Leon’s injuries were barely healed before he took off from the dunes toward the mountains nearby. The quaking wastes told him that something massive was coming, and while he was strong, he wasn’t yet ready to challenge something unknown that inhabited such a hostile place as Arkhnavi was turning out to be.
The mountains were close, and though bereft of any dirt or plant life, Leon still sought some measure of shelter within the stones. Without his ability to fly, however, it was slower going than he’d have liked, as the gray dust beneath his boots was unstable, making every step laborious, and all the while, the quaking grew more and more intense.
He’d made it halfway to the nearest mountain from where he’d made landfall when he realized that he wasn’t going to make it. A single glance behind him showed something beneath the surface of the dusty dunes plowing through straight toward him, coming with such speed that escape would be impossible. The dust kicked up by whatever this was, however, screened it from view, though it didn’t stop the sounds of its bone-shakingly deep shrieks from filling the air. The cacophony chilled Leon to his very core, tapping into primal fear buried beneath his skills, power, and confidence.
But this fear wasn’t debilitating; despite the darkness magic that inundated the air, Leon still had control over himself, so he kept his feet moving in the direction of the mountain even as he drew Iron Pride. Every step he took, especially with his strength vastly increasing his speed, gave the tau pearl more time to heal his injuries—and they were already almost completely healed, he could hold Iron Pride with only some slight pain.
As the creature surged behind him, Leon could feel the vast dunes beneath him shaking with greater and greater ferocity, making it harder and harder for his boots to find purchase. He already knew that he wasn’t going to make it to the mountain, but it seemed he wouldn’t have enough ground beneath him to make a stand.
He took another glance behind him, finding that the creature was now so close that the dust it threw up as it plowed through the dunes was like a wall towering so high above him that he could barely see the black clouds. He had perhaps a few seconds before he had to do something, and his options flashed through his mind in an instant. He, unfortunately, had few to consider.
His first was to try and keep running for the mountain and hope the creature didn’t reach him. He ruled that out immediately.
His second was to turn and try and fight whatever this thing was. Its aura towered as high as the dust it kicked up, but from what he could sense through the dark and the gloom, he felt like he could take it. It seemed ninth-tier, but given the magic polluting the air, he didn’t quite trust his senses.
His third option weighed heavily upon him, tempting him greatly; he could snap Ambrose’s silver twig and return to Aeterna. However, he’d only just arrived in Arkhnavi, and while things looked awful here, he couldn’t be sure if that was true everywhere. He hadn’t even yet tried to do what Ambrose had asked of him, and while it wasn’t something he wanted to do in general, he still felt it was his duty to try and keep going.
So without any further thought, Leon skidded to a halt in the loose dusty wastes, turned, and leaped into the air directly into the dust cloud that this creature was throwing up. His lightning magic surged through him, pushing the darkness around him back several dozen feet. Iron Pride seemed to sing in his hand, the Adamant itself ringing with joy as his magic power flashed through it, and the Iron Needle in the handle seemed to hum along with its tune.
The creature’s shrieks intensified as the dune beneath Leon exploded upward, a beak-like thing larger than the largest ark Leon had ever seen erupting upward toward him. It was covered in slimy black skin, and the interior of the beak was filled with millions of silken threads, each one filled with enough power that Leon knew he didn’t want to be entangled within. Despite the enormity of the beak, Leon could tell that the vast bulk of the creature remained buried in the wastes.
Without hesitation, and with the beak snapping up toward him, he swiped downward, packing as much power into the swing as he could. A wave of lightning illuminated the sky as enough lightning to fry a small army spewed forth from Iron Pride. Leon was gratified to sense the darkness in the air parting before every silver-blue bolt, and then to see the creature’s beak snap shut and pull back as the bolts fell into its open beak.
A hellish shriek filled the air, more terrible than any he’d yet heard, hitting his eardrums like needles as he reached the apex of his leap and began plummeting back to the ground. Leon ignored the pain, trusting in the enchantments in his armor and the tau pearl to keep him going through anything, and fired off massive bolt after massive bolt at the creature as it pulled its beak back down into the dunes.
When he hit the dust that covered the ground, the creature had fully retreated below the surface. It moved slower now, not shifting through the dust so violently that it created a dust storm, but he could still feel it moving around him, circling at a distance as if watching him warily. He didn’t know how badly he’d maimed the creature, but he took quite a bit of comfort in having done enough damage to make it wary.
Unfortunately, this also meant it wasn’t mindless. Whether by instinct or by intelligence, it recognized him as a threat and was reacting fairly appropriately, and that made it infinitely more dangerous than a mindless monster.
[WHAT IN THE HELLS IS THIS THING?!] Leon bellowed into his soul realm, not thinking he’d get much of an answer, but hoping at least for a response.
[Unknown,] Xaphan calmly responded. [Run.]
Leon didn’t stand there posturing for the creature and instead took Xaphan’s advice and sprinted for the mountains again. Cover from this creature that swam through the dunes and the tiny promise that the light he’d seen held spurred him onward, and he didn’t relax a single degree until his boots landed upon stone instead of dust, and even then, he kept going. The creature was still out there, dogging his heels, and he felt that if it sensed an opportunity, it would strike again. But it stopped as he reached the edge of the mountain, and as he jumped and climbed higher, he threw a few additional lightning bolts backward into the dust as an explicit threat.
Strangely, the dust exploded as his bolts hit, but didn’t vitrify. His bolts made no glass in the dunes. Whatever the dust was, it seemed even in the intense heat of a lightning bolt, it wouldn’t melt.
Leon shot up the mountain, only stopping once he’d reached an open area close to its jagged peak. There, he stood near the edge, watching the dunes shift as the creature shrieked and swam about. From that vantage point, he could tell it was immense, easily dwarfing even what he’d heard about the Horned Serpent Jormun had transformed into.
But it seemed unwilling to leave the dunes, so after letting his adrenaline wear off a bit, Leon shifted his gaze to the environment.
To the south, the black storm continued to rage dozens of miles away, with nothing but dunes between him and it. He could see nothing but the waves of darkness that violently surged over the entire horizon. The dunes extended further north and east as far as he could see, with only these solemn rocky peaks to his west breaking the monotony.
[Hey, Xaphan,] Leon said as his body slowly calmed down, [have you any idea what in the hells is going on here?]
[Suspicions…] Xaphan crackled. [I need to observe more before I can say anything with certainty. All I can say with confidence is that nothing we’re seeing is… natural. Someone, or something, did this. The plane wouldn’t have descended into such darkness on its own, especially not with a Planar Lord as powerful as a Grave Warden to watch over it.]
[Keep me updated on anything that occurs to you,] Leon replied.
With a sigh, Leon began examining the peaks themselves, looking for that tiny light he’d seen from the sky. By his estimation, it was only as large as a magic lantern used for illuminating an average room, but it had stood out as the only bright thing he’d seen so far on the entire plane.
Now, though, he couldn’t see anything, even as his eyes swept over the mountain where he thought he’d last seen it.
‘Where there’s light, there’s people,’ Leon reasoned, and with no other lead to go on, he moved deeper into the mountain range.
He attempted to fly again as he moved, hoping to push enough darkness back that he could use his elementless magic to get a good grip on himself, but even as it avoided his lightning, the darkness clung to him like grease, and he could never get ahold of himself.
‘Flight’s out, then, until I can find someplace safe to experiment…’ he bitterly thought to himself.
So by foot he slowly made his way through the mountains, jumping and leaping through the rocky crags at speeds that would make a mortal’s head spin, yet were practically crawling compared to what he was used to. Eventually, though, he moved far enough away that the creature’s shrieks were rather quiet in the background, and he found himself on one of the tallest mountains in visual range. It was about halfway up this particular mountain that he thought he saw the light.
It didn’t take too long for him to explore the mountain, and find a relatively large, flat section of the mountainside where the light had been. It rose and fell to the west and east, respectively, while the south side of the flat area sharply dropped off a cliff and the north side sharply rose into another one.
Most of the mountain was rough and rocky, but the cliffs here were smooth, though not without a few dents and divots that told him the flat area had been cut from the mountainside rather than formed naturally. So he examined the cliff face, hoping to find anything at all that might tell him where the light had gone.
Unfortunately, he wasn’t able to sense any kind of magic within the stone that was different from the surroundings.
He was about to break out a few spells he had prepared for such occasions when he heard a few pebbles tumbling down the cliff behind him. He spun around and found someone standing there, staring at him in wonder. Leon’s guard immediately went up; he hadn’t sensed anything about this stranger before becoming aware of his presence, and that rang all of his alarm bells.
The stranger was a man, tall and broad-shouldered. His skin was pale orange, though not the same as someone with a bad tan; rather, it seemed like that was simply his natural skin tone. He had no hair, though his eyebrows were dark and bushy. He had a hard face without a shred of fat, with defined cheekbones and a square jaw. His eyes were green around the pupil and pale purple near the edges of the iris and softly shone with inner light. He wasn’t particularly well-dressed, with ragged trousers, bare feet, and little more than rags struggling to cover his torso, which Leon noted wasn’t excessively muscled, but still well-built—and rather well-scarred, too, painting the picture of a man used to violence.
Finally, and most notably, he had the aura of a ninth-tier mage, though it was subtle and difficult to sense amidst the air, polluted by whatever dark magic still filling the air and clinging to Leon, preventing his taking flight.
As Leon met the man’s gaze, his expression turned from one of wonder to something more guarded, and when he spoke, his words were in no tongue known to Leon. Leon wasn’t sure how to respond, though, and he stared at the man for a long moment contemplating his words. When Leon didn’t immediately respond, the man’s demeanor began to shift negatively and Leon felt his aura flare with power.
“Wait!” Leon finally shouted, giving the man some pause. “I apologize, but I don’t speak your language! I can’t respond to what you’re saying!” Given the way the man’s brow furrowed, Leon could tell that he couldn’t speak the common language of Aeterna, and so any expectation Leon had of an easy time communicating died then and there.
The man said something again, this time in what sounded like a third language, and Leon deeply exhaled before reaching into his soul realm. The man reacted poorly to even this slight exertion of Leon’s power and threw himself back, nearly right over the edge of the southern cliff.
Leon froze and held up his hands in a placating gesture. This man was powerful enough to surely be someone of importance, so if anyone had to know what happened on Arkhnavi, it would be him, and Leon didn’t want to make an irreparably bad first impression. The man didn’t go over the edge, but he gave Leon a searching and deeply distrustful look as he stood upon the cliff.
With considerable caution and doing his best not to startle the skittish mage, Leon retrieved the giants’ Rumble Stone from his soul realm. He’d learned how to use the thing from Rakos, so if the man allowed him to, then he should be able to both instantly teach the man his language, and the man could then use it to teach his language to Leon.
Leon smiled in what he hoped was a comforting gesture, but Xaphan quietly observed, [Keep that look on your face and he might just throw himself over the edge to end the suffering you’re inflicting…]
[Not now, demon,] Leon retorted. To his shock, the man’s eyes narrowed, and a frown appeared on his face as Leon and Xaphan had their exchange.
‘Can he… sense Xaphan?’
Whatever was going through the man’s head would remain a mystery until they could communicate, so Leon concentrated his magic on the Rumble Stone, using his relatively weak command of darkness magic to impart his knowledge of the common tongue into the Rumble Stone. As soon as his aura shifted with the change in magic, though, the man’s eyes widened in shock and terror and he shot off the cliff as fast as a bolt from a Lightning Lance.
“No!” Leon shouted.
[Look at that, you drove him away and he couldn’t even understand a word you said,] Xaphan quipped.
[NOT NOW, DEMON!] Leon repeated in frustration as he leaped after the man.
They fell into the rocky valley separating the massive mountain from its smaller neighbor, and when the man noticed Leon falling after him, he twisted in the air, punched outward, and shot five thin blasts of brilliant white light from his knuckles that arced through the air toward Leon.
Leon sensed an immense amount of power packed into each one, but not so much that he didn’t have options to deal with them. His working theory was that the man had been startled by his use of darkness magic, though, so he settled on one defensive measure that he hoped would instill a little trust.
A shield of light conjured by Clear Day’s pearl snapped into place, and each of the five beams of light splashed harmlessly across it.
The man scowled and twisted again to land with athletic grace. His body then flashed with light and he shot further into the mountain range, moving faster than Leon could blink. Were it not for Leon already flooding his body with lightning magic, he might’ve even lost track of his—hopefully—future ally.
Once he landed, Leon bolted after this skittish survivor, his body blazing with silver-blue lightning before which the darkness in the air parted like mundane ice before his black fire.
Sensing this, the man only redoubled his efforts to escape, and for all his speed, Leon struggled to keep pace with his quarry; the man clearly knew these mountains far better than Leon did, and as he ran, his power sank into the stone his feet touched. Leon learned to avoid those patches when once exploded when he got too close, and another morphed into hands grasping at his feet, slowing him down.
After several minutes of chasing, the man finally darted into a cave, Leon still in hot pursuit. However, before Leon reached the cave, the edges of the cave mouth began to shut like the jaws of some terrible beast only masquerading as a mountain, though Leon could sense it was the object of his pursuit that was to blame.
“NO!” Leon shouted again. “WAIT!”
His words fell on deaf ears, if they fell upon ears at all, as the entrance of the cave slammed shut in his face.
[Ha,] Xaphan humorlessly grunted. [Should’ve practiced your earth magic more, human.]
Leon halted in front of the shut cave mouth and reached out with his senses, while saying, [Xaphan, you’re lucky I’m not jumping in there to give you a good smack right now. Thank this guy when we finally find him.]
[Doesn’t seem like that’s going to happen,] Xaphan cracklingly responded.
Leon resisted the urge to shout in frustration; his magic was practically bouncing right off the cave mouth, which now looked like any other bit of mountain save for the efficiency with which it rebuffed his power.
But he clenched his jaw and got to work. He may not be that skilled at earth magic, but that didn’t mean he was helpless in this situation. He was going to find that man, and when he did, he was going to force a way for them to communicate into his head, morality of the act be damned. He could ask for forgiveness once he could actually ask for anything at all…
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