Chapter 361: To the Empire (5)

The ground bellowed, and the floor where Ketal’s blow had met the Twisted warped and sagged, then crumpled into shapes that had no business existing in a palace. Ketal watched the deformation, and an irritated line creased the bridge of his nose.

“It offends me,” he said in a flat tone.

Every time the thing moved, his carefully held picture of the world—his fantasy of how a world should look and feel—was spoiled by a touch that did not belong. Disgust rose as a dull ache in his throat.

The Twisted tried to mend itself. The wound Ketal had carved across the mass of spines and sinew flexed and shivered. Authority reached in to torque the flesh back into the pattern the Primarch preferred. However, nothing answered.

The scar did not close. It looked erased rather than cut. The marred band remained, a pale gouge that refused to accept instruction. The Twisted levered itself upright and gave a sound too dry to be called a groan.

“You have grown stronger. That strange force of yours remains. You do not suit this world,” the Twisted said.

“And you have grown weaker,” Ketal replied.

Whether it had spent too much strength prying free of the White Snowfield or something else had leeched it, the Twisted was not at its full height. For a being that should have stood taller after consuming two of its kind, this level of decay bordered on startling. Worse, the tether to the capital acted as a collar. Its movements pressed against an edge he could feel.

Ketal’s eyes cooled until they looked like weathered stone.

𝐟𝕣𝕖𝐞𝐰𝕖𝚋𝐧𝗼𝚟𝐞𝕝.𝗰𝐨𝐦

Can I kill it in this state?

he thought. He calculated the line as quickly as a hunter mapping a sprint during a draw.

I think I can

.

If he bled his strength without stint and called every authority that would answer his voice, he could erase the thing that had stepped out to the Mortal Realm. He could make this piece of the oldest vanish for good.

Yet, he did not move. The reason had no poetry to it. It came down to what would happen after.

If he poured himself into the kill, the Twisted would answer in kind. Power would collide at a level that paid no attention to ceilings. In that collision, the delicate, hateful constraint that kept the Twisted bound to the capital would snap like hair pulled too tight. He did not need to guess; he knew. His authority specialized in erasing ropes and seals. If he let it sing freely, every knot would come undone.

Once that happened, the Twisted would cast its apostles outward as a man cast seed across a plowed field.

The apostles were not minor nuisances. Each carried a measure of the authority that bent the world. The exceptional among them—the kind that had ruined Magna Rain—could crush even a Hero mage. The more ordinary ones still stood above almost every fighter left on the continent; unless one had reached the absolute peak of the transcendent class, one had no business trying to meet them head-on.

If hundreds of such beings were to rise and spread across the world, the outcome would not demand reflection or philosophy. The world would shatter beneath their march. The Twisted alone could devastate half the Mortal Realm before he finished tearing its heart from its body.

That will not do

, he thought, and the words were unadorned.

In its present condition, the Twisted could be killed. In its present condition, the apostles could not all be contained. If he chose the duel, his victory would come wrapped in a failure far larger than any single death.

Not now.

Ketal relaxed his hands and let the axe’s nose fall a finger’s width. The killing heat that had been rising through his ribs ebbed. Across the room, the Twisted paused as if listening for a step and hearing none.

“You do not come,” it said. “What stops your foot?”

“I will be going back,” Ketal answered.

“What?” the Abomination said, quick and sharp inside his skull.

“I will prepare on my side,” Ketal continued, unbothered by the two-fold audience. “Time favors you. Take it. It is not my concern whether you spend it well.”

“I cannot deny that,” the Twisted said.

Time would mend and thicken it, letting it press against the boundary until it found a seam to slip through. Yet none of that aligned with the opportunity before him. The moment demanded action, not waiting, and the enemy no longer held the power to shape his choice.

“You abandon a chance when you have it,” the Twisted said. “I do not understand.”

Ketal had stepped back with deliberate restraint, choosing preservation over destruction because he intended for the Mortal Realm to endure. The Twisted, however, could never grasp that truth. To it, he was merely an outsider—a being without origin or loyalty to the world he now guarded. It would forever misunderstand that choice, and that misunderstanding served him well. An enemy unable to discern his reasons could never strike where it truly mattered.

“Before I go,” he said, “I am taking someone.”

He drove his heel down. The floor split. He dropped through the wound, wrapped himself in Myst so stone and splinter skated from his skin, and dove toward the lower levels. The Twisted guessed incorrectly, lunging to shield the cells where the apostles waited in patient, head-tilted silence.

Ketal was not headed for the apostle warrens. He turned aside through a narrow run of empty chambers and hit a small room with a ceiling too low for a giant and too high for a cell. He broke through as the axe fell like a judge’s mallet. Bars that were not iron shattered. The thing had been a prison, but the cage it had made was all twist and echo, not steel and bolt.

The shell fell away, and the figure inside stood in the light like a sketch done in white chalk on black slate. Bones shaped the man; magic kept them together. The Tower Master had been reduced to a scaffold. Ketal took one look, marked the rate and color of the stain in the marrow, and let out a short, honest breath.

“Only half-tainted,” he said. “If I had been an hour later, we would have lost you.”

“You did all that to save a being from the Mortal Realm,” the Twisted said, genuinely puzzled. “You, a being from elsewhere, for a creature of no weight.”

The tone suggested it did not know where to put the act in its catalog. Ketal did not explain himself. He bent and lifted the Tower Master across his shoulders.

“I am taking him,” he said.

“That displeases me,” the Twisted replied. “I meant to make him my apostle.”

“I do not need your leave.”

Ketal drew the axe back and let Aura climb until it filled the small room and crowded the walls. He did not swing for the Twisted. He turned his body and hurled the edge through the earth.

The arc the blade described did not stop at the stone. Aura unspooled along the line until it looked like sword-light traveling without a sword, and the stroke raked the underground like a plow. It found the chambers where the apostles waited and bit toward them. The Twisted flared its authority and blocked the cut; it had to. In that necessary moment of attention, Ketal was already moving in the other direction.

“Then, until next time,” he said, and the farewell was as light as if he were leaving a tavern after a good conversation. “It will not take long.”

He climbed through the palace’s broken ribs and out of the capital. His guess had been correct. Once he stepped beyond the city’s boundary, the Twisted could no longer reach to swat. The tether held; the thing’s strength failed to cross.

He rolled his shoulder to settle the weight he carried. His face stayed composed, but the sweat on his neck told the truth about fatigue. The Myst inside him had thinned to a careful line.

“You owe me for this,” he said to the Tower Master, not unkindly. “It will be an expensive debt.”

He adjusted the man’s balance across his back and began to walk.

***

“By the heavens,” Helia breathed.

She saw Ketal at the threshold and then saw the shape across his shoulders. Her voice wavered and broke into a small, unguarded exclamation that would have embarrassed her in any other room.

“Is—is that the Tower Master?” she asked him.

“Yes,” Ketal said. “Half taken by the Twisted’s stain. I do not have a clean cure yet. Seal him in a holy space. If something goes wrong, I will decide then.”

“Can he be saved?” she asked him, her eyes already bright with the grace she was calling.

“I do not know,” Ketal said.

The Tower Master had not been entirely consumed, and that trace of survival left a faint thread to follow. If the Twisted were destroyed, there was a chance the corruption would retreat. Yet chance alone was not a plan, and Ketal refused to build hope upon uncertainty. He would act without the comfort of promises.

“We will act when the problem becomes a problem,” he said. “For now—bind him.”

“Yes.”

She opened the scriptures and spoke words written for making and safekeeping, not for display. Holy power unfolded in thin sheets and wrapped the Tower Master as a silkworm wrapped a twig, laying strand over strand until the man vanished into a brightness the eye could look at without pain. When the seal held, Helia closed the book with fingers that trembled and exhaled once.

“What happened?” she asked Ketal.

Ketal gave her a clear account. The Primarch that fought in the White Snowfield had won and stepped into this world. It had eaten the Empire completely. It had not needed to coax the Empire into its mouth; the Empire had already built itself as food—no, as a shrine. The Empire had always served a being from the Demon Realm. The Twisted had only inherited a temple.

The expression on Helia’s face bent into a shape that had no name between outrage and nausea.

“The Empire served... from the beginning,” she said. “They worshiped it from the beginning.”

“It seems the Empire existed in order to worship the Abomination,” Ketal said. “How does that taste?”

‘Noisome, ’the Abomination muttered, as if someone had spilled sour milk on its name.

Helia pressed a palm to her temple. She needed a moment to steady the whirl in her thoughts.

“Then the war with Hell,” she said. “Their refusal to move. Of course. And their... keenness about matters touching the Demon Realm...”

“Also explained,” Ketal said.

She sank into a chair before her knees decided for her. He waited until she had the breath to ask the next question.

“Can you fight the Primarch?” she said softly. “Can you defeat it?”

Helia had owned the truth quickly. The strongest power on the Mortal Realm had never been on their side. She did not cry or rage. She measured, and she asked. Ketal, who admired clean lines, answered in kind.

“I can fight it,” he said. “I can kill it, but there is a catch.”

“A catch?” she said.

“It is not alone.”

The citizens of the capital had become its nourishment, their lives consumed until nothing remained of what they once were. In their place stood the apostles it had fashioned, hundreds of twisted forms born from the ruin of human bodies.

“If I use my full weight to kill the Primarch, the collateral will almost certainly break the leash that holds it to the capital,” he said. “It will thrash, and it will loose the apostles. They will pour across the continent.”

“Could you not handle them alone?” she asked, and even as she asked, she knew the shape of the answer.

“I could,” he said. “But I might burn half the world doing it.”

He looked at her and asked the question she would have to answer to herself if he did not ask it aloud.

“Helia,” he said. “If scores of Hero fighters and hundreds of highest-level Transcendents attacked today’s continent, could the continent hold?”

“No,” she said, and the word came out like stone.

It was not merely unlikely. It was impossible. The war with Hell had stripped the strong. Counting Transcendent fighters had become meaningless because there were so few to count. If the Tower Master could be reduced to nothing more than bones confined within a cage, the lesser stood no chance at all.

“The gods,” Ketal asked her. “Can they help?”

“They burned much to cast Hell out of the sky,” Helia said. “To act again on the Mortal Realm, they will need... at least a month.”

“By then it ends,” he said.

Even if he cut the Twisted down, the ruin left behind would not be undone by the return of strength. Helia understood, and understanding took the color out of her face.

Ketal rubbed his jaw in the quiet and then spoke. “Then we use a different method.”

“You have one?” she asked him. Hope and fear both lived in the question.

“I do,” he said, and the admission sounded like a man naming a distasteful medicine. He had walked through his options and had disliked the one that remained, so he had walked through them again. Yet the circle had not given him another exit.

“I know where to ask for help,” he said.

“Even if you ask,” Helia said, “no one on the Mortal Realm has that kind of strength.”

“Not the Mortal Realm,” he said.

Her eyes widened. He held her gaze and finished the thought.

“The Inside,” he said quietly. “Where the Primarch came from.”

“Ah,” she said, and the shape of the idea unfurled at once. Her mouth went dry. “The ashen-haired barbarians of the White Snowfield.”

***

“They are ignorant,” he said, nodding. “They are blunt, foolish, and proud. But they are also strong.”

Three barbarians had followed him beyond the White Snowfield, each possessing the strength of Heroes. Yet none among them had been the mightiest of their kind, only those fierce and loyal enough to walk the same path despite knowing the cost.

“By the Mortal Realm’s measure, there are dozens of Hero-equivalent warriors in there,” he said. “There are hundreds at the very peak of the transcendent grade. They can keep the apostles busy.”

“Are you planning on bringing them out of the White Snowfield?” she said. The words were not refusal—they were fear.

“It is not impossible,” he said. “The seal is weak. Even if it remains, I can tear it enough to let them through.”

“If you say it, then it can be done,” she said.

The barbarians could face the apostles. That much seemed true, and yet her expression held more alarm now, not less.

“Is it truly wise to let them out?” she asked him.

The barbarians were strong, but they were not the Mortal Realm’s allies. The three who had come out had fought the people of the world more often than they had helped them. She remembered that they had tried to kill the Tower Master despite Ketal’s order. Three had been enough to cause that much havoc. If hundreds of their kind were to rise, the strain on the world itself would be unbearable, its foundations cracking beneath the sheer weight of their power.

“There is no other way,” Ketal said.

“I know,” she whispered.

He did not look pleased with the plan either. He did not want to open that door. He did not want to owe that debt. He did not want to move his past into his present and let it set its feet. He would do it because every other road ended in worse.

If they fought the apostles, he could give the rest of his attention to the Twisted and not set the world on fire while he did it. The least bad choice was still a choice.

Helia let the acceptance settle, and with it the responsibility for what would come next. She nodded once. Ketal turned and looked toward a place no one else in the room could see. His eyes fixed on a far line. The White Snowfield lay in that direction.

“I did not think I would go back,” he said.

The White Snowfield was not part of the fantasy world he loved. It was a place that stripped away color and then stripped away meaning. It had been his prison. When he had stepped out into the world, he had promised himself he would not so much as spit toward the White Snowfield’s horizon.

However, now he had to return by his own will. He would tear others free by his own will and lead them out into the sun.

“I will have to see those damned faces again,” he murmured.