The 13th God (The Cycle of Galand Book 8), page 59
"At last you seem to understand me."
"Because when I take on your power, I must not become you."
The lich rumbled and bore down on him. Dante knew that if he'd been in his physical body that his bones would have snapped and fractured. But they were here, a place of the mind, perhaps of the spirit, and though the lich still threatened to crush him, and then to rush past him, out of the prison of the lichstone and through the portal to the Realm of Nine Kings, Dante hadn't fallen yet.
He was still being forced down through the haze, though—and a gateway was clarifying below them, an inversion of the ones they were used to, a circle of light flecked with dark stars. Dante tried to push back harder and bring himself to a stop, but there was nothing for his hands or feet to get a hold on.
The doorway expanded below him. The lich was as relentless in this realm as he'd been in Rale, when he'd marched his army of Blighted across the land, and even the bed of the ocean, tireless, beyond all mortal capability. Dante had no Spear of Stars or its equivalent. What hope was to be had?
He sank lower still. His anger swelled in his throat and for a moment he stalled, inert in the air.
"That will not be enough," said the remnant of the lich.
The lich bore down harder. Dante felt himself quivering. As soon as he did so, a small part of his anger transmuted to doubt. But as soon as the first cracks appeared in the wall, the rest crumbled seconds later, and he was pulled down toward the portal again.
His anger spiked once more. This time as much toward himself as the lich. So what if he didn't have a Spear of Stars? He'd been the one who'd fought the gods for the spear. The lich had never done any such thing. The lich's goal, if he pushed his way out of the stone, was to run away. Dante was the only one left with any hope of stopping Nolost.
And the only thing standing between him and that possibility was someone who had put tens of thousands of innocents to death. Someone who Dante had already once put to death himself.
His descent slowed, dwindling to a halt. The lich tugged harder yet but Dante suspected he was nearing his limits. When the effort brought Dante just a few inches closer to the doorway, he smiled. A flare of contempt ignited in his chest. He came to a total stop.
"I will become what you once were," Dante said. "And I will banish Nolost from Rale."
He lifted his right hand, fingers spread wide, and moved his mind into the ever-shifting patterns that were trapping him like a cage. The sides of the cage bent inward toward him.
"Let me free," the lich said. "I have earned it!"
"You never believed in the right to earn a thing—only in the power to take it."
Dante trained the fire of his mind on the pattern before him. It was like a river coming to a cliff, and he was the pool at the bottom: it had no choice but to fall to him. It bent closer and closer until the patterns grew distorted.
"It is not yours!" the lich said. "I am the one that made this what it is!"
"It was given to you by Arawn, and you broke your compact with him. There is nothing here to honor."
Dante extended his hand and grabbed hold of the ether before him. He expected it to fight back, even to try to hurt him. Instead, it wove around him like a tame creature. He commanded it to him and it moved past his hand and down to his solar plexus.
His vision went golden as the ether joined him. As ether, it was harder for him to command, but its nature was of the nether, and that he was a master of. A hole opened in the opposite side of the cage as the ether continued to flow around the sides and into the center of his body.
At once, that which had already joined him threatened to burst him apart. For a moment he fought down panic—panic that, if he let it take him, would kill him then and there—and then he saw that the ether was misaligned to him, that its patterns must be made to mirror those specific to his flesh and the nether within it. He circulated it through his body, down to the marrow of his bones and out to his hair and fingernails, and everywhere he matched it to the patterns of his self.
The back wall of the cage was now gone altogether, the sides beginning to shrink as they poured inside him. Then there was only the wall behind him. It grew smaller as well.
"I don't know if there is a realm beyond for you," Dante said. "Goodbye."
The ether gave a dazzling flash as the last of it entered him. He thought he saw a vision of the lich not as the lich but as Bade, the young, ambitious mortal man. He looked frightened, but then his eyes fixed on something unseen, and a look of recognition settled over his face.
And then he was gone.
The gold in Dante's vision shattered like glass. He was back in the darkness of Pholos hanging above the putrid flesh-bowl filled with its boiling yellow soup. However long the taking of the light had seemed to take, everything was exactly where he'd last seen it.
He, however—
"What the fuck?" Blays was still struggling within a swarm of tentacles, but he looked far more alarmed by Dante. "What happened to you?!"
"I found the will to overcome." Dante's voice sounded different in his own ears.
He realized that he was still caught up in the limbs of the entity, too; the pain had been so minor that it had gotten lost in the rush of sensations of his return to the world of the physical. He beckoned to the shadows. They answered. They looked different, too. As black as ever, but somehow brighter. He whipped them through the arms, severing them in one cut. He had enough left over to rake them through the tentacles entrapping Blays, too.
The nether was different. When he called to it, it was almost like it was already there waiting for him. And when he wielded it, it was almost like it knew what he wanted it to do before he knew it himself.
"Nolost!" he said. "You are about to learn to fear death."
Shadows warped into his hands. The organ hung below him, bubbling away. Sensing his intentions, Nolost drew it back toward his body, but the nether leaped away from Dante, and he shaped it on the fly into an army of whirling blades. These splashed into the yellow liquid and gashed out the underside of the organ. It fell apart in a dozen different pieces, the liquid within it spraying in all directions.
Nolost yanked back the stump of it, concealing it within his body. Dante had already drawn forth more nether. He was about to resume his attack on the part of the entity he'd been assaulting before taking on the power of the lich, but something told him that wasn't right, that he should concentrate on an area twenty feet to the left of it.
He bent the nether that way instead. The blades glinted with specks of white as they sped toward their target and cut into it. Black vapor billowed from Nolost, who rolled over, trying to remove the new wounds from Dante's line of sight. Dante threw another wave of shadows at the entity anyway, and found he didn't need to be able to see his target to guide his bolts to it. He could have done so with his eyes closed.
More smoke blasted from Nolost's viscera. A chilling, groaning noise reverberated through the air. The entity curled on itself while flicking tentacles at Dante, but he knew they were no more than a diversion, and brushed them off with a few blades of nether. Nolost had managed to protect Dante's target from him, though, and a cold fury raced through his veins. If Nolost meant to shield the wound with his body, then Dante would just have to rip through his body until he carved his way back to it.
He both commanded the nether and launched it in a single movement. Arranging it into thick wedges, he slammed them into Nolost's side, spacing them out to cleave out more of his mass. As thick vapor surrounded him, enough to choke him, Dante wondered if he still needed to breathe.
The attack had scooped a hole out of the entity like a well-honed shovel. Some ether jumped past Dante, but it was just Gladdic incinerating some stray tentacles. Dante assembled another bunch of nethereal axe heads and hacked them into Nolost. So much vapor was floating around that he almost felt like he was in a nethereal version of the Mists.
It cleared enough for him to see he'd gouged a hole in Nolost deep enough for him to stand in. He glanced down at his hands. They were the same size as before, he thought, but they were glowing. Even without any nether in them, they shed a purple-black aura that made him look like he'd just emerged from another world. He looked frightening, didn't he? That's what Blays had reacted to when he'd returned.
He felt as if people should be frightened of him. He felt like he could now see inside of things, to the truth of their inner workings—and tear them apart. He had ascended into something he didn't know the limits of except that they were so vast that even he might be frightened of it. Was this what the lich had felt like, all the time? It was no wonder he'd planned to wipe the world clean and create a better one. Especially once he'd had time to learn to wield the full extent of the powers he'd taken for himself.
All in due time. For now, he had an entity to crush.
He called a new round of nether. He had just launched it when Nolost, who had continued to roll over onto his side, began to soar away. He smiled. The entity was retreating from him: it was afraid. He could destroy it, couldn't he? End the assault on Rale here and now.
The entity was fast, but the nether was much faster. It slammed into the enemy's flank, sloughing off another slab of whatever it was that made up its flesh. It didn't appear to be a vital part of Nolost, yet the entity shuddered and slowed.
Dante sailed toward it, pulling himself smoothly through the nether, far faster than he'd been able to before. Nolost leaned further into his turn but this only let Dante catch up to him even quicker. He raked the entity with more shadows. Great as he was in size, how much of him had the lich, and now Dante, carved away from him? A fifth or more? To kill him, would Dante have to reduce him to nothing? Or would he break apart much sooner than that?
"What does it look like when an entity dies?" he said. "Is it a grand spectacle, like a bursting star? Or do you simply leave a dead and cooling body behind, no different in the end than a mortal?"
As he drew closer, he angled to his right, putting himself between Nolost and the portals. Nolost broke away from him, trailing smoke as Dante sliced off another part of the entity's stern. A clump of tentacles lashed at Dante. He uprooted them like weeds. The attack was so trivial to fend off that it didn't even manage to delay the one he'd been preparing. He loosed another volley of nethereal wedges, watching them cross the void with satisfaction.
Something leaped at him through the vapor left behind by the tentacles. Another limb. It was as long and thin as the others but more rigid and its tip was shiny and pointed. Dante hacked at it with the shadows but was only able to cut halfway through it. Then it was upon him, stabbing him in the chest.
A sickly heat shot through his body. He could feel a terrible poison pumping through his veins.
Now I will absorb you too, Nolost said. Just as I did to him.
Dante pulsed the nether inside himself. He was clothed, and so couldn't see it, but he knew that black lines were spreading up and down his blood vessels, just as they'd done with the lich. The lich's solution had been to cut off the poisoned part of himself—and even that hadn't worked.
Dante moved to the source of it, enfolding the venom in shadows. Yet they slid right off it. He rushed out to the periphery instead, focusing on the thinnest and weakest of the little black tentacles expanding within him, but he couldn't get a grasp on these either. Nolost was turning to come at him and Dante fled, pulling himself through the nether.
He swept the shadows through his veins again. Nothing; the nether couldn't get any purchase at all. But he had the ether, too—including the light of life itself. He found this within himself, drawing it out and sending it to the fringes of the still-spreading venom. It met the toxin with a sizzle that felt like he was being roasted from the inside.
It quenched the venom, though. As if aware of his efforts, an arm of the black poison reached toward his heart. Dante raced to meet it with the ether, touching the light to it just before it could slip through one of his valves. The two elements wrestled against each other, deadlocked. Dante's command grew shaky—he'd never been much for the ether, and the light of life, though potent, was even harder to guide—yet just as he feared it would falter, the light surged forward, snuffing out the venom.
The ether rolled smoothly down his veins, away from his heart, but its momentum grew sluggish as it neared the site of the sting. Dante set his mind behind it and pushed it onward until it came to the wound, where it neutralized the last of the venom.
You recovered from one, the entity said. Let us see if you can recover from twelve.
Eleven more of the long, rigid limbs unfolded from his body. He must have been building them as Dante had been attacking him, enduring the injuries knowing he'd soon have something to kill Dante with. Even his "retreat" had likely been a ruse to make Dante overconfident, to lure him in while stripping him of any suspicions.
He slung the nether at one of the venomous limbs, but Nolost simply retracted it into his body and let his outer hull absorb the attack. He hadn't been able to cut through the first one that had attacked him, but he hadn't focused his full strength on it, either. If Nolost attacked him with all dozen at once, Dante thought, maybe, he could sever three or four of them. He had, with some trouble, been able to purge himself of the venom of a single sting.
Contending with eight of them would be the death of him.
All things contain at the moment of their creation both their peak and their fall. Nolost sailed toward him, holding his new limbs against his sides. In your case, the two will be just minutes apart.
Dante streamed away as fast as he could, firing nether behind him. Nolost let it slam right into him. There was only one thing left to do, then. Dante reoriented himself toward Wessen and launched the shadows at the god's heart. As he looked more closely, though, Dante's spirits sank. Wessen's heart was still exposed, but whether through his sorcery, or his divine abilities, the wound Blays had cut into it had healed over, leaving the organ untouched.
The god had been hanging from his chains, unconscious, but he stirred as the nether struck him, grimacing in annoyance. It wasn't going to be nearly enough. Even the White Lich hadn't been able to pierce the god's heart quickly enough, and for as much raw power as Dante might have taken on, he had nothing like the lich's knowledge of how to wield it.
But maybe he could still figure that out.
He reached inside himself, spreading across the pattern of ether within him and spooling it out from his core. The spark of it drew Wessen's eye; he gazed at Dante dully, exhausted. Shakily, Dante extracted more yet, stopping when he could feel it about to start slipping away from him.
A ball of light spun in the air before him as he soared toward Wessen. He held the ball in his mind, stretching it from its top and bottom, further and further, until it resembled a javelin—or a lightning bolt. It shimmered, dimming, but then swelled so bright he could barely look at it. Dante took it in his hand and lifted it high.
It flickered again. Cracks ran up and down its pearled surface. Heart hammering, he made to throw it, but it was already crumbling apart between his fingers, the light sifting down through the air and returning to his body. Frantically, he grabbed for it again, but no more than a few motes of it answered his call, dangling before him before disappearing back inside him.
Wessen, having watched all this with fearful concern, now laughed.
A couple of tentacles lashed at Dante, stretching to their limit and then withdrawing just as he was about to obliterate them. Nolost was testing his range. In desperation, Dante pounded on Wessen's heart with the nether again. He was almost upon the god—but the entity was almost upon him.
Wessen glared down on him, some life entering the god's eyes. Then Dante was right before him. He noted, numbly, that he'd barely scratched Wessen's heart. Anything more would be futile. There was nothing left to do but turn toward Nolost.
Death, Nolost said. Nothing more.
He flicked a single tentacle at Dante. It would have hit him if Dante hadn't cut it apart. Nolost made an inscrutable noise, drifting to a halt. The entity was chewed-up and tattered but it was still enormous, dizzyingly so, enough that a part of Dante couldn't believe he was standing off against such a being, and that this must be no more than a manic dream.
But the hardened, venom-tipped limbs that thrust out from Nolost's body were very real.
Dante had already gathered as much nether as he could hold and he launched it forth. This time, rather than trying to chop through the tough and much thicker arms, he punched the shadows into the very tips of the stingers, looking to blunt them.
He smashed many of them—hard to say if some were fully disabled or just damaged—and would have gotten a couple more if a chunk of his nether hadn't sailed past his targets. He drew more, doubting he'd get to use it. The stingers strove forward as the nether streaked toward Nolost.
At the last moment, he bent it toward the base of a limb he'd left fully undamaged. The shadows crashed into it, clipping it off just feet from Nolost's body. It started to disintegrate, starting where it had been cut short and moving up its stem.
Yet the severed limb continued to move toward him. The others were a heartbeat away and he threw what he could at them but most of his attention was locked onto the cut limb as he grabbed hold of the nether within it and pulled it to him. He flung himself at it, bear-hugging it, just avoiding impaling himself on its tip. Using its mass as leverage, he swing himself around to face Wessen.
One of the stingers clunked into the one he was wrapped around. Another jabbed him in the calf, which went numb, then felt as if it had caught fire. He seized the nether in front of himself and clambered forward as fast as he could. Another limb stabbed into his back. It hurt like he was being dissolved—maybe he was—but he had no time to tend to it with the ether.
Wessen's huge face hung over him like the moon. "No! Kill him, entity!! Kill him now!"
Another stinger clicked into the one Dante was riding while one more gored him in the side. Venom trickled up and down his body. He glanced back. Smoke rushed up the limb he was riding as it continued to fall apart. If he'd had to pull it by himself, he never would have made it. But it still had much of its initial momentum.
