Return of the Runebound Professor

Chapter 530: Vile

Noah’s eyes cracked open, his consciousness back inside his own body. Soft vines curled beneath him and pressed against his back. Moxie must have moved him into her bed while they’d been using the Mind Meld potion.

Pushing himself upright, Noah glanced over at Lee. She laid beside him, still midway through shaking off the last of the potion’s effects. She yawned and stretched her arms out like a cat, discreetly craning her neck to the side and taking a bite out of the bed before quickly turning her head back to its resting position.

His eyes narrowed slightly. Lee had won every single game they’d played. It hadn’t even been close. He’d had to remind her the rules once or twice, but she seemed to miraculously keep pulling out the exact cards she needed.

She’d also somehow pulled the exact same winning card about eight times in a row. Given that said card should have still been in the discard pile after the first time, that was quite the accomplishment.

Note to self. Don’t play cards in Lee’s mindspace. She cheats. I should definitely try to convince Jalen to bet something big and then take her on, though. Could be a great way to get some free stuff once we get back to the mortal plane.

“How’d it go?” Moxie asked from where she sat at her desk, her chair rocked back on two legs. “Did you figure it out? Is it my turn?”

“We’re working on it.” Lee sat up and slipped out of bed. “I’m better at cards than Noah is.”

Moxie looked from Lee to Noah with a confused frown. “What? Cards?”

“Later,” Noah said. “Let me fill you in. Another Mind Meld, please. The sooner we handle this, the better. I don’t want to get caught with our pants down if some prick shows up looking for revenge. I think we should still be good on time, but it doesn’t hurt to move quickly.”

“Thanks, Lee. And if you eat the entire bed, I’m going to be pissed. Control yourself.” Moxie procured a Mind Meld potion and downed half of it before tossing the rest to Noah and flopping down beside him.

“I’ll only eat a little,” Lee promised. “Your vines taste good.”

“Thank you,” Moxie said dryly.

Noah downed the potion and laid back down, welcoming the darkness that swallowed him whole.

***

The conversation in Moxie’s Mind Space didn’t take long. Noah went over everything that he’d discovered from studying Igris’ soul and the discussion he’d had with Lee. Their attention then turned to exactly how Lee — or anyone other than Noah, for that matter — could actually go about creating a Fragment of Self.

Forming a Rune was already difficult enough. As far as they knew, the knowledge didn’t even exist in Arbitage. But now they needed to do more than just form a rune. They had to form one while finding an inciting energy that somehow represented the individual person working on it.

There was a chance that some form of energy could always work as a universal catalyst for a Fragment of Self, but their discussion didn’t yield any potential results for it. Noah’s discoveries were a promising step, but they just didn’t have the tools to use it quite yet.

It soon became apparent that they weren’t going to make much more progress purely through theorizing. Both Noah and Moxie were completely stumped as to potential forms of energy. The best bet they managed to come up with was making a ludicrous amount of copies of his Fragment of Self, then destroying all of them.

There was a chance that would create enough energy to saturate an area with so much power that it could be used as the inciting energy, similar to how all of Noah’s deaths had given him enough death and rebirth energy to create the Fragment of Renewal.

That was, unfortunately, a stretch at best. So much power was lost through conversion between runes that he couldn’t even begin to imagine how much power he’d need to acquire and waste to get an area that saturated — and that wasn’t even mentioning the effects on his own soul. There was no way smashing hundreds, if not thousands, of runes representing him wouldn’t have some form of negative side effect. Noah didn’t dismiss the possibility completely. There was a chance it could work, but it was far from their first plan.

He and Moxie came to the same conclusion that he had with Lee. The best way forward was to keep their eyes out. They knew what they were looking for. It had to exist somewhere. Renewal had made a Fragment of Self as well, and Sunder had come from Decras. That meant there was another way to make a self-rune.

Until they found it, all they could do was prepare. Lee still had some work to do determining who she really was. Until she did, even if they did find the inciting energy they needed, it wouldn’t be of much use.

The Damned Plains were a big place. Noah was hopeful that they’d stumble into something — or someone — that they could use to form a Fragment of Self for Lee. If not, then there would be an answer somewhere else. None of them had any plans of taking defeat as an answer.

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When the discussion started to go in circles that were leading nowhere, Noah and Moxie found that they still had just over fifteen minutes left in the Mind Meld potion.

They didn’t use it to play cards.

***

A demon clad in white crouched upon the roof and looked down at a mansion with a broken window. Gray skin, so light that it was almost alabaster, ran beneath robes far too wide for her body. Gnarled scars warped the entire left side of her face and a horn twisted out of the side of her head, a mixture of flesh and bone. A black, two-headed axe easily as tall as she was rested on her shoulder like it weighed nothing more than a feather.

The demon had not moved once since they’d arrived over four hours ago. She stood as still as a spire in the Black Reaches. She had been called on before, but never by Zath. Never by one who had actually spoken to Lord Sievan.

Axil, Zath’s messenger had said. Lord Sievan has requested your service. Seek the Master Rune bearing the name of death and return it to its owner.

A shiver ran down her spine. Perhaps it hadn’t been Zath himself that had spoken to her, but the words had come from his mouth. A direct order. An honor that her younger self never would have believed she would achieve.

Failure was not an option. A command passed down by the Lord of Death himself was not a request. It was a mandate. No result other than success could be acceptable. Axil was resolved to this. She would do anything that was requested of her to honor the gifts that Lord Sievan had passed onto his subordinates.

There was just one problem.

The rune she sought had been sold at an auction house to a demon by the name of Spider. But tracking was not Axil’s strong suit. She’d been called on because fate had blessed her with a location close to what Lord Sievan required. Locating targets was not one of her skillsets, but she was not completely without a path forward. Belkus was on good terms with Lord Sievan.

She would have preferred to approach the demon directly. The Rank 7 was more than capable of pointing her directly toward her target, but the politics would not allow for it. She was a Rank 5 and more than capable of handling any work herself. Furthermore, Lord Sievan’s name was respected through all the Damned Plains. Seeking help from a City Lord in his service would bring shame upon him.

Thus, she had been forced to speak with one of his subordinates. Her one lead had been a lumbering Wealth Demon in the service of Belkus by the name of Igris. An information broker that had claimed to know of Spider.

Igris had clearly had a personal vendetta against the demon, but Axil was unconcerned with it. Everything had fallen into place as if the gods themselves were guiding her — right up until she’d watched Spider crash through the window of Igris’ house. Until she’d heard Igris’ soul scream and shatter, felt his presence pass from this realm to the next. Until she had sat in silence, and watched Spider slip free of the window.

Another shiver ran down Axil’s spine.

Sievan’s path granted those following it a certain degree of understanding of death. To their eyes alone, existence was a canvas. Those who took lives painted death upon its surface, only adding the final stroke with their own.

And therein lay her problem.

Spider had been beautiful. Death heralded his footsteps and passed behind him like an ocean current. His canvas was so immense that Axil couldn’t so much as begin to comprehend where it began and ended.

She had been completely unable to act in its presence. To make any moves to interfere with such a work of art was to spit upon her own face. She had to witness it firsthand. And so she had observed with rapt attention as Spider slaughtered Igris. Her gaze had followed Spider as he slipped out into the streets.

The woman that he’d come with had long since left after cleaning out the house. A woman whose canvas normally wouldn’t have drawn Axil’s attention. It was short and poignant, but nothing of true note — right up until they were together. Their designs fit together with such beautiful synchrony that she had not even noticed the droplet of saliva rolling down the side of her lips and along her face until it had reached her chin.

Axil sat in silence. She could not bring herself to do more than watch and remember. Not yet. Such a sight had to be savored. The sooner she acted, the sooner it would be over. An internal war raged within Axil, but eventually, she rose.

Shouts echoed through the air as demons finally realized that Igris had been slain. It seemed not many had mourned his loss, but Axil could not have cared less about him. This was about more than a rune.

Butterflies danced in Axil’s stomach and she wrapped her arms around herself as she let out a shuddering sigh, a tremor racing through her entire body as she rose to her feet.

This was a test. It had to be.

She had been ordered to retrieve the rune, but nobody had said how it had to be done. She could not help herself. She had to feel the glorious sensation that Igris had. To witness the beauty of such a canvas up—

A presence prickled at the back of Axil’s mind. She turned. An armored demon stood behind her, two curved blades in his hands and a snarl on his lips. His canvas was plain. Worthless. Disgusting.

“Don’t move,” the demon snarled. “What are you doing here with that creepy expression on your face? Do you have something to do with Lord Igris’ death?

“It was exhilarating to witness,” Axil breathed. “A thousand times greater than any pleasure you could have ever experienced. He was turned into beautiful, beautiful brush strokes.”

“What the fuck?” the demon’s weapons lifted. His chest filled with air as he prepared to call for help.

Axil shifted. The space between her and the demon vanished. Her lips pressed against his. The demon’s eyes shot wide open in surprise. He screamed, but it was too late.

It was not a kiss.

Her jaw unhinged. The demon tried to pull back. It did nothing. He was nowhere near strong or fast enough to escape. Axil’s teeth clenched down, carving through flesh and crushing his skull with a muted, splintering crunch. His cry for help was lost as she inhaled, ripping the soul from his body and grinding it to pieces within her own. The taste of death swam across her tongue and poured down her throat, joined by chunks of flesh and bone.

She released the demon, but nothing hit the ground. His body disintegrated, specks of black dust swirling through the air of the damned plains and joining the churning smoke far above.

Axil’s features screwed up in disgust.

“Vile,” she whispered, but her expression shifted as she looked in the direction that Spider and his companion had departed in. She had to determine what it was that Lord Sievan truly wished her to learn. To witness the beauty of their canvas again — and, if she was truly, truly blessed, to watch their beautiful, beautiful paintings complete as their life passed from this world and into the next.