Lilian walked up to us and extended her hand towards Nakoda’s face.
He, understandably, flinched away.
“Stop being a baby,” she snapped. Using her bloody thumb, she drew a sigil across his cheek. “This mark of magic will heal you over time. No adverse side-effects…Except maybe you’ll start thinking a little differently.”
“How do you mean?” he asked irritably, slapping her hand away very un-Nakoda-like. He hopped down off my saddle to retrieve his lance. He stared at it, at his reflection across its metal surface. “Doesn’t matter…I just wanna kill bad guys…Stab this into that stupid monster’s stupid face and make him stop laughing in my head…”
And then he started singing a lullaby to himself. A lullaby all about stabbing. He kept on singing after climbing back up onto my saddle. “Stab ‘em again and again…And I’ll stab ‘em again and again, and stab ‘em again and again…”
Lilian looked impressed. Not by the song, but by Nakoda’s darker disposition.
“So not pure of heart after all,” she mused smugly. “Just severely repressed.”
Sapphire and Paco, still atop Turtle, approached. Alton and Salim were still standing by the door. The shade was hovering by the latter’s shoulder, having finished off the mutant by now. My stomach turned as I forced myself to walk over. Nakoda kept singing to himself, but his voice was losing enthusiasm. Paco aimed his rifle and Lilian readied her bow as Sapphire reached over and placed a hand against the nearest wall. Lines of blue energy flowed from her fingertips, across the wall, and into the door. She nodded after a moment, mouthed, “Access granted.”
Everyone, except Nakoda, returned the nod, preparing themselves for whatever nightmare was on the other side of the door. What a truly, truly odd combinations of creatures we made. But hey, sometimes you have no choice but to work with what you’ve got.
Alton and Salim stepped in unison towards the door. It split down the middle and the two halves slid apart, letting us into the bridge.
The bridge itself was another circular room. It was devoid of windows or even a flat ceiling. It was like walking into a giant, steel egg. But instead of a yolk, this egg was incubating a man-sized, floating bloodstone. It was spinning in place, its surface constantly rippling and changing. Sections of it were missing, having fallen off. Sickening fumes emanated from these fractures, warping the room, turning the very air green. It warped my perception of the bridge, along with the four individuals standing around the mutating core.
The first one I recognized only because of her clothes. She was the woman wearing scarves back on the Jenivere. She was now wearing her flesh mask around her neck in place of scarves. Her real face was that of a green and yellow scaled reptile with glowing yellow eyes. She had her clawed fingers up. Dark colored magic flowed from them and into the gaps in the core.
The woman standing next to her was doing the same. She was as pale as the mutants, with long white hair that didn’t quite do an adequate enough job to cover up her sickly, near-skeletal body. Green veins were spreading across said body, making her glow like a disturbing hybrid born from human and jellyfish. A coarse rope was wrapped around her waist. From it hung a pair of dismembered arms and a woman’s head that resembled Sapphire, only with black hair instead of blue.
“Onyx!” Sapphire exclaimed.
Yet her cry was drowned out by Alton’s infuriated roar of, “KOVACK!”
His ex-captain was standing between us and Lizard Lady and the White Witch. The hood of his coat obscured the upper half of his face, but unblinking, glowing green eyes pierced through. He gripped a makeshift glaive in his left hand. The same one I assumed he’d used to break open those mutants from their pods, unleashing them upon us. Besides shifting his feet into a fighting stance, he showed no reaction to seeing Alton again.
“Kovack!” Lizard Lady snapped. “End them!”
Kovack was already moving before she could finish giving the command. He bolted towards our group. He kept his body low, though, evading shots from both Paco and Sapphire. In the timespan of a single heartbeat, he closed the distance between the core and Alton.
The blade of his glaive slashed across his ex-first mate’s chest, splattering both of them with Alton’s blood. Drawing upon hate and his new magic, Alton managed to catch himself, screamed, and retaliated with his rapier.
Kovack simply sidestepped the blade.
He then swung the glaive again, cutting off Alton’s right arm at the bicep.
Both the arm and rapier hit the floor with a deafening thud. They were quickly followed by Alton collapsing to his knees, staring in shock at the blood now streaming freely from the stump. The only reason why Kovack didn’t finish him right then and there was because of Paco. The gunslinger unleashed several shots, striking Kovack’s left shoulder with one, making the ex-captain jump back.
“Keep her away from us!” White Witch bellowed, glaring over at Sapphire. “It’s almost done!” As she spoke, the lines of magic connecting her hands to the core expanded and grew darker in color. That same color pulsed through her entire body, illuminating the skeleton beneath.
The unnatural light of Kovack’s eyes flickered as he focused them upon Sapphire.
So he isn’t evil! I realized. They’ve got him mind controlled!
Unfortunately, that didn’t change the fact that he was still going to try to kill us. If anything, it made things more complicated. If he’d been evil, I wouldn’t have felt bad about taking him out. But now that I knew he was a prisoner in his own body…?
Seeing as she’d clearly been called out as the ex-captain’s next target, Sapphire wasn’t feeling merciful. She lobbed a bomb over. Kovack swung his glaive upwards as if to knock it back towards our group…Only for his arm to shudder. He tapped it with the flat end of the glaive’s blade, sending it towards our enemies instead.
It went off, striking him, Lizard Lady, and White Witch with ice shrapnel. Lizard Lady gritted her fangs and pushed through the pain to keep her connection to the orb intact. White Witch, meanwhile, howled in pain as blood streamed from her shredded abdomen and legs. One of Onyx’s arms had had even been knocked off.
Lilian took the opportunity to summon three bloody skeletons again. Hey, if it’s not broke don’t fix it, right? They scrambled through the bridge, with one nearly slipping across the expanding pool of Alton’s blood. They all managed to evade and leap past Kovack and go after the weakest and most heavily injured of the opposing party: White Witch. Together they grabbed and drove her to the ground. She was caught between trying to fight them off or trying to maintain her connection to the core.
“No!” she wailed as the lines tethering her to the orb grew paler, thinner. “My Lord, hear me! Please! Bless me with your strength! Your power!”
Kovack started towards her.
But I stopped him with a horn to the ribs. Nakoda held onto my reins as I then launched back onto my hind legs. I stomped my front hooves down across each of the ex-captain’s shoulders. I felt his bones break, but he managed to roll out of the way before I could properly pin him to the floor.
He forced himself into a kneeling position, staring up at us…but his eyes weren’t as green as they’d once been. The hand he was gripping the glaive with was trembling. Was that from the lingering pain of my attack or something deeper? Was Kovack fighting to regain control of his body?
Could we save him?!
The answer turned out to be no. But we’ll get there.
First let’s talk about the fourth stranger in the room. Up to this point he’d stayed further back, partially obscured by the core. He now walked a little ways over, as if to get a better look at all the chaos going on. He wore a black shroud over armor similar to Sapphire’s, though with yellow highlights instead of blue. The yellow matched that of his somehow spiky and fluffy-looking hair and glowing, pupilless eyes. His boyish face was pale and perfect, like a doll’s. He turned his head towards Sapphire and smiled. The smile quickly disappeared as he then directed his attention to White Witch and the trio of skeletons currently brutalizing her. Yet he made no move to help her. Instead he arched a pale eyebrow at Lizard Lady.
“Go,” he said, sounding exasperated that he had to do that much. “Earn your place among our Forces.”
She snarled with frustration, but still turned to face us. She broke the magical connection between the core and her left hand, and quickly made a sweeping motion with it. A fog of inky blackness poured across the entire room. I instinctively made my horn glow, granting Nakoda and I the ability to see through it, though our enemies were now blurry and discolored. But I couldn’t bless the rest of our group, meaning that at least some of them were now rendered blind. Maybe some of them could see through it? Salim or Lilian, maybe?
Speaking of Salim, he’d been kneeling by Alton this entire time, pressing a healing hand to the stump. He managed to stop most of the bleeding, but not all. With Alton still in shock, Salim made an impatient sound and suddenly ran through the black mist, towards Lizard Lady. White Witch be damned, she’d returned her full attention to pouring magic into the core.
No, I realized. She was using magic to unravel it. Layer after layer was falling away and hitting the floor. One gap in particular growing wider and deeper with each rotation.
And fangs were appearing around the rim. Long, needle-like, and leaking mucus or venom. A choir of whispers spilled from this new, unnatural mouth. They spoke in a language I didn’t understand, but whatever they were saying made both Salim and Lizard Lady smile fiercely.
“Yes!” she screamed as if in ecstasy. “More! I’ll give you more, My Lord! I will feed everything to you!”
With her distracted, Salim took the opportunity to send his shade in. It zipped past her shoulder, into the mouth.
“What?!” she exclaimed.
The chorus of whispers stopped, if only for a heartbeat, before mutating into booming laughter. If I’d been able I would have tried to impale myself with my horn right then and there. As it laughed, the mouth vomited up salt-smelling mucus across the bridge’s floor. It mixed in with Alton’s blood and sloshed against my feet, making me cringe. But I couldn’t escape the vision that came next, seemingly triggered by contact with the slime.
The scene of thousands of corpses, maybe millions, floating in the sea took me over. Pirates, sailors, merchants, children. It didn’t matter. They knew the risk of entering this monster’s domain. This was the price. They belonged to it now.
Now and always.
As I helplessly watched them float, a tiny, green fish appeared from the darkest depths of this terrible sea and whispered, “There are other worlds than these. But if you want to find them,” the fish’s entire body stretched and it screamed with a mouth of fangs and barbed tongues, “TRY HARDER.”
I was blasted back into my body. Salim, likewise, stumbled, looking as if he too was coming out of the same vision. Had that been his guardian?!
“What?!” Lizard Lady cried, staring at her hands. They were now devoid of magic. Her link to the core had been severed. “I-I…No! My Lord, no! Why have you forsaken me?!” Her entire body shuddered before she threw her head back and screamed, “EVEN AFTER ALL THE SOULS I’VE FED YOU?! GIVING YOU THIS ISLAND?!”
She whipped around to scream hysterically at the yellow-haired man, “Volt, our Lord needs more!” She pointed at us. “Kill them! Do something!”
Volt frowned thoughtfully at her, and then at the core.
“No, thank you,” he answered. “That’s not my boss.”
He raised a metallic hand, snapped his fingers, and disappeared with a flash of lightning.