The Beginning After The End novel Chapter 356

Chapter 356: Closure

ARTHUR

The aetheric blade in my hand—no larger than a simple dagger and hazy around the edges—drove into a winged creature made of stone before shattering partway, not yet able to withstand the impact.

My hand wrapped around the creature’s throat. It looked like a bat with a petrified squashed face and a huge mouth. Its wide jaws snapped crazily just inches in front of my face as its jagged claws dug into my arms in a desperate effort to pull itself closer.

Holding the gargoyle back with one hand, I conjured the blade again in my other hand and plunged it into the beast’s head, which split apart with a resounding crack.

The blade broke and faded away, leaving me with empty arms to defend myself as two more gargoyles plummeted toward me.

Twin bolts of dark fire struck the descending gargoyles, and the swooping beasts exploded. Their rubble clattered to the ground like hail and sent up little splashes where it landed in the stream bisecting the zone.

I glanced back to see Caera holding her arm out, revealing the silver bracer she had taken from the Spear Beaks’ treasure room. It seemed thin against her wrist, barely more than a decorative cuff covered in intricate engravings.

Two narrow silver shards were revolving defensively around her, blazing with dark light. In the next breath, they began to dim as they drifted back to the bracer and reconnected to it, fitting into the pattern of engravings.

Regis loped toward us, spitting out a chunk of rock from his mouth.

Behind him, the zone stretched out far into the distance, covered with the wreckage of our passing.

We were in a canyon with sheer, rocky cliffs to either side. They climbed so high that only a sliver of sky could be seen above us, like a reflection of the thin, clear stream that ran along the canyon floor. Loose rocks and rubble—the remains of the gargoyle creatures—littered the canyon floor.

“That rocked,” Regis said, deadpan.

“I admit, it wasn’t bad once things got rolling,” Caera replied, carefully maintaining a straight face except for the slightest quiver of her lips. “In fact, it was rather…marbleous.”

“I guess fun, like beauty, is in the eye of the boulder…” Regis answered, his voice trembling as he desperately tried to keep from laughing.

I faced the exit portal with a deep sigh. “I’m so glad I brought you two.”

Caera stepped up beside me. “Oh, don’t be so stone-faced, Grey.”

“Yeah, Princess. You shouldn’t take us for granite.” Regis broke, barking with laughter.

Ignoring my companions, I focused on the portal, my mind working at a question I’d been carrying with me ever since acquiring the Compass.

It had to be more than just a portal generator that took us in and out of the Relictombs at will. My mind kept going back to the djinn. As difficult as it was to believe, they had designed and built this place. They must have had a way to travel through it, and I already knew that the Compass could interact with a Relictombs portal.

An image flashed in my mind, the false memory implanted by Sylvia with her last message to me. The clarity of the memory had faded with time, but I knew it was one of the zones leading toward the next djinn ruin.

So far, I had stumbled blindly through the Relictombs, knowing that this place was guiding me toward my goals…or so it seemed, at least. But trusting blindly to the machinations of a long-dead race of aether wielders didn’t suit my needs. Not if I was ever going to master Fate.

Sitting down, I focused on the fading memory that Sylvia had left me with as I activated the half-sphere relic. It thrummed with aether as misty gray light engulfed the portal, replacing the oil-slick shimmer that hung like a curtain inside the cut-stone frame with a clear view of my room back at Central Academy.

“Damn it,” I cursed, cutting off the flow of aether into the relic, causing the portal to shift back to its original appearance.

“Protein paste for your thoughts?”

I looked up to see Caera holding out nutrient-filled rations stuffed in an insulated tube packaging.

“Just thinking about how to properly use the Compass,” I answered, flinching away from the strong smell it emitted. “How do you eat that stuff? It smells horrible.”

She shrugged before squeezing the contents from the tube into her mouth. “Unlike you, I actually have to eat to survive. This stuff is easy to carry around in bulk for long ascents.”

“I guess I’m glad I don’t need to eat,” I said, wrinkling my nose.

Caera waved the tube around, fanning the smell of jellied meat in my face. I cringed and swatted her hand away, my knuckles ringing against the silver cuff around her wrist. “How does your new artifact feel?” I asked, eager to divert her from torturing me further.

“Ridiculously frustrating,” Caera pouted. “It’s like I’ve grown a new limb that I have to learn to use from the ground up.”

“Eh, he does that all the time,” Regis said, shrugging his lupine shoulders.

I clamped my hand around Regis’s muzzle before responding. “It looked like you had the hang of it by what I saw back there.”

A faint smile tugged at the corner of Caera’s lips before it disappeared just as fast. She held up her silver bracer as she turned toward the portal. “Do you think the Compass works kind of like my artifact?”

“What do you mean?” I asked as I let go of Regis.

“When I first channeled mana into the artifact, I actually thought it was just a defensive item because of the way the shards barely hovered in place around the bracer. It took me days of constant experimentation to realize that the shards were able to be controlled independently,” she explained, tracing the grooves etched into the silver bracelet. “What if the return function of the Compass is the default and for you to do more, it needs further guidance?”

Caera’s expression softened. “It seems unlikely that the ancient mages would let their people traverse these zones aimlessly. Otherwise, what would have stopped them from being trapped, wandering haphazardly to their deaths?"

I watched as she unconsciously fiddled with the silver bracer around her wrist. Her gaze was empty, focused on a distant memory. She wasn't thinking about djinn, or me, or even herself. Because it wasn’t about her.

“You’re scared of the possibility that the Relictombs sent your brother somewhere he couldn’t escape,” I said softly, winning a surprised look from the blue-haired Alacryan noble.

“Is reading minds another of your otherworldly powers?” she asked in horror. “Please tell me you haven’t been hiding the fact that you can—”

I let a small smile slip onto my face. “I’m good at reading people, but it’s not magic.”

“Yes,” she confirmed with a sigh of relief. “I’ve been wondering for a while now…was that zone you found his dagger and cloak in someplace…”

“Someplace only I could escape?”

She nodded hesitantly. “Like the mirror room or the frozen mountains? Even the bridge of faces would not have been escapable without your…”

“We’ve been calling it God Step,” I filled in.

“Without your ‘God Step’ ability.” She gave me an appraising look. “Regis named it that, didn’t he?”

I let out a loud laugh that resounded off the canyon walls. “How’d you know?”

She smiled wryly. “Something tells me you wouldn’t be so…grandiose in the naming of your abilities.”

“One, it’s a great name,” Regis replied defensively after pulling his muzzle out of my grip. ‘And two, you used to use a spell called ‘Absolute Zero,’ so…’

“No,” I said in answer to her original question. “The zone where I found your brother’s dagger wasn’t like those. It was deadly enough to claim the lives of many ascenders before I found it, but it didn’t require the use of aether to escape.”

“That’s something at least. I’m glad he had a fighting chance, even if he didn’t make it out.” Caera forced a smile before turning and walking away.

Regis remained by my side as I returned my focus back on the half-sphere relic in my hand. Like what Caera had said, maybe the Compass needed more guidance. Shutting my eyes, I visualized the zone that had left the biggest impact on me, the one I could recall with utmost clarity.

“It’s actually changing,” Regis said with disbelief before he let out a groan. “You just had to pick that one.”

I pried one eye open to see the smooth marble floor, high arched ceiling, and rune-covered doors capping both ends…along with the armed statues lining both sides of the hallway.

“It actually worked,” I huffed, feeling the drain from my core as the Compass continued to siphon aether out of me in order to hold the new destination open.

Deactivating the relic, I began recalling the details of our destination in my head. Once the image was clear in my mind, I patted Regis on his side. “Get Caera. We’re leaving.”

By the time the portal had stabilized to the next zone we would be heading into, Caera had arrived with Regis, wide-eyed in awe.

“I can’t believe you actually figured it out so quickly,” she muttered.

“Your advice helped,” I said, holding out a hand as Regis disappeared back inside me. “Let’s go.”

With a deep breath, the two of us stepped through, immediately greeted by a humid gust of wind. Around us were dense trees growing from both floor and ceiling, speckled with the occasional colors from the aether fruits, while webs of tangled roots spread endlessly beneath our feet.

“Well, this definitely isn’t your room,” Caera observed. “So this is one of the zones you need to visit on this mysterious quest of yours?”

“No,” I said quietly, turning to her. “It’s where your brother died.”

The Alacryan noble’s head whipped toward me, her intelligent red eyes wide and trembling before she turned away, letting her hair fall to shield her face. “Thank you, Grey.”

Ignoring the prickling sensation of Regis’s taunting grin, I stored the Compass back into my rune before stepping forward. “Don’t thank me yet.”

The last time we were here, Regis and I had killed the giant millipede and all but one of its eggs so that we didn’t destroy the delicate ecosystem contained within the zone. But time worked strangely in the Relictombs, so we didn’t know what we would find here.

Scouting the nearby trees, I found one with strong branches and began hoisting myself upwards, avoiding the dangling fruit and the invisible creatures that used them as bait. Once I was seventy feet in the air, I scouted out our surroundings, looking for the millipede’s lair.

Although the rough-dug hole that opened up into the millipede den was nondescript, the aetheric glow that emanated from it wasn’t, and it didn’t take long to find. It was less than a mile away. Before I could drop down to the others, though, movement caught my eye in the distant canopy. Treetops rustled as something moved beneath them.