Chapter 84 THE SHELL-LESS GOD
The air inside the temple had ceased to be oxygen filling their lungs; it had turned into a suffocating tar. The massive black smoke that had torn itself from Serra’s body swirled like a vortex against the high ceiling of the temple.
Two red eyes materialized within the smoke, scanning those below. There was no anger in that gaze; only pure, distilled arrogance.
"Father..." Valeria whispered, sinking to the floor. She dropped the bloody shard of ice from her hand. "There is no body to stop him. He is everywhere now."
The voice coming from above cracked the stone pillars of the temple. "You imprisoned me in the flesh of a woman. A small, weak piece of meat... But now... now I am limitless."
The Silent Priests tightened their circle in panic. The High Priest raised his bandaged hands toward the ceiling. The command he sent to their minds this time was not a request, but a scream: SEAL!
The Priests opened their mouths simultaneously. They had no tongues, no vocal cords, but the sound they produced was like a physical shockwave. A high-frequency vibration targeted the black smoke.
Valerius’s smoke form rippled. It contracted, as if in pain.
But a second later, that terrible laughter rang out.
"Your silence cannot suppress my noise."
The smoke descended like a spear. Straight into the High Priest’s chest.
It wasn't a physical blow. The smoke forced its way through the gaps in the Priest’s bandages, into his nose, into his ears.
The Priest was lifted into the air. His body convulsed. His bandages glowed with a sickly black light from within, and then—EXPLODED.
Instead of blood and flesh, black ash scattered everywhere.
"Get back!" Dorian shouted.
Dorian tried to capture the smoke using his Void power. He swept his hand through the air, creating a black gravitational field. Part of the smoke was pulled toward him.
Valerius’s face turned toward Dorian within the smoke. "Ah, my dead son... You are a void, whereas I am fullness itself. You cannot swallow me; you would choke."
Valerius slipped out of Dorian’s gravitational pull and struck the temple’s dome.
BOOOOM.
The centuries-old stone ceiling cracked like an eggshell.
Snow and the storm rushed inside.
Like a demon finally finding freedom, Valerius rose into the sky, hovering over the "Valley of the Dead." He had left the temple, but he hadn't left the mountain. He was descending into the frozen graveyard below, where thousands of corpses lay in wait.
Serra lay panting on the ground. Her eyes had completely returned to their natural color, that warm brown, but her gaze was hollow.
"Is he gone?" she asked, her voice trembling.
Dorian ran to her side, lifting her up. "He is out of you, Serra. You are clean now."
"I am clean," Serra said, staring at the purple sky visible through the broken roof. "But he is free, too. And hungry, Dorian... He is so hungry."
Lukas ran to the temple doors and looked out. His face turned as pale as lime.
"I think I understand why he came here," Lukas said.
Outside, beneath the glaciers, those thousands of frozen corpses... had begun to move. Valerius hadn't chosen a single body for himself. He had chosen an army.
From the summit of the temple, the view was the apocalypse itself.
In the valley below, the "Frozen Legion," which had been sleeping under the ice for centuries, was awakening with Valerius’s dark breath. The ice was cracking; rotten hands were breaking the surface of the snow. Thousands of soldiers with rusted armor and frozen flesh... In their eyes burned the red glow of Valerius.
"He's using them like puppets," Kael said, looking down through his scope. "This isn't a zombie invasion. This is thousands of bodies ruled by a single mind."
Dorian had seated Serra in a sheltered corner. Atlas was asleep in his mother’s arms; the chaos had exhausted the baby.
The remaining Silent Priests did not mourn their fallen leader. They immediately activated the temple’s defense mechanisms. A blue energy shield materialized around the temple.
"We are trapped here," Valeria said. The cut on her wrist was still bleeding, but she didn't care. "That army will climb up here. And this energy shield can't hold them for long."
Dorian went to Valeria’s side. "You know these lands. What is my father’s goal? Why is he gathering an army?"
Valeria looked at the activity below. "Not just to kill. At the furthest point of the North, there is a place called the 'Star Graveyard.' There... lie the weapons of the old world. If he reaches there with that army, he won't just destroy this kingdom, but the entire continent."
Dorian turned to his group. Lukas, Kael, Serra, and Valeria. All were tired, all had bled.
"How long will the shield hold?" Dorian asked one of the priests.
The priest sent a time into his mind: Until dawn.
"We have one night," Dorian said. "We must make a plan."
Serra stood up. Her legs were trembling, but her stance was upright. "We can't fight him," she said. "He is no longer physical. Bullets, swords... they won't work."
"I will work," Dorian said. "But I need to get close to him. And it's impossible for me to pass through that army to reach him."
Lukas was examining an old mechanism at the back of the temple. "Maybe we don't have to fight the army," he said. "This temple... is not just a place of worship. This temple is a lid."
"A lid for what?"
"A ventilation lid opening to the underground rivers," Lukas said, pointing to a rusty valve. "Hot water rivers flow beneath the glaciers. If we blow these valves..."
"...the valley floods," Valeria finished. Her eyes lit up. "And in this freezing air outside, that water freezes in seconds."
"We will freeze them again," Dorian said. "We will bury my father’s army back in the ice where they belong."
"But we'll be trapped here too," Kael said.
Dorian looked at Lyra in his arms. The baby was awake and smiling at her father.
"We won't be trapped," Dorian said. "Because when the water rises... we won't swim. We will climb."
Dorian pointed to the peak of the mountain, that sharp point piercing the clouds above.
"We will get to the Star Graveyard before him. And we will strike him there, with his own weapon."
The first screams began to rise from below. Valerius’s dead army had begun their ascent.
The night would be long. And the silence would soon be replaced by the sound of grinding bones.