#this is probably one of the most solid things ive written for my writeblr so far

[nikkywrites]

Cemetery of Power || Caffeine Challenge 30

Lila starts her ritual. A friend begs her to reconsider. Part two to this.

Used the dialogue prompt and picture sorta.

This is edited a fair bit. Some for flow’s sake, but I did tweak Lila’s spell/ritual and it changes a bit from there. No major shifts, but you may want to give this a glance over if you’re following in the transfer. This encapsulates the kind of changes that’ll happen to everything.

*****

Lila strides out of the bar, blade pressed against her side, bell dinging over her head like a toll for death. She walks around the side, to the cold, bricked, dark alley. Spray paint tags the wall, still wet, a swirl of colors that is abstract to any human that doesn’t know better, but more to those who do. It’s a doorstop for the portal she’d opened to get there.

It leads to the woods. Long grass curling around her ankles, hooked fingers from below trying to pull her in with old magic imbued and rotten. Spindly, tall trees reach for the sun, jagged branches thirsting for magic that no longer lives under it’s cover. Magic migrates, like flocking birds, to where it is easy to live, to where those who practice it reside. When the nest is left behind, empty, the twigs and dirt and sky thirst for what is now gone. These grounds were sacred, once. Lila was going to make sure that they were again, if just for a single moment.

The buildings were long gone, overtaken by nature as the centuries dragged on, but the magic they had been built with, tempered with, housed with, remains. It will take more then time and earth to remove that.

It thrums under her feet, desperate, pleading. Lila unsheathes the Soul Dagger she’d dealt Xia unfairly into relenting. It should corrupt her, leak poison into her blood that explodes her mind, taunting her with all her thoughts of death. Lila isn’t a Soul Keeper. She doesn’t have a drop of it in her past, in her ancestry. But the blade will cooperate nonetheless.

It knows what she is and what she’s going to do. It will listen. Cooperate. It’s going to do what it was made for, regardless that it’s not Xia wielding it anymore. Not a Soul Keeper. It knows this is important.

It takes souls. Cuts the bond between body and spirit. Is an astral blade forged by the Fates, eons and eons and eons ago.

There are few things older than a Soul Blade. This one, Lila knows, happens to have come from the Cutter of String. The final Fate, the lesser Fate, the one who held the shears.

She walks through the trees, pulling against the magic in the ground, in the dirt, in the trees. It obeys, with that blade in her possession. So few know of Fate’s connection with Soul Keepers. Lila knows.

She knows of it’s history while also knowing of the corpse that lays in the ground here. An old body, an old soul, old magic that powers the plants to this day, however dwindling it is. Secret knowledge. Deadly knowledge.

Kneeling, she digs her fingers into the soft earth, malleable with power. She hums a few notes of an old spell-song. She stakes the blade into the ground, to the hilt. Light spills from the edges and she drinks some in, allowing it to strengthen her throat. She begins the chant.

The tongue she uses is old. Ancient. Powerful. Forgotten. Monarchs had crumbled under the taste of a single syllable, a fraction of a word, of a sentence, of a declaration. Now, it burrows and grabs and tugs.

Bones rise from the dark dirt, shambling into a skeleton’s form. With words alone, she assembles one of the oldest skeletons, restoring it to it’s original form. To pristineness. To smooth white instead of craggled yellow-brown. When assembled, she stops. Slowly, reverently, she glides her finger along the clavicle, a sharp jutting point.

“Ward,” she breathes, running her gaze along the forgotten fragment of life. The skull tilts, in response, empty eye sockets turning towards her. “I’m sorry.”

For everything. What she’s done. What she’s doing.

Taking the dagger from the earth, she holds it in her hand. Resumes her chant, lets the power of her words shake the air. His bones vibrate. Her fist tightens and she severs the spine where it holds the skull. The bones sparkle into luminescent powder. She coaxes it into her palm. She blinks at the stinging in her eyes.

Closing her fist and pressing it to her heart, she says the part of the chant, the ritual, the spell, that’s actually draining. Important. The point of no return. Magic spears her. She opens her palm and blows the lackluster dust from her palm. The grinded remains of his bones, unneeded anymore.

It sparkles in the air, hangs still like a puppet on the end of a string. Blows away in conjured wind and becomes nothing that will ever be assembled again. Together.

Lila’s marrow burns.

“What are you doing?” A voice sounds behind her, a familiar one that is too late.

She doesn’t turn, instead aids the invading magic within her, infuses it into her breath, her being, her soul. As sacrifice, she trades three inches of her hair and a secret long passed. Her skin changes, rippling into a darker shade, adapting to a thicker epidermis, the skin of a boy who had changed magic. Who almost became a god. A true Ever. Unforgotten. Almost, almost.

Finally, she turns to her visitor, with the enchantment accepted and progressing. Changing her.

“You know what I’m doing,” she says, dual-voiced like a doubled edged sword, hers and something deeper.

Colin looks at her, pity in his eyes like a corpse from a noose. “You can’t do this.”

Her hair recedes into her skull, shorter, thicker, lighter. “You’re to late to stop me.”

“Stop trying to be him,” Colin says, a plea instead of an order because she’ll never listen to that. “You’ll never be him. He’ll take you.”

She stands, bones shifting under her skin, breaking and shattering, painful but welcome. “I’m not doing this for fun.” The feminine lilt is receding, a background echo to his deep tenor. “I’m adopting him so he won’t be lost. You can sense it. Traders are hungering for a piece of him. He was rotting. It’s too dangerous for him to lie dormant any longer. He’ll rot this forest.”

Colin steps forwards, hesitant, arms raised. “He will consume you. That tongue will only keep him bound for so long.”

His eyes, wide and green, are begging her. Please. Don’t. It’s hopeless. Already too late. He’s a part of her now and if she doesn’t get rid of him quick, things will stay that way. He will consume her. But she has to try. Too much is at stake for her not to.

“It’s not for forever. But no one can get their hands on him. Not even the company.” She fixes brown eyes that aren’t hers on her friend, steely and serious. “He’s too much. He could be used to destroy Nons. For eradication. War. It’s too much, Colin.”

Tears light his eyes. “The Garden is sealed. You won’t make it.”

The old soul bubbles within her own; a temporary extension, a temporary half. “Together we can do it. We have to try. It’s his best chance.”

His tears fall. His face collapses on itself in preemptive grief. “You won’t come back,” he whispers, voice breaking like she imagines his heart is. He steadies his breathing as her outward transformation completes. “Why is this your duty? Why does it have to be you?”

She doesn’t have any more time to spare him the answer. It’s not an easy one anyways. It has things she can’t tell him in it. Things she keeps only to herself. It’s a hard answer.

But the short of it is that no one else is capable. For reasons both in her control and not. She is Ward’s only chance at peace.

Taking a breath, first and new in this body, she stands over him. Taller, body thin and boney. Once, he had fostered all life, protected something doomed to death with his kindness, turned tides of extinction into tides of evolution. Much of magic would be dead and lost if he hadn’t sacrificed all he did. If he hadn’t created all he did. 

Unspoken, his name is just a series of letters to most, a category of spellwork to others, nothing in it’s entirety but something in fragments. To Lila, to long dead corpses, to something he bore that still remains, he is more. He belongs in the Garden, in the cage of ethereal vines that holds souls too powerful for Keepers to have and too powerful to sit in the earth he once breathed in. 

He is too much to let lie. Important in ways that don’t matter. Corrupted too much by time to be harmless and giving and true to what he was. He must be moved.

The forest would change. The Garden would change. Her and her magic would change. Stepping forwards, closer to Colin and not, her footprints sink below the mantle all the way to the core, to molten metal and chunks of forbidden, ancient magic.

His aura, even in death and new not-life, is strong. Pungent. Trees bow beneath it, grass abating, life waning. Magic leaving the forest to die. To look the same but be hollow under bark and grass and sky. Sighing, she takes a step forward in the forest and finishes her next at the gate of the Garden. The cemetery of power.

Immediately, all remaining bits of magic left behind withers. Gone ebbs the fiendish pull of the call for blood, for death, for skin. Centuries among humans had turned his kind healing into vicious corruption. His magic had rotted over time and started trying to self-live, to sustain itself on outward life.

It had tried not to fade into obscurity. It knew what it was. What it did. It knew it did not belong where it was.

Haunted woods haunted no more, Lila brandishes his power and skin like a fleet of trained men. Tearing at rust, at vegetation, at gates made of celestial, intangible steel, she demolishes the veil of protection and starts lying his soul to rest among all the dead, among world domineering strength, among vile healing and kind destruction.

She takes an old soul and heals the world.

*****

I’m still proud of this. Apparently originally I wasn’t sure about it, but I like this piece. I have no idea how the core of it came in an hour, but this is something I’m proud of. A little big, maybe, in the scope of it, but good.

Poor Colin. He’s just trying to be a good friend, but he doesn’t understand.