13. The Keeper (II)
The trees crowded close. They'd be at him in seconds. He had to think. He wasn't looking at the Keeper's body—he was looking at its puppets. Where was its weakness? He spotted it suddenly, so tiny it seemed a trick of light—this red glimmer in the distance that must be where the Keeper really was. But he had to wade his way through a wood army to get there. He breathed deep and shut out the prickling of panic. He tried to keep as many of them in his field of view as he could. His Chains whipped out—
He jerked; he'd had a sudden thought.
Then he crossed his arms, frowning. Frowning even as they barreled at him, dead branches stretched out like spears, angling to skewer him.
But he wasn't nervous anymore. "Am I stupid?"
He'd been caught up in the aesthetics of it, the looks. Haunted houses had always bored him, but this one somehow put a little worm of doubt in him. Now he saw these Monsters plotting up at him were really scarecrows. He felt silly.
It was because he'd forgotten to actually take stock of what was going on. And he'd just gotten that new skill. He hadn't even tested it; it was easy to slip his mind.
I'm in the woods. And I have a fire weapon.
Not even just woods. These were the most flammable kind of wood: dead trees.
…
As they rushed him he threw out his chains, high out, arching to make a broad circle.
Then the branches struck. He fell back into his usual detached calm; he was a little amused as he watched them skewer him—as though it were happening to someone else. It was like those magicians' boxes where they put an assistant in, then drive spears through. At the end the assistant always emerged unharmed.
In this case, he was disappointed but not surprised to find he was very much harmed. The branches smoldered with white essence; they went straight through him. There must have been six or seven in all. They tried to throw more but trees were big and unwieldy. They got in each other's way.
𝕎𝕒𝕣𝕟𝕚𝕟𝕘: ℍ𝕖𝕒𝕝𝕥𝕙 𝕦𝕟𝕕𝕖𝕣 𝟝𝟘%!
𝕊𝕒𝕧𝕒𝕘𝕖 𝔹𝕠𝕕𝕪 𝕒𝕔𝕥𝕚𝕧𝕒𝕥𝕖𝕕!
𝕊𝕥𝕣𝕖𝕟𝕘𝕥𝕙 𝕚𝕟𝕔𝕣𝕖𝕒𝕤𝕖𝕕 𝟚𝟝%
𝕊𝕡𝕖𝕖𝕕 𝕚𝕟𝕔𝕣𝕖𝕒𝕤𝕖𝕕 𝟚𝟝%
𝕍𝕚𝕥𝕒𝕝𝕚𝕥𝕪 𝕚𝕟𝕔𝕣𝕖𝕒𝕤𝕖𝕕 𝟚𝟝%
Right! But now they were stuck in here with him. And the noose outside connected.
The Chains lit up with blue fire, clear as a morning sky. And they tightened; it was like seeing a spark flicked on a pool of oil. Everywhere he saw dead wood burst into flame; there was a hissing, a crackling, a screaming. The trees thrashed all around him, struggling to get free, but the noose tightened further, the fire flaring hotter. Fire leapt gleefully from branch to branch; the crackling grew fiercer. Suddenly all he saw was fire, a field of blue fire, a lively ocean drowning the trees to nothing.
The trees closest to him—or maybe the Keeper controlling them—saw the problem now. The noose had clumped them too tight; they weren't breaking free; they were stuck in here with him.
The only way out was to kill him.
They turned back to him, raised their branches once more—
He yanked violently on the chains, and they all came rushing in. Bunched so tight there was no room to move; they tried wailing on him, but they could only clobber him with the blunt underarms of their branches; the points were too close to angle. He had drawn it so tight he was suffocating himself. But he was grinning all the same.
They were the ones burning.
The tall trees began to slump, crack off, break apart. Trunks split in half, branches dropped away; all that was left was heaps of smoldering ash, speckled with dying embers.
Zane stood there in the middle of it and surveyed his work, satisfied. He'd just cleared out a huge chunk—he doubled the size of the clearing.
More trees were lining up at the edges. Pouring in from all over the region. He wasn't getting a break, huh.
They rushed him again, a second wave. So it didn't matter how much the Keeper lost. It meant to keep chucking them at him until he whittled away.
The question was—who would outlast who? Sure, this Keeper had a lot of trees, but…
He swung out a Chain in a broad arc, wrapped it around the nearest tree he could snatch, made a noose. He did the same with the other Chain. Then he set both trees aflame.
The Chains began to spin. Could he stack Skills? The Chains spun faster and faster; ghostly blue fire raised the air—apparently so! It looked like one of those typhoons gathering over the Pacific, but the water was burning. It roared as only natural disasters could roar, and even just the embers flicking off it set the branches of trees ablaze.
Then, licking his lips, Zane started to run. And when he made contact with those reaching trees, they melted before him; he ripped clean through a grove, burst out the other side, turned back to find the world on fire. His torches were running out so he scooped up new trees and kept up his mad dash, spinning, vomiting gouts of fire all over. Everywhere he went, destruction followed.
And the trees gave chase, desperately grasping. They came at him in their thousands, firmed up in thorny walls, and he tore straight through them, ripping them up at the roots. Vines snatched at his ankles but charred before they could firm a grip. He saw tree after tree after tree ignite; he felt the fire burning within him, in his heart, felt something catch fire there too. He began to run, laughing, exhilarated, and all he saw were licking tongues of flame.
A grove lit all at once. A line of trees lunging for him, then falling back, bursting ablaze one by one. As he ran, he stared into that fire, that flush deep blue catching on pale white bark, again and again and again…
Wait. What was that?
There! He saw it—hidden in the fires…in that seam, the instant between when wood took the flame. A crack. A crack in the surface of the world. What was he seeing?
A strange feeling washed over him. Something he had never felt before. He stopped, and took notice.
His eyes started to lose focus; the world felt somehow like cardboard, or rather made of surfaces: he was seeing what lay beneath. As he peered into those fires it was like staring into a door nudged open just a sliver; he could just barely make out the great beyond. What was going on? He felt… very good. In an incredibly odd way.
He saw it, staring into the fire; he saw it—a revelation. He'd been struck by this feeling before; this sense of sudden realization where everything suddenly makes sense. But this was on a scale he never felt. If that feeling was a candle, his mind torched in bonfire.
Suddenly he was floating; he felt outside himself, he wasn't here anymore, not really. These things, this running, this torching, it was happening distantly to someone else. He was falling beneath it all, falling through the surface of the world. He couldn't seem to tear his eyes from the fire, the way it caught; he couldn't stop himself. He saw it: the truth beneath it all.
He'd seen this truth before. Not only in the fire—it was in him all along. His life was like dead wood, floating in empty space, needing a spark, a fight. A fire, and he ignited. It felt absurd, and yet looking at the scene of wanton arson he saw something of himself.
It was hard to fathom; he didn't understand or even really accept what was happening. Not at a conscious level. It was as though he had taken a wrong turn down the labyrinth of consciousness and gazed upon the naked face of God.
This did not feel normal.
Then the feeling swept out of him, but it left something behind. An indescribably intimate knowing, a sense of perfect stillness, of harmony.
He froze.
The wood at the ends of his chains was charred to ash, the last remnants of the dead tree army circling for one last charge. But Zane was quiet, shocked to stillness.
He felt he had just grazed something very profound. Something that lay dormant beneath the surface of the world. But he could wake it. He didn't need wood anymore.
Prometheus brought fire into this world… "Let there be light," he whispered. He raised his hands.
And the chains roared up in fire. Not the fire of the noose—this fire was so bright it was nearly pure white, burning on the steel. It didn't need to be thus; Zane knew then he could make anything burn.
𝕃𝕒𝕨 ℂ𝕠𝕞𝕡𝕣𝕖𝕙𝕖𝕟𝕕𝕖𝕕
𝕄𝕚𝕟𝕠𝕣 𝕃𝕒𝕨 𝕠𝕗 𝕀𝕘𝕟𝕚𝕥𝕚𝕠𝕟 (𝔼𝕝𝕖𝕞𝕖𝕟𝕥𝕒𝕝 𝕃𝕒𝕨 𝕠𝕗 𝔽𝕚𝕣𝕖)
It felt like he was beloved by the Universe in a way that was hard to explain. If the concept of Ignition was an object, and normal people went through life seeing it, touching it, thinking they knew it—only he knew it could be picked up. They all saw the front, but he saw both the front and the back; he saw it in its entirety, and he knew there was a handle on the other side.
All he had to do was reach for it.
Reach, and from nothing came fire.
He reached with his Chains, and the fire that burned there was special. He knew instinctively; he could feel it. It carried within it a Law. A Law that didn't need touch. To be in its presence was to burn.
He stood, panting, breathless amid a wasteland heaped high with ash. At its edges, white fire tore into the last of the wood and left nothing in its wake.
What was that?
Law… he rolled the thought around in his mind. It wasn't essence—but it seemed to amplify essence, to give it certain traits it could never have on its own. It turned his fire white. And when his chains touched soil, they left burning lines in their wake. This fire burned everything.
How had he done that? Gotten that? He was so immersed in the burning it was like they were one and the same. They were, briefly, intensely, one.
Could he do that again?
He shook his head, chuckling. He could leave this till later; the battle was done. Far out, across the barren, cracked earth, over the mounds of ash, stood a shadow cloaked in black.
Zane strode for it.
He couldn't see its face, even a few dozen strides out. When the moonlight met its cowl, it vanished into the dark. The only things he saw were two glowing red eyes deep within. There was no telling what it was thinking.
𝕂𝕖𝕖𝕡𝕖𝕣 𝕠𝕗 𝕥𝕙𝕖 𝔽𝕠𝕣𝕖𝕤𝕥 (𝕄𝕠𝕟𝕤𝕥𝕖𝕣)
𝔼𝕤𝕤𝕖𝕟𝕔𝕖 𝕃𝕖𝕧𝕖𝕝 𝟛𝟠
Let's end this.
He dashed straight for it. It whirled back so fast you would have thought it teleported if not for the trail of shadows it left; it raised its hands, pale knobbly hands, like knots on a tree trunk.
A dozen keepers shimmered into existence. Then they all shuffled around him, surrounding him. Zane leapt for one, swiped at it. It vanished. He swiped at another—then a third lunged for his throat from behind, nearly firmed its hand around his neck. But he slashed a Chain at it and it too puffed to smoke.
Enough! His Chains lit with white and he tore out a Chain Cyclone. Flares blitzed the air. The illusions vanished shrieking; the real Keeper threw its arms over its face, and the flares sputtered out on its cloak.
As the Keeper blocked, Zane snaked a Chain around its leg. It tried to run, it couldn't break free. Then he snaked the other around its throat.
Promethean Noose!
It didn't panic as the chains went right around it. Instead, it calmly reached its clawed hand for him, and he felt his heart lurch in his chest, felt suddenly sleepy.
He felt his life draining out from him, could see it on the air, this white film pouring into the keeper—
Not fast enough. Grinning, he wrenched harder. He felt something give beneath the chains, like brittle wood snapping.
𝕎𝕒𝕣𝕟𝕚𝕟𝕘! ℍ𝕖𝕒𝕝𝕥𝕙 𝕌𝕟𝕕𝕖𝕣 𝟚𝟝%
It was starting to tremble. Zane felt eyes swelling shut, but he had the bite in deep. He had it, and he knew it.
𝕎𝕒𝕣𝕟𝕚𝕟𝕘: ℂ𝕣𝕚𝕥𝕚𝕔𝕒𝕝 ℍ𝕖𝕒𝕝𝕥𝕙
𝕊𝕒𝕧𝕒𝕘𝕖 𝔹𝕠𝕕𝕪 𝕒𝕔𝕥𝕚𝕧𝕒𝕥𝕖𝕕
𝕊𝕥𝕣𝕖𝕟𝕘𝕥𝕙 𝕚𝕟𝕔𝕣𝕖𝕒𝕤𝕖𝕕 𝟝𝟘%
𝕊𝕡𝕖𝕖𝕕 𝕚𝕟𝕔𝕣𝕖𝕒𝕤𝕖𝕕 𝟝𝟘%
𝕄𝕠𝕣𝕥𝕒𝕝𝕚𝕥𝕪 𝕚𝕟𝕔𝕣𝕖𝕒𝕤𝕖𝕕 𝟝𝟘%
The notification had hardly passed when a crack louder than all the rest resounded through the grove. It came from the Keeper's neck.
The Monster hung limp.
𝕋𝕙𝕖 𝕂𝕖𝕖𝕡𝕖𝕣 𝕠𝕗 𝕥𝕙𝕖 𝔾𝕣𝕠𝕧𝕖 𝕙𝕒𝕤 𝕓𝕖𝕖𝕟 𝕤𝕝𝕒𝕚𝕟!
𝕆𝕓𝕛𝕖𝕔𝕥𝕚𝕧𝕖𝕤 𝕞𝕖𝕥: 𝟛/𝟛
𝔽-ℝ𝕒𝕟𝕜 𝔻𝕦𝕟𝕘𝕖𝕠𝕟 𝕃𝕦𝕞𝕚𝕟𝕠𝕦𝕤 𝔽𝕠𝕣𝕖𝕤𝕥 𝕔𝕝𝕖𝕒𝕣𝕖𝕕!
ℂ𝕠𝕟𝕧𝕖𝕣𝕥𝕚𝕟𝕘 𝕥𝕠 𝕊𝕒𝕗𝕖 ℤ𝕠𝕟𝕖…
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