Chapter 507

[ Temporary Containment: 00:00:00.0000 ]

I was in the darkness, but it was familiar. When I reached the Arcanist level my soul became so strong and fine tuned that my memories became perfect, and I was able to remember the majority of my life, except for those moments when I was asleep.

In one of the memories I remembered, it was me in the womb of my mother. I was warm and had never felt so safe. I did not feel the same in the darkness, one reason is that it is cold, and I could not hear that sound that soothed my soul… the heartbeat of my mother.

Nevertheless, in this darkness I felt myself return to my baseline, all the pain and fear had vanished, and when I felt the call of the Hollow… Titan? I reached out of the dark, pushing from its depth to the light.

That was not new for me. I had done it before, and as I reached for the light, I felt a cold grip on my hand that pulled me from the dark, and I was standing on a pool of darkness… I looked around, and I almost gasped, before this place held a pool of darkness, now it was an ocean of it that stretched into the distance, and I thought I could see flickers of purple lightning going off in the distance.

“You are awake.”

It was my own voice, but it was flat and cold, but there was something underneath that coldness that I grasped, it was almost as if the voice was tired.

“Controls are yours. Take them slowly. I could not finish the mission, the changes to my nature necessitate me to sleep to complete my evolution.”

I felt something cover my body, as if a weight had been added to my soul, or better yet, it was as if I was a gear taken out of a massive machine, and now that gear was being slotted back into place… but I could no longer recognise what was touching my soul. There was nothing familiar in what I was touching.

“What did you do,” I whispered in shock.

“The records are complete. You will find them when you look for them.”

The purple lightning flashed and for a moment I saw a faceless giant made of darkness slowly sinking into the ocean of black.

“That’s not an answer.”

I was shocked when the faceless giant chuckled as its head sank into the deep. “It is a better answer than the one you have time for. A hard battle awaits you ahead, but you now have the tools to dominate. You wanted perfection, I have delivered as close as possible… Stand up, Elric. Kill all the demons.”

My eyes flashed open to the world ending.

∞

I was surrounded by a storm of earth and demonic essence. The earth was screaming and breaking, but all of it seemed to be so far from me, almost like it was happening underwater, it was as if there was a barrier between me and the world, and a part of me could tell that the world had slowed down, no, it was my thinking that had become much faster… still, I felt as if I did not know the body that I was waking up to as I tried to stand.

I lifted an arm to put a hand on the ground and it came up far too fast, the back of my hand went past my face and kept going until the shoulder stopped it.

By all the lights in heaven… what was that?

I slowly put down my arm, and lifted it again with my eyes on it this time, slower, and I felt a slight click as if my memory was beginning to remember this body.

A slight click echoed in my head and the events of the last hour flowed into my soul and I froze in place, even as the earth for tens of miles began to sink, and my body effortlessly hovered in the air as my mind broke apart all the changes that had happened in my body and soul.

The realisation of what the Hollow… Titan had done to me was startling. I had not expected this change. I had expected something, but nothing like this, and at the end when I recalled his last actions I nearly cursed it aloud.

…there was a fifty-fifty chance that I would be erased at this moment, and I patiently waited. Elric had access to all the records of my workings, and he would not be lost in my creation.

“You flipped a fucking coin,” I whispered in anger, “How dare you Hollow? You think I will be willing to lose you again after I lost you once before?”

I slowly came to my knees in midair, my long white hair rising around me, disobeying the laws of gravity, even though no wind could come near me. Chunks of earth the size of city blocks began to rise all around me, and Caelith Mourne moved, as something massive pushed it from below.

I could see all of this, but it no longer felt… big.

Maybe it was because there were too many things happening to me at the moment, but I just wanted to come to my feet first.

I knew from the records kept by the Hollow Titan that this was the phase where my soul was recognising my body again.

The Hollow was a crazy genius, it had changed my body and soul on such a profound level, but the core of who I was remained the same, and it was this core that was slowly merging with the rest of me.

“Crrkkk… Boom!”

The sound of the Caelith being tossed aside reached me, and I looked up and unconsciously gestured towards the celestial structure that had been shoved nearly a dozen miles away and called for it.

Space seemed to shudder and then vibrated before a massive shadow appeared above me, and I did not need to look up to know that the Caelith had just reappeared above me.

I did not know how I did that, the full control of my body and soul was not available to me, I could not even check my status screen, but Celestial magic which I knew depended on intent seemed to be something I could call even in this state.

From the shattered earth, an arm came out. Grey, and wet, and it came up for a long time, as if it was a rising mountain and not an arm, and when the elbow cleared the lip of the hole the forearm was still coming, and the hand at the end of it opened across half a mile of shattered earth and slowly descended before crashing to the ground a thousand paces away from me, but the shockwaves of the descent could not even reach me.

A second arm followed, and this landed at my other side, and behind it were four massive tentacles that snaked around the two arms as if they wanted to connect them together.

My body straightened, as I was able to feel for the first time since I was awoken, the beating of my heart. Looking down, I saw that I was naked, and in the moment I realised this I was clothed in my grey Acolyte robes.

A small smile touched my face as I placed my hand over my chest, “Hollow, let me see what you have given me.”

I called up my status screen.