Author's Note: Aaaaand the second chapter is finally here! Sorry for the wait, but I was kinda busy... I was busy procrastinating. But I have finally written this thing down and now it's ready for you guys to read! As always, Read, Review, and Rejoice! Telling me about any Easter Egg's you find hidden or any theories about the next adventure of the Sentinel will land you a special prize.
DISCLAIMER: I do not have ownership of any part of Percy Jackson and the Olympiads. If I did, then I would have made my fanfic canon! Use your brains damn it!
Choose Your Gender.
The Day Before Today,
In an abandoned warehouse hidden heavily with the Mist, two people are meeting. Their faces are shrouded by the darkness, tendrils of the inky blackness huddling their faces.
"What are we going to do about the relic?"
"Not sure yet. Polyphemus is being stubborn about his demands. He would give us the Fleece to restore the relic but we will have to fulfil his demands first."
"Damned one-eyed fucker! To Tartarus with him," screamed one.
"What about you? How does our army fare? Are the patrons providing? I can smell the heat of the forge on you. And also a certain... stench. How's that working?"
"Everything is working fine. You will have what you need by next year. Just be sure to secure your position by then. It won't do for you to get caught this early in the game. Especially since the civil war hasn't started yet."
One of the figures shifted and the ceiling light hit his head to illuminate a head of golden hair. Just as quick his hair had appeared, they disappeared again, shrouded by the obscuration magic performed on them. The figure spying on them from the rooftops cursed. The magic was too strong to be broken by the subtle moon magic that granted her secrecy, and trying to use anything stronger with him present would be equivalent to shouting HEY! from the rooftop. The figure adjusted her silver robes and decided to end it for once and forever. She drew Obscuration Runes on herself, hoping that the enemy wouldn't figure out who was after them...
As an afterthought, she dimmed the obscuration enough to let the silver stand out. Hopefully, they would think she was a Hunter or someone like that. Checking the quiver on her back for arrows, she stood tall on the roof. She shot two arrows into the warehouse. The glass broke and along with the shards fell two lightstones. She planned to go in as soon they were blinded by the lightstones and hit them with the element of surprise. If not a direct kill, she should get enough of a head-start on them to finish them.
Kill whoever was planning the attack and hopefully get back to the cave in time for dessert.
Her idea was not absolute, however, as it was seen a moment later. The lightstone hit the floor and flared out white light with the intensity of the afternoon sun. The obscuration spell that hid the conspirators broke a moment later, showing a tall young man with sand-blonde hair, eyes as blue as the winter sky and, most distinguishing of all, a long pale scar that ran from the bottom of his right eye to his chin. Near him stood a man in battle armour, with a ram-horned helmet and a large mace hanging from a loop on his belt. The boy stepped back in surprise while the Titan merely smirked.
"We had been expecting you," was all he said.
"Nobody expects Death." The Sentinel went into battle mode right from the start, not giving the enemy a chance to prepare. Her twin daggers danced at the rebels, hoping to slice off the ram's head where it grew. Her assault had varying effects, ranging from a large crippling injury to the boy, who couldn't keep up with her speed due to the after-shock of the surprise, to mild annoyance from Krios who merely swatted aside her slashes with his gauntlet, not even bothering to hide his distaste at her weakness. Seeing that her strikes were bring wasted, she decided to end it quickly and twisted the daggers in her hand, and threw them at the blond guy, who blocked the first with his sword but was struck in his heart by the second. Removing a smaller bluestone from a pouch on her back, she tossed them at Krios.
"Hope you like the present My Lord," she screamed while jumping backwards away from the Titan, " Lady Selene said that your body still reacts to the fragments of the chain that was used to bind you. I guess we will just have to find out the truth for ourselves, won't we?" Expecting the tiny rune-balls to bind and destroy the Titan, she jumped further back, hoping to save her clothes from being touched by the shower of ichor and dust.
She was confident in the runestones. She had no reason not to be. They were made by Lady Selene. One touch and Krios would feel his power drained and go back to Tartarus and wait for another few millennia to reform. So she jumped back. She jumped back from the impending explosion that Titans gave. She jumped back hard. And jumped right into a sword thrust from her back. A sword thrust from the Titan Krios.
The Other Krios shimmered for a moment before the glamour faded and Prometheus stood in his place. The Real Krios walked out of the shadows, sword held in both hand and a Sentinel impaled on its blade. He twisted the blade, making the woman puke blood from her mouth.
"How my brother Iapetus would envy me today! He always said that impaling was his right," joked the Titan. "But then he wasn't the only one who ignored others, was he? Our little assassin here thought that attacking and killing me would be this easy. How they forget that besides being the Titan of Stars, I am also a Master of Disguise and Obscuration. People like you and my father learned it the hard way."
Prometheus walked up to the Sentinel, the small rune-balls in his hand, "I'm sorry but were these little balls supposed to kill me?" he laughed. "They hardly tickled me since I wasn't the one those infernal chains were forged for."
"When you informed me that there was a secret order of immortal girls who would have the potential to stop us before we began, I expected more Lord Prometheus." Another figure walked out from the darkness in front of her, revealing himself to be a perfectly alive Luke Castellan; his earlier dead body replaced by a bleeding lamia.
The Sentinel stared disbelievingly as she saw her life fading before her and the risk she took for it be completely wasted. Her hands came up to grab the sword, to try and pull her impaled body off of it, only for the blade to cut into her hands and bite further into her skin. Her vision started to blacken as more blood ran out of her mouth, and the hole in her stomach pooled blood around her feet.
" I wouldn't try saving myself now. Few people could've survived this injury... a Sentinel who has been alive since the last century is not one of them," advised Prometheus. "It is your time to go now my dear. Go." He motioned to Luke standing beside him and looked amusedly at Krios standing behind her, "Pass on the Sentience to your successor, she will be fully trained and ready to carry on your work... by the time we win this war."
The trio laughed. Krios jerked the sword again and kicked the body lodged in it. The Sentinel flew across the room, stopping after sliding across the floor and painting it red with her blood. She reached up to her neck with her weak palm and pressed the glowing silver-red medallion that hung there.
Golden light surrounded her as her wounds closed themselves and the medallion took her the nearest candidate who would have the honour of becoming a Sentinel.
Marina opened her eyes as she fell on top of a boy. Although the boy protested, she was grateful for the soft landing. Her strength had left her body and every breath felt like a burning in her lungs. She felt her age catching up to her and hoped the girl would come here soon. She heard brief sounds of screaming. Soon she was lifted by tender hands and set upright against a hard surface.
"..rushi... who? ... joking... girlfrie... conscious..." the words flickered in broken lapses. Some water was splashed across her face, bringing her back from the edge of unconsciousness. She felt more than saw the medallion in her palm glow a bit when a thumb was pressed against her wrist. Energy flowed from the medallion into her and she gasped awake, finally seeing the room she was in and the boy she'd probably fell on. She saw the girl hovering over her, concern painted across her face. She saw a tiny silver string connect itself from the medallion to the girl and catching the hand that had moments ago checked her for signs of life, she placed the medallion in the girl's open hand and – with the last drops of life she had before the medallion disconnected itself from her life force – forced out the words:
"Take it! Take the Sentience! You must be the Sentinel. Warn the others... the old one is stirring. Tell Lady Moon to awaken the council. You must save them."
Her strength left her and she fell back against the hard wooden surface of the bed. With her life slowly leaving her, she thought of the day she had been recruited and wondered if she might find her predecessor in the Hall of Memories. She wondered if the recruit, 'Ros' if she heard correct, would be strong enough to stop the second coming of the Titans. It was too late to prevent the war entirely. Training a Sentinel into being perfect at whatever they did took the better part of a decade. The new Sentinel might just have a chance at chopping off the head of Krios as revenge for her, but she doubted that The Order of Waves might survive that long into Titan rule. They had effectively ruined an attempt at rebellion even though it was not their duty to do so. Thankfully, she had done her duty and so she could rest in peace. In all 109 years of her long life, she had worried about what would come next, but now that her service had ended, she had no regrets and no loose ends. She was finally content.
Opening her eyes one last time she saw the magic of the Medallion kick in as someone from the room was teleported, to Lady Moon probably.
Life was good. Death will be better.
0300 hrs,
Lady Moon's Lair(HOW MANY TIMES DO MUST I SAY IT'S A BASE NOT A LAIR!)
The Hour of The Ritual.
"Soooo, this Siproites guy sounds like he was pretty cool, but I think maybe some extra knowledge of what I am getting into might be necessary before I allow you to bathe me with what is either blood or ketchup," said Tushar. Lady Selene had said something about the initiation ceremony that had to be done in six hours of the arrival of the new Sentinel and how they had already lost a better part of it and had pressured him into the ritual. Something told him that he should ask some questions about stuff he did not know, but that caution had long before been drowned by his over-eager adventurer.
After all, it wasn't like Lady Selene would 'intentionally' try to harm me, would she?
How wrong he was!
"Sooo, this is the ritual room?" asked Tushar.
It was, in fact, the ritual room. One of the doors in the Sentinel's underground base (lair!), which was hidden particularly well behind a normal door, which led you outside into the forest if opened once, but if one were to open and close the door from the outside 13 times while resisting the compulsion to step through it, one will find oneself into the aforementioned ritual room.
Stepping through the thoroughly abused door, he had faced a set of spiral stairs going deeper into the earth. He had followed Lady Selene down the damp stairs, illuminated by torches holding green fire. He had occasionally stumbled or tripped or slipped on something that wasn't quite visible to him, but Lady Selene had snapped her fingers and he had proceeded downwards safely again. They were defences against non-Sentinels entering the room he would have learnt later.
The area, where the stairs ended, was big. Very big. And sophisticated to the boot, Tushar had noted. A bird's eye view of the dungeon would reveal four prominent characteristics of the floor. The first was The Ritual Room, made out of black marble, wood and imperial gold, which occupied over a third of the floor. The Lab was a bit smaller than the ritual room but no less interesting. Despite holding only a tenth of the area, it was easily Lady Selene's most favourite place. For anybody with the right skills, the lab was heaven. The Observatory, on the other hand, was much weirder. The cavern was, to the unclouded mind, over a 100 mt deep inside the Earth. Despite this face, it somehow managed to fit in a hole in the ceiling, acting as a skylight, probably to pour moonlight into the ritual room and the lab. The Observatory, seemed to the layman, a useless addition, as the sky could easily be seen from the lab or ritual room. However, the spartan room covering a third of the area was built keeping in mind the war, and as such was fully equipped to observe and analyse, not only rare cosmic events and moonlight of the eclipse but also to act as a radar. A fifth of the area was filled by hallways and corridors, every wall of which was covered with bookshelves. Volumes from ancient Greece and Rome, detailing rituals and potions so rare that they'd make Hecate wet her cloak, were stored in these shelves, with a perfect stasis charm cast over them to prevent the decay of Time to work on them.
Lady Selene, however, had dragged the distracted initiate straight over to the ritual room, where the magic was going to happen. The ritual room, Tushar noted, felt different. There was a feeling of something different inside it, which he could not catch up on. The walls of the room were half a meter thick and made out of a black rock which he had never seen before. The insides were lined with obsidian, while the floor was layered with black and white marble slabs. The ceiling had crystals buried inside its surface that glowed a radiant silver and illuminated the room. The ritual area was made like a target board, with the red and black concentric rings replaced by land and water. The centre of the target was a large circular island around 6 mt in diameter, which floated inside a ring of water around 2 mt wide, which was surrounded by another circular land strip half a meter wide, which was surrounded by another moat around three and a half meters wide, which finally connected to the rest of the room with the marble floor.
Since Tushar had stepped inside, Lady Selene had summoned various ingredients and had been arranging them around the place without so much as a glance towards Tushar. The questions had started when she had come back with a bucket full of blood floating behind her. The bucket of blood in question must have been obtained through some very immoral means. But that did not concern Tushar. What concerned him, was the fact that it was hovering over the central disc of the ritual room; the place where Lady Selene had asked him to go and wait.
"Are you sure that we should do this?" asked Tushar, "I don't feel so sure about this. You haven't even told me what the ritual is about. All that I know is that it's about some great hero named Siproites. I don't even know who he was!"
"Do you want to bring an end to the Order of the Waves, Tushar," hissed Lady Moon. "I have never missed an initiation before yours. Unless I complete this ritual and make you an official Sentinel, you need to learn to go with the flow!"
"All my books have taught me one thing," said Tushar pointing a finger at Lady Moon, "Don't participate in a ritual you can't recite backwards in your sleep."
Selene paused waving her hands around the room — all the equipment, candles, buckets, stones, knives stopped where it was (including a stream of half molten wax being poured into a glass which froze in the air) — and looked Tushar in the eyes. He finally saw how... deep her eyes were. How the silver light of the crystals set in the ceiling of the chamber would naturally fall on her face and her eyes looked just that bit more silver; beautiful silver that had somehow managed to show not lustre, but age. At that moment, he realised that there was a burden on Selene's shoulders. A burden that had been on her since before Civilization. A burden that she had taken on for the protection of others. The part of him that objected to being the subject of the ritual slowly withered and died. Nodding his head with a look of seriousness that he never wore before, he walked towards the centre of the ring, walking through the water-filled moats slowly to not fall.
"Thank you for understanding," said Lady Selene, her silver eyes softening up a bit at his gesture. "You won't regret this when I'm done."
For my sake, let's hope I won't, thought Tushar, before squishing that thought and concentrating on the preparations. The blood bucket floated about him, while the rings around the central disc were being used to place candles and incense in weird formations. Some were placed on the rings, while some floated in the moat on silver discs. A large brown rug suddenly rushed under his feet, forcing him to bounce lest he was thrown back, and fitted itself snugly on the central platform. An ornate vase floated from behind Selene and poured a black liquid inside the water of the moat, turning it inky black.
"Strip your clothes and throw them inside the basket."
"WHAT?" shouted Tushar, flummoxed by the command. A small wicker basket bumped against his feet, nudging him with the small hand-holds. " You want me to stand naked here!"
"Why?" asked Selene, a small smile crossing her face. "Surely, you have nothing to be ashamed of!"
Tushar heated up at the jibe and made a face, his lips forming a pout. "It's cold out here I mean! What if I get hypothermia? Who's gonna help you through the ritual then?" he said slowly.
"Your clothes haven't been cleansed of outside agents which might intercept the ritual. I can't use the same disinfectants on your clothes that I'll use on you. Any outside factors might make the ritual go haywire," warned Selene. "That's why it's best that you leave nothing on your body." She started magicking stuff around again, this time various tinted crystal balls flowing around the room. "Put the Sentience in too. It'll jump to you if it's needed," she added, not disrupting her work.
Hesitantly, as if expecting someone to save him of the embarrassment, he started removing his clothes and put them in the wicker basket.
Tushar had never been an athlete. Once he had tasted the drug of imagination he had reduced his outdoors time, till it had trickled down to only the PE period at school. He was not a glutton, so luckily his body was not obese, but his muscles weren't defined either. His small appetite combined with his mother's fatty Indian food had made sure that he wasn't scrawny or fat but normal. With just the right amount of fat hanging from his skin to put him between the thin and obese category and not enough muscle to make him look like either a swimmer or a wrestler, he looked...mundane. He looked precisely like what one expects an NPC to look. Standing at 5' 9'', he was mundane. Weighing in at 60 kg, he was mundane. With the top speed of 30 km per hour, he was mundane. With no muscle on his body, he was mundane. With stretch marks on his stomach and back, he was mundane. With his mundane body, he was mundane.
Luckily, there was a part in him that was not mundane. The only part of him that he was proud of him. His mind which was, all thanks to him, not mundane. His mind which connected threads out of the blue. His mind which saw reason where everyone else cried war. His mind which snatched floating straws to make a craft in the middle of a cyclone. His mind which was not gonna help him so soon in the ritual.
He stripped naked and, feeling the cold wind hit his skin, placed the Sentience upon the pile of his clothes. The basket flew outside the room and the wooden door closed. Lady Selene stopped the telekinesis a moment later and looked around the ritual chamber with satisfaction. She looked him in the eye and told him, "Lay down on the rug with your arms and legs spread outwards. And whatever happens, don't drink the blood or let it go down your eyes."
"NOX —" the mage lights floating around dimmed themselves "— Kindle," Selene spoke in Greek and the white candles and black incense sticks scattered around the chamber lit up in response. " Begin." Picking up a grey leather-bound tome, she started incanting the words for the ritual, switching between Latin, Greek, Sanskrit, and other — never heard by human ears since 1800 — languages. Tushar's naked skin itched against the animal skin rugs that he was lying on, as the fur on the rug began bristling. The silver bucket overhead slowly tilted, pouring the crimson liquid onto the boy's naked body — slowly advancing towards his face, forcing him to close his eyes and lips; the action coming to his mind almost naturally. He did so with haste, some unknown part of his mind that he had never felt existing before telling him of the infinite horrors of accidentally ingesting the blood.
The stream of blood pouring down climbed up steadily, coating his legs and his chest with the thick liquid; solidifying in its place and creating a second layer of skin upon him. He felt the blood stick to his skin and try to crawl inside his very body, uprooting the hair that had grown on his arms and climbing in through the pores with a mild shock to his nerves. He felt the blood pour onto his neck and then his lips. His tongue tasted the drops of blood that had trickled down his closed lips and he felt it's sweetness melt his taste sensors; before the sweetness turned to extreme bitterness that tested his ability to not puke in the middle of the ceremony. The taste changed again, as if a chameleon's skin, and he felt the sour tang of rotten lemons nauseate his entire body. The taste changed once more, salty beyond the limits of the Dead Sea, salty enough to feel like his bones melted. He pressed his lips closer and tried not to think about the few drops of blood that stayed in the gorge between his lips. The crimson stream poured onto his nose and he smelled the viscous liquid, reminding him of his every dream and every aspiration that he ever had, and along he went with all his dreams. He lived his life to the fullest and took another step after that. He stood above his sister, high up in his parents' eyes. Society looked at him and threw garlands and laurels at him. His friends grinned at him and begged him to let them be a part of his next adventure. He stood tall above the world, victorious, stronger than the rest, wiser than the rest, smarter than the rest. He stood above them all as the MILF(Man Itching Life's Fantasy).
And suddenly he was back. Like from a chair tipping far too back, he came back to reality with a jerk. His eyes widened, only for the blood to pour down it. He felt his eyeballs burning and his pupils dilated wider than they ever had before. He felt the blood press a hot brand onto his eyes, he feared that blindness that was gonna plague him for the rest of his days.
Luckily for Lady Selene —Blind Sentinel's took more time to train—, he didn't go blind. Unluckily for her, Tushar could see now. His mind cleared of the fog and he started improving his body. His hearing refined and he started understanding the words spoken by Lady Selene.
"Change him so he can serve. Change him so he can help. Change him so he can work. Change him so he can provide. Change him so he can do. Change him so he can take. Change him so he can give. Change Him So He Can!"
His body contracted and spasmed again, with the burning sensation he felt in his eyes returning. He felt his muscles burning under the skin as more of the blood flowed down from the hair pores. He felt his bones go brittle and froze under the implications of it. He felt the blood burn again and his bones broke, earning a cry from him, all thoughts of not drinking the blood forgotten. The blood suddenly vaporized and suddenly he felt new bones grow inside of him, the experience being more painful, earned another ear-splitting cry from him. His muscles spasmed: once, twice and thrice. Tushar felt the oncoming storm those spasms indicated. Immediately they tore themselves apart under the sudden pressure and sewed themselves together much stronger. All of these renovations took place while he was completely conscious and as such, hurt like a bitch.
Even though his bones and muscles had suddenly made themselves stronger than they ever were and stronger than they ever could've been under his neglect, he screamed at the pain. Once he had screamed his lungs out, —they would be rebuilt in a minute— he regained some semblance of his surroundings and heard a steady pounding coming from the direction of the door.
"Change him so he may live. Change him so he may breathe. Change him so he may survive. Change him so he may create. Change him so he may not die. Change him so his heart may beat. Change Him So He May!"
The burning came again. This time much stronger. It focused on his internal organ, shredding him apart piece by piece and mashing it all back together before he could scream. His voice gave out as his voice-box was destroyed and remade in the turn of a second. His stomach, his intestines, his liver, his kidneys all felt as if they were bring washed with acid. His lungs were the worst, the pain made him breathe in sharply, only to find that there was nowhere for the air to go, and for a second, he discovered the true meaning of being breathless. His heart came next, and as all blood stopped flowing through his veins – for one moment – his body shut down. Only to fire back up faster with a new heart to pump blood faster through it all. His brain came next but, thankfully he would add, he did not remember any of it. He took a few slow breaths trying to deduce the Where, Who and Why before his memories returned and the screaming started a new. His new and improved organs or his stronger filtration system did not help much in that regard since the pain was imminent when having your organs regrown. Luckily, his brain did have enough focus to listen to the pounding noise again, and upon looking at the door, found the, probably titanium or adamantium, the door being slowly dented with every hit that echoed around the chamber.
The part of his mind that had been objecting to the ritual in the first place was very much willing to stop this at once, but another part of him told him to not interfere. A part that he was beginning to doubt very much by this point. He had often doubted himself and had come to terms with the fact that given his many moods, there might as well be 13 different hocruces inside him. But he had spent many nights sleepless teaching himself not to doubt himself and he was ready to see it to the end unless something worse than body reconstruction happened. But since he had agreed to the ritual in the first place, he was going to see it to an end. If only to see the silver of Lady Selene's eyes one more time...
WAIT A SECOND! Tushar mind-screamed. Why am I getting romantic thoughts about Lady Selene?
And then he started thinking further back. The silver of her eyes. The irrational decision of joining an unknown ritual. The weird presence of a new identity inside his mindscape. The thoughts that repressed his desire to stop the ritual. They all made sense to him now.
" Change him so he shall do the tasks I give him. Change him so he shall not hesitate. Change him so he shall trust. Change him so he shall work. Change him so he shall host. Change him so he shall stand guard. Change him so shall be a carrier. Change Him So He Shall!"
A silver light shone from the candles around, lighting up Tushar's blood-covered naked body. Unlike the earlier things, his body did not change this time. Not physically. But none the less he felt something inside him change. Something that made him forget temporarily about stopping the ritual that he had no desire to participate in. And he felt it too, a pull at his heart, like experiencing a new flavour of ice cream, like stepping through a waterfall and emerging on the other side with a different perspective. Like standing at a place where, at the same time, it was raining and also sunny. As if he had split a blob of jelly into two separate halves. As if his soul and spirit had somehow been altered. That he had been changed.
The pounding against the door continued, the minimal damage being done to it was not worth Selene's attention.
" I call upon thee," she lit her hand on purple and black fire and continued "Answer my call from the otherworld. Answer my plea and fulfill your duty. Come forth from the Moon Realm and make this body your vessel as you guide this lost soul to victory in the name of your sisters and the name of your duties. Come forth Darkness and occupy this shell as you pave your path to victory."
The skylight dimmed as mist covered it and the flames of the candles burned a brilliant silver, and a black mist-form – definitely female or a misshapen male if the spectral image was anything to go by – descended from the natural skylight and floated down to levitate above Tushar's waist. The black mist-body, which was by now only a mass of black mist swirling in the shape of a female body, started glowing and assumed a corporeal Silver-Grey astral form. The girl, because there was no doubt now that it was a girl, was almost Tushar's age. With her long astral hair floating behind her in an anti-gravity field, and her body hovering close above Tushar's body, he suddenly remembered that he wanted the ritual to be cancelled. (He also maintains that were it not for the gravity of the situation, he would've pointed out how he liked to be on top.)
"St...Stop this RITUAL! I don't want to be turned into an object of possession!" He screamed desperately, too shocked to look anywhere except the astral girl slowly lowering herself towards Tushar's body. He tried to move out from his place on the bear rug, but found that most of his body was either not responding to his commands or too much in pain to move; the newly reconstructed bones and muscles being too sore and the grown brain not yet fully in control of his senses.
" Come forth Shadow and take your dues. Come forth and occupy. Come forth and cut. Come forth and take him for your own. Come forth and change him so may fit You. Come forth and Change him so he can provide You. Come forth and change him so he shall become You. COME FORTH!"Lady Moon screamed, her eyes burning with silver fire, completely unaware of Tushar's protests or the increased pounding at the door of the chamber.
"Stop! Don't do this," the boy said, raising his blood-soaked hands in front of his body to stop the spirit from descending. But with an icy creep down his arms, the spirit simply passed through his hands and started descending into his body, astral legs going through his waist. He saw the legs of the astral spirit disappear into his waist and felt the small changes that were happening across his body. Changes he definitely did not agree to. Changes he did not like to think about. "STOP THIS AT ONCE, LADY! I did not sign up for a gender transplant! Stop her from... from changing me!" He shouted at the petrified Lady Moon. "And you," he shouted at the spirit slowly making it's way down his waist, "Stop using me like this. I don't have any problems with beautiful girls trying to straddle me, but I don't let ghosts do that to me! Stop using me as a hotel room. I ain't a necrophile!"
The Spirit did not stop. It seemed amused by his words if the small smile on her face said anything.
The pounding increased. Way stronger and louder. Loud enough to distract Tushar from the spiritual taboo happening to him. Strong enough to rattle the chamber and shake the candles floating in the moat.
Tushar looked at the badly damaged door which was about to be blown off its hinges and recalled– The Sentience. It had always protected him when it felt that he was in danger. And it had started trying to break the door down since he was having his muscles sand-blasted. All he had to was distract the spirit long enough for the Sentience to bust through that bunker and sparkle the room with Holy Water. Then he would be safe and away from this place.
That was easier said than done, however, especially since the girl was halfway through Tushar and the boy was already feeling dizzy and weird. He felt his hair growing longer and his bones shift under his skin. Luckily, when he pressed his legs together, he could feel his stash secure in its place. The girl was still lowering herself slowly on his waist, her stomach already touching his.
" Lady... woman... Spiritess? Whatever you are. Let's cut a deal. You can keep my body on days that don't end in Y," Tushar joked, and much to his astonishment, the spirit actually shook at the shoulders as if laughing. More importantly, it slowed down. If only slightly.
"Okay then, how about you keep it on weekends? Surely a beautiful soul as yourself would be content to grace the world with her awesomeness twice a week won't she? So what does the world's most beautiful girl say?" flirted Tushar, and the silver-grey spirit blushed orange at the cheeks. She stopped long enough to flash him a bigger smile. She even giggled. Giggled! Spirits don't usually flirt. At least not with a guy like him.
Tushar had convinced himself that flirting could save all his problems when the girl took thing too far. She slapped his chest playfully with her hand as if flirting back, then started entering his body at a faster pace. Her hands started sinking into his chest while her chest went through his waist. Tushar panicked again because no matter how much he had tried, his mouth had once again landed him into trouble.
Unfortunately for him, the girl was almost shoulder deep in him, and Lady Selene showed no signs of helping him, petrified as she was in her silver summoning state. Fortunately, the Sentience chose that moment to break open the door and burst into the room.
The door breaking down had caused a lot of chaos inside the room, as the broken metal landed on the floor of the cavern and scattered the various ingredients scattered about Lady Selene's feet, creating a cloud a black, brown, red, and blue dust. He raised his head from his position to see what happened, but in all this chaos Tushar could see neither the girl nor the Sentience or even Firefly Selene. He felt something attach to his forehead and warmth flooded through him... but so did chill. Something went inside his waist and he felt the chill settle over that part. The Warmth and the Chill spread over his body meeting in a battle at his heart. The warmth turned burning hot while the iciness turned a numbing cold and the polar opposites collided into his body, punishing him for something that he had no part in. All he could do was lie there with his blood-soaked hair and spirit-raided soul, while the two powers ran circles around his heart, causing him no small amount of pain. When he thought that he was gonna pass out from the extremes colliding in his heart, the two sensations combined and he felt his heart slow down. Thump-Thump! Thump! Thump! THUMP! T-H-U-M-P-! It stopped beating.
His body went limp. The room went quiet. The candles had all extinguished. The incenses were shooting thin tendrils of scented smoke into the chamber. The water inside the moat was still. The various crystal balls around Lady Selene had all stopped glowing and laid by her feet. Selene herself was not moving, still in her ritual-induced Silver-Eye paralysis. The air was heavy with the smell of the ingredients that had been thrown around. Blood splattered across the walls, almost as if creating a crime scene for the boy's death. The moonless sky looked down upon the chamber through the natural skylight, looking almost sympathetic for the boy. The crystals in the ceiling stopped glowing as if the room mourned the boy's death.
Tushar Mukherjee, The Boy Who Wished, was dead.
Selene's eyes slowly stopped burning with silver fire and she regained consciousness. She closed her eyelids and cast a mild cooling spell on her eyes. She cast another spell, a chronas, to check the time, and was pleased to know that she still had an hour left for the ritual despite her hour-long ritual-induced paralysis. She slowly opened her eyes hoping to see the boy throwing tantrums about switching his anatomy and adding the spirit of a past Sentinel to his mind, but she believed that he would get on rather well with the flirty and playful Sentinel that the girl had been in her time.
Therefore, she was quite shocked to see the door to the ritual room, made of the strongest metal on Earth, broken down and the dormant energy of the ritual room dissipating due to the wreckage. However, she had more important business to attend. Finding where the dormant energy went could wait. The more pressing matter was that Tushar, the young naive boy, was lying on the alter, very much not alive. She ran over to his body, knocking over candles and crystal balls in the process, and pressed a hand against his heart, only to find it not beating. His waist had frozen over with ice formed on it, while his forehead was still burning like a furnace, the blood she had applied to it, dried and crusted. His earlier messy black hair had grown long and turned white. His body was still blood-soaked, but she could see the newly defined muscles now. She even saw the way some of his bones had changed, a female skeleton frame in his male skin. Most probably the effects of the ritual not finishing itself properly. She had not accounted for the medallion interfering in the ritual in such a violent way. She knew of the medallion's tendency to protect the initiate and therefore had placed a spell on the boy so he would stay silent and keep his eyes closed till the end of the ritual. Something must have gone haywire for the compulsion to break and the boy to panic in the way he did and summon the medallion so strongly. The medallion stuck defiantly to his forehead, not coming off even when Selene cast a spell on it to retrieve it. Her eyes widened as the medallion glowed the silver it did when protecting its host from an attack. She checked the energy levels of the room and found them decreasing still, steadily being siphoned off elsewhere. She looked at the medallion and with another flick of her wrist, confirmed her suspicion.
The medallion was absorbing all the energy.
Millennia worth of stagnant unused magical energy was too much to be stored into a single article, which was why the base used the energy instead in the ritual room to fuel any rituals that had to be done. Many of the initiates often tried their luck with rituals and magic during their training, but only 1 in 20 was cut out for it. All the failed rituals and misfired spells, when done inside the base, were automatically adding their strength to the ritual room. And counting the ten years of harsh training most Sentinels went through and also the occasional visit by an on-duty Sentinel in which she often felt free to use her botched up spells, the ritual room had a lot of energy. A lot. Enough that the baboons on Olympus might consider it a threat to their existence if released at once.
Selene knew that the Sentience was the master key to all the facilities of the base. It was the only thing besides herself that had complete control over the entire facility. But for it to intake such high amounts of energy was nothing but suicidal. The medallion had been choosing and training the Sentinels, with Selene's help, since the beginning of Time. For it to be destroyed now (at the brink of war too!) was disastrous. The Sentience was going to self destruct and destroy along with it the base itself with the energy it was absorbing. A better part of the forest too would become infested with magical energy, mutating the wildlife to be abominations for centuries to come. Abominations whose first thought would be to feed and find their place in the world. The destruction of the Sentience would expose the celestial world to the humans, it would do the very thing they were trying to prevent. It would destroy the Divide instantaneously with the destruction it might cause. Everything that they stood for would be destroyed unless...
Unless it was trying to pour that energy into the boy. Give him a super-powered magical defibrillation in a way. A very strong defibrillation. Yes... it could work! All that was needed now was... a slight push. A way for the Sentience to push the energy inside safely without killing the boy. But that was the difficult part. The medallion's choice was absolute. Even though it had selected the boy's sister, Arushi Mukherjee, as the nearest contestant worthy to be a Sentinel, the boy had been the one to hold it and be teleported when it was activated. That simple and accidental act had marked him as the initiate for the ceremony. And as such, it would do all it could and use all its energy to protect the boy till the induction ritual had been done on him. However, the boy could not enjoy all the benefits of the Sentience unless he became a full Sentinel. Something that was pretty much impossible with him being a boy. BUT, if Lady Selene were to somehow turn him into a girl, even if only temporarily, and perform the ceremony on him, the Sentience would get that extra push needed to revive him.
The way to do it, however, was going to cost her very dearly. It was time to send a summon to her old friend. Her specialization in the field would surely finish the job within half an hour, leaving enough time for the Sentience to revive the boy.
It was time to call Artemis.
Tushar awoke. Which was weird considering he had felt his heart stop breathing? He looked around to find himself in a hospital of sorts. The Infirmary at The Base said a voice in his head. Wait! Who said that? 'It's me, idiot,' the voice replied. I am Mystery, your new roommate.
"Ah! I see you are awake Sentinel," said a new voice.
Of course, I am awake! He thought bitterly. How many voices had the crazy goddess crammed inside his head?
"I am not inside your head. Sit up and look at me."
Okaay. That was definitely not inside his head. He gently sat up on the bed, leaning on his elbows to do so and was greeted by Lady Selene sitting nearby on a bench. "Are you feeling fine now? The ritual went way worse than what I had planned," she asked in a warm tone, nothing that he had expected from a woman who wanted to fit a spirit of darkness and shadows inside him. She smiled another one of her smiles and asked him, "How's your head now? I couldn't ask you before since you were unconscious, but I really want to know what effects the gender swap ritual had on you."
Wait. Gender-swap? I thought it was a possession ritual... That means...
Tushar looked down at his chest and found two things hanging there.
First: The Medallion.
Second: A Brand New Pair of Boobs.
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