Chapter 309: Abomination (1)

“Ah,” the Holy Sword whispered, and it felt as if it swallowed its own breath while listening.

The other voice within Ketal was rough and raw, closer to a beast’s snarl than to human speech. Even so, it was unmistakably language, charged with intent, heavy with its own will. The Holy Sword heard it clearly and could not deny what it had heard.

“At last, I can spit out my will properly. Curse it. That took disgustingly long.”

“What is this?” Ketal said, startled despite himself. “You can speak? I thought you only howled. I assumed you could not form words.”

“Did you truly take me for a beast?” the new voice said.

Irritation and anger rasped through the air. As the voice throbbed, the Myst inside Ketal churned as if answering it. Ketal chuckled and answered with light amusement.

“No offense. You only ever howled, so that conclusion was natural.”

Something with will had been inside him for a very long time. It could assess situations and make choices. Ketal had already deduced as much, so the fact that it spoke surprised him less than it might have. The Holy Sword felt no such calm.

“A m-monster?” the sword thought, and the thought bled into voice because it could not hold it back.

The Holy Sword had always known that Ketal carried something strange. It had assumed the strangeness ultimately belonged to Ketal and had not pressed further. What it sensed now did not fit that comfortable interpretation. Something enormous and alien and powerful flexed from within Ketal, and the sensation made even a relic that had dwelled among gods feel very small.

“T-this is...,” the Holy Sword stammered.

“Be quiet, toy,” the beast said with unhidden annoyance. “Do not foul my ears.”

“Ah,” the Holy Sword said again, but this time the broken syllable came out of a mind that felt as if it had been shoved to the edge of a cliff. For a heartbeat, it was like a mortal staring at the true body of a god, soul and senses blanched to numbness.

It fought through the vertigo and forced its own purpose upright. The effort shook it, but it did not fall. The stubborn recovery seemed to nettle the thing within Ketal.

“For a trinket like you to withstand my will. The world truly has rotted,” the beast said.

“So you can converse with the Holy Sword,” Ketal said, studying the exchange. “You can talk to someone other than me.”

“That trinket belongs to you,” the beast replied. “It is not strange that it senses the part of me that lives inside you.”

“I see,” Ketal said, and nodded as if filing the information neatly away. “What should I call you? I can keep calling you the beast of Myst, I suppose. Do you have a true name you prefer?”

“Do not call me a beast.” Disgust clicked through every syllable. “Do not compare me to creatures without mind. That is offensive. Yet to use my original name while I am shackled to another is a greater insult. I dislike the label you have used, but there is no helping it.”

It paused, and its irritation resolved into a decision.

“Call me the Abomination. That is the name the young ones used for me.”

Ketal remembered what Hephaite had told him and felt no shock, only the steady confirmation of a guess he had been carrying since that conversation. The entity inside him was the one the God of the Forge had described.

It had killed more gods and more demons than any other single being, and it had blackened more of the world than anyone could count. In the end, every power in existence had joined forces to erase it, and even then, they had only managed to destroy most of it, allowing a piece to slip free and endure. That surviving fragment now lived inside Ketal, and it was the Abomination.

“When did you take up residence inside me?” Ketal asked it.

“From the moment you took a portion of me,” it answered.

“That would be when I acquired the axe,” Ketal said. “That was a long time ago.”

He had carried the axe since he was weak enough to be killed by an unlucky fall. He could hardly remember a time before it. The Abomination had been with him since then. He had never noticed it until he began handling Myst. For a creature with a legend like that, it had been remarkably quiet.

“Quiet? Me?” the Abomination said, and the tone shifted to an angry scrape. “Nonsense.”

“So you were not lying low,” Ketal said.

“I did everything possible to rip you open and swallow you,” it said, voice flat with remembered effort. “Nothing worked. I wasted time. All of it was meaningless.”

In the beginning, the Abomination had raged. It had tried to consume his flesh and eat his mind, to make that feast the seed of its rebirth. However, none of it had touched him, just like how a human flailing his arms in a cold, indifferent cosmos did not stir the stars. If nothing else had changed, Ketal would never have known the Abomination existed.

“But you began to harbor power from the Outside,” it said.

That power was the world’s strange birthright, the thing Ketal called Myst. He had pursued it and gathered it with relentless purpose. The Abomination had not wasted the chance. It fed on the Myst he collected, nurtured strength from that nourishment, and clawed its way to the point where its awareness could finally breach the surface and turn into language.

“So that is why you were so eager to cooperate,” Ketal said, almost amused. “I wondered how you had become so tractable.”

Whenever Ketal gained Myst, the Abomination grew stronger. That had been the reason it had helped him retake the mines with such willing efficiency. Something was living inside Ketal, something parasitic by nature. It should have been horrifying. Yet, somehow, Ketal sounded as relaxed as if he had run into an old acquaintance at a tavern.

“You have been watching everything from inside me,” he said. “If I stretch definitions, that makes you an old friend. Good to meet you. How have you been?”

“Bastard,” the Abomination replied, sounding offended by the casual greeting. “You keep trying to drag me into the open and prod me around. That is irritating. Leave me alone.”

“So that is why you threw a tantrum whenever I tried to handle Myst,” Ketal said. “I am sorry, but you are my strength. I cannot do as you ask.”

“You are an annoying creature.”

“That is my line,” Ketal said, still light. “You tried to steal my body. You are bold to complain.”

His laugh was easy. The Holy Sword shivered at the casual tone and could not help itself.

“I-is this not dangerous?” the sword asked Ketal, the words thin with worry. “We should speak to the gods immediately and figure out how to deal with this.”

The Abomination had once required gods and demons to work together just to contain it. The Holy Sword lacked first-hand records, but it did not need them to understand that this was not a presence to be treated lightly.

“There should be no problem,” Ketal said. “Its new strength comes from Myst I earned. Without the Myst I gathered, it could not even be speaking. It grew by eating my Myst.”

That meant the power ultimately belonged to him. The Abomination had become stronger, but the nature of that strength had bent closer to Ketal’s. Resistance was no longer possible.

“Bastard,” the Abomination said again. It did not contradict him.

“Then nothing between us changes,” Ketal said. “That is acceptable.”

With that conclusion filed, he hummed, drew the axe, and returned to his task. He had encountered a complication, but his goal had not altered. He focused. The Myst within him rolled like a slow tide. He seized a portion, felt the Abomination recoil out of irritation, and forced the Myst to condense.

It took shape along the edge of the axe. It clung and then settled. What had been a wavering, candle-flame instability earlier now held steady. He had formed an Aura.

“Oh. That is perfect,” Ketal said, pleasure warming his voice. The manifested Myst no longer flickered. It held form with reliability. He could draw it out when he wished and keep it where he placed it.

“The consumption is lighter than I expected,” he judged after a minute of steady maintenance.

He had enough Myst to support its use throughout a fight. However, a problem remained.

“If I use this, it is difficult to also reinforce and shield my body,” he said.

The issue was not quantity but allocation. The very act of manifestation pulled his Myst into the Aura and held it there. With practice, he could likely divide flows more elegantly. At the moment, using the Qura while also sheathing his flesh in Myst felt out of reach.

“If you helped, it would work better,” he said to the Abomination in a speculative tone. “You should help.”

“Why would I?” it said, utterly disinterested.

Ketal had expected as much. He let the refusal slide and concentrated on the aura. He held it, released it, re-formed it, and learned the edges of what he could do without tearing the flow.

“Ah. Ahh...,” the Holy Sword groaned softly as it watched.

For the first time, it could follow the Aura in detail for an extended stretch. The observation chilled it. The Aura was dangerous. It was different, not in degree but in kind. An instinctive dread crept up from someplace older than reasoning, a dry fear with the taste of death in it, like the moment a drawn bow found the exact point on a heart.

Ketal glanced at the trembling Holy Sword and asked the Abomination mildly, “The way demons and the Holy Sword react when I use this must be because of you, yes?”

Hephaite had said that the Abomination’s authority sat close to death.

The Abomination answered without false modesty. “The young feel something like instinctive fear when they meet me. It should be so in reality as well.”

Pride colored its words, and the Holy Sword had no grounds to argue. Ketal kept working the Myst. When he stopped to breathe and reckon, nearly half an hour had passed.

“For now, I can sustain it for roughly thirty minutes,” he said, satisfied. “That is not bad.”

He returned to the holy land and lay down on the bed to rest. The room was quiet. The Holy Sword, which had fallen silent in shock, spoke again with careful softness.

“Y-you are that... the Abomination... right?” it asked.

Long ago, the Abomination had killed gods and demons and corrupted the world. That same presence now lived inside Ketal. He did not seem to care, but the Holy Sword could not ignore it. It was dangerous. It needed to understand what that danger wanted, because it wanted to protect Ketal.

However, no answer came. The Holy Sword overcame its fear and asked again.

“Excuse me, Abomination,” it tried, and the title sounded like it had been dragged across a field of burrs.

“Do not address me, toy,” the Abomination said, voice bored. “You are just a wretched tool. If this creature had not shown you mercy, you would have been discarded and passed around by the young ones until you finally flickered out. You do not interest me.”

The Holy Sword flared with sudden heat, not because it had been insulted, but because the insult pressed a private bruise. It knew, even without being told, that it had not helped Ketal much. It tried to protest.

“I still know a great deal about Ketal,” the Holy Sword said, and it could not keep the tremor out of its tone. “I can speak to him from within and understand him in a way you cannot. You cannot even bring yourself to talk to him, and you oppose him. That is not the same.”

“You think you know him?” the Abomination said, and it laughed without humor. “You think you know this creature? You? How funny. You know nothing.”

It did not stop there.

“Not only you. The ones Inside and the ones Outside are the same. None of you truly know him.”

“W-what do you mean?” the Holy Sword asked it. The words had a strange shape. It did not sound as if the Abomination meant history or a curriculum vitae.

“Do you know where he came from?” the Abomination asked the sword.

“Well... he is the ashen-haired barbarian from the White Snowfield,” the Holy Sword began, and then hesitated because even to its own ears the answer sounded like a story told to children.

“You think I am bound to something like that?” the Abomination said. “You truly know nothing about him.

The Abomination lived inside Ketal. It knew him better than anyone. It understood him more deeply than anyone had dared to try.

“He is from the beyond. He is a being that is neither from the Inside nor Outside.”

“Beyond...” the Holy Sword repeated, and the word clicked around like a stone in a jar. It could not make the sound fit any meaning it understood.

“If you do not know, keep it that way,” the Abomination said, entirely unimpressed. “You will not understand.”

The Holy Sword stammered and found no line of counterargument to grasp. Silence settled. Ketal had been listening to the two of them talk, saying nothing while they traded barbs and hints. Now his eyes cooled.

“You know what I am,” he said quietly.