Val’Kraise stared up at the Everseeing eye, past the massive bridge that led up along the side of Coral to the Observatory he desperately wished to stand within. To pray within. The divine rain parted around his cult’s primary place of worship and the path upwards; a miraculous show of godly favour from the Great Iris upon one of its apostles.
Oh, how he awaited the day he could achieve a similar feat. Val’Kraise imagined his own eyeless gaze melting through an ocean of torment struck down upon the heathenish cults burrowed away from the great one’s gaze.
But that day would not be today.
Val’Kraise had been tasked, to his utmost dismay, with guard duty. He, after all he’d done for the cult in his years, had been whisked off to the side for the duration of the greatest ceremony in all of Coral’s history.
This was absolutely Val’Ugneg’s fault. He just knew it. That bastard had been undercutting his progress for years.
Val’Kraise lowered his unblinking gaze to Por-Val’Dannel, where the eyeless man waved through the last of the young acolytes up to the bridge. The man was a prickly sort, but if he could find a way to earn a favour out of the heavy-set harbinger, then it wouldn’t matter that Val’Ugneg would get to sacrifice his eyes first.
The big man turned his eyes skyward, and Val’Kraise followed suit. Even down here, the spiralling lights of the Great Iris were an inescapable beauty.
“I’m going to head up,” a voice said, much to Val’Kraise’s annoyance. He was forced to look down. “Having all of us here is overkill. The three of you alone would be enough to kill anything dumb enough to approach the skyway.”
Irritated eyes fell on third creed insignia proudly woven into this nothing’s hood. The man was gesturing between Val’Kraise himself, and the two eighth evolution harbingers. Val’Leaecee and Por-Val’Dannel.
“You want to join the ceremony?” Val’Kraise asked, keeping his voice level.
“Y-yeah.” The low creed wavered before standing straighter. “Nobody could make it past you, and the ceremony needs as many eyes as it can. Weak as I am, I would be more useful up there.”
Val’Kraise glanced to his two partners. Both were just as insulted as he, but held themselves back, knowing how this would end. The rest of the small army of lesser creeds did not hold such solidarity. Some snarled at the back of the man, barely held back from shouting under Val’Kraise’s piercing eye. Others looked hopeful. Those, he considered worse than even the fool who asked to climb to the highest point of Coral. They were just as greedy, yet lacked the bravery to act. They hoped they’d be able to follow suite.
“Do you believe yourself better than us?” he hissed as he locked eyes with his lesser again. “You believe anyone would be here if given the choice?”
“N-No, I-”
Val’Kraise stepped forward, cutting off the weakling’s excuses.
“Are we but mere inconveniences in the way of your rise?” He stepped forward again, getting right in the face of the now cowering man. “Do you believe yourself special? That the Great Iris will grant you favour over the rest of the devotees willing to perform the role as assigned?”
The man tried to backtrack, but found his feet didn’t work. “I didn’t- I-”
Eyes gazed into eyes, and the man began screaming. Finally, he regained his feet, only for them to crumble underneath them as he clutched his face.
“Do not howl, for that is only a fraction of what we see,” Val’Kraise said. “Return to your position, and ingrain your inferiority into the synapses behind your retinas.”
As the man desperately nodded and scrambled back amongst the midst of weak harbingers, Val’Kraise settled back and turned his upward once more.
“Shouldn’t have been so soft on him,” Val’Leaecee murmured. He didn’t need to look down to see she was glaring daggers at the third creed with her empty sockets. He could see exactly what she did, after all. “He should die for such an insult.”
Val’Kraise sighed. “We can’t go around killing everyone that annoys us.” She gave him a look and he had to rolls his eyes. “Sure, you could… but knowing you, we’d run out of bodies by the end of the year. It’s better to make sure they understand their place. They can still be useful.”
Val’Leaecee grumbled under her breath, but didn’t argue. Connected to her sight as he was, he felt when her attention became engulfed in the spiral above.
He’d been linked to these two’s sight for years now, and yet it still baffled him the way they saw the world. It was as if all colour and beauty had drained from anything but the Great Iris. The name they worked towards to allow all their sight-based abilities to function even without eyes was standard amongst the highest creed, but it could never replace the true vividness of their long-trained eyes.
That loss was what made the sacrifice so powerful. It was a shame he wouldn’t get the chance to lose them today.
Val’Kraise was used to ignoring the conversations of lesser creeds. One had to be when there was so many of them permeating the holy spaces of the Observatory all the time. So it was a matter of course that he let the few dozen concerned murmurs slip from his mind as he bathed in the hypnotic divine eye. Likely, the man who’d seen through his eyes had broken down. It wouldn’t be the first time.
That dismissal vanished with the first scream.
His eyes snapped to the voice. It was the same man again, except instead of curling over himself and covering his temporarily enhanced eyes, he had nearly fallen over himself in a mad dash towards the stairs.
So he decided to ignore Val’Kraise’s warnings?
Shaking his head in disappointment, his sight landed on the man’s foot. In an instant, it was gone. Blood gushed from the missing limb and the man fell. What was the purpose of it? He hadn’t even made it to the first step of the opulent staircase.
“Attack?” A voice called, laced with uncertainty. “Is it phantoms? Another cult?”
Val’Kraise and his companions turned at the alarm. Ah. Apparently, the man had just been trying to flee. All around where they stood, creeping tentacles of darkness moved in. The shadows stretched across the ground with nothing solid to create them. The dark shapes slunk out from every crevice, every sliver of shadow cast from the accretion disk above.
But it was most thick down the stairwell to Coral’s depths. From there, the otherwise surface-bound shadows swam through the air. They hooked into the space dominated by Iris light, and consumed it.
This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.
The man hadn’t made an attempt to get past Val’Kraise. He’d seen what was down there. A sight — or the absence of one — that now had the seventh evolution cultist’s blood running cold.
“The Nightmare! It’s in the light!?”
With that announcement, a ripple of terror washed through the small army of cultists. The effect of months of uncontested onslaught, of missing associates, and the churn of rumours had a decisive effect on morale. Especially those of the lesser ranks who lacked any confidence in their own strength.
They all ran. It was a frenzy, and none of the low creed wanted to be the last to stick around.
“Hold your ground,” Val’Leaecee roared. Her tone was powerful enough to make many flinch, but in the face of such horror, none did as ordered. Their ranks fell into chaos.
Val’Kraise steadied his own heart as he looked into that black abyss and reached into the sight of all around him. Thirty terrified, jerky eyes flickered back to the darkness that raced towards them like any of the nightly mists. He searched for a form, a shape, anything he could latch onto to vaporise, but it was nothing but darkness. It was as black as the black hole beneath their feet.
The antithesis of their Great Iris.
It was the gaze of that darkness he felt next that truly unsettled him. Deep, penetrating; he’d felt the all-consuming sensation of being seen in the recent days of activity from his god, but never had it been so engulfing.
He stretched his ability towards that gaze. Five… no, six eyes. But the moment he tried to worm his way in, he felt the weight of entire worlds suddenly crash through him. He saw… everything. In an instant, he felt like screaming as his eyes burst in his head, unable to contain the impossible sight.
Por-Val’Dannel and Val’Leaecee stepped forward, and it was all he could do to connect their sight to one another.
The wave of darkness crashed past them without a care for the two harbingers of the eighth evolution. It raced behind them, swallowing every cultist and cutting off all Val’Kraise’s eyes. Not a single ray of light cut through the black.
Screams. Thirty screams sliced through his ears at once, and in an instant, all those eyes were gone. Dead.
Only the two powerhouses remained, but even they offered little sight beyond Val’Kraise’s sudden blindness.
Something wet washed past his feet. It soaked into his cloth shoes and hanging cloak, but the habitual glance down revealed nothing. Thankfully, the two harbingers had felt it as well, and were not quite as blinded by this Nightmare as Val’Kraise.
It was blood.
A lot of blood.
Val’Kraise really hoped this was some sort of multiplying name, or a broken bloodbank, because the rising sound of river rapids spoke of more dead bodies than he’d probably seen living.
Por-Val’Dannel unsheathed his blade — an odd choice amongst Everseeing Eye cultists — and barked a quick command, “Val’L̊̆̆̅eaec̬̳e̾e.” She didn’t wait a moment. Her gaze fractured the world into a thousand broken fragments. Through Por-Val’Dannel’s sight, he couldn’t make sense of it. Her ability broke his vision and left him disoriented, as if space itself was made of shattered glass.
Flickers of the Great Iris’ light bled through the cracks, threading the darkness with irremovable beams and expanding their sight. Val’Leaecee could still see perfectly through her own ability, and so Val’Kraise worked to share that sight with the large swordsman.
As one, they caught sight of a flicker. Something crossed a boundary of shattered space, and they all caught a glimpse of the massive form of black and red. The next flicker was a set of claws. Long as his forearm.
Val’Leaecee leapt out of the way, but she was too slow. The shrouded blades sliced through her chest and heart with unfathomable ease. The woman wasn’t exactly defenceless against such attacks.
She gasped, and her hands rose to her chest defensively, but her eyes showed nothing wrong. There was blood, but that seemed to be more from the churning waves now rising above their knees. She didn’t have a scratch.
And yet, she clutched herself as if it had been agonising.
“Don’t-” her breath shuddered. “Don’t get hit.”
“Yeah, no shit,” Por snapped. He spun towards another flicker between shards, but nothing came.
Another shift in the light had them all jump. It had been on the complete opposite side of them. Two more flickers snatched their focus until they happened to get a decent look. It was the blood. The roaring, bubbling waves of blood they couldn’t escape was disturbing the light. It was a distraction. Something to pull their attention from the real monster.
A second was a long time in a fight for high evolution cultists. So when they had to deal with five seconds of constant flickering where any one could be an attack, it was no surprise that the three of them grew tense.
Val’Leaecee was visibly struggling, but without a wound he didn’t know what was wrong.
Whether it was the tension of a hundred false calls or they’d let their guard down, none of them saw the next attack until the razor teeth ripped out the front of Por-Val’Dannel’s head. The darkness obscured a lot, but he could see through the big man’s eyeless sight. Sharp, shark like teeth ripping through your face from within was nothing if not horrifying.
Por-Val’Dannel stood frozen, expression contorted in a voiceless scream. He hadn’t even thought the man could feel pain.
It took him a long few moments to snap out of whatever horror held him captive. Despite what Val’Kraise had seen for himself rip through the man, his head was still in one piece. He’d been paralysed for long enough that whatever was out there could have easily struck again… yet hadn’t.
The next flicker sent the swordsman into a panic. He twisted and sliced his blade along the edges between spatial shards. It was supposed to be a shock for whoever they fought — not even the human Tomes would survive that sort of attack — but in his fear, Por had been desperate for an escape.
Metal sliced through space, and the fracture split. Instantly, the world severed, and they had a border in reality between them and The Nightmare.
Hopefully.
“We- we need to run.” Por-Val’Dannel was already backing away, moving towards the stairs. “Only the Apostles can deal with this. Them, or A̲r̀̒̈́̀͂̂̔̑͘͠͝a̿͐́̇̓̋͊͐͋̔s̀ẗ̯ͅh͉̓́ĭ̜s͎̍-V̫̟̣̜̣a͆l͉͚̝'b̫ö́͊͝o͂̀̀͑̚r͈͒ himself.”
Val’Kraise agreed. Whatever had happened to his partners, he didn’t want to feel himself.
“You wish to run?” The suddenness of the thousand interwoven voices struck the back of his neck with a bolt of terror. “But I’ve only just begun.”
He was running before he even realised it. Fear had taken control, and all that mattered was climbing those glorious stairs and reaching the divine eye. Forgotten were the attempts to keep the two harbingers sharing senses.
Still, as he ran, he instinctively held onto the others’ senses for his own sake. They, likewise, fled.
Val’Kraise saw a mere instant of five swirling galaxies before Val’Leaecee was gone.
Eyes.
The fractured space slammed back together, and what little light Por had to see vanished.
Those galaxies… those eyes… they had been as intense and colourful as the Great Iris.
Five more seconds passed without so much as a whisper. Why was it always five seconds? But the instant five seconds passed, Val’Kraise lost Por’Val’Dannel's sight.
He was blind. Truly and utterly blind… and it wasn’t even in service of the mighty Everseeing Eye. Only familiarity let him climb the stairs to the Observatory five steps at a time. He was getting closer to his god. He just needed to keep moving and the darkness would part for the Great Iris’ light.
But the darkness never left.
Val’Kraise found himself counting. Three. What were his options? What could he do? Four. Against all his better judgement, The Nightmare was just as horrifying as the rumours spoke. If he was going to have a chance of survival, of being any use to the great watcher above, he needed to do something drastic.
Five.
Agony.
The pain wasn’t physical. No, his soul was struck. A dozen sharp spikes pierced the unreal representation of his name before a heavy, bludgeoning blow followed through. Something had taken nails to his core, then taken a hammer and shattered the whole thing with too much power.
Val’Kraise’s soul senses were rudimentary, but even he could tell how bad of a state that put him in. His soul was almost as fractured as the world had been from Val’Leaecee’s sight.
Not only that, there was now something stuck to him. It stalked around his soul like a predator, even in the absence of The Nightmare.
He realised suddenly that he was rolling. The attack on his soul had thrown him out of his sprint, and now he was tumbling down the steps. Catching himself, he leapt back into his desperate climb.
Two.
There was only one thing he could think to do. It was an emergency action that was probably going to leave him crippled and and down in the lower echelons of the power for the rest of his life, but he knew it was possible.
Three.
Val’Kraise had always known he could twist one of his names in a certain way, but he’d ignored it. He wasn’t the type to self-sacrifice for any sort of reason. All he needed to do was time it with the-
He choked. There was more pain now. Far more than before.
“But… it hasn’t been five-”
“It’s not a hard limit,” the thousand voices snickered. “I was just avoiding the backlash. But you were never going to hit me.”
Val’Kraise faded to the eerie laughter of The Nightmare. Truly, the antithesis of the Great Iris.