Grey Vivium 12

Something hot and wet welled up from my eyes and ran down my face as I crawled on claws of Destruction and my burned legs into the portal.

The world wrenched nauseatingly around me. Empty space ripped past. I hurtled through a blurred nothingscape. With no other matter to turn on, Destruction feasted on my aether and my body.

Then I was…somewhere else.

A rush of cold air. Hard ground beneath my knees. The vague impression of sharp, fanglike peaks in the distance.

There were people all around me, dozens and dozens of them, surprised faces jerking away, swirls of color as shields were cast from a dozen different sources, incoherent shouting—questions, commands, pleas—and staring up at me from the ground was part of Valeska’s face, disembodied and sitting in a pool of blood.

Sharp-edged tongues of violet flame tumbled out of me, and I felt only relief as the Destruction found something else to feast on.

“Th-that’s him! Grey!” several voices shouted, and the people—mages, soldiers, Alacryan soldiers—surged backward.

“Retreat! Retreat!”

A few spells flew at me, but Destruction pulled them out of the air and devoured them.

“Move aside!” a vaguely familiar voice snarled.

The feverish confusion I felt cooled, and my mind seemed to shift back into focus. I was in an enclosed courtyard surrounded by heavy gray buildings. In the distance, the faded blue outlines of the Basilisk Fang mountains clawed at the sky. I was in some kind of military base or encampment, probably around the eastern edge of Vechor based on the position of the mountains and the brutalistic, military styling of the encampment.

The soldiers and mages in the courtyard were all wearing the red and black uniforms and armor of Alacryans. A man in clean, azure-lined robes had pushed through the line and was staring at me with a vindictive grin.

“What are you all so afraid of?” he crowed, his bright jade eyes gleaming from a cleanly shaven face framed by carefully styled brown hair. “Look at him. There’s barely anything left—”

Violet fire began to spill away from me in waves, tumbling across the hard black stone of the courtyard floor and toward the lines of Alacryan soldiers.

A soldier grabbed him by the shoulder and tried to pull him back behind the line of shields. “Professor Graeme sir, it isn’t—”

Janusz Graeme’s victorious sneer shattered as realization dawned across his face.

Destruction caught up with him as he turned and tried to drag himself over the soldier, knocking the young man down. They both went up like so many dry pine needles, and then were gone.

I laughed. A mindless bark of pure delight, empty of empathy or care. The sound of it sobered me instantly.

More shields flashed into existence as dozens of voices crashed together in a concentration of fear and confusion. I pushed, and pushed, and pushed, all my focus turning back into myself as I tried to force out every particle of aether in my core, projecting the wild, uncontained Destruction as I did.

Tears or blood—I couldn’t tell which—welled up behind my eyes as I watched line after line of Alacryan soldiers vanish within with violet fire. Then the blaze moved into the buildings enclosing the courtyard, and everything and everyone within them, and still there was more.

Destruction spread beyond my line of sight, but I could feel it gleefully leap from structure to structure, leaving no tile or brick or timber behind, destroying utterly and without consideration.

But I’d regained myself, and I no longer felt the apathy and ecstasy of the ruination I was causing. I felt hollow, like the flames had burned away something intrinsic to my being, like I was shedding a piece of my humanity with each passing moment as the violet inferno spread and massacred all within the base.

I pictured Ellie and Mom again and steeled myself. There was no choice, not this time. Not when it was between my loved ones and the people who sought to murder them.

But I still couldn’t help but picture the ring of force speeding through the forests of Elenoir and leaving nothing but devastation in its wake.

My core gave a last, final, painful squeeze, and the flames guttered out with sudden finality. My reservoir of aether was exhausted. There was nothing left. And with no aether to fuel it, the Destruction godrune dimmed and went quiet.

I turned in a slow circle, staring around at what I had wrought.

The base was a large complex at the center of an entire town. A circle of ashen nothing spread for half a mile in every direction. The devastation ended suddenly with simple, functional stone buildings, many of which were partially collapsed or destroyed. A three-story complex sagged and crashed to the ground as I watched, sending up a tall plume of dust.

In the distance, I could hear the ghosts of screams, dozens of them, perhaps hundreds.

Just behind me, the hovering oval of the portal remained intact, the tempus warp on the other end continuing to project.