Discordant Note | TBATE

Chapter 144: Beneath the Clash of Titans

Naereni

I never thought the sun could be angry. Throughout my life, the sun was the only bright thing in my life. As a child, I'd always stuck to the shadows, avoiding the enlightening brush of sunlight. Sunlight meant you were spotted, the dark protections of alleyway corners and broken buildings stripped from you. It meant you became a target of the bigger children who would take all your food from your pockets and leave you hungry. And if you were especially unlucky, an adult who wanted an easy meal from whatever you had on you.

But even when the sunlight touched my skin, it was warm and inviting. The sun was a naive dot in the sky, spreading its light over everything in a healthy yellow smile. The sun didn't know that my gut clenched in hunger, or that I hadn't washed in months. It continued to blissfully believe in the light, trying to entice me into its embrace.

The sun was never angry. Never deceitful; just ignorant.

Mardeth's aura was like a constricting serpent that wrapped around your soul, squeezing tighter and tighter in a gradual, deathly embrace as it dripped venom into your ears. The poison it whispered into your mind was just as deadly as the tightening weave it held around your body; telling you you were nothing. That you were lesser. That this was your inevitable fate; to slither on the ground and eat the dirt as you groveled.

But Toren's intent blazed like a furious star, waves of power radiating off of him in a palpable rhythm. It was like the beating of the world's deepest drum, the reverberations seeming to travel through the very ground I lay on. The power that he cast wasn't ignorant like the sun, but neither was it warm and inviting. It was a burning thing that barely resisted the urge to sear. Its purpose was to burn everything away, after all. Toren's aura made me want to huddle and close my eyes for fear of blinding myself. This wasn't a person; it was a force. You couldn't reason with a force. You couldn't steal from a force. You just hoped it would not burn you for daring to witness it.

I can't tell who is stronger between them, part of me thought. Their strength is so far above mine that I can't even gauge it anymore.

When submerged beneath the water, one couldn't tell if it was a lake or a sea.

Karsien watched from where he lay, green lines stretching along his neck and shoulders from where the vicar had grasped his throat. He coughed weakly as Toren slowly advanced, a smirk on his scarred features. Hofal groaned next to me on the floor, his face a mask of pain. Sevren Denoir slowly pulled himself to his feet as Caera's soulfire sputtered out, her scarlet gaze wild and uncomprehending as it roamed over Toren's form. She moved out of the way as Toren stepped past her, watching his back.

"I heard you had a visit from Varadoth, little mage," Mardeth said, his eyes snapping to where the remnants of his decimated spell had eaten into the floor. I heard the floor creak and groan beneath me, that decay chewing through the wooden floorboards greedily. "That tittering old fool thought you were someone worth talking to. Worth debating. But he was wrong," the vicar said with slime, his eyes leering at all of us. "You aren't worth talking to. You're worth taking from."

I froze in fear again as Mardeth's intent blanketed me. I felt my shattered leg shift, the agony coming once again. I cried out in pain, but just as quickly the glaring sunlight of Toren's aura blanketed me against the constricting serpent.

I knew that Toren was strong. Frightfully so. But never had I imagined this.

Toren looked from the stream of energy sifting from the basilisk blood crystal, tracing the connection up to the horn grafted on Mardeth's forehead. Those burning eyes, which seemed to peer too deep, widened in even further alarm. "That's what you've been planning," he breathed, drawing the saber at his side and flourishing it once. "To Integrate; to ascend past the white core." He shifted his stance. "I won't let you."