#griminal-rising

Aylin had rescued Chelan from Ericah’s shadow a while ago, now. She’d told him then, completely silently, how she’d gotten locked up there in the first place. She wasn’t even a dragon. She was an angel, a servant of Etihw sent to bring Justim and Vicers home. Without the two, their realms would begin to go mad, and everything would fall apart.

But Sornas had sealed her, a being of light, into the shadow of a crystal dragon, and had killed Justim. She’d had to become the shadow to escape, and with Aylin’s help and careful tutelage, had stayed alive to help Vicers hide, fully aware that he would never go back home, and so thus, neither would she.

The dream realm was large. Sornas’ fury at her continued existence was larger. They both had shadow magic, on the night of a lunar eclipse in the dream realm, where their powers were going to be at their best.

They had no time to plan out a strategy. He was coming now. 

“Back me,” Aylin said quietly, stepping backward, touching their winged backs together. “Give me my life support and I’ll be able to stop him. I know how.”

What will you do? Chelan had never spoken, not even to him. Aylin just knew what she meant without any sound at all.

 “I don’t kill the dream-demons, that’s not wise or possible,” he said. “I just put them somewhere else. If you back me, I can summon them all. They’ll bring his soul to me without his body and we can seal him away with them.”

It will kill you to try.

“I’m hoping you’d make sure that we don’t get that result.” He didn’t have to see her to feel her roll her eyes, but she most certainly had. Two beings of darkness, to bring forth the light.

Sornas could be heard in the distance, his screech of anger louder than anything either of them had heard in a long time. It would be seconds before he was upon them. The runes on Chelan’s body lit up, a beautiful violet of shadow magic she’d carved into her skin. Aylin felt the power, and lit his body up white.

“Come to me,” he said, at a normal speaking voice, and the silence beyond Sornas’ screams exploded. “Bring me his soul.”

The ground of the dream realm shook, side to side, like a quake grounding them from their powers. Aylin crouched. Chelan knelt, her shadow magic stabilizing the three feet of ground they were standing upon.

The earth below them fractured, and gave way, and they stood on a three-foot diameter island of soil in a sky of fractured islands, like the Arcane lands. Whose dream they were in, they no longer knew.

The wails of the demons echoed over the ground’s agony, shades like silhouettes and monsters formed before shapes had been understood to exist in concrete forms. Evils so ancient that they could only have been made by the subconscious.

The world rang itself into silence. One demon returned, a shadow of a beast, quiet and submissive, and held out to the two idols half a broken soul, violet-vile magic at the broken edge.

Chelan knew as well as Aylin did that right now, when Sornas’ soul had split in two, the world had ended. Their three-foot island was all that was left in the blackened purple sky. Everything before right now was gone.

Below them, the swirling void made form of the Relic, the being that had chased Vicers and Justim to Sornieth in the first place. It had swallowed the other half of Sornas’ soul and most of the demons, its glittery taint clinging to their reward.

If they didn’t do something now, it would kill them all.

“I have to stop it,” Aylin said, his voice ragged. 

“You really think I’m letting you do this?” Chelan asked, her voice raspy from lack of use but still strong. She stared off into the distance.

He would’ve marveled at her voice, if he didn’t have to save the world. “You need to help me,” he answered, and then looked up, realizing awkwardly she hadn’t been talking to him at all. He followed her gaze.

Standing on an island five feet across, a few yards away, in his original bipedal form, Vicers stood with his back to them. A true deity, in every sense of the word. The face behind the idol that both of them had been.

“Save the world,” Vicers whispered. Aylin felt the magic seconds before it punctured his chest. He dropped to his knees, convinced he was about to die. Chelan fell down beside him, choking on the agony.

“Don’t let it desecrate the world where we buried my Justim,” he whispered, his voice ringing in the silence, and he was gone.