by Dante King
Chapter Eighteen
I moved with lightning speed. Isu countered almost as fast. But “almost” was never good enough when an opponent was up against me. Grave Oath was buried hilt-deep in her chest by the time her left hand was around my right wrist and her right hand was clamped over my throat.
“I knew you’d figure it out,” she whispered hoarsely, a trickle of dark crimson blood dribbling out of the corner of her mouth as her full lips curved into a tragic smile. “Welcome to the realm of the Immortals… Vance Chauzec, God of Death…”
Her eyes rolled back in their sockets, and all the strength drained from her hands. She let out a death rattle, and her body fell limp against mine.
For a moment, nothing happened, and a surge of panic rippled through me. Had I just unwittingly killed all my own powers, along with the Goddess of Death? Had I just done the stupidest thing I could have possibly done, in my quest for ultimate power? Were my skeletons upstairs now nothing more than piles of dust, and Fang a lifeless, rotting corpse? Had I turned into a normal man, without the power to even raise a cockroach or mosquito from the dead?
The answer came to me in what I could only describe as 10,000 bolts of lightning all crashing into me at once. Raw power filled every muscle fiber in my body to the point of exploding. My blood was alternately boiling and freezing in split-second intervals. My insides were broiling and liquefying within me, yet simultaneously swelling with fresh strength and furious vitality.
With this intensity exploding a thousand times per second inside me, I felt my soul leaving my body. But I was sure I wasn’t dying. Actually, it did feel like a kind of death, but it wasn’t anything like that.
It was a rebirth.
A cord of anti-light kept my soul attached to my body, but once it had stepped out of its fleshly prison, a force like a gigantic catapult launched me upward at a tremendous speed. I ripped through the cathedral in the blink of an eye, passing through wood and stone as effortlessly as a ghost. Then my spirit shot up through the night sky, ever higher, until the lights of Erst and all other towns in Prand were nothing but tiny dots of light on the vastness of the dark land beneath me.
I was surrounded by stars, too many to count. Then I began to hear them. No, not the stars—voices. More voices than I ever thought could exist, the voice of every living thing that had ever died. And when I looked down, floating like a distant moon above the planet, I saw them too.
Whether they were ghosts or simply echoes of souls that had long since passed on, I saw them as clear as day. Sentient beings, in their trillions, floating in a translucent cloud, like a living atmosphere around the planet. It was terrifying yet magnificent. It was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen.
Then, as if the anti-light cord that kept my soul attached to my body was a bowstring that had been stretched as far as it could go, I was pulled back. I hurtled through the sea of souls, tore through the sky, and plummeted to the mortal realm, falling at a terrifying speed.
With a violent impact that felt like it had shattered every bone in my body, I was back.
I fell to the ground, gasping and convulsing. The experience had almost killed me, I knew that much. My pulse was racing at such a speed that I felt on the verge of exploding. My stomach twisted in knots of excruciating pain. My lungs were aflame, and I could barely breathe. I managed to get up onto my hands and knees, but only to start puking.
I threw up over and over again, until my stomach was completely empty. Then, I retched some more. I collapsed, drenched in sweat, shivering and gasping for breath, my heart hammering. I lay like this for a while, feeling like I was on the verge of death—real death this time.
Then something stirred within me. A buzz of immense power that started in my heart and spread out through my body. It coursed through my veins and swelled my muscles, supercharging my blood and electrifying my nerve endings. In seconds, I went from feeling like my death was at hand to feeling like I’d never felt before.
I jumped up onto my feet, high on raw power.
I was a god.
I was no longer simply Vance Chauzec. I was Vance Chauzec, God of Death.
Grave Oath lay on the floor, trembling with power invisible to anyone’s eyes except mine. I picked it up and noticed an ethereal glow swirling around its blade. When my eyes focused on the peculiar light, I discovered it was actually a composite of many lights. Each individual glow represented a soul Grave Oath had taken. I could identify every one of them with my new divine senses. I rolled through them, recalling the memory of killing them, and also seeing lives that I hadn’t taken personally. They must have represented Grave Oath’s former owners.
Looking down at Isu’s lifeless corpse, I knew right away what my first act as a god would be.
“Time to see just how this resurrection thing works,” I said.
I had no idea what I was doing, and I didn’t have Isu around anymore for advice or guidance either. But I was a god now, so these things should just… well, come to me. I stared intently at Isu’s body and pictured life returning to it. I remembered how I’d raised Fang and focused on that memory, combining it with determined thoughts of bringing Isu back to life.
I felt a brief lurching sensation, almost as if my soul was about to be stretched out of my body—as it had while raising Fang—but this time. it was definitely different. My spirit seemed to stay put after that quick jolt. However, I could see inside Isu’s body, as if I had once again shrunk to a microscopic size to travel through her veins while retaining my regular sight. But I still felt like I was very much myself, present in my own body.
The process of resurrecting her was very different from raising something from the dead to serve as a zombie, though. That simply required reactivating the mechanisms of the body and had nothing to do with a soul. To truly resurrect Isu, I needed to return her soul to her body.
Grave Oath hadn’t taken her soul, as it had the soul of a human or animal it killed. And why would it; it was her own weapon, forged and enchanted by her hand. If there was a single soul that Grave Oath was incapable of stealing, it had to be Isu’s.
So, where would it be? I considered my spiritual journey in the stars and came upon a reasonable answer. The only trouble was how to find a single soul swimming out there in a sea of billions. However, as soon as this thought entered my head, a realization came over me: I had a compass that was attuned to souls.
Resting Grave Oath in the palm of my hand like a compass needle, I angled my hand up, keeping my thoughts focused on Isu’s soul. Grave Oath rotated madly for a few seconds, then suddenly came to a jolting stop, pointing upward. I pictured the sea of souls I’d passed through, focusing my mind on the direction Grave Oath’s tip was pointing, as if an immensely long, perfectly straight rod was attached to it.
I sent a spectral hand shooting up into the sky. It was as if I could see via the fingertips of this hand. I traveled in a perfectly straight line, directly along the path Grave Oath pointed. There, up among the stars, I found her: Isu, in spirit form.
She gave me a look that suggested she was expecting me. I curled the fingers of my huge, ghostly hand around her form, then shot another hand up, this one traveling far further into the cosmic darkness.
My next action I knew completely by instinct, as though the act of becoming a god had given me infused knowledge. I needed a handful of pure sunlight, the original source of life. That, plus her soul, was what would truly resurrect her from the dead.
With Isu’s soul in one spiritual hand and pure sunlight in the other, I whipped my hands back down to earth. They rapidly shrank, moving from gigantic to so small, they were invisible to the natural eye. Isu’s soul and the sunlight shrunk with them.
I shoved these two key elements into the core of Isu’s dead heart. One element, the vital third piece, was missing though, and I realized why resurrection was such a rare thing: it required some of my own life force. Reaching inside myself with my spectral hands, I dug deep into my own beating heart, whe
re there was a ball of pulsing energy. I grabbed a handful of this energy and yanked it out. Weakness overcame me, and I almost dropped to my knees, feeling as if someone had sucker-smacked me in the head with a mace. I pushed past the loss of strength and persisted with my task until I finally inserted my own life energy into Isu’s heart.
There was a blinding flash of light, accompanied by a scream of terror, a distinctly feminine scream. Isu was screaming out of her physical lungs, her physical throat, her physical mouth.
She sat bolt upright, her eyes looking as if they were about to pop out of their sockets, her chest heaving as she gasped for breath. I knelt beside her and noticed right away that the breath now coming out of her nostrils and mouth was warm and humid, like the breath of any other living creature.
Lord of Light be damned. I’d done it. I’d resurrected a dead body, fully and completely. And not just any old dead body. A dead goddess.
“I’m alive,” she finally managed to gasp. “Physically alive. I haven’t felt this way for thousands of years.”
“And I’m the God of Death now. I don’t think I’ve ever felt like this,” I said with a smirk. “Weird how things work out, huh? So, tell me, Isu, how does it feel to have our roles reversed?”
She chuckled dryly. “I always suspected it would come to this, so I’m not entirely unprepared.”
“You could have told me to do it when I first saw you. But then, I suppose you wouldn’t exactly want a rival Death God on your hands, would you?”
Isu gritted her teeth. “Now that you’ve resurrected me, I’m in your debt, until you release me from this debt.”
“In my debt?”
She stood, dusted herself off, and rolled her eyes. Where Grave Oath had entered her chest, just above her left breast, there was now a faint scar.
“I have to serve you,” she muttered. “Until you officially release me from your service. That’s how it works when you resurrect someone.”
“And if I resurrect Xayon, the Wind Goddess, will she have to serve me as well?”
Isu snorted derisively. “Do you know how much of your life force you just used to resurrect me, Vance? It took more than you realize. If you tried to do it again with another god or goddess, it’d kill you—for now, at least.”
“For now?”
“Yes, for now. Don’t get too big for your boots, Vance. You’re only a minor god for the time being. Barely above a demigod. You need to accrue many more souls before you can think about resurrecting another deity.”
“Well, I intend to become a major deity then. As quickly as possible. I’ll resurrect the Wind Goddess for my friend. And you’re going to help me do that.”
She scowled but didn’t protest. She couldn’t refuse now that she was officially indebted to me.
“Fine,” she hissed through clenched teeth, clearly unhappy but powerless to do otherwise.
“We’re going back to the cathedral.” I turned toward my skeletons, who’d remained in silent vigilance during my transcendence from mortality to divinity. “On second thought,” I said to Isu, “you should stay here. I’d prefer to explain to the others what happened before you show up.”
“As you wish.” Isu wore a mocking smile as she bowed her head.
“Aren’t you forgetting something?” I said, unable to keep the grin from my face.
“Such as?”
“Master, perhaps?”
A growl escaped from Isu’s lips. “Master,” she managed to let out through gritted teeth.
“Keep an eye on her,” I told my skeletons as I moved through them. I wasn’t sure how powerful Isu would be, but I doubted that she still had the same kinds of abilities as before.
Brimming with satisfaction, I headed up to the cathedral. Things had gone way better than I could have imagined. But my quest wasn’t over yet. Not by a long shot. And neither was Rami’s.
I couldn’t help strutting the instant I stepped back into the inner sanctum. I was walking with such a swagger that even Rami started smiling, the glumness leaving her beautiful face for a while.
“Guess who’s not just a mere mortal anymore?” I beamed an ear-to-ear grin.
Elyse stared at me in confusion. “Not just a… huh? What in the Lord’s Luminescence are you talking about?”
“I may or may not have just become a god.”
“Become a what? You can’t be serious.”
“If you died, I could resurrect you. Seriously.”
Elyse folded her arms across her breasts, a maneuver that almost made them pop out of her new dress. “I don’t believe you.”
“You want to try? It’ll take a fair bit of my life energy, but you’re not a goddess, so resurrecting you shouldn’t kill me.”
“Are you insane? What really happened down there? Did a coffin fall on your head?”
“I am a god now. I killed the Death Goddess with Grave Oath, and in doing so, I became the God of Death. It’s all pretty straightforward, really.”
Regardless of what Elyse thought about what I was saying, it seemed that Rami had no qualms about taking me at face value.
“Vance,” she gasped, staring at me in awe, “is it true? Are you really the God of Death now? Do you wield the power to resurrect the dead?”
I grinned at her rather than answering.
“Then we need to find Xayon’s body,” she said. “If you can bring her back to life…”
“It turns out I’ll need to take a few more souls before I can do that, but I’ll handle it as soon as I’m able to. When we find the body, of course. So, I guess that’s our next mission. And since the only man who knew where Xayon’s body is has had his skull turned to mincemeat, we’re going to have to do a little digging around.”
Elyse palmed her face. “I don’t believe it.”
“I helped you get your bishopric back. And you promised to come with me to Brakith so that I could get my lordship back.”
“I did. But I didn’t promise to—”
“Rami helped too,” I interjected. “That means you owe her. The least you could do is help her with this. Besides, we’re forming quite the adventuring party.”
Elyse sighed. “So be it. As long as you cease this foolish nonsense of being a God of Death.”
I shrugged. “You’ll see soon enough.” I turned to Rami. “So, are there any other artifacts related to Xayon that might give us some clues as to the whereabouts of her body?”
Rami furrowed her brow and scratched her delicate chin. “Well, it is rumored that Xayon’s armor is still in existence.”
“What does it look like?” I asked. “Do you have any leads on where it might be?”
She shook her head. “All I know is that Xayon’s sigil is engraved on the breastplate.”
“Xayon’s sigil?”
“This.”
She handed me the amulet she’d taken from Nabu. I took it in my hands, and she pointed to a stylized symbol of a tornado engraved into the gold around the jewel. Elyse looked over my shoulder as I was examining it, and gasped.
“I know that sigil!”
“You’ve seen this before?” Rami asked excitedly.
“Yes!” She seemed positively exuberant to be on the quest now.
“Isn’t this something you should have mentioned earlier?” I asked.
“I didn’t know what it represented. I thought it was some kind of guild symbol. That’s what everyone in Erst assumed it to be.”
“Where is it?” Rami blurted out, unable to contain her excitement.
“It’s on the primary fountain in the town square. There are many legends and superstitions about the fountain. Some say it has healing powers; others say that muttering a curse over it will call up a storm. One thing everyone in Erst knows for sure is that it’s older than almost everything else in the town. It was built during the time of monstrous dungeons and adventuring guilds, when the Lord of Light was just one god among many.”
“It sounds to me,” I said, “like that fountain is exactly wh
ere we need to start looking. So, what’s stopping us? And on a night like this one? Saint Jorl’s sounds like a perfect time to reward ourselves after a job well done. Debauchery and drunkenness, the perfect combination for a night out for the God of Death and his servants.”
“Servants?” Elyse scowled.
“Well, maybe not servants. Allies?”
“I will serve Vance Chauzec, God of Death, wherever he leads.” Rami genuflected before me.
Elyse bristled. “He’s not a god. An excellent assassin and an even better necromancer, but he’s no god. Even if he were, I only serve the Lord of Light.”
“Thank you,” I said to Rami as I took her hand and lifted her up. “Elyse, if a miracle is required for you to have faith in me, then that’s what you’ll get. Only not right now. I’ve got a town to paint red—your town, officially again, now that Nabu is dead—and a shitload of souls to steal.”
Chapter Nineteen
“Yes, Nabu is dead, and I’m Bishop of Erst again,” Elyse said. “But I don’t think the guards and soldiers outside will be too pleased with what we did in here. We can’t just march out there as if everything’s fine.”
“We don’t know how many of them might be loyal to Nabu,” Rami added. “How many of them won’t care that Elyse is the rightful bishop. We may have a bigger fight on our hands than we can handle. We slew the church’s most elite and honored warriors.” She gazed uneasily at the scattered bodies of the dead Resplendent Crusaders.
“Well, regarding that second problem,” I said, “I’ve got a solution.”
Before I could continue, our conversation was interrupted by a piercing shriek. It came from the stairs leading to the crypts. I knew exactly who it was.
Rami drew her sais. “What the hell was that?”
“It sounds like one demon still draws breath in this cathedral,” Elyse growled, her fingertips glowing.
“Relax, ladies, relax,” I said with a chuckle. “That’s just… our new friend.”
“Our new friend?” Elyse stared at me in disbelief. “We’re friends with banshees now, or whatever made that horrible sound?”
