80. The Seeds of Change Descend

The Seeds of Change Descend

In a dim room beneath the center of the ruined downtown of Sanguang City, figures began appearing in groups of two and three.

Roughly half of them looked identical: the same solid build, the same muscular limbs, the same classically handsome but unremarkable faces, pale skin, black hair, and hollow eyes flickering with strange inner light.

They wore what appeared to be simple black plate armor over garments of chain, leather, and linen that clung to their bodies like a second skin. A staff and a hammer hung from each of their belts.

The more of them arrived, the less dark the room became, but the more sinister it felt.

The walls were rough granite, bearing no marks of tools or human workmanship, shaped entirely by magic.

Their uniformity felt deeply unnatural to any observer.

The underground room had an odd curvature, noticeable at a glance but difficult to quantify, until someone tried to measure the room with eyes skilled at comparing distance and proportion.

Then the source of the wrongness became clear.

The room was thirty-three meters wide and sixty-six meters long. The ceiling was three meters above the eye level of everyone present, and the floor was three meters beneath it.

That floor was where the other half of those present appeared. Unlike the Dark Masons, they were not identical in the slightest.

They wore T-shirts and jeans, leather and cotton clothing, synthetic skirts, or silk dresses. Their varied garments had almost nothing in common except that they were modern, dirty, and, after two weeks of continuous torment, ragged enough to be nearly falling apart.

All of these people shared one other feature: their eyes were dull, as if they belonged to corpses, though their owners still breathed.

Sixty-six Dark Masons stood shoulder to shoulder in a circle, one span apart from each other.

Sixty-six mostly unresponsive captives, terrified and broken by the invasion’s horrors and forced to fight for survival every moment of every day since their capture, stood before the invaders in a second circle.

Some were survivors taken in raids. Others were collaborators driven mad by their own circumstances, or people who had joined the invaders for safety and then tried to flee after their remaining sanity failed.

Aside from being human, all the captives had one thing in common: they had killed enough monsters or people to develop abilities of a certain strength.

The Dark Masons raised their staffs in perfect unison, then brought them down hard across the prisoners’ backs with dull, heavy impacts.

The invaders’ magical architects were physically strong, stronger than any ordinary human.

These particular humans, however, had grown through the conflict in several different ways, and endurance was the most common. Not one of them fell to the first blow.

Then came the second, the third, and the fourth.

None of the humans tried to run, defend themselves, or activate any ability. They were simply murdered with methodical brutality.

They stood until they could no longer stand, then silently endured the strikes of one-amo-long black metal staffs, steadily, mechanically, and with appalling cruelty, until they were reduced to crushed meat and bone.

Every blow generated power, and the Dark Masons guided that power into the ritual. Strike after strike, for a total of one thousand nine hundred ninety-eight blows.

In each pile of bloody remains, one organ remained intact: a still-beating heart, proving that despite the victims being tortured beyond recognition, not one of them had truly died.

When the beating ended, every Dark Mason dipped his staff into the spreading pools of blood.

The black iron staffs drank the blood and lengthened as the pools diminished, growing from one amo to three times that length while their color darkened into deep crimson.

Then the architects of Mavis placed the three-meter staffs against the basalt floor, raised their hammers, and struck.

With each blow, the basalt cracked, flaked, and shattered. Whenever sparks burst from the backs of the staffs, dark red liquid seeped from their tips, soaking the violently broken stone in blood.

There was no finesse or control here, only the release of violence, yet the new pattern was carved into the floor with absolute perfection.

Archon Mort’s will ran through the entire process, guiding it from afar and directing every violent action, every heavy blow, toward its intended end.

The pattern he required was not part of a prepared spell, but it was close. He modified it on the spot to satisfy his need for several additional traits.

Gradually, the grooves carved into the floor grew deeper and wider. They filled with more blood than the victims should have been able to spill and were shaped into a dodecagonal antiprism. The victims’ broken flesh flowed into it.

Except for their hearts.

The invaders collected those hearts at the center of the pattern, and the dust raised by their work gathered there on its own through magic.

There, the hearts mixed with the highest-quality oil and spirits found in the city, forming two claylike masses, each with thirty-three still-beating hearts embedded inside.

Then the two masses were shaped. They soon became tall humanoid forms, were set aflame, and left to cook in their own juices.

The blood-filled dodecagonal antiprism bubbled and churned as power was gathered within its boundary, mixed with the material inside, and transformed it.

None of them was a Dark Priest. None of them had been granted the authority to command this ritual.

But Archon Mort was.

And that was enough.

“Descend to us from the darkness that devours all things, you who are called worthless by your enemies, yet forever feared for your rise!”

Sixty-six voices shouted in the local tongue, using new words fitted into an ancient pattern, building a bridge of sympathy between different dimensions.

“Dark Lord, Crimson King, we of Mavis beseech you: turn your gaze upon us!”

Space warped more violently, buckling under a weight beyond gravity.

A crushing doom more oppressive than air pressure descended as something alien and terrible heard the call and looked upon this dark corner of the new Earth.

“Grant us the tools to spread your doctrine, the strength to protect your faithful, the means to destroy your enemies, and the ability to proclaim your holy name!”

Something invisible but real was torn from the broken flesh that filled the pattern carved into the floor.

Without lungs, without mouths, sixty-six souls screamed for the last time as something essential to their existence was taken and granted to the burning figures at the ritual’s center.

“We break the nine seals and open the sevenfold gates! The contract is upheld, yet broken!”

Suddenly, a crack, a hole, a breach appeared in the universe above the ritual, covering the entire roof.

From that howling nothingness extended the smallest and thinnest sliver of an indescribably vast being, and the entire region trembled beneath it.

“Send us your favored Seeds of Change. Reward us if we triumph. Avenge us if we are slain. If we prove unworthy, destroy us all!”

The alien fragment of that immense existence extending from the portal sank deep into Earth’s crust, while also expanding outward in a shape partially sympathetic to the room.

It formed a circle around the ruined city, sixty-six meters in circumference.