Death was not an unknown concept to Orion. He didn’t understand it the way he understood physics, nor could he discuss it as easily as mathematics. He couldn’t wield the concept, nor could he talk about it in detailed terms.
Compared to a necromancer, who lives and breathes death, he was probably a beginner. But he possessed something very few could claim. Only the most skilled necromancers dared to experience it themselves, turning to rot and decay to become unliving liches.
He had experienced death. Orion Amadeus Voidwalker had lived once before. It was a different life, one he sometimes regretted and sometimes missed, but undeniably alien to anything this world could offer.
So, he was confident in saying that he knew what dying felt like. It was not a pleasant experience, one’s own unmaking, especially at their own hands, but although feeling the multi-dimensional stretching of his body and soul as it traveled through the voidspace between layers of reality was extremely similar—uncomfortably so—it was not the same thing.
Orion reappeared a thousand feet away, the farthest he dared to aim, considering how completely insane the idea of teleporting not only himself but also multiple others at once was, especially during his first attempt.
He nearly fell flat on his face, but a strong arm wrapped around his chest and pulled him back up.
There was no time to get lost in the nausea that threatened to overwhelm him, no time to answer the questions he could already feel building up, because Behenien completed her strafing run, slamming hard against the bridge and unleashing the greatest amount of flames she had so far.
Even from a thousand feet away, Orion was blinded by the purple. The bridge shook at the impact but remained intact, and with nowhere else to go, all that magical fire burst outward.
Asteria appeared before them a moment later, executing a much smoother teleportation than he had. Silver light gathered around them in a barrier, and when the raging fires reached them, they exploded outward, leaving them untouched.
Orion breathed heavily. The spectacle was truly incredible, and the amount of information he was receiving from being so close to the action would, at any other time, be incredibly fascinating.
But something was off. He felt weak, even weaker than when he had exhausted his reserves and hit mana burn during the last battle on the Belt.
Even as more and more purple flames poured out of Behenien’s throat, as Asteria began chanting something that made the air wobble, and as the Local Field reacted to a new force pressing upon it, Orion felt his legs give out from under him.
That drew Eire’s attention, as she was the one who grabbed him, and he heard her gasp, though by then, his awareness was already fading away.
He looked down, more because his eyes were drooping than out of any real awareness, and he saw the cause of his sudden weakness.
“Huh. I guess it’s true that wormholes are the sharpest things in existence,” he murmured, almost amused that that little question was finally answered.
Less amusing was the complete absence of his own left foot. The stump was bleeding, although the cut was so smooth it wasn’t gushing, as it might have otherwise.
It was still more than enough to threaten his life. With all the strength remaining in his body, he looked back up beyond the silver shield, where the flames were raging the fiercest; his foot had probably already turned to ash.
His eyes finally drooped, and he sagged. The last thing he felt was Eire casting something, but he was already too far gone to understand what.
Loud voices echoed all around him. Orion really wanted to shout at them to be quiet, since he couldn’t remember the last time he’d slept so well, but his words died in his throat from the dryness.
“Silence! He’s waking up!” A more urgent voice finally silenced the others, one Orion recognized as his mother's.
Opening his eyes took more effort than he remembered putting into such a simple act, but with patience and time, he managed the herculean feat.
What greeted him was a beautifully painted ceiling depicting a hunt under the gentle glow of the waxing moon. He stared at it for a long moment before remembering to turn his head.
His mother’s face was the first one he saw. Asteria was smiling gently, but he knew her well enough to realize it was a strained expression, one she was putting on only because she thought he needed her support.
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Behind her was Pauline, who struggled to compose herself into a semblance of calm, but didn’t appear worried, only angry.
Orion could manage anger. It typically arose after negative events rather than before them. As long as nothing else was imminent, he’d be okay.
The other person, on the opposite side of the wide bed he had been placed on, was Eire. She looked exhausted, both from stress and much more magical fatigue, likely having drained her own reserves.
What she could have done to do that, as a high third-tier witch, he couldn’t seem to recall immediately. But the more he stared at her, the more memories of the battle on the Floating Bridge flooded back to him, until eventually, his eyes drifted downward to where a blanket covered his lower half.
“My foot?" he croaked, voice raspy and painful.
Asteria was quick to offer him a glass of something that was clearly not water, but it was soothing anyway, so Orion didn’t complain as she propped him up.
“Slowly,” Asteria said, easing the cup from his lips. “And listen.”
He attempted to sit up on his own and failed, but she was there to catch his shoulder before he could list sideways. Up close, the gentle smile was held together by sheer will.
“You did a good deed,” she began, and the warmth in her voice stirred something behind his eyes. “You got Pauline, Eire, the kid, and yourself out of danger. On your first teleport, with passengers, while a Matriarch was bearing down on you. You were very brave.”
Asteria’s grip tightened, and her smile faded. “It was also very stupid. Don’t ever do that again.”
“Okay,” he rasped.
She glanced across the bed. Eire stepped closer, looking like she’d been wrung out and hung to dry. “You were bleeding out fast,” she said, voice steadying as she spoke. “I tried to heal it, but I couldn’t, and I ended up having to improvise, since the better healer was busy keeping us alive.”
Orion’s mind finally made the connection, and he swallowed the lump in his throat. “My foot?” He asked again.
Asteria exhaled and closed her eyes. “It’s gone. The fold you opened sheared it off at the ankle.”
Eire lifted the blanket and peeled back a linen wrap. Where flesh should have been was stone—no rough chunk but a sculpted foot, pale as bone, chased with faint rune lines.
“Before you panic,” Eire added quickly, “try moving it.”
He willed it to move and sensed some resistance, as if he were pushing through thick oil; then the stone toes moved, stiffly, yet they still moved. He flexed his ankle and found its range of motion was limited. A strange, tingling sensation ran up his calf, as if the command arrived a half-second late.
“Enough,” Asteria snapped, pressing his knee down. “Don’t tire yourself.”
He lay back down. “How did this even happen?”
“I had to transmute some of your flesh into stone to attach the construct,” Eire said, with a hint of the craftsman’s pride slipping past her exhaustion. “I anchored a runic lattice to your tibia and created a channel for your nerves to connect with the foot. It will obey you, though poorly at first, but it should improve with practice. It also drains a trickle of mana while active, so be careful not to overuse it for now.”
That was very cool, but it didn’t answer his most pressing question. While on Earth, losing a foot completely would have meant using prosthetics, but the Sanctum had some of Cyril’s top healers, and his mother was among them. She should have been able to regrow it.
She seemed to sense his question and answered grimly. “Whatever you cast,” she said slowly, “is not how we teach spacework at the Sanctum. Our method lets us travel through space without disturbing the void. Yours cuts through directly, which is why you could bring so many people with you on your first attempt. It severed your foot so perfectly that your body accepted the new state as a baseline. When I poured a regenerative elixir into the wound, it failed to find anything missing.”
“So growing it back,” he said flatly, “is not going to be simple.”
Asteria shook her head. “Not with what I have on me. I’ll need high-tier reagents and a rite to change the template again.”
Orion glanced between the two witches, trying to distract himself from his loss. “Is that why you were fighting?”
“That doesn’t help,” Asteria said, lips pursed. “But no, the argument is about where to go next.”
Pauline, who’d been a taut line at the foot of the bed, stepped up. “I believe we should go to Last Thaw,” she said crisply. “As fast as possible.”
Eire’s jaw clenched. “The High Priestess summoned you home, and even if that wasn’t the case, we have to report what happened.”
“To be precise,” Pauline countered, ignoring her argument, “a Dragon Matriarch attacked the Floating Bridge. Sea dragons aren’t sworn to the Dragonspire Dominion, but everyone knows they share blood ties. We should treat this as the opening move of a campaign until proven otherwise. If we march straight for the Sanctum, with the storm still raging and the roads likely filled with wyrmlings, we risk being cut off, and we’d be leaving the Belt undefended.”
Eire didn’t flinch. “And if we delay, we will starve the only mind that can see further than any of us of information. If the Dominion, or their allies, are moving, the High Priestess needs to know.”
Asteria looked at Orion. “What do you think, moonbeam?”
He let the arguments wash over him, forcing his mind to emerge from the fog. Returning immediately was safer once inside the mountain; it would mean a direct line to the High Priestess and a top-tier lab for his leg. It also meant abandoning an important city after a mass-casualty attack, leaving every settlement on the Belt at the mercy of whatever else surfaced from the sea.
He pictured the survivors he’d seen on the bridge. The glassy eyes, the burns, and the way people clung to each other, shell-shocked by the brutality of the attack.
“This wasn’t spontaneous,” he said finally. “You don’t get a Matriarch this far inland without groundwork. If that’s true, the problem isn’t just a single strike, and something bigger is at play. We won’t fix that by showing up at the Sanctum a day earlier."
Asteria observed him without revealing anything.
“Can we send a message ahead?” he asked. “Something secure.”
“Yes,” Asteria said. “There’s a Moonline alcove in the shrine in Last Thaw. I’ll need to take control of the temple, but I might be able to send brief messages back to the Sanctum. It won’t be the same as standing before her, and it could cause a lot of confusion and chaos if the message is not delivered perfectly, but it’s possible."
He shrugged, a tired, lopsided motion. “I doubt anything we do is going to be worse than what’s already happened. You should send as full an accounting back as possible, and we should fortify Last Thaw in wait for more orders. Two Tier Threes and a Tier Four on the ground will do more good there today than we will in a mountain tomorrow.”
What he didn’t mention was that he fully expected the Collegium and his father to also be rushing to support their side of the Belt, which should hopefully lower the danger they would face.
Silence fell. Pauline’s jaw twitched; Eire’s eyes cooled from feverish to merely hot, and Asteria’s shoulders lowered slightly.
She leaned in, kissed his brow, and when she pulled back, her smile was genuine but tinged with sadness. “You keep proving yourself to be immensely generous, moonbeam,” she murmured. “Very well, we will make for Last Thaw.”
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