick away from them but could do nothing more than thrash at the air.
The entity grabbed up Gladdic again. Gladdic tried to say something but a loop of tentacle wrapped around his face, muffling him. Blays whisked his spear back and forth, cutting them down like straw, but they probed closer and closer.
A huge mass of them reached past the struggling mortals toward the lich. He had been stabbing into Wessen's heart all the while, dedicated to his morbid task, but he was forced now to spin about and turn his ether on the cluster of dark arms.
You can leave here now, Nolost said. Or you can die here. There is no other choice.
The entity reached toward the lich. The lich erased the mass of arms with a single pulse of nether, yet the cloud just condensed back into new limbs. The head of the entity drifted nearer to him and the lich bared his teeth and sailed away to the side, opening ground between them.
Dante had just cut down the tentacles around him, and caught sight of little glimmers of light around the lich's body that vanished as soon as he stopped moving. That's what he'd meant when he'd said he was using the ether: he wasn't bringing the ether to him. He was bringing himself to the ether. This wouldn't have worked anywhere else, but everything was so much lighter in Pholos that it was just possible.
Dante tried to do this himself but found himself unable to get a firm enough hold on the ether to pull himself toward it. Then Nolost was grabbing at him again, and he had to fight like mad to avoid the entity's grasp.
The ball of tentacles lunged at the lich. He struck them apart, but the black vapor kept flowing toward him, coagulating back into tentacles and grabbing at his chest and limbs. Hungry mouths nipped at his skin and scraped over his exposed bones.
"You are nothing more than a defiler!" The lich's voice rang with a metallic echo. "There can be no victory for one who believes nothing!"
Call it as you like. You will be dead, and I'll be what killed you.
Light shot from the lich's hands and he disappeared within a black mist. Dante reached out and called himself to the nether. He felt himself swaying, as if tottering on a precipice. Nolost hung above him like a flagship. Gladdic had managed to free his face of the tentacles but was still being squeezed by them, blood dripping down his brow. Blays swore; one had grabbed his right wrist. Another curled around the shaft of the spear and tried to yank it away, but the strap held fast.
A knot of arms tumbled away from Nolost's underside, falling toward Dante. He carved into them with the shadows but they came back together almost as fast as he could tear them apart. He shielded his head as they uncoiled upon him and grabbed him up in their jabbing embrace.
Ether glowed from the lich. With a roar, he ripped himself free of the many arms that had bound him and soared forward, lashing out at the entity as he fled from it. Nolost tried to heave about, but his tremendous size had rendered him cumbersome, and as the lich sailed away from him, he could only grab uselessly at the empty air.
Caught in the grip of the squeezing, stabbing limbs, Dante felt like he was dying. He wrenched at the nether and hacked it into the entity, cutting himself loose. He wanted to cry in relief, but he wouldn't have had time even for that; the mist had already become new tentacles that snatched him up before he could take hold of more nether.
The lich continued to fly from the entity. Wessen cackled with slow laughter. The White Lich wasn't just retreating from Nolost. He was headed toward the portals. They hung in the emptiness with nothing between him and them. Dante wanted to scream at him, to curse him, but the entity's arms were squeezing him so tightly he could barely breathe.
The lich was still moving parallel to the body of the entity. As he finally reached Nolost's tail end—a huge bulb that forked into two long, long spines like the stinger of a centipede—he drifted to a stop and turned around.
"I could seek godhood," he said. "But I would do so alone. For eight hundred years I made my plans. You stole them in a single moment."
It was nothing personal, said the entity. I am sure you can see that by now.
"You have cut the last string that tethered me to my mortal life." The lich stared across the void, waiting, heedless to the fact that Dante and the others were in the middle of a struggle for their lives. "But that was not your worst mistake."
You have a judgment? Let us hear it.
"At first you sent a mere part of yourself to deal with us. Destroying it would have hurt you but not killed you. In your slave-like compulsion to annihilate Rale, you have brought the rest of you here—and now all of you can be killed!"
His voice rose with every word and as the White Lich spoke the last of them he sprung away from the portal at the entity. Nolost made a humming noise that might have been laughter. He had finished swinging about as the lich spoke and he reached out with a vast host of limbs, ready to meet him.
Your own words condemn you, the entity said. You have become a slave to vengeance, and it will destroy you.
The lich gave no reply. The tentacles momentarily loosened their grip on Dante and he took the opportunity to tear them apart and patch up his wounds. As soon as he was no longer bleeding everywhere he slashed the nether through the appendages entangling Blays, then healed him as well.
"That," Blays wheezed, "was not fun."
He set himself in a guard position, but Nolost seemed entirely focused on the lich. Given that his body was both gigantic and completely alien, it was hard to read its language, but Dante thought the entity was looking forward to what was to come.
The lich placed his right hand over his solar plexus. Glowing blue-white, his hand sank into his skin past the wrist. He was well away from Dante, yet the pain on his face was impossible to miss. Ether crackled around him in ways that Dante had never seen.
All of the lich went transparent; a thousand star-like lights pulsed within his flesh and bones. They began to move, drawn toward the center of his body, accumulating there one after another, a ball of perfect light that grew wider with each second.
When roughly eight out of every ten of the tiny stars had been absorbed together, the remainder came to a stop, drifting back toward their original locations. The lich's hand closed around the ball of light at his center.
With a shout of agony, he drew it forth.
It wasn't all that large, about the size of an orange, hanging before him in the air, as beautiful as the moon. He reached out to it with both hands but was careful not to touch it. Slowly, he moved his hands apart, drawing the sphere out into a cylinder until it was longer than a man was tall. He chopped his hands to the sides. Ether flashed, obscuring everything.
When it faded, a blade hovered before him, shining brightly, straight and double-edged. He reached for it and took up its handle.
"Now, destroyer. We will see how much you enjoy your own."
He rushed toward the entity. Dante tried to move himself to the nether again, feeling himself sway, but no more. Nolost whipped a wall of tentacles at the lich, who slashed his sword across them. They made a crackling sound as the blade made contact and parted them cleanly. The stumps wriggled in pain.
Nolost brought himself to a stop. He struck at the lich with more limbs but yanked them back as the lich swung at them. It was an obvious feint but the lich kept coming. The entity snapped the tentacles forward, aiming for the lich's sword arm. The lich managed to cleave through half of them before the other half wrapped around his wrist and elbow and upper arm. Dante gritted his teeth, but the lich merely swept his left hand across them, vaporizing them with ether—and then flicked his sword through the vapor, annihilating it.
The entity went still.
"What was that?" Blays said. "Does he actually have a chance?"
"I don't know," Dante said. "But I have to figure out how to move so I can drag you in front of Wessen."
I haven't seen a weapon like that in a long time, Nolost said. Not since I saw it slipping from the hands of a man I'd just killed.
Dante sent his mind into the nether in front of him and willed himself toward it. He swayed. And floated a few inches forward. Just as he thought he'd figured it out, he drifted to a stop.
The lich carried across the emptiness. Nolost neither retreated nor advanced. For as tall as the lich was when Dante stood before him, before the colossal bodies of Nolost and Wessen, he looked like a beetle trying to fight with a grown man.
A new limb unfolded from the entity's side. It was much thicker than the tentacles and its surface was shiny like chitin. It jabbed its pointed tip right at the lich. He was far less maneuverable floating through the nether than on solid ground, and though he tried to veer out of the way, the stingered arm had no trouble matching his movements.
He swung his blade into it just before it could gore him. An icy clang rang from the sword. It cut through the tip of the limb, dispersing the severed portion into vapor. Yet the new tip of the arm collapsed into a spear-like point and drove toward the lich. His backhand wasn't fast enough to catch it. He had thrust the open palm of his other hand toward it as well, though, and slapped it into the stinger just before it could strike him. Though he didn't budge the limb one bit, he pushed himself away from it, then hacked the sword downward, cutting off another piece of the entity.
Dante looked away for just a moment to call himself to the nether. The nether had no awareness, at least not that he knew of, but it almost felt like it reacted to his effort with surprise, as if he was attempting something that no one else had ever tried before. It answered him, and pulled him forward by a foot before he lost his grip on it.
