Chapter 5: Oath and Ossuary

Chapter 5: Chapter 5: Oath and Ossuary

Elias watched the knight fight from the bottom of the water.

He couldn’t do much else. Every breath came shallow and wet, scraping over something broken on his left side, and the edges of the world kept dimming and brightening like a bad bulb. But he could see, and seeing was the one thing he had always been good at.

The bone knights came at her from every side, and she met them like a wall that had learned to swing a sword. Her blade left streaks of white light in the air, and every stroke took a skeleton apart at the joints. Halberds came down on her shield and skidded off. She pivoted, cut, stepped, cut again, never more than two paces from him, never once letting anything past.

It should have been enough. It wasn’t.

The smoke was the problem. It poured from the censer in thick, bruise-colored ropes, and every time the knight drew breath, the white fire on her blade dimmed a little. Her footwork was slowing. Elias could see it in the way her heel dragged through the water, in the way her shield rose a fraction late, just like Brody’s had.

And the King kept rising. It dragged itself out of the rubble of skulls, crown askew, and swung the censer again. She had to throw herself sideways to meet it, and the smoke doubled.

Count, Elias told himself. Count it.

The King swung. The censer arced across the chamber, and at the bottom of the arc, it hung. For one second, the chain went loose between the King’s fist and the censer, swaying, before the King hauled it back up.

Swing. Slack. One second.

Swing. Slack. One second.

And inside the censer, through the lattice of its vents, something burned. Not incense. A heart of green-gold light, pulsing in time with the candles in the walls. Whenever the King took a hit, the light flared, and the cracks in its bones knitted shut.

The core is in the censer, he thought. It’s carrying its own heart on a chain.

A bone knight broke through the ring and came straight at Elias, halberd raised. The knight was five paces away with three skeletons on her shield.

The halberd came down. Elias didn’t have the strength to flinch.

It stopped an inch from his face, as if it had struck glass.

Across the chamber, the knight staggered as though she’d been hit from behind. Then her blade flared, twice as bright as before, and her next cut threw a crescent of white light across the water that split the halberd-bearer in half from ten feet away.

Elias stared.

Every hit she takes for me, he thought slowly, makes her stronger.

He knew what he had to do. He hated it.

"Hey," he croaked. It came out as a whisper. He tried again, louder, and something in his ribs screamed. "Knight!"

She didn’t turn, but her head tilted toward him.

"The core’s in the censer. After every swing, the chain goes slack. One second." He coughed, and it tasted like copper. "Cut the chain."

"I can’t reach it." She blocked a halberd and shattered a skull with the rim of her shield. "It won’t swing close enough to me. It fears the fire."

"It’ll swing at me."

That made her look back, just for an instant. Her eyes were grey, he noticed, and very tired. "It will kill you."

"You said it wouldn’t." He got one hand under himself, then a knee. The world tilted, and he waited for it to stop. "You swore."

Something passed over her face. Not quite a smile.

"So I did."

Elias stood up.

He didn’t know how. His left side was a wall of fire, and his legs belonged to someone else. But he stood, and then he walked, one step and then another, out from behind her shield and into the open water between the altar and the King. He splashed as loudly as he could and shouted, wordless, a porter’s hoarse bellow across a gate floor.

The King’s candle-eyes turned to him.

The censer came around.

It came slowly, the way it had for Brody, the way it had for him the first time: a long, lazy arc of bone and chain and bruise-colored smoke. He didn’t run. He stood in the middle of the black water and watched it come, and it was the hardest thing he had ever done.

It hit him.

It hit her.

He felt it pass through him like a gust of hot wind, and then all of it, every ounce of that barrel-sized weight and every bit of its burning, rerouted across the chamber and slammed into Aveline Rosier.

She didn’t stagger this time.

She ignited.

White light exploded out of her. It poured from the seams of her armor, from her eyes, from the edge of her sword, so bright that the chamber went colorless, the skulls bleached to nothing, and the smoke burned away in a ring around her. She looked like a second sun had come down to stand in the water.

The chain went slack.

One second.

She was already moving. She crossed the chamber in two strides and brought her sword down in one clean stroke, and the chain parted like thread.

The censer dropped. It struck the altar steps and burst open like a cracked egg, and the core rolled out into the shallows, green-gold and pulsing, the size of a fist.

The King lunged for it.

So did Elias.

He was closer. He’d made sure of that. On his way out, his fingers had closed around something in the water: a guild dagger with the Ironfang crest on its pommel, dropped by a hunter during the retreat. He fell more than knelt, and he drove it down with everything he had left.

The blade went into the core.

The core cracked like ice on a pond.

Light poured out of the fracture, and the King froze mid-lunge, one bony hand an arm’s length from Elias’s face. Hairline cracks raced up its fingers, its arm, its crown. Then it came apart all at once, three meters of barnacled bone collapsing into a heap of dust that hissed as it hit the water. All around the chamber, the bone knights crumbled with it.

The windows came so fast they overlapped.

[Irregular boss defeated: the Ossuary King.]

[Experience shared: Elias Pierce, Aveline Rosier.]

[Level up: 1 → 2.]

[Excess experience converted. Threshold Sanctum stabilized.]

The XP hit him like a wave hitting a seawall. Heat flooded his limbs, his chest, the broken place in his side, and he dropped to his knees in the water, gasping. His ribs still hurt, but he could breathe. Barely, but he could.

When the world stopped spinning, the core was still there under his hand, dim now, the size of a plum, with a thin crack running through its heart. He picked it up. It was warm.

He put it in his jacket pocket, next to three pink envelopes.

"You live," the knight said.

She stood over him, the white fire gone from her blade, breathing hard. Up close, she was taller than he’d thought, soaked to the knees, her armor dented and scorched.

"Elias," he managed. "Elias Pierce."

"Aveline Rosier. Of Carrow." She looked around the ruined chamber, at the skulls and the water, and then at the stone wall sealing the doorway. "Who built that?"

"The man who left me here."

She walked to the wall, set her feet, and struck it once with the rim of her shield. The whole thing blew outward in a spray of rubble. Beyond it, the nave was empty. Candles still burned beneath the water, and there was no one left to see.

Elias tried to stand and failed. Another window slid into view.

[Active summon: Aveline Rosier. Recall to the Threshold Sanctum?]

He didn’t know what that meant, and he was too tired to find out any other way. Yes, he thought.

For one second, he saw it: a grey plain under a starless sky, flat and silent, and a single stone hall standing alone in the middle of nothing. Aveline stood in its doorway, looking back at him.

Then it was gone. He was alone in the Drowned Cathedral, and somewhere far above him, the gate began to groan.