The Umbral Messiah Pt. 16

"You bitch!" Sari snarled. She stepped towards the glowing light - but before she could close her hands around her, the Keeper faded into hissing sparkles. Her voice had the last laugh, echoing throughout the room.

"The way has been opened. Now, the choice comes down to you three..."

Charlotte shook her head, slowly, as Sari turned to face her. "Huh," she said, softly. "I always did wonder how I fit in here. I guessed that explains it." She slid her arms over her shoulders, her lower arms cupping her belly as she tightened her grip around herself. "Tossed between Messiahs like a pet." She looked grim. "I even get fucked by each of you!"

Sari bit back her immediate response of 'well, except for Hectae' - which she was fairly sure came from Ranna. At least, she hoped it came from Ranna. Instead, she stepped forward, taking one of Charlotte's lower hands, squeezing.

"Fuck that thing," she growled, softly. "You have a reason to be here."

"What?" Charlotte asked. "If...if the Chanti machine down here controls the Void, builds the barriers, and the Reliquary allows the power required to enact the change world wide, then the Keeper is entirely correct. You'd need a direct and intuitive understanding of the Void, the kind you can only get by what you and the Corpse King and Hectae have gone through: To have died and returned to live once more! I'm a wizard. A powerful wizard. But...but I'm not that!"

The wall started to rumble. Stone shifted. Ground against one another. The walls were shifting and moving - the Keeper arranging things to that they'd have a clear shot to the heart of the engine of Chanti creation and destruction. Charlotte and Sari saw, at the same time, that the ceiling was starting to plane down towards them as it tilted to the side. Sari and Charlotte ran together, sprinting towards the exit, and reached it moments before the wall finished crunching down behind them. Smoke exploded past them, blown out of the room by the shifting of stone and metal.

Sari found herself standing at the top of a set of stairs that led down towards a rectangular stone plinth that sat in what seemed to be an infinite darkness. The black stone almost blended with the darkness around it - but the light cast by the glow stones placed here and there made it clear enough that there were parts of the room that simply dropped away into nothingness. The rectangular stone plinth had two other stairs leading up from it, forming into a large triangle with Sari and Charlotte standing on one of the points - the other two points held figures that she recognized as the Corpse King and Hectae. Hectae started down her stairs, taking them two at a time. The Corpse King ambled, casually, not bothering to hurry.

Sari turned to Charlotte, taking her hand, squeezing it. "Come on," she said.

Charlotte bit her lip. Her eyes were locked on the slab at the heart of the room. "There's a place for the Reliquary," she whispered.

Sari gulped. "Come on." She tugged this time.

Charlotte and her came down the stairs and all three Umbral Messiahs came to the Alter. There, they stood, looking across at one another.

The Corpse King was deadly and regal in her nudity, her stitched together body radiating a cold beauty that made Sari's heart throb and her girldick ache with eagerness. The Corpse King looked at her with a smirk, her eyes cold. "It seems killing you didn't really stick as much as it should have. Ah well." She shrugged her broad shoulders. "And who is this?" Her eyes shifted to Charlotte. "You seem familiar."

"This is Charlotte," Sari said, quietly. "Your goons had something to do with her transformation. Threw her into the spider pit."

"Ahhh..." The Corpse King chuckled.

Then her eyes fell on Hectae.

Hectae grinned at her.

"Sup, Mistress," she said.

The Corpse King's face flickered with momentary recognition.

Then Hectae's eye glowed bright blue and a beam of searing white light shot from her eye - shooting straight at the Corpse King's head.

Time seemed to stop.

The Corpse King moved with glacial slowness to Sari's eyes. But she was frozen. The beam was faster than an arrow. Faster than a cannon ball. Faster than a thought. But despite that, the Corpse King placed her broad palm between Hectae's blast and herself - the blue beam terminated in her palm with a flash and a hiss of smoke and steam. The Corpse King rocked backwards - but her eyes flashed. Purple chains exploded from the ground and snaked up, trying to grab onto Hectae's wrists, ankles, throat. Hecate sprang backwards as the Corpse King landed with a grunt. She glared at Hecate and Sari snarled herself.

SARI.

The voice that spoke boomed within her mind, echoing outwards. It was deep. It was masculine. It was...

It was immediately recognizable. It was her father.

Hecate growled as she stepped forward. "You took my severed head and you played with my soul like it was fucking cheap wrapping paper! You made me your goddamn slave!" She drew from her belt a short, brutal looking cleaver and sprang on the Corpse King. The chains that had been trying to grab onto her thrust forward - snatching up one of her wrists, yanking her backwards for a moment. She grunted as the Corpse King sprang to her feet.

"You were already dead. Killed by your master," the Corpse King said, wiping her smoking hand against her belly, leaving behind a smear of black powder. "Do you think you'd prefer nothingness and oblivion? I gave you undeath."

"Fuck you!"

The scything blue beam whipped out again.

SARI. RELEASE ME. RELEASE US .

The swirling chaos of the future unfolded itself before Sari's eyes. She stepped forward. She could taste the freedom of the demons in her mind, on her tongue. The impossible madness of the moment. It blazed through her. Her eyes filled half with the fight before her, half with the call of her father. She realized, then, how...impossibly stupid her earlier confidence had been. Her father was a demon lord, trapped behind barriers so thick and impermeable that they maintained reality itself, and he still had influence enough to impregnate a woman. How much greater would his power be here? In the heart of the onrushing change of the world?

She felt the booming voice in her again and again.

YOU WILL HAVE THE WHOLE WORLD. YOU WOULD HAVE ETERNITY. YOU WOULD HAVE TOMORROW. SIMPLY FREE US, NOW. NOW! NOW!

She took a step forward. A step forward. Charlotte called out to her, but Sari could barely hear anything around the roaring in her ears.

Hecate was grabbed by the Corpse King's throat and tossed towards the altar. She caught herself against it, coughed, choked.

The Corpse King slapped her palm down on the altar.

The Reliquary was in her right hand. It glowed brilliantly. Shimmered with its inner light. Sari's eyes shone with the light of it, reflecting in her eyes. It looked remarkably like a...a cock. A massive, powerful, draconic cock. Sari took another step forward as she tried to hold herself backwards. Her heart sank as her hand reached out, her fingers spreading. Sari flung herself against the chains inside of her mind, against the power of her own father, trying to wrench her hand backwards, to retain control of her own body.

Maybe it was her experiences with Ranna.

Maybe it was her own willpower.

Maybe it was nothing at all.

But from Sari's perspective, the reliquary seemed to hover just out of her reach and her hand stopped, fingers jerking backwards, clenching inwards in a claw as she forced herself to not reach that last inch. She held it, just long enough.

The reliquary flared with purple light and sprang off the table, yanked away by a telekinetic hand. It swept through the air, twirled, and clapped against Charlotte's palm. She staggered backwards, as if the weight of the thing was incredible. She clutched it with both of her lower hands and shouted, as loudly as she could.

"Stop!"

Hecate, The Corpse King and even Sari stopped. Sari's body felt as if it was no longer being puppeted from the inside - the fingers of her father's control slipping away as the reliquary was removed from the altar.

Charlotte glared at the three Umbral Messiahs, her lowers hand gripping the draconic cock even fighter, her other hands spreading to either side of her - gesturing to the whole scene. "Enough! Enough!" She glared at them. "The Keeper says you three get to choose what the future is. But I say, what in the hells says that the Keeper knows everything about everything? The Chanti built great relics and ruins - but they're dead and gone. And we're here. I say, that means we get to decide what the future is like. We get to decide how the changing of the world will happen. Not them!"

The Corpse King frowned. "Give me the Reliquary, Charlotte," she said, holding out her hand.

"No," Charlotte snapped. "I'd rather toss it into the Void!" She pointed to the blackness surrounding them. Sari blinked, realizing that the stairs had vanished in the gathering darkness. It was like they were slowly descending - the platform they stood on creeping down into night, away from the doorways that led back up into the Chanti structure and into the warm, sunlit skies of Shandil and the world beyond. Charlotte shook her head. "That's where we are now. This whole structure was built to connect Void and World - to provide the pivot point. But it also means that I can just derail everything by throwing this thing away." She hefted up the Reliquary.

The Corpse King clenched her fist. Black fire swelled around her knuckles and she took half a step forward.

Sari and Hecate both spoke up at the same time.

"Don't even think about it," Hecate growled.

"Stop right there," Sari snarled.

The Corpse King opened her fingers, black fire popping and hissing around her fingertips. She inclined her head, subtly, as if bowing at court. "Very well then," she said, her voice serious. "We're at an impasse. I attempt to get the Reliquary to save the world-" Hecate snorted loudly. "-then you two attack me, buy time for your spider-touched lover to doom the world. But if either of you even take a step towards that altar with the reliquary, then I will drop this whole structure into the Void without a second thought."

Sari sniffed.

Hecate smirked. "And I have my eye." She tapped her temple.

"A Chanti trifling," The Corpse King said, waving her hand casually. "Why do you think I took it to study?"

"Well, cause you steal everything," Hecate growled. "Souls, bodies, gold, why not eyes."

Charlotte shook her head. "Shut up! Stop bickering." She huffed. "As much as I hate to admit it...the Corpse King has a point."

Sari blinked at her.

"What?" Charlotte asked. "She's right - she does want to save the world. If we do nothing, then the Barriers will choke the vitality from the world. Without the chaos and creativity that is the essence of demonic energies, without the death and release that is necromantic energies, without the Void, then the world becomes undone. One way or another. The Era of Shattering, as the Keeper calls it, is just...just..." She fumbled for words.

"A loan," Hecate said, smirking. "Like putting off a debt to your kids."

"Exactly," The Corpse King said. "My research is clear. An era of sleeping dead is the only stability and peace this world can know. It is not oblivion - it is eternity."

"Except the Void recedes naturally," Sari said, frowning.

"We can make the barriers work for us, not against us," the Corpse King countered. "Bring the Void in, then don't let it out. Make this mingling of death and life last forever."

"But that's just stasis," Sari said, throwing up her hands, her tail lashing. "That's just eternally laying around-"

"In paradise," the Corpse King said, her eyes growing faintly distant. "I have been in the state I wish to bring to the world, Devilspawn. I've felt the cold embrace of eternity. I've lain beneath the silver surf of that endless river and felt the turning of the ages pass me by. In a single eyeblink, I endured the caress of forever and woke knowing my purpose: To usher in a world where all might know such peace. Such contentment."

Hecate snorted. "Sounds like you got touched in the head." She glared across the altar that separated her from the revenant.

"Ah, yes, I defer to your greater mystical knowledge and wisdom, oh woman who spent her entire adult life being beaten about the head by clubs for a living," the Corpse King managed to pack enough sarcasm into her voice to startle a little giggle from Charlotte. Sari glanced at her lover and Charlotte actually blushed.

"S-She can be quite charming when she puts her mind to it," she said, shyly.

"I know," the Corpse King said, winking at Charlotte.

"...how many times did you lay her?" Sari blurted out.

"Once!" Charlotte squeaked at the same time the Corpse King said. "Seventeen."

"Seventeen!?" Sari and Charlotte said at the same time - though Charlotte sounded more disbelieving than Sari, who sounded more impressed. The Corpse King looked smug.

"I kept better count of your orgasms than you. Considering you were having them, I'm sure we can forgive you for this lapse," she said, smugly. Then, shaking her head, she gestured to Hecate, her voice growing stern. "And what do you offer, if you are given the chance to guide this machine, mercenary?"

Hecate snorted. "I just know what the world's like. I've had the worst of it slammed into me again and again and again - and you know what? There's more joy than there is misery in there." She shrugged her broad, muscular shoulders. "I've seen pain and heartbreak, and beauty and love and the pleasure of a fine woman and fine wine. And, hell, we're still recovering from the Shattering - the Silver Crown has broken and the Free Cities are all licking their wounds. But I've had to escort around enough wizards and arcanists and siege engineers to know we've only scratched the surface of what we've learned out there."

She lifted a scarred hand, ticking them off on her fingers. "When my pa was a merc, there were no cannons. There were no telescopes, hell! The old ways are falling by the side and who knows what the Arcane Universities are going to put out next as wizards plumb the arts of sky and sea and shit." She snorted. "It's all a bit above my head...but also, it's my head when the newfangled bullshit comes out. I've had to adapt to some new magical spell more times than I can count."

She gestured around herself. "The Chanti, they had a big ass Empire, but they also didn't change much, did they?"

"Noooo," Charlotte said, drawing the word out. "The Chanti seemed remarkably stable and controlled over their long rule."

"Exactly, they never made a Chanti cannon, nor Chanti gunpowder," Hecate said. "Hell, their stonecraft isn't even as clever as ours." She sniffed. "I've had to fight behind an old Chanti fort's walls, they didn't have half the tricks we've invented to kill each other better."

Charlotte frowned and Sari's brow furrowed. "So, what? You think we can let the world wind down because people in the future will be better able to fix it in the future?"

Sari nodded. "Hell, if we all walk out of here, we'd have two of the best wizards the world's ever seen working on it." She smirked at the Corpse King. "Admit it, the idea of studying the Chanti machines and the Barrier has to be appealing."

The Corpse King pursed her lips. "Hurmph. Maybe. But I'm not sure I can countenance the suffering that would inflict. Because while we work, orphans would still starve. Kings would still wage unjust wars. And there's no assurance that our labor would bear any fruit."

Hecate snorted. "Yeah, you fucking take risks when you live. But you wouldn't understand that, Corpser, would you." Her glowing blue eye flashed as she glared at the other woman, who glared right back at her.

The three girls then all looked at Sari.

Sari blinked. "W-What?" She asked, her red skin flushing.

"Well, if we're deciding the fate of the world, we need to hear the third possibility," Charlotte said, chuckling.

Sari shook her head. "I don't want to let my father out. I don't want-" She made a choking noise. Her eyes closed and then Ranna's voice spoke from her. "No! Stop!" She writhed, then jerked her head to the side. When her eyes opened, they had gone from yellow-black to black on black. But despite the lack of color, they still glowed with an inner light. Her grin grew confident and her voice was rich and dark and masculine, rumbling from her throat. "I believe I can answer the question - and I apologize, in advance, for the discomfort this is giving my daughter. I am Amh Krahos Zhoark Shegar Esuiberus Kalkameron Morn. I am also known by my other self-earned titles: the Devourer of Stars, the Singer of Endings, the Thousand Headed Deity, the Wheel Smashing Lord and Cycle Breaking Death Word."

Sari bowed, sweeping her arm wide, her body clearly moving at someone else's beck and call.

"You can call me Amh Shegar."

"Let her go right now!" Charlotte growled.

"I would if I could," Amh Shegar said, amicably, tail flicking behind him as he stood up within his daughter's body. "But only my blood and this weakening between the worlds allows me to reach beyond my prison at all."

In a remarkable display, all three women standing around the altar - who had been deadly enemies at previous points in their lives - seemed united in their antipathy to the Demon King. Amh Shegar lifted up Sari's palms, in a placating gesture. He chuckled, nervously. "Please! Please, at least let me have my word. All of you have an extremely limited perspective - some broadening may be exactly what you need. After all, two of you are arcanists. You know the need for wisdom, eh? And, my fine Hecate, you are a sellsword. Knowing what lays beyond the next hill is vital to keep your head, no?"

The three women exchanged a glance. "Fine," Charlotte said. "But it'll have to be a hell of a pitch."

Amh Shegar chuckled. "Amusing thing to say to a Demon Lord. But, well, we demons are locked beyond the world by the Barriers. We live in a world without time - for the Void is before and after all things. Thus, we have no means by which we can see a better tomorrow or a forgotten yesterday. We long for this...and in exchange, we are willing to offer you everything ." He spread Sari's palm upwards, and a shimmering mist wafted before him - and from it seemed to shine every treasure, every pleasure, every comfort that anyone could imagine. Warm beds. Beautiful partners. Gleaming jewels. "Demons can shape reality itself with our will. Given continuity, there is no reason, no reason at all, for us to deny this world a paradise. Anything you want, we would give in exchange for this magnificent boon."

"How could we possibly trust that offer!?" Charlotte asked, her eyes wide.

"Why would we ever betray you?" Amh Shegar looked honestly confused. "We would have everything we've ever wanted. Every trick, every betrayal, ever lie told by a demon has been towards a singular goal: To have a past and a future and a life . Why do you think we keep trying to posses human bodies?" He chuckled. "Ranna herself was willing to sell the rest of us short to make her position secure - and I'm willing to forgive her for that. So long as we do get free. If not, I'll be... quite upset."

Sari's faced shifted and Ranna spoke through her. "H-Heh, uh, so, I think you can trust my liege. Who I was completely faithful too. In my own way!" She giggled, nervously, before Amh Shegar returned to the forefront.