Tragedy of Gold

"God's Blood," Bart breathed, and Mihai cackled as a single tear ran down Cithara's cheek.

"How does it feel Hero? All of this, ALL OF IT!" he roared at the end, shaking the halls before directing his hands down at Bart in a showy gesture, his voice rolling back to a purr. His face was an exquisite mask of nigh-orgasmic delight.

"... is your fault."

It hit Bart like a sledgehammer. Mad he may be, yet Mihai was highly intelligent. Never had he reasoned poorly in their engagements, in building this enmity... was it all artificial? Bart drew in a breath and set his teeth, his friends seemed to waver and instead, he planted his heels, refusing to be moved.

"Fate, Prophecy, or sheer blind luck, I made my choices and I would make them again — aye I've seen the Cycle, and in it, I saw hope!" he shouted back, seeming to split the pall falling over the group. He advanced a step, taking his blade in both hands and bringing it before him in an advancing guard — as if the Absolute Iron could guard him from the cultist's words as much as his body.

"A puppet who sees his strings is still a puppet, Bart!" Mihai shouted back, stepping boldly towards the Paladin anew, blood creeping along the floor with him like a crimson carpet. "All this bravado on a reused script, all this might on recycled conflicts!" his face twisted with a madness Bart remembered, a gleam of the impossible places he'd seen, the infinite Cycle beyond.

"Cut the strings, Bart, burn it all down — we'll make something glorious and new out of its parts," he crooned and gore crawled up his fingers, his limb lengthening with it into overlong, hooked talons of dripping, frozen blood and viscera.

"We'll make The End."

Bart lashed out then, blade snapping out from a high guard into a serpent-quick downward cut at Mihai's face, the man's strange gore-caked arm lashing out and meeting the Absolute Iron blade with a grisly crunching sound like crushing ice, slapping it aside from its trajectory and grasping the blade firmly — even as the frozen bloody member began to writhe and bubble where it made contact with the hateful metal. Bart and Mihai's eyes locked across the bind, Bart snarling in response:

"There may be an End to things," he rasped, leaning on the bind, making the blade cut and bite into the cultist's flesh. "It may even be soon — but I promise you monster — that you will not be there to see it."

Mihai's grin turned even more mad, face practically warping to accommodate so many teeth in a smile, squeezing tightly around Bart's clashing blade, even as he began to whimper frantically against the searing pain as the First Blade vented its hatred into his mere touch, he laughed and it was froth-flecked and full of malice.

"Ever true to your role, well then. Dance for me, puppet." Bart's only response was to clap down his visor, eyes set. To his left came an exultant roar, and he ducked aside the first of two savage cuts from Parias, bringing his blade up in a brutal series of mid to high parries that sent sparks flying between their blades as the edges met. Bart seized the mantle, golden-eyed and blazing he adjusted his footing and drove back at Parias with a mighty thrust, both hands on the hilt couching it to the right side of his frame, his entire body coiled into the motion. The thrust drove forward with such inhuman force Bart's armor rattled, and the ashes gathered on the nearby planks scattered, blown clear by the sheer force of displaced air as he drove that triangular point at Parias' black heart with superhuman strength.

Parias snapped his blade directly before him and pivoted his hips, responding with equally preternatural speed, he slapped Bart's blade to the side, clashing his own blade against it with a shower of sparks and a scream of metal, the two champions met crosspiece to crosspiece with an impact that shook the floor beneath them, Parias' eyes wide with glee.

"IMPRESSIVE!" he exulted in a throaty roar, shoving Bart backward and breaking the lock, only to be immediately forced into a full defensive parry — as a speartip nearly took his eye. Gram had quite literally leapt into battle, his polearm leading with a thrust he smoothly carried into a rapid series of stabs and cuts fully taking advantage of the bec-de-corbin's superior reach to drive Parias back off Bart, getting a spitting series of curses from the black-armored murderer as he slapped, deflected, and dodged the flurry before Gram nimbly danced backward, his lighter armor and springier build giving him far greater mobility than Bart had.

"Do you NEVER cease talking?" the visored Darrowmite spat in a weary tone, snapping his spear up to a high guard with both hands, a disgusted roar came from his side, and Mihai lunged at him, both arms rippling forwards into hooked talons of frozen, tainted gore as he lunged for the mortal spearman — only once again to be deflected — by a blazing golden-eyed goddess.

Cithara's horn had intersected the lunging slash, and she'd interposed herself between Gram and Mihai, bulling him backward with surprising strength and cutting, sweeping blows of her horn, chipping chunks of his hardened bloody weaponry free as she pressed him with fury.

"Unhand my children!" she bellowed in a clarion tone, driving him back further with a radial burst of force — eyes, hooves, and horn blazing with the grasp of her orbit. She gathered a pressing point of light at the tip of her horn, the air around it rippling and twisting with heat as the Queen of Love's anger crushed the air around her glittering weapon with main force, and hurled that pressurized product at Mihai in a sudden, piercing spear of blazing, semi-liquid flame — the lance of searing compressed air blasting in a tight, spear-like beam at the cultist, who's teeth clenched along with his hands.

The impact shook the entire building, and staggered even Bart and Parias in their heavy armor a step, stopping the melee as a white flash of raining sparks and hellish flame... was stopped.

Mihai cackled madly as a single hand pressed back on the burning ray, sending chips of flame and scattering white-hot sparks flaring around him, starting small fires and burning holes in his clothing here and there where they landed. A swirling maelstrom sat in his unnaturally mutated palm, forming a semi-circular barrier over his hand, deflecting the intense beam of heat in a blooming pall of ash and mist as the moisture in the air flash-vaporized, making the cultist's swirling shield visible to the naked eye.

"A wonderful performance from the Queen of Harlots!" he crowed, forcing his way step by step forward through the intense pressure of the cutting beam of white-hot inferno, his shaking arm growing more steady as Cithara's own strength began to waver, she clenched her teeth and set her hooves, driving forward with the hellish lance, causing Mihai to stagger against the renewed intensity.

"Do... stay for the finale... I promise... it will be to die for..." she snarled, her blazing golden eyes gleaming with rage; Mihai snarled and brought both his hands up, another chained whirlwind dancing in his palm as he doubled his shield, splitting the beam and suddenly giving a yell — pushing forward, and then flinging his arms wide. There was a surge of air from his extended hands, and the beam suddenly bloomed and blossomed, Cithara's eyes went wide and Mihai's dilated to points of teeth-baring madness. There was a faint whining sound, and suddenly everything went deathly silent save for the muted roar of the billowing, roiling bloom of energy.

Then, it exploded.

The burst of fire and air pressure hurled everyone standing to the floor, Bart and Parias making a clashing cacophony as they were laid out, Gram bouncing in a tight ball of limbs, leaving a skittering trail of sparks as he slid across the cobbles. Nazir and Rashid were both caught weapons out, mid-rush as they closed with the battle — the two of them along with Naima thrown unceremoniously to the ground, head over heels by the blast wave, adding Lidia and Cithara to the scattering of forms, blasted from their feet into dazed tangles of limbs and gear. Everyone was half-deaf and half-blind from the explosion. Even Parias and Ishtar, stunned and staggering with everyone.

Everyone, but Mihai.

Exultant, he stood over the wreckage, newly-formed cracks in the stone foundation snaked outwards and chunks of pillars falling all about them, raising new clouds of ash, lime, and dust. His laughter rang over the shattered halls as he suddenly rose into the air, his body peppered with rapidly-healing burns and gouges as he spread his arms around him.

"Enough! We've all danced a lovely show, all you puppets neatly in a row, each waiting for your call to the stage — the Champion's perfect fated party! All ready to cover each other's faults, to fill each other's gaps — truly inspiring," he belted out in a tone of absolute disgust, a grin splitting his face anew. "I will admit, there is a pageantry to this I enjoy, a certain vitality to the struggle — however," he focused on Cithara.

"I arrived with the intention of victory."

There was a rumbling sound as the party regained their feet, the ground began to vibrate, dust dancing and skittering across the foundation stones and cracked floorboards. Bart turned his gaze rapidly around, Parias stepping backward, a knowing look of smugness on his weathered face. Mihai caught his gaze.

"Did you even stop to ponder what I was doing here? Why all the corpses? Why the altar? Why ALL OF THIS?!" he cried at the end in delight, spreading his arms. The shaking became unbearable, once again everyone staggered from their feet as the sound of rending earth and splintering stone came to them, and the masonry beneath them began to shudder, heave, and buckle — focused directly beneath Cithara's sprawled form.

"I CAME TO KILL A GODDESS!" he screamed, his voice shrill with ecstasy.

The ground rent asunder, an explosion of debris blinded Bart, and the force of it threw him and his companions into a sprawl, Nazir caught it in midstep as he regained his feet, sending him hurtling backward into a wall with a meaty smack, Lidia and Naima bowled after him in a pile while the rest of the party was knocked rolling and prone. Bart slid and bounced until he caught a pillar at mid-spine some four feet off the ground, crying out in pain as he fell heavily, blinking dust from his eyes through his visor as the dust cleared — and Cithara screamed.

Up from the earth had torn... a thing. Beneath them the ground shifted, settled — collapsing away in places, the remaining walls of the cathedral fell away into the smoldering hellmouth below, leaving the cathedral's floor alone as an elevated platform beneath the dug-out atrocities below.

It was massive, too wide to see easily around, like a great, twisted pillar of fluted and carved marble. It was bone-white and dull, and at first, Bart thought it made of stone and sediment... until he saw that ossified surface breathe. It climbed high into the air, a pillar of unnatural marble-white stone and hideous, impossible geometries; faces, limbs, and bones twisted beneath its surface, forming together into a uniform, symmetrical mass — each one placed not randomly, but in sequence — a purposeful construction that bent and flexed with such ponderous mass. Its tower-like shape was lined at regular intervals with strangely architectural arches and sweeping buttresses as if it were a living structure made of flesh, bone, and ash... and to Bart's horror, he began to understand that is exactly what it was.

Cithara's screams were full of terror and agony, and his eyes climbed high on the arching abomination, where its pillar bloomed outwards into out-sized, bony limbs. Each appendage built rather than grown, structured around struts of bone and mortar of ossified flesh. Like the mouth of a great insect, or the mandibles of some monstrous crab — in those unfolding limbs, each ending in grasping, hooked talons, struggled the Lady in White, screaming as glorious, golden ichor poured from wounds where the monstrous thing had torn into her flesh where it bound her, grasping her limbs and hooking her flesh — pulling them to their extremes, lashing around her neck and strangling another scream of pain with a gagging choke.

"It isn't easy to summon such a thing, not this far, it has taken centuries of toil to dig the tunnel to make way for her," Mihai exulted, a soft cackle coming as he spread his arms in reverence. Within the strangely insectile maw of the Pillar of Bone, a gruesome set of fleshy folds spread apart with a horrifically sexual form, a shape pushing through the meaty, slick sheathe towards where Cithara was held in its clutches.

It was a face, feminine in shape, hollow and sallow, with an eyeless veil of bone and chitinous mass where the upper half of its visage should be; the ridged and fluted surface rising up to form a sleek, thorny crown. The lower half of its face was a perfectly symmetrical feminine form, with pale, full lips that parted... and out from them issued formless, overwhelming sound. Sound that drew screams from the mortal and immortal alike as it assaulted their minds, bent and warped reality, and threatened them with madness but a hairsbreadth away. His scattered companions all fell to their knees, those who had risen, grasping their heads — Bart himself shook as he looked up with wide eyes.

"Bow down, Bow and give fealty, petty beings of flesh, for SHE IS HERE!" Mihai exulted, spreading his arms as Parias, Ishtar, and even the scrambling child-Ghul servitors knelt, offering clasped hands above their heads in worship.

Bart simply stared, unable to respond as Cithara's screams reached a fever pitch, as the effigy's pallid lips parted again... and began to draw something from the Unicorn, a thread of glimmering radiance snaking out of the unicorn's wounds — her blood, her Ichor. That hungry visage swallowed it down, and it physically grew as it did, becoming more massive, more terrible, more real with every drop that passed its bloodless lips.

"By God..." Bart breathed, his fingers feeling numb as the sheer weight of the presence crushed at him. "It... it's the Empty Queen."

Mihai's cackling peaked and he spun, slowly turning in the air to regard Bart. "Oh, if only! It is but a sliver of her awareness, a piece of her grandeur — the roots of the Ossuary, extended over centuries of work beneath the deepest, darkest parts of the earth, far beneath the Sea of Glass," he reached out a reverent hand to the living, breathing structure — a piece of the Ossuary itself, brought here. Bart felt as if it were leeching the very warmth from him, and he struggled to hold onto his grasp of the Mantle in its presence, eventually forced to let it loose with a gasp, the glow fading from his eye as the sheer metaphysical weight dragged him down.

"Feeding it blood, bone, and souls over all this time took so much work, but here she stands, even in so tiny a splinter of her majesty. Here her power is absolute," his teeth showed as he split into a grin of pure pleasure.

"Here, you can kill anything. The truth of her existence grounds everything. Power, Divinity, Life itself. Here, you can kill a God."

Bart spat a curse and dragged himself to his feet, numb fingers grasped the First Blade — which practically was alive with enmity for the manifestation of evil standing before it, that vibrational energy of loathing spurred Bart on, it was a focus. It would do.

"Oh no," Mihai said, twisting to face him again; "I will not have you and yours ruin this, not now. I planned well ahead, centuries Bart, centuries," he snarled and hooked his fingers, dragging upwards as if he were pulling a great weight, and the air began to shimmer, the very ground began to warp and twist. Light began to lens as if through a window and the shadows lengthened as everything seemed to run and melt like wax around them.

"Cithara!" Bart roared, charging forward, blade in hand — mantle or no, he was a champion.

"BART!" Cithara wailed, golden ichor running over her perfect ivory pelt, he leapt as Mihai released his sorcery — and time stopped. Bart hung in the air, seeing everything around him in perfect, crystal clarity — frozen in that moment. Parias was midway through raising his blade, Rashid and Gram had found their feet, weapons bared as they also advanced. Lidia and Naima were helping Nazir to his feet, blood running from beneath his helmet, his teeth set in pain. Cithara's golden blood stopped in midair as it fell, her beautiful features twisted in impossible agony and fear.

"How does it feel to be powerless, 'Champion?'" Mihai's voice asked, mockery dripping like venom from his words. He walked through the frozen moment casually, gently reaching up and dipping a clawed fingertip into a perfectly round globule of static golden ichor, pressing it to his tongue lewdly. Bart couldn't respond, but he could move. Only inches, but his eyes and muscles still strained, pushing against it.

"I could kill you now, I think," Mihai said, licking his lips. "A knife even would do it," he mused, drawing his obsidian dagger free from his flame-pocked sash and walking straight up to Bart, dragging the glassy point of the weapon across his armored form.

"However, you have done something really quite difficult. So great a task, I really must commend you on it," the cultist mused, tapping the knife over Bart's heart as his face went flat with absolute, unfettered rage.

"You have truly pissed me off," he slashed that blade across the enchanted steel of his armor, leaving a shower of frozen sparks in its wake. "You are to be given Glory for such a thing, I am a man of long, long temper by needs alone — and yet, you and your accidental little prophecy, here in the final moments of my triumph?" he clenched his teeth.

"Infuriating."

He slashed at Bart several more times, ineffectually as even the enspelled obsidian was still just that, and Bart's armor defeated it handily, but clearly Mihai was more interested in venting than anything. The frozen sparks hanging there, the cultist irritably sweeping them aside to lean into Bart's face, staring through the visor.

"I do respect you though, even if I hate every single particle of your being. So beneath the gaze of my Goddess, I instead will simply..." he smiled wide, too wide, eyes empty. "... show you the End."

He clenched a hand again, and Bart felt that melting, reality-warping energy again, and Mihai's voice split the air like a thunderclap as he swept his hands wide.

"BE DAMNED THEN, DAMNED TO THE WORLD AS I HAVE WROUGHT!" The very air shattered like a thousand panes of glass. Suddenly there was no ground, no earth, nothing but the shattered fragments of perception and the fragment of the Ossuary, seeming to wind down into the darkness in an infinite spiral — a spiral that Bart and his companions were hurled downwards into, Cithara's screams split the air as Bart reached for her, free of the frozen moment, lunging upwards to her.

"MY LOVE!" he shouted, and she wept bloody golden tears as the Queen's grasping, knifing limbs only closed tighter.

"NO, BART, NO!" she wailed as he dropped from sight, falling with gathering speed, the only point of reference in the darkening void the rapidly passing length of the Pillar as he plummeted into nothingness, Mihai's mad laughter and Cithara's agonized screams the only accompaniment as the empty dark swallowed him whole.

CHAPTER 5

Bart didn't remember blacking out, but the sudden impact with something hard and unyielding woke him with a groan and a clatter of plates and harness. He rolled over with a fresh grunt of discomfort, his stomach turned and his head swam — his body was simultaneously freezing and pouring sweat into his underclothes, shaking violently as he just... lay there for a bit, eyes glazed over behind his visor.