Unbinding

"To wake a god is not like waking a man. You do not shake its shoulder. You break its ribs." —Sanguine Ritual Scroll, Forbidden Text

Unbinding

Zalim - The Throne Room

There was no clang of metal on stone. There was no spark.

When the black scimitar struck the floor, it did not cut the gold plating; it unmade it.

Zalim watched in horror as his brother, his Edge, sank effortlessly into the foundation of the world. It was as if the blade were passing through water. The boundary between the throne room and the ancient prison beneath it simply ceased to exist.

For a heartbeat, there was absolute silence. The air pressure in the room plummeted, popping ears and sucking the breath from lungs. The world turned grey, the color drained by the sheer, ravenous magnitude of the sword's hunger. It had finally been fed a meal worthy of its appetite, and the reality of the room shuddered in recoil.

Then, the mountain screamed.

It was a sound felt in the marrow of the teeth before it was heard, a tectonic vibration that shattered the emerald dais into dust and turned the stained glass windows into shrapnel.

Violet light erupted from the fissure—a geyser of raw, corrupted Ether that blasted the ceiling, melting the gold leaf into raining slag.

"Beautiful," Root whispered, shielding his eye with his iron arm, his voice trembling with the ecstasy of a successful incision. "The patient is awake."

The floor began to tilt, the geometry of the room failing.

"Move!" Aga roared, scrambling to his feet on the shifting debris.

The woodsman grabbed Gaidan by his good shoulder, hauling the broken soldier back just as the section of floor they had been standing on crumbled into the glowing abyss. The heat wafting up was not just hot; it was ancient, the stale, suffocating breath of a being that had slept since the dawn of time.

The Gold-Guard automatons were not so lucky. Three of them tumbled backward into the fissure, their heavy brass bodies disintegrating in the violet wash before they even hit the bottom. They didn't melt; they simply unraveled, their gears and pistons turning to dust.

"The cables!" Gaidan shouted over the roar, pointing with his dagger toward the pit. "Look at the injectors!"

Through the widening cracks, the face of the Stone King was visible. The massive, crystalline visage was contorted in agony, its mouth open in a silent howl. The massive iron injectors Root had drilled into the god’s neck were pulsing violently. The Sanguine siphon wasn't just drinking anymore; it was clawing the essence out of the waking titan, turning the god's own struggle into power.

Zalim stood frozen on a floating slab of masonry, suspended in the violent updraft of magic. He wasn't looking at the god. He wasn't looking at the destruction.

He was looking at his right hand.

It was empty.

For the first time in centuries, the weight was gone. The hum was gone. The voice that had whispered to him in the dark, the petulant, hungry child he had carried across deserts, oceans, and epochs was silent.

His sword—the friend, the Edge—was down there, embedded in the heart of the Stone King. He could feel it vibrating through the floor, drinking the god’s pain, glowing with a terrible, dark joy that had nothing to do with him. Had it found a new master. A master made of infinite stone and infinite greed, he wondered.

"Root. He took it," Zalim whispered, the words feeling like glass in his throat.

He looked up at Root. The glassiness in the swordsman's eyes was gone, shattered by loss. For the first time, Zalim looked truly, visibly human. And he looked ready to weep.

"You forced him," Zalim said, his voice cutting through the noise like a razor. "You forced him to taste of a god."

"I gave it a purpose!" Root called back, standing safely on the high ledge of the throne, untouched by the chaos. "A sword is meant to cut, Twice-Born. I merely gave it the ultimate whetstone. And now, I will take the harvest."

Root raised his mechanical hand. He wasn't aiming at them. He was aiming at the ceiling, toward the black tower suspended in the foundry above. The red runes on his iron arm flared, syncing with the pulse of the dying mountain.

"Initiate full extraction."