C. Sebastian Nutt
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Chapter 176 - Quick Negotiations
🕑 Added 2025-06-07 18:02:01 +0000 UTCA feeling like electricity races up Sigrid’s leg as she stares up at the throne erected in front of her. To either side of her, the guards who walked her into the room turn venomous glares in her direction, the one on her left moving to draw his weapon. She can’t help but smile; the charge in the room is just too great to bear.
“Sigrid,” a man from one of the tiered balconies calls down. “What have you done with Evilynn Ca’Mari?”
She refuses to take her eyes from the Duke. If they miscalculated an iota, if the man is not so drained and weakened as he appears, then he could easily kill her before she could react. Though the tiger lay sickly and sweating, attempting to feign indifference and drunkenness, Sigrid knows that it makes him no less of a predator.
“She will be here presently,” Sigrid calls back. “Though, I imagine you will not like it when she does, if any of you manage to live so long.”
She listens, straining her senses, hearing the shift of steel and mail, the sliding of metal as guardsmen move about the high chamber. “This is quite a few people to investigate a single woman,” she calls. “Something tells me you expected me.”
The duke leans over in his chair, taking up his goblet and swallowing a draft of water before coughing into his fist. When his words finally come, they come covered in phlegm. “So, are you the architect of the recent troubles or merely a sacrificial piece here to deliver this message of death and destruction?”
“I am but a lowly servant, but in the game taking place in this duchy, you might consider me the opposing player. After all, the real powers are absent, are they not?” Ah, there they are. People move about the chamber, sticking to the shadows, as if the dark might protect them from her detection. Unfortunate for them.
“And after you have killed all of us, what do you plan for my lands then?” the duke asks. “Leave here and make yourselves a menace to some other part of the empire? Make an example out of some other land to spark your rebellion?”
“Rebellion?” The thought is so ludicrous that it almost makes her lose concentration. “Ah, so you must not be my opponent then. I had hopes. No, my lord, this is not about the human cattle you keep chained to the land or some pursuit of misguided justice. The Ca’Mari have no compact with us to unseat you. We do not want your throne. All we want is that.”
The risk of error is terrible, but she can’t help but follow her sense of drama in the moment, turning her eyes onto one of the stone pillars stretching the height of the chamber. The innocuous bit of stone, outwardly the same as all the others, hides a treasure within, one that took Ferro weeks to sniff out.
“If you merely deliver to us the Pil…”
“Kill her!” the duke roars, drowning out her words as he slams his fist against his throne.
Many things happen together. Eight auras explode throughout the chamber, though the duke keeps himself restrained on his throne. Sigrid senses them all immediately, seven endowed and one magician, each carrying a significant amount of power in the projections of their souls. People begin to spill into the room from their hiding places in the chambers beyond, men and women with weapons or grimoires already drawn, charging at her with incredible alacrity, already charged spells going off throughout the chamber, summoning a battalion of creatures straight from the hells.
But while Sigrid stands within the maelstrom of activity, she acts. The wan moonlight sprinkling down from above casts shadows throughout the room, and from the shadows emerge the grasping roots of the Blood Tree. Every wall reaches out, shadows growing long, more than a hundred people caught up in her initial strike. Those not outright killed by the whipping roots are snagged, their limbs caught and broken by the constricting tree, only a portion of those surviving long enough to be pulled toward the shadows. Before the duke’s sentence of death can even finish echoing through the high chamber, the words are swept away on a tide of pained wailing.
The guard on her right side finds a root wrapped around his ankle. He screams as he is drawn back, his weapon clattering to the floor, the bones in his leg ground to dust before he vanishes into the shadows. The other guard fares better, stepping over the lazy swing of the root and running for the stairs that lead up to the higher level. Knowing the trick of it, and thinking that Morello should have at least taken the hit to sell the ruse, Sigrid worries for a moment that someone might notice. Of course, given the sudden havoc breaking out through the throne room, no one does.
The Blood Tree does not escape its attack unharmed. For every member of the guard, it snags or renders into bloody pulp inside their armor, another manages to block its attack and cut back at it. The roots recoil and break where they are struck, slithering back into the depths.
Sigrid twists the cuffs on her hands, bending the metal until they wrench open, dropping to the floor. Her eyes flash back to the throne, seeing the duke still sitting there, his eyes hard and locked on her own. But now, there is a book in the man’s hand, an ancient-looking tome bound in leather.
Likely, written on those pages are spells powerful enough to destroy this entire structure. This elven man, sitting slouched in his throne, has existed here at his nexus of power for centuries; Sigrid can only guess at what he might be capable of. But then, Dal has been weakening him for months. She wondered if her would unleash all of his power to blow the room to pieces, forsaking every single person in here. The entire plan hinged on him not being so callous that he cared not to harm his family, that he would take a more measured and sophisticated approach. Now, she only had to push him to it.
A man drops into space between Sigrid and the duke, a man dressed in the familial regalia of the Mari’s, one burning with unrestrained power, wreathing him in a powerful aura of white brilliance. Her crimson eyes flick up, taking in the vision of Fas Cla’Mari. Though she has long disabused herself of the idea of holy messengers, she can’t help but think the man looks like an angel in the moment, the power wrapped around him so great that it moves his clothing as if they are caught in a breeze. Fas’ left arm is stretched toward her, a strange and powerful monster grafted to his arm, forming a barrel more than seven feet long, the end of which stops just a few inches in front of Sigrid’s face.
The man makes no threat nor demonstrates an ounce of hesitation. In an instant, a gentle blue light like that of a distant star issues forth from the darkness of the barrel. In the next moment, the room around Fas shatters as white hot light issues forth, consuming not only Sigrid but everything behind her for thirty feet.
Sigrid weathered the energy, feeling her flesh threatening to melt beneath the intensity of the attack. Time floated away, pushed aside by the sheer lethality behind the blast. Never in her life had someone so powerful tried to snuff her out. Never had the full might of those sitting in their high and rustic obelisks direct their attention her way. She felt for a brief moment what it was Ferro had been trying to tell her. She understood it.
Madness. Jor’Mari lashes out, the claws now decorating his outstretched hand, cutting back the root encircling the woman’s thigh next to him. In the world of black and white, the tendrils of featureless light rush out of the wall, scattering men and women into piles of raining, black blood. Even as he cuts away the lash about the woman’s leg, he can see that it is broken, see that she has no chance to walk out of this room on her own.
A man, her husband or son maybe, grabs her, dragging her away toward the door on their balcony level. Jor doesn’t even have time to focus his thoughts before another lash of white snakes out of the wall, wrapping around his wrist. The tendril squeezes, and he has to change his body to match the sheer strength behind the root. Even then, it nearly drags him to the wall before he can cut the root away. A flash of light in the corner of his eye captures his attention; it comes from the floor of the multi-tiered chamber, the place where his brother just jumped down to, the place his father is.
Jor’Mari throws himself over the edge of the balcony, falling into the void, seeing his brother down below. Fas stands in front of where the woman was, the demon Teriabellum fused to his arm, in the aftermath of the most powerful blast Jor’Mari has ever seen from his brother’s bonded demon. A wedge of the darkest void extends away from Fas, a bar of power so utterly complete that it erases the world in front of him as it continues to fire.
Falling through the open air has never felt more of an eternity, just a few seconds stretching on and on. Jor’Mari sees it all, how could he not?
A hand, the fingers willowy and overly long, reaches out of the void, grabbing onto Teriabellum, the demon fused to his brother’s arm. The explosive power issuing from the head of the demon dies away, cut off by the constricting hand crushing the summoned beast and Fas’ arm.
As Jor’Mari’s feet touch the stone, he finally sees the monster standing in front of Fas, much changed since she threw back the hood of her cloak. The facade of the woman has fallen away, revealing a monster that only possesses the vague shape of a woman. Its skin is made of dried wood, thorns covering its arms like bracers, a lashing vine of bark whipping behind it like the tail of a feral animal. It has no face, only a field of white flowers covering its head, ending at two wooden lips concealing rows of wide, flat teeth.
Somehow, he knows where its attention is turned, somehow he can feel its focus on him. Only once in his life has he felt the same malevolence as he does now, when he saw that monster in the highest room of the tower during the Trial of Rising Tide. Only that creature can’t hold a candle to this one.
His feet touch the ground, his body firing forward in the same instant, but his warning dies on his lips before it can be conceived. As if it were the easiest thing in the world, something that requires no effort at all, the monster reaches up with its free hand, pushing its fingers through Fas’ chest. It takes a step forward, its face on the duke, and before it begins its second step, Fas’ body is split in two, thrown to opposite sides of the room just to be out of the way.
Jor’Mari springs through the air, his reaching hand aimed at the monster’s throat. Pain erupts in his side, and he just catches sight of the whipping root reaching up from the ground, knocking him aside like a gnat, before he bounces off a nearby pillar and collides with the floor. The monster that just killed his brother doesn’t spare him a glance, its featureless face turned toward his father.
“Are you going to try?” the monster asks of the duke.
The duke, already standing, seethes atop his throne, the grimoire in his hand thrashing about violently in the wake of the power he calls to himself. “I will show you a true monster.”
Despite the power swirling about the man, despite the glory of an imperial duke in the throes of his power inspires, the monster simply smiles, stopping its advance, as if it were waiting for something.
