The Storm King

Chapter 604: Waking Up

He rarely dreamed anymore. For him, sleep was a delightful void of thought and a much-needed relief from boredom.

When he did sleep, it was often for long periods of time—tens or hundreds of years would pass before he would wake. And it was always one of the most entertaining parts of his existence, waking up. Oftentimes, it was like stepping into a completely new world. The Empires around his sea would rarely change, but there would usually be great happenings going on in other parts of his realm.

Plus, there was a boy he’d been keeping an eye on, and he was looking forward to finding out how he turned out—if he met a heroic end, if he upset the status quo, anything at all, really.

Unfortunately, he barely felt like he’d laid down before he found himself being shaken awake in his bedchamber, a gorgeous room richly appointed almost entirely in blue. The walls were painted a dark blue, the carpets were a slightly lighter shade of blue, and his bedsheets were blue. The ceiling, thirty feet above him, had been enchanted to resemble the sky at dawn, with a few hints of red and pink at the edges, while the rest was a deep, calming hue of dark blue.

However, all that he saw when his eyes cracked open as he was forcefully dragged back into the waking world was the worried face of his apprentice, still looking like he was barely out of his schooling days despite being almost a full Nexus cycle old. His apprentice’s lips were moving, but he’d been sleeping very deeply, and even his mind worked rather sluggishly when he was forced back like this instead of being allowed to wake naturally.

“Hmm…” he groaned as he blinked several times, his eyes opening wider every time. “What’s going on…?” he croaked groggily.

“Master!” his apprentice called out, his anxious voice on the verge of panic. “Master!”

The Grave Warden shook his head clear of sleep, letting his powers fill his body and properly wake himself up.

“What is it?” he asked as he sat up in bed, blinking the sleep out of his eyes.

“One of the crystals is dimming! One of the Primal Gods is attempting to escape!”

The Grave Warden stared at his apprentice for a second, his sleep-addled mind working slower than usual. However, when what his apprentice had just said fully hit him, less than a second later he’d teleported the both of them down to the crystal chamber, and fully dressed himself. The chamber echoed with shrill alarms, and from what he could tell, had been doing so for days—he mentally cringed, wondering just how long it had taken his apprentice to wake him up. Days? Longer?

It wasn’t a large chamber down below the tower, deep within the core of Aeterna, but it was the safest and most heavily warded place on the entire plane. It would take many Primal Beings working in concert to breach the defenses here. And yet, it seemed a simple place—largely empty, almost appearing to be a natural cave save for a wall covered in fist-sized crystals that glowed white, arranged in a grid. However, for those that could sense it, they’d realize that a terrifying amount of magic power was flowing through this room, more than even a tenth-tier mage could control. It would take a post-Apotheosis mage to fully comprehend and control the ocean of magic power that flowed through this chamber, and even then, few would be capable of fully controlling the nearly-endless enchantments that wound their way from here throughout all of Aeterna.

For the Grave Warden, however, controlling the magic flowing through this chamber, even without a single control console in sight, was as easy as breathing.

His eyes and other senses immediately ascertained that there weren’t any faults with the supply of magic to any of the wards and that those same wards were all functioning perfectly well—rather, something was subverting them instead of undoing them completely, working around them and triggering various failsafes and contingencies to achieve a desired result. It wasn’t much of a difference in practice, but he supposed that was why nothing had tripped his alarms earlier. If he’d paid more attention before this, though, then things might not have gone so far.

Regardless of how exactly things were happening, the result was the same; something that could not be killed, even by the most destructive and powerful means that humanity had at their disposal, was being released upon the universe, and the Grave Warden did not believe that humanity as it stood now was a match for such a creature. If it successfully escaped, the Primal God would rise, and all the universe would be at its command.

His eyes instantly found the crystal that was dimming, and he approached in a flash, while his apprentice respectfully stood back and stayed silent. He gently placed a fingertip against the crystal and his mind was filled with all the information within; in less than second, he knew exactly what was wrong, and his blood ran cold.

Krith’is, called Flesh Ripper for its penchant for tearing apart humans and other fleshy-beings and putting them back together in all the wrong ways, was no longer in its cage.

‘Of all the ones to get loose…’ the Grave Warden thought as his heartrate accelerated.

Without missing a beat, space bent around him with nothing more than a wisp of intent and willpower on his part, and he found himself within the vast underground chamber filled with pyramids of black stone beneath the Serpentine Isles—and filled with ocean water, to the Grave Warden’s surprise. To his knowledge, only four of the forty-eight tomb-prisons under his watch had been flooded.

‘Five now, it seems,’ he thought to himself.

Some of the ocean-dwellers had managed to find their way down into the cavern. If intelligent creatures found these places, he’d often take them in instead of punishing them for violating such a place, making them as much guardians of his planar graveyard as he was. However, most of the things that had entered this space since it had been breached were not suited to such purpose.

Three caught his attention upon his appearance.

The first and most eye-catching was massive, longer by several times than even the largest mortal sea-faring ship. It had a long almost serpentine body, though colored pink and with the head of a fish. Or, mostly fish—it had a prominent hinged jaw full of needle-like teeth that could pierce the scales of even the most powerful of krakens, and eyes that were as black as the deepest abyss.

The Grave Warden was none too fond of these creatures, and with nothing more than a blink of his eyes, turned the ninth-tier snake-fish to stone.

About thirty miles away in another section of the graveyard was another of the creatures that had caught his attention; it was also much bigger than the creatures that dwelled in the shallows, with an eel-like body, black scales to better blend in with the lightless deep, and large, nearly-blind eyes. Its aura was also of the ninth-tier, though newly ascended by the looks of it. It was a species of shark, he believed, though about a hundred feet long and vicious as a monster unleashed from the bowels of the worst hells. Even now, he watched as it feasted upon a school of fat fifth-tier piranha-like fish that had made their way down through the cracks in the cavern ceiling, the shark showing no mercy as it greedily devoured the entire school.

With another blink, this shark was also turned to stone. If it could not be of service, the Grave Warden concluded, then it would have to die for having found this place.

The final creature that had caught his eye was obviously far more intelligent, though far more alien than the other two. It looked almost like a flower, with a long, perilously thin body, and several wide, petal-like fins that protruded from its rear-section, which the Grave Warden knew were specialized not only for pushing the main trunk through the water, but were also hyper-sensitive to the currents of water and magic that glowed through the ocean. It had no eyes, but these fins could sense the world around it just fine. Its front-section meanwhile, had a dozen long root-like tentacles that were perfect for grasping just about anything with enough strength to tear that thing apart, and it had enough finesse with those limbs that it was more than capable of even the finest and more delicate of work.

Its body was bioluminescent, though it didn’t glow—rather, the light its body produced shifted to match its environment, allowing it to easily camouflage its body. It wasn’t nearly as large as the other two, perhaps only as large as a small whale. It wasn’t a predator by nature, preferring to instead feast on the kills of other monsters, and its natural magical talent made it far more adept at evading and escaping other creatures than in killing them. However, at the tenth-tier, this one was more than capable of defending itself with violence, as was evidenced by the gigantic corpse of a black many-tentacled thing whose body was so revolting that the Grave Warden had to stifle a gag at the sight of this flower-like fish ripping and tearing it apart.

The final creature noticed his arrival—it was the only creature that did—and quickly dropped its kill and darted down to hide itself among the pyramids, the colors of its body rapidly changing to match its immediate environment. This wasn’t nearly enough to escape his attention, but at the least, the Grave Warden left it alone for the time being. If this place needed a more active guardian than the powerful passive defenses he’d included in the rest of the plane, then like those graveyards that had been breached before, he’d assign something to defend it, and this creature seemed like a perfect fit.

With that taken care of in only a matter of seconds, the Grave Warden snapped his fingers and sealed the cracks in the ceiling, once more cutting this place off from the rest of the plane, and finally turned his attention to the graveyard itself, and the prison at its heart. His heart stopped for a moment when he realized that the light of the main pyramid had gone out, indicating that its occupant was no longer there. However, as his senses swept the area and he examined the interior of the pyramid, he calmed down slightly.

But only slightly, for within, he found dust that glowed like platinum—the remains of a Primal God. He was quite familiar with how their bodies fell apart when they died, and he had no shortage of dead god to compare it to with the thousands of other pyramids in the cavern, each one containing remains of other Primal Gods.

But this one… Krith’is had never been able to be killed. All the power of the heroes of yore had fallen upon that monster, and though it was hardly the strongest or the most destructive of the gods, every gash opened, every drop of golden ichor spilled from its wounds, every blast of magic was all wasted, for a moment later, the primal monster would heal and retaliate.

Some insight it had gained from tearing apart humans and any other sentient creature it could get its hands on had given it this power, of that the Grave Warden had no doubt. He shuddered when he remembered the battle that had brought Krith’is to its knees, and the terrible price that humanity had to pay to do so. If the Kings of the Primal Gods and Devils, and the seven Great Dragons had not already been defeated by the time the Flesh Ripper had been captured, then the losses humanity suffered at Krith’is’ blood-soaked hands would’ve likely crippled their revolution.

But somehow, in the brief couple of years since he’d fallen asleep, the monster had met its end…

‘Or maybe it’s some kind of ruse?’ the Grave Warden thought, and in a flash of light, he entered the pyramid, being immediately transported to the pocket world within. It was little more than a black featureless void, an abyss perfect for storing something that couldn’t be killed.

The Grave Warden examine the corpse-dust more closely. He’d seen more than enough of this stuff in his time to know that this wasn’t fake dust, and the Flesh Ripper had been stored alone, as had the few other still-living Primal Gods in his care, and as far as he could tell, the other graves were full. If this was some kind of ruse, then it was incredibly convincing—however, he took some comfort in noting that the prison had never fully opened, preventing Krith’is from physically escaping.

Piecing together everything he knew of the Primal Gods, he imagined that the Krith’is had used its divine form to escape from its prison, but then ran into something powerful enough to break it in its much more fragile state, which then resulted in the death and disintegration of its physical body.

In a flash, the Grave Warden appeared outside in the cavern once again and took to investigating the area much more closely, looking for anything and everything that might prove or disprove his hypothesis. He took in every detail, every disturbed ward, every quiver in the currents of magic, he even cast his gaze upward and examined the Serpentine Isles in greater detail.

He scowled when he realized just how negligent he’d been these past few thousand years. He’d been guarding these graves for so long that it was so easy to fall into complacency, but he’d long ago sworn to fight such instincts with everything he had.

’No more sleep for me, not for a long time,’ he thought to himself as he traced the few strands of strange magic he felt, quickly identifying several dozen origins from all over the plane. Evidence of many blood magic rituals, all designed to weaken the wards protecting this place—and this was after the destruction of the islands above had already slightly disturbed the wards, as far as he could tell.

With a few thoughts, the wards all over the plane were repaired and reinforced, from the most distant at the edges of the plane, where a thin border of Mist of Chaos separated the plane from the Void to the hub of all his enchantments within the crystal cave back in the center. He’d have to do much more work to ensure that his reinforcements did their job, but for now, these measures were enough—especially since he could sense that all the other cages were still intact, and their residents accounted for.

At the very least, it seemed his hypothesis was proven correct, for even without its physical body, a being like Krith’is could not have run around in Aeterna without his notice—not in Aeterna, not in his place. And yet, the Grave Warden could sense no sign that its divine form had escaped.

‘So… Krith’is is dead…’ the Grave Warden mused as he glanced back at the central pyramid. He then noticed that one of the angel corpses was on the stairs leading to the top, while another angel was missing.

He also noticed a small fleet of ships slowly sailing around the empty patch of sea where the island above this place used to be, and a demon hovering in the sky, following at a great distance while hiding himself in the clouds.

It was no stretch for the Grave Warden to assume that these people knew what had happened here, and with another silent invocation of his teleportation magic, he appeared in front of the demon.

“Gah! Fuck!” the demon shouted in surprise as he scrambled in the air, quickly assuming a defensive position.

The Grave Warden only smiled. He had to know what had happened here, and the demon would tell him.

—

Leon felt himself twitching as he slowly opened his physical eyes. It hadn’t taken much between the Thunderbird and Nestor to help him return to normal, but the process wasn’t painless. Still, the thought of just how downtrodden and broken Nestor sounded after everything that had happened over the past day brought a smile to Leon’s face, even though he knew that a flood of questions was going to come from the dead man sooner or later.

‘That’s fine,’ he thought. ‘I have my own questions I’ll need answering…’

He lay upon the deck of a Legion ship, and as his eyes opened, he caught the tail-end of his transformation back into his human body as the last of the pitch-black feathers retreated below his skin. He then realized, to his immediate dismay and embarrassment, that he wasn’t wearing any clothes. Fortunately, it seemed his body was entirely back to normal, at least when it came to his control over his magic, and it was the easiest thing for him to quickly summon some spare clothes from his soul realm and dress himself.

He also noticed the hordes of people crowded over him, nearly all with looks of worry in their eyes—chief among them was Maia, who knelt at his side, gently cradling his head in her arms. With her were the rest of his retinue, and he could see the white feathers of Anzu in the background loudly chirping and making a fuss as Legion sailors tried to keep the griffin from bowling everyone over to reach Leon.

His limbs felt sluggish and his eyes were heavy, but he felt strong enough to rise.

“Careful, now,” Alix said as she slipped under one of his arms. “Whatever the fuck just happened to you, I think you’ll be needing some rest.”

Leon didn’t verbally respond, but he agreed, and he felt Maia quickly position herself under his other arm.

The rest of the Legion sailors and marines on the deck parted before them, giving them more than enough room, while Gaius, Marcus, Alcander, and Anzu followed behind. Many of those who’d crowded around Leon had been dressed like high-ranking Legion knights, but he was in no mood to speak with them about much of anything right now—all he wanted to do was to lie down and rest, even though he’d just woken back up in his physical body. The process for returning himself to his human body had been long and magically intensive, and the Thunderbird hadn’t allowed him to relax in the slightest. However, he was encouraged by the fact that she’d indicated that, with a month or two of tuning to his rather unique physiology, it might be possible that he could switch from human to avian at will.

Some much welcome good news, but neither that, nor his ascension to the eighth-tier could erase the fact that his sword was missing, as was Xaphan. His armor was also destroyed, as was his flight suit. His immediate retinue was fine, but Sigebert’s fleet had been nearly completely destroyed. The remains of the fleet were sailing extremely slowly, so he assumed the search for survivors was still ongoing.

No matter the case, there was a lot to do, quite a bit of searching that he had in his immediate future, and more than a few questions he’d need answered from both those within his soul realm, and without. There were undoubtedly many questions he’d have to answer, as well.

For now, though, he just wanted to lay down and cuddle up with Maia until strength returned to his body. How long that ought to take, he wasn’t sure, but at the very least, he was already starting to feel a little better.