Chapter 191: Corruption (Patreon)

My flames, guided by Śuri’s control, shriek back through the bridge with a deep, unsettling rumble. I do my best to hold back the heat from hurting Leal and Grímr, but the intensity is almost too much to deal with. Even with Yalun doing most of the work, Śuri’s flames are just something else.

The grand elder can use my own flames and make them so much hotter and more efficient than I could ever hope to achieve. The explosive thrust he provides is unmatched by anything I’ve experienced. Even without the excessive weight that is Grímr and Leal, I couldn’t come close.

These two came with us at my insistence, and now they are the ones in the most danger. They already have to deal with the corruption clawing its way through their bodies, and now they have to suffer under what must be excruciating heat from my elder’s flames.

I’m determined to ease their troubles the only way I can right now. The falling barriers trying to close us in; the explosive water rapids closing around us; and the surreal piercing ring of an eye dispassionately glaring down on us, I shut them all out of my mind. Only one thing is important right now: limiting the heat.

This mental state is not something I’ve achieved often, nor is it something I enjoy doing, but right now, I’m not about to half-ass it.

My sight cuts out. I’m not sure whether I literally can’t see, or my focus is so narrow that I simply cannot register anything visible. Next, all my other senses cut out besides the only important one; I still need to feel the heat to block it.

My thoughts stifle, and my control becomes entirely dedicated to the mass of heat ahead of me, the dim heat beside me, and the dim heat below me.

I place a wall.

Anything on this side becomes cold.

It doesn’t work.

A bubble around dim heats.

It works… until it doesn’t.

I’m forced to bring some focus back to my thoughts. With me and Yalun working together, we can only slow the rapid increase in temperature experienced by Leal and Grímr. For whatever reason, Leal is not coating herself in her usual shroud of water, so she is in far greater danger to this heat, even if she only experiences it for a few seconds.

My ethereal flames, while able to stop both Kalma’s decay and the green eye’s influence, cannot halt the propagation of heat any better than my normal fire.

A hard focus isn’t enough to put a stop to the growing heat, so I need to think of something else. I send a thought to Śuri through my flames, trying to get him to cool it down a bit, but he refuses instantly. Too focused to give reasoning, he simply continues to rocket us forward.

This would all be fine if Leal could protect herself, and now that I’m out of my hyper focus, I can see her try. The markings across her body stutter and die each time she activates them. It’s the corruption. The green otherworldly glow has infected not only her feet, but has climbed rapidly up the tattoos to her knees.

Each time Leal initiates the glow of her markings, the infection intensifies in return and climbs ever higher.

What do I do? If she doesn’t shroud herself in water, then Śuri’s heat will burn her to a crisp in moments. But doing so only encourages the spread of something far worse.

Grímr’s wings and the thrust applied have kept us far from the flooding water, but can we use that to cool Leal? I can’t ask Grímr to take a dive right now; at our speed, that would be the same as slamming into the metal barrier rapidly closing ahead of us.

An idea pops into my head, and while I despise the thought, I don’t hesitate. With the hottest flame I can achieve, I blast the water below. The white flames immediately vaporise plenty of the deadly liquid and engulf us in steam. I tug my inner flame from the flamethrowers a moment before connecting with water, but the vapour rising still inflicts pain through the rest of my fire.

Yalun gives me a sour look, but upon seeing Leal, sighs and joins me in boiling the water.

Already hot steam isn’t the greatest to cool Leal down, but it does the job of blocking the brunt of the heat coming from Śuri’s fire. I watch the molten remains of the shutter and much of the metal around our exit from the bridge as Grímr tears out of the island before the barrier can close.

Grímr skims the water and tears a chunk out of the metal, but we are outside.

Śuri’s jets don’t let up, though. Our acceleration becomes bearable and the temperature drops to something more manageable, but he continues to thrust us away. The drain on my energy is not at all insignificant.

The cloud cover is thick, and the rain is heavy, but that means nothing to the eye. Much of the island’s surface must permeate with corruption, as the green ring that stares into our core with venom is now a kilometre wide.

It is so obscenely massive that a laugh bubbles out of my throat despite the terror. The eyes of both other Titans were massive, but neither could have been more than a hundred metres wide. Titans are many kilometres tall; how big does this creature have to be to have an eye almost as large as a Titan itself?

Maybe the eye is its full body… but we saw those green clouds moving as if to its will. The green clouds which reached to the endless horizon of the other world.

Thankfully, the being appears stuck on the other side of the window. Its influence in our world is limited. We can fly away without fear of it following us, even if we do need to find a way to remove the growing corruption from my friends’ bodies.

The poisonous green eye trembles, and a deep rumble groans out from the island below. Each geyser doubles in strength, blasting ever more water into the air. The metal below buckles in places, shattering in others, only for ever more water to pour out from sections clearly not intended to be geysers.

The damage and increased water pressure are not limited to what we can see. The eye begins to lose its whole. Fractures all along the metal window to the other world accumulate, splintering sections off the eye.

Already dark clouds around us thicken. Falling rain only pounds down harder. Because of Śuri’s insistence to use all my energy to push us as far away as possible, the island rapidly fades out of sight, and soon, so too does the eye.

Finally, with some breathing room, I turn my focus to Leal and Grímr, who still suffer from the infection spreading along their bodies. Leal has stopped activating her markings, which has stopped its spread along those tattoos, but it simply bleeds into her body from the new heights.

What can I do for them? Do we amputate? But Leal can’t regrow her legs or arms like an áed. I don’t want to leave her crippled until we can find a mage like Imiha. The types able to heal are supposedly incredibly rare.

Each moment I contemplate, the corruption spreads further. We won’t make it the day without it consuming their bodies, no less finding someone that can actually help. I’m the only one unaffected by the spread, so I’m the one that has to figure out how to help them.

Why doesn’t the green energy affect me when it clearly does so for each of the other áed? What is different about me than others of my kind? The answer is obvious; the changes the Void made to me. Conversations with Yalun paint a certain picture, despite her lack of finding the true difference in my flames.

Combine that with the Void Fog appearing on the other world — even if only briefly — and I have to assume that is the only reason I can hold back the spread. As something tied intricately with the changes made by the Void Fog, my ethereal flame must work… but that means doing something I’ve been hesitant for a while.

“Leal, Grímr, I’m sorry,” I say as my only warning before plunging my ethereal flames into their bodies.

I’ve known I could do this for a while now, and I’ve tested it by placing my flames either in my friend’s fur, or the surface layer of skin, but have never gone beyond that. In a way, it is like Kindling, only it will hardly feel as comforting to them as we are not of the same race. As intrusive as it is, pushing my ethereal flames through their body would be the same as that fire mage from a while ago trying to take control over my flames.

Leal gasps at what must be an uncomfortable and invasive sensation. My flames slide along her inner organs. I can feel her heart, lungs, and stomach all twitch at the touch of my fire. Heat doesn’t pervade her — I won’t allow it — so her inner temperature doesn’t change, but the sensation of her organs being touched is clearly uncomfortable.

Grímr doesn’t have anywhere near the same reaction as Leal, but that shouldn’t be surprising because it’s not actually his body my flames permeate.

Not wasting time, I spread my flames away from their chests to their limbs and press against the corruption. It works… at least somewhat. I stop the spread through their bodies, but I cannot burn through the infection. All I can do is compete with the energy. Hold a battle to an impasse within the body of my friends.

“What was that?” Leal shivers. It’s hard to hear her over the roar of wind as Grímr shears through the air.

“Sorry,” I apologise again. A shield of flame wraps around us, calming the screaming air. “The spread should be stopped, at least.”

“That, was an Anatla Monolith.” Śuri seems to misunderstand her question… or maybe I was the one who did? “Nothing else in the old texts fits.”

Anatla? They’re real? So Kalma’s doomsday warnings weren’t just the cries of a madwoman?

No. Just because she knew about the Anatla, doesn’t mean she is right about the end of the world. But… with Titan-like beings like that, it doesn’t seem as farfetched as before.

“What do you know about the Anatla?” I ask. Now, with some separation between us and the island, it is apparent that the green storm is limited in what it can influence in our world. If not, none of us would still be alive. The very fact that there is a window into its home means that our worlds aren’t completely separate. Is this what Kalma meant by the barrier collapsing?

“Nothing more than conjecture,” Śuri says. He’s stopped borrowing my energy now that we’re rocketing away from the island at a pace far greater than Imiha’s assistance brought us. “It’s a record from before the great tragedy. I thought it was just another story to inspire fear of the outside of our wastelands, but that…”

Śuri trails off as he stares ahead. He steps forward until balancing on the alicanto’s neck and drops the flames shielding us from the intense winds.

“Grímr, turn south, now!” He urgently shouts over the roar of cutting air.

My portian friend sweeps his wings immediately and we curve ninety degrees to the left. Śuri’s flames nudge me again, requesting my energy even as he uses his own to reignite the jet behind us. I’m tempted to deny him, simply because I’m unsure of the cause of his urgency. Aren’t we already away from the island? Relenting without opposing him, I let him convert my capacity to physical flames again.

I know physical flames are the most energy inefficient type of fire, but he’s draining me far too quickly to be comfortable. What has him so stressed?

Once Grímr’s wings balance out, the ocean to the west comes into view, and not only do I understand, but I push more into our thrust myself.

After the rapid waters flowing out from the island rise into tsunamis — which seem far further away from the island than before — they collapse again, falling into an immense downward spiral. I cannot see far through the downpour, but the ocean dips into a slope not unlike that of a mountainside. It’s like I’m watching the edge the world and all the water has no reason not to flow as rapidly as it wants into the abyss below. If there is another side, it isn’t visible.

But that isn’t the worst part; the ocean edge is moving. It moves toward us, quickly consuming the section where waves can form and engulfing the flat rapids blasting from the island.

“What is that?” Yalun asks for me, her talons digging into my head as she shrinks herself again.

Śuri doesn’t answer immediately. He stares down at the approaching abyss for a long minute. While he does so, I open my hood momentarily to let Yalun in before blocking it off from the weather again. When Śuri lets out a sigh of relief and cuts off the flow of my energy, we all follow suit, even if the edge is still approaching below.

“That is the Titan. Thankfully, it’s not coming for us.” He points back, where the sinking ocean moves toward the island.

Really? A titan, now? We just finished escaping that Anatla. What sort of disasters will we need to face as we try to escape now? Whether Śuri is right or not about it not coming for us, I’ve experienced enough of the Titans to know they don’t need be aware of our presence to inflict deadly disasters.

Though strangely, as we continue to fly, nothing disastrous hits. No slamming gusts. No titanic waves. The sky doesn’t even fall. Unless you consider the storm that pelts us, our flight away from the falling edge of water is almost pleasant.

“Are you sure that was a Titan?” I ask. It looked dangerous, certainly, but Titans always leave devastation in their wake. Escape from a moving Titan can’t be this easy.

But Śuri nods with more surety than I expect. “The last time I was foolish enough to think of it as anything less, I paid for it.”

Well, I’m not about to complain about getting away without issue. Whether it is a Titan or something else doesn’t truly matter. I’d love to say we all got out unharmed, but the corruption in my friends barely being held back by my flames is not something I can ignore.

It is disappointing that we couldn’t stop the island from pumping out more water, but it has been doing so for a thousand years, I’m sure we can wait a thousand more to figure something out.

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