[Archived Short Story] Sacrificial Inflation

Past a bitter sea, green with poison so potent even the sun’s rays seem to be poisoned by it.

Over a land where even sound freezes, so cold that no cloud has ever graced the sky, barren without snow or ice.

Deep in the fiery mountains so far south all compasses, both mortal and magic, fail.

A battle finished and heroes laid low marks which very well might usher in the end times once again.

Will the gods need to flip the table like petulant children who can’t admit defeat and set new pieces on the board?

A vile man, once rich in the mortal ways yet having traded it away for chthonic knowledge most vile, prepares his ritual; now unhindered by the forces of God’s, man, elf, dwarf, and whatever other fool sapients tried standing in his way.

Around him stand an uncountable number of humanoid forms from all sapient races, though further back the balance shifts from natural born to souls reaved from the beyond and given form as homunculus. Each being stood upon a carved sigil, filled with mercury tainted with herbs that somehow dye it a purple hue. The ritual reaches a crescendo and starting at the edges of the unthinkably large and inhumanly flat circle, one by one, the beings convulse.

Faster and faster, until they all reach a breaking point. Their chests bulge outward, ribs snapping as hearts and heart equivalents all burst out. The heartblood being squeezed out, a few drops from each heart no matter how big or small. These drops stream towards the center, joining along the way.

Above the vile man , streams of blood all join together in a raging sphere of tainted red, partly from a few other colors being mixed in and mostly from the ritual’s power. Once the blood has been completely gathered, the man pulls a small ruby black crystal from his pocket. While small, this crystal had taken him thousands of deaths to create as he tried over and over to perfect.

Now, though, it all comes together. He gently throws the crystal up where it is caught by the ritual and introduced to the turbulent blood sphere above. As they touch, the reaction is instantaneous. That small crystal, barely large enough to represent a single drop of blood, acts as a seed crystal. The liquid blood condensing down as it takes on a similar crystalline structure.

All the while, magic from the ritual stretches out the ball into a giant hoop. In the end, this forms a circle with a diameter of nearly five stories, the edge a finger width of blood crystal. Then sparks of darkness jump up from the massive magic circle below and by grinding up the soul shells of the sacrifices, jump starts the blood crystal ring.

The air crackles with power as the ring drifts down towards the ground. Though once it touches, the hoop of crystal effortlessly continues as it sinks partly into the ground, leaving two-thirds above the dirt. Then the power within that thin piece of crystal snaps into alignment with the crossing ley lines present below and darkness fills the loop. No light escapes this inky surface and yet if stared at long enough colors of a sort can be seen. Colors made not by the presence of light, but rather tortured tints corrupted into literal shadows of their former shades.

The man cackles and calls forth for the demon army of legends. He calls for those who will conquer the world and in doing so, drag it down into the dimensional foam, right into the pits, a great realm where true infinite can be found and world’s lost in the trench of despair that it forms. A place without edges, yet bound by the metaphysical to only ever dig deeper into the untold sins of every reality.

He can’t help but imagine the results. What he had given up his home, family, and even his very name, which was stricken from reality such that every instance, both in print and memory, was burned away.

Then an imp walked through. The classic counter to the cherub, a small pudgy demon with the appearance of a child, if twisted and irrevocably evil. This one is wearing a strange orange vest, a yellow hat, and holding a board of wood with some papers on it. The imp looks around and uses the smoldering tip of one claw to write some things onto said paper.

Suffice it to say, the vile man was a bit perplexed. “Imp, I called, yet all I get is you?”

The imp makes one last mark on their papers before looking up. “Ah, my man! Excellent ritual circle. You even carved things to the correct depth. And is this actual philosopher stone blood crystal? My, my, my! Most mess that part up! Just one tiny problem that we need to go over before the army comes through. Wouldn’t want to have an angelic army called down in opposition to us!”

The man’s rage simmers at how the imp is treating him, but he gets the point. Something wasn’t quite right. “What? I followed the description of the ritual perfectly! I even culled lives equal to that of half the world.”

The imp’s face puts on a pained look. “Yeah, see, that last part is the problem. It should have been a minor one, though. You just missed a hidden civilization or two and there are a few sea tribes you missed. Which, all things considered, is still a lot, but what’s killing a few million more?

“The portal is opened, so if that was it, we could simply call in a few war bands to go out and harvest what was missing. And going by the current state of the world, if we went purely aquatic, no one would even notice.”

The man scowls, “Yet that isn’t the only problem?”

The imp coughs into his hand, “Yeah, you see, you didn’t actually sacrifice half the world’s population, even if we ignored those you missed.”

The man grits his black stained teeth, “Then are these bodies a lie? Stair upon my work! I gathered beings from all across the world as I made the count!”

The imp nodded, “And for a low-tech world like this, you did an amazing job of counting. For calculating a world’s population, being only a few million off is astounding! A few lords back in the pit wouldn’t mind hiring you on to help with the numbers on planets similar to this one.”

The man squinted, “Then why do you deny me?”

The imp shrugs, “Well, before you got around to the ritual, the world gained, like, a fifty percent increase in sapient population. So yeah, your half a pop sacrifice ended up being just a third. Sucks all around, we really would like to sweep across the world in a wave of fire and violence.”

The man growls, “How is that possible?! Nearly five hundred million people don’t appear out of nowhere! Who? Which of my enemies managed this?”

The imp rubs the back of their neck, “Well, some would see this person as being their worst enemy.” And he gestures at the nearest homunculus.

The man stills. “Don’t you dare! Those things are simply sacrifices. They don’t count!”

The imp rolls his eyes, “Heh, good joke, but I think you’re forgetting one of the requirements for a sacrifice. Mainly that they have to be sapient as well. So if they didn’t count, they wouldn’t have worked and you would not have had enough sacrifices to even open the gate.”

The man rages, “But it worked! You’re here! That means it should be fine! If I had to sacrifice half the world, I might as well just conquer it myself!

The imp nods, “Truly, you aren’t the first and won’t be the last to use quote unquote, lesser beings, for the sacrifice. In fact, it would have worked if you had gone further. Sure, a few hundred million homunculus would have taken a lot of work, but if you had simply doubled the numbers? Well, then you would have half the world’s sapient population to sacrifice.”

The man, “But shouldn’t what I’ve already sacrificed be enough to power things as they are? Sure, it isn’t half the world population at the moment, but it was when the ritual was developed.”

The imp shakes his head, “The actual number of sacrifices after a certain point aren’t for more power. Hells, if you provide the power and there was only one other person on your planet? You could sacrifice that one person and get it to work.

“No, what those sapients are for is to hide the world from the heavens. It is specifically half the world’s population because the ritual uses the souls on a one-to-one basis to hide the still living souls from those above. So, at the moment, you can only hide half the current population and the heavens would definitely show up to stop us from plucking another world, just as surely as we show up when they try the same.”

The imp looks side to side before whispering to the man. “But I might have a solution for you. As always, there will be a cost, but for the price of a single soul, someone you’ve beaten down and sidelined until now has quite a powerful soul, we can get things rolling. Maybe a heavenly horde will show up, but we’d at least have a head start and a high chance of victory. That soul has even already been delivered to us.”

The man scowls, “If there was such a solution, what was the point of my ritual in the first place?”

The imp shrugs, “Well, as I said, the soul would only cover the half you didn’t. Besides that, well, who would turn down more souls? The afterlife sort of runs on them, after all. The only reason I’m even suggesting this to you is because the army gets a cut of any souls we personally reap and so your ritual is like ringing a dinner bell for us and I’m hungry.

“Some others might lose out, but I’m not someone who could handle thousands of souls, let alone nearly a billion. So for me? It is better if we go ahead with this, even if it isn’t quite as profitable.”

The man throws his hands up, “FINE! I’ve come too far to turn back now. Use this significant soul to complete my work.”

The imp smiles like the combination of a shark, a lawyer, and a used car salesman who just offloaded a lemon in a sale that can’t be refunded. “Then let’s go ahead and use this ‘worst enemy’ of yours.”

The man frowns as something seems wrong.

He doesn’t get the chance to connect the dots though, as a black blade pierces him from back to front, right through the heart.

Behind the now dead man, a devil becomes visible and solutes the imp, “Another wonderful negotiation, sit!”

The imp laughs, the sound of which deepens as his form shifts and grows; the safety helmet, high vis jacket, and clipboard changing with him into a suit, bowler cap, and a cellphone. “These low-tech cultures are always so easy to handle. Too many people thinking you can rule a world just by force of arms. The fools.

“At best, you’ll rule the area close to you. Without better communication technology, anything past a certain point might as well not exist. Kind of a shame, though. This less than human slime would have been interesting to watch in the abyss he was aiming for. As if being the one to bring a world down is enough to control it!

“His rule would have been plucked away by someone else in next to no time, all the while the fool would have howled about how it wasn’t fair and that he had earned the world. Oh well, summon the troops. I want this world added to my holdings within the century. And please, do something to uplift the population. Being somewhere without cell reception is such a drag.”