MAGUS INFINITE

The Soul Flayer’s shriek was cut off mid-syllable, and I felt the impact through the ground beneath my feet. The forest trembled, and the moon above flickered.

Then the paw lifted, and I saw what remained of the demon, a flattened, twitching mass of yellow eyes and tentacles, its darkness pooling around it like spilled ink. It tried to reform and pull itself together, but the forest itself seemed to resist it.

The paw vanished, and the remnants of the Soul Flayer struggled to rise. ”No... why is a Heavenly Beast in your soul... What are you? An Archon... No, a Maker’s experiment? Your kind are banned from this broken arc of the sky... Arggghh, this is not over yet!”

A black page tore out of the broken body of the Soul Flayer, and I stepped back when I realized that this was from a page of a Grimoire, likely from the Sovereign of Darkness, the page rippled before it exploded into a pillar of darkness that pierced into the sky, but a massive paw seized that darkness and began to suppress it, causing a loud rumble that shook the entirety of the forest.

Under the commotion, the remnants of the Soul Flayer surged forward and seized my consciousness. ”I refuse to believe that I cannot find the core of you.”

The trees dissolved, the moonlight faded, and I was standing in a field of wheat.

The wheat was wrong. I knew it was wrong the moment I saw it. It swayed in a wind that I could not feel, its stalks too tall, too pale, too perfect. And as I looked closer, I saw that each stalk was a skull.

Thousands of them. Millions. Stretching to the horizon in every direction, their empty eye sockets fixed on the sky, their jaws frozen in silent screams.

I had seen this place before. In my dreams. In the moments between death and waking, and then in real life, when I had sown horror across the earth. The field of screaming skulls had followed me across the loop, across the deaths, and it remained inside my soul... a lingering scar that even the purification of Celestial Essence could not wash away.

”No, no, no, no... what is this?! This is not your core. What... what...”

I thought I heard a whisper in the distance, and a flash of scarlet that vanished before I could totally understand what I saw, but I thought it was a woman wearing a scarlet dress.

When the time comes when you can find your way beyond the shores of life, I shall await your return in my bosom.

I shuddered and turned to the Soul Flayer, who was lying among the field of skulls; its body was still broken, but I fear that what was going on inside its head was far worse.

”Do you know...” I whispered, and the Soul Flayer turned towards the sound of my voice, while looking at me as if I was the monster here, ”... do you know that Death, she wears a scarlet dress.”

The yellow eyes of the Soul Flayer widened in a myriad of emotions, shock, fear, tiredness, and then with a scream of utter resolve that drew my eyes, the Soul Flayer exploded with a sort of power that I did not think it still had inside of him, and the world shifted again, as a massive sinkhole appeared below me and the Soul Flayer, and we were falling for what seemed like a long time and my feet touched the ground, and when I looked, the ground was filled with skulls and bones, and then water covered the bones.

∞

I knew where I was before I looked... the familiar nightmare.

Boiling water coming in over my ankles, but even in a mortal body, I could feel no pain. Bones from the waterline back as far as the land went, and skulls half buried in the bone with their jaws open, and the water running out through the empty eyes so that every one of them looked like it was weeping.

I may have had this dream from the moment of my birth, but I began to remember them when I became three years old, and they had never failed to find me every month.

There were more skulls than there used to be, and this beach seemed to stretch forever. A flash of understanding entered my soul, and I remembered that there was one more room inside my soul... a new one that I just acquired when I became a Warden.

This room was the Caelith, and if I was not wrong, this beach of bones must be what its insides must be like, but if this was the case, how come I was dreaming of this beach from the moment I was born, when I had just recently become the Warden of Caelith Mourne?

That mysterious mountain behind my home, and the golden Caelith inside of it- how were all of these connected, and how did I find myself in the center of all this madness?

Then as I looked into the distance, I began to see them, distant figures whose shapes I could recognize anywhere... Caeliths, and there were hundreds of them... thousands, but I thought that some of their shapes were wrong, as if they had been broken.

I looked around, a bit lost, and I saw Sad was on its knees in the bone, and it was not looking at me. It was looking up with the clearest look of horror that I had seen in a while.

So I looked up, and I saw a gigantic heart made out of metal that covered half of the sky. I blinked because I did not understand what I was looking at at a glance.

It was massive, a structure of grinding gears and spinning wheels, its surface covered in symbols that I could not read. It turned slowly, silently, and because I was looking at it, I could feel its presence pressing against my soul like the weight of a continent.

Finally the Soul Flayer whispered, ”That is... that is not possible. That is not a thing that should exist inside a soul, and you... you carry it inside you?”

I think it tried to rise, but it could not, and after a second, the demon gave up, and it sighed, ”You are not a soul, Elric Voss. You are a tomb, and to think he wants me to carry this for him... hahaha, he is a fool; we are all fools. This does not belong to this world... this does not belong to any worlds!”

The Soul Flayer began to laugh. It was a broken sound,

”I have been inside you for three months,” it said. ”I have drunk from your soul, tasted your memories, felt the shape of your power. And I never saw it. I never saw any of it. Else why would I dare to do this... How could I stand before the Pivot of the firmament and claim to contain it?”

”What do you mean, Soul Flayer? Tell me what this thing is?”

The Soul Flayer laughed again, ”You ask me the wrong questions, child. What you should be asking is how long you have before you are broken by this thing you carry... not even a Maker can hold a Pivot, and they were the creators of existence.”

With those words, the breath of the Soul Flayer vanished, and it collapsed into an orb of soul matter that was drawn to my consciousness.