Stygia's frozen devil-prince, Levistus.
The ice shook and cracked around him, geysers of water bursting from beneath. White faces of the damned sobbed and screamed from within the shifting blocks. Anilya rose on her hands and knees, crawling away from the rising waves of the ocean.
Despite pain and the croonings of that evil, Bastun held back the tide that swelled to break him.
This had been the failing of Arkaius. The long-unanswered covenant he had forged in Ilythiiri runes had been too much for Shandaular's king. His desire to save his people had driven him to desperate measures, pitting devils against the Nentyarch's demons. In the end he had turned away from the call of that dark mind in the depths, horrified by what he had created.
Bastun knelt alone on that precarious perch, resisting the weaknesses of his own humanity in order to hold the edges of the Word intact for those he left behind. The power that Arkaius had denied, Bastun reluctantly accepted.
He felt a measure of control transferred to him as strength flooded through his arms and legs. The wound. in his side disappeared. His aches and pains fell away. Spent rage left him hollow, and he sensed the sighing approval of Stygia and its hidden lord. With a strained thought he willed the ice to stop its quaking, and an ominous stillness settled uncomfortably within him.
Anilya approached slowly, shaking with cold, though Bastun sensed little more than a cool, gentle breeze. He looked up, coursing with a torrent of borrowed power, and only faintly felt the desire for vengeance. All doubt and things unnecessary, emotions that could unbalance his control, he made a space for them within. She had chosen her path, and he would make sure only she suffered for that choice.
'You killed him,' he said, voice low and growling, amplified into an inhuman sound that grated in his ears. The last memory of his master's face, dying in the snow, flashed through his mind.
Anilya looked at him in fear, then over her shoulder at the nightmarish landscape that surrounded them both.
'You opened the Word, vremyonni,' she said, straining to breathe the cold air. 'Do not accuse me of trifles like murder!'
The durthan lunged, dark flames spitting from her hands as she sought to take hold of the Breath. The spell licked painfully at his hands and arms, hissing where it touched the buried blade. He stared curiously at the effect as if outside of himself. Anilya pulled and scratched at his fingers, finding them as hard and immovable as stone. The shadowy flames disappeared, leaving bits of his skin brittle and peeling, blackened and steaming. Looking into the durthans crazed eyes, he watched her confidence waver and fade to fear.
'What's wrong?' he asked. 'I thought this was what you wanted.'
Force gathered around him, and he willed it outward, watching as Anilya was slammed backward. Her body flew through the air and crashed against a spire of ice, then slid to the ground. The sound of breaking bone echoed, the reverberations tingling across his skin.
As he witnessed the violent effects of a mere whim, he wondered what he had done to himself. The swirling power clenched on his innards, twisting and stretching as it sensed the presence of his doubt. Gasping in pain, he pushed away his brief fear and breathed heavily as the pain subsided.
Anilya coughed, blood staining her lips as she pushed herself to a sitting position. She cradled a broken arm and one leg was bent at an unnatural angle. In the distance Bastun could see shapes diving and winging through the clouds. Black feathered wings bore tiny figures ever closer. Waves rolled in the ocean as beasts rose to the surface, spiny backs breaking the water before submerging again. Wiping her mouth on het sleeve, Anilya turned and saw them as well.
'They're coming for you,' he said, shaking with the strain of maintaining the caged chaos that flowed from the Breath.
'So it seems,' she replied, shifting her shoulders and looking away from the awakening denizens of Stygia, 'though I suspect they'll have an eye for you as well.' She shook with cold, frost forming in patches on her face and arms. 'We could leave together, use this power for the greater good.'
'I told you once before,' he said. 'Your passion lacks sincerity-and there is no good in this.'
Pale arms, encrusted with ice, broke the ocean's surface and gripped the edges of the small island. Humanoid bodies, their faces frozen in grotesque expressions, pulled themselves sluggishly onto solid ground, flopping and sliding as they piled over one another. Dark angels, screeching hideous dirges overhead, circled and cast black eyes onto the procession of the damned.
Slowly, Bastun turned his head downward, unable to look upon the foul souls as they sought purchase on the ice. The slight weakness pained him, but the unnatural strength did not fade. The power did not so quickly punish this flaring spark of humanity. Claws scraped and drew his attention to the left where he spied a serpentine monstrosity writhing over a distant block of ice. Its pale blue eyes met his and he found a part of himself hiding in its multifaceted gaze. He shuddered, and the pain grew a bit more, but subsided more swiftly as if the power of Stygia were reshaping each lapse to its own design.
'Don't look away, Bastun,' Anilya said hoarsely, and he looked at her blue-tinged lips, frozen droplets of blood clinging to her chin. 'Remember this. Remember all of it.'
The first of the condemned souls grasped her ankle, and she winced as her injured leg was tugged. Try as he might, he could not look away, could not abandon the need to see the fate of his friends' murderer. He whispered under his breath, in equal parts praying to the Three and recounting all that had brought him to this moment, this choice, this grim acceptance.
Anilya had not the strength to scream or cry out, but the damned did it for her as they pulled her inexorably to the ocean. Bastun heard in their voices a lament for their own existence, the dim memories of lives and deaths and torments suffered. He realized the curse of Shandaular and its Shield was birthed in the depths of this place, in the unceasing repetition of a frozen hell. Its power rushed in his ears, leaving him numb as a tangled mass of limbs and faces engulfed the durthan.
'Remember it, vremyonni!' she called out. 'Remember the power! Rashemen may yet have need of it!'
The first splashes of falling bodies broke the water, and she was gone, the voices of her captors gone with her. In a daze, Bastun lowered his eyes and stared at the hilt of the Breath, studied the strange hands, his own fingers wrapped tightly around this fulcrum between worlds.
'It is done,' he muttered, and yet he knew it could not be true, briefly imagining having to repeat the words every morning for eternity. The thought broke through the separation between will and flesh, and he pulled at the blade. Ice cracked and split as the sword shifted. The runes along the Breath flared, and he felt the walls he had built around his humanity begin to crumble. Pain flared behind his eyes, and he tugged harder, his new strength breaking the magic's grip. The walls of the Shield flickered around him, indistinct and transparent.
He rose and braced his feet on either side of the embedded Breath, straining and staring into the storm-laced skies above. Dark-winged angels, fiendish minions of Levistus, dived from their heights and fixed him in their black- eyed stares. The Breath glowed with a brilliant white light, and it felt as though he were tearing a limb from his body as the blade began to slide free from the clinging ice.
Flashes of darkness, stone, and lightning danced before his eyes. Black wings surrounded him, enveloped him in soft, downy feathers that reeked of perfume and death. Scarlet lips whispered in his ears, promising unimaginable pleasures and ancient secrets.
He fell away, tumbling backward as if struck. A cold stone floor arrested his fall. The Breath clattered and clanged as his arms fell out to his sides. Ilythiiri runes squirmed in the ceiling above, their magic fading once again into dormancy. They settled back into their patterns, entwined inside the knotwork of the Word's symbols. Bastun's head rolled from side to side. He stared at the walls and the mirage of power that swirled through the chamber.
Sitting up he raised the Breath before him, its once simple blade now filled with an unholy power. He stood carefully, looking upon the Word and the Breath with new eyes. It was more than a mere portal or gate; its influence still curled and swam through his body. Closing his eyes he felt something new. Reaching out with his thoughts he could sense the high walls of the tower, each stone in its foundation, every open door and errant breeze as if the Shield were an extension of himself.
The eastern walls, mostly a shell now as their interiors had crumbled long ago, warmed slightly as the first gray light of a winters dawn tried to penetrate Shandaular's mists. Much closer though, he could sense another presence on the Shield's walls.
