Chapter Nineteen: Avarice (Part Three). 

They didn't travel far. It took all her restraint not to remove her boot and throw it squarely at Evara's head as they went. It was clear that Evara could feel the burning leer as it stabbed into the back of her head. She was unsubtle in her attempts to avoid matching Ash's gaze, hiding her face and pacing far ahead of her sister.

They came upon a vast and empty chamber. Pale blue walls reached as high as the massive temple would allow. A rainbow of runes lined every few meters, with only a few purple symbols at the corners. Strange sconces sat beneath each rune and bore a stone carved face in each, only none of the faces were distinctly human. Some had two mouths, one over the other. Some had all too large eyes, while others had no eyes at all. One wore a cruel and sadistic grin across the wrinkles on the skin that should have been a left eye, while the right flowed with stone tears.

"All magic extracts a cost. All actions have a consequence. Allow me to show you," Kana said with a deep and steadying breath. The old healer sat herself in the centre of the chamber. Her every breath echoed off the utterly devoid walls as she closed her eyes and almost looked in prayer.

"I will use a very simple magic. Champion, if you would present your spear?"

Ash drew Ser Stabby from his mount and placed him on the ground before the old woman.

Then, all at once, everything fell to silence. Not a breath echoed, not a footstep sounded and – after a disconcerting moment of realisation, for the first time in her life – Ash couldn't hear her own pulse.

Instinct forced her to pop her ears, maybe to make sure they were still there. It made no difference. She couldn't hear the blood rushing through her veins, nor the breath in her lungs.

"Tame Ignis roate. Ignis et Hevest," the old healer whispered. Then the words weren't her own, but those of the walls and sconces. Whispered words that slipped between the cracks and seams. Curses of vile death, blessings of loving life. It was not so far from how it had been when the goden had confirmed her, only much more subdued. A dozen ghosts whispered in her ears and crawled along her skin as something... powerful encircled the ancient healer.

Wisps of crimson starlight sprung and danced like the ancient fae of her bedtime tales. They wrapped around Kana and bounced from her every freckle before coalescing within her open palms.

Ash thought that might be the end of it, but it was barely the beginning. She quickly realised what the old hag had been talking about. The wisps were the magic, and this next part was the corruption.

Black veins sprouted. First, from her throat, then along each of her arteries. It enwrapped her entirely as the blackness engulfed her whole and swallowed all light that tried – in vain – to escape her.

Finally, it reached her eyes. It was as though her pupils had suffered an eternity of utter darkness, and had evolved to dilate wider than her eyes could possibly allow.

The next part forced Ash to take back her spear as she shielded her sister. The corruption exploded from the old woman's mouth as twelve massive and hairy spider legs. They writhed and clawed at the open air as though they were desperately trying to claw their way out of the old woman. Despite the fact that it looked as if only the tips of the legs had erupted out, it still proved enough to lift the old woman a meter off the ground.

Ash stood ready to strike. She was sure something had gone wrong, until she saw the flailing body of the magician clasp her hands together. The action forced away the creature and powered it down, back into her throat, where the corruption slowly vanished.

Kana returned to her feet and drew what must have been her first breath, by the vigour of it. After a moment where all stood too confused to speak, she turned to the sisters with her hands clasped as though she had caught a butterfly.

"Magic," she smiled as what she held flooded from between her fingers. It was light like they had never seen. The light of heaven's belt, only close enough to take in hand. It swarmed them like a wave at high tide. Ash floated her hand through it and felt the slightest resistance as the crimson comets crashed against her. "And consequences."

The surge spiralled back and gathered within the old woman's hands yet again. It came as an impossibly vast orb, like a room filled with nought but mirrors sealed within a ball in her hands. Infinity, sealed within glass.

Kana beckoned for Ash's spear, which she placed forth and allowed the tip to pierce the creation.

Once withdrawn, a sheen of beautifully patterned blue ice lay at the blade of her spear.

"Child, draw near," the old woman whispered to Evara. The orb in her hands flickered in an instant from its crimson hue to that of a blue so deep and vibrant, the sunset might weep at the sight from sheer jealousy. Evara's steely little eyes grew near as large as the orb as the old woman split it. In her left hand, the great creation, in her right hand, its smaller offspring. She offered the lesser to the child who held her little hands out to receive it gladly.

It floated an inch over her hands. Little liquid sparks jolted from it to her the gentle flesh at her palms, though the sensation didn't seem to hurt.

"What do I do?" Evara asked with the single shallow breath she allowed herself.

"Whatever you want... You hold in your hands, the light of creation." The old woman pulled a single strand of blue from her own orb and weaved it through the air into a great cloak of the softest fur.

"How- How do I do it?" Ev started to shake a little. It might have been fear or sheer excitement. A bead of sweat fell from her brow and scuffed over her makeup, before it dropped into the orb and burst into pure steam.

"Trust your instincts. This is magic, not science; what feels right, is right."

Evara hesitated for a moment. She held a short breath, before furrowing her brow as though she had made some obvious realisation. Immediately, she blew against the orb like a late-night candle.

The blue orb shattered into a dust finer than any sand or powder. It twirled and sparkled on the imagined wind before spinning and twirling round and around. It was a gorgeous dance between a billion little dance partners. They pranced and spun down to the ground, where they melded together into a thick trunk. They continued on, and formed another trunk just beside themselves.

Evara was not passive in this. She looked like a grand composer as she forced a killer effort into instructing the particles on their very placement. She stitched together the very fabric of life as she joined the trunks together in what came to be a torso. She carried on without a trace of fatigue as she carved a face from the air. Kana's awe grew more and more apparent as Evara worked without a single failure, nor so much as a hair out of place. She seemed somehow prouder of the child than Ash.

With a final flourish, and a final burst of stardust, her monument was complete.

A statue of a five-meter-tall knight in shimmering ghostly blue steel. A warrior deserving of legend.

"Evara... Child..." Was all Kana could manage. She seemed even more drained of breath than the child did. "The power required to create such a... masterpiece of a statue... I... Who are you?"

"Statue?" Evara repeated with a cocked brow. "No, he's not a statue, look."

She flicked a hand and robbed the warrior of his stillness. He took up his blade and flourished it before allowing it to come to rest upon his shoulder. He stood there, his massive plate torso heaving as he drew giant-sized breaths.

"Ev, that's incred-"

"-DISPELL IT!" Kana screamed. She jolted across the hall and wrapped her hands around the child's shoulders, shaking her violently. "DISPELL IT NOW!"

"Let go of her," Ash viciously ordered as the old woman continued to rattle the young girl.

"CHILD DISPELL IT!" She repeated in abject terror with absolutely no regard for the elder sister.

"Okay, okay! I will!" Ev said as she pulled away from the crazed old woman. She raised her hands as to take up some instinctive action, but she was too late.

There was a screaming. Simple and quiet, not quite human. Closer to the sound of a boiled kettle. That was what came first, anyway.

"It's not working," Ev quietly realised. She repeated some strange action in a much more frantic way, but received the same result.

"The runes, quick!" The old woman cried. She rushed to a torch mounted against the entrance and lit the first carved sconce. The rune above it quickly lit with a vibrant golden glare. It was not enough.

The pale, almost transparent, blue of his armour shifted to a much darker and more sickly tone. The metal bubbled and popped while the warrior screamed in mouthless agony. He seized and shook like a man possessed by some violent illness. He creaked and writhed while his body burst into spores of black bile.

The legs, which she had realised were nought more than fingertips, burst from beneath his helm as his chest exploded into a visceral mess of tentacles and sharp little hairs.

The body of the knight became nought more than an inconvenience to the creature. It spread out far, its legs reaching from wall to wall and roof to floor. What had been Ev's creation hung limply from its oozing neck while it stood upon the legs of hellspawn.

The sickly and plagued green and black legs stretched as though they had been crammed within the knight for a decade or more.

"Get behind me," Ash ordered. Ev ran to her sister's side, but the healer was too stuck by horror to edge away from her single lit sconce.

"Ash?" The little sister whispered.

The creature seemed to hear the plea. It decided upon its final form, and burst the body of its little warrior. A thousand, thousand rotating eyes all battled to get a glance of the vile Champion. The noise it made might have been a laugh, but it drained at her very soul.

"Light the runes... I'll deal with it," Ash spat.