Now, now he could do it right.
He returned every rock and circled, circled.
Found the precise right spot. The key to the whole network, the way in. Scorio wanted to crow with glee. Profound happiness suffused him. He held off as long as he could, watching the lizards, then pictured his hammer above his head. Held it high, held it till he imagined his arms burning, then brought it down with all his might and struck.
The rock in his mind split, and he screamed with feral joy.
Time passed.
Days? No, surely months.
Time ceased to have meaning.
The coffin remained inviolate, protecting him, keeping him in torment.
He became a monomaniac, obsessed. Spoke to himself, commented on his progress, argued with a fictional Naomi.
The pile fell apart in a clinical fashion.
He took to pausing for long stretches of time to mimic his sleeping hours.
Eternities flowed by.
Finally, endless ages later, he loaded the final chunk of rock on the sled. Pushed it to the Chasm and tumbled it in.
Turned and regarded the work site.
It was perfectly level.
Every stone. Every rock. Every boulder was gone.
He had no idea how long it had taken him.
For breathless seconds he simply imagined it and felt a terrible and vulnerable sense of triumph.
He’d done it.
And now?
The saurians napped on their ledges. The Gold mana burned. The silence was profound, broken only by the occasional bubble of magma popping.
Scorio mentally inhaled, held his mind as still as possible, a great and trembling expanse of frozen glass, then when he could hold it no more his mind shattered and he screamed.
Chapter 45
Madness was sweet release.
Thoughts melted into each other, became endless, mindless reveries, devolved into shrieking fits, smoothed out into periods of angelic grace. Voices argued, his memories changed, became unreliable. He sank into long periods of muttering paranoia, burst into song.
Eventually, even this activity grew quiet.
His mind became an empty cave.
Wind whistled through it occasionally, but no words, no thoughts, barely any emotion.
The saurians slumbered, fought, mated, dove into the magma, and emerged a million times over.
Then, one day, something new.
Scorio watched a saurian emerge from the largest cave. He’d never seen this fiend before.
It was easily many times larger than the others. If the biggest hitherto had been the size of The Sloop, this one was the size of The Coffer.
It was gigantic. Its back was crenelated, its eyes the size of Scorio’s head, its fangs bigger than Scorio’s legs.
The other saurians scattered with never before seen alacrity.
The behemoth moved to the rim of its ledge and there paused as if surveying its kingdom.
Scorio watched it, breathless with childish wonder. Would it save him? Swallow him whole? Perhaps it could speak, perhaps it could break the spell. It would become his best friend, his mount, they’d ride forth together to kill everyone, no, not everyone, not his friends, yes, his friends too, damn them, they’d abandoned him, not even thrown their lives away to save him, they’d kill everything, become the greatest legends in all of hell…
The behemoth gazed down for an eternity, never blinking, then finally slid forward and poured itself off the ledge to fall into the magma.
Scorio couldn’t follow it down, but its impact had to have been prodigious because a wave of gold rose up around him, lifted his coffin, and tossed it over onto the rocks.
Scorio lay on his side now staring straight down into a dark crevasse.
No. No no no.
He couldn’t be left like this, staring down at rocks. He couldn’t take it, he couldn’t, he couldn’t—
Something tugged him free. His coffin slid back out into the open.
The behemoth’s snout was just visible at his feet like a scaled hill.
It gripped his coffin by the base, a nip, and then tossed its head up.
Scorio flew. Rose up, turning, and for a delirious and gleeful second saw all of the cave, details spinning around him, and then he fell back and straight into the monster’s maw.
Devour me!
But no. The behemoth caught him between its leviathan jaws and bit down.
The coffin held.
The behemoth shuffled back, retreating a bit into the magma, raised its head again, and adjusted its grip on the coffin.
Which slid a little deeper between its jaws.
Again it bit down.
Scorio stared in horrified fascination as the huge teeth bore down on the smoky white light.
Nothing happened.
The prism was too strong.
Then Scorio heard a delicate crack.
Eager, he reached out with this Heart’s senses. There, just above his chest, he saw a tiny perforation appear under one of the saurian’s fangs.
Tiny.
The smallest crack.
The saurian strained for a while longer, then tossed him aside.
Scorio tumbled over the rocks, bounced, and came to a stop propped nearly vertical, caught between two large and ragged rocks.
He watched the behemoth sink back into the magma like a sinking ship. An untold time later, it emerged, climbed lethargically back up the cliff, and disappeared into its cave.
The other fiends returned cautiously to their spots.
Scorio’s mind was blank. A sense of curiosity filled him, and he examined the tiny hole in the prism.
Probed at it with his mind and watched as a tendril of Gold insinuated itself through it.
But the coffin wasn’t just a shell; it was a solid matrix of power. The Gold mana’s progress was incredibly slow. Like touching a cube of sugar with the tip of a wet nail.
Scorio was delighted. Fascinated.
He watched the Gold slowly spread. It took forever. But with the coffin’s seal broken, it could now steal inside.
It spread in slow motion through the coffin’s corpus, flowering, a toxic cloud of splendid power.
Time passed. Saurians dove and retreated. But Scorio remained rapt. And realized, days, maybe weeks into the process, that the Gold might be spreading slowly at its edges, but was melting the coffin’s core within its cloud. This didn’t make a difference in its progress, but when it broke through to where Scorio lay, it would spray forth like a needle of glory.
Death.
The knowledge hit him like a blow from his own sledgehammer.
This was death at last.
Release.
Ydrielle’s plan for eternal torment had been foiled.
The behemoth had saved him. It truly had proven to be his boon companion, his favorite friend.
The Gold cloud spread, drew closer.
Just like the Sapphire mana had done through Nox’s jellied pool.
Scorio’s thoughts stilled.
He refused to think, to dream.
Just like the Delightful Secret Marinating Technique.
Could he?
No no no, a thousand times no.
But that had been Sapphire, which was even more potent than Gold.
But that had been an imperial gel bath, created specifically for that purpose. It had protected him, made manipulating the mana terribly easy. Structured the mana along its matrix.
This coffin. This prism. It was ordered, crystalline.
Scorio’s thoughts came together for the first time in what felt like centuries. The Gold mana would break through to him at a single spot first, but the pressure behind it would inject the Gold straight into his being.
His Heart would seek to absorb it only to shatter and burn.
The Marinating Technique involved Igniting the mana while pouring the rest into his reservoir, condensing it, making it as hard as a diamond even as it had forced his reservoir to expand to its greatest size.
And even then he’d only survived due to the gel’s active aid, and the finite amount of Sapphire.