Sen, Zulli, and Arty huddled behind August’s bulky frame as they peered down the bleak staircase.
“No.” August replied to Arty. “There’s something down there that wouldn’t allow the trespass.”
Sen could feel the pull of the void stronger than ever. It tugged at his chest, a pulsing heave at his soul begging him to go forward, to ignore everything else and bound ahead. He didn’t trust it enough to follow its call. The purple gleam of the glowstones swam with the same purple corona around his jet-black irises as they peered over to Zulli, who had placed a tender hand on his shoulder. She had her other hand in a ball clutched to her chest. She could feel something in her soul connection to him.
“Are you okay?”
Sen’s eyes flittered across her blank, shadowy face. He wished they could see into hers.
“I’ll be alright.” He lied.
The tone had shifted. Arty was the only one out of the loop, as August had known all along.
Sen squeezed through the doorway around August, taking the lead on the staircase, despite August having their own source of light.
“What is it? What’s down there?” Arty asked.
“Nothing.” Sen replied. Black oil covered his body as his Abyssal Vestments donned around him. The black chrome plates on his chest peeked out from underneath his Heartswarmth Tunic. He hadn’t attempted to keep the tunic on, the rest of his clothes dissipated into his voidspace, but the tunic stayed, nonetheless. Maybe it gave him comfort that he needed and subconsciously, he refused to let it go, like a security blanket. Maybe it had refused being taken off for him, acting of its own accord. Either way, he was now armored and ready to move forward. His shadow engulfed the descending staircase as the only source of light was the bright white crystal floating next to August, behind Sen. He thought about lighting a torch, he had a few in his voidspace, as well as a couple lanterns, but something about the darkness felt right, and illuminating it felt wrong.
August slowly followed behind Sen as they descended the staircase, providing what light he could. Zulli stayed uncomfortably close to August, keeping an eye on Sen, and Arty held up the rear. After descending what felt like a very long flight of stairs, they found themselves in an area larger than the room before. August stepped forward ahead of Sen and his crystal pulsed brighter to try and fill the room. It couldn’t, either not bright enough to reach the room’s edges, or not strong enough to keep the darkness at bay, as if it were alive and actively pushing back.
It was an elliptically shaped viewing room, somewhat like a theater, or a sanctum, with terraced platforms of black stone descending down to a circular floor. In the middle of the floor rose a black metal nest of jagged edges, with a large purple crystal inside, the shape of an ostrich egg, but about twice the size. It resembled one of the glowstones from the room upstairs, only unlit, with a crack strewn across. Inside the crack was a sword, obviously violently thrust into it. Behind the crystal dais, some few feet, sat the only sitting furniture in the room. It was a single chair made from the same black stone as everything else, solid and bulky. On the chair rested a skeleton, larger than a normal person, but of the same humanoid structure. The skeleton was wrapped in tattered gray and black rags, with plates of armor resembling the same black chrome sheen as Sen’s. Behind the chair sat another archway set into the wall, this one about twice as large as the archway before with different runic script set across it.
“Some kind of… ritual chamber?” Arty guessed, peering around. He produced his own crystal that he had to hold in his hand. It produced light in a cone in front of him, and he went to scanning the area on his own.
“We found the sword.” Zulli remarked. She was smiling, despite no one being able to see her face, but her smile dwindled and faded when she looked at Sen again, who hadn’t moved since entering the room.
Sen’s face was stern, unmoving, as he scanned the skeleton.
- Uladin (Void Cult Lich) – (Iron)(Dormant)
- ???
The skeleton was completely lifeless, and they had found the sword as Zulli said. Feeling the tug of his Void Guidance, Sen realized it wasn’t pulling him in the direction of the sword; the sword just happened to be implanted in the thing he was meant to find.
August and Sen stood like statues just ahead of the entrance to the room before Sen took a step forward, moving down one of the terraced platforms.
“You won’t be able to pull the sword.” August told him. “It’s silver rank and will be too heavy for you to move.”
“So, you’ll pull it then.” Sen replied, blank faced, his eyes moving slowly between the crystal and the skeleton as he trudged forward.
“I will.” August replied.
Sen stopped moving at the last platform before reaching the circular floor below. August hesitantly caught up to him, his crystal's light illuminating more, giving Sen more fidelity into what his eyes were seeing. “And then what, August?” Sen asked in a tone that was not much higher than a whisper.
“Then, we find out why there was a cult dedicated to your arrival.” August told him, in his own low voice.
Arty heard them talking, but acted like he didn’t, pretending to read some of the glyphs that marked the floor. Zulli’s attention was rapt on August and Sen; she didn’t know whether to interject or let things play out, so her indecisiveness turned the latter into reality.
Sen shook his head. He blinked a couple times, then he shook his head again, pulling himself out of the trance he was in since entering the room. “It’s a lich.” He said, pointing at the skeleton.
“That was our guess.” August told him, referring to himself and Garrus.
“And when we pull the sword, the lich's soul gets released from the crystal into the vessel.” Sen added.
“Indeed. Garrus’ sword has an inherent suppressive effect, which is why he left it here.” August told him. “...To keep the lich dormant.”
“It’s iron rank. If Garrus is silver, couldn’t he have struck it down easily?” Sen asked.
“It’s… complicated, as you may guess.” August replied. “Liches aren’t meant to be iron rank, they are usually much more powerful. This one is like you, it has quirks.”
“Quirks.” Sen repeated.
“Should we talk about this, before we pull the sword?” Zulli finally interjected.
Sen looked over at her, and Arty finally looked up, bringing his attention to the group.
“Yeah.” Sen replied. “What do you think, Zulli, got any ideas?” He asked, some life coming back to his voice when addressing her.
“We won’t know much until we do it, but I assume Garrus suppressed the lich for a reason.” She said. “I think we’re here for its soul.”
“Its soul?” Sen asked.
“That’s the whole thing with liches, right? They can transfer their souls to other vessels?” Zulli posited.
Sen and August both nodded in contemplation, while Arty put his attention to the archway behind the lich’s stone chair.
“The glyphs here are all pretty much common language.” Arty told them. “But those words on the archway are the same as the ones before. Can you read them, Sen?”
Sen closed one eye and peered at the archway as if a bright light were shining at him in the dark. He felt the pressure inside his head as he once again read the script.
“Upon the shoulders of the fragments-” He mumbled. “-The derogation of reality abides-” He looked away for a moment, then closed his other eye to view the script with the one closed before. “-Awaiting the vessel of creation unmade.”
Arty’s lips pursed as he nodded in a perturbed, exaggerated fashion. “Alright.” He said, disgruntled. “Well, that’s just great. Are we thinking Sen’s the vessel of creation unmade or what? What else could that mean?”
“August please don’t tell me there was a prophecy about me coming here.” Sen chided to him.
“Garrus didn't tell me anything about a prophecy, but where there’s cults, there’s usually prophecies.” August replied. “After Garrus came here on a contract, the Adventure Society ended up confiscating what little evidence that was here. But they couldn’t take what he saw.”
“What did he see?” Zulli asked.
“The lich told him things, then showed him something he called a Rift.” He hasn’t told me much more than that.
“And the Adventure Society just left the rest here? They didn’t think they should take care of the lich?” Sen asked.
“They found it too interesting, too beguiling, to destroy.” August said. “They will now know more about it from my report when I get back.”
Sen’s head rolled in realization. “So, they’re using us to figure out more about this Void Cult.”
“They are.” August said. “Otherwise, the contract wouldn’t have gone through.”
Sen looked back at the crystal, and then at the armored skeleton hanging over the stone chair.
“I wonder if I’ll be able to loot his soul.” Sen said, thinking about what Zulli mentioned before. “That’d be pretty cool, right?”
“Sen.” August scolded him. “Think about the implications of what you just said.”
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“Ah.” Sen folded his arms and brought a hand up to his mouth, tapping his lip with one finger. “Yeah, that’s not that cool, is it, the whole devouring souls thing?”
August simply grunted.
“So, what’s our plan?” Arty asked. “You said that lich is iron rank right? So, if we wake him up, August can take him out if he goes loco.”
“I am not meant to interfere once the sword has been pulled.” August said with his eyes low. “That is one of the many favors that Garrus made me promise him.”
Arty put on a look of dismay. “Well…” He looked at Zulli. “We’re iron rank. Two against one isn’t too bad, I guess.”
“Hey now.” Sen interjected.
“You won’t just run away when things get dangerous?” Zulli questioned mockingly.
“Well, hey.” Sen said.
“What kind of guy would I be to think two against one is dangerous?” Arty replied.
“Three to one!” Sen said, his arms motioning at his cool armor.
Zulli shrugged, she was smiling, enjoying the rise they got out of Sen.
“Sen, very nice armor.” Arty said. “But liches are infamously powerful entities. It would probably be best if you just stayed in the back and let us take care of it.”
Sen’s eyebrows furrowed. “Guys, listen.” He said, regaining his composure and pinching the bridge of his nose. He took a deep breath. “I spent a long time in the void. I know none of you know what it is, but it’s just a big place of nothingness. It sucked. And it’s here. The void is here, I can feel it.” He turned to face the crystal with Garrus’ sword stabbed into it. “When we pull that sword, the void will be here. I don’t exactly know what that means, but…” He let out the rest of his breath before taking another deep one. “…The void hungers. It wants to take. And… if it takes anything, it’s gotta be me, and only me.”
August’s stoic expression somehow become more stoic, realizing the time had come. His head hung lower, and his wavy brown hair hid his eyes from the sides.
“If it takes you, then it’s going to take me too.” Zulli told him.
“I don’t want you to go there, Zulli.” Sen replied. “I don’t know how you’ll hold up, physically or spiritually. It might tear you apart. It might make me tear you apart.”
“I don’t care.” She said. “I came here because we’re connected. This wasn’t some contract I did for some society. I’m a part of this as much as you are.”
“I am not.” Arty stated matter-of-factly. “You two can go. I’ll hang out with the big guy.” He said, pointing a sideways thumb at August.
Sen shook his head. The void would do what it wanted, anyway. “Zulli. Just don’t do anything hasty. You neither, Arty. August? We might as well get this started.”
August hesitated only for a scant millisecond, then walked toward the crystal dais. He reached behind him, pulling his leather helmet from side pocket on his knapsack. He fitted it over his face, his fingers running along the brim around his neck to straighten his hair underneath, then he fixed the solid facial covering that left only a slit over the bridge of his nose for his eyes to see through. He reached out a hand to grab the sword.
“Alright. We’re doing this then.” Arty said as he took a step back onto the first set of raised platforms behind him. He placed a hand inside the front of his coat, like he was ready to pull a gun from a hidden holster.
Sen and Zulli shared a look, both putting on their game faces.
The sword had a golden cross hilt with a long red ribbon wrapped around the handle which draped from the pommel towards the ground. The blade was a gleaming silver, straight and slender. August pulled on it. The rank disparity of items compared to their wielders didn’t necessarily make them heavy, the difference of the strength of their inherent magics just made manipulating them in physical reality intrinsically more difficult, like trying to swing a baseball bat underwater. Therefore August, being on the precipice of silver rank, didn’t have much difficulty manipulating Garrus’ silver rank weapon. The sword rang out in the open room as it scraped against the hard matter of the crystal, until it was completely released.
Arty’s handheld crystal light dimmed, as if the darkness had become more intense. Then August’s higher ranked floating crystal followed suit. They dimmed more and more, until there was no more light. The crystal at the center of the room, cracked and damaged, then began to hum and glow faintly with a purple hue, the hum getting louder as the light became more intense. Streams of bright pink, white, and black rose from inside the crystal to its tip, forming a manifested ball of dark purple light outside of it. This purple ball then floated in the air, moving slowly toward the skeleton sitting in the chair. It collided with the skeleton’s chest, causing the entire skeleton to shudder, shaking the dust from it. The light dissipated from its chest, leaving only the faint purple glow of the crystal to illuminate the room.
Sen stepped forward, putting himself on the other side of the crystal from August, and Zulli cautiously followed him, leaving some space while keeping her eyes on the lich.
Tiny white lights formed in the empty space of the lich’s eyes sockets, and a low, conservative grunt came out of him, while they felt its aura manifest. The lich straightened itself in its chair, putting both hands around the end of each arm rest, as its tiny eyes danced in its eye sockets, looking around the room at the team in front of him. The lich let out another grunt from his aura.
Sen recognized him. He knew his name from his scanning ability, but his presence and his aura also felt familiar, though he could not place from where.
“Good.” The lich let out in a long, drawn-out diction. “You’re here, despite my failure.” He said, the tiny lights within his sockets locked on Sen. He stood from the chair, his height much greater than that of a person, looming over them. His armor and ragged clothing somehow stuck in their rightful places on his skeletal frame. The team took steps backward in reaction to his movement. August stepped back further than Sen and Zulli, all the way back to the first set of platforms with Arty, but he kept his eyes forward the entire time.
“You are still very weak. You have been tainted by this world’s magic. We have much work to do.” The lich said as he placed a large bony hand on the top of the dimly lit crystal, which brightened at his touch. Sen didn’t budge but had a feeling of dread bearing down on him. Sen knew the lich was talking to him, as if he was ignoring everyone else in the room. The archway behind the lich began to hum and vibrate, shaking dust onto the floor. The room was very dim, the edges of the room almost complete darkness, but the darkness that filled the archway was ominously more intense. It reflected no light and actually seemed to consume the purple glow that trespassed in its field. Sen knew what was beyond the archway. The lich walked over to the archway, its size seemingly made to accommodate his massive frame, and he held and hand towards the darkness, inviting Sen to walk through.
Sen turned to look at Zulli, a look of sadness strewn across his face. “Zulli… I…”
“Let’s go, Sen.” She replied without hesitation, grabbing Sen's arm.
They both walked around the crystal and behind the chair, looking into the darkness of the archway.
“I told you I’m coming with you.” Zulli said.
The lich’s eyes locked onto Zulli. “You shall not.” He stated as he raised a hand toward the crystal dais. A massive hand comprised of pure darkness reached out from the crystal to grab Zulli around her arms and torso, locking her into place.
“Hey!” Both Sen and Zulli shouted at the same time.
Sen produced his sword from his voidspace and instinctively wreathed it with his aura, its blackness matching that of the archway and the hand holding Zulli. “Let her-” Before he could finish, the other skeletal hand grabbed him and flung him into to the dark archway, and Sen disappeared.
“Sen!” Zulli yelled as she was held off her feet, watching Sen disappear into the void.
“Whoa!” Arty yelled, producing a silver baton from his coat, it extended from both ends with a sharp point forming at the tip as he bounded forward. He made a swing at the arm originating from the purple crystal to no effect, Arty’s baton doing no damage to its incorporeal form.
August watched in solemn silence as the Lich turned away from them and walked through the blackness of the archway. When he was gone, the black hand holding Zulli dropped her on the floor and drifted away into nothingness.
Arty ran up to the archway and attempted to poke his baton into it, but some kind of barrier kept him from breaching it.
“No.” Zulli muttered, getting to her feet. She quickly moved to the archway, trying to push her hands into it. “No, I’m supposed to go with you!” She yelled, pushing harder. Her fingertips slipped through the barrier, disappearing into the void. She kept pushing until she got one hand through, and then an arm, before she pushed her face against the blackness. She pushed hard, groaning and fighting against whatever barrier attempted to bar her from staying with Sen. Her shoulder creeped through, and then half of her face, until her whole head was sticking out the other side.
The silence of the void gave Sen a sense of unease upon hearing it, or rather, not hearing it again. With a title like Voidwalker, it was only a matter of time until he was back in its embrace. The eventuality of it did not bring him solace. He turned backward to look for the rift where he came from, but there was nothing, and soon the lich manifested from that nothingness, its rattling bones-against-steel actually creating noise in the silence. “What are you-?” Sen was caught off guard by not being able to hear anything coming from his mouth, and wondered why he could hear noise coming from the lich. He put a hand up to his forehead as he felt a concentrated source of pain in the middle of it.
He then saw white light coming from where the lich had manifested in the void. Little white dots, maybe with a bluish hue, Sen couldn’t tell in the contrast to the void. They looked like stars poking through a moonless night sky. Five of those dots became a hand, and then an arm, connected to a shoulder, shining their bright bluish-white luminescence in the darkness of the void. The arm wriggled as if in struggle, when a face began to manifest. Long, very long, strands of bright silver hair draped down from the face, and silver eyes found Sen looking back. “Sen!” She yelled when her mouth finally pushed through.
“Zulli!?” Sen both questioned and answered, though no sound came out of his mouth, despite the sound coming out of hers. He dropped his sword and ran up to grab her hand, neither pulling on it or pushing her away, just holding onto her hand as he looked at her face. He could see her features, and she almost blinded him with her brilliance. Her silver eyes had no innate features of their own, they were simply pure silver orbs, but he could see her nose and her mouth, and the ridiculously long silver hair that would have reached her knees had her whole body been visible. He could finally look into her eyes, and what he saw, the look of longing and anguish, melted him to his core. “Zulli, I’m sorry. I’ll be back. I don’t know when, but I’ll be back.” His voice came through while inside her radiance, though it seemed distant, like he was yelling through a layer of concrete.
“No, Sen.” She argued, her own voice breaking through the silence of the void. She was still struggling to push herself through the barrier when a large skeletal hand reached over Sen’s shoulder and pushed against her face before she could say anything more, easily overpowering her and pushing her back into the room where her black shadowy form almost melded with the rest of the darkness. Sen solemnly fell to his knees, and his eyes lowered into the blackness of the abyss as the lich loomed over him.
August helped Zulli to her feet again, but it was too late. The archway lost the deep void it contained and was now merely a black stone wall. The dark crystal dimmed. August’s crystal had regained its light and was floating by him once more, and he used the light to inspect her for any injury. “Zulli, I’m sorry.” August said, trying to console her. She savagely wailed at him lying on her back on the floor, trying to get up.
“You couldn’t do a single thing!?” She berated August, hitting his arms as he held her in place, his attempt to calm her down. “I can’t feel him!” More wailing, more breaths of desperate anguish. “I can’t feel him anymore. He's gone.”
“He’s going to do what must be done.” August told her, letting her go.
Arty’s eyes hung low as he kept them off the two, feeling awkward in the moment. He felt he didn’t know them well enough to sympathize.
August stood up straight, his head hung low with his hands on his hips as Zulli finally surrendered. She covered her face with her hands in defeat as she lied on her back.
In the void, Sen rested on his knees after watching Zulli being forced back to the physical plane of the other world. He remembered the last time he was here. He remembered the grief that transformed into a solemn anger. He decided he would skip the grief part this time. Activating the weightlessness inherent in his armor, he made a quick jump backwards to grab the sword he had dropped when entering the void. Before his moment of weightlessness ended, he bounded forward back at the lich, wreathing the sword in his aura, and summoning primordial flame around it. He didn’t care where he was aiming, he just wanted to hit the lich. He just wanted violence.
The sword was caught by the lich’s gauntlet, sliding the attack away from him with a deft maneuver that didn’t seem fit for a being so large. A thin layer of frost covered the gauntlet as it was affected by the frostburn of the primordial flame, but it didn’t phase the lich in the slightest. Bony knuckles impacted Sen’s chest and sent him reeling backwards, tumbling on the floor that didn’t seem to exist, but held them both up nonetheless.
Sen got up in a silent coughing fit from the impact of the punch. The concentrated source of pain he felt right behind his forehead started to escalate, feeling like there was a hot needle in his frontal cortex.
The lich manifested something in its hand in the same way Sen would pull something from his voidspace, an item wrapped in a lively black shadow. It was a cube about the size of an apple, that seemed small in his large skeletal hand. He tossed it onto the ground in front of Sen, and it made sound like a rock skipping across a frozen lake as it awkwardly rolled toward him.
It was the reason he came all this way. At least, part of the whole.