C. Sebastian Nutt
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Chapter 177 - Collapse
🕑 Added 2025-06-09 18:02:01 +0000 UTCThere it was again, that burgeoning sense of excitement setting her core on fire with its buzz. The world is made so strange in the moments she lets go, lets her last vestiges of humanity slip away to reveal the thing hiding deep within her soul. The relief is like the first taste of air after being trapped beneath the surface of the water, a rush of coolness so powerful it blots out other sensation.
Then the other feelings begin to return: the slickness of the blood sticking to her hand, the yelling around the chamber, the deep thrum electrifying the air, the source of which stands in front of her. Duke Mari’s face twists with anger, rage barely controlled, as a shroud of clear color flickers about him like a cape in the wind. The man’s collar is dark with sweat, his lungs pumping like bellows as he reads from the grimoire in his hands. It shouldn’t be long now.
She jumps backward just in time to avoid a hammerblow descending from above, the force of the strike enough to shatter the floor. The first branch of the blood tree crawls up from the ground, the bark mottled with lichen sticking to dry bark. Sigrid rides the limb reaching from the shadow, being lifted away into the air as the tree continues to stretch upward. Her attention splits for a moment, recognizing, vaguely, the woman standing on the floor of the chamber with a warpick between her hands. The soul presence surrounding her is so uncannily similar to the duke’s that Sigrid concludes this woman must be his daughter, the third child of the duke, perhaps.
The momentary distraction allows just enough of a gap for another assault to collapse onto her. Manacles of golden light solidify around her wrists, chains dropping away and digging into the bark of the branch on which she rides, holding her tightly in place. The branch continues to grow as it climbs upward, now so thick around that it might as well be a bridge. Two men, each with burning auras moving about them, drop onto the branch before her, their swords poised and held at the ready, their faces demonstrating both conviction and caution.
“Come,” Sigrid calls to them.
The first of the endowed slips forward, his enchanted blade swinging for Sigrid’s neck as she remains restrained by the chains around her wrists. The blood tree moves, a root extending from the shadow to intercept. Her calm breaks in the moment that the whipping root is stopped, the hand of an invisible monster holding tight to the thrashing root. She barely has the time to haul on the chains anchoring her in place, pulling her body prone far faster than falling could manage. Still, the edge of the man’s blade cuts a deep path across the front of her head, shattering teeth and digging into the field of flowers that constitute her face. Pain, a fiery explosion of burning, erupts over her, the magic of the nobleman’s sword digging into her.
The blood tree feels her agony, the tendrils reaching from the shadows around the room writhing in their distress, lashing out with none of the consideration they showed earlier. One of the pillars stretching the vertical length of the chamber groans as roots encircle it, squeezing with a blind fury that cracks the stone. Throughout the chamber, guardsmen usher the gentry away from the chaos, doing their utmost to protect those with no real power to speak of. As they are trained to do, each bears a grimoire, each calling forth a creature from the three hells to attack the enemies of the duchy while they handle protecting the citizenry with their hands. The demons most manage to bring forth are pitiful things, sickly beasts made of bone and sinew that inspire more terror in their appearance than in effectiveness to deal with the rampaging tree reaching in from the dark.
The cacophony that wails through the throne room would put a thousand screeching gulls to shame, but Sigrid notices little of it. The manacles lashing her to the branch recede into the wood as she falls onto her back, pinning her wrists to the bark. The same warrior moves in, his blade already arcing for her. She kicks out with a foot, catching him in the ribs before he can take her head off, forcing the strike to go wide as his body sails across the room to collide with the wall.
The other man is on her before she can properly recover, the point of his sword descending, aiming to impale her through the chest. The bark of the tree explodes around her, the wood warping, becoming a bed of writhing tendrils striking out toward the man. Somehow, he reacts, shifting his blade to parry the sudden barrage of attack, and finding himself thrown away toward the wall. But the man drops something before he can be hurled away, a squirming ball of wurms nested into an acorn. The wriggling demon sticks to her chest as it falls, the moving creatures along its surface burrowing into her wooden flesh, delving deeper and deeper by the second, racing toward her core.
An impossible wail erupts from her mouth as she strains against the cuffs holding her in place. She sees him then, a flicker of blue aura in her sight, the court magician hiding on the third balcony. The old elf’s hands glow with a subtle golden light, the magic the same color as the bindings holding her in place. Sigrid strains, hauling with her considerable strength against the bindings, twisting her arm to turn in just the right way. Thorns fire like arrows from the back of her forearm, bullets of deadly force aiming at the magician keeping her trapped in place. Another captain of the Mari family guard steps into place, the fusillade of thorns clattering against the flesh-covered shield attached to his arm. Even those spikes that manage to stick into the demon the man wears as a shield seem to dig into it, being eaten by the defensive creature.
She knew they would be strong, these people that she came here to kill, knew that they had worked in some cases for a century to master their art of battle, that their coordination would be superb. What arrogance would be required to think that any single individual could overmatch these people? But then, she didn’t need to beat them to kill them.
The growing branch beneath her continues to groan as it grows and stretches ever upward toward the moonlit window overhead. The manacles about her wrists snap back, reeling her arms open as the chains sink into the tree, her strength alone not enough to tear them apart. She had not expected to be pushed this hard this fast, but three more of the endowed climb the stretching branch behind her.
In the fractions of seconds passing by, she thinks to herself about her naivety. Hadn’t the master warned her about over-confidence? Yet, she thought she could accomplish this without revealing all her tightly held cards. These people; they were only an enemy of necessity, and she had not paid them the proper respect. Next to them, she was an infant in the art of battle; they deserved her all.
The petals covering Sigrid’s face flutter away, splashing into the air like a spray of blood from a wound. Throughout the chamber, a momentary hush falls as a new aura joins to mix in with the rest, a wreath of power so dark and malevolent that it breaks the wills of three in the room with just its appearance. Though the twisting energy seeps up from the floor, floods in out of the very walls, none mistake the monster rising through the air on the back of the wooden branch as not being the origin. A shiver snakes down the spine of Yul’Mari as she pulls herself back to her feet, staring up at the faceless creature surrounded in a field of fluttering petals, a wide, flat-toothed grin on its face.
Two of the petals drift lazily through the air despite the feeling of time having stopped, landing on the manacles holding Sigrid bound to the branch, sapping the magic from them. With little strain, the bindings snap, freeing her. She stands astride the reaching branch, staring down at the mix of people who gaze back up at her, spreading her arms wide, inciting flowers to bloom throughout the chamber, the very stone giving them birth.
One man, the guardsman with a demon strapped to his arm in place of a shield, fails to notice the soul presence surrounding him being sipped away by the budding flowers. His knee collides with the wooden frame of the balcony, energy sapped from him in a fraction of a second. He just manages to raise his head in time to see the growing bulbs covering the balcony around him open, small motes of light hovering above their centers in a beautiful display of color. The flowers detonate, the explosion rending both the man and the balcony apart in a flash of violence. Petals covered in gore and the wooden structure of the balcony itself rains down onto the heads of those below as the flowers continue to spread over every surface like a wave of locusts, nowhere so densely covered as the branch of the blood tree still ascending in the center of the chamber.
“Run,” Yul’Mari screams ahead of the tide of growing petals, hurling a woman through a second-story window to spare her a gruesome fate. The three racing up the back of the branch act decisively, two jumping away from the tide of budding flowers, moving back to reassess. The third, however, presses forward, heedless of the unknown danger. He staggers as the bloom reaches him, the flowers around him drinking greedily from the uncontrolled power spilling out from him. He staggers, a wave of weakness coming over him. The weapon falls from between his hands, the small imp-like creature riding on his shoulder falling motionless to the branch covered in a vibrant field of petals. The last thought that crosses his mind before the flowers around him fill with vibrant and deadly light is just how beautiful they appear.
Sigrid drinks in the unrestrained sense of majesty and might that infects her. Standing high on the blood tree, looking down at the ants fleeing her tide of bloom beneath her. She raises a wooden finger, touching the hardened glass of the domed ceiling, watching how the moonlight cascades over her wooden hand. Her awareness seeping through the chamber, she is easily able to bend back to avoid the ball of fire sailing up at her from below. The windowed ceiling of the throne room shatters, shards of glass raining down toward the world below, the explosion of the flung fire erupting in the clear night sky far overhead.
Down at the bottom of the chamber, a new figure stands, a demon with the vague shape of a man stands. It is covered in rough auburn fur over its entire body and its torso sports three pairs of arms. The head of the creature is that of a wolf with three long and crooked horns protruding from its skull. At the point where the horns meet, a ball of fire condenses from the air. The reptilian eyes of the demon stare up at her, searching and failing to find her own. At a glance, Sigrid knows that this is the most powerful monster she has ever seen. A smile curls at the corners of her wooden lips.
All around the summoned demon, the encroaching field of flowers withers as it is exposed to the incredible heat radiating from the monster. Behind it, the duke slowly limps back to his thrown, collapsing into it, panting. Sweat runs down his face in rivulets, and his hands shake as he moves to grab his water.
“Finally,” Sigrid mutters. She extends her hand out, blocking the moonlight sprinkling in from above. Across the floor of the chamber, a reaching hand of shadow moves, its depths more pitch than tar. The entire throne room begins to shake as something begins to emerge from the shadow, clawing branches of a dead tree. The blood tree itself begins to wail as it is called fully into the material world.
Morello races through the winding hallways of the palace, pushing himself for all he is worth to get away from the throne room before things get too bad. Only once before had he ever seen Sigrid use all of her considerable power, and he knew better than to be close by when it happened. Rounding the corner at the end of the hall, he smashes open the innocuous-looking chest sitting next to a plush green sofa rather than fiddling with the lock. Bag in hand, he turns, his body changing, the muscles in his legs growing more dense than steel.
Every step cracks the stone. Every stride propels him forward like a cannon shot, but even so, he fails to make it up the palace’s south tower before the entire structure begins to quake. Dark brick cracks around him as he races up the stairs, mortar tumbling loose into dust, sprinkling down atop him. Through the tower’s windows, he sees the rest of the coven far below, the full might of the 5th army closing in upon them, hemming them into a circle. It can’t have taken more than a few seconds for him to reach the top of the tower, but by the time he does, the palace is a changed thing.
The central building lies now in ruin, much of the structure ripped asunder by the dead tree reaching up toward the night sky. She had described it before, a wonder extending more than four hundred feet into the air, its trunk so large around that you could fit a mansion inside. Morello blinks, staring skyward at the full revelation of the Blood Tree. Entire rooms of the palace lay between its leafless branches, stone the size of men appearing like less than insects in the thicket of boughs. Somehow, his eyes land on her immediately, the powerful figure atop the highest branch. Like the reaching branches, Sigrid’s hand claws toward the heavens, toward the shining moon overhead.
As she reaches, as the Blood Tree’s branches curl skyward, the moon itself returns the attention. The pale edifice of the rocky satellite begins to change, the white color dimming, turning dark, until it becomes a crimson sun shining in the sky. The wind dies away as the red light sweeps across the land, the night sky itself taking on the color of blood, the clouds made into dark purple mounds floating across the sky. The suddenness of the change is so rapid that Morello almost forgets himself, but the sight of a six-armed creature scaling up the trunk of the Blood Tree brings him back to focus.
He has a job to do. The blood moon has descended; now is the time. Reaching into the bag at his side, Morello pulls free the strange and buzzing sphere inside. The magic enchanted onto the runes of the ball call to him somehow, whispering dark nothings into his mind. Was this lethal attraction how the Master managed to catch the power of their wayward brother inside this bauble? Morello didn’t know, but he knew that the object in his hand was more precious and powerful than he was.
Following the sequence of marks he had been shown earlier that day, Morello slides the runes along the surface of the sphere. One by one, they fall into perfect place. With a metallic click, it is done. For but a moment, the buzzing sensation of the sphere in his hand stops, the light of the runes fading.
The sphere in his hands releases a pulse of magic so powerful that he staggers back and drops the object, and yet so subtle that no one much notices it for the first few seconds. Another power descends upon the palace grounds next to the blood moon, a power that calls to war and madness.
Comments
Connor Nutt
Sometimes the protagonist must struggle in isolation in order to return changed.
Stephen Balinski
I love a good villain POV chapter but 5 in a row with not a peep from the MC is rough! I want to know what's happening with Charlene. She's in a tough spot and I'm super curious how she gets out of it.
