Olryme's Arc

Chapter 10 of 10

The ruins shuddered around Olryme. Deep in the broken floor, an obelisk pushed upward — black stone laced with gold veins, a crystal crown waking with blue light. Its seals had slept under the soil for ages. Now they remembered their purpose. The air pulled tight around Nyxi and the mortal she had just filled. Nyxi felt it a breath too late. The obelisk's light struck her where she stood inside the mortal's chest. Her smile did not fall. It simply stopped. "Ah," she said. "Old work." The gold drained from the mortal's eyes. Black smoke tore out through the mortal's mouth in a long, silent ribbon. Olryme moved. They reached for the smoke, ready to bind it before it could find ground. But a woman in red stepped between them — a Blood Priestess, sleeves already open at the wrists. She knelt at the obelisk's base. "Take me," she said, and opened her throat on the stone. Her blood poured into a shallow basin that had not been there a moment before. Violet darkened the water. Blue flame leapt up from the center. The smoke that was Nyxi sank into the pond and drank. When she rose from it, she wore the priestess's body — pale, dark-haired, red-eyed, calm. The priestess herself lifted away as a single white moth and was gone. The mortal collapsed inside the ring. Across their open palms lay a sword Olryme had not made — a long blade of black flame and bright shadow, humming softly, left behind by the seal's work or the priestess's death or both. Olryme could not tell which. They knelt and gathered the mortal up. The mortal's chest rose. The mortal's chest fell. Nyxi watched from her new skin. "This body will hold," she said. "Yours will not, in the end." She turned toward the tear in the world that still glowed at the ruin's edge. "We will speak again, Olryme." She stepped through. The obelisk's light went out. Olryme stood in the quiet ruins with a breathing mortal in their arms and a sword they did not understand, and felt, for the first time in eons, that they had not been the one to decide how this ended.