Chapter 13

Twist. Twirl. Shift. Slice. Duck. Jump. Slice. Kick. Slice. Spin. Slice.

On and on Shades went, Mel barely a pace behind. His entire body, his entire being attuned to the chaos around him. To the wordless shrieks and howls and clattering of bones. Destruction, his vocation. Chaos, the rhythm of his heart. Triumphant, his grin, as he watched one glowing socket dim for but the briefest of moments before being replaced by another, and another, and another. His elation gradually reduced however, as he slowly came out of his haze and realised that the never-ending horde was just that. Never-ending.

His first hint came as he felt his reserves weakening, but the mass of undead, less so. His second, most recent and most obvious came as he and Mel cleared an area around them for a small respite. He didn’t need to look at Mel to see how tired she was getting. She didn’t have his powers of regeneration and her heavy breathing reminded him of the fact.

“Mel.” He said.

“I know.” She replied.

He looked over at the lich king still standing tall at the foot of its throne. The skull in its hand had started to crumble as it used its tremendous power. It still had a long way to go and, regardless of how much fun it was to turn bone to dust all day, Shades knew they couldn’t outlast it.

‘No wonder it’s the boss.’

Shades had to take it out himself, a normal blade hadn’t affected it in the slightest.

‘Or maybe…’

He was just about to fill Mel in on his half-formed plan when their enemies came crashing down.

‘She wouldn’t survive without me,’ he realised, ‘not while being this tired.’

They spun around each other, half an eye on the other’s back.

He couldn’t shout at her, the slightest distraction would be their undoing. They needed time.

Circulating an extra burst of speed, he twisted around Mel, grabbed her and jumped up to the nearest pillar. He didn’t see any archers so he figured if they stayed high, they’d have a moment. The passing brush of wind of a thrown sword quickly dissuaded him of the notion that they needed archers. Still, it was better than what they had.

“Can you stay high?” He shouted. “I’ll take him out.”

He felt her nod on his shoulder as she caught her breath.

He didn’t need to tell her to keep moving as he left her on a pillar and jumped on an opposing one, leaping from one to the next as he made his way closer to the lich.

He’d thought about using his shadow abilities to just appear behind the lich and cut its head off. Unfortunately by the time this thought had crossed his mind through his haze, he had already used the power a few times to avoid a blow he couldn’t dodge. The next time he Shadow Jumped would have to be his last if he didn’t want to end up in pain. If killing the lich didn’t end up destroying its creations, he wouldn’t be able to make it back to Mel in time before she was overrun, and he’d rather not take that chance. He cursed himself for his over-eagerness for a good fight and his arrogance at thinking he could handle anything the lich threw at them.

A few pillars later, he made it close enough to the lich to jump at it in a burst of speed.

Appearing in front of it barely a second later, he could practically feel his claws shearing through its spine before they collided against a sickly green energy shield, barely half a metre from contact. He almost growled in frustration before, with a burst of energy travelling up his arm, he was flung away, crashing into another pillar.

He managed to grab onto it, digging his fingers into the stone to keep from falling to the mass below as he tried to shake the numbness from his arm.

‘Good thing I didn’t go with my first plan of throwing Mel at it.’

He twisted his head to the side to avoid a thrown battleaxe that lodged itself in the stone barely an inch from his face, closing an eye at the spray of dust. He leapt to another one as the feeling returned to his arm.

‘Alright, new plan.’

Mel seemed to be holding up fine, he thought, as he watched at her easily avoiding the thrown weapons, flying this way and that.

‘Maybe I could chance it.’

He looked at the lich again. He couldn’t think of any other way to get to it. To get through that shield. It was the first thing that could withstand his ethereal claws and he was at a loss on what else he could use. If he had some kind of long range ability, he could maybe have overpowered it.

Steeling his resolve, and hoping that the thing’s creations died with it, he channelled his ethereal power in an explosive burst and held it all in. In the brief second of frozen time it gave him, he fixed the position in his mind and Jumped, appearing behind the lich, already spinning with his clawed hand only a few inches from its spine.

It had no time to react and Shades’ claws cleanly severed its skull from its body. Time seemed to freeze again, its skull floating in mid-air, the rest of its body slowly descending to the ground. Shades realised after a second that the skull wasn’t falling with the rest of the body. The undead horde had stilled momentarily as well.

Then the skull’s sockets started glowing a bright white and a strange rune appeared on top of it, seeming to draw in the air and dust to a single point beneath the skull. It sockets glowed brighter and brighter.

Feeling what was a coming, Shades, in a burst of speed, leapt away from the skull. He was just too late however, and a massive, explosive shockwave of force erupted from the skull, causing Shades to rocket forward and crash into another pillar once again. Thankfully he managed to decrease his weight just before collision, only cracking it instead of having it in break half and fall on him.

“This is getting annoying,” Shades grumbled as he shook his head to get rid of the daze the impact caused.

Getting a handhold, he surveyed the damage.

Some of the closest pillars to the throne lay in big piles of rubble while others had large cracks here and there.

The death of the lich had rendered all the undead lifeless. Well, more lifeless than they were in any case.

Spotting movement, he saw Mel extricate herself from a pile of bones, spitting out dust and rubbing off the worst of the dirt covering her. Shades knew he definitely needed a bath when they got out of here.

Whistling to get her attention, he pointed to the dais that, strangely enough, was the only place not covered in rubble or bone. He saw her nod and leapt to the platform, soon joined by a floating Mel.

“Well...” He started, “That worked.”

“Thankfully,” she replied, “I don’t know how much longer I could have lasted.”

“Yeah, my bad. That frenzy in the beginning really messed up my thoughts.” He grimaced. “Probably not a good idea in the future unless we actually know what we’re up against.”

Mel just nodded, before pausing, a frown on her face.

“What’s that?” she pointed at a dark purple glow, obstructed by a pile of bones at the foot of the dais.

Going over to it, he cleared the bones and picked up something they had forgotten about.

The purple skull.

He felt a small tingle in his hand but thought nothing of it, assuming it to be left over power still being radiated. He brought it over to Mel.

“It’s the skull the lich got all its power from.”

“Should you be touching that thing?” She asked, dubiously looking at it. “Just throw it away and let’s get out of here.”

The tingle started getting worse and Shades could feel pins and needles up and down his arm. He tried throwing it away but it just stuck to his hand. Grabbing it with his other hand to rip it off, that hand just got stuck as well. No matter how hard he pulled, he couldn’t get rid the skull.

He hissed as a sharp pain spiked through his hands and the skull felt like it was growing hotter and hotter.

“Shades? What’s wrong?” Mel made to grab onto the skull but Shades jerked it out of her grasp.

“No!” His face was scrunched up in pain now as the skull felt like it was searing his skin. “Don’t touch it.”

The pain rocketed up a few hundred notches and Shades couldn’t keep the groan of agony escaping his lips. It felt like the searing heat in his head, only on his hands.

Soon it felt like the skull was burning the flesh off his hands, and before his eyes that’s exactly was happened. Starting from his fingers, the flesh slowly blackened to ash and disintegrated. His arms started trembling as it felt like they were getting electrocuted. The pain made him scream in agony, his regeneration working overtime and was the only thing keeping him from getting vaporised in seconds, but the slow advancement making the pain all the more excruciating.

“Cut them off, Mel!” He shouted, looking at her through the tears in his eyes, “My arms, cut them off!”

Her own tear-streaked face stared at him in distress before his words sunk in. She’d been trying to find a way to help him and came to that conclusion just as he shouted it at her.

Firming her resolve, she formed her claws and sliced through his arms before she could think twice.

The skull quickly turned the hands attached to it to ash, but was connected by a strange glowing tether to his severed stumps and kept burning it up, the ash flowing through the tether into the skull, slowly devouring Shades.

His pain intensified and he fell to his knees, barely able to think through the haze that clouded his mind.

Mel was crying and searching for a way to help him, kneeling beside him, not able to handle his pained cries. It had almost reached his elbows by now.

Her eyes caught the brightly glowing skull.

She knew. She knew what would happen if she managed to destroy it. That violent energy needed to go somewhere.

Her face became resigned. Her heartbeat stilled. She always knew that when the day came, she’d give her life for Shades. She’d do it a hundred times over. She simply wished that it didn’t have to happen so soon. She wished they could experience a life together, no matter how difficult. She wished they had longer. She wished…

But the choices before her made it apparent that there were no choices at all.

She knelt in front of him and held his face as his entire body trembled. Shades blinked through his tears as he gazed at Mel.

Her face looked so sad.

She leaned in closer to his ear and said something that he had wanted to hear for so long.

Then she kissed him and the pain dulled as his heart swelled. The haze in his mind cleared just enough for his thoughts to catch up and he realised what was happening as she drew away. His eyes managed to focus on her as she crawled to the skull.

“No… Mel…” He managed to croak out.

He tried crawling after her but fell on his face as his elbows couldn’t catch him in time. The trembling in his body increased as the pain spiked once more but it was nothing to the pain in his heart. His tears were now for an entirely different reason.

“Mel,” he groaned, digging his arms into the ground to try and get to her. “Please… No…”

She formed a single large claw, sharper than any before, using all the energy she had left.

“Mel!” Shades screamed.

This wasn’t happening. This couldn’t be happening. There had to be another way. Some way to use his ethereal energy to counteract the curse. Something. Anything but this.

‘Anything but this!’

He had just managed to get his trembling feet under him when Mel turned to him, a sad smile on her face. She didn’t say anything. Nothing needed to be said.

A tear drop fell from her chin. Time froze as the violet glow illuminated it. It glinted in the light like the rarest of amethyst gems, the sight searing itself into Shades’ mind like the pain of losing his limbs, the moment forever captured.

Sound faded away as time resumed its inevitable course and Mel’s hand descended on the skull, piercing through the top and splitting in half, the crack like a gun shot in the silence.

A howling could be heard then, like the very air was screaming in pain, before a violet explosion of force and light erupted outwards in a shockwave many times worse than the one preceding it.

Shades was flung to the other side of the throne room, cracking the hard wall as he smashed into it. Falling unconscious, his last fleeting thought was of that jewel frozen in time and Mel’s final words.

“I love you.”