The echoing of his footsteps on the stone stairs clattered in resounding echoes throughout the passageway, the silence of the darkness broken only by that swift rhythm. Dust that had layered itself upon the stairway despite his best efforts scattered as his boots hit the ground, sending grey particles billowing up around him.
The reliquary was a lonely location on the outskirts of Gol Secondus, City of Rebirth, situated deep underground and only accessible via a secret route known only to a select few – even lower numbers of which had been granted knowledge of what was kept within.
Garen Velox, a priest of the Cathedralis ex Remembrance of middling ranking (though still important, as all who brought the faith of the Goddess to the people were vital to the future and safety of the Kingdom of Light), was one of those. In fact, the unassuming man, with his wispy, greying hair and hurried gait, was the keeper of this arca, entrusted with its protection and proper storage by King Marik himself.
His fingers were still reflexively clutched to the simple but incredibly influential King's Blessing amulet that was a badge of his duty after showing it to the imposing but utterly necessary guards that had the permanent role of defending the vault from any potential interlopers who would seek to claim or destroy the relic within.
It did not hold a complex design, two stylised angel wings wrapped around a golden sun, and could easily be passed off as a talisman of protection that was hardly uncommon within Lucael, but with the pendant Garen, a plain cleric of the Goddess had the authority to access places in the Kingdom of Light that were forbidden to all but the Lucerna ruler himself and to requisition near any force to wield at his disposal.
The application of mana in a certain way that he had been taught by Hierarch Francis caused the silver wings to unclasp, opening up to reveal the sigil of the Sword of Wrath, King Marik and holy Akroma's personal emblem.
Garen coughed at the dust that sprung up at his every step, holding the sleeve of his priest attire to his face to prevent any more from irritating his nose. He did endeavour to keep the place as presentable as possible, but the reality that it was only he who was able to enter (unless he permitted the soldiers outside to, though they were not allowed to know what was kept hidden away in this place) and that he had far more important issues to attend to meant that it would be an impossible task to have everything at a pristine condition.
As he descended through the darkness, Garen snapped his fingertips together, generating White mana within them that shone with a golden light, illuminating the grey stone around him with a cold glow that, whilst still comforting to his mind, lacked any of the heat conferred by a hearty fire.
When he passed one of the many ornate braziers built into the wall, a portion of his conjured luminescence detached from the orb in his wrinkled hand, automatically activating the torches set at regular intervals within the stone.
Light spilled out across the corridor as Garen travelled down the efficiently hewn stairs, banishing the shadows as he passed and leaving spheres of illumination in his wake.
Relaxing his breathing – descending into this secretive vault had always put his nerves on edge, his responsibility to safeguard the object held within honing both his magical and physical senses – the late middle aged clergyman who had survived the horrors of the City of Silence forced his trepidation to dissipate.
The flickering light sent the darkness into a spherical dance, twisting and writhing like a physical force at the edges of his vision. Garen quickened his pace, not wishing to spend any longer than was necessary in this place. Despite the cold of the freezing winter first month of the new year, the eternal night had seemed especially cloying recently, as if it was pressing down at the humans that lived within it and scratching at the magical defence emplacements that protected the metropolises from abyssal intrusion.
Try as he might, Garen could not shake the sensation that he was being watched, that perfidious eyes traced his every movement. Muttering a prayer to the divine First Angel to grant him safety, the man reached the first waypoint on his journey.
He let the orb of White mana divaricate and flow to the extremities of his fingertips so that each of his digits was ensorcelled by a constant incandescence, tracing a pattern of his own devising on the stone walls.
The runes lit up with the glow of magic that he had enchanted the passageway and its ultimate destination with power that was a mixture of the mana which belonged to him alongside the aid of Hierarch Francis and another high priest by the name of Reldawen, his own not sufficient for the scale of the protective runes etched in the underground.
In spite of his initial impression that something was wrong, Garen, cursing his mind's weakness at not being able to dissuade his fear, completed his inspection of the wards in this area as meticulously as normally. His emblematic magic was the precise reason that he had been personally selected for this task, a runic proficiency that he had developed since childhood and had been a perfect fit to this new responsibility of his.
Breathing out an exhalation of relief, Garen ensured that his exhilaration on observing something that was not entirely expected (in the logical sense) did not compound his ability to function properly. The wards had not been breached; he confirmed that with another survey of those that were put in place to prevent any tears in the reality of this place at this section of the descent.
An intricate pattern of light, geometrically pleasing to the eye, faded as Garen removed his hand, his confidence bolstered by the knowledge that he was safe here – at least, from Sancturia invaders, though the highly trained guards to the entrance would have stopped the incursion of any others, and the runes would react violently to such enemies.
He continued on his way, the detailed but bereft of superfluous ostentation wooden staff – a symbol of his office as a cleric of Gol Secondus – held in his left hand ready to strike at any enemies of the light that he might encounter. At equidistant checkpoints along the silent route he completed the same procedure of assessing the state of the runic fortifications, methodically carrying out the preliminary sections of his duty.
As he walked, the perimeter of light that surrounded him receded, leaving darkness in his wake as to conserve his mana. The shadows danced behind Garen, as if they were taunting him, though his honed senses and wards detected no malevolence.
The past few nights after the victory over the Welkalite New Empire of Passion had been declared had heralded an even greater intensification of the abyssal night that perpetually surrounded the Kingdom of Light, reaching levels of darkness that had not been seen since the internecine war between the loyalists and those who followed the Traitor Prince.
Garen hoped that it was not a sign of things to come, as despite the fact that measures had been put in place to defend against an opportunistic attack from Johnias and that King Marik had reputedly returned to Civitas Sol from Usnaan the vast majority of the military was still situated within Welkas and would take several days before responding to an assault on their homeland.
That had been the rationale behind this impromptu examination of the reliquary and the catacombs leading to it. Garen had been on an edge recently, a sensation gnawing at the heart of him that he could no longer ignore, and thus had chosen to ensure that nothing could tamper with the dangerous artifact under his care.
His breath misted in front of him in puffs of air coloured by the summoned light, the effectively hewn stone corridor that was mostly natural and seemed to stretch on forever abruptly coming to a halt.
Garen's progress was stopped by a medium sized but still imposing granite doorway that reached up to the damp ceiling of the passageway. The door was covered in traditional Lucaelian iconography that the priest had, with the aid of his Hierarch, painstakingly carved into its surface.
Fluted angel wings, ancient characters that signified protection and punishment for heretical trespassers and the like covered the obstruction, but more subtle were the lines etched into the grey rock that connected four otherwise relatively innocuous sigils which would be impossible to notice unless one was a runic master or an expert in the study of patterns.
Garen focussed his White mana into the quartet of symbols, focussing his mind and concentrating at the task at hand. He pressed the amulet into the centre of the crossguard of a longsword etched into the, light flowing like liquid metal through the barely visible lines in a display of concentration that the priest had become well accustomed to.
Before opening the door to the vault, Garen reached out with his mind, harnessing his sixth sense and tracing along the pathways of the runes he had already activated – one last check to assure him that he would not be allowing enemies of the crown access to the reliquary.
Satisfied, he pulsed his authority outwards, the stone door smoothly sliding away and revealing the interior of the room beyond. Garen stepped in, the dust of isolation which had been omnipresent on his route nowhere to be seen within the cold room.
The arca was a semi-spherical chamber comprised mostly of the same grey rock that the rest of the tunnel consisted of, but with the sigils of warding that were merely carvings and enchantments on the underground pathway had evolved into intricately yet still functionally (as with most things of importance within Lucael – the people of the Kingdom of Light were a practical sort, wont to requiring every embellishment to have a purpose, even those in the most exalted places of worship) formed silver and gold engravings that decorated the reliquary.
A single pathway of rock led out towards the centre of the room, a jutting plinth surrounded by a golden orb of energy just above the surface of a more tangible container.
The ground fell away into an endless crevasse around the platform, one more defence against any form of teleportation based infiltration – the inscribed enchantments served to scatter it in the first place, but intensely focussed magic might be able to gain access. In that case, such precision as to bypass the wards and appear straight onto the ground without falling away into the immeasurably darkness would, by the grace of the Goddess, be impossible.
There, in the centre of the nexus of mana that permeated the air of this sacred place, was the artifact that Garen had been given the honour of becoming the custodian of.
Set into the top of the altar-esque pedestal a contained within the shimmering sphere of White mana was a closed book. Garen could feel the untapped power radiating from it in spite of the containment field, and muttered a short prayer to bolster his mental defences so that he would not succumb to the temptation to look inside.
The leather-bound tome was anodyne enough to the naked eye, but had been taken from the unhallowed ruins of the haunted and desecrated City of Silence a bloody and bitter two years into the civil war after the vengeful king had commanded his army to victory against one of Johnias's nefarious sorcerers who had taken up residence within the desolate metropolis.
To Garen's knowledge the woman had not been a traitor Lucaelian in the first place but instead the spawn of one of the bastard settlements within the abyss that had allied itself (or been subjugated by) with the betrayer prince.
He did not know what the capabilities of such a book were, nor what the agent of the enemy who had claimed the shattered husk of the once brilliant City of Quiet had planned to do with the item before King Marik had split her life from her body with one fell swoop.
But Garen could guess at its potential – could, but wouldn't, as such thoughts would be heretical – from the fact that it had not been destroyed in a focussed blast of purification magic, indicating that it was possessed of enough malevolence as to regenerate whatever unholy lore it contained back in the hands of those who wanted it.
The priest shielded his mind with another prayer to the angels, knowing from experience that even thinking about the book could invite its tendrils of darkness into his head. He stepped around it, the flickering light blossoming like a luminescent flower within his hand before the clergyman imposed a set order upon it to organise the radiance into a pattern of runic symbols reminiscent of all those that had been assiduously written into the cavern.
The golden magic played over the sphere encasing the tome, reinforcing the barriers already there as well as flowing across the semi-sphere to make a final check on the wards of the arca – Garen had learnt well in his line of work that one could never be too careful, and should the power of the malicious book fall into the wrong hands.
Nothing. Nothing had penetrated into the prison of this damnable volume, as was to be expected – there was no way the location of the malefic artifact would have been ascertained by those outside of the vault, and it was unlikely that many knew about the existence of the object in the first place. The interior of the arca was so saturated with subliminal White mana as to be anathema to all things demonic and corrupted, but Garen knew first hand that the spawn of the darkness could find a way to either barge through or insidiously bypass any defence.
As if in response to the thoughts, his sixth sense suddenly sprang into action, the presence of another source of mana within the central underground chamber like a flare within his mind.
What? But how? None of the wards have been damaged! How have the defences been breached?
Heartbeat thudding into overdrive, Garen instantly allowed the light in his hand to expand before placing it atop his staff and slamming it into the ground. The golden magic followed the pathways of runes across the stone room, supposed to bring the entire reliquary bursting into dazzling luminosity.
But as the mana left his controlling influence, it fizzed and spattered like the dying flame of an abandoned candle, the shadows remaining wrapped around the edges of the room. Yet Garen could not overtly perceive the taint of unholy Black mana, suggesting that however this intruder had entered this restricted area was not necessarily through evil means – though the abyss had always been able to conceal its polluted influence until it was too late.
Garen tried again, the bottom of his staff crashing into solid rock once more as he attempted to instantly dispel the magic illuminating the arca, which would make the unholy relic contained within much more difficult to gain access to. As he had anticipated, the wards failed to acquiesce to his demands, and the man moved so that his back was to the book – anyone wanting to take it from this place of imprisonment would have to go through him first.
"Show yourself, heretic!" the priest spat as he swivelled his head around, trying to keep up with the blurred motion of the one who had managed to follow him into this restricted location.
Experimentally but still swiftly, the cleric ventured a small amount of White mana into the connections that he had established with the enchantments woven into the cold rock of the room. He was startled to find that the runes simply would not respond to the stimulus provided by his magic – it wasn't that the mana was too weak to activate the defences, but that those defences didn't register Garen's input at all.
The intruder must have somehow blocked off his link with the enchantments, though Garen couldn't reconcile that with the fact that up until this point he had been able to obtain information regarding the entire area from the inscriptions.
That meant that they had somehow managed to subvert the entirety of the vault's enchantments to their own will, but such would require a tremendous amount of power and knowledge of the precise way they were laid out along the tunnel – much more than he was sensing right now.
No … it can't be that – But does that mean they have to have the ability to distort the way in which the defences respond to me?
Very well then. I shall have to play by their rules. The Lucaelian swept his staff round, keeping a tight hold upon his magical energy instead of feeding it into the runes that were supposed to amplify its strength.
The cold swelling at the pit of his stomach caused by the realisation that the intruder must have known that he would survey the damned relic of the massacre at Gol today or had been waiting in the city for a long time undetected refused to be quashed no matter the mantras and prayers he ran over in his mind.
The priest tried to push it aside, focussing on the blurred outline of a figure cloaked in shadow as it darted through the darkness, seemingly bounding over the chasm in the outer rims of the chamber as if it was solid ground.
Garen was a Summoner; he could call upon the power of an elemental of holy essence that had aided him through the many plights of his life in recent years, but he knew that with the rate the intruder was approaching him he would be dead before his companion was called from the Mind Realm.
Instead, Garen channelled mana from his heart to the peripheries of his fingers, taking up a stance so that the head of his staff was pointed in the direction of the rapidly advancing interloper. He placed the King's Blessing amulet at the tip of his weapon, starting to channel magic through it as radiant light spilled out over the chamber.
"Your presence defiles the sanctity of this holy place!" Garen let his voice become a defiant proclamation, using all of his expertise in delivering inspiring sermons within the midst of brutal battle and infusing it with mana to make it resound across the subterranean room.
The wings of his pendant opened once more, mana-borne light emulating that of the divine spilling out and explicating the indistinct assaulter within its illumination.
He saw a woman, lithe and deadly, clad in startlingly red robes dappled with black speckles. Jade eyes widened in surprise from within the confines of a bone white mask shaped into the form of some sort of fox before they were covered by slender arms arranged into a defensive position. Crossed over her concealed face like that would somehow protect her from the retribution form her intrusion.
The clergyman released almost all of his power that he could access without Summoning into the prestigious talisman, knowing that something that the Lucerna monarch would usually entrust to his most devoted servants would easily be able to withstand the influx of White mana.
Garen could feel it building within him, singing within his veins, the choir of violence in the name of the Goddess that he had been removed from for what seemed like aeons allowing its voice to pass through him.
"Begone!" he shouted, the word instilled with his zealous wrath as a beam of blindingly bright light cracked through the Sword of Wrath design of the King's Blessing. The masked defiler was consumed by the incandescence, a scream barely audible over the thrumming bass harmony of the light ripped from lips that were soon immolated by White as they were turned to purified ash.
The dust that was all that remained of the woman collapsed to the stone floor in a blackened heap, only noticeable in the central arca because of the meticulous work Garen had undergone in keeping this consecrated ground clean of filth.
And yet … the feeling that the trespass was still happening refused to leave from where it was pervading the aged Lucaelian's mind. Despite the fact that he swept his staff round, out of the corner of his eye he watched with stunned stupefaction as the ash of his opponent dissolved into gleaming cyan flecks that expanded in a glittering burst of obtrusive colour like the shattering of obscenely hued glass.
An illusion! Garen's mental voice screamed at him, but by this point it was too late. A figure landed behind him, grace matched only by her stealth, and before the cleric could cast a spell of protection a razor sharp edge was drawn across his throat.
"Angels … deliver me … protect the ..." he gurgled. His neck hurt, but not nearly as much as he would have imagined the pain of death to be. It still stung, yet the blade had been so honed that he had barely felt it at all. But what he did feel was the crushing agony of knowing he had failed his king and the Kingdom of Light.
Delta scowled beneath her mask as the old man's eyes rolled back in his head, blood vividly red against his pale complexion spilling down his chin and throat where she had slit it open.
When will these Lucaelians learn? Their precious angels are just as blind as they are, and their myopic beliefs are part of the reason for the coming darkness – the darkness that will swallow the whole world, not just their insular society.
She looked down at the sagging weight of the man in her arms, and for a brief moment regret welled up within her chest before she crushed it – or at least endeavoured to.
Despite the amount of people that Delta had put to the blade over the years, these clinical killings in the name of the Confederacy had never sat well with her. She was aware that this aversion to murder was exacerbated by the fact that her current self, form, persona, host, whatever she wanted to call it, was still young.
Still full of the optimism that had once defined the main assassin of the Confederacy.
Delta, the fox-masked of the Eternal Realm, refused to count her kills, aware that even as a virtually immortal entity the weight of them would still grind her down into nothingness, but she knew for certain that her newest body or self had murdered many more in a short space of time than many of her earlier selves.
She turned the dead man over in her arms, blade already sheathed after it had ripped through the fragile flesh of his jugular. Gloved hands – enchanted in a manner to imitate a pious servant of the king so that the artefact tied the priest had used wouldn't explode in a flash of obliterating light – unclenched death-stiffened fingers from around the amulet that would allow her to access what she had come to Gol Secondus for.
Her left hand turned a deep scarlet for a moment, before a gout of flame rippled out from her opened palm, incinerating the man's corpse and boiling the blood that had been splattered on the ground. Then, the Red became Blue, shimmering sapphire rippling out into that gaseous blood and ash and wrapping it within the sphere of her magic.
Delta refused to leave any trace of what had happened here. To that end, she focussed, collecting the memories and mental images of the man that she had just cut short the life of into a single space, weaving together a visual illustration of him from the threads of mana that slid around her fingers and focussing on what Beta had taught her all those selves ago.
The illusion that formed wasn't perfect; flaws formed from Delta's relative lack of knowledge concerning who she had just killed. It would be bereft of the personality traits and quirks any deeper than the most obvious surface attributes, but that would suffice for now.
Delta wasn't as adept at long term deception and manipulation as Beta (who, despite his recent recalcitrance, could weave together plots and duplicity that could – and had – ensnare entire kingdoms) and Gamma – she was more focussed on temporary misdirection that would stop those that she had interfered with from realising what had happened until the Confederacy had already proceeded to the next stage of its monumental plan which would soon be coming to a conclusion.
That would be happening here. Delta – and the artefact under inadequate guardianship within the City of Rebirth – would be gone long before anyone realised that the Garen who appeared before them was a fabrication and investigate the reliquary she was in now.
The glimmering, ethereal illusion nodded its head towards her, confirming that it knew its duty. She was confident her rendition would last as long as it needed to, and even if it didn't Delta doubted the inquisitors of the Kingdom of Light that would doubtlessly investigate such an irreverent intrusion would even know to suspect something other than the forces of the abyss.
Delta turned away from her temporary creation to the object of her current mission – the Aalyex of Anguish lay suspended in its imprisoning golden sphere of perpetually revolving runes. The woman could feel the dark power emanating from the malicious tome even through the suppression field. She doubted that the Lucaelians knew the true extent of what this book could do, as otherwise they would have kept in a facility far more heavily defended and consecrated than this place.
From what she had seen of the doctrine and dogma that spun around the Lucaelian people like a multi-layered web of faith, they did not prioritise the research of the dark talents of the enemies that they had fought against for over a thousand years – though the Confederacy had been battling against them and others for much longer.
Indeed, the mere mention of the word "demon" was considered close to sacrilege by the common citizenry, and within the upper echelons of the Kingdom of Light's hierarchy they prided themselves on their perceived purity and lack of knowledge of the forces and powers of hell.
Despite the fact that the Confederacy had only relatively recently gained access to the north-west nation of the great continent – the shifting hells of the demon kings prevented entrance in all but the most mundane of methods – Delta knew that it was not directly the fault of the Lucaelian populace for their ignorance concerning their mortal foes.
The angels that they so ardently revered had wilfully blinded their devotees to the nature of their antithesis, just as they had willingly blinded themselves in the name of their goddess and supposedly divine mother. It was their doing that neither they themselves nor the people that they claimed to protect were aware of how the powers of Black mana could be utilised.
Perhaps if they had not forbade delving into the lore of the hells then the Kingdom of Light might have had an inkling of the events that were on the blackened horizon. Lucael's citizens thought of their nation as a gleaming bastion of incandescence against the predations of the darkness, but in actuality they were a frail scab of hope compared to the nightmare still to come.
The angels were doing nothing to halt the rising evil. Delta doubted that they even knew about it. In fact, in their utter refusal to see the evidence blatantly in front of their all-seeing and yet ignorantly blind eyes, they were actively damning not just the kingdom of Lucael but the entire world.
Luckily, the Confederacy had schemed for too long in the shadows and prosecuted too many plans just out of sight of those that would stop them to leave humanity unprotected.
The Aalyex of Anguish was a fatal artefact created by a witch acting upon demonic instruction containing the grand total of all of the suffering felt by the poor citizenry of Gol as the city had been rent asunder by betrayal and corruption.
Although, from what Delta had discovered within her relatively short time within the Kingdom of Light, the Arch-Heretic Johnias Otium Lucerna had accomplished what he had wished for in the slaughter – not only had a horrific blow been dealt to the morale of the loyalists, the power of the abyss had swelled against the barriers of reality, allowing significant numbers of demons to manifest within inner Lucael – the woman and her masters had wished for the ability to replicate the effects of the unholy butchering of Gol's inhabitants.
When used correctly, the Aaylex could bolster the effects of any sacrificial rite aiming to weaken the thin film of skin between the mortal plane and the forsaken realms of Sancturia by a significant magnitude for a short duration through a short pulse of the condensed agony felt by the last moments of the souls held within.
Such a rupture in the fabric of reality would only spew the black lifeblood of the abyss for a limited time unless a being of suitable power could be anchored to the physical realm, but that was all the Confederacy – and those that would be acting unwittingly as their puppets – would need.
Though Delta found it disdainful to employ such vile artefacts in pursuit of their goals, she had seen enough within Lucael and the surrounding darkness that would quickly spread across the entire world to know that it was necessary.
It was all necessary. It was all for the Greater Good. That's what the Eternal had to keep telling herself. Once this was done, she could fade into the grey bliss of rest until the Confederacy was inevitably needed once more.
Quickly casting her own spell that would allow her to place both herself her prize within one of the stable warp-dimensions Gamma had created within the abyss (allowing the Confederates to move through a clear path transparent of hostile mana within the realm of Lucael, connecting it to the routes already established leading out form the Eternal Realm), Delta took one last look at the now near empty hemisphere of rune-inscribed rock around her.
To say that she did not anticipate the coming end-game would be a severe understatement. It was time for all of the carefully laid plans of the Confederacy to come to fruition.
Delta was ready for all of the murders and manipulation, precisely tailoring the paths taken by nations of Yentar, Welkas, Eria, many more that no longer existed in the eyes of man and now the Kingdom of Light that had remained out of their reach for far too long, to lead towards the balance being kept.
She had lived thousands of lives for this purpose, the purpose the five Eternals were created for. The stage was set. The Host was ready, she knew it. The evil that they had battled against for millennia was playing right into their hands.
The hunt was over.
And Delta was ready to embrace the kill.
My apologies once again for a very short chapter. A few events in my life have made it so that I have little time for writing, further compounding the fact that I was finding it hard to detail this interlude period between the war in Welkas and the next part of the story in the first place.
I'm not abandoning this story though. I do have plans for the Eternal Dance of Light and Dark despite the fact that they have played around in my mind for years and constantly change from what I originally intended. For anyone that still cares, I intend to continue it in smaller instalments such as this one and the earlier chapters. Anyway, thank you for reading. Feel free to review if you have any constructive criticism to share, though bear in mind that I'm obviously not writing at my peak ability and I don't have the time to go over and check everything.