Dan felt like he’d been doused by cold water. As he gazed up at Nyxalrai, he struggled to fathom what he saw through the wisps of darkness. Where the last time he’d seen her, she’d been wholly human, now she seemed anything but.
The eyes were the most obvious. She shared far too many similarities with the grand eye above. He wanted to pretend they were an illusion. A trickery to blaspheme the core beliefs of the Cult of the Everseeing Eye; an insult.
But… those eyes were no mere imitation.
The piercing weight of her gaze settling through every fibre of his being made sure there was no questioning their validity. Their striking resemblance was no lie. The only difference Dan could see was the depth to the worlds through those eyes. Nyxalrai’s eyes held a galaxy while the Great Iris contained billions. Despite that difference, it felt superficial. They both spun with the true fidelity of entire realms. Even at scales of difference apart, both the Everseeing Eye and Nyxalrai were beyond his comprehension.
And then there was the fact she had five. Dan wasn’t sure what to make of that. Did it bring her closer to the Great Iris, if only by five out of a billion?
He’d seen creatures with more than two eyes in their heads before. Often, they looked strange. It was like it twinged a part of his mind — the same part that could intuit doppelgangers — and made the unbalanced, unfamiliar number of eyes stick out as out of place. Odd, even if that was how those creatures always looked.
But Nyxalrai… hers eyes looked natural.
Which was downright contradictory. It was not natural for a human to have more than two eyes. Yet Nyxalrai had five. She had five, but nestled in an arch through her face, they looked… right. Dan had seen her with only two — it was how he’d always known her — but now that he saw how those eyes fit into her head so perfectly, he couldn’t imagine her without them.
Dan couldn’t recall what her eye colour used to be.
The other weird, inhuman aspects of her body weren’t nearly as intense at affecting his memory, but they each seemed so natural. They were nothing like the strange alterations of the Bodytwisters. Her changes were so far beyond what that cult could achieve that the thought she might be working with them hadn’t even crossed his mind.
Her hair, which he knew used to be brunette, was now a translucent bluish-white. Only when he looked closer did he notice it wasn’t actually hair. Not in the way one usually thought of it. The strands were thick. Not quite so thick as to be noticeable at first glance, but now that he’d seen it, he couldn’t stop seeing more oddities about the hair. The strands weren’t a bundle of long, unimpeded lengths. They split as they fell along the side of her head, rarely bonding with a neighbouring strand, before coming to a stop at her shoulders.
No, he quickly realised. They didn’t exactly stop. Those strands shifted in a way divorced from Nyxalrai’s movements, and as he watched, they grew. It was slow to the eye, sure, but for hair? She’d probably grow it all back from a cut in only a few hours. How did she manage that?
Her hair was alive. Each instant he looked, it was like he was learning more about a strange alien organism. The strands of glacial blue hair shifted as if breathing, swaying slowly. It was what he might have imagined ocean moss to be like, back in the ward.
Blinking — and belatedly realising how good it felt to do so — Dan’s eyes flickered over the rest of Nyxalrai’s body. There were so many other parts that were immediately obvious. Three pairs of barbed tendrils swept back at the side of her head. Teeth more apt in the mouth of an apex predator. Wings. Tentacles. A tail? Even her feet looked like some strange combination of tree roots and viscous water.
There was too much to focus on. Was one of the tentacles holding back another from reaching for him? Did those wings fade into the dark? Was that a chainsaw on her tail?
Actually, the last one was the most understandable. He’d been expecting something of the sort considering which cult the girl had joined. If anything, the vicious looking chainsaw did nothing but drive home that this really was Nyxalrai standing over him and not some monstrous entity summoning images from his mind to give itself form.
This… creature really was the girl from his ward.
“N̪ỷx̱̽alr̘a͎i, what are you?” The words slipped from his mouth.
“A Seed, apparently, but that’s not something you need to worry about.” Her tentacle waved dismissively, completely replacing the hand gesture as if it were second nature. “It’s N̪ỷ̽x̱̽alr̘a͎ith now, by the way. I’m showing you the true me now because I need you to understand. If you still don’t after all this, well…”
“Why are you here?” Dan’s eyes snapped over the shadow that seemed to bleed from Nyxalraith’s body and spill over the nearest hundred metres of cultists. As they were talking, people were still dying. “What are you planning?”
“I’m sure you didn’t want to cut off your eyelids, right?” she asked with an amused lilt.
“It is a necessity to solidify my future.” He appreciated that she thought about what he cared for, but this wasn’t something he could avoid.
“Uh huh.” She sounded annoyed by his statement. “Well, I’m here to show you that any future you might imagine with a cult is nothing more than a fantasy.”
Nyxalraith stepped away, and he caught where her deep, endless eyes glanced towards. The enclave of acolytes and cultists he had spent these last months expressing his devotion beside.
“Wait. Please don’t kill-”
Nyxalraith spun and directed him with such a harsh glare that he couldn’t have finished his request if he wanted.
“Their lives depend on their own actions.” Despite the chaos around them, she spoke with unbending calm. “This is a performance. I am going to show you what you already know, but refuse to accept. When the self-serving nature of the cults shows how little you matter to them, I hope you’ll make the right choice.”
Nyxalraith reached for her chest. In an instant, Dan’s mind was blinded by a flash of impossible Pink before it was gone again. He almost averted his eyes at the sight of Nyxalraith’s tattered robes, but instead of… skin, there were teeth. Long, dangerous teeth. Did she have a mouth across her chest? What the actual fuck?
A golden sceptre raised in her hands, and the surrounding darkness seemed to take on a new aspect. It was thick and seemed to give the shadows a physical weight. Given the darkness was already cutting down cultists with ease, Dan wasn’t sure how much more he was supposed to expect from whatever this relic was.
Instead, the burning acrid yellow light seemed to only emphasise the monstrous silhouettes of tentacles, teeth, and claws as they shifted through the overall darkness of the storm surrounding Nyxalraith.
Stolen novel; please report.
“Oh, and try to scream for help a little. It might expedite the process.” With that said, she was gone. Her body melted into shadow.
Even if Dan could still see the piercing light of that golden staff, any hint of her true form vanished amongst the nightmarish silhouettes. She shifted through the outer concentrating arc of the Observatory, making it clear to all that there was a core to this ‘Nightmare’ and it was slicing through sacrificials quicker than they could give up their eyelids.
Her wall of shadow stretched outwards, leaving the raised platform with the upper creeds entirely untouched. People were screaming. Some were trying to climb up to the only safe place.
“Brothers and Sisters. Do not give in. We a-” The rest of the cult leader’s speech went unheard as a thousand-voiced screech forced Dan to cover his ears.
The screams stopped again. A calm overtook the cult and they all knew what they needed to do. Dan watched the few mid and lower creed cultists who’d tried to run to their elders now leap down from the platform of safety. One, a young looking woman, even crumpled under a broken ankle as she landed wrong.
The sudden shift in the crowd’s attitude was jarring.
Through the — likely intentional — disruptions in darkness, Dan saw cultists who didn’t so much as react to their hands being severed as they tried to follow through with their own sacrificial rituals. They were entranced. Nothing could stop them from sacrificing what was theirs to the god above.
At the thought of the Great Iris, Dan glanced up again. The spiral was stronger than ever. Trillions of lights spun with impossible speed. A galactic turn every few seconds. Star after star fell into the accretion disc, intensifying the iris until Dan felt his skin scorch and the storm rumble at the sides of the Observatory.
If the Great Iris actually descended, would any of them survive?
Sure, he’d always been interested in what secrets lay above. Everyone in Coral was, to an extent. But was he willing to cast aside his life for a glimpse beyond? Looking around, he knew so many people here would. He was not like them.
Nyxalraith wanted him to know the worst aspects of the cult, but it wasn’t as if he was ignorant to the backstabbing and self-centred nature. That was just the way people were, whether they be with a cult or without. It wasn’t something he could change. At least the safety of the Cult of the Everseeing Eye was a step above the others.
Only the Omen Artisans had managed to avoid more conflicts in Coral’s history; but they weren’t a pinnacle cult.
Really, the bloodshed Nyxalraith had unleashed on this peaceful, if slightly undesirable ceremony was worse than anything he’d seen the cult do. Did she not care for life? She hardly looked human. Did that lacking humanity make her a monster that lived up to the title she’d been bestowed?
Why did she give him special treatment when she was just as happy to butcher the older acolytes that had also been preparing their eyelids for sacrifice?
“Are you prepared Dan?” suddenly her voice whispered in his ear. “I’m about to show you exactly how little the people that control you actually care about you. This is how much their ‘protection’ matters to them.”
He couldn’t see her, but he didn’t miss the wave of her silhouettes and the sudden vanishing of hundreds of metres of darkness. In its place was an intricate weave of ritual circles. Crimson light flowed with an eerie sluggishness off floating runes of blood that stretched across the entire Observatory.
For a ritual that hadn’t been there a minute earlier, it was surprisingly complex. Dan couldn’t make heads of even what type it was.
“Destabilisers?” Arasthis-Val’Boor had no such problem. And from the sound of it, the rituals were not something he would take lightly. “Val'M͖̘ͬj̫̏ȏl̬͚ͬr̅ā̱xͥ͆, deal with it.”
There was a moment of silence where Dan was able to take in the sheer butchery Nyxalraith had unleashed in order to create those rituals. The ground was piled with pieces of people that had been living only minutes ago. Strangely, the piles rose higher than there were cultists to have filled them.
But there was one detail he noted that gave him the slightest hope: the lowest of acolytes, those his age, had been left alive. Not all undamaged, but they were alive. Maybe Nyxalraith wasn’t enti-
Blinding light.
Dan’s arms snapped over his head, but even with both limbs in the way, it was impossible to keep the shine from filtering through skin, muscle, and bone. His body buzzed with the ambient power and his ears bled from roar-turned-ringing.
He’d been trained to deal with bright lights, so it only took a few moments to adjust and lower his arms. His other senses? All shot. Overwhelmed.
A thick pillar of pure white sliced through the outer ranks of the Observatory. Blood, bodies, metal? All of it was eviscerated without so much as a speck of dust to remain.
The solar wind of the Deific Tempest which, until that point, had been curving around the Observatory and bridge as if divine favour now angled inwards. The rays of incomprehensible power struck the dome above their heads and instead of shattering the glass, it was funnelled inwards. Directed.
A beam harnessing the immense destructive power of the strongest ever accretion storm vaporised bloody pentagrams and everything else in its way. With such intensity, this weapon wouldn’t have any issue slicing through Coral. He imagined some unfortunate souls below suddenly being ripped out of existence as this beam cut to the black hole.
It didn’t even need to move slowly to work. Dan watched as the stream of concentrated storm raced across the Observatory, leaving nothing behind of the tens of thousands of cultists caught in its way.
In mere seconds, the beam killed more cultists than Nyxalraith had since she arrived. All in its desperate attempt to destroy the bloody ritual.
Dan’s gaze flickered to the platform of the high creeds. None of them seemed to care that their lesser brothers and sisters were being eradicated thousands at a time by their own hand. Most were far more focused on the Iris above, almost dancing with elation.
Then, a hundred cultists stabbed their eyes in unison.
His gaze tried to turn skyward, but a streak of light stopped them.
Oh.
He was going to die.
Something slammed into his side, and he was suddenly sure that he’d broken half his ribs. It felt worse than being hit by a sledgehammer. Not that he knew what that felt like.
Darkness embraced him. It took him a second to realise it wasn’t the darkness of death, but Nyxalraith’s strange manipulable shadows. She had saved him.
The inhuman in question kneeled over him, speaking something he couldn’t hear.
She had been right. Of course the higher creeds wouldn’t care if he was dead. What did she want from him? For him to say she was right? Did she want to gloat? It wasn’t like there were any other options for him besides the cult. The Cult of the Everseeing Eye… she’d made her point and he could never feel comfortable amongst their numbers again.
Was she happy with that? Now he’d become little more than a homeless, powerless nobody destined to be stomped beneath the boot of the cults. Is that what she wanted to hear?
Nyxalraith had a look of contemplation on her face. She reached her arm forward, and he watched in morbid fascination as those long claws of hers slid back into her arm and her doll-like fingers seemed to slide off the back of each claw to take shape. Her hand touched his chest… and slipped inside without resistance.
The chill that clutched his soul was inescapable. Where the girl’s gaze made it feel like she saw every part of him that had ever existed, this new sensation of her hand in his chest made him feel like his entire being was nestled in her hand. It would be nothing but a tug, and he’d be dead. Proper soul-dead.
Dan’s ears popped and his chest suddenly didn’t feel that bad.
Nyxalraith looked too pleased with herself. “I’m surprised that worked.”
Dan was surprised he could hear her.
“Do you need to see any more?” she asked.
With a curt shake of the head, Dan answered to the negative.
“Good.” Thankfully, she didn’t gloat at the loss of Dan’s entire future. “I have somewhere I want to take you. Better not to stick around for the summoning of their god.”
At the mention of the Great Iris’ descent, Dan jerked. The final proclamation of the cult leader reached his ears.
“-revered Great Iris, we pledge ourselves and welcome you!”
Dan snapped his head up. There, the accretion disk was closer than ever. A blade cutting across the sky in a violent spiral. The world came to a silent standstill. Tension ground everyone to a halt, as if the very world was teetering on the edge, just waiting for the fall.
And it did.
In an instant, that heavy pressure grew a thousand times heavier. It had come. The Great Iris’s presence was felt to all.
The Deific Tempest ground to a halt. Uncountable stars ceased their spiral. Then, the eye that had been ever unmoving for the entire existence of Coral, it moved. No one dared to breathe as the immense eye flickered around, as if searching each of the people of Coral. Its sight seemed to linger on Arasthis-Val’Boor.
The man took that as an invitation to speak up. “Great Iris, the Almighty Everseeing Eye, I am-”
The god looked away. A slight, but noticeable flicker towards something else. Towards the dark shadow marring the Observatory.
“It has been a long time.” The voice was powerful. Despite only hearing it in his mind, the voice rattled his bones and left him quivering. “You finally stopped hiding.”
“Wait…” Nyxalraith’s eyes widened. Her thousand voices rang with confusion, exhilaration, and surprise. “Little God?”
Dan squeaked. “Little?”