Return of the Runebound Professor - Chapter 505 (Patreon)

Scheduling this chapter early since I'll be on a plane when it should come out. Surely I didn't screw something up...

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Yoku’s hand tightened around her mask and Spider watched her, mild curiosity in his expression. He seemed to have absolutely no idea that the thin piece of ceramic wasn’t there to conceal her identity. It was there to make sure no demon mistakenly looked into her eyes.

Any demon that knew who she was — even Belkus himself — would have averted their gaze instantly. Spider didn’t so much as flinch. Either he had absolutely no idea who she was, or he simply didn’t care. Yoku was willing to bet it was the former, and she’d yet to lose a single bet throughout the entirety of her very, very long life.

She lifted the mask away from her face but paused before she could lower it completely. And, for a brief instant, the demon that peered endlessly into the future was plagued by memories of the past.

Old faces flickered in her sightless eyes. Some of them had started to fade with age, but it even the relentless millstone of time hadn’t managed to completely wipe them from her memory. They would haunt her for as long as she lived.

There had been a time, so long ago that nearly everyone that still recalled it had long since passed, where Yoku had not possessed the Moonlight Prophecy Master Rune. A time when she had lived with her parents and brother in a small cave in the Wastes.

Yoku only possessed a single clear memory from that time.

The very last one.

She could remember the pain. The burning agony searing through her body as the Master Rune had changed her. As it granted her the gift to witness the potential probabilities of everything before her. As it gave her a looking glass into the future. As it took her eyes in turn.

It had been a cruel joke. A Master Rune that granted vision of the future had an inverse that took her sight of the present. Moonlit Prophecy had burned away her irises and left behind empty portals to the immense might stored within her soul.

If that had been the extent of the rune’s damage, then perhaps she never would have seen it as a curse — but Moonlit Prophecy was far too great a Master Rune to be satisfied with that. The immense weight of every single probable future stored within her hung like the sky itself had been propped up upon rickety stilts.

But Moonlit Prophecy’s passive had taken her sight. It prevented her from looking into the incomprehensible, shifting paths of the future with her own eyes, kept her from being forced to witness the entirety of an ever-growing universe of potential within a split second.

Moonlit Prophecy had taken her eyes to protect Yoku, but it didn’t protect anyone else.

She still remembered the look on her father’s face as his mind had melted. His eyes had gone glassy and flat, windows to an abandoned soul. She remembered her mother’s scream and the panicked confusion that had flooded through her.

Yoku hadn’t understood what has happening when her father died. She hadn’t known what she had done — but she’d learned. She’d learned when she spun to her mother and brother, only to watch the screams die on their lips as every aspect of them that made them who they were was swept away.

She couldn’t wipe the faces of her family from her mind if she’d tried. She hadn’t even been able to squeeze her eyes shut and shut the world out in darkness. Moonlit Prophecy had taken her vision, and it had cursed her with eternal sight.

No future could ever escape her sight again, and that included the one that she’d made for herself.

In all the years that had passed since that day, the pain had lessened. She had grown stronger. She witnessed the rise and fall of countless demons. She saw the mistakes they made — both in the present and in the future — and learned to avoid them.

While others rushed, Yoku advanced. One foot ahead of the other, she ground toward the inevitable future in which she was the victor. Fewer and fewer demons existed that had survived to her age. Her eyes became a tool. One that occasionally snuffed out a flickering candle that was a life, so insignificant that she barely even noticed.

But today, for the first time in centuries, Yoku hesitated to bare her eyes to the world. She had seen the most probable future that resulted from lowering the mask. It was the only one in which Spider allied with her. It made absolutely no sense.

Ever since the Master Rune had permanently bonded with her body, not a single demon had met her gaze and survived with their mind intact. At best they were reduced to mindless drones, unable to do anything but obey any commands they heard.

It had been so long since Yoku had a true ally that she could barely remember the meaning of the word. No demon in their right mind was stupid enough to dare let their guard down around her when a few moments of direct eye contact was enough to end them.

Her eyes had been an absolute in a sea of twisting probabilities and futures. But, for the first time, she doubted not just her powers, but them as well. She simply couldn’t comprehend how the future in which Spider would do as she willed was the same as the one where he held her gaze.

The moment he held her gaze, Spider’s mind would collapse and nothing would remain but an empty void. An empty shell of what had once been a demon was in no way an ally. It was just a corpse that hadn’t been told it was dead yet.

Does that mean he survives? What happens when Spider meets my gaze? Does he have a way to truly look at me when nobody else has? Will he see my strength and bend knee? Or will my Rune have no effect on him at all?

“You okay?” Spider asked, tilting his head to the side. “Did you get second thoughts about taking your mask off? It’s fine if you don’t want to. I don’t particularly mind, since I have absolutely no plans of removing my own.”

I haven’t come this far to back down now. I’ve done too much to get here only to falter. This is the future I need. The only path forward where the moonlight still shines. I will advance, just as I always have.

Yoku lowered the mask. Her flat eyes locked with Spider’s, two windows to their respective souls completely bared to each other. For a silent instant, nothing changed. Then her soul shuddered.

The immense power within Yoku connected her to Spider as every potential future unfurled itself like a garden of blooming flowers. The full weight of her Master Rune crashed down upon him, just as it had to everyone else that had ever held her gaze.

It drove into Spider, twisting tendrils of black smoke visible only to Yoku rising up from the ground and drilling into his eyes to enter his soul. The connection between her and Spider thrummed.

And then the incomprehensible weight of Moonlit Prophecy, the Master Rune that had ground the mind and soul every single demon that had ever gazed upon it into mindless mush, crumpled like a scrap of paper.

Visions crashed into Yoku’s mind one after the other. A smiling man standing in a strange, well-lit room surrounded by children holding wooden objects that sang in harmony with strange, melodic voices.

A white bed and white sheets, with arms of pale, pallid skin that matched. The shrill, infuriating beep and screech of odd, metal structures with glowing surfaces covered with strange, incomprehensible runes.

An empty room — and then darkness. Darkness and waited what laid beyond it. Yoku’s lips parted in mute horror.

Glowing bodies in an endless golden line leading through a vast expanse of nothingness. Complete and utter boredom, but more than that. There was nothing but steps.

Footsteps.

Footsteps.

Footsteps.

Footsteps.

Over and over again. Endless boredom. Time stretched and dilated, losing its meaning. It could have been thousands or hundreds of thousands of years. It was impossible to tell.

Incomprehensible pain pierced Yoku’s mind. If she still possessed control of her body, she would have screamed. Instead, she could do nothing but watch the visions drive into her with increasing intensity. Years — decades — centuries — millennia — all passed in the briefest flicker of an instant. She saw nothing but mere flickers of it, but even those were enough.

Moonlit Propehcy held every future that she could see within it, but when Yoku looked into Spider’s eyes, what she found waiting there was eternity. An existence that reached so far back through the universe that even every sprawling future she could conceive was nothing more than a blip before everything that its soul had experienced. It was like weighing a marble against a planet.

 And, as blood dripped from Yoku’s nose and trickled from her eyes, she finally understood the future that she had witnessed. She could only weigh futures against herself and he was heavier than she was.

 Spider didn’t bend knee to her. He didn’t obey her desires or become a part of her plans. There was only a single future in which she got everything she desired, and that was the one where she became a part of his.