Page 17

Lost Sun Killer Myth: Tying Up Loose Ends

D ays passed. Krahe couldn’t find an easy route of ingress into Sorayah’s home, until she tested the route that was often forgotten—entering from above. Climbing a nearby building, Krahe got onto the roof of Sorayah’s home and skimmed down. Hot, stale air assaulted her and the darkness of a disused attic choked her senses. After getting some light by pouring thauma into her arm she saw that the attic was completely empty, and had clearly not been used in a long while. She took a moment to bring a small DD-fuelled light out of storage, using a small tendril to affix it to her shoulder. Krahe didn’t even try skimming down again, assuming the presence of wards; she simply looked around and found the door. It was old, dusty, and didn’t even have a lock, but it didn’t open, suggesting a latch at the other side. Its hinges were on this side, however.

Krahe left, deciding to prepare before committing. She sourced a tubular lock pick from Garvesh, and learned that, apparently, artifacts and talismans capable of breaking local wards were fairly difficult to come by. And so, Krahe gave up on subtlety. If she had the time, she would’ve tried to source such an item or even develop a Theurgy capable of it, but as she saw it, she didn’t have that much time. Sorayah’s case was a loose end that needed tying up. It didn’t need to be a perfect, cleanly executed ghost operation.

She returned the next day around two hours before Sorayah usually came home, once more skimming into the attic. Ten minutes and a few usages of the Forming Toroid later, Krahe had succeeded in knocking the hinge pins out and propped the door against the wall. A narrow stairway led directly to a hallway on the floor below. The house was quite small, with one bedroom, a reading room, kitchen, and basement. Rugs, wood, bronze, and semiprecious stones made up the decorations, with simple glowing stones set into the walls as lights. It was, just like much of Audunpoint, an ancient building that had been renovated.

The bedroom was locked and warded, as was the basement, but the same couldn’t be said for the kitchen or the reading room. She picked the locks on both, taking only a few minutes for each, given the fact the locks weren’t particularly strong and didn’t have any particular anti-picking measures. There was nothing suspicious in the kitchen, unsurprisingly. Going through the reading room, Krahe found a variety of books, including several interesting books on the interactions between theurgy and anathemism, none of which were to be found in the Society’s library. There was also a complete copy of Burning Torment Wrought in Black, and fragmentary copies of several Human Charcoal Letters. Besides occult texts, a surprising volume of Sorayah’s personal collection was made up of human-saurian interspecies smut.

Unfortunately, Krahe didn’t find any spare keys inside a book, even after searching the writing desk and finding three different hidden drawers. One of these contained a smut manuscript involving a painfully obvious self-insert being taken advantage of by men whose appearances lined up a bit too closely with members of the Society. It also got human sexual anatomy comically wrong, ascribing them with what Krahe assumed to be Saurian traits.

What she did find, however, was a book that lit up as an anathema hazard on the Prospector’s Eyes, far out of reach on a high shelf. After getting it down with a tar tendril, Krahe found it to be locked with a padlock that had no keyhole. Trying to get into Sorayah’s mindset under the assumption this was one of her locks and not just something she had found, the first thing she thought to try was to simply pour some anathema into it. At first, it didn’t work. The lock lit up with runes, only for a snap to sound from inside. Gradually, after a number of attempts, Krahe got it open by pouring in as little anathema as she could. It was a tiny amount, the smallest she had ever produced at one time, and it felt horrid. Barely starting the fusion reaction only to snuff it out felt wrong .

While Krahe shuddered in place at the unpleasant feeling, lines of eldritch runes pulsed over the lock’s surface and it popped open. The book was indeed hollow, containing a poorly shielded box within which there sat a piece of coal shaped like a human hand. IIt couldn’t be described as charcoal, as its surface had a gleaming luster, with an orange glow only coming out of a few thin cracks and the cross-section of the wrist. It was much closer to anthracite in appearance. It constantly radiated anathema, twitching in a claw-like rigor as if it was still attached, and as if its owner was in the throes of terrible pain.

“Ohoho, there’s exhibit A…” she uttered as she smiled to herself. Truthfully, Krahe wasn’t even slightly opposed to making use of anything she found for herself. If human charcoal could be used to somehow boost her own capabilities, she would use it. However, given its documented uses, she didn’t expect this to be the case. Every application seemed to be some variation of allowing the user to control Thaumic Fusion and/or to shield herself from exposure.

Krahe closed the hollow book, set it down on the writing desk, and sat down with the chair turned to the door, gun in hand. While she waited, she read through Sorayah’s manuscript. She couldn’t take it seriously in any sense of the word, and ended up turning her attention to the other texts, such as a book on theurgy titled “Dreaming of Hyperion Shore.”

Around two-thirds of the way through the first chapter, the front door opened. Krahe continued waiting, listening to Sorayah walk around for a few minutes, watching her through Barzai’s eyes. Then, abruptly, her footsteps stopped in the hallway outside the writing room. She had realized that something was amiss—the door was ajar.

Barzai saw her conjure a brass apparatus, presumably from her own Kenoma Pocket, resembling a bullseye lantern. Soon enough, Krahe was staring her in the face. She conjured a cigarette, raising it to her lips as Sorayah stared at her with a mixture of bewilderment and pure, seething hate. An angry-red spotlight spilled out of her lantern, containing a continuous stream of faint anathema. The way it scattered strangely looked like two beams converged into one.

“ You… ” she hissed.

“What? Me ?” Krahe laughed. “Did you assume I was dead just because I stopped showing up at the Society? Did you really think the amateurs you sent actually succeeded? I admit I didn’t leave much in the way of survivors that could report back, or even identifiable corpses, but c’mon. You didn’t hear back from them, and it didn’t seem suspicious? Even a little bit?”

“I assumed they taught you a lesson that you took to heart .”

“My, so intimidating. Let me guess; that lantern has human charcoal in it and you intend to blast me with anathema. Is that right?”

Sorayah didn’t answer, but her grip on the lantern tightened, and her eyes narrowed.

“Well? Hit me. Better turn me into a shadow fried into your carpet all at once. Better make sure it kills me in one hit. Y’know what? Let’s make it easier for you to pull the trigger. Let’s go to your basement, shall we? That’s where you carry out the final step to turn your victims into human charcoal, isn’t it? I’m sure you won’t be so hesitant when your interspecies porno isn’t at risk of getting incinerated alongside me. Y’know, I’ve seen my share, and I’m fairly certain human penises don’t actually have bones in them, and they certainly don’t have knots .”

A noise somewhere between an angry snake’s hiss and an angry crocodile’s rumble began to issue from Sorayah, her throat visibly reverberating. Her teeth ground together, and she gripped the lantern ever tighter. Even the beam grew in intensity as something mechanical inside the device moved, now starting to lightly burn away at Krahe’s wards. Nonetheless, Sorayah backed out of the door, slowly, keeping both her eyes and the lantern pointed at Krahe. To her surprise, that offhanded suggestion had worked. She had fully expected to be breaking into a dead woman’s basement ten minutes from now, but it seemed Sorayah’s sensibility—or perhaps love for her book collection—won out.

Krahe, not yet trying to stand up, casually picked up the hollow book.

“Leave it!” Sorayah snapped.“Get up. If you want to see the basement before you die, I can give you that much.” Her attempt at control sounded feeble, her voice far too angry and not nearly confident enough. Krahe couldn’t help but derive great amusement from this classical scenario; Sorayah’s demeanor reeked of a serial killer caught metaphorically with her pants down, thrown far off-kilter, struggling to convince herself she was still in control.

Her original intention was to split her forearm open lengthwise while placing the item into her Kenoma Pocket, but she decided against it. Considering that course of action triggered a revulsion akin to the thought of consuming something far beyond one’s ability. So, she did leave it. A puzzled expression came over Sorayah when she saw that the lock was undone, but she maintained her focus on Krahe while backing out into the hallway. Krahe followed, openly raising her barrier as she went. It had changed quite noticeably. The swirling umbrella of grayish ash and smoke had grown darker, and glistening, obsidian-like chips were now included within it.

Sorayah stopped some distance down the hallway. Her features tensed, and she raised the lantern. Something inside it moved, and the beam narrowed down to a diameter even smaller than Krahe’s barrier, shifting in hue towards purple. Then, in a near instant, a deluge of strange sigils burst out, crackling with an eldritch energy that was neither lightning, nor fire, nor any single definable force. The charge-up was far faster than she had expected, and since she hadn’t seen the minimal telegraphing before, she had no way to predict when the artifact would fire.

Despite Astro Diving on reflex right when the beam hit, even the quarter-second of blocking it had built up an intimidating amount of hard entropy. The beam had to be anywhere from two and a half to five times stronger than Krahe’s strongest Cinder Flash, based on whether it was Energetic or Arcane in nature. If it was Energetic, it would completely obliterate her wards and fry the living hell out of her if she got hit straight on. If it was Arcane, she wagered she might be able to weather one hit and be fine. Two hits would definitely be very fucking bad, but maybe survivable if it hit a particularly resilient area like her left arm or anywhere armored by her Biosuit. These were all worst-case scenarios, of course. Krahe wouldn’t take the risk of eating another hit head-on.

Seeing Sorayah’s eyes go wide and her stance falter at the sight of her astral form, Krahe surfaced once again.

“The flame of a candle,” she lied.

But Sorayah didn’t know that. She was too busy reeling from the backlash of Krahe’s barrier. Angry serpents made of smoke and ash manifested in her vicinity and spewed outbursts of burning cinders at the lizard woman with unerring accuracy, their flame reddened by Isotope and their constituent smoke a rich, sooty black from the abundance of hard entropy. It was burning filth in the purest sense.

Five seconds passed. Sorayah, wild-eyed, raised the lantern again. The charge-up was even shorter this time, but Krahe reacted based on the tensing of Sorayah’s arm and avoided the vast majority of the blast with another dive. Nonetheless, the attack did graze her, and what little she had to block still filled up over two-thirds of her entropy tolerance. Even then, it felt like being sprayed with acid in the way the Isotope-filled blast corroded her wards and wormed into her. One more blast like that would fill her arm’s ability to contain, and it wouldn’t take much more after that to make her get sick.

“I don’t know what you expected. I can just keep doing that, y’know. While I admit that there is some effort to doing it , your attacks can’t affect me once I’ve transformed… And I’d wager you can’t fire that thing faster than I can disperse what little entropy nullifying its effects costs me,” Krahe lied again, omitting the five-second dive recovery time. She took a step forward, prompting Sorayah to take a step back, grasping the lantern with her other arm much like someone whose giant penis-metaphor revolver just bounced off of a cyborg’s subdermal armor. She started manipulating something in the lantern’s rear for the third time, and the beam began narrowing for the third time, but Krahe interrupted her—

“I wouldn’t. I gave you two chances, and there won’t be a third. Next time I’ll dislocate your arms instead of just standing here. Now be smart and take me to your basement.”

“You can’t expect me to believe that you can break my wards that quickly. Mine are especially resilient.”

Krahe stepped forward as if preparing to sprint, skimmed towards Sorayah, and mid-skim adjusted her exit position and facing so she would come out into a ground slide, or as close as she could with her current Control attribute. It was rough at best—she slammed onto the ground in a somewhat awkward slide-kick position, but her momentum carried her through and the smooth rug provided some assistance. She was able to get behind Sorayah in the commotion. The Saurian exerted a level of strength and grapple resistance well beyond what her size suggested, but Krahe had three things that allowed her to come on top:

Firstly, knowledge of real grappling arts. This included bits from various martial arts learned throughout her life, followed by the mnemonic imprints for the Whitestone and Bergmann Security Grappling Manual V.3 burned into her memory, all culminating with Sector 7 Style’s brutal joint-locks designed to counter an opponent’s superior strength and exploit the common weak points of most cyborgs.

Secondly, the Left Arm of Chernobog. Specifically, it was the unique property that had allowed her to lift a man weighing more than a hundred kilos back in Cassius’s—or rather, Seer’s—gambling house. The Left Arm’s physical attributes grew not just based on her own pure strength, but also her arcane attributes. At this point, it was far stronger than her right arm.

Thirdly, tar ; she could throw the full weight of her magic into a grapple through Tar-tendrils.

By exploiting all three of these factors to the fullest, Krahe managed to get Sorayah into an arm-lock. In the process, the Saurian had fired two more blasts from her artifact, imprinting reams of purple, smoldering eldritch script into the walls and carpet.

“I won’t need to break them, unless you’ve got some truly special wards that protect against grappling,” she hissed into Sorayah’s ear. “Now drop the artifact or I’ll make you drop it.”

“I cannot. It’s volatile. Who knows what will happen if I let go.”

With a smirk, Krahe extended the tendril she had winding down Sorayah’s arm and wrapped it around the lantern.

“No excuses. Let go.”

Sorayah didn’t, so Krahe wrenched her arm—not enough to dislocate the shoulder, but enough to make it abundantly clear that she was able and willing to do so. It was not out of mercy, but because Krahe didn’t want to risk the possibility of the basement’s wards requiring both hands to open. Once she had the lantern grasped in a Tar-tendril, Krahe skimmed backwards, raising her arms into the firing configuration of Wandrei Faust.

“Basement. Now.”

A few uneasy minutes later, Sorayah unlocked the door and proceeded to move her hands over its surface. Her palms, held in stiff gestures, snapped through a sequence of three specific positions while Sorayah uttered a sequence of three inaudible keywords.

When it finally swung open, Krahe ensured that the two of them stepped in at the same time so that Sorayah couldn’t try slamming the door in her face. Beyond was a short stairway into the earth, leading into the basement proper. It was fairly spacious, a single large rectangular room, mostly plain, smoothed stone. It resembled a laboratory of a sort, with bookshelves and a large L-shaped table that included a sink in its design. A mixture of glassware and occult implements made from a mixture of brass and strange dark stone were strewn across its surface. Shards of coal-like material pulsing with red light were suspended in clamps, contained in flasks, and so on. A few of them could be recognized as human parts—mostly fingers, toes, and other such small pieces. None of them moved like the hand in the book; in fact, none of them quite looked like it either, truly resembling charcoal. Krahe realized what the hand reminded her of: high-grade rock coal, anthracite.

On the left side of the room, Krahe saw the door she had tried to break through earlier, barely visible behind a large device that was shaped like a vending machine, clearly placed there as a barricade. It was a power supply unit, based on the tank with Thaumine sloshing about inside, and the black cable hanging from it and snaking to the various devices through the room.

“Are these your best results?” Krahe asked, glancing towards the table. She decided to pretend she knew more than she truly did, making the assumption that Sorayah hadn’t gotten far in her research.

“Yes. My materials have been sub-par. Perhaps we could work together—”

“Very compelling offer, I’ll consider it,” Krahe interrupted facetiously. “Move, open the next door.”

As Sorayah carried out the same unlocking and ward opening procedure as before, Krahe added, “If you’ve only gotten so far with the resources available to you, it means I caught you early.”

She was just blowing smoke, of course, speaking from extremely fragmentary evidence and wild assumptions. But it had its effect nonetheless, and Sorayah, with shaking hands, opened the door. Forcing her through the door and sticking close, Krahe was struck by a grim sight.

The walls, floor, and ceiling were all reinforced by metal sheets, crudely riveted into the walls and glimmering with enchanted runes, with the exception of a 2m wide circle in the middle of the room. In it knelt a man with his arms chained to the ceiling, or rather, what had once been a man. He had turned completely into glowing charcoal, radiating heat and anathema, the burnt scraps of high-quality clothing still hanging off of him. His posture was arched and tense, knees wide, face contorted in a voiceless, agonized grimace. Not screaming, but rather with gritted teeth. Around him, filling the circle, was a layered, extraordinarily complex glyph carved into the stone. Dried blood filled its grooves. Krahe tried to discern whether the man had been cut, but with the number of straight, narrow cracks covering him, she couldn’t tell whether any of them were simple cuts.

Walking around, dragging Sorayah along, she noticed a hammer and chisel on the ground just outside the circle. The man’s right leg had been chipped off halfway up the calf. She’d seen worse, much worse, but Krahe was nonetheless disgusted at the scene. Even if it wouldn’t haunt her, even if it couldn’t unsettle her to the point of tremors, that grimace of torment still sparked a visceral blend of disgust and anger somewhere deep inside. It would’ve died out, buried under decades of growing numbness, but she stoked it, gladly taking the ember of righteous fury into her mind’s hand.

“In the corner. Now,” Krahe said, pointing at the far end of the room with one hand and shoving Sorayah with the other.

“Really? It gets to you that much ? I’ve seen the posters. You must’ve done far worse than I if the Hashems want you dead so badly.” Sorayah scoffed, but she nonetheless did as she was told.

“To feel disgust and anger at the sight of evil is no sin, and to tolerate it is no virtue.”

“There is no such thing in the scriptures of the Twin Churches.”

“I didn’t say it was. I also didn’t say I was an apostle,” Krahe said, approaching within the Forming Toroid’s range. Raising her hand, she pointed her gun at Sorayah.

“Don’t move, I won’t shoot you…” she trailed off. The Forming Toroid began to glow and Krahe flicked her wrist, using the gun as a pointer. In moments, Sorayah was restrained by a series of smoky jade rods.

“Wgh—What is that? Archon-forged?” Sorayah questioned, audibly struggling to keep herself together. The panic was starting to overtake her voice. Krahe didn’t care much. Oh, she was sure that Sorayah was sorry; sorry that she got caught; sorry she encountered a fish too big for her.

“Correct. I get it, you’re clever. It won’t save you.”

Krahe conjured and lit a cigarette, taking a drag as she observed the man-turned-coal.

“That phrase about evil—a philosopher in a faraway land said it, once, thousands of years ago. You know what happens now, don’t you? I promised to show you real anathemism. D id I not? Barzai, come.”

She outstretched her left hand. The eidolon simply stopped hiding and flew into her palm.

“Why?” Sorayah questioned.

“You came after me. I warned you. You persevered. Actions, consequences,” Krahe deadpanned. Slowly, tendrils began to grow out of her arm, forming a hemispherical nest in which Barzai stood.

“No. Not me! Why?!” Sorayah demanded, growing audibly frustrated. “The Society, the Talisman Mistress, everything. You’re a saint; don’t pretend otherwise. Only the Temple of Records holds texts listed as the Human Charcoal Letters, and only a saint would have such high-level access. I know. I tried, through an apostle who owed me. What I don’t understand is why you would come after me. I am of no consequence. The Grafting Church doesn’t send saints after small-fries like me. They’re too busy dealing with things like rogue grafters and body theft. Am I just… a diversion? A convenient notch to pad your record with?! That’s all my hard work to unearth these ancient arts will amount to?!”

By the end, Sorayah was nearly screaming.

Krahe turned to look at her.

“You put yourself in my sights at a time when I was looking for a target to test this on.” She glanced at her left hand. “Just bad luck. Is that what you want to hear? It’s half of the truth. The other half is that, in truth, I would have come for you sooner or later. Surely, you can’t have deluded yourself into thinking what you are doing is permissible.”

“You still haven’t answered me. Why?!” Sorayah demanded, wild-eyed and ignoring what was happening in Krahe’s left hand in favor of locking her gaze on her To facilitate their conversation, Krahe kept Barzai as he was, simply building the shell around him, fully aware that she could will him to transform into the core at any moment.

After staring into those wild eyes for a few moments, Krahe explained herself: “This is what I do. This is what I am. I don’t know how to do anything else. After you, it will be Semzar Hashem. After him, his father. After him, whomever is pulling his strings. I mean to follow the roots of infestation spreading through this land all the way to the source, because evil has a name. A face. Perhaps a mansion and a family. Many of society’s ills do not spring up from nothing. There are oft-powerful men who proliferate them, perhaps for their own gain or because they are driven by an ideology. And just as evil has a face, so does the hand that will strangle the puppet master with his own strings; you’re looking at it. That is what I am.”

“You’re mad,” said a wide-eyed Sorayah in a hushed tone. “So what? You mean to just keep killing until the world is ‘rid of evil?!’”

“Come now,” she sneered. “The world is much too large for one woman to personally fry every shitbag businessman into his office chair. A gardener never runs out of weeds to pluck. I only need to make sure I never get the wrong man! Easy enough.”

At this point, Krahe was just messing with Sorayah, purposely using extreme rhetoric while remaining quasi-accurate to her true beliefs. Alas, nuance didn’t make for a good monologue.

“What of the churches, then?! You don’t mean to claim—”

“What makes you think I won’t come after a corrupt priest? By rights, I ought to root out corruption within the church with absolute prejudice. It would be a disservice to the divine not to do so. It’s almost time now—there won’t be much left of you after this; just a shadow on the wall. I’m sure the higher-ups would prefer it if I just pulled out your voidkey and had you taken in for questioning, but I did promise to show you real anathemism… ”

“No, wait! Wait, wait, wait! Please! I don’t need to see it, and my key, it’s—”

Sorayah desperately thrashed against her restraints. Krahe genuinely didn’t understand why she hadn’t tried to fight back or free herself; surely, she wasn’t so reliant on that lantern device as to be incapable of normal thaumaturgy. Or perhaps she was smart, and rightly thought that fighting back would only serve to worsen her situation.

"-it's here. Take it, just don't kill me," she said, twisting her head. A sigil on her neck began to glow - it was a triangle with small circles at its corners, each circle containing an eldritch sigil. They were some of the same sigils as those which filled the ritual circle. Sorayah gritted her teeth, hissing, and a hexagonal rod bearing that triangular mark slowly emerged from her scales. It was an extraordinarily simple design in physical shape, this simplicity offset by the fact its body was covered with countless more angular patterns with sigils in circles at the angles. Krahe's mind immediately jumped to circuitry.

It looked to be a stony, reddish material at first, only to seamlessly transition to the anthracite-like, glowing material one-third of the way down its length.

“The church will reward you more for bringing me in alive. You should know that!”

Krahe manifested a tar tendril, using it to reach over and begin pulling on the key. Though it took quite a bit of effort, it came out without incident. It was around 20cm in length, with its lower 2/3 made from the same anthracite-like matter as the hand. She didn't bother to appraise it yet, slipping it into her pocket, because her attention was solely on Sorayah. The saurian looked disappointed and frustrated; despite trying to hide it, Krahe noticed the shift in her demeanor and the rumbling in her throat. For this reason, Krahe kept her hand in her pocket, fusion-forming a smoke burster packed with as much isotope as she could fit. Out of sight and beyond her notice, concealed by clothing, reams of eldritch symbology pulsed across Sorayah's back, eidolons swimming beneath her skin like predatory fish waiting to leap out of the water.

“Disappointed that I didn’t come close enough for you to set off a contingency or something of the sort? Come on.” Krahe scoffed. “What kind of fool did you take me for? Every member of the Society is a theurge, and you were a high-ranking one. Of course you would have contingencies.”

Raising her left hand just above her head, she willed Barzai to collapse into the Daemon Core. Despite the lack of need for an incantation, Krahe nonetheless recited one, to see if Sorayah would try to interrupt it.

“Lei-Amul, Thelder, Wandrei, great sages of the Astral Gulf, hold fast the Three Keys and uncoil the chains that bind—”

As expected, Sorayah’s pupils became hair-thin lines and she emitted a shrill, ear-splitting screech. Her entire body was enveloped in pulsating strings of runes, and, on reflex, Krahe decided to dive while she finished casting. She had seen these runes displayed earlier during their confrontation at the Society, but this time, they were far denser and brighter, and they leapt off of Sorayah’s skin, lashing her surroundings.

The Saurian freed herself and carved deep gashes into everything around her in an instant; the human charcoal fell apart, scattering into pieces. Krahe honestly wasn’t sure why she hadn’t done this sooner, but the reason revealed itself when she got a look at Sorayah and saw that she hadn’t been entirely spared, either. There were deep gashes covering her whole body, all the way into the meat. Moreover, she seemed to have become feral, based on her hunched stance, bestially heavy breathing, and glazed-over eyes.

“Where…” Sorayah growled, looking around. Her eyes locked onto Krahe, and she lunged across the room. With that leap, yet more reams of script exploded out of her, shredding the ceiling and floor, but passing through Krahe unimpeded. Being able to see it up close and while partly submerged in the Gulf, Krahe got a front row seat to serpent-like creatures covered in those runes tearing their way out of their master’s body before transforming fully into their theurgic forms.

It was done.

Krahe emerged from her dive, raising her hand.

Sorayah leapt right at her without a moment wasted, but by the time she or her absurdly lethal, self-destructive theurgy could reach Krahe, she had already burned both her skim charges to get out of the way.

Desperation—and with it, sapience—flashed over Sorayah’s contorted features. With a swing of her arm, arabesque runes flashed down its length. A deep gash along the same spiral appeared on the limb as the runes tore themselves free, lashing towards the Daemon Core rather than Krahe herself. A last-ditch effort to try and shoot down the theurgic vessel before it could carry out its function.

It was too late.

The spear of eldritch script did pierce the shell, but it only hastened Sorayah’s demise.

A narrow beam of red light shot out, accompanied by a thunderous buzzing sound. It obliterated both Sorayah’s theurgy and her arm, and before she could even scream in pain, it expanded to consume her entirely.

Then, just as quickly as it had begun, the deluge was over, and a disjointed shadow had been burned into the reinforced metal that covered the ritual chamber’s interior.