[Severed Divinity] 96. Unraveling

Welco had two shadows on the upper level of Eldrassin city, where the sects resided on an idyllic grassy plane. Another two watched from the primary level, one near the base of the towering stairway, the other situated on the library roof, where the building’s lofty height provided an excellent vantage point.

In what almost felt like slow motion, six other shadows—which were all watching the wall where Devon Aran and his accomplice sat—lost sight of the Aranites, only for the shadows near the upper level to spot them. In moments, Aran had vaulted the length of the basin, pulling his follower in tow.

He landed on the stairway, fracturing its millennia old stone steps. When he bounded off, the stairs buckled in the center of the section. Instability rippled out, and like a house of cards, the monumental stairway began its collapse, magic flaring along its length as runes broke, forming a veritable light show.

There were enchantments to prevent damage to the stairs. Ones fed by the same batteries that fueled the entire city. Built to withstand combat between tier threes.

Aran was, of course, a tier four—but to shatter the enchantments with a single, seemingly lazy leap… Without any of the power of his aspect incarnation behind it…

It was numbing. Welco acknowledged the tendrils of despair worming their way into his heart. He thought he understood the general limits of tier fours after living in proximity to the queen for hundreds of years. He’d heard that Aran was strong, that as a tier three he’d killed a tier four, but everyone knew the rank gap grew increasingly steep with each tier.

The most powerful tier three might best a middling tier four, but the same couldn’t be said when pitting tier fours against the mythic fifth tier, the first stage of convergence.

As Welco watched Aran dash through the upper level, he wondered if perhaps Aran scraped those impossible tier five heights, touching on the might of nascent soul, even without achieving convergence with a cultivation core and a mystic seed.

Because everywhere he trod, his aura destroyed, utterly. Grass, dirt, boulders, structures—everything, and within a wide radius, at least a hundred feet around him. His control must have been immaculate, for his follower remained unscathed, now traipsing along beside him under her own power, a look of concentration on her face.

What really stood out to Welco was how Aran’s aura lashed at the world. Yvonne Lehal’s aura was one that exuded sharpness, but her focus was on void. On annihilation.

Aran was renowned for his enlightened approach to ruling, and later for closing off the Aran Empire from much of the outside. Legends were told of his martial prowess, always of how he defeated beasts beyond his tier and shared blood with his followers.

Very little was ever spoken about Aran’s actual power—the way he’d focused his cultivation to reach the peak.

Had Welco lived in isolation as a mage, he might not have a proper lens through which to assess the man’s technique, but Welco had spent hundreds of years building up the cultivation arts of Clan Femera. None of his cultivators had developed auras of their own, but Welco had paid handsomely to study recordings and receive live demonstrations of tier three cultivator auras so that Femera’s arts wouldn’t be a dead end when one of his cultivators advanced to tier three.

That said… Welco had never seen anything like Aran’s aura ability. It was as though the world around him were simply destabilizing, falling apart.

Unraveling.

“What is Aran doing?” Sumana Laius asked.

Even as the beast spoke, Aran reached his first destination—the evacuated shell of Clan Femera.

He’s not just wantonly causing destruction—he’s moving with purpose, Welco thought. “The emperor is… dismantling my clan,” he replied blithely.

The great beast’s mouth arched slightly wider. “Forward-thinking of you to evacuate them when you did.”

Welco didn’t grace that with a response. He was an expert at multitasking, and could easily carry on a conversation while monitoring Aran’s movements, but he found himself fully absorbed by the leveling of Femera. In an instant, the central ring scattered to the wind; the wall-less tent structures disassembled and drifted away like ash. Aran ran slowly, methodically through the clan grounds, like a hound homing in on prey. He found Welco’s mansion and the entire structure unraveled as he reached the front door. For one stunning, ethereal moment, Welco’s residence expanded out, suspended in the air, as though a repulsive force existed between every floorboard and every panel of the walls.

It revealed even the basement levels, since the ground itself also broke apart. The healing baths and their reagent-infused water spilled out, and various other storage rooms divested their contents.

And then, it all just… dissociated and unwound until nothing recognizable was left, except the un-decomposed corpse of the man Welco had killed the previous night. The Aranite tier three who had faced off against the drayavin Celavee for control of the cosmovault permitting access to Eldrassin’s palace.

Welco viewed the destruction from his shadows, and at a distance, so he saw it from two angles. That didn’t make the ruination of his longtime home any easier to watch.

It didn’t feel real.

Aran remained stationary near the former entrance to the destroyed residence, while his protégé—the woman whose name Welco still didn’t know—walked gingerly toward the revealed corpse, where it lay on a mound of mulch, naked. She knelt down and tore a section of the silken cape from her back, cocooning the man. When she stood, the cape had seemingly regenerated without any signs of being torn.

Then, Aran approached. Suddenly, there was a sword in his hand, a long, thick blade. He plunged it into the soil beside the man, then murmured something indistinct, his lips barely moving. Then, he touched the man’s swaddled form and it disappeared.

A storage device—like the cosmovault, but large enough to house a body. Truly a treasure worthy of Aran’s power.

And with that, Aran and the waifish woman turned to depart.

“He’s moving on the rest of the clans now,” Welco said clinically.

“What do you mean?” Yvonne asked.

“He’s running through them, deliberately, on his way out. Everywhere he goes, the world splinters.”

Her composed expression flickered for a moment, turning unsightly. “I must see this for myself.”

She blitzed past the Anarch, and climbed the stairs the way they’d come. Sumana Laius growled and followed in pursuit, nearly barreling Welco and Isen over. The teen grabbed onto the monster’s fur, while Welco kept pace through dint of his abilities as a shadow mage. He needed the outlet.

“Conceal me,” the Anarch demanded as they approached the surface. Welco stared dumbly for a second as he beheld the monster’s massive form, one that barely fit in the subterranean corridors.

But he recognized the opportunity—a concrete way of ingratiating himself to the monster after the revelation of his supposed betrayal. Even though sustaining the invisibility would drain him, he cast the spell.

Shrouded, the Anarch bounded from the closed-off landing and onto the surface. Random passersby nearby died instantly as it emerged, caught in the frigid chill of its aura.

It can’t control it, can it? Welco realized. Or at least, it can only lessen the strength and range of its aura to an extent. It was unthinkable for a tier four to have such little control over aura, which developed during tier three… but then again, it was remarkable for the tier four monster to have one at all.

As the Anarch leapt onto the rooftop where Yvonne stared into the distance toward the upper level, the violet-eyed elf turned to face it with contempt reflected in her eyes, her vision uninhibited by Welco’s shadows. “Can you at least see far enough to witness the destruction at hand?”

Sumana Laius growled, reverberating through the surroundings and shattering a nearby window. Chaos was breaking out around them, elves screaming as scores of people dropped and the ice crept over the walls and ground.

Suddenly, Welco felt Isen next to him, his eyes wide, the pack slung over his back frayed and covered in frost, barely hanging on. His hand gripped the hilt of a blade on his belt, the one he’d temporarily offered to Allezin in the queen’s palace.

He was hiding it fairly well, but Welco could tell he was deeply afraid.

“Good thinking earlier,” Welco said with a shadow puppet, speaking directly in Isen’s ear. It was easily drowned out by the screams of civilians.

Isen flinched at Welco’s voice, but gave him a small nod.

“We must lead him away from the city,” Yvonne suddenly said. “He’s looking for the legacy, leaving no stone unturned, starting with the clans—those with the most power and influence, and most likely to be involved.”

“That is not my concern,” the monster hissed. “You already agreed to help me secure the legacy in return for peace between the Anarchate and the Elven Lands. We should leave, now, and force the information on its location from their lips.”

Welco shuddered as the beast’s killing intent washed over him.

“I need the city intact,” she stated. “How about this—lead Aran out of the city, and the entire legacy can be yours.”

“Not even a single prototype for yourself?” Sumana Laius asked. “It is interesting, Yvonne, how little you have cared about the legacy. Almost as though you have already secured part of it for yourself.”

“Do you agree to my terms?” she asked, insistent. Welco’s shadows watched as Aran tore through Clan Jira’s mage tower. It was very much occupied, both by mages and cultivators summoned by the ringing of alarms when Aran breached the perimeter—and yet, none of their spells or abilities did anything to stop him.

Like everything in Aran’s domain, they, too, unraveled. Jira was a sect with two tier threes, one a mage, one a cultivator. A husband-and-wife duo. Welco watched in muted horror as Mir Jira tore apart, his aura only able to withstand Aran’s focused attention for a half a minute. Karalee Jira tried to approach, her visage the picture of righteous wrath, but fled soon after, leaving everyone behind while her husband disassociated. Her crystalline techniques, which focused on sharp, brittle attacks that exploded into shrapnel, as well as body hardening and reflective counter-spelling, were utterly neutered by Aran’s aura. The Jira Clan’s typical trump card against powerful attacks, magnified reflect, didn’t seem to have any effect.

“I… agree to the new terms,” Sumana Laius finally said. “But before we lead Aran away, first we must learn of the legacy’s location.”

Welco took a deep breath. He’d prepared for this moment, ever since Isen spoke about them sending the legacy beyond the city intentionally. He’d been communicating with Allezin through a shadow puppet.

They’d agreed to have Allezin hide one prototype whenever he passed by a memorable landmark, such that they wouldn’t all be lost if Allezin was discovered. Ultimately, they needed the prototypes as a bargaining tool—and if they lost them, Welco knew how precarious their position was.

No matter what, he could not divulge the locations of all the hidden prototypes. Nor could he tell them where Allezin was, though most likely, the Anarch could find him if he rallied his drayavin and monsters to the task.

It was infuriating not to have a solid understanding of the full plan. Isen had simply told them to go north to Shevenar, and they’d gone along with it, not having any better alternatives. It had been a fine course of action hours ago, but they needed further direction, and it certainly wasn’t forthcoming, not with the two tier fours so close.

What they really needed to do was split up—get away from Yvonne Lehal and Sumana Laius, and make their way to Shevenar to meet up with Allezin where they could escape.

“The legacy has been scattered,” Welco finally said. “I will tell you where the prototypes are located—they have very little use for me, personally, and I would rather them in your hands than Devon Aran’s. You should understand why I cannot tell you where all of them are now, though. They’re the only leverage I have to keep me and my own alive.”

Sumana snorted and looked to Yvonne. “This is your problem to solve.”

Suddenly, she stood before Welco. Her presence nearly staggered the mage, and she wielded her killing intent like a knife. “You don’t have a choice, shadow mage,” she murmured. Then she smiled, the expression evident even with the black bandages. “But you aren’t the one who claimed to know where they are. Isen, here, sent them away, isn’t that right?”

Isen stepped back into Welco’s chest, nudging him back.

“Yvonne, you should be asking me, not him,” Welco said, raising his voice slightly. The screams in the area were growing increasingly frantic as the city’s denizens realized the upper level was under attack and klaxons wailed, calling for everyone to shelter inside.

“I’ll ask Isen first,” she said.

Then, Isen writhed, a pained gasp escaping his lips.