LIGHTNOVELONLINE 131 – Return it to the Depths
Even now, as he raised up his scimitar, its handle wrought of Mnarian Grey Stone and inscribed with the sign of the Great Fivefold Eye, the Thing From Beyond struggled and writhed to squeeze through the veil. Even now, it whispered to him, speaking truths and knowledge he did not wish to know. To his misfortune, he had underestimated the creature’s craftiness, for even the drops of his own blood upon the floor were enough. Its form, obscured from true perception and thus made to look as if slathered in tar, erupted out of the unfinished angle-web in a burst of unlight.
Barzai skewered it to the ground, his scimitar pinning the beast in space and reality alike, its blue flame blazing over its form as the deathless creature thrashed against a restraint it had never known. In its own way, being forced to experience existence in such a mundane manner was as hellish for it as its whispers were for Barzai. He held no hatred for the thing, only aversion and pity. It wasn’t malicious, after all; if anything, the opposite. It just so happened that the favour of a creature such as this was truly ruinous indeed.
For a few minutes, Barzai sat and thought, watching the spirit struggle, chanting to himself to drown out its incessant blabbering of knowledge from worlds afar.
The reality of the situation sunk in. The Thing’s return could only mean one thing.
The Seal which had held it was now broken; a Seal which even Barzai hadn’t been able to withstand. Indeed, in a desperate effort, he had commanded the Thing From Beyond to inhabit a pen and draw a mighty mind-invasion sigil, and then sealed it inside, leveraging it against the condition that it would break if someone withstood its effects. The only way he could prevail over the abomination was by betting that the Seal would never be broken, by betting against the possible future where it was broken, and now that that future had come to pass, he himself held no power over it, and he never would. The only thing keeping him from becoming a mad puppet to an eldritch, inhuman, child-like creature, was his beloved Scimitar.
Barzai huffed. The Liminal Coil had found its next host.
He knew what needed to be done to rid himself of the Thing From Beyond. The only method which could dispose of it permanently. The method he had worked so hard to avoid; he had to dive into the Gulf with it skewered upon his blade, and then take it back where it came from, listening to its whispers all along. The odds that he would return at all, let alone with his mind intact, were slim, but he had readied himself for this eventuality.
There was no choice. The preparations were long and grueling, forcing him to venture out into the swamp, where he had buried something he had never wished to exhume: His old Gulf Key. The Liminal Coil’s sibling. Moreover, he had to carry out several rites to reinforce his spirit. He donned a gruesome contraption of bronzelike metal that clamped onto his spine, ribcage and skull, reproducing some of the Liminal Coil’s benefits in a crude and limited manner. Like a horrific parasite, it held onto him, digging into his skin. The Rite of Dho-Raza and the subsequent astral dive came to him far more easily than he wished they had. Everything was there, irrevocably carved into his brain, alien wisdom with his mind twisted around it like scar tissue around a half-rejected implant.
Barzai barraged the Thing with questions. One after the next. From the mundane to the esoteric. To his regret, he received a vast wealth of knowledge which would have aided him greatly if he had known it sooner. Amidst terrible futures of unprecedented human suffering and horror, invaluable insights laid. The Thing spoke to him, that much was true, but it was in no language of man. It was in thought and memory. Each unearthly, horrific noise came with a thought-flash as vivid as if he were truly there to see it.
But, before even the halfway point of the journey, he ran out of questions. He felt the Thing begin to ramble of its own volition, gnawing at his already-scarred sanity. At this rate, he would go mad.
So he asked: “Who broke the Seal?”
And for the first time, the Thing was silent. What felt like an eon passed before he received an answer. By then the Thing’s home, an inconceivable vastness of pearlescent spires that intersected and stacked atop one another in impossible geometries, had come into view of his soul’s sight. The answer was a face, a young woman with green eyes that had murder behind them. She looked at the Seal, and the moment the Thing From Beyond moved to empower the Seal, the creature felt an absolute terror, as if the power of its prison had been turned inward. It ended when the Thing From Beyond fled its now-broken prison. There, in the Astral Gulf, it glanced back, and beheld a humanoid shape of smoke surrounded by grinning maws filled by shark-like fangs, with tongues or perhaps tendrils of blackest pitch lolling out from some of them. Barzai, unable to fully grasp the Thing’s eldritch senses, saw no more than that. It was an astral body abnormal to the extreme, especially given the circumstances eliminated the possibility of an Outer God’s involvement, but, unlike everything else to do with the Thing From Beyond, it didn’t deny conventional logic. If anything it made perfect sense that a freak would be the one to inherit his cursed legacy.
The emotions which the Thing sent to him were a blend of terror and confused familiarity, like seeing something known in a place it absolutely does not belong. Without words, he asked the creature to elaborate on that familiar terror.
His received answer was an image of the Dark Invoker, a divination card representing a boon from a foreign source that carried a corrupting influence or a catch. A loan, a gift given with ulterior motives, a high station given for a bribe, and so on. It was inverted, mirrored, and in photographic negative. Then, as if the Thing was confused, it, for the first time ever, somehow pulled that thought out of Barzai’s head… And wriggled off of his blade in his moment of confusion.
