Nyxala lamented the taste that infected her tongue.
She licked her lips absently. The little mouth in her tongue chomped at a bit of fat that clung to her cheek. Once again, like every time, she was surprised by how good it tasted. She didn’t want human meat to be so flavourful, but it was. That new name definitely made her appetite for it even worse.
What was she meant to do? Stop? She couldn’t possibly leave so many valuable bodies lying around to be incorporated into the ritual, now could she? Especially those with souls still in them.
The flavour was divine, but it was only a small part of why she continued to eat. She could stop whenever she wanted.
Nyxala licked her lips again.
…Who was she kidding? She was absolutely addicted. It was difficult not to be when a single bite did her so much good. The new name, she was pretty sure, made the digestion of soul-parts from bodies incredibly efficient. Unless even the lower creeds had suddenly become a half stronger… and the way they fought hadn’t indicated such. A sacrificial ritual could barely compare.
Then there was the hunger. Nyxala wasn’t sure when it had started, but she’d become ravenous. It was… concerning. She didn’t like how much her hunger grew with each person eaten, yet it wasn’t growing. Not really. Instead, it was as if with each little bit she sated herself, she simply became aware of a starving emptiness that had always been there. She couldn’t even blame the void in her chest; it applied to her original mouth, too.
Nyxala shook her head and focused back on the task at hand. With the two power substations down, most of the Fleshsmiths’ Island was thrown into darkness. There were patches here and there where the burning glow of the ritual was bright enough to fend off the shadows, but that was not the majority.
And it threw the cultists into chaos.
She came across no less than five groups rioting against their high-creed wardens. Desperation to reach light, or flee from the Island overpowering their fears of the stronger Fleshsmiths. Of them, only one group had succeeded in overthrowing their betters.
Still, even for the group that survived, the threat of an encroaching shadow proved damning. No one knew when the phantoms would start appearing, so when they found a small refuge of light — only wide enough to protect half of them — there were betrayals.
As she ran through the dark towards the heart of the Island, Nyxala slipped into one of those lit spaces to clamp her fingers down on the windpipe of a woman unfortunate enough to be closest to her. She didn’t stop. The throat came with her. She hadn’t needed to kill the cultist — in fact, she left the five that still sung their hymns completely unbothered. The only reason Nyxala had gone out of her way was to refresh O̅s̫stho̲th’s boost.
To her continued surprise, the name rewarded psychological attacks just as much as any other strike. If she managed to terrify her victims — which she believed she’d done rather well at — then the boost she gained was even better then killing them outright. Of course, she still had to mix it up, but there were a lot of ways to scare a lower creed. The stronger cultists were tougher to frighten, but not impossible. Generally.
It had been almost an hour now since Lysyra had fallen to the ritual, and Nyxala was getting antsy. She needed to reach the heart of the Island soon.
Nyxala wished she’d been able to take out the power sooner, but they were well guarded. No surprise there. Even going in prepared, some of the fights she’d got caught in bordered on disasters. One in particular had terrifying arrows that clung to her and crawled through her flesh. She’d been forced to cut off Curious to keep it away from herself, but that had been entirely useless. The arrow pinned her tentacle to the space it previously occupied — floating at hip height — only to crawl through some imaginary echo of where her tentacle had previously been.
She had been lucky there was a part of the man’s soul in that arrow. The curse she’d opened had slowed the arrow as much as it slowed the Fleshsmith. As far as she could tell, he hadn’t even noticed how sluggish his movements were. His mind had been affected, too.
Another flash of blue parted the shadow momentarily, granting her original eyes the relief of light. Nyxala hoped that these occasional waves of soul-blue pulses weren’t preventing phantoms from appearing. This was the ninth now, and while she hoped it continued because that meant they were still gathering souls, she also needed it to stop if her plan was to work.
Zandisth was in the central chamber right now. No amount of hate-fuelled rage would allow her to bridge the gap between herself and the Fleshsmiths’ strongest man. So as much as she really would love to fly down there immediately and start stabbing away at him, she needed to play this smart.
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For now, murder wasn’t necessary. Saving Lysyra’s soul was.
The shadows, or the phantoms that came with, would be her cover. Nyxala just needed to hope her guess that light and observation was what forced those creatures to attack was correct. If so, she might actually have a chance at navigating the shadow safely.
Well, relative to everyone else.
Nyxala kept moving. She switched between running and flying where the twisted geometry would allow. She only ever chased down a cultist when she needed to reignite her boost and keep it going. After some time without another wave of the flickering soul-siphon, she realised it wouldn’t come again.
She should be happy that the space for phantoms had widened… yet a pit of dread settled in her chest. She needed to be quicker.
Despite pleading for their arrival, Nyxala was anything but welcoming of the first phantom she stumbled across. Happenstance. An accident. Pushy brushed past it and she felt that horrid agony of having her soul scraped away.
Nyxala choked down the instinct to turn her gem eye and burn what attacked her. She kept her gaze down, and kept moving. So long as she didn’t acknowledge it, she would be okay. Probably.
The whispers tickled her antennae now. She could hear them. They manifested in this space and rapidly solidified it as theirs.
Calming herself, Nyxala forced herself to slow down. Her original eyes were pinched shut, and both sceptre and gem eye were clasped firmly inside her chest. She couldn’t see them, and they couldn’t see her. Edge-sight was hardly perfect for navigating, but so long as it ignored phantoms, nothing was better. Well, besides one thing.
Now was the moment of truth.
Nyxala freed her shadow. Immediately, she was overwhelmed. When everywhere all around her was shadow, her own failed to form in any distinct shape. Instead, it blended with the surroundings in a way that overloaded her senses. It was like her fingertip had suddenly been stretched out and spilled through an ocean. All that sensory input, and it was all trying to scream through a tiny bundle of nerves.
She was part of the shadow. But the shadow was also her, if diluted. It was more than likely that spreading herself through the shadow like this would simply open herself up to her soul being shredded by the phantoms within.
Thankfully, that didn’t happen.
Through torrents of sensations, Nyxala gained an inkling of the vast shadows around her. She couldn’t feel the phantoms. Instead, she became aware of where they were not. The stagnant shadows clutched the extensions of her body as they existed in the absence of light, and pulled them everywhere except the phantoms.
It was difficult — near impossible — to parse the information through the overwhelming nature of the shadows, but the hint was enough to guide her.
Excited at the prospect that the shadows might very well be her domain now, she rushed forward, avoiding the blank space she felt herself pulled away from. The whispers of the phantom passed her by ineffectually. It ignored her. It might not have even noticed her. The shadows became her escort, and she slipped through them as if she was a part of the dark herself.
A scream ripped through the corridors to her right. A Fleshsmith. The phantoms had noticed the intruders in their newly asserted territory, and were quick to begin the hunt.
Eventually, a pinprick of blue in the distance announced her own target. The heart of the ritual. The ethereal blue was unmistakable; that was where she would find Lysyra’s soul. Whatever Zandisth intended to gain from this ritual, he could do it without the soul that belonged to her.
Nyxala deviated from the blue glow to push her boost to its highest heights one last time. She needed it.
There was a dozen or so cultists huddling in a carved divot in the wall. Surprisingly, these weren’t infighting amongst themselves. The highest creeds worked along with the low to keep their small space as illuminated as they could.
Most held basic candles. They wouldn’t hold back the shadows of the phantoms. No, they’d probably only attract the entities’ attention. It was the slabs of flesh grafted to the walls and ground that really held back the ever-encroaching shadow. They burned and smelled of cooked meat, creating a cindering wall to keep out the dark.
Maybe it would stop the shadows. It wouldn’t stop Nyxala.
Nyxala pushed the shadow of her tentacles past the wall of light. They split to eight, then sixteen, fanning out over every surface and curling in on the cultists that had forgone the hymn they were supposed to be participating in. It was a simple act. Cost her no effort. And yet the fear that sprouted in the hearts of the Fleshsmiths resounded in O̅s̫stho̲th’s enhancement. Nyxala could feel their terror in the strengthening of her body.
With the cultists primed and ready to become butchered steaks, Nyxala struck.
But she never took the first bite.
A pair of hooks cut into her shoulders and Nyxala came to a rapid halt. Despite her edge sight, she hadn’t seen the sharp points coming. It was only when she moved in to attack that they slid around her neck and drilled into the flesh right before her skin shifted to bark.
Nyxala, carried by the massive boost of O̅s̫stho̲th, shoved herself forward. The hooks didn’t budge. They sunk deeper into her shoulders and she failed to take so much as a step.
Before she could recover, her shoulders were pulled back harder than she could resist. She ragdolled along the ground, unable to field any resistance to the strength behind the meat hooks. Her tentacles pulled the drill-bolts from under her cloak and slammed them into the ground. They locked in place and held her still.
For a moment.
Nyxala didn’t have the opportunity to shout before her tentacles were ripped from her hips, unable to sustain the tension of whatever was pulling her. She watched them flop lifelessly as she realised she was being carried closer to the light. Twisting her head, she tried to see what — who — held her, but was immediately pulled into the air so that her feet dangled uselessly.
“Z͐a̟͠n̖͐di̥s͈t̝̾h̃̔́’s hunch was right.” The woman met Nyxala face to face. Scarred and heavily muscled, she struck an intimidating figure. Especially considering the ease with which she lifted Nyxala. Like she was nothing but bait on a fishing line.
But it wasn’t the woman’s face that chilled Nyxala’s veins. She’d glanced her soul. The woman was tenth evolution, at the very least.