Unbound-Chapter Nine Hundred And Sixty Four – 964

The Echo of Noctis was unraveling.

Flesh split like an unspooling thread and its blood geysered into the air—yet the Echo’s empty face only laughed. Felix hurled Fiendstone platforms forward, hemming the creature in, but it glitched beyond them, throwing itself onto the Precision Mines that exploded amongst the Moonbeasts.

“Hey!” Wendell cried. “Get off my bombs!”

The Echo roared in pain, and more pieces of it whispered away, torn into the sky in thready chunks. A cacophony of bells, deep and brassy, nearly knocked Felix from the air.

Another golden thread had snapped.

There aren’t that many left. Felix pushed his Perception across the Echo’s shifting form. The one constant, the Omen Door at the center of its chest surrounded by enormous moonshards. Another one of those dropped, crushing a beast a hundred feet below.

Stop The Echo, Scion.

“What do you think I’m doing?” he snapped.

Wasting Time.

Felix bared his fangs. The Beast wasn’t wrong. Everything he was doing was just buying time—and it wasn’t working.

Fiend! I’ll Remove This Foul Anchor And You Will Face My Might, Untethered!

The Echo shoved a twisted hand into its own chest. Those threads kept its claws away from the Moonshards that surrounded the Omen Door, so the creature instead dug into the slick meat of its side, snapping bones and rupturing bulging organs. The Echo screamed, ejecting a river of ichor from its busted folds. It’s arms bulged, multiple limbs flexing into one another until they congealed, vascular and bulging as tendons stuck out across its inhuman neck.

With a wet, crashing snap its claw tore sideways and out, through its own chest.

Multi-cast!

Sonata of Domination!

Astrum Ascendence!

A Fiendstone cage shaped around its limb, trapping it against shoulder and chest. Felix fed the spell, flaring the song of them together until cold fire burst across his hands and forearms. Fiendstone spread, snapping across its wrist and waist, until even the Omen Door was coated. For a moment, it worked. The Echo was frozen in place, its bulging muscles straining ineffectually against his powerful shaping.

Felix wasn’t done.

Magus of the Grand Design!

Sigaldry scored the stone, lit with red-gold as fractal shapes spread like fire across kindling. An array of binding locked into place, lashing sigils and glyphs together with a sound like crashing bars and the turning of an immense, immutable key. Felix flared his Sonata, pouring more of his Intent into its patterns as he funneled a deep chill across the array, and the sigaldry soaked it right up. Ice snapped across the Echo, a brutal frost that stilled its slick shadowflesh to a sluggish crawl.

The Echo's empty face pivoted to Felix, slow and menacing. Chains. You Nym Are All The Same. You Cannot Face Us Free.

“I don’t plan on it,” Felix managed, his Will and Intent stretched to their limits as he held on without ripping the Echo apart.

It swung its head, trying and failing to hurl its Body forward. Remove This Obstruction! These Threads Are An Affront!

"I didn’t do this to you!"

Liar! You Walk The Broken Path, Stealing Power That Is Not Yours! The empty face twisted in a way that Felix couldn’t only describe as a sneer. We Know Your Mind, Felix Nevarre! I Have Known It Since The Moment You Betrayed Vellus!

Oh Beloved! Where Have You Gone?

Felix blinked at the mood shift. “Vellus betrayed me.”

More Falsehoods. When She Fled Screaming From Your Jaws, Fiend, I Was The One To Soothe Her Wounds. I Listened To The Song Of Her Memories. I Heard Her Warnings. The Ones You Cast Aside.

“She tried to make me her Vessel," Felix snarled. That betrayal still stung, all these months later. “What about that was helping me?”

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She Told You. Trust Is In Short Supply Among The Divine.

Felix recalled his first real meeting with Vellus, stitched across a memory of his childhood home. She had been a horrorshow and her words had been cryptic at best, but it was true: Vellus had told him not to trust the gods.

The Echo twitched, but the ice held it fast. My Beloved Is Ill. Has Been Since The Nym Befouled Our Compact. Her Words Are Misleading—

“What’s the Compact? Is it similar to Ouranic Law?”

To Felix’s surprise, the Echo sighed. There was fury brimming over its Spirit—enough to extinguish a city—but a thick strain of bitter regret clouded its concerto. It was as if sanity had filtered back through its insane Mind, at least for a moment.

My Beloved…She Fought Against It.

“Against what?” Felix didn’t expect answers from the Echo, but the words leaped to his lips regardless. It didn’t matter what he said. As long as he could keep this thing talking, he could extend their time in the Omen Door.

Empty face turned up at him and Felix stared down the barrel of it. She Fought Against Us All.

Felix lowered himself on a tether of lightning as explosions ripped among the frozen Moonbeasts. Wendell, the Claw, and the giants were hard at work stripping the field of minions. “Tell me more. Why’d she fight you?”

To Save Us. The Echo laughed. To Save Us!

The speck of stability he’d heard was washed away in a flood of conflicting emotions. Too many to count, they were as powerful as an erupting volcano. Fiend! She Would Have Empowered You! Saved This World From Its Ruin! All It Would Have Cost You Was Your Will!

Felix pulled back, disgusted. "She wasn't trying to help me, she was trying to help herself."

All Of Us Are Selfish! That Is How Creation Works! Authority Is Not Meant For The Weak! It Is Meant For Those Who Know How To Dominate All Others.

Anyone Else Is Unworthy Of Its Mantle.

"People deserve to live, they have a right to it."

What Right? Who Gives Them This? The Echo’s laugh was cold and cruel, slower now that ice crawled up its throat. We Are The Divine, And We Grant Them No Such Clemency

"Oh, shut up!” Felix snapped. “Authority doesn't come from you. Thieves and tyrants—everything you hold is stolen. You're not gods at all. You just figured out how to hoard the most."

The Echo hissed, its head recoiling. You Know Nothing!

"You stole from the Cardinal Beasts, I know that much! You parceled it out across all eight of you, claiming a rule that wasn’t within your Authority.”

Eight. It laughed. So Foolish. Blinded By Hate And The Systems Lies. Authority Is A Pathetic Promise. So Easily Corruptible.

"Is it?" Felix asked. "Because so far, everyone has to put so much work into bending Authority to their Will. Your tyranny is exhausting you. You're here as a shell of your former glory because every wrong move has a price. Every choice has a consequence. Your reign, your tyranny, is unnatural. Unsustainable. Look what I've done in a little over a year. Look at how I've grown. Not at the expense of other people, but because of them."

You Are A Child Given A Sword. Dangerous To Everyone, But Himself Most Of All. You Ape Our Mannerisms. You Seek Our Power, But You Do Not Know The Weight Of Their Responsibility.

You Know Not The Heft Of Ouranic Law.

"No, I don't. And neither do you anymore." The echo, if it had eyes, would have blinked at him. It recoiled, a sudden clear shock washing through its tumultuous Spirit. “I’m right, aren’t I? Your Authority is gone.”

It was a guess, but Noctis power had been stolen. It stood to reason that the laws binding it would have vanished as well. Before him was a true echo; A shadow of a shadow.

I AM FREE!

Felix grunted as his Fiendstone cage shook. “You’re really not. And you’re not Noctis either, lady. The Goddess of the Night is dead.”

NO! It hurled a single hand upward, and Felix flinched, his Skills already mustering, but the appendage merely unraveled, shooting skyward into ever-thinning tendrils before it punctured the black clouds. They parted, burst aside in a circular spread to reveal a daylit sky.

But…It Is Night…?

"Your moon's been destroyed.” Felix shouted over her outburst. “Your power's been taken. The night is broken."

Oh Vellus. Oh Beloved. Who Will Shelder Your Madness Now? There was such an ache in her Spirit that Felix almost felt bad for her. Almost.

And he almost missed the Moonbeasts that rushed the Echo's position. "Wendell! Incoming!"

"On it!" The twenty-foot lizard ran through the frozen creatures nearest the Echo, shattering them with shoulder, sword, and snapping jaws. He plowed straight through and into the lines of enormous monstrosities that had formed at the edges of their battle, each twice the size of the Lizard. “Here! Take this!”

He swung his swords and explosive lines slashed through their ranks, scattering shadowflesh and moonshards alike. Chunks of the beasts hurled away, and the guy all but halted the horde in its tracks.

What he missed, however, were the others. They had crawled up the Echo’s back, long serpentine abominations studded with more moonshards than any others. They wrapped across neck, chest, and shoulder, sinking their strange limbs into the folds of his Fiendstone.

Sonata of—!

All at once, the Moonbeasts exploded.

VELLUS!

Fiendstone shattered, raining down across the ground. The shards of the Moonbeast's tearing through his shapings like wet clay. Its chest and arms were freed.

I Will Return To You, My Beloved!

Its arm pressed forward, and golden threads stretched and snapped. Moonshards fell.

The Omen Door…cracked.