Chapter Thirteen, Apotheosis II

Deep within Moribond

Drakkon sifted through endless gray. Nothing ahead nor behind but gray. It refuted his being. Desolation is all this realm held for him. Time made irrelevant by the bleak influence of this dimension. Sun & moon wrestled in twilight. Suspended in eternal gray. Infinity was before him, behind him, within him; one second and one millennium, indistinguishable in sea of mist. No telling how long he spent in this all-encompassing murk.

Dull. Dreamless. Breathless Dusk. This purgatorial wasteland: boundless. A uniformity converged on the elements, conforming to the ocean of gray. But a unique hue flickered to contrast the tireless dimness. Disturbance split the windowless austerity just enough to start unveiling the dayless vista.

Translucent strands appeared against the frayed grayness. Pulling on these, unraveled the drab web to show color of awareness. Stringing lucidity within this dreary dream world to lead him to himself. Yet such lunette threads did not lead him to a control however, as there was nothing to seize of a dissociated oneness. Any emission of command from his consciousness only bounced back off the dull blockage; all order of ego dissipated in the beamless labyrinth’s monotony.

This temporal convolution belied influx of ashen crests, abated then to ageless clout. At the foremost slant of his mind a hidden barrier locked his full return to conscious, keeping him in stillborn limbo. Barely traceable along the edges of his brain, he could make out its existence. Concentrating, drawing up the latch, another form materialized out of the brain-mist. Phantom tendrils uprooted, exorcising true form. Their slashing vines frayed the shroud of abyssal unity to whittle out a door.

Before him: cyclopean gate, archaic and yet so lasting in foundation that it remained even when forgotten. The threshold, gruesome in its colossal expanse. A buried totem of the gods’ passage that would threaten all heaven in its height otherwise. It took the mountain’s depth and made it its sky, dominating this obscure underground orb which bore its absurd glory. Parts of it, where old planks once protected its paths, were musty and inert. Yet the rest was as though it had ne’er been disturbed in all the ages from whence it was begot. Emanating power, a sentience in the stone; as though it was not just a gate but also its keeper, a guardian deciding who may earn passage through its insurmountable construct.

No matter how much he pressed the bulwark of this old world kept him from penetrating its breadth. Perhaps the shrine’s vanished masons set this to mock anyone stealing their secrets from their necropolis, making it impregnable even in ruination. Fiddling with it he felt an overbearing and disembodied gaze lingering above, scolding his attempts with cheerless chins of stone. But the pilgrim blistered with Need to escape this sepulcher. This intent coiled about to spring psychic talons. Pulse & power of the furies to batter this barricade or wrench the earth around it.

The whole foundation shook. Stones and sight crumbled away as the gate melted by the slings of Drakkon’s desire. Brought down in hail of scorching debris; comets of ash & starry meteors plummeted to shatter as entropic eggs. Those stony judges and the mortar of their gate trembled. They were but aspects however, for the gods looking in from far ahead were unphased by this summoning of apocalyptic carnage. Brushing off the crashing boulders as though they were nothing more than droplets of water. The imprints of those astral Watchers leered with spectral stares, unflinching, unwavering in unpredictable intent over where their defiled gateway led to their hidden city.

The Pilgrim reemerged past the gate, passing vacuum of space between the stars. Stepping onto translucent staircase, shimmering spray of planets bled out along their wells. Their empty encasement enraptured in hemorrhage of new colors & streaks. A magnificent nebula became the way. He traveled up the empyrean banister. Seeing cycles of creation swell; structures from the same cosmos all consisted of transform into fresh facets. Ever twirling, mystical birthing.

The gaseous masts of stardust sailed through him. That renewing vessel washed then ashore, unto a beach sanded by halos. From that sand he found massive hall where the gods themselves were housed. Here the firmament beneath bent into its furnishings. Here presented interstellar ball, masquerade of motion from that which always is. The floor spang with a life beyond life. Eternal. Immutable. Engaged in spiral dance of perpetual motion as it wound about itself. New dancers of the same materia. The heavens delighted in playing with the totality of infinite possibilities. Then came their choir.

Each star sung the song of itself with all the silky wonder of the welkin which conceived them. Reciting melodious ballads that foretold their tales and their inversion. Yet even in shedding cycles these dancers effulged brilliance that defied awful finality. Death could not claim that song which shared itself with peers of future & past. That court of the stars - filled of comrades near and far, undead, and unborn – proved this through constant performance. A taste for him of their true immortality.

All at once the stars & planets sung their arias in perfect harmony. Their cosmic cadence an anthem rebounding through the star-halls of creation. Every note expressed essence through their consonance. Each pause amplified space of silence so to breathe definition. Congruence of chiming worlds. Bows from this symphony played Drakkon’s strings as his soul hummed its part within the canticle. Ringing with cosmic vespers.

But the path to the peak dropped abrupt midway. Leaving a massive chasm just before the last rise. Deciding on a leap of faith, the Pilgrim sprung from last stair to distant precipice. Crossing the distance, a milky stream of stardust flounced, brushing him with unspeakable currents. Sweeping him into the gulf. No indication of direction or whether he even truly moved within the untamed morass, but he knew that he was falling.

Yet heaven once more granted him a boon. From abyss above burst forth blasting astral frame aloft into flying nimbus.

The breath of the nebula gifted Drakkon with seraphic wings to lift himself freely.

An auroral circle spread from the passage meeting the encroaching darkness with its light as he flew into the lucent orb.

Ahead was the full argent glory of the sun. Solaris, the tireless lantern which beamed with patience over mankind’s dawning and all ages since, foretold to bear witness to all eons till the world wanes again. It now illumed path to land. As he flew into radiance his wings evaporated against the brazen incandescence that lit the galaxy’s ceiling. Trusting in the gravity of his orbit, the traveler of the depths & summits let his wings be torn.

The way spiraled, making peculiar contours that lead on to captive expanse. Eventually the winding tunnels became more clearly defined, able now to make out plunges and swerves ahead. This visibility came from the natural luminescence of rare lichen and fungi draped all along the walls & sprouting from the ceiling. The pilgrim smeared some of the vibrant algae across himself.

Sight confided in light, producing both in happy junction. Now he would not tread in darkness, even if it gave away his presence to any potential predators within the cavern system.

The labyrinthine walls led past through unusual series of indents and carved curves that wound about in pattern lined with symbols. There was a pressure burning above Drakkon’s brows, an intuitive flare that told him there was something of importance to be gleaned from these markings. He rubbed glowing hand across them and smudged bioluminescent flora in the cracked lines that wrapped around the icons.

With the writing illuminated he made out an arcane tongue. Related to his language but pre-dating it, with occult phrasing indecipherable to outsiders. But in this transcendent state of mind Drakkon knew them to be a map of the mountain, or rather to something within it. That map twinkled with importance. He placed his hands in the center of the hollowed surface and suddenly found that the world was spinning. The rockface itself had merely been a façade and was made of a more flexible structure that spun about to uncover a hidden passage through its narrow fissure.

The earth’s gut grumbled the further he disturbed it. Rocks and dust crumbled about, shaken loose by minor tremors rumbling through the deep. He pushed up against another false front in the wall that had been illumed by the layer of glowing algae slathered over himself. He slid through the slit into utter awe. Arriving within subterranean vestibule teeming with unstained majesty.

A washing pool waited at the island alcove which served as threshold to another antechamber. Beautiful waterfalls graced the perimeter, churned steam. Nymph-like figures bubbled up from the springs. Pirouetting about the surface to their young, virile visitor with eager welcome, inviting him to partake in their dance. Water-fae whirled about, playing in the basin of sunless mist. Giggling as their visitor quenched his parched throat of their liquid forms.

A strange humanoid fiend with sunken features and harrowing shape watched his approach from the safety of the peripheral pool. Always escaping the light whenever Drakkon would chase the foul thing, its gibbous glare dispersing in ripples to evade reflection.

Past the basin a statuesque effigy stood guard over the passage from the small island. It was that of the aspect of death, the Dark Goddess Malderath. Her ashen likeness, divinely macabre. Leathery wings burst from the statue’s shoulders to arc over the way. Her gaping mouth bore elongated fangs. The stone goddess groaned faintly at the pilgrim. This was her domain, her house of the dead. And she, that Queen of Necropolis who sees with the infinite eyes of the Hels who serve her, as the arbiter of mortality. Her court decides who shall be taken up in her wings and at what hour of delivery into the dark country of unknowing afterlife.

Despite Her glare the grim Goddess did not choose him then... A pale glimmer in the water’s surface shifted into a crystalline ball of fractal patterns that spun about in flowery motions creating a kaleidoscope. Ebbing ‘neath the shrine’s flow, signed his passage through the sanctum.

Inexplicable pillars and masterfully crafted ebony columns surrounded him. This under-Temple endured the erosion of time’s tide well enough to not be disturbed save for dilapidation of what was once wood or other material. Perhaps, a bubonic thought pustulated, some of what had been eaten away had been strung & sewn with more fleshy material. There were traces of human sacrifices, after all. Tools and abandoned athames of fatal sort. Offering bowls sprawled out over altars, lined with dulled residue of what might be bone.

Traces of death teeter through the tomb. Burial mounds divide the walkway with red staves inscribed in the floor and across totems that circle the catacombs. Skulls and mummified relics remain. Fossilized and preserved through forgotten means. The souls bound to this place scream their undying woes, the lashings of eternity here, at this passerby who is no shade. His Sight hardens against visions innumerable. Flashing impressions of the lives lived here and their cousins in death. He feels the knife plunge into still beating hearts over & over again. Fights back the last gasps of those condemned. Resists reenactments in the first person of dying for some nondescript cause. That Eye he could no longer shut could see the monks of this forsaken temple prepare bodies, perform their funeral rites. In a blink their fate falls from pinnacle to darkest nadir and abandonment.

A hexagram of human skeletons lined up in the dead center of the corridor awoke to rattling un-life. Twitching and furrowing along the ground, it lifts conjoined carcasses to crawl with many mangled legs. Coming upon the lone living soul in perverse presentation. He tried to center himself in strength by affirming his purpose. Repose his fear for Corinna’s sake. Endure by humming hymn of coming bliss, but half-choked longing for life did not halt the march of death. Nor negate the appalling reality before him of petrified cadavers linking up as deathless monstrosity beset on caging the defiler of their mausoleum in their gnarring ribs.

No. This is Malderath biting, teasing me through the malahausca. No necromantic nightmares here shall stop me. The abomination averts course. Burrows up into the ceiling, scattering skeletal strips as it leaves him to the rest of the crucible. Pulling down alternate corridors, blocked by bone-piles, shed as scales.

The way forward: a dreaming ziggurat of obsidian marble. He dared its steps, masoned of material older than thought. Living blocks built up its spine, radiating embers dawned from fallen star-rock. An unnatural giant of inconceivable origin. No aspect of this gargantuan monolith bowed to the elements. It’s substance exempt from all forces of life & death within sinking crypt. The higher he climbed the heavier he felt.

Deathless schism of dark bellows grumbled, tugging at his soles to pull him into its wretched sepulcher. A Helwind dusted the zikkurat rail from the catacombs. A nether-borne cyclone heralding the return of abomination. Wrapping around the pinnacle was that befouled monstrosity borne of many corpses. Malicious vortex pressure married serpentine shape. Melded with alabaster scales, skeletal hands lining its spine and a long draconian snout. The horrific wyrm loosed a roar to tear away the tomb and deafen the intruder.

Staring straight into the eyes of its prey the bony eel glissaded through the ocean of underworld air. Its tail coiled tightly around his ankles & hands, enslaving his limbs to the irradiated limestone of the pyramid. A pit black shape arose with eyes afire. The foul fulcrum of the dead drake’s soul, a lich declaring demise of the traveler-shade in its verdict. Charcoal-gray claws curled for human throat. Intuitively, Drakkon broke the fetters to lash out against this hellish assailant.

But with every blow the figure’s black breadth enlarged. Belched frothing mass, vested with bulk of every knock. He knew – through the stupor of the shaman’s pulp - that struggling with this shadow only granted it more might against him. But he could not relent his barrage. He refused to simply surrender to this phantom. This devil’s presence stole away the sky he’d only just reclaimed from earthen burial. Levitating over him it withdrew to wraith’s saddle upon the dragon of the sacrificed dead. Its battering wake left no stone unmolested save those unchanging blocks of that pyramid’s grand apathy.

Yet for this pilgrim there would be no evading the wyrm’s maw. So, with hopeless sigh admitting his fate, he stopped his exertions and accepted the end. This harbinger of mortality, flapping over to gorge upon his essence. He gazed into the pits of perdition which returned the piercing stare as the entity entered him. His dreamlike cogitations took on an alien texture. Through that submersion into otherworldly sea Drakkon rediscovered promptly the glittering hue of Solaris’ light. Light which burst forth from his Self and swirled about, that darkness entwined with radiant thread.

He lunged into blistering brunt of hellfire the drake spewed... Every filament incinerated in catharsis of soul- flare. An inferno swallowing up a hundred lifetimes. A searing of spirit, unending undoing. Immolation igniting new potentials, past-states, hybrids of sleeping and unborn ages turned to pitch. This spiritual conflagration beset by those Watchful Lords whose judgement annihilated his essence. Holistic destruction. Naught but vestiges.

Nothing could resist the broiling tempest. But this cremation was not to last. No Permanence to imprison his end but a temporary transition to transcend this soul’s catching fire. His ashes carried to furnace, forge a prescient edge. Opening this inner sight, slit wide by occult knife. All-seeing Eye of Creation. Beholding the nature of this plane and its neighbors; knowing how to remold himself through view of the cosmos, with a blink from Time’s Father winking such Vision. Sculpting greater form from the gray marble and tempered mettle. He joined with the embers of burning bridge leading to recreating himself. A salvation through the fire. This new body possessed no traits of his past physical self, no discriminating factor of male of female makeup, nor any tangible limbs.

The range of this bare and unbound touch: periphery of this present eternity. The radius of Self spread, becoming all it touched. Ambition reached farther, peeling back boundaries of false flesh to commune with that which destroys only as it creates.

Slipping his consciousness into the dragon’s vessel, Drakkon invades every shred of essence – possessing it for himself, becoming the deathless fire it wields. He reins in the winged beast as extension of his mental filaments. The serpent jerks wrongly with cries from its core, briefly earning semi-sovereignty. But in that flash of freedom, the dragon does not assault its namesake but instead winds itself about the pinnacle of the monolith. Each rotation encircles itself, drawing towards its end in eternal sigil of itself, clenching down on its tail.

The drake’s contorting & distended mouth eats away at its vessel. The creature disintegrates, bite by bite. Shed skin & flakes of its self-consumption fall from its feast. Those death throes unnerve all Moribond. The full range of the caverns crack under tremoring pact between the dying beast and the breast of the land bound to it.

A fissure rips the very crust of the earth as Elderath divides her plane with rigorous brush. The ziggurat was unharmed, Drakkon included, as though shielded by invisible barrier, but the rest of the underground reservoir & temple suffers dissolution. Desecration by volleying boulders and blazing lances thrust into their dilapidated sites.

The growl of earth and that dying drake magnified their harmony & dissonance alike. With strident crescendo the combined cry sundered the mountain, breaching vast cleft in the walls. This rupture rearranged the tunnels, collapsing nigh every way, while forcing new openings.

He dared the breach by the temple’s back, over tumbling rubble to peer through the crack. There a vast pool nestled itself on the far side of the derelict necropolis but littered with the fusillade of earthly missiles. Past that, another gash screaming out daylight with all voices under heaven’s sign.

Western Sky Ablaze

Early Morning, Ty-Drasil

In the dew-frost of the early morning, condemned by cold, when dawn’s break was just a shy wink teasing out the horizon Azarra paced manically about. Her muscles and mind hurled along back walls and sleeping floors without insight to lead her bustling commotion. She clutched at dubious premise, unsure if she could act on it, and cautiously neared the Sentinel mess hall with witchery concealed beneath her cloak. A psychotropic potion crafted hours before in secret insomnia under the night’s banner. She grappled with this one small but wicked deed, flirting with it as her only remaining salvation. She’d sent Delphine to curry favor with Surrellius, acting on presumption that his target of infatuation could invert his aim. But this had been to no avail of yet. The heretic’s noose loosened not, and time tightened about her throat. Her veins thus yearned for tainted drops or else to see her ire bewitch the sentinels’ stew.

What good is all this? If I escape, I will be forced to wander till I die, forever cast from the world of Man. They will carve my name into all ears as a witch, a daemon-mother. If I may not sway them let me pass on. Hels! I cry, sorrow streaming, take me thusly! Io Malderath ov stark veils: O, Deathly Lady! Should my fate prove foul grant me swift deliverance from icy earth!

The viscous consistency of her thoughts slingshots away by dazzling flash of star-parade plummeting from the heavens’ tent. Shooting stars, flickering arc; their transient spirits fast extinguished by swift fury of their flight. Thirteen... Azarra noted, counting the felled stars she observed from outside the mess window. The sky became once more composed in its bleak body as she actively searched for further signs.

But the ephemeral heralds summon a change. All comes to screeching halt by the surreal intrusion of a gargantuan comet. From plane far north of their cosmic egg, the earth, Divine Bolt sets the western sky ablaze. This jagged, spectral heap’s trajectory careens towards the surface with immeasurable speed. The wail of the astral body penetrating the barrier of air, a dragon’s boasting cry. Royal blue streaks lay into the sky, painting elden trace along its exit. Charring the space around the mountains, this envoy of stars marks its trail for all to hark its majesty. Its azure canopy covers that carmine glare of Saathar, distantly towering. The spirit flies from true north across the west ridge, dipping low beyond the brim of Moribond’s expanse. Crashing into valley, it hammers earth with force to send legion of tremors out. Battering land, confounding across with doom and awe.

Azarra dropped clumsily to the ground, echoing the fall of her heart in chest. In petrified amazement her hands coveted the floor and dug for deeper soil. The rumbling vibrations battling the planet perturbs stones and boulders atop the pass. All assembled in Elderath valley sang their prayers of fear-strained thanks to their respective gods; praising that it had not chosen their interim seat as its designated landing but had punctured that other side of the range.

When the earth’s quaking ceased her body yet persisted in its trembling. She did not know how long she stooped outside threshing, before being seized back to reality. Reined in by thundering hooves nearby. Horsemen clamored by with great haste and number. Ahead rode Surrellius, his expression of sharp suspicion to the prodigal oracle well-worn. Alongside several sages, groggy from an abrupt awakening, and a flock of sentinels.

As they proceeded past her for the source of the crash, Azarra saw Ligeia and Delphine riding in the posterior. Broiling, convoluted emotions riled in the pit of her upon seeing her friend again. Delphine who, stopping, extended her hand to share the seat. She gratefully climbed up the lumbering steed. All to the degrading sneer of Surrellius, who chanced to look behind his shoulder with hateful prejudice as she joined the expedition.

They rode beyond the Temple through the circuitous avenues of Moribond pass for several kilometers. Then into the mountainous wilderness, crossing swiftly through the small hours ‘fore Dawn fully reared its head giving slight but welcome warmth to their expedition with the first snows gathering on the paths. Azure coals kept their residue afloat overhead. The target of their hunt soon pronounced itself near with the scent of smoldering combustion. Visible signs of the collision became apparent by rows of trees blown back by the radius of the blast.

Through to the ruins of an entire enclosure levelled by the impact of the meteor they chased. Their posse found that those who made this dip their home died without any forewarning. The snow ahead melted, and a peculiar emission radiated through ash. A warmth borne not from sun nor by mundane fire but from alien source. A color to match baleful specter, this signal slithering between matter and space, an awful aurora. The blow scorched crater in the valley. Devasting bolt from beyond gulped much of the dale in its gnawing girth.

Yet from this wretched scar on the land all there were drawn to a sudden emergence of a living being. A glittering aura rose from the chasm. Sentinels identify this stranger soon, and all were consumed by speechless shock. They recognize the face of Drakkon. Peering at them, pupils dilated, he sees through bodily curtains into their souls.

Bewilderment swept over the circle of riders unanimously. Even Surrellius seemed to fall from his saddle in horrified amazement. This solitary being, with only nearly twenty years of experience upon the worldly crust, was surely no mere mortal. For the stars themselves showered him in their favor with celestial missive.

Azarra unseated and ran to her son. Drakkon stood aloof as if she were but a figure of a dream. She wrapped her winter cloak about him, made her bond known, to remind those who sought her demise of the intimate net tangling the two. Ground and sky opened for him, her champion. Truly his essence glowed. Flooding the wintry air with whitest light of him, unearthly against the rising day. Sapphire remains of that comet baked & cooled, their shards casting dimming strands. Under which all basked in wonder of his coming. She wept for this return. & for her sublimation into godhood (through proxy).

Having witnessed this miracle of ages, the Shaman Ligeia pronounced stern acclamation for the Pilgrim. She called to rally the temple. To summon Gaahl, that the coronation should proceed posthaste.