I swept the knife from the altar and scattered the bones across the floor.
“What are you doing, Swordslinger?” Saruqin laughed. “You think you can stop this so easily? The magic is done. The doorway to the demon realm is open. Knife, bowl, crystal. . . they are just tokens now that their work is complete. All you have done is show the extent of your ignorance.”
I reached for the crystal orb and saw Saruqin’s eyes flicker with something like apprehension. I threw it to the ground and lifted my foot as though I were going to crush it beneath my heel. Then, Saruqin smiled, and I realized exactly what this orb was.
I’d seen through his lies.
Instead of stomping on the orb, I reached a hand toward it. I didn’t know what the hell I was going to do with it, but when my fingers wrapped around it, I felt my Vigor drain. It was glued to my skin, and no amount of effort could remove it. Every last ounce of my magical energy poured into the orb.
I crouched over, my shoulders slumped. I forced my head up, expecting to see Saruqin pleased with his ploy to sap me of all my Vigor. Instead, his face was contorted with fury.
Then, I realized what I held in my hands. The channels through the crystal were clear as day. They were robust and impassable, like the earth pathways I’d forged inside myself.
This was the Earth Core. Saruqin had stripped it from the Vigorous Zone so he could open up the demonic gateway.
The orb in my hand shuddered and trembled before it suddenly lit up. I lifted my other arm to ward off the blinding light as screams roared from the portal, as though it was a living creature filled with a legion of demonic forces. Another wave of demons raced out of the portal as it slowly started to reduce in size. Only a few inches at first, but it seemed to be shrinking faster by the second.
The light from the orb subsided, and the demons who’d just come out from it were staggering, their bodies steaming and sizzling. As they lumbered toward the exit, the flesh started to melt from their bones. With each step, more oozed onto the ground, and their bones started to crack and crumble. In seconds, all that was left of them was a sulfur-like dust on the floor.
I heard Saruqin scream.
“What have you done!”
As he roared, his shredded robes started to become looser, as though the body inside them was withering away. He clutched his mask and removed it, gasping for breath. His eye sockets were empty, and his flesh looked like it belonged on a 2,000-year-old mummy.
His arm quivered as he slowly lifted it toward me. I wasn’t going to give him the chance to channel.
I pulled my arm back, raising the Depthless Dream like a javelin. I flung the trident, and it hurtled through the air, melted water trailing behind it. The prongs gleamed with an icy sheen as it rocketed toward Saruqin’s head. The sharpened tips plunged into his face and through his skull. He was thrown from his feet and carried on the trident to the far wall before the prongs buried themselves into the stone. He hung there for a moment, twitched, and then went limp.
“You fool,” he whispered as black smoke drifted from his mouth. “You have doomed us all. The Path of Peace is not what it claims to be.”
As his body shriveled with rapid decay, I ripped the Depthless Dream from the wall, dropping his corpse to the ground. Before my eyes, it crumbled into a sulfur-like substance.
Suddenly, a sound like the very earth tearing asunder ripped through the palace. The earth beneath my feet shuddered, and the portal finally slammed shut. A crack appeared in the demonic statue and ripped from its stomach to the altar beneath it. The fracture continued its pace, running toward me. I spotted the Earth Core starting to roll toward the rift in the ground and sprinted toward it. As the gap widened, I leaped across it and snatched up the core.
As my hand wrapped around the reinvigorated orb, it morphed and changed. First, a leather-wrapped handle formed, then a pommel. Mist spiraled into the shape of warhammer with a spike on the other, so large that it was almost like a cartoon mallet. Except there was nothing comical about the weapon. It was clearly designed to crush bones with its flat surface and puncture skulls with its spiked on. The warhammer became heavy, and I had to tense my muscles to avoid letting it fall to the ground.
“You have saved me, Swordslinger,” said a robust female voice.
“You’re the Forgotten Memory,” I said. Even though she’d been described as a sword, I figured the stories might have gotten that element wrong.
“No,” she said. “I am not. I was not forged by ancient hands but by you.”
In this single moment, I discovered where Nydarth and Yono had come from. I now knew what they really were. Sure, they were dragons, but that might have meant something different in this world. I assumed they had a dragon form, but their jobs on this plane had been as elemental cores. They must have once been stripped from their Vigorous Zones and made into spirit weapons. If I hadn’t just fought a cultist hellbent on leading a demonic invasion, I might have actually been able to wrap my head around it all.
The Seven Realms had no end to strange, it seemed.
The thoughts faded to the
