He was careful not to use the Gift itself, however.
Shadow and red light appeared in his hand, just like when he destroyed the debt collectors. But no ball of hellfire appeared in his hand. This time, his hand glowed.
The goblins charged at him, thinking his spell failed.
Except then another flash occurred. A blast of wind blew the goblins to pieces. The glow in Rys’s hand grew brighter.
“What was that about?” Fara asked from behind him.
He let the spell drop and turned to face her. He’d killed the remaining goblins with his wind spell, so no threats remained. On her end, the shark monster had been pulverized into the stonework. Water coated her hands. She dried them off using her oversized sleeves.
“Testing out my sorcery,” he said.
“I thought you were more powerful than this,” she said.
He shrugged. “Imagine that you went to sleep for a really long time. Then you woke up and all of your magic was different. Sure, it’s more powerful, but that doesn’t help you learn new things faster. I’m a fast learner, but I still need to learn.”
It was a convenient lie, and not too far from the truth. He was learning his new Gifts, but his sorcery was unchanged. The change to using a knowledge Gift affected how he cast, while the seals affected what spells he could use.
“So you’re actually weakened?” Fara asked, her eyes narrowing. Her tails fanned out behind her for a brief moment.
Seconds passed as Rys and Fara stared each other in the eye. Then she lowered her tails.
“You did a lot better than I expected,” she said. “How does your magic work?”
“It’s infernal sorcery. It uses infernal energy.”
“Amazing. I use spiritualism. It runs on the power of spirits,” Fara replied with a roll of her eyes.
Rys led her to where Orthrus continued to hover. The wisp had ignored the battle.
“Unlike your answer, I was being serious. Infernal energy is a type of magical energy. It comes from Hell. In order to use it safely, it needs to be processed or else it kills humans,” Rys said. “Hence my need to relearn a few things.”
Fara frowned. “Your magic literally runs on the power of Hell?”
“Yes. Great, isn’t it?”
“No.”
Rys ignored her, and continued his explanation, “Most infernalists use magical artifacts. Rings, staves, amulets. Those work, but not that efficiently. I used infernal Gifts specifically intended to convert the energy for me. But the devils who gave me those Gifts are now long dead. I’m hijacking another Gift to do the conversion right now, which isn’t ideal.”
Eventually he’d need to find a new Gift to do that. Or maybe he’d actually invest in the artifacts, so that he wasn’t reliant on his knowledge Gift to cast his sorcery.
“Your spiritualism is much more powerful than I expected. You’re channeling your spells using your tails. Which means you hold your astral energy in them as well, until you need to convert it into magical energy for spellcasting,” he said.
Fara blinked. “What?”
“You… don’t know that?” he asked.
“I use my tails to cast arrays, which is what foxes call our spiritual techniques. I don’t understand anything else you just said, other than the words,” Fara said. She frowned. “I’m not sure if you’re trying to confuse me or sound smart.”
He let the topic pass. If Fara didn’t understand her own magic, it wasn’t worth raising.
But he was very curious about how her magic worked. If she were an enemy and this were his original time, he could have dissected her and worked out how she ticked. But she wasn’t, so that was off the table.
For that matter, her hostility had drastically reduced in the space of a few short hours. That brought a smirk to Rys’s face.
“You said I did better than expected. I told you that I could handle this place,” Rys said.
Not that he felt so confident given how much of his power was missing, but only an idiot showed weakness in front of someone like Fara.
“Most people don’t come down here bare-handed and unarmored,” Fara said. “So yes, I’m impressed.”
Fair point. Rys tugged at his silk clothing and grimaced. Not exactly what he usually wore to a fight.
“I’m a sorcerer. I’ve trained to fight without equipment,” he said. “But I’ll forge some weapons and armor once we’re back and I have some tools. There wasn’t the time. I should have asked Vallis to bring some.” He stroked his chin.
“Forge?” Fara raised an eyebrow. “Vallis said you claimed to be some famous demonic general. Why would you know how to forge anything?”
“I grew up on the streets of Ruathym—that was the capital of the Infernal Empire, by the way,” Rys said. “Humans were the lowest of all races. Little magical ability. Short lifespans. Weak physical ability. That made us expendable in a society that ran entirely on the individual power and whims of various infernals.”
Fara scowled. “How could a race as infamously evil and capricious as devils and demons rule an entire continent?”
“By beating rules and order into everybody and teaching them that the only way to improve things is to either become more powerful or work for somebody who already is.” Rys shrugged. “But we’re digressing.”
“It is an interesting digression,” Orthrus said, hovering nearby. He remained near the same stonework as earlier, still indicating for Rys to uncover whatever lay beneath.
“True,” Fara said. “So, what? You started as a lowly human and… became a general that knows how to forge weapons?” She looked skeptical.
Rys chuckled. “It sounds stupid, but that’s because you don’t know the time span involved.”
His gaze became distant. Many of his oldest memories were foggy at best. That wasn’t due to the seals. When his body had been reconstructed, not everything had been brought across perfectly. He had been an ordinary human once, and that meant his memory had been less than perfect at that time.
“I got off the streets by becoming a smith,” he said, flexing his fists. “Then I learned rune-crafting. I needed something to make me different from the thousands of other weaponsmiths in Ruathym. Unfortunately, that attracted attention. Exactly what you shouldn’t do in Ruathym. A succubus took an interest in me. Over the decades, history played out.”
Fara frowned. “That’s awfully vague.”
“Are you going to tell me everything about your past?” he asked. “Is that what we’re doing now? Swapping life stories? You wanted to know how I can claim to be a famous general and a blacksmith. The answer is that I was a smith long before I got pumped full of infernal energies.”
Looking away, Fara rubbed her arms. Her tails lowered behind her. Rys suspected the movements of her tails might not be entirely random or driven by emotion. Did they indicate something more and he couldn’t understand them?
“The stone,” Orthrus said, drawing Rys’s attention back to his objective.
Nothing about this patch of flooring looked different. Rys looked at it from a few different angles, suspicious of Orthrus’s intentions. The attack from earlier had thrown him, even though it hadn’t been too serious. Fara might be impressed, but Rys wasn’t. The goblins moved quickly and were numerous, but they were no stronger than your average lesser demon.
Rys reached down and slipped his fingers through the cracks between the stonework. Immediately, he knew this flooring was off. This wasn’t a block of stone, but a thin plate. His Gift kicked in and he hurled the stone plate to one side.
A circular panel of steel lay beneath it. Glowing lines of energy crisscross it and met in the center. Strange symbols were etched into the steel. His translation Gift didn’t work on written languages, so it couldn’t help here.
An indent in the center held what appeared to be a long black slate of either steel or stone.
Rys gripped the slate and pulled on it, but it was stuck fast.
“Twist it first, then pull,
” Orthrus advised.
Rys followed the instructions. The entire steel panel turned along with the plate, drawing heavily on Rys’s Gift and causing the muscles in his arm to bulge. Fara gasped, then covered her mouth with her hands. She looked away with a blush and flattened ears when Rys looked at her.
Once the panel turned ninety degrees clockwise, it stopped moving. Rys tugged on the slate and it pulled free. The lines of energy vanished. Nothing else changed, however.
Standing up, Rys looked over his prize. It was roughly two feet long and an inch thick. It also weighed as much as an adult man, if not more. If dropped from a height, it would crush somebody flat.
But it felt inert. The material was unfamiliar to Rys and seemed far denser than any stone he had handled.
“We have what we need. Let us leave before anything else finds you,” Orthrus said. He left the way they came.
Or at least, it should have been the way they came.
“What the hell is this?” Rys asked.
The room they entered looked unfamiliar to Rys. They had backtracked, but entered an entirely different room. This chamber had only a single entrance and exit. The same had been true of every room he had been in so far.
“It’s the Labyrinth,” Fara said. “We’re only a few rooms in, so the exit can’t be far.”
Rys frowned, then it clicked. “The magic in every wall. It’s because the entire Labyrinth is changing, isn’t it? That’s how we were ambushed from behind even though we were in a one-way passage.”
“Indeed. The Labyrinth is ever-changing. An entity beyond the restrictions of time and space,” Orthrus said. “The fox’s comment about passages across the archipelago is true. The Labyrinth stretches across every island in the archipelago—it is a part of them.”
Aware that Fara was here, he remained silent. But he had many questions.
Fortunately, Orthrus anticipated the most obvious one. How had he known where this stone slate was?
“I have considerable knowledge of this place and how to navigate it. But my methods are imperfect. Fortunately, we didn’t need to descend past the first floor. But my senses tell me that we will need to go deeper if we wish to find the power conduits for the seals.”
This explained a lot. Fara’s fear of the Labyrinth. The weakness of the beasts here. How entrances cropped up across the entire archipelago at random.
But it raised so many questions that it left Rys hungering for answers. He needed to wait, for now.
Orthrus led them back to the castle. After sealing the gate up again with the iron bar, they ascended the staircase to the third level.
Once there, they followed Orthrus to a hidden chamber behind a false wall. Despite its hiding place, others had clearly found it since the castle had been abandoned.
The chamber looked vaguely similar to an office. Rotted desks occupied much of the room. A cracked dais sat in the corner and had been stripped of its decorative lining. Little else had survived centuries of looting. The walls were filled with holes and unreadable markings, just like the rest of the castle.
What drew Rys’s eye were specific holes near the dais that looked far larger than those elsewhere. Long, flat hollows in the walls and floor that looked suspiciously similar in size to the slate that Rys held in his arms.
Rys slid the slate into a hollow and twisted it. It locked in place. At that moment, Rys felt the slightest twinge of something brushing against his mind. Before he could respond to it, it vanished.
Then his attention was captured by everything around him.
The room burst into light. The power slate lit up with white veins of magical light, which then stretched across the stone walls. Rys felt magic thrum in the air and even within his bones. Something pushed into his mind and flooded him with power.
Every object in the room began to restore itself as the magic touched it. The rotten wood regenerated. Unrecognizable piles of black matter unraveled into paper. The stonework gleamed as if it were brand new while gold and silver decorative trimmings appeared out of nowhere. More furnishings constructed themselves from nothing.
Rys remained dead still, afraid that he might be caught up in this madness if he moved. Orthrus buzzed about excitedly. With a squeal, Fara leaped out of the chamber and watched from outside, peeking from around a corner while her blue flames hovered above her head.
After several long minutes, the magic receded back into the stone slate. The veins of light vanished. Only the slate itself remained lit up, continuing to emanate magical energy.
The room now looked like a control room or an extremely fancy magical atelier. A glowing magical image of the ruined castle hovered above the dais in soft white light. Elsewhere, Rys saw more hollows within the walls and floor. Places for more slates to be inserted.
“I’ve seen a lot, but this was impressive by itself,” Rys said. “I can definitely believe this is pre-Emergence magic.”
Orthrus chuckled. “It’s different, isn’t it? Even if you’ve played with a worldstone, you must know that this is far superior.”
“Pre-Emergence?” Fara asked, creeping back into the chamber.
Oh, right. She was still here.
“You know what the Emergence is, don’t you?” Rys asked.
Fara rolled her eyes. “It’s when the divine races first arrived in Harrium—the angels and the infernals. Not that I’d call any of them divine.”
The continued use of the term was curious to Rys. Races who came from other worlds were called “divine” and he thought it was because they had ruled the world. But people still called them divine, even though it had been over a thousand years since the last great divine empire collapsed.
He gestured to the restored room around him. “This is the work of a divine race. But not one I recognize. On top of that, the power is obscene. The angels were the only race I knew of that could manipulate time and space easily, and they never did it on this scale.” He chuckled darkly. “I plugged a stone block into a hole and undid millennia of decay. The Labyrinth recreates itself within minutes and extends across an entire archipelago. So, yes, this is pre-Emergence.”
More to the point, this was astral power.
There was a lot more separating the three methods of magic than the types of energy they used.
Astral energy was the stuff of souls and far more powerful than sorcerous energy. Any being strong enough to work with astral energy directly had the ability to manipulate reality itself. An angel might not cut an arm off with their sword, but instead sever the very idea of the arm being connected to the arm. Regeneration or healing became impossible.
With enough power and talent, sorcery could mimic astral power, but that was it. The greatest Infernal Gifts only scratched at what was possible with astral power, because infernals relied on sorcery.
Fara’s use of spiritualism attempted to bridge the gap between sorcery and astral power, because she had the raw power of astral energy at her disposal. Her disadvantage was that she couldn’t directly use that energy. That was why she used spiritual techniques—they were a way to safely use the astral energy without harming her.
In a way, spiritualism was similar to infernal sorcery. The energy source was lethal to the user, but it granted far greater power if used correctly.
Rys abandoned his thoughts. Instead, he looked at the glowing blueprint of the castle that hovered above him. Fara followed his eyes.
As if responding to their gaze, the image began to shift. The ruined exterior morphed into an ordinary keep and turned blue.
“I’m scared to think what that means,” Fara said.
Rys felt power pulse within the castle. He didn’t feel it through his magical senses, but deep within his mind.
During the chaos, something had connected to his mind. He reached for it and found a massive wall of power, too vast for him to comprehend. But he sensed something beyond it.
He decided not to find out what it was. It felt dormant.
Whatever it was, its r
aw power dwarfed even Lacrissa’s by at least an order of magnitude, and anything more powerful than the Succubus Queen wasn’t something he wanted to disturb right now.
But that connection allowed him to sense the state of the castle. Something was moving within it.
He stared at the blueprint. The sub-levels of the castle shifted now and turned blue.
Suddenly, Orthrus broke his silence, “You are the master of the castle now. I am heartened to see that I was right to awaken you, after centuries of effort. That leaves you with complete control over the castle, including its ability to remodel itself.”
Fara raised an eyebrow and looked at Rys questioningly. Presumably, she had sensed Orthrus’s speech, if not the content.
“This allows me to change the castle’s exterior and interior,” Rys said. “Just like the Labyrinth.”
Fara’s eyes widened. “That stone block allowed you to do this?”
“I did say this was pre-Emergence,” Rys said.
“I… Sorry,” Fara muttered, her tails falling low.
The two of them exited the chamber. Outside, the sub-levels already looked better. The stonework repaired itself as they walked upstairs, and dust vanished. Magical torches sprung up along the walls and lit themselves.
Fara remained silent, but her demeanor said plenty. Her ears remained flattened against her head and her tails hung low against the ground. She rubbed her hands against her arms as she looked around.
Shortly afterward, the two of them stood in the empty hall. Just as occurred below, this place was being repaired as well. The plant life vanished into motes of prismatic light as the castle destroyed it using magic. Even the ceiling repaired itself rapidly, blocking out the sunlight. Here as well, torches appeared to provide light.
The architecture was very simple, he realized. Probably because he hadn’t actively thought of much when he looked at the blueprint. It had simply tried to become a “castle” or something similar. The hall lacked any furnishings inside it.
Demon's Throne Page 4
