Chapter 450: The Line That Divides (Bonus Gift 2/5)

The blade of blood came down on me like the sky collapsing, howling through the air with the serpent’s jaws locked around the hilt. I did not raise the pen to block it, since I had already met that weapon with a sword once tonight and I could still remember how it felt to be split in two.

Instead, I set the nib against the empty air in front of me and drew a single line. I combined what I remembered of Space, since the seal on my soul would not let me touch it, with the rules of Sharpness I had established when I created this pen.

It was the simplest stroke there is, the first thing every Initiate scratches onto a slate when the instructors want to know whether their hand shakes. It glowed white and hung between the god and me, no longer than my forearm, and the blade of blood hit it and stopped.

The whole valley flinched. A ring of force came out of the clash and flattened what was left of the forest for miles. The two-thousand-foot weapon ground against my little line with a sound like a mountain being dragged across glass, and the line bowed like a bowstring drawn to the ear. All the while, the Law of Sharpness hummed through my fingers, telling me in its flat, certain voice that this line divided the blade from me, and that this Law would not be broken.

Of course, the line only held as long as I could feed it, and I mostly could. I did not have access to the oceans of Anima inside me, but the small crack in the seal could channel a stable portion of it, and that was enough to sustain this line through the clash.

It was thin, a thread against the ocean I could feel pressing behind it, but it was mine. After carving Scripts out of the raw lightning in my channels, with every one of them burning away the moment the god leaned its weight on it, a thread felt like a river.

Inscriptions were never meant to run on essence dragged out of the air. Every Engraver knows that, and I had been doing it anyway because I had nothing else.

I had something else now.

The serpent’s one good eye widened, and its jaws tightened on the hilt until I heard a fang crack. It pushed, and the line held. Then I drew a second stroke beneath the first, at an angle, and the blade of blood skidded off it and went past my shoulder and buried itself in the earth, and a new canyon opened to my left all the way to the horizon.

I let out a breath I had apparently been holding since I died.

"Oh," I said. "Oh, I like this."

∞

The god was hauling its sword out of the ground, and I fed the thread of Anima into the pen and wrote Bind.

The chains that came out of the bedrock this time were white and dense, and they sang like struck iron. I was no longer restricted to controlling lightning, but could pull from the strength of the earth itself. The chains went around the serpent’s lower coils three times and pulled it against the earth so hard that the valley floor split beneath it, and Raktanāgeya thrashed, and the chains did not care.

It screamed. I let it, since the warband was far enough away now that I did not need to write its voice out of the world, and honestly, after being laughed at over my own corpse, I found I did not mind the sound.

Remembering my death, and all the other deaths I had suffered, I killed the last bit of inhibition left inside me when it came to how I fought, and the next Script that I etched on the world was... Sever.

The word burned gold, carrying the Law of Sharpness, and flew from the nib. It struck the serpent’s chest... and a damned canyon opened. Flesh, scales and divine sinew peeled away in a single wet tear, and the sound was horrific as a chunk of flesh the size of a small city fell from its body and crashed into the valley below, still twitching.

That... could not have felt good.

The serpent howled. Its blood was acid and decay, and where it fell, the earth melted into glass.

The smell of blood and the cry of a god dug up something primal inside my soul, and the next Script that left my pen was... Divide.

Another chunk of the serpent fell, and it almost went insane with pain. Without holding back, Raktanāgeya tore its coils out of my chains, leaving a great deal of itself behind in them, and lashed out faster than thought, but I wrote Halt.

The Law of Sharpness drew a line across the air, and the tail met it. The force behind that blow was so great that space screamed at the point where I arrested the momentum of the god, and the tip of its tail sheared off and came hurtling towards me like a comet of flesh.

Carried by my lightning and a Script of Speed, I appeared above the tail, my pen dragging across its length as it blasted past me, and I carved it open like a fish. The tail split into two long ribbons of meat and bone, and I rode one of them down, laughing like a madman.

Using the falling tail as a launching point, I pushed off, and in the air I wrote Bind dozens of times. Chains of earth and iron burst from the ground for miles, pressing the screaming god to the earth as I landed on its body.

I bent down and placed one gigantic palm on its scales, and I felt the power of a god.

I had lived inside the Law of Flesh for long enough to know flesh when I saw it.

When I looked at the god pinned beneath my chains, I could see every seam in it: where the muscle was rooted to the bone, and where the scales grew out of the hide. Looking deeper, I saw where the great cords along its spine were anchored rib by rib. All of it was held together by the same stubborn agreement that held my own body together, and I was holding a pen whose whole nature was the line that divides.

"Even a god is only meat and bone."

I placed the nib against the scales just behind its skull, then drew a long line down the length of its body, walking beside it as I went, patient and even, like a clerk ruling a margin in a ledger.

The flesh separated along the line, and a massive slab of meat as long as a village slid away from the ribs. The scales on it were still twitching as it rolled off the god and fell into the valley. The sound of it hitting the ground was the sound of a landslide, and the smell hit me a heartbeat later, hot and copper and so thick I could taste it through my teeth.

Beneath where it had been, the ribs stood bare, white and slick and each one as thick as a watchtower. Behind them I could see the heart of a god.

The serpent twisted, fighting against its chains, trying to crush me, but I wrote Open, and the ribcage around its gigantic heart split apart. I stepped inside.