Chapter 36
After six hours in the Crucible, I started to feel pressed for time. I trusted that Lily was unlikely to use her knowledge of me or this place in a way that would harm me, given she could have already done so anytime since she overheard my conversation with Rose. However, that was only for now.
She hadn’t kept quiet to protect me, but because it served her interests. In a way, that’s even more reliable, but I didn’t know enough about Lily to confidently claim things would stay this way. Hell, after what she’s experienced so far, she might immediately try to screw me over the moment we left the Crucible.
So what were my options? It would be up to The Watcher whether she stays here forever or not, so I can’t count on abandoning her here. One morbid option would be to intentionally torment her with our remaining time to a point that she loses her mind and returns as a mental invalid. It’s not pleasant, but it an option I could employ if needed.
It would be great if I had studied the topic of devils in detail, but I only had a layman’s knowledge of them. I knew they liked contracts and pacts, but I had no idea how they were made or how I could abuse them. Besides, everybody knows only an idiot tries to outsmart a devil when it comes to making a deal.
“”
I clutched my chest and breathed out slowly. A sharp pain had struck my heart as I was lost in thought.
“What’s wrong?”
Lily, who had remained as close as possible at all times, put her hand on my back as I doubled over.
“Just a troublesome passenger.”
“Huh?”
I did not elaborate, but I was referring to the black parasite coiled around my heart. I still had not learnt what it was for, possibly a failsafe to kill me if I became a threat to the Primordials?
No, that seemed unlikely. If it ever came to that, they could just send Poggy, and I’d be done for. I naturally assumed it was placed there by The Watcher, which meant I had a piece of two different Primordials inside my soul. And yet, neither could seemingly communicate with me.
“Hey, Rex, what’s that?”
Lily called me out of my thoughts again, and I followed the direction she pointed.
In that colourless world, a shining ray of crimson light descended into a pit at the bottom of a downward slope made from countless bodies, their flesh picked clean. It looked like a staircase to the afterlife, the kind of thing anybody should avoid.
“Dunno, let’s go look.”
The pain in my heart subsided as I looked at the sight. I decided to trust in my instincts and brazenly walked into the pit.
“Wait for me!”
Lily ran after me, she was clearly not happy about it, but the alternative was waiting outside alone and defenceless.
“I wonder if something made this…”
I mused to myself.
“Anything that could survive long enough to create a den must be a big deal, right?”
“...If that’s what you think, why would you make me come down here?”
Lily cautiously checked down every side passage as I walked without pause, going deeper into the darkness with each step, the crimson light did little to aid my vision.
“None of your business.”
We continued downward, but no matter how far we went, there were no signs of life. Lily continued babbling to ward off her ever-growing sense of unease, but I had long filtered her voice out.
I was no longer satisfying idle curiosity or relying on a faint feeling of relief as the constriction on my heart loosened. I was being pulled along by an undeniable call. One that could not be heard with the ears, but felt in the bones.
It was similar to the feeling that arises when death is imminent. That screaming sense of self-preservation that sets your hairs on end and sends a shiver down your spine.
It was a feeling I was all too familiar with. I knew that whatever was waiting at the bottom of this path would bring death, but it was the fact that this feeling existed , in the Crucible, where death was but a momentary thing.
There had to be something more to it, some reason this intense feeling of impending doom radiated from so far. Some reason it called to me. Some reason it felt almost comforting.
“R-Rex, I think we should leave…”
Lily couldn’t understand it the way I did. She felt only the terror of something unknowable coming to end her.
I stopped. Not because of her words, but because I felt I had reached my destination.
At my feet lay a human skull with antlers. That is how it would appear to the imperceptive viewer, at least. The structure was slightly off, with none of the usual holes or gaps, except for the eye sockets, which housed two sunken black pits of flesh that bore shining ruby lights within.
The skull rose slowly from the floor of decay, bringing with it a towering body of twisted black roots tangled around a fractured skeletal system. It was vaguely humanoid, but when fully revealed, it hunched over and rested its two freakishly long hands on the round, sitting like a beast. A tail of pure white bone coiled around like a silent threat and rested near my feet.
It grinned at me. No, its skull was permanently contorted into a malicious grin of razor-sharp teeth.
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I heard the panicked footsteps of Lily sprinting back the way we came. She was too terrified to give voice to her fear and reacted in pure instinct, seeking survival in the only way she could.
But I didn’t turn, and I heard her footsteps abruptly stop soon after anyway.
The beast crept towards me and lowered its head to meet my gaze. Its teeth clacked together as it took deep rasping breaths through its nose. It was smelling me.
Then, the mouth hung open, and a long black tongue dangled out. I was reminded of the creature that killed Hans. This beast had many similarities, but seemed far more…
It reached a single finger towards my heart, then recoiled and looked me over with renewed interest.
“Lost soul.”
It spoke with a voice that rattled my mind. Alternating between high-pitched growls and a deep, rumbling speech, it was a voice that would haunt the nightmares of even the creatures of the night.
“Come.”
It strode past me and rose to stand on its digitigrade legs, rising even further above me. I followed its movement and saw it approaching Lily, who had frozen in place with a look of terror on her face.
This was the same thing I experienced once before. The Watcher had frozen time around us.
The beast wrapped its fingers around her torso and lifted her. With its tail and spare hand, it began expertly carving something into the ground. The bones broke and splintered as if they were glass as this monstrosity pierced through everything to complete its work.
“Stand.”
It pointed to a circle, and I stood there as commanded.
Its work continued, and I realised what I was looking at.
An impossibly complex spell circle. One that was being overlapped and connected to yet more circles. This was at the level of an archmage.
It crushed Lily’s body slowly, and as the blood flowed out from her gaping mouth, the beast used her motionless body to paint out the runes within each circle.
It was a messy final product. In the world of spellcraft, accuracy was crucial. This kind of brutal mockery of the art form had no right to function in any capacity.
And yet I could tell that it was a functional spell circle.
The beast finished its controlled brutality and dropped Lily’s rigid form into the centre. It then stood opposite me in another circle of its own.
“Die now. Through blood and death, you are bound.”
That horrific voice spoke to me again, and before I could react, its tail shot across the gap and pierced my stomach.
I collapsed, bleeding out not far from Lily. Just before my vision faded, I was surrounded by an intense red light and wrapped in a feeling of warmth and piercing pain. I saw Lily’s eyes still frozen in time and thought she was the lucky one.
***
We awoke not surrounded by death, but in a quiet, warm tent. Lily was back to her usual self, and we were both appropriately clothed once more.
Tiara nuzzled up against me as I rose from my bedroll, and I lifted her to my chest, quietly scratching her chin.
As I tried to make sense of what happened, I felt something squirming beneath my flesh. I removed my shirt and looked down.
“W-what did you do?”
Lily woke up at that moment and caught sight of the mark on my chest, then in desperation, she pulled down her own collar, revealing a similar mark above her breast.
Mine resembled a skeletal snake forming a ring around a skull with antlers. Hers looked like thorns coiled around a heart.
Her eyes widened, and she lunged at me, pushing me back down into the bed. She spoke in hushed whispers, aware of the others sleeping just outside but still desperate for answers.
“How did this happen? Undo it! Undo it or I’ll—”
Suddenly, both our markings throbbed. Mine gave off just a mild warmth, but Lily must have felt something different as she buried her head into my chest and gasped for air.
“Y-you… How could this…”
“What is this?”
I cut her off. I was less interested in her apparent self-pity and more invested in finding out what she knew.
“Don’t mess with me. You know what this is.”
“I don’t. Just tell me.”
As soon as the command left my lips, she shuddered and immediately responded with uncharacteristic diligence.
“It’s a command seal. Warlocks use them to gain control over infernal beings, but there are conditions. You should not be able to force one onto me. There has to be a sizable difference in our strength and will, and you would need to subdue the target beforehand.”
“Could it be done by a third party?”
“Impossible. The spell is already hard enough to pull off as it is. If you did it for someone else, it would require a spell sequence so complex only the emperor himself could pull it off. Besides, why would anyone go through so much effort just to bind an infernal being to someone else?”
She didn’t remember anything that happened after time was stopped. Naturally, she wouldn’t know what that creature had done or why. Even now that I knew what spell they cast, I couldn’t make sense of it.
Did The Watcher command it? But why would they want me to have power over a devil? Just to set my mind at ease by making it impossible for her to betray me? Was there something I was meant to do with her power?
“Hey, I told you what you wanted. Will you free me now?”
“Dunno how.”
She looked at me with wet eyes, a mixture of fear and hatred behind them.
“Look, I seriously didn’t do this. I couldn’t undo it even if I wanted to.”
“Damnit… I can’t believe it turned out like this…”
She closed her eyes and rested her head on me again, this time breathing in slowly as she came to accept reality.
“Oi! Come on out, you two lovebirds!”
Gustav’s voice rocked us from our confusing moment.
“I’ll keep your secret, you keep mine.”
I pushed her off and changed into my armour and robe. She went out ahead of me. As my mask returned to my face, I stepped out to see Lily being lectured for not waking up the next watchman.
“Ahaha! Soooorryy!”
She responded to the criticism with her usual levity and waved happily to me as I emerged.
“Hey, lover!”
“What the hell are you talking about?”
I joined the group and stood next to her.
“No need to be shy, everybody already knows.”
She clung to my arm and fluttered her eyelids up at me. She was truly remarkable as an actress to behave this way so soon after it seemed her world had been turned upside down.
“Knows what? What crap did you feed them in the three minutes it took me to get dressed?”
“She snuck off into your tent and remained there the entire night, she didn’t need to us anything.”
Leon commented dryly.
“Look, kids, I get it. The hormones, being in close proximity to each other in high-tension situations, these things happen. More power to you. But at least wait until someone else has taken over your watch, we were left open for a good couple of hours there. Lucky that Fred needed to ‘water the plants’ and noticed something amiss.”
Frederick scowled at us like we were vermin he caught in the act of defecating in his room.
“See, Rex? I told you we didn’t need to hide our love.”
Lily stood on her tiptoes and breathed onto my neck as she spoke. I needed to come up with a convincing lie to stop this train before it arrived at the station.
“It’s a misunderstanding. Lily just came to ask me to scare off some spiders while she took a dump.”
Lily’s smile froze, and she looked at me with dead eyes.
“Right, Lily?”
I tapped my chest and smiled back at her.
“Yeah… that’s what happened.”
“Then why was she in your tent in the morning?”
Gustav raised an eyebrow.
“She left her coin purse behind.”
“I was just going back to get it when you all made a fuss. I couldn’t resist playing along.”
Lily backed up my story on her own and jingled her coin purse as if to demonstrate she was telling the truth.
“Oh… well, sorry for the embarrassment…”
Gustav scratched his head awkwardly.
“Anyway, the fishermen friends already left, it’s high time we went our own way too.”
We loaded back into the caravan, Lily sat by my side this time, with Meztili opposite us.
“I told them it wasn’t what they thought.”
Meztili spoke up first.
“They didn’t believe me when I brought up all the times Lily has snuck into our rooms before.”
“Thanks, Tilly.”
I responded.
“Why not just let them believe it? Don’t all boys want others to know they lost their virginity?”
Lily tried prodding me again, but she shut up immediately after my response.
“I’m not a virgin.”
In fact, everybody went quiet.
