[Fsh] Chapter 58: Victory

Caledon watched as the guides around the dragon fell into tombs of earth at their feet, buried underground. Then, he watched as shadow and earth melded together, creating a protective barrier around the dragon, as it triggered its self-immolation.

Not even the combined forces of earth and shadow were able to even partially mitigate the force of the creature’s blast. Caledon lunged towards Vale, slamming into her with such force and speed that he barely felt her in his grasp as he tumbled into the floor of the temple.

Then the explosion in the garden echoed outwards. First, he was met with the shockwave that emanated from the epicentre of the blast. Then, came the earthen chunks that had attempted to contain it. They had achieved their primary objective, to mitigate the creature’s immolation to prevent the deaths of the guides that assailed it.

Unfortunately, the golem had not thought about the risk its earthen barrier posed to Caledon and Vale, who, unlike the guides in safe in their subterranean tombs, stood upright in the temple, right in the trajectory of the columns of earth propelled towards them by the blast.

Only to be severed by familiar slashes.

Caledon’s eyes widened as he realised that one of the creatures had evaded the safety of the tomb.

The bladefrog.

The bladegrass it wielded was melting, glowing orange with the heat that had greeted its surface as the frog used it to parry the dragon’s explosion of self-immolation. The bladefrog sent arcs of slashes radiating outwards towards the oncoming columns of earth, ensuring that they harmlessly fell around Caledon and Vale where they stood.

Then, the frog turned to the dragon, its eyes falling on the wing it had begun to heal with its outburst of flame.

With the remains of its weapon, the bladefrog lunged forward, tearing a strike through the point in the dragon’s wing which had been gradually healing, severing it once more.

Before being enveloped in flames.

“NO!”

Caledon shouted helplessly as he ran from the temple, closing on the dragon.

Where in Insanity are Rathos, Clona and Serevim? Is there another enemy they’re contending with?

Then, his guide’s words interrupted his despair.

“Caledon, your corruption will be essential to slaying the creature. Another source of corruption fills it, twisting its form and empowering it. Overwhelm it with your own, and still its heart.”

Caledon watched as the black liquid congealed over the creature’s severed limb, then watched as black flame burned, gradually regenerating its wing and defying all sense of reason.

Where are the guides?

As he searched the garden wildly, expecting the guides that had been swallowed to the ground to rise up, and capitalise on the window they had bled for…

None appeared.

Then, his eyes caught on to the golem – the guide comprised of gargantuan pieces of stone-

That had been melted through with the creature’s supernova, unable to shelter itself, even as it saved the other guides around it.  

Feardamnit. If I don’t do something, the creature will regenerate, and we won’t be able to muster enough damage to kill it for good, with the guides trapped far beneath the ground.

Then the dragon fixed him in its gaze.

Caledon snapped out of his reverie when he noticed the dragon surge towards him. Even in the absence of its wing, which gradually continued to heal, it moved with the swiftness typical of creatures a fraction of its size, tearing through the distance between them.

Forget creating an opening for the guides… I need to create an opening for myself.

If Berevan Brimstone had taught him anything, it was that there was nothing as effective as Fear to make both creature and elf alike hesitate. The flash of the final blade and the victory that accompanied it were as good as secured if you could birth fear in your opponent.

[Mirage of the anglerwhale]

Caledon drew upon the visage of the only master of immolation that had burned brighter than even the dragon before him.

Highlord Berevan Brimstone.

The Herald of the Eternal Phoenix.

Caledon watched as the creature flinched at the sight that he invoked in its vision. Caledon called upon the image of his father at the very height of his powers, as he had only glimpsed once before. When Berevan had burned in his Dreadwalk, skin turning to embers of red and gold, as he averted a Winterstorm that threatened to penetrate the robust walls of the Archcity of Flames.

Then, he called upon the force of his own invocations as the creature stumbled.

[Bloodlink of the vampress]

[Lightning of the thundermare]

[Authority of the wyvern]

Caledon drew on every invocation he had at his disposal to push the creature off-balance, capitalising on its momentary hesitation. He watched as the creature sailed through the air, its poise disrupted, tumbling into the ground in a spray of soil.

The dragon came to a rest a short distance ahead of him, its head buried into the ground and rendered immobile from its skid.

Caledon lunged across the distance, summoning his Phobia as he tore down the gradual slope of the garden to close on the dragon. His eyes widened momentarily at the sheer volume of golden flames that erupted in a deluge. Stronger than he had ever seen them burn before.

He set his jaw and closed his eyes, focusing on the wrath that lingered within him to shape the golden flames that blossomed forth into a blade.

Caledon Brimstone tore it across the creature’s neck, the immaculate golden blade of his wrath parting the creature’s leathery skin and causing it to scream into the dirt in which it was embedded. The fact that it was buried in the ground prevented Caledon from being disoriented further, his ears already bleeding as they were.

Then he watched in horror as the gleaming orange lines of energy that pulsed beneath translucent skin began to brighten, and he knew that his strike had been insufficient. The creature was already beginning to heal, heralding its flames to seal shut its wounds and to stem the black blood that poured forth from Caledon’s strike, as it had with the wounds inflicted by the guides.

Caledon’s eyes traced the lines of energy into a round, shadowed mass that peaked out from behind the shadows of the creature’s ribcage.

Caledon leapt onto the creature’s chest and drove his Phobia directly into its shadowed heart.

He felt the creature shudder and slump.

Finally defeated.

Caledon was breathless as he stared at his Phobia ,which had miraculously reached the creature’s heart. At its very height, the dragon would have undoubtedly reached the size of Brimstone manor, and it was nothing short of a miracle that his golden blade of wrath had pierced it.

“Caledon, you did it!”

Vale ran towards him with a grin, followed by Rathos, Virgil, Severim and Clona, who emerged from the temple at the top of the hill. He heaved a sigh of relief at the sight of the Dreadwalkers and Virgil, whom he had lost sight of during the Insanity of the battle.

As they clapped and cheered, Caledon weakly returned their smiles as he heaved a sigh of relief.

Then he saw a blade of shadow cleave through Rathos’ skull.

Time seemed to slow, for a moment, as he struggled to process what he had glimpsed.

Caledon turned to regard Beldrian, his breaths growing shallow as Fear began to seep into him.

No… Rathos’ guide… it killed him? Has Beldrian been corrupted as-

He watched, as vines laced with thorns and blood red roses sprouted from the ground beneath Clona’s feet lashing through her body with a dryad’s rage.

Worse of all, was the onslaught inflicted by Cygni.

“WHERE IS HE.”

The presence of the moonwalker eclipsed what Caledon had experienced in his foray through the emberwoods, when he had been subjected to the presence of a wandering moonwalker from the shadow woods.

Gravity drove him into the flesh of the dragon he had killed, pressing him up against its warm body. He felt sharp points biting into his skin, and Caledon struggled to raise his head as gravity pressed the blades of grass back into the earth from which they emerged.

Then he stared, as Rathos, who had been beheaded, Clona whose guides’ vines had torn a bloody path through their bodies, and Virgil, whose legs and bones had snapped with the force of his guide’s presence all continued clapping and cheering.

Vale and Severim joined them.

All of them bearing a familiar smile.

A mother’s smile.

Only the guides who retained their connections with their Fearshapers had seen through the illusion.

Beldrian’s reaction to reuniting with Rathos had been one indication, but he had been too preoccupied with the clash, misinterpreting it as affectionate bullying.

His companions had been a product of his Fear, all along. The symptoms of his Fear had always been relegated to his own perception. They had never been imposed unto others before, fuelled by the effects of the Tranquillity withdrawals, and amplified in a place of Insanity.

The gambit of his Fear of corruption finally revealed itself.

His eyes turned bloodshot as he watched as his Fear twisted the reality of the guides around him, who had lashed out in anger at the imposters bearing their Fearshapers visages.

Wrath, like he had only experienced once before, on the floor of a shattered manor surged through him, burning a path through his veins. His Phobia, buried in the flesh of the dragon he had felled began to sink further into the corpse as it came alight in a raging inferno.  

“Oh, Cally, she’s dead already. There’s no need to kill her twice.”  

“LEAVE!”

Virgil, Vale, Rathos, Clona and Severim’s lips moved in unison, their voices melding to create one that was all too familiar to him.

The mocking tone of Appella Brimstone that his Fear adopted whenever it wished to torment him.

Then her voice changed, shifting into one that was familiar to him. She spoke as Caledon had remembered, from before she had departed for the Archcity of Dreams.

The familiar steel of Appella Brimstone’s voice from his dearest memories, that was delivered with his mother’s impartial kindness and love, was twisted to the ends of his Fear.

Twisting his memories in service of its torment.

The impression that his Fear conveyed was indistinguishable from his own memories of his mother.

“Caledon Brimstone. What is there to Fear from corruption, when reality itself becomes your greatest nightmare. I did this because I love you.”

His mother paused, her expression shifting from the eerie, mocking smile that his Fear relied upon to one that he recognised as a boy. Stern and serious, always with a lesson to impart.

“Or would you rather have killed her, knowing what she truly was?”

His mother gestured to the body on which he stood.

The pinpricks that he felt across his skin, as Cygnis had imposed her gravitational field upon him…

Were feathers.

A golden red plumage.

Sale, the Eternal Phoenix, lay dead beneath him, his blade of wrath driven into her chest.

Berevan Brimstone’s guide lay slain by his son’s own hand.

“N-no… No… this is another trick…”

Caledon watched as his shades, the products of his Fear, disappeared before his very eyes. Even as they vanished, Sale’s body lay unchanged beneath him. Caledon felt despair enter his heart. He tore his nails across his forearms, bringing with it the pain that he had used in the past to free him from the lies of his twisted realities.

He screamed, as he did when had witnessed his father slain in the shattered hall of Brimstone manor. Then he wept, pleading for his guide to dispel the corruption that he was enshrouded him, what was surely a lie meant to torment him.

Sale’s body remained.

“Caledon. She has passed. We had no choice, she fell to Insanity.”

The words of Beldrian, the wolf of shadow, reached him.

“No…”

Caledon wept, as he ran his fingers through Sale’s plumage as he had done countless times as a boy. The generous and kind guide, always there to heal his wounds with her tears and soothe his worries with her song. With kindness that just as easily burned as it had healed, if anyone posed a threat to their family.

“Her spark of rebirth. She never used it. She told me.”

Caledon watched as a golden haze of Alarum appeared before him.

Caledon tore at it, drawing it into him with a hunger and longing that he had never succumbed to in the entirety of his descent.

If there was ever a domain so diametrically opposed to corruption, it was purity.

Everything that the phoenix embodied.

Caledon, where he stood, on the very precipice of the shores of Sanity, strode into the waters of madness to carve a dimension to his Fear which would have otherwise been impossible. Birthed from the death of his father’s guide were his greatest wishes. The invocations that he longed for, which would no doubt serve as the seeds to develop a dimension to his Fear capable of curing his mother of the corruption that ailed her.

[Purification of the phoenix]

[Infusion of the phoenix]

Invocations that were useless to him, where he wept on Sales’s chest.

What he searched so desperately for, the unspent phoenix’s spark of rebirth rendered into the shape of an invocation his Fear, was denied to him.

Even if such a thing existed, it was far beyond the purview of a sickening Fearshaper of corruption.

“Caledon, let me.”

His eyes widened as they snapped to the familiar voice. For a moment, he thought she was yet another product of his Fear, brought back to torment him, as he slipped into Insanity.

Then Caledon’s eyes roved to Vale’s missing arm. Her hollow eyes, the blood that trailed from the corner of her mouth. Holding herself up with the aid of her towering scythe of bone.

Walking towards him, as if she was the reaper to guide his soul into the undying night, for the sin he had committed. Behind her, Rathos carried Clona’s torso, the Dreadwalker of roses still alive, their armour torn through, with Severim and Virgil bringing up the rear.

Behind them, was his own image. Carved through by Rathos’ sword.

Caledon Brimstone grinned at him, before disappearing.

Then he watched as Vale drew in alarum that was denied to his own eyes, as a Fearshaper of corruption. His breath caught as he watched the Fearshaper of death claimed alarum from a creature of life.

He watched as Vale’s face twisted in agony, as her scream erupted from her throat. But even as it did, Caledon saw himself as he was, without the artifice of arrogance and pride. As a Fearshaper was corruption was meant to.

He saw himself in truth.

In that moment, he cared not for Vale’s well-being. Only what she offered him.

That she brought back his father’s guide, no matter the cost.

He felt Zel blink into existence at his shoulder, his golden iris fixed on his charge.

Then as Vale’s scream came to an end, the alarum of Sale’s death giving form to her invocation…

Vale smiled.

Then, Caledon watched as it tightened.

Twisted.

Vale sank to her knees, then shook her head, despair filling her expression.

She gently shook her head, tears fleeing from shadowed lavender eyes.

Bearing within them, hints of the void.

---

“The Inheritances do act as havens. Protecting guides that Fearshapers would otherwise hunt in their lust for descension. So do they allow Solastra to seclude away invocations which would birth terrifying dimensions of Fear, that would endanger Elucidor. But there is another purpose, to Inheritances.”

Shiver met the deep eyes of midnight blue that glowed in the howling winds of the snowstorm.

“Prisons. For those who have been lost, to Insanity.”

They emerged from howling winds into the heart of Iltheria. The blizzard swirled around them, high into the air, creating a column of clouds far above her

They strode into the eye of the storm, where her final invocations lay.

“Today, we put to rest another kind soul, whose Insanity claimed her.”

Sadness tinged the voice of the [legendary] guide, as Shiver trailed the spiritfox into a beautiful plain of winterlilies atop a sweeping hill. She took a moment to turn to the forest around her, and were it not impeded by the blizzard’s winds, she had little doubt that it would have given her a clear view of the majesty of Iltheria.

“We will bring her peace, together.”

Shiver turned her gaze from the forest, unto the guide at her feet.

“Fight with everything you have. Do not hesitate, under any circumstances.”

“Will I see-“

“Yes, you will.”

Vivienne paused at the precipice of the Inheritance. While Shiver could not see its entrance, she could feel it, as goosebumps erupted across her skin.

The heart of Iltheria lay before her.

“I look forward to seeing that troublesome 'Popsicle' too, as you call her.”

Shiver manifested her Phobia.

The evidence of Shiver’s descent was wrought across every inch of her blade. The countless cracks that marred its immaculate surface had healed, and the cries of her guide had quietened.

The gleaming cerulean blade cast from purest ice shone in her hands, as mist peeled off its surface, bearing the promise of her desolation.

Shiver’s eyes gleamed as she strode forwards to master her Trepidation.

To reclaim her guide.