Chapter 476: Green Claws

The green fire behaved like water as it rushed past me into the crater, and it began to fill it up. I started to step back when I felt a growing pressure emerging from the crater that sent faint chills down my spine.

Something like a groan mixed with a woman’s moan was coming out of the pool of green fire, and the sound transformed into laughter that mixed the voice of a man and a woman, and I could hear the stranger’s voice inside it before it was eclipsed by the sound of bones being broken and flesh being rearranged.

Boom.

A massive pillar of green fire burst out of the crater, as if it could no longer be contained. The pillar rose through the dark towards the apex of the pyramid two miles above.

The heat coming off it was not heat as I knew it, but a weird mixture of cold and heat that pulled the air in that place towards the pillar. It was a good thing I had not really needed to breathe for a long time, because in less than a second there was no air left in there at all.

My own skin pulled towards it, and my eyes widened a little in surprise, as I had no idea that even my Adamantium flesh could be affected by that suction, and I took several steps back.

A demented laughter came out of the pillar as the sound of a body being reshaped grew louder, and the only thing I could do was prepare myself for what was coming.

I did not feel fear, not really. What I felt was anticipation, and more than enough rage to fill an ocean. I did not appreciate the deaths of my companions, even though they had managed to survive, and something about this stranger and the Necromancer made me wary.

I was glad that monsters like these had been left behind in history.

∞

There was a soft sound I could have missed through the commotion from the pillar of fire, as a leg came over the rim of the crater.

It was black, jointed in the wrong number of places, and longer than a ship’s mast, with its end pointed like a spear. When it came down on the stone the floor for miles jumped as if a meteor had struck. My eyes twitched as I tried to imagine the weight of that limb.

Then a second one, a third on the far side, and the fourth came down about sixty feet from where I was standing and buried its point four feet into the rock.

Before long, eight massive insect-like limbs surrounded the crater, and then the body they belonged to came up out of the fire.

The bottom half was a spider, black and segmented, with the green fire running under the shell like blood in a lamp. And out of its front, where a spider’s head should have been, was a man from the waist up... two of him.

∞

I have seen a great many things that were just... wrong, and this one was heading towards the top of that list.

There were two torsos fused at the shoulder and the flank with what resembled burning green threads, four arms between them, and above the shoulders there were two heads pressed face to face, forehead to forehead, cheek to cheek, so hard that the flesh of each had spread against the other the way a hand spreads on glass.

The places where they were fused were covered with green threads that pulled at their faces, twisting their features into a thing of nightmares.

One was the stranger. I recognised the shape of his jaw, and his empty eyes. The other was a woman, with a long face and a high brow. Her mouth and her eyes were open, and they were filled with green fire.

They were not two heads on one neck. They were one head that had been made by pushing two into the same space and refusing to let either of them be lost. It almost reminded me of the strange figure inside the body of Dorrik that I had seen when I gained my Eldritch Perception for the first time.

Was it possible that the Necromancer and this stranger were once a single being?

I could see the woman’s eye through the ruin of his cheek, stretched by the threads, and I shook my head. This was not the time to be distracted by unknown speculations.

"Necromancer," I said.

The green fire came off the pillar and went into the four hands. It came out through the fingers and kept going, hardening as it went, until each hand had four claws on it, curved, translucent, and burning cold. Sixteen blades. I watched the light travel down each claw to the point and drip off it, and where the drops hit the floor the stone aged, and the surface crumbled to grey sand.

Both mouths moved. Only one voice came out, and it was neither of theirs.

"You called me here," it said. "Your light from the heavens tore through my flesh like pale moths under a silver flame. Tell me how you wield the blood of Terra, and I will let you keep your name when I am finished with the rest of you."

I blinked. "That’s very generous. Do you do weddings?"

I got the pen up, and I had time to draw exactly one Script before the floor around it shattered.

∞

The eight legs pushed at once and the stone beneath that thing broke into pieces the size of wagons, and the whole shape vanished. I do not mean it moved quickly. I mean the space where it had been was empty, and the sound of its departure arrived afterwards.

It was in front of me before I could blink. The distance between us might as well not have existed, and the first pair of arms was already swinging. Eight claws came at my chest from two directions.

The Script I had written was Harden, borrowing the impossible weight of the pyramid to serve as my shield, and even this defence, which would have stalled the Blood God for a moment, was sliced through with a harsh screaming sound, and four of the claws tore through my flesh and came off my ribs with a sound like an axe on a bell.

The impact took me off the floor and threw me three hundred yards along the ground, as the other four opened me from hip to shoulder on the way past.

I hit the ground rolling. Green fire poured into the wound, and the Law of Flesh went to work and slowed, because whatever those claws were made of did not want the wound to close. It wanted it to get older.

I came up on one knee with my whole left side numb, grinning like an idiot, and carved Bind on the ground. The floor erupted with chains of blue light that wrapped around the spider’s limbs, and it tore through them almost at once, but almost at once was long enough.

Ten seconds had passed.

I growled. "Crush!"