Chapter 394: Whatever It Takes
Isorai could see into the trenches where the oily, sentient sludge wrapped its tendrils around the anchoring ghoststone pillars, dragging against the ritual's pull.
The balance wasn't tipping toward purification. She couldn’t continue to fight with it for much longer. She was already draining Ruhkaal. She couldn’t eve conjure her spear.
The vroth refused to budge, and from her vantage point, she realized with horror that the ascension was beginning to stall. The platform she stood on, trembled and the ritual ground to a halt again.
She kept chanting, pouring more and more power, screaming it as if being louder would help. Her voice echoed, but carried no magical power.
The vroth trembled, a low rumble stopped and started—it was laughing at her.
Fury raged through her. She thought of the spears downstairs and kept pushing, scraping the vestiges of her magic to pour into it, every drop she’d stolen, borrowed, or inherited. She reached north to borrom from the crystal trench on Elithor, drawing it into the Great Tree. She pushed the roots deeper until it was drinking from the underworld. She pulled pure moonlight from Thaeryn in the temple of Elithor.
Ruhkaal’s fire scorched through her until it felt like it was peeling her flesh from her bones.
But it wasn’t enough. Her eyes burned.
The vroth laughed, mocking, waiting until she ran out of power, until they were all defenseless.
Gasping for air, her vision blurring as the sheer volume of power threatened to vaporize her where she stood. Isorai looked inward. She reached deep into her psyche, calling out to her Irongrave alter, for any of her alters.
“What am I doing wrong?” Isorai cried out mentally, her thoughts frantic. “Why isn't the ascension working? I've given it everything!”
A wave of cold washed over her. Irongrave eyes looked at her, but she said nothing as if Isorai should already know. Before she could process the quesion to ask, a glint caught her eye, it hovered directly in front of her.
The piece of currency attached to Kaelen’s life force. The last of him in the world.
It pulled at her neck.
She opened her scroll, let every coin go, but not that one.
Not Kaelen.
She wasn’t ready.
She couldn’t—
The chain broke.
“No!”
She tried to grab it, but it was gone before she could, sucked up into the sky. It spun wildly into the air, caught by the howling, chaotic storm, and vanished into the dark, churning clouds around the scales.
The loss stole her breath. The hollow ache in her chest pulsed, but she pushed it down and breathed through it.
Taking the last drops of her power until she could no longer feel her face or the weight of her body. She dug deep into the halls of her mind and offered up each ring one by one, the alters, too. Whatever it took.
Hadn’t she always said that?
“What ever it takes.”
The stars violently flared, sparkling within the darkness above the scales. From beyond the darkened horizon, the full moon rose with unnatural speed, its pale face instantly turning a deep, ominous blood-red. As it reached the highest point, the black sky fractured further as the sun rushed to meet the bloody moon in the same sky.
It was working. Isorai could barely breathe around the relief. A massive, ancient scroll unfurled from the ether. It stretched infinitely into the heavens, glowing with a harsh, golden light. Across its parchment, thousands of names and currency requests began to list themselves, scrolling upward so quickly they became a blur of blinding light. She couldn't read the individual letters, but she recognized it as the underworld as reckoning the bill, taking a tally of all that had been paid and requested.
Please let it be enough.
Please let the Moongrove Killer be taken and it be enough.
Isorai tried to hold on. She tried to keep her eyes open, to maintain her grip on the ritual, but she couldn’t.
The last of her stolen magic left her body in a violent, outward pulse, rushing down the trunk of the Great Tree. A black bolt of lightning struck from the sky, boiling the vroth alive before it was fully formed. In its place, the massive skull appeared. The currency pouring out vanished just as quickly as it appeared. As the lights flickered and the flow of power into the ritual ebbed, she sagged.
Her heart gave one final, heavy stutter. And then, it stopped.
In the absolute silence, as the world faded to black, Isorai looked up one last time at the scrolling text hovering directly above her head. At the very top of the list, a single name glowed brightly before dissolving into white ash.
Althea Moongrove. Her mother.
The name disappeared, erased from the ledger.
The platform holding her above the Great Tree’s canopy dissolved into nothingness. She fell and closed her eyes, falling silently through the emerald canopy, tumbling down through the branches and feeling nothing.
The taste of sulfur and cold ash was the first thing that registered in Ruhkaal’s mind as consciousness dragged him back from the brink of oblivion. He felt nauseous and his mouth was so dry.
He didn't wake up to the roar of his own fire, but to the brutal, agonizing sensation of being dragged across jagged stone. His limbs dragged deep, useless furrows into the earth as Xaruh—looking haggard and determined all at once0—hauled him by the scruff of his neck up a steep, jagged incline. Behind them, Kaal stumbled forward, guiding the High Matron. The both looked like hell, covered in soot and red in the face. A trail of dark rock followed the four of them. Volcanic?
Probably.
“Is… Drae’ okay?”
Xaruh chuckled. “Probably being unfairly chipped in the forest… You alive?”
“Yeah,” he croaked. “Barely. What… happened?”
Xaruh explained that a spear of black lightning kill the vroth, the scales were gone and no one has seen Isorai yet. They were headed to the Grove, since it was officially open.
They had survived. They hand the rest of the continents with few casualties thanks to the barriers, Isorai had apparently helped maintain using Yseira’s voice and the organization of Bloodweaver potions. The volcano had held until the last moments before going dormant again.
"Easy, son," Xaruh rumbled, his voice a rasping, exhausted whisper as Ruhkaal tried to get his feet under him. He finally let go of Ruhkaal, allowing him to collapse onto a bed of damp, pristine grass when they’d crossed into the forest.
Ruhkaal lifted his heavy head, blinking against a sudden, piercing light, coming from the east.
It was dawn.
“Did I imagine a red moon and the sun being in the same sky?”
“You didn’t.”
He nodded. “Okay… Thanks.”
The bruised, chaotic sky of the previous night had vanished, replaced by a pale, breathless gold that bled across the horizon, slowly giving way to blue. The suffocating weight of the vroth’s corruption was gone, so the air tasted clean. No Choir insight, but it was likely they were just in hiding or camped out in Bharin, for better or worse.