LIGHTNOVELONLINE 103 – The Rite of Dho-Hna
Bit by bit, she found grains of info on the influx of strange, yellow-paper talismans of abnormally high quality. It wasn’t long before she bought herself a corkboard and started working things out using it and an array of memslates and documents. By the end of the first week, she’d gotten her hands on a device that could take notes onto a memslate directly from her thoughts merely by funneling a hair-thin strand of Thauma into it.
There were multiple threads to follow, and, in her pursuit, she pulled on all of them.
First was the source of the talismans, a foreign woman known only as the Talisman Mistress. Supposedly, she contacted prospective clients rather than the other way around, and she never actually met with them, using remote-communication talismans to discuss orders, even to deliver goods and receive payment in the same act.
Second and third were the assassins. The first was both well-known and considered utterly unreachable, a wizard known by a variety of nicknames, the most common among them “Crescent Jezail”, for his rifle-staff, which was nearly as renowned as himself. He was known to be difficult to contact and expensive, charging not for results, but for the effort he put in.
“One shot,” a man had said, “costs a hundred thousand DDs, against any random individual. The price doubles for “direct hit insurance”. Double the price for the bastard to make sure he actually hit his target, can you believe that? He must be one hell of a killer if he still gets work. Tracking a target, shooting someone that might be a troublesome target for any reason, every bit of extra effort is another charge… And if I could afford it, I would sooner hire him than, say, Hassan Asadi.”
As for her studies into eidolons and the Astral Gulf, she found herself progressing in a significantly less concrete manner. She couldn’t exactly quantify how much closer she felt to getting results, but she did feel as though she was getting closer.
Then, on the seventeenth day, she broke through.
Krahe sat in the living room, wearing only her biosuit, having moved the table out of the way. There, using Thaumine-based ink that had cost way too fucking much, she drew out a so-called “angle-web” across the floorboards, a strange pattern that both detailed a series of movements, guided kenomaic energies, and subtly weakened the Banishment Veil, merely widening one of its eyes rather than trying to tear at the net.
In accordance with Barzai’s instructions, she held out her most potent casting catalyst - her left arm - and began chanting, stepping onto the angle-web from the Gate of the North. Barzai’s texts had specified a general structure and what each incantation should contain and mean, but demanded the practitioner to construct their own.
Krahe called on key-holders and lock-openers, breakers-down of walls and locked gates.
She invoked the pseudonyms of hackers and jailbreakers, of those who had torn down the meticulous protections wrought by almighty megacorporations out of petty spite or for their own amusement.
Reaching the South-most Pinnacle, she initiated a Partial Dive. The void tore in, the world fell away, and the angle-web now sprawled across untold eons. Barzai had foretold this.
With a breathless hiss, she invoked digital daemons and dataphagic AI, whose names had been plundered from the names of ancient gods.
Proceeding to the Angle of the North-east, she recalled words and thoughts which she had dredged up days prior. It had been a mere query as she worked away on the incantation, and the answer she had gotten was a deluge - a vision of what she was certain to have been her entry into this world, nothing but fragments of light dancing over that chamber and of the words by which it had been carried out. These words of power, alongside others, the Wound-like Grin gave unto her; or rather, it spoke them in pieces, rearranged and twisted, in a soundless voice that blasted through her head and made her nose run bloody.
Even now, as she repeated them, she herself couldn’t quite comprehend many of the words coming out of her mouth. Zasas. Zasas. Nasatanda. Amrakas.
Crossing the Penultimate Angle to the Pinnacle of the West, she once more invoked: “Eternal darkness now surrounds me, Sunken One be my guide!”
At once, the final, eastward path became as a burning road of coals, and, as she walked across it, she traced with her left arm’s fingers Barzai’s Sigil of Transformation and chanted: “Stepping past the precipice, into the howling vortex, let the Black One’s yawning maw carve my chosen path! Trespassing the boundaries of mortality, I embody the key, ancient and immortal! ZENOXESE, PIOTH, OXAS ZAEGOS, MAVOC NIGORSUS, BAYAR!”
At the Ultimate Angle, on the Angle-Web’s south-eastmost corner, the world rippled, and tore open, and Krahe stepped through, finding herself now wholly submerged within the Astral Gulf. No longer did she feel the urge to breathe, and she plunged deep into the cosmic depths, feeling herself drawn in a particular direction. In accordance with the Rite of Dho-Hna, the angle-web would collapse and draw her back to realspace should she stray outside the Astral Gulf or remain submerged for too long, giving her a limited time to find herself an eidolon, or hopefully, three.
Casus was returning merely for a change of clothes, as his shirt was drenched in gore, blood, and other vital fluids, but found himself perplexed at the state of the living room. He found a complex, eldritch sigil drawn on the ground, shining so brightly it projected a cage of unlight all the way to the ceiling. It took his Third Eye to peer through and see Lady Blackhand slumped down near the south-easternmost corner of the sigil, her body constantly billowing with ghostly smoke, both the smoke and her hair billowing about back and forth in different directions. He turned his gaze to the pushed-aside coffee table, and instantly knew what was happening when his eyes fell upon the manuscript. There was nothing he could do at this point but watch, and so, after quickly changing his clothes, he did just that. His butcher’s work for the night was done regardless.
