Return of the Runebound Professor-Chapter 700: The Night’s Shadow

Lorne’s head jerked upright as he found his fingers tightening around the stone armrests of his seat. His back was stiff. His skin prickled with goosebumps. And, for the first time in hundreds of years, the litany of screaming voices in his head had gone silent.

Wretched clarity drove into his skull like a lance. It wormed through thoughts that had long since been ripped to shreds and pulled them back together forcibly. Memories flashed through his mind in a hazy blur as the tapestry that he had torn apart with his own hands pulled itself back together.

Everything ground back into place. Lorne’s mouth slithered up his arm and re-fastened itself into place on his face. His eyes readjusted and suddenly both found themselves looking at the same thing. The bones in the leg he’d put on backwards snapped in their haste to re-correct themselves, but the damage healed before he could even register it.

And for the first time in many yesterdays and more than a few tomorrows, Lorne’s mind was perfectly and utterly clear.

He hated every second of it.

“This,” Lorne said as he rose from his chair, displeasure etching itself into his features like a chisel taken to stone, “is most displeasurable.”

The only other occupant in the cave, a guard standing near the doors, spun toward him as his eyes went wide in awe and horror. He dropped to his knees instantly, slamming his forehead into the ground so hard that there was a resounding crack.

It was a long second before the man let his head lift once more. Blood dripped from an open wound on his forehead and reverence burned in his eyes.

“You have found yourself. Forgive me. I did not expect you to come to awareness so soon. It is much earlier than your previous prediction. Many of the tasks you set before us are not yet complete. I beg your forgiveness.”

The man’s name supplied itself to Lorne — and he didn’t like that much at all. His memories were being far too helpful. That was an ill omen. An ill omen, indeed.

“Jaxon,” Lorne said. The name was a bad one. Lorne didn’t much like it. It sounded too much like one that a child who fancied himself a warrior would give his dog. He did, however, rather like the man to whom the name belonged. His memories told him that he did, at least. Lorne just wasn’t so sure he wanted to listen to them right now. “How long has it been?”

“Ninety four years,” Jaxon replied after a moment of thought.

“Six years early,” Lorne said. His lips pursed. He wasn’t supposed to be this aware yet. He did not want to be this aware yet. Getting awareness of his own existence was generally an incredibly uncomfortable experience. That was doubly true when he was early. There was absolutely no way that every single part of him would have decided that now, of all times, was a good time to start thinking straight again.

And that meant something had woken him up.

Lorne cast his senses outward. He didn’t expect he would have to have to look very hard. Anything with enough power to rip him from his self-imposed sleep and drag him back to cursed consciousness was not going to be difficult to find.

He was correct.

The offending presence met his thoughts like a hot spike. It was composed of several swirling storms in the distance, spreading to rapidly cover massive portions of the experiment he’d been poking around in for the past few years.

Each of the storms was individual, but they were all part of the same whole. They were all perfectly concentric and without flaw. There wasn’t so much as a single errant wind in the lot of them. They were perfectly trimmed. Perfectly flawless. Perfectly manufactured.

Lorne hissed in displeasure. They were disgusting.

“The Night’s Shadow is roused,” Lorne said.

Jaxon’s eyes widened. “It has woken?”

A thought lurched within Lorne like a bucking horse. The seams of his consciousness shuddered. The delicate balance that had been so rudely thrust upon him were starting to split and tear. He wouldn’t retain his thoughts for much longer. They had places to be, after all. Keeping them contained to just one body was cruel.

“Not yet,” Lorne replied. “My grasp on reality is too tenuous. I was woken by the monster’s stirring, but it has not yet fully woken.”

“What should we do? What are your orders?” Jaxon asked, rising back to his feet. A thin river of blood ran down from his forehead to trail along the side of his nose on its way toward his lips.

“You will continue as you were,” Lorne replied. He walked back to his chair and sat down in it. Something sat ill in his stomach. The world would be far worse off if the Night’s Shadow awoke. It had been sealed away for good reason.

His plans had not accounted for the ancient monster returning. Then again, his plans rarely accounted for much at all. Everything was far more fun that way — not to mention it was impossible for anything to go wrong when there was nothing that had to go right.

It is too early for me to be spending energy worrying about problems. Especially ones that are not yet my own. But the Night’s Shadow wouldn’t stir on its own. Somebody is poking around where they shouldn’t be.

I do hope they’re smart enough to keep it properly bound. I will be most displeased if I have to suffer one more millisecond of logical thought than I have to.

“Understood,” Jaxon said, giving Lorne a sharp salute. “We will obey your orders.”

“Or don’t,” Lorne said. “I really don’t care. Life isn’t meant to follow a direct set of steps, you know. There’s no purpose to life beyond living. Just live.”

“I will do as you say.”

Lorne suppressed a sigh.

Jaxon was missing the point. But most people did. He supposed he couldn’t complain too much. After all, in a few moments, he wasn’t going to care. Not about this, and not about anything. He felt himself splitting apart at the seams once more. His existence couldn’t tolerate extended stays together, especially when there were far more interesting things to be doing.

Did you know this text is from a different site? Read the official version to support the creator.

He would come back together when the time was right, and that time was not now.

Still, I do hope that there’s something left of the Empire when I wake up again. I had some interesting experiments I wanted to check on.

If someone was powerful enough to prod the Night’s Shadow… then they have more knowledge than most. And there’s only one reason that someone like that would ever prod one of the Avatars of Order.

It seems somebody is trying to figure out how to become a God.

***

A Formation sang into being around Noah as he built it layer by layer. He’d never used Unstable Pandemonium to create a Formation before, but it had all the elements from his earlier runes within it — and he wasn’t all that concerned about blowing himself up at the moment.

Really, using new Runes for older Formations wasn’t as insurmountable of a task as the texts Noah had read led him to believe. It was very doable. The process required a much steadier hand and an extensive understanding of the medium he was working with, but Noah was pretty sure there was only something around a thirty percent chance of killing himself.

You know what, maybe that’s why people didn’t like it. I suppose most people don’t really fancy the idea of killing themselves one in three times they try to call on their magic.

His thoughts were drifting, but Noah couldn’t help it.

He needed the distraction.

The very world around him was trembling in fear. As he layered pieces of his Formation down over each other, preparing the most powerful magic that he could possibly bring to bear, everything trembled.

Tree branches shattered and were torn into the air by the intensifying maelstrom. The forest creaked, groaned. Night swallowed the sky and snuffed the sun in its pitch black cloak, leaving not even stars to glint down from above.

The only light to see by came from the worsening white vortex far above. Something was coming. Something terrible.

And the world knew it.

Noah gritted his teeth as he fought to keep his Formation from falling apart. He poured power into the song around him, binding the magic together with every note. Noah let Sunder’s magic weave through the pattern he was creating. There were no delusions in his heart about his chances in the fight.

He was outclassed. But if he could strike first, if he could catch it off guard, perhaps he could get a good blow. One that gave the Night’s Shadow enough pause that the others would have time to escape. Even if he managed to get the monster’s whole attention, Noah just had to hold on for a little.

It doesn’t matter if I die. It matters how I die.

The vortex cracked. It bulged. Pure, unfiltered magical energy pressed against it. Something was breaking through.

Noah readied himself. Determination set itself into his jaw and his hand danced faster still as it pulled the string of his bow across his violin in a humming blur. Music coiled around him like a massive serpent readying itself to strike.

The moment it grows near, I’ll try to cut it with everything I have. That’s the best chance I’ve got at hurting something like this.

The vortex shattered.

From within it arrived the end.

Massive could not have properly described the enormous tendril that poured free from the jagged white hole in reality. It was as wide as a city block and had a pointed, triangular tip like that of a squid’s head. There wasn’t even a way to tell its length — it just kept pouring out from the portal without any seeming end in sight.

The tendril was the pallid gray of a long forgotten tomb. It was riddled with enormous, oddly shaped holes that ran throughout its entire length. They came at every angle and ran all the way through it, crisscrossing through each other.

And then the screaming started.

Like thousands of damned souls all crying out at once, the horrible sound tore across the Scorched Acres without mercy. It pierced into Noah’s ears and carved into his mind like a physical blow.

He staggered, missing a note of his Formation as his consciousness trembled. But the screaming had only just begun. It continued to tear through the forest, only growing louder as the tendril coiled out through the air.

Noah forced his hands back into motion. He couldn’t let his Formation falter. The sound of the screaming was so loud that he could barely even hear his own music over it, but he didn’t need to hear. He just had to play.

The screaming grew louder still. Noah’s Formation trembled under its assault. Trees cracked and shattered as they were torn apart from the sheer force of the sound waves. The ground shuddered, split apart to form growing chasms all around Noah.

The tendril lazily extended through the air, reaching toward something in the far distance. With that movement, the screams shifted. Their volume and pitch changed — and a loud crackle of storming white lightning traveled down the course of the Night’s Shadow. It wove in and out of the holes like a slithering snake of electricity before carving out into the air around it.

A horrifying realization drove into Noah with such force that he nearly lost control of his Formation for a second time.

The sound he heard wasn’t just some mere screaming.

It was coming from the holes riddling the Night’s Shadow’s length. The entire monster was like a massive instrument. Every time it moved, every time the wind passed through the holes, the screaming changed.

This wasn’t just the monster announcing its arrival to everyone that dared be close enough to listen.

It was music.

Music on a stage that the world had never seen.

The Night’s Shadow was an entire orchestra.

Noah’s domain prickled. Something pressed against his soul, but he pushed back instinctively. The trees in the Scorched Acre were considerably less fortunate. Loud cracks split the air as their trunks begun to change.

All around him, the blackened trees started to turn gray. Wood changed its form to turn hard and stonelike. The trees begun to melt from the inside out, rivulets of what had once been bark now running down their lengths like hot candle wax and leaving gaping holes throughout them.

And then the trees too begun to scream.

The sound drove into Noah’s ears like a pounding drum inches away from his head. Blood trickled down the sides of his skull and his Formation trembled along with his soul.

Gray spread across the ground like moss, swallowing dirt and turning it to stone. The entire forest was being twisted and warped into a reflection of the Night’s Shadow.

It was horrifying and beautiful and terrible all at the same time. The notes were alien and foreign, but now that he had realized the truth, there was no other way to change it. This creature created song just as he did — but at a scale far greater than Noah had ever imagined. It had turned the very world into its instrument.

Noah’s domain prickled. Out of the corner of his eye, he spotted a Slasher that had been unfortunate enough to be caught within the monster’s song. The lower half of the creature had already turned to solid, hole-covered stone.

It thrashed desperately to no avail. The entire creature had been turned into a monument within just seconds. Rivers of its own stonified flesh poured down along its body, leaving screaming holes in their wake.

He could still feel the Slasher within his Domain… but it was changing. Within moments, the monster was no longer what it had been a moment before. The Night’s Shadow hadn’t just warped the monster’s body.

It had changed its soul.

The Slasher wasn’t dead. It still lived, somewhere within that twisted tower of dripping stone that it had now become. But the being within the stone was no longer the Slasher. It may not have died, but it had been warped beyond recognition.

And if the monster could change the Slasher’s soul, it could change his as well.

A chilling realization drove into Noah with such immensity that it could not be ignored.

If this thing corrupts me…

My gourd won’t be able to do anything. I won’t have died.

I’ll just be gone.