"M-my name is Dr. Demetrius Tepes... I was born in Bucharest, the capital of Romania, when I was a boy, I was sent to the most renowned school for alchemy. I was a model student, but I hungered for more than the knowledge held within its walls.”
A cough took him and he spat bloody phlegm onto the floor. “Throughout my life, it has become my sole desire to conquer death, to remove the limitations placed upon us… t-to play god if you want to say it that way."
"I-I believe I have found what is needed for me to be able to walk amongst those in the divine realms” He stopped pacing, turned to face the camera. “I will travel the cosmos learning the knowledge that each world has."
Demetrius crossed to the far wall where a velvet cloth covered something the size of a man's fist. His fingers shook when he pulled the cloth free. The ruby sat in its iron cradle, big as a heart and roughly the same shape, it had golden flies etched into its surface that seemed to buzz with power. He could hear the hushed murmur of its power. Thousands of souls crammed into a stone the size of his fist. Unstable didn't begin to cover it.
"This," he said to the crystal, "is my legacy. Everything I have sacrificed and refined, every soul I've claimed. I will use this to ascend beyond the limitations of mortal flesh." His lips cracked when he smiled.
Tepes stepped over a puddle of waste and crossed to the generator rig. It was old and ugly. He could admit that. He lifted the ruby with both hands—careful, careful, his fingers were so bloody thin now—and slotted it into the cradle at the center of the rig. It clicked into place. The murmurs got louder.
Then he turned to a stasis tank that contained a boy who was held in suspension gel, thick and amber. He was naked and strapped to a steel frame inside the glass. He was no more than eighteen years old, give or take.
“With the flesh of my flesh and blood of my blood I shall transfer my soul into the body of my last living descendant.” Tepes pressed his palm to the glass. "You won't remember any of this…"
There were tubes running into both of his grandson's arms, and into the base of his skull. Wires connected a metal cap that was drilled into his shaved head, trailing back through the gel and out through sealed ports to the transfer array.
He limped to the control panel and powered the upload sequence. Script flickered across the display as knowledge poured into the boy's mind through the wires attached to his head. Tepes sat on a stool watching the sequence.
He crossed to a steel slab that had been tilted. It was fitted with its own crown of wires and copper leads. Demetrius lay himself down on the slab. He fastened the straps across his chest and legs with shaking fingers, fitted the cranial extraction ring over his own skull, and tightened the bolts until they bit into his temples.
"Fly Catcher," he said. His voice came out dry and small. "Initiate Fly Catcher."
The Tesla coils screamed to life, red energy splitting the air between them in jagged arcs, and the ruby blazed brightly. Power surged from the generator toward the stasis tank, cables thrumming fat with current, copper fittings glowing cherry-red. Tepes gritted his teeth against the vibration that rattled through the platform and into his body, he tightened the cranial ring one final turn, and felt it cut into his skin.
There was a sound like a whip cracking as a cable snapped, sparks fountained across the floor, catching paper, catching spilled chemicals. The generator bucked as arcs of electricity ripped free from the containment coils, tearing through equipment, through glass, through the air itself.
"No—" Tepes tried to sit up. The straps held him.
A surge hit him full in the chest. His body convulsed, and he felt something tear from within…
He was ripped free of flesh and bone and dragged screaming through the wire and the light toward the ruby. He couldn't breathe. He didn't have lungs anymore. He was inside the stone, crushed against thousands of other screaming souls, the ruby was beginning to crack, fractures racing through it, the golden flies splitting it open and consuming each of them.
Broken bits of red stone peppered the ceiling as the ruby exploded, its power. Every soul, every stolen life, vomited outwards in a single wave of destruction that tore into the tank shattering the glass and spilling the amber gel to the floor.
The boy's body seized, every muscle locking rigid, the golden flies burned themselves into his skin working their way up his arms, chest, face, and neck each etching lines of fire that ate their way inward. His flesh fell apart. Consumed by the golden marks spreading across him until there was nothing left, only a shape made of red ethereal light swarmed by golden flies that buzzed and burned and ate.
This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.
The overload tore through the building like fire through dry wood, stone crumbling to powder, iron melting, everything Tepes had built was collapsing. The corpse on the platform turned to ash. The workbench, the recording device, the stacked plates, the rat droppings… all of it gone in seconds, consumed and ground to nothing.
Where the laboratory had stood, there was dust and char and silence.
The boy's soul winked out and was gone.
He tried to move his fingers but they wouldn’t respond… he tried his legs and was met with the same numb feeling. They were just sacks of flesh hanging below him, numb and useless, as though the connection from his brain to his limbs had been cut somewhere around his shoulders. The only thing that seemed to work was his pain receptors, and that worked beautifully.
he told himself. He'd had one like this before… not this exactly, but close enough. Sleep paralysis. That's all this was. He opened his eyes enough to see blurred outlines formed within his vision. He could see his pale and split wrists. There was a silver knife sitting on the tub's rim, its blade smeared dark from tip to handle.
He tried to push himself up… but his arms gave out the moment he put weight on them, pain screaming up through his wrists, he slipped and fell back into the water, his mouth filling with the bloody filth. He choked and using his elbows he heaved himself up, his head breaking the surface of the water.
He walked out of the bathroom naked and freezing. Finding himself in a connecting bedroom, with a massive bed and a fireplace that had gone cold. There was also a desk and a full-length standing mirror. He saw his reflection in the mirror… he was lean, and pale with a sharp and handsome face if you ignored the dark smears of blood across his cheeks. His wet hair hung over his forehead in long wheat-blonde strands.
Ivan stood dripping on the stone floor and let the pieces fall together. The last thing he remembered was sitting at a bar drinking a pint with his friends. The only thing he could think of came from his obsessive reading… hundreds of web novels consumed in his apartment until his eyes hurt and the sun came up in the morning. He'd read about it a thousand times.
His chest tightened. He clenched his jaw until his teeth ground, drew air in through his nose, held it, forced it out. His wrists throbbed. A hallucination didn't feel this real.
There was an open notebook sprawled on the desk, its pages covered in messy handwriting, and beside it an ornate glass jar filled with ink so black it ate the candlelight. The ink was bubbling. A slow, lazy roil, like something was alive at the bottom of the jar.
His bloody finger touched the page… the ink was still wet. Ivan’s skin began to prickle as he felt the air around him thicken, he could hear whispers in it. Ivan jerked back from the desk, his wet feet slipping on the stone floor. There was something in here with him.
“Who’s there? Show yourself!” His voice came out cracked and shallow.
The jar , black ink and pale fire twisting upward in a column of hellfire burning the notebook to ash, within the flames a serpentine eye began to form. A single massive eye the size of his fist, its surface covered in pupils… hundreds of them. All different sizes, all swiveling and contracting and fixing onto him at once. Bat-like wings spread from its back as it shot forward.
Ivan threw his hands up just as the eye demon smashed into his face, its wings hugging his head, its hundred eyes pressing against his face… he grabbed at it, his fingers scratching against the membrane of its wings, pulling, tearing, but it did not come off. He could feel it burrowing through his skin and bone and eating its way deeper until it was gone entirely.
He stumbled to the mirror. His blue eyes, bright and uninjured, were looking back at him filled with terror. There was nothing there. Ivan stood in front of the mirror, naked and dripping, but he was alive.
Floating next to his shoulder was an ethereal pen… It was made of dark metal and had dozens of tiny golden flies engraved across its surface. It had a pair of bat-like wings and a ruby tip that dipped, and moved on its own, scratching gold script into the air beside his reflection. Letters formed from nothing, hanging like embers, each one burning itself into place with a soft hiss. The gold script hung in the air beside his reflection.
He stood dripping blood and bathwater onto the cold stone as he watched the pen finish writing.
You have begun the path of the Pendragon
Pendragon: The nature of the pen is to inscribe the nature of beasts. What beast will you become?
Pen: A Soul-bound magical item that is uniquely shaped by your soul.
Feats: Reaper: Extract the spiritual nature of a dead spirit beast or Pendragon.
Feats: Inscribe: Using Spiritual Ink you may permanently bind a spiritual nature to one of your empty sockets.
Feats: Record:
They hung exactly where the pen had placed them, angled toward him and him alone, bright enough to read but casting no light on the walls or floor. He could see them in the mirror too, only reversed, floating just past his shoulder.
He reached for the words. His fingers passed through the gold script the way they'd pass through smoke, except there was no heat, no resistance, nothing at all. His hand slid through empty air where the letters burned. He tried again, slower, watching his fingertips enter the floating text.
It reminded him of a heads up display. He'd played enough games, watched enough bad sci-fi, spent enough hours in VR rigs at the university lab to recognize the concept even when it was built from magic and floating gold text instead of pixels.
The pen waited patiently, the flies on its barrel sparkled in the candlelight and, for a moment, one of them looked like it twitched. Ivan focused on the word
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