C. Sebastian Nutt
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Chapter 199 - Light Under Shadow
🕑 Added 2025-07-11 18:35:56 +0000 UTCThere is something that moves. It grinds like a misaligned link in a spooled chain, like a stubborn thorn of rock scratching against the lim
There is something that moves. It grinds like a misaligned link in a spooled chain, like a stubborn thorn of rock scratching against the lime as the foundations of the earth slowly shift. Morello feels it, a jagged point set against his bones, but he refuses to let the disturbance bite.
He has known it, maybe known it ever since the master forced that liquid down his throat, made him what he is now, that there was intention hidden in the power. It was change itself, but not purposeless, not undirected. It knew what he was, just a man before, and it wanted to make him into something else, something specific. Only, if that was what the intention had been, it chose a poor power to grant him.
He knew the body that the power wanted him to obtain, that there was strength to come with the embrace, with the shedding of his human vestments, but he never felt the need to do so. His power was over bodies now, an ability to manipulate and shape them when he wasn’t being opposed, and his mastery over himself was strongest of all. And, if he was to be honest, something he tried to avoid doing whenever possible, he rather enjoyed the scrap of humanity he held pinched between his fingers. There was something in the indignant rage, the frustration, the suicidal arrogance that lived next to avarice that kept pulling him back to it.
It was that arrogance that made him believe he knew better, that he could craft for himself a better body than whatever distant intention living in that elixir could. Morello strode across the hellscape of the battlefield, confident that the body he made for himself was of greater design. He towered above everything else, muscles packed beneath thick and hardened skin so dense that they put stones to shame. His bones were stronger than iron and created a lattice to protect the organs that kept his new body functioning. His arms were weapons superior to any on the field around him, able to change shape, become reaping scythes at his barest mental command.
When others tried to stand against him, they found themselves overmatched. Even the lesser of the endowed, the third sons of the nobility, could not match his power. Those lesser nobles danced with the swarm of demons they created, years, maybe decades for some, lending incredible mastery in the way they employed their spears and swords. Morello was ignorant of warcraft, of the martial arts, but it mattered very little.
As he watched, letting the scurrying minions run forth in their suicidal fervor to kill the mortal men and women, he found a good one. Morello felt something poetic in the kismet of seeing her here on the battlefield in front of him, standing at the head of the line, waving a spear like a frantic farmer trying to harvest grain. He didn’t often impersonate real people, too much risk involved in that, but when he did, he tended to like disposing of them before. This woman, Yor’Mari, was a stain on how he liked to do things. Luck was truly on his side to allow him to remedy that.
Only, before he could stride forward and cut her down, another of the duke’s children entered the melee. He was a weaker one, too far down the line of succession to gain any of the power that the nobility hoarded and granted their descendants. He was just a white-haired half-breed, a man playing magician. Morello would make certain he died here as well.
The battle didn’t last overly long. Just like all the others, the two children of the duke found Morello’s strength overwhelming. The woman’s spearwork buckled beneath his blows while the other flailed at him with marginally more grace than Morello displayed.
Then, he had her. Too focused on his hands, she missed the moment his leg changed, his foot morphing into an inverted claw that struck up at her from the ground. She cried out, ripping her impaled leg off the bone spur transforming into a hook while inside her thigh. The line of guardsmen started to reel her in, but the damage was already done.
He saw it proven in the look in her eyes, the fear that made the whites stand out bright. She knew then exactly what he wanted to make her understand, that all of her elven beauty and advantage was barely worth anything. They always held themselves so high; they thought that the nature of their flesh made them better than everyone else. She would have that illusion shattered now, not that she would have long to regret her folly.
As he was in the throes of his triumph, Morello bent down and lifted the duke’s son by his throat. It was then, as he cut down with his bone scythe, that confusion broke through his excitement. Morello watched with flickering eye as the boy’s skin began to shift, the parts beneath rearranging themselves in a flash. There was a brief sensation of gazing into a mirror before his weapon of bone stopped short, caught in the hand of the young man. He felt the grinding whine again then, the feeling of his soul being scratched, as the young celenial’s hand began to constrict on Morello’s arm, his grip growing tighter and tighter.
Instinct forces Morello to move. He sees a twitch, Jor’Mari’s left hand slowly climbing up to grab onto Morello’s wrist. The body of Jor’Mari falls from his grasp, even as it continues to spasm and writhe. Morello leaps back, but finds weight on his arm, the celenial still grabbing hold of the bone-scythe. The off-white of the bone begins to crack under the grasp; the spiderwebbing breaks send a twitch of pain up through the monstrosity's arm. Something in the dull eyes of the man holding onto him demands decisive action. Raising his arm, he brings it down with a crack that blows the air out of the area around them. The ground breaks, grass turned to dirt by the kick of boots and the scratching of claws, dirt turned to mud by the lifeblood soaking into it, is pushed away as Jor’Mari’s back collides with the ground. The celenial’s grip falters, and Morello slips away in that moment.
The demons, those lowly beasts gathered about him, scamper away as he backpedals, forming a growling ring around the pair. Sensation comes as a strange thing to Morello in that moment. He built this body, decided how it should be, but only now begins to understand what it feels like to have blood under such pressure pumping through his veins, to know the feeling of his skin heating but being unable to sweat. Morello stares at the divet he put Jor’Mari into, watching as the man’s body continues to squirm, muscles growing huge beneath the skin, his skeleton expanding, spikes of bone running lines beneath the skin. For an instant, the celenial’s body pulses, expanding rapidly, the top part of his robes splitting, before he returns to the size of a normal man.
There is a change, and not a small one. The duke’s son opens his eyes, focusing on the red sky with black orbs riven by veins of golden light. The whole of him looks covered in ink, an oily shadow that clings to his skin and clothes, somehow cracking as he pulls himself from the mud. Where the oil cracks, faint light pushes through. When Jor’Mari stands, he looks not far different than normal, a bit taller perhaps, and covered in a shadowy sheen. The biggest difference pushes out of his forehead, two great horns that extend a foot and a half into the air above his head. Between the growths of long and sharp bone stands a sphere of light, a miniature star of pure radiance.
Jor’Mari looks down at his hand, caught up in the sight of his flesh rendered in shadow, the tiniest detail standing out against the ink covering him. He can see it all so clearly, better by the moment as the darkness over his eyes continues to flake and fall away. The world, he thought, he had seen it clearly before, thought he knew what it looked like. Only now, he realizes how blind he had been, how blind he must still be.
The demons prowling the circle about the two close in, pressing forward toward the distracted figure walking out of the hole he had been thrown into. Light, a soft aura of white brilliance, ripples away from Jor’Mari’s skin, the cracks in the oil widening as he pushes the power outward. The demons around him shriek as magical terror is driven into them, hissing as they retreat away.
As the lesser demons retreat, flailing and backing away from him, Jor’Mari pulls his attention away, looking at the figure standing inside the limited reach of his aura. The hulking creature that still pretends to be a man stares back, clearly affected by the magical influence of Jor’Mari’s soul presence, but not subdued by it.
“I thought size was a source of strength too,” Jor’Mari says.
Morello slides forward like liquid, his body moving in impossible ways, dozens of joints forming in his arm as he whips forth the scythe. The inked magician moves just as impossibly, taking a stride to the right far faster than Morello can track. The bone weapon at the end of his arm crashes into the ground where Jor’Mari had just stood, already twisting, turning to cut backward into the magician.
The movement is almost a casual thing, Jor’Mari’s hand clenching around empty air as the weight of an invisible weapon slides into his grasp. When he swings, the head of the mace thudding into Morello’s reinforced ribs, the blow comes harder than anything he has ever felt before. Morello’s body morphs in the air as he is thrown back, eyes appearing on his shoulders, taking in information as he tries to navigate a landing while the ground races past beneath him. Then there is a second blow, the cold crack of enchanted steel into the center of his back, the reinforced vertebrae in his spine shattering beneath the power as his face is driven into the mud.
Veins squirm through Morello’s body, the myriad of eyes on his shoulders staring up at the magician who somehow beat him to this spot. Morello’s nerves come alive, seeking out their breaking points, trying to reach and reattach the split ends. All the while, he can see the man above him, no, the demon. The sphere of energy between the horns of Jor’Mari continues to grow brighter, the ink covering the man’s skin chipping and flaking away by the moment to reveal flesh beneath shining with a light of its own.
“Why should I have to choose?” Jor’Mari asks, setting his foot on Morello’s back like it had the weight of a granite statue behind it. “The endowed don’t have to choose. No, they get it all, all at the same time. Why shouldn’t I?”
Jor’Mari pulls back his hand, raining down a storm of blows with his invisible mace, powerful enough to crack stone. The reinforced flesh and bone beneath him begins to break and dent as it is beaten, breaking and bleeding, but the monster is not dead. Spikes of bone strike from the ground, the form of Morello’s body giving way as his ribs invert and shoot upward toward his assailant.
The counter-attack comes too quickly to be dodged. Jor’Mari is pushed away, stuck on the tips of fourteen bone spears that lift him from the ground. He hangs for a moment from the branches of bone, the ink on his skin chipping and disappearing into smoke on the air.
Morello shifts, his body turning, new bones growing to replace the ones that stand stuck in the earth. He heaves, the pain of such swift reformations nearly driving him insensate as he pulls his body back together. The organs inside ache, beaten to such blood ruin by the assault, barely enough to keep the vital functions of the body running. Cradling his arm, favoring a leg still trying to regain function and feeling, he drags himself away from the tree of bone he has stuck into the ground, his eyes turning up toward the being hanging limply from the points.
Jor’Mari stares down, the shadows in his eyes gone now. His eyes are pearlescent orbs, a mirror to the glowing ball suspended between his horns. The ink falls away in a rush of liquid that turns to mist, leaving behind something too beautiful, too sinister, to be mistaken for a man. It lacks detail somehow, the light that makes up its being too bright to distinguish the contours of flesh within, and it stares down with abyssal intent.
“You are not as strong as that other one,” Jor’Mari says.
As the limbs of the bone tree shatter, as the form of Jor’Mari vanishes, Morello begins to understand some of the words. Why had the thought that size would matter? It wasn’t as if Sigrid was huge; it wasn’t as if the master was either. Morello groans and gasps in a breath, the armor of his breastbone shattering like candy as a clawed hand stabs into his chest. He feels it for a moment, a hand squeezing his heart.
“So, you do still have one of these,” Jor’Mari says.
Morello’s body begins to revolt, shattered bone stabbing at the intruding limb, but it fails to pierce more than an inch into the skin. Then Morello feels a twisting sensation, his entire body trying desperately to invert, to lessen the damage, as Jor’Mari turns his arm and rips out his heart. As he falls back, the world growing dim around him, he briefly wonders if the intention in his granted power might have been right, if there might not have been a better form to take.
The body of the monster falls to the ground in a heap of distorted and ill-grown limbs. Jor’Mari looks on at it, staring at the misshapen monster, wondering for a brief instant what kind of person had been inside the monster. His attention turns down to the warmth in his hand, to the massive ball of muscle and ventricles dripping dark blood over his changed skin. He doesn’t think, merely brings the organ to his nose, and takes a whiff before biting into the meat. The taste is ecstasy.
My feet touch the mud, feeling the cold seeping up at me from the ground while the wind continues to buffet me with a stifling heat. All around me, guardsmen are shouting at me to stop, to stay away, but how can I? There is something in his eyes too sad to be left abandoned.
Jor’Mari shifts as I touch the earth not a dozen paces away. His presence swells around him, moving through my own and touching me, trying to bore terror into my heart for the briefest of instants before pulling back. His head rolls in my direction, the blank orbs of his eyes falling upon me. Some instinct inside of me demands that I fear him, that I guard against what he might do. Despite not being the hulking man I have seen him become before, or the one covered in spikes, or the one who has fangs like a viper, he appears now both more normal and alien than I have ever seen him. Two horns extend from his forehead, climbing high and hosting an orb of light that shines like a crown above him. But even without pupils, even with the red still staining the skin around his mouth, I know this man.
“Jor,” I say, daring a step forward.
There is confusion on his face, confusion and an inkling of fear, a brief moment where I think he will step away. He doesn’t, lingering, staring down at me with his arms slack by his side.
“You are dead,” he says, more of a question than anything.
“No,” I reply, shaking my head, walking up until I can reach out and touch him. “No, I’m not. I am here.”
He turns his head, looking down at the crumpled body of the monster on the ground next to him. “I think I’m breaking, Charlene. I don’t know when I will stop.”
Reaching out, my hand touches his cheek, turning him back to face me. I have to stand on the tips of my toes to reach his eye level. “He hurt me,” I tell him, motioning to the crumpled monster. “He hurt me, and you killed him.”
“I didn’t know,” Jor’Mari says, shaking his head, trying to step back, but I won’t let him. “I thought you were dead. I didn’t know.”
“Thank you,” I say, stepping into him. “Thank you for saving me.” Then, our lips meet, and through the exhaustion and the horror, I feel like I have finally returned for the first time.
Comments
Nicholas
I feel like Jor's power up was a bit cheap compared to Charlene's. Like she suffered and died for more power and was still barely able to defeat Fero but Jor simply decided he should be more powerful and then wiped the floor with Morello.
Vinka
tftc! Glad our power couple is finally back togheter ^^ Also, I'm pretty sure ''white-haired half-breen,'' is supposed to be ''half-breed''?
