Chapter 53
Varis turned toward Kian, eyes burning like molten gold, his godlike flesh swollen, leaking rivulets of dark blood. Kian’s gaze widened as he realized that he could see an ethereal, silver radiance flooding into Varis from all directions. Some hitherto unknown part of Kian reached out and touched that luminance, recognizing it for the very essence of life stolen from the world around him. In that flow, he sensed the deaths of hundreds of people, perhaps more.
Kian had half a heartbeat to consider Varis’s atrocities before the youth slammed into him. With impossible strength, Varis drove him toward the portal. Kian wrenched himself sideways at the last instant, and his back slammed against the searing edge of that terrible gateway. He screamed as an enormous heat melted a groove in the flesh around his spine. He strained with all his failing human strength against Varis, trying to hurl him to one side. Varis, surprised by Kian’s resilience, fought to keep hold, veins bulging in his neck and brow, muscles standing out like cables of unyielding steel from his unnatural skin. For a moment, they were equally matched … but only for a moment.
Varis suddenly drove Kian’s skull against the edge of the portal. The stench of his own seared hair and skin filled Kian’s nostrils, then blood, cool compared to the fiery heat roasting him alive, began to dribble down his neck. Seeing the advantage even as Kian blinked against the fog of a swoon, Varis heaved forward again and again, trying to batter the mercenary’s skull to a pulp.
Kian quickly neared the extent of his strength. He was close to failing, dying. Then another, sharper pain swelled in him. All that he had his companions had struggled to achieve had been a waste. I have failed them … I have failed all.
Without warning, Varis relaxed and stepped back, just enough to ram his dagger into Kian’s middle. Then Varis moved farther away, his features alight with triumph. Regret washed over Kian as he slumped to his knees.
Gazing numbly upon the hilt of the dagger protruding from his belly, Kian was startled to find a blue glow drifting from his wound and his hands, and then from every inch of his skin. Though he was not sure how, he surrendered the powers of creation that he had held back, letting them flow outward. Neither Varis nor Peropis seemed to notice the delicate aurora surrounding Kian, as they gazed upon him with otherworldly eyes.
As the powers of the gods spread outward from Kian, he grew weaker, becoming again as he was born, a creature of frail flesh. In his heart, though he had never embraced or understood the powers that he held, it felt good and right that he should cast them away.
With that justification alive in his mind Kian steeled himself, jerked the dagger free of his bowels then, with all his waning strength, forced the powers of creation from himself in a single, massive blast, wanting more than anything for it to rip away the same powers from Varis’s flesh. What had been visible to his sight alone burst forth, washing the Golden Hall in a brilliant glow. Blue fire licked around Peropis and Varis, stunning them both, but otherwise leaving them unharmed. Or so it seemed at first.
Varis looked mutely this way and that, as the sky-blue radiance began to fade. “No,” he muttered in disbelief, staring at his hands.
Kian clenched a fist to his belly and sagged to his side, eyes wide with wonder. I did this, my desire for it to be so, he thought, stunned. For the first time since seeing the youth enter the temple in the swamp, Varis looked as he had, a highborn man-child full of pride, ambition, and discontent. No longer was he a god made flesh, nor even a man in appearance, but only a boy again.
“Do something!” Varis wailed at Peropis, sounding like petulant child. “I demand that you give me your full blessing! No more lies, no trickery, give me the gift you promised!”
Peropis spoke in a voice full of menace. “I warned you once to never make demands of me. I give what I will when and of my choosing … and I take what I will when I desire.” Her black gaze rolled toward Kian. To him she said, “It would seem that I, indeed, chose wrong. I give you this final chance to decide your fate. Will you accept?”
“No,” Kian sighed, utterly spent.
Tentacles raised up in an incongruously human gesture of exasperation. “The world of men is filled with mere worms,” Peropis urged. “What worm can stand against a king … a god?”
Kian blinked slowly, floating between death and life. He was neither king nor god, and never would he wish to be. “I am a mercenary, an Izutarian,” he muttered in the tired voice of an old man.
Varis, howling in rage, bolted toward Peropis.
“Fool,” she said quietly, her voice full of mockery.
“The power of the gods is mine!” Varis screamed, even as one of Peropis’s many flailing limbs caught him about the neck and effortlessly hurled him into the portal. A roaring pillar of flame went up, and a gossamer filament of silvery light streaked from his body into the hellish place beyond Aradan’s throne room. Of Varis’s flesh, one instant he was whole, the next he was a smoldering husk.
Kian stared open-mouthed at the portal, with its terrible landscape of heat-blasted rock and roiling fires. His enemy, that he had by turns fled and pursued, even as the world ripped itself apart, was dead.
“Fool,” Peropis said again, bitterly. Her features, all tentacles and swollen bulges of dark slick flesh, writhed with a malice so pure Kian feared that looking upon her visage would kill him, yet he could not turn away.
“I give you this last chance, Kian Valara, do you accept what I offer-godhood?”
“Never!” Kian snarled with the last of his strength. “Never would I take anything from your hand. I would rather die a thousand deaths.”
“So be it,” she said. “So be it. A thousand deaths are only a taste of what I will inflict upon your wretched soul.”
“I do not fear you,” Kian answered, though he did.
Something large and unseen struck him, like a hand created of air, and knocked him rolling across the floor. “You are nothing,” Peropis croaked. “Your thoughts and hopes are as a words upon a page to me.” Each step she took on her writhing appendages seemed to fall heavier than the last.
Your thoughts and hopes…. Despite his wounds, Kian made it to his hands and knees, even as another unseen blow threw him over the palace floor. He slapped against the tiles with a pained grunt. Slowly, for bones beyond count felt cracked or broken, he stood again. Groaning, he began limping toward Peropis, dripping blood from more places than he could count, his middle burning where Varis’s dagger had parted his insides, every footfall sending bolts of blinding agony through his limbs. But he did not fear, not now. With a dreamlike perception, he knew that the power of the gods was still flowing within him, building, seeking escape from his mortal flesh. What he thought he had discarded, was in truth a part of him, and ever would be.
He kept moving, even as the sharpness of his pains lessened. He touched the spot low on his belly where Varis had stabbed him and found only a tear in his tunic and drying blood. There was no wound. The observation, the meaning of it, flooded his mind with possibilities, ideas, strength. In moments, all that had been wrong with him was healed. On the heels of that revelation came another niggling idea. It flashed through his mind, even as he saw a pulsing blue aura spread out from his flesh. That radiance seemed to have a will of its own, and he cautiously added his own deepest desires to it.
Though she had no aspect that could be called human, Kian saw a flicker of doubt, perhaps even fear, spread across Peropis’s vile features. Unable to resist, and not wanting to besides, Kian flung his arms wide and loosed the tumultuous flood of energy within him, directing it deadly work with his mind. In an instant, like a flash of lightning with a deep clap of thunder, the radiant aura roared outward from his skin, from his bones, and from deeper still, from his very soul.