Chapter 84: The Weight Of a Presence

Chapter 84 -084: The Weight Of a Presence

Nyx sat atop a wooden chair, book in hand, although it was clear to see that she had not the slightest interest in its contents.

“Aldridge.”

“Yes, Progenitor.”

“Ma’am will do.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

She sighed, gazing out the window. The sky was perpetually darkened red and, even the sun was blocked out although the clock in the room said it was just afternoon.

Under that dull red light, the whole district looked as though it had been dipped in wine, and nothing in it moved except the smoke from distant chimneys.

“How many days has it been since we arrived here?”

“Two days, I believe.”

By now, the book had been flung into a corner of the wide, lavish room, where it caught fire and quickly reduced to a pile of ash.

They had come here after their encounter in the alley. It was rumored to be the best inn around, and it was. She had insisted on the best rooms, and Aldridge had not argued.

Notwithstanding its not-so-wonderful neighborhood, the inn stood at a staggering ten storeys and was apparently run by one of the Demon Lords, one who also had quite good taste.

Aldridge had to admit it. The halls were wide, the staff were silent and quick, and the rooms smelled of something warm and dark instead of the rot and metal that lay over the rest of the city.

“Why has none of those dimwitted demons sought me out yet? Any probable, reasonable explanation?”

Aldridge sighed. The Progenitor, who was surprisingly energetic, had asked the same question in different forms over a hundred times since they had lodged here, and his answer had always been the same.

He had long since learned that the question was never really a question. It was the Progenitor’s way of thinking aloud, and the right answer was to let her finish.

“We concealed our presence, did we not? Subtlety is what we agreed on, no?”

“No, non, Aldridge.” She rose from her seat. Her aide followed suit, fetching a towel and taking her dress as she removed it to settle into the bath. “That’s not subtlety. That’s complete invisibility, and that is wasted on our purpose here.”

She lowered herself slowly into the water, without ceremony and without a care, enjoying the temperature of the bath.

“As I was saying,” she continued, tilting her head back onto the tiled rim. Aldridge was quick enough to fetch her a glass of pleasantly dark red wine, the color of the sky. She raised the glass in slight appreciation before taking a sip.

“What, then, do you suggest we do to announce our presence?”

The water worked wonders, slowly loosening up her joints, and a slight moan escaped her throat, one that showed how pleased she was. Then she closed her eyes, and the room went quiet in the way a forest does before a storm. Aldridge had just barely opened his mouth to ask what she had in mind when it hit.

Her answer.

A Presence. Her Presence, heavy and suffocating, vast and ancient, unfurling outward from her, into the room and out into the world.

The first wave was gentle. Oppressive, but gentle. The second wave, however, was not.

Glasses rattled on their shelves, and the lamps swung on their chains. For a moment, the whole inn seemed to hold its breath.

It crushed everything instantly. Windows shattered, poorly built buildings fell, and the ground trembled. Above it all, it fueled one instinct across everything it touched: the instinct to kneel and cower before an unknown gaze that weighed upon them without mercy.

Aldridge was spared the suffering, but the roars and screams from below reminded him once more just how monstrous the beings above the Archsage ranks were.

He kept his face still, but his hand had tightened around the glass he held.

When they had gone to pick up the Progenitor from the human realm, she had ranked as just an Adept. But as the months passed—very few of them, actually—she had quickly regained every bit of her past power and glory, aided by a rather ingenious device the human race had managed to cook up: the Rank Breaker, which had come into play during the later stages of her rapid growth.

It still amused him that a thing made by humans had ended up in the hands of the one being in the world who could do the most with it, even before its use had been officially approved for them.

Now she sat in a tub with a glass of wine in hand and had the entire region begging to be spared, without lifting a single finger.

Somewhere below, the staff had fallen to their knees in the corridors, and the sound of it carried up through the floors.

The Presence rolled inward a few moments later, a period that had felt like ages to its victims. Some of them had even lost their lives!

“We have lost our subtlety, ma’am. Is it alright to do that?” the old vampire asked, a bit worried.

“It would seem our subtlety is not getting us where we want to go. If the Demon Lord in charge of this region is capable or competent enough, they’ll seek us out. And we can even frame our newly found strength as a gift from the salvation we shall preach to them.”

“That’s a new way to view things.” The old vampire refilled the Progenitor’s glass. “But your Presence was weakened, and I’m not yet fully convinced why someone such as yourself would consider these rather strenuous activities to achieve a goal your strength alone could achieve. You are a Half-Deity-ranked powerhouse. You could topple a realm if you wanted. Why the patience?”

Nyx set down her glass as she rose.

Aldridge came over, wrapping her in the towel and taking her glass. He also made the shattered glass scattered all over the room slowly fit back into its original positions.

The pieces slid home without a sound, window by window, until the room looked as though nothing had touched it at all.

“Because there’s a slight difference between just enough and too much, Aldridge. And that difference is the only thing standing between us and being found,” she replied, “by something far less reasonable than even the Khyronians’ Supreme Demon.”

He frowned slightly. “You think someone is listening?” he asked, more as a statement than a question.

“Not necessarily. But I think there are few things left in this world capable of sensing what I truly am. And they would come running the instant I gave them a deliberate reason to.” She paused deliberately. “What I released today was a mere taste, enough to frighten and attract as much attention as we can afford. Anything more, and I stop being a rumor that merely frightens demons and become something that registers on scales far above theirs.”

She donned a red silk dress that draped all the way to the ground.

“And you’d rather not register.”

“I would very much rather not register, my boy.” The faintest, humorless curve touched her lips. “The histories of the vampire kind have branded me the One Above All, a title I genuinely believe in and will never hand over to anyone under the sun. Or not,” she joked, referring to Khyron’s weather.

“But there are a few things in this world, like I said, that I have absolutely no interest in waking. Some of them, I genuinely doubt I could escape. It would be foolish to rouse them because I did not handle quite trivial issues well, would it not?”

He absorbed that in silence for a few moments. Over the course of her past reincarnations, she had been acclaimed as the strongest by many in the Citadel, and even in other realms, for centuries, for millennia.

But this was the first time she had ever claimed that a ceiling existed to her near-invincibility. And for one of Half-Deity rank to claim such a thing meant that there were beings who preyed even on Half-Deity ranks who overstepped. A truly terrifying reality.

Aldridge had served her through more lives than he cared to number, and he had believed there was nothing in the world that she would not face. He found that belief was not entirely gone, but it had grown a little quieter.

“So we are doing things slowly.”

“No. Quietly. Slowly gets us nowhere. If all this goes well, I might go on to break into the realm of the Quasi-God. But for now, quietly we shall tread.”

He nodded, and that was all the answer the Progenitor needed.

A new book was picked up, and pages were flipped.

This one she held properly, though her eyes were not on the page. They were on the door, and on whatever was approaching it.

“They are coming. Someone is pleasantly earnest. Set out my dress for the evening before you receive our guests. And get me another glass.”

See y’all tomorrow.

We are open to constructive criticisms, reviews, comments, gifts and subscriptions (^^)

Gracias!