Disciple of Vengeance by CC Rasmussen (phonics readers .txt) 📕

left hand, puncturing his chest and letting his lifeless body fall to the floor. He looked up in horror. “No,” he said Janis lifted his hands and inhaled his essence.

Malarlo hadn’t moved. The cult leader was standing in the center of the chamber, his hands folded together in front of him, his hairless face as passive as ever. Janis could feel the life essences of the men he’d killed swirling inside him as the symbiote consumed them. Its tendrils dug deeper. He imagined it like branches squeezing his heart. Felt sick with energy.

“Quite a display, Janis Aphora,” Malarlo said.

“You should’ve killed me when I entered,” Janis said through the delirious haze.

“The wizard said you would come,” Malarlo said. “And we do not fear death. For it is only a return to potential and eventual rebirth.”

Janis walked towards him. Malarlo smiled. Janis felt woozy at the prospect of feeding on his soul. Why was he so sanguine? “Tell me why Orinax betrayed my family, and I might let you disappear into the Shimmer,” Janis said, swelling the air in his right hand until it was a condensed packet.

“You’ve bonded with a fascinating Lethi. In all my time in the Shimmer, I’ve never encountered one like it. If I had the time, I would love to dissect you.” Janis felt another presence enter the room, one he’d felt before. “Watching you is its own treat, though. I sacrificed these men so you could expend yourself enough that we might learn what it is. The process was painful, but useful. All sacrifices for the Yrgamon are worthy because through it we will live again.”

The mage was here. “Tell me,” he screamed.

Malarlo scoffed. “You sad little man. You don’t have any idea as to the forces arrayed against you.”

Qinra.

The mage attacked before Janis could attack Malarlo, Qinra’s telekinetic blast sending him face-first onto the floor. His Shadowstalker instinct kicked in. He rolled into the shadows, leaping up and pressing his body against the wall to buy just a few seconds. He tried to pick out the mage in the starlight, but the husk was too quick. The god-being had possessed many sapiens in its time. Countless, perhaps. He was against an entity that held a deeper understanding of what it was doing than he’d probably ever have. Janis could barely bend gravity into a shield before the flames hit it, the heat burning his hands as the pressure inched him against the wall. It was, mercifully, not as tied to his brain, keeping his mind free to find a way out. The mage pressed his advantage. “Janis,” the god-being hissed through enslaved vocals. It was like his name emanated through countless more world branches. Janis grit his teeth. “Die.”

Janis struggled to dive away, but the flames covered everything. He could feel Qinra’s hate for him, and Orinax’s drive for his destruction. Could tease out the vague impressions from the alien mind, though only barely. Soon, it wouldn’t matter if he wasn’t able to move.

He felt Sciana’s presence before he saw her. It was like a distant beacon of light on an otherwise black shore. Arrows flew at the demon, forcing it to shift its attention from Janis just long enough for him to throw himself to the floor, exhausted.

Malarlo had disappeared, but the mage was visible now. Its body glowed from inside, its skin covered in dark red splotches and creases emitting a red glow as though his insides were magma. Sciana sprinted across the opposing wall as the mage hurled telekinetic blasts at it, kicking more dust into the air. The walls crumbled. Janis pushed himself to his feet as the dome cracked above them.

“Kill it,” Sciana screamed as she fired another arrow at it. The mage waved an arm up and blew it out of midair. Janis sliced up with his arm, sending his own telekinetic blast at the husk. It sliced through its chest, unleashing more of the eerie glow and sending it to its knees. Janis raced towards it, compressing an even larger one in his open palm, when the mage looked up, its skin coagulating over the once crippling wound. Janis screamed with rage as he hurled his attack, demolishing the wall behind the mage as it leaped away.

He threw up a shield again just as the telekinetic attacks sliced and pounded against it, straining even his symbiote’s power. “Sciana,” Janis yelled. “He’s too strong. Get out.”

She was a presence to his right, a hazy thought in the back of his mind as he concentrated fully on holding the mage’s attacks at bay. His nose was bleeding again, his skin on fire. He heard her fire an arrow and wondered what possible good she thought that could achieve. The dome above them cracked further, a massive boulder landing between him and the mage. He looked up as the rest of it followed, throwing himself aside as great stone blocks collapsed into the center of the chamber and onto the mage.

He stood up, coughing. She helped him up. “We have to hurry,” he managed.

“Surely it’s dead,” she said.

“No,” he exhaled through a raw esophagus. A soft red glow seeped out through the creases in the rock as if a swarm of fireflies was approaching just outside a door. “Run.”

He led them down the curving hallway until they reached a circular chamber with branches spiraling in three more directions. Janis hissed. Sciana studied the ground and sniffed the air. He watched her as she inspected each of the hallway entrances, returning to the first after checking all three. “The leader went this way.” Janis squinted at her. “The Uma don’t need magic,” she replied. “We leave that to you heathens and apostates. It makes our methods sounder, not less.” The mage’s presence grew behind them. “We don’t have time for you to doubt me.”

They ran down it. There were no further branches, only a door at the other end. A group of cultists stood beating on it, wailing. “Malarlo. We are loyal servants. Please.”

“That door is old Trajan,” Sciana said. “Nothing can get through.”

“We will,” Janis said. He strode down towards the dozen cultists.

Sciana grabbed his arm. “Don’t.” He tried to pull away. She held on. “You are losing yourself to this thing the same way that creature behind us did.”

“I’m powerful enough,” Janis replied.

She stared into his eyes. He noticed a small imperfection in the right one, the one with the scar. “This won’t bring them back.”

“No,” he replied. “But it’ll remind the world that they’re gone and that I’m still here. What do you care what happens to me?”

He pulled his arm away, and this time she let him. Took a few more steps, then began his culling, collecting the electricity from the surrounding lamps, causing them to flicker and drawing the attention of some of the group. One of them even pointed at him before he arced it into the air just above their heads. Sciana turned away as the entire group shuddered, spasmed, and fell to the floor. Janis inhaled and collected their life energy with one massive injection of power. He felt the symbiote swell, its tentacles clutching his insides and skin tighter, trembling with the ecstasy of it. Janis pressed his hands together, condensing the air between them until his hands naturally pushed apart from the growing pressure. When they reached shoulder length and he could barely hold the tremendous pressure, he hurled it at the door, blowing it off its hinges.

Even with all that it cost, he could still feel the energy coursing through him from having consumed so many lives at once. “Come,” he said, half in a dream state. It was more intoxicating than soma, more revelatory than the sorgin zorrotz Renea used to eat. He strode through the door as Sciana followed. She did not look down. There were no more corpses to see.

Janis stepped into the cool air and looked up at the stars. Behind him lay the remnants of the collapsed dome, before them a courtyard littered with ruins of stone and metal.

“What is this place?” she asked.

Colossal statues, perfectly cut renditions of sapiens, god-beings of the Yabboleth, and some Janis didn’t recognize, lay upright or in shambles before them. Wires stretched from some large metal objects, twisting around a toppled column. “I don’t know,” Janis replied. “But he’s here.”

Sciana walked past him. “This way.”

Janis followed as she crouched, sneaking towards a stuttering bit of light that glowed just past one of the fallen statues in front of them. It was of an ancient Trajan warrior, his bolt caster held in his hand in front of him. Maybe it had been a kind of sentry statue, meant to intimidate those who walked this courtyard thousands of years ago. Now, all it watched was the passage of time in the sky.

Janis felt Malarlo before he heard the man. His yelling was audible under the rumble and crackling of something past the statue, his words muffled and indistinct. Sciana edged around the foot of the fallen statue, but Janis grabbed her wrist. She jerked back to him and he held up his hand, signaling to wait.

“I want to hear what he’s saying,” Janis whispered.

She looked angry as she leaned towards his ear. “There’s no time,” she whispered, annoyed, before she leaned back and motioned with her head behind him. As his high dissipated, he remembered the mage. Felt the dark presence growing. They rounded the jagged base of the statue and saw a flat disk on the ground surrounded by a glass tube. Malarlo was standing inside it, a tentacle attached to his head, its mouth folded over and obscuring it all the way to his neck.

“Is it eating him?” Sciana asked.

Janis strained to hear past the sound of the artifact working nearby. “Only his words,” Janis replied. Sciana looked confused. “He’s communicating with someone.”

Janis held out his hand. Sciana handed him her curved dagger, then notched an arrow in her bow. Janis got to the glass tube and tried to find a way inside, but it was seamless. How had Malarlo gotten inside? He followed the wires. Most stretched from a large Trajan window nearby, its surface glowing with arcane symbols moving in rapid succession. Janis approached it. There were buttons and knobs all along its base, but he did not know what they meant.

“Hey,” Ruck said. “Want some help?”

He’d perched on top of the strange tentacle encasing Malarlo’s head. It was attached to yet another piece of machinery.

“What are you doing? Get down from there.”

Ruck looked annoyed. “You want to see who he’s talking to or not?”

“Do you actually know what you’re doing?”

“Of course,” Ruck said, crossing his arms. “I told you, I worked on this thing for them. Yabbo, it’s like you don’t even listen to me.”

Janis exhaled. He nodded. Ruck swung his small body underneath the base of the tentacle and set to work. Janis could feel the mage approaching. Qinra’s dark cloud of hate spreading through the Shimmer towards him, hoping to snuff him out. He was about to tell Ruck to hurry when the tentacle whined and detached from Malarlo’s head, snapping back into the base like a frog’s tongue until only a small bit of it lay dangling out. The glass tube that had separated him from the world slid into the ground just as fast.

“Whoops,” Ruck said.

Malarlo fell back on his heels, blinking incessantly. Janis grabbed him by the throat and pulled him to his knees. That got his attention.

“Where is Orinax?” Janis asked. Malarlo struggled against his grip. Janis kneed his chest. “Why did you back the Arawat in killing my family?” What he’d taken for choking became more clear as