The Twelve Apocalypses: A Damned Soul's Path to the Abyss

A man can learn a valuable lesson in the most unlikely of places.

For example, that he should retreat to a safe distance after defacing a statue chock-full of Divinity.

My head was spinning and ringing all at once. I was aware of painful burns all over my body. When I brought a hand up to my face, it came away bloody, my fingers deeply stained in the odd cyan-black mixture that now ran through my veins.

Groaning, I squeezed my eyes shut and tried to think. I knew I was in the middle of doing something important, but couldn't for the life of me remember what.

"-den! Hayden!"

Mia's voice reached from me from what felt like an immense distance, slightly distorted and definitely off.

I blinked bleary eyes and shifted, frowning when I encountered a rather uncomfortable and… thorny? Yes, thorny surface.

Then I looked around, and my eyes widened.

I lay in a field of crystal flowers stained in blood. Mia was standing just a few feet away with her back to me, cutting arrow after arrow out of the air. These arrows were shot by a rather bedraggled-looking goddess that was more flayed flesh than whole at the minute, but still apparently able to wield a bow.

My mind cleared rapidly.

Without me consciously controlling them, my crystal flowers had stopped moving, forcing Mia to cover my ass. No longer. I pulsed my mana out, biting back a scream when it encountered my burns and other injuries.

The crystalline roses were still mine. My mana still burned within them. All I had to do was reforge the connection, so I did it, ignoring the cost.

With a wordless cry, my spell took root again. The annoying goddess faltered when the flowers rose up around her. They failed to pierce her skin, but there were open wounds aplenty to take advantage of. The vines I controlled burrowed into those gashes, winding around the deity's bones.

The goddess grunted and stumbled, but all her attempts to get away failed. When my flowers finally reached her arms and tied them to her sides, Mia blurred forward. Her masterfully crafted sword sliced through the air once.

A goddess died that day.

There was a pause, then a flare of power, and the entire body of the deity flaked away in a rush of gold that streamed into Mia's soul purse. That answered one of my questions, at least: gods were much like demons, creatures of pure soul and mana. Emotions too, of course, though I imagined those got bundled into soul crystals quite well.

Then Mia was beside me, and I lost the fight to keep hold of my spell. I also failed to bite back a hiss of pain when her hands gingerly traced one of my many burns.

"You're hurt. Again. Can you stop getting hurt? I don't care for it," she grumbled.

"I'll work on it. Anything for my brat cat."

She didn't take the bait. Instead, she shot me a flat look and started rummaging through my dimensional purse.

"I didn't exactly know it was going to explode, okay?" I wheedled. "What was I supposed to do? Let it animate fully?"

"You should have killed it and then got away. Or killed it from a distance. You're pretending you're a mage nowadays, aren't you?"

"Hey now, that stings worse than these burns!"

"Good. Maybe you'll try to prove me otherwise."

I was still coming up with a clever retort when she found a healing potion, uncorked the vial, and poured the contents down my throat.

I didn't put up much of a fight, and I couldn't say it wasn't a relief when the burns cooled slightly. Still, they didn't go away entirely, which was frustrating. How were they so… pervasive? I frowned down at my armor, expecting to find it absolutely ruined, only to see it was perfectly intact.

"Wha…? How do I feel sunburned all over, and my armor's not damaged? This isn't fair! It's supposed to stop that kind of thing!"

I totally didn't whine. I was airing my grievances with much poise and dignity, dammit.

Mia glared at me. Before she could respond, though, there was a second eruption of mana across the cavern. I turned my head just in time to catch sight of Glaustro cutting down the male yeti god.

That, at least, made me sigh in relief.

"We've won, then. I hope Wilhelmina died in particularly spectacular fashion."

"She didn't."

I looked at Mia, suddenly feeling apprehensive. "Hrm?"

"She didn't die. Some idiot had to go and get himself blown up. Again. Which is something he must apparently do at least once per invasion, but preferably more, I guess. The explosion rocked the entire cavern. It gave her a chance to get away, and she took it. Glaustro and I were too busy panicking and trying to get to you to stop her. She took a bunch of her people with her, too."

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"Damn it." I slammed my fists against the ground, wincing as the movement sent pain flaring through my wounds. "We really needed her to die."

"She's badly hurt, worse than when she came here, and she has maybe half her troops. She can run, but she's a much lesser threat," said the rumbling voice of my major.

I collapsed in on myself for a moment before I dared to look up at him with trepidation.

"I'm sorry. It's my fault. We lost so much Divinity, and —"

Glaustro cut me off with a curse, looking well and properly pissed.

"Divinity? That's what you're sorry about? For fuck's sake, Hayden, I could care less about the lost Divinity. You almost got yourself killed, again! If that was just because you thought I'd be desperate to get my hands on some stupid —"

He stopped his tirade long enough to take a deep breath. "What I'm trying to say is that I value your lives, yours, Mia's, and Bronwynn's, a hell of a lot more than Divinity. Understood?"

I swallowed thickly. "Understood."

I couldn't look him in the eye, but I heard the laughter in Glaustro's voice when he continued speaking.

"Good. Don't do it again. Now, just to make the lesson stick, you're going to go and collect every little fragment of that statue you can find. I might just have you put it back together again, by hand, alone, so you better get me all the pieces!"

I gaped at my superior officer with wide eyes, but when he barked that I had my orders, I scrambled to my feet and rushed to obey. The healing potion had reduced my burns to 'strongly irritated skin' at that point, so the task was not as unpleasant as it could have been. Even so, I flinched every time I bent down to pick up a piece of the statue.

And there were a lot of pieces.

—

In the end, we left those caverns with plenty of local souls, a ton of slain enemies, and a decent haul of Divinity. The two gods Mia and Glaustro had killed were reduced to peculiar golden soul crystals that seemed to be as heavy as a small mountain. They radiated so much power that even I would have been hesitant to consume one.

On top of all that, we got six totem banners which were only slightly tattered from close proximity to an explosion. And, of course, the pile of icy statue bits. I couldn't rightly say whether I'd collected them all, but I did pick up every sliver of ice that radiated Divinity in that cavern. By hand. Glaustro had watched me like a hawk to make sure I didn't use any spells.

Overall, the mood in our burgeoning city was celebratory. A good haul and a blow dealt to a rival… what more could a demon want?

Well, souls, of course. That's why our soldiers erupted into full celebration only when Glaustro announced that every member of his little army was going to be richly rewarded for their contributions. He also promised special bonuses to those who landed confirmed kills on Wilhelmina's more notable subordinates.

I had no idea who those subordinates were. I'd never bothered to learn about every notable officer attached to the legion. But someone must have been keeping track, because several soldiers on our side were now shamelessly boasting about their extra pay and grand accomplishments to anyone willing to listen.

I wasn't willing, and neither was Mia. She all but dragged me away on the first opportunity, then forced me to take another potion once we were in the privacy of our tent. At least that second potion erased my burns once and for all.

Still, somehow, I couldn't rest.

I was frustrated with myself. By all accounts, we had won. Then why was I so… unsettled, at the thought of Wilhelmina still out there, skulking around?

Probably the look I'd seen in her eyes. It was so bleak, so utterly unrepentant, and so hideously furious, especially when she encountered Glaustro. She fought like a demoness scorned. Clearly, all her resentment over her many losses had landed squarely on the shoulders of my major.

Would someone like that truly be content to just curl up and tend to their wounds, far from the reach of their rivals? I wasn't convinced. Something told me we would be seeing Wilhelmina again, and soon.

We simply needed to be ready for her.

—

"I don't think I'm making an unreasonable request! I even said I would take Mia with me, didn't I?" I complained, my eyes darting from one stony face to another.

"I never said I wanted to go," was my wonderfully caring best friend's answer.

"You'd let me go out there alone?"

"No. I'd just sit on you until you started seeing sense again."

"You can't be serious! Wilhelmina is out there somewhere, and we need to find her before she finds a way to cause trouble. Again!"

"Hayden, I won't say that you're wrong," Glaustro began, his oh-so-calm voice making me bristle. "What I'm saying is that you should consider the risks of what you're proposing. What are you going to do if you somehow manage to find her? Charge her and her entire army on your own?"

"A very tiny army. A tiny army we decimated the last time we fought," I groused. When the stony faces grew stonier, I hurried to add, "And I wouldn't do that! I'd, uh… find a way to separate her? Assassinate her? Call you in?"

Bronwynn sniffed, clearly unimpressed. "That last one's better than the rest, but it's still a pointless risk, boy."

"You would make a horrible assassin," Mia contributed helpfully. "I would know. You always go for 'loud and dramatic.' Really, roses?"

I flushed, dropping my eyes to the floor. "We're going to regret it if we let her heal."

"If," Glaustro repeated. "She's very badly hurt, Hayden. I'm not sure she could manage taking down a god in her current condition, and she's only likely to get worse as time goes by. Whatever and whoever damaged her soul was vicious. This might be her final gambit for survival, here and in the Abyss alike."

"Exactly! Who knows what a demoness like her might do if she decided she's going to die anyway?"

At last, Glaustro looked properly worried. But he shook it off quickly and resumed his stern expression. "All the more reason to face her together, or not at all."

I gave up. If they wanted to let her bide her time, then fine.

I would just need to be there and keep them alive so I could finally say 'I told you so.'

"Onto other, more important matters," Bronwynn cut in, which earned him one of my most sour looks yet. "The city's shaping up nicely. Soon, we'll need to seriously consider what we're going to do. If we choose to establish a connection to the Abyss, we can benefit from trade and fresh recruits. On the other hand…"

"If the wrong people find out about Divinity, then we'll be pressed to defend our claim. We'll have to fight off mercenaries and worse," Glaustro finished for him.

We all exchanged worried glances. The tradeoff didn't make it easy to reach a decision. If we had any real claim on the world, if we had seized the right to command its Will, then we could feel a lot safer about connecting to the Abyss. Unfortunately, that was months away at our current pace, if not years.

When a world had a unified center, some type of ruler who clearly held sway and stood in for the Will whether they were aware of it or not, then seizing a world was pretty straightforward. Just steal the power from the ruler through blood and conquest.

But on a world as scattered as Breskwor, with a will so young? I had no idea how many souls and how much territory we would have to claim to make our hold on the world stick.

I sighed as a sense of helplessness spread through the room like a disease.

Really, whoever said playing conqueror was easy?