MAGUS INFINITE

I hung in the air, my body still humming with the residual energy of my regeneration. I had been thrown 1,200 miles by an attack from a Sovereign I had not even seen coming. The thought should have terrified me. Instead, it made me angry.

I turned and began to fly back toward the Sovereigns; even from this distance, where the horizon was curving into the earth, I could still feel the rumbles of power in the distance... the war had resumed again, and I was missing it.

My body cut through the air like a blade, the wind screaming past me as I pushed myself to speeds that would have shredded a lesser mage, but I could still see that my speed was not enough.

I thought about Stormstep and how I could integrate it with the Law that I had just mastered. My body flashed and vanished, reappearing miles ahead, and I kept doing this when I discovered the limitation of this movement even with my Law due to the lack of lightning essence for me to appear out of.

Stormstep could carry me forward for nearly a mile; with the addition of my Law, I could boost this distance to several miles, but this was dependent on the fact that there was lightning essence of sufficient volume to carry me.

Lightning Essence was spread all over the world, but they were sparse and could not carry me effectively when I tried to use them as a medium to cross over. I had become too powerful.

So I built my own road. I threw the Loom west in a line, millions of threads, and I did not weave them into anything. I just laid them out ahead of me like a rail, one leg at a time, and stepped along it, and... it worked.

It worked well enough that the first three hundred miles went by in the time it takes to breathe twice, and despite the fact that I was most likely walking towards my death, I could not help but smile at the thought that I now had a viable method to travel across the entirety of the world. I will just... build my own road.

”Boom!”

The ocean a few miles in front of me exploded, shredding the lines I had created in the air, and forcing me to stop, as a gigantic scaly mass emerged in front of me.

The ocean below me was churning, a whirlpool forming in the center of the vast blue expanse. The water was not being drawn down by gravity, but was being pushed aside, forced away from something that was rising from the depths.

The head of the creature emerged, and it turned out to be a dragon’s head, and I mean a real one, not the drakes of Khoreshen that the monasteries tame and ride. This thing’s skull was longer than a barrack; it came up streaming seawater out of a mouth that could have taken a house, and the scales on it were the colour of an old bruise, and there were seven eyes down each side of the jaw where there should have been two, and every one of them was open... and they blazed with a sickly yellow color

I recognized this dragon; I had seen its head among some of the biggest vats in that flying prison, but I think at that time, the head was blue and it only had two eyes.

I had never seen a living dragon; no one had seen one for a long time, and despite the fact that this creature had been warped into something else, its majestic presence could not be denied, and for a moment, I could do nothing but stare at it.

Then the rest of it came out of the water, and I was not too shocked that it was wrong.

The body was human-sized. Not human, human-sized, hanging under that enormous skull like a fruit under a branch, a torso and hips and two legs that would have looked ordinary on a large man, and out of that torso came arms, many arms, I counted eleven before I stopped counting, as more were still emerging, thin and long and jointed in too many places, some of them ending in hands and some of them ending in things that were not hands.

If not for my perception that was able to wrap around this entire creature, I would not have been able to see its entire form.

The whole assembly should not have been able to hold itself up; none of it made any sense, but it did anyway, like this creature was just giving a giant middle finger to nature and existence itself.

It hung in the air over the ocean with the great head lolling forward on a neck far too thin to bear it and all those arms drifting underneath, and the demonic aura coming off it went through my Adamantium flesh like a draught through a door.

”Elric.” The voice came out of that Draconic mouth, and it was still the voice from the corridors of the vessel, and my stomach turned over.

”Sad,” I said.

∞

”Yes! Yes, yes.” All of its arms moved at once, which was appalling. ”You know Sad’s voice. Sad knew you would. I was calling for you for so long Elric, but you refused to listen to my voice, even after I have whispered sweet nothings to your mind for three months... you still pretended not to hear me... It hurts Elric, it truly does.”

I looked at this abomination before me before I glanced at the battle ongoing in the far distance. ”You have left the body of the Sovereign of Darkness.”

”Forced out...” It said the word with real distaste. ”And whose fault is that? You burned my consciousness, Elric; you gave the old man a chance to tear me out, hehehe. I took enough of his life-force as I went away, and he is not going to live for long, but here I am!” all of its arms spread wide, and I discovered that they were very long, each extending for at least a hundred feet.

So that answered one question I had been carrying for the last twelve hundred miles. The Sovereign of Darkness was free from the hold of the demon; I had unknowingly fulfilled my promise to him, although he was dying.

But the demon was here; it had survived this division, and had apparently taken a new body and was coming for me... I wondered how much essence I would gain if I killed this demon.

”So, you took the head of a dragon?” I asked.

”Do you like it? It is the child of a god.” It said it the way a starving man describes a meal. ”A real one. From before your Academies started pulling the divine out of souls like weeds. It has been asleep in the dark since before there were men to name it, and it is still asleep, Elric; Sad only has the head, Sad could only fit the head...”

The jaw opened, and seawater and something darker poured out of it. ”...and it is enough.”