LOCATION: THE CRUCIBLE, 100TH FLOOR
PLANET: LAPIS DIVINUS, ORION LUMINARY INSTITUTE
YEAR: ? | DAY: ?? | TIME: ??
The brute stood a full foot-and-a-half taller than Kaela.
He wielded a flail, a cruel weapon Kaela had heard of but never fought against. It was a steel haft with three chains extending from the end.
Each chain was about a foot long, and was connected to a heavy steel ball with spikes extending from it in all directions. As the man stood there taunting Kaela, the steel spikes dripped blood onto the floor by his feet.
“The Princess coming to take back her throne?” he yelled through his mocking laughter. “Well you’re going to have to get through me first.”
He swung the flail in an attempt to intimidate her, and slammed the three balls into a marble column next to him. They each took out a large chunk of stone and kept on going.
This man was strong.
And Kaela had no patience for any of it.
She dropped into a fighting stance, waiting for him to make the first move.
He started laughing again, grabbing his belly with his free hand.
“She’s gonna fight me unarmed? Is this a joke?”
He took one step forward, his foot landing just to the side of the pool of blood his flail had created.
Kaela moved faster than he had expected.
She feinted to the right and he took the bait, swinging his flail with everything he had. He was clearly trying to end the fight with a single blow.
The third spiked ball slammed into Kaela’s shoulder, tearing into her armor. Two of the spikes tore deep into her shoulder, and with the great effort of his swing, his foot slipped on the blood. The polished marble floor provided no traction for him as the tall man toppled to the ground.
Kaela reached into the aether with her left hand and pulled Phantom Blade into reality.
The last thing the brute saw was the dark grin on her face as she sliced him open from waist to sternum. He tried swinging the flail one more time, but it only fell onto his face.
Kaela rushed to help Rowan.
The two royal guards with him had fallen, and he was facing off against three opponents now.
Kaela swiftly dispatched one while Rowan finished off the last two.
They were both huffing for air. Kaela’s shoulder was wrecked from the flail, and Rowan didn’t appear to be in much better shape. Their faces and armor were spattered in red.
She slumped down against the wall and pulled out a healing salve from her pack, splitting the gray, thick paste with Rowan. He wrinkled his nose against the smell, but accepted it anyway.
“It won’t do anything for the pain, but the damage will stop escalating,” she said.
“Thanks,” Rowan said through heavy breaths. “I would have been done for without you.”
Then he glanced over at the bodies of the two men who had fought beside him. A look of anger and determination crossed his face.
Kaela only patted him on the arm.
“Give me another few minutes, and then it’s time to end this.”
They waited only until their health was topped back off. Then they stood, nodded to each other, and pulled the doors to the throne room open.
But nothing Kaela had imagined prepared her for what she saw inside.
The once lavish, beautifully appointed audience hall was thoroughly covered in blood. It was everywhere. On the walls, the floor. The long wooden seats were filled with it. The tall columns were slathered in crimson thirty feet high.
Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.
She took it all in, and then her gaze moved to the raised dais up front.
The throne was dripping in gore and viscera. Bones were strewn about on the dais, but Kaela realized that they were organized in some sort of pattern.
The man on the throne spoke, every word saturated with pure arrogance.
“Princess Kaela and Ellister Rowan. Have you come to pledge your fealty already? I had thought you would have put up more of a resistance before you gave in to the inevitable.”
Alek Velthorn was wearing the robes and crown her father had worn the day he sent her away. His wife Carmina stood next to him, draped in the exact gown the Queen had been wearing when she waved a silent goodbye to Kaela the day she left.
All of the garments were dripping with blood, and Kaela could see from this distance that the scepter Velthorn held in his hand had bits of brain matter on it.
The entire macabre scene made Kaela retch, but she and Rowan continued their stride toward the front of the great hall.
“Nothing to say?” Velthorn said. Carmina rested a hand on his shoulder, and he reached up and took it in his own. They both laughed.
The closer Kaela got to the front of the hall, the worse the smell got. It wasn’t just the tangy, metallic scent from all the blood. It was the meaty, rotting carcasses they had left everywhere.
What surprised her was the lack of flies. Or any other insects or rodents that would normally have swarmed toward such an open feast.
“That’s far enough,” Velthorn said. They were twenty feet away from the dais. Just a few feet past the last of the benches, and the space was wide open here.
This was the exact spot where Kaela learned she was to be sent to Seraph’s Hold.
The blood on the carpet had dried enough to provide solid traction again, and Kaela subtly moved her boots side to side in hopes of cleaning them off.
“I said that’s far enough!” Velthorn said. He rose from the throne and took one step forward.
That was when Kaela noticed one more detail.
The heads of the Caerwyn royal family were lined up on the bench just behind her.
A look of terror filled each of their faces.
On either side of them were the head of maids, cooks, guards, and other servants. Kaela recognized the one maid who was kind to her on her first day here.
Kaela had seen enough.
She growled, fading from view into the aether.
She grabbed the handle of Phantom Blade as she ran forward as fast as she could.
She phased back into reality in mid-swing, taking off Alek Velthorn’s head in a single swipe.
She was gone before his head even hit the floor, running through the aether back to Rowan’s side.
Carmina was still staring at her husband’s head with a look of horror on her face when—
No, it wasn’t horror.
It was surprise.
Carmina looked from her husband’s head on the floor, then over to Kaela, once again standing thirty feet away.
Carmina stared silently for a moment.
Then she burst out into hysterical laughter.
“Oh! How precious! Hahaha!”
She reached down and picked her husband’s head up, raising it until she was looking directly into his eyes.
Blood dripped from his severed neck onto her robes, but she didn’t seem to notice or care.
She pulled his head in and gave him a long kiss.
Then all traces of the jovial expression left her face and she looked Kaela in the eyes.
Carmina tossed her husband’s head to the side like it was a toy she was discarding. Her voice took on a dark tone, but there was almost a sense of flirtation beneath the darkness.
“You know,” she said, “Alek served as a good little puppet, but I was just about done with him. So you did me a favor.”
She reached down toward his body and pried the scepter out of his hand. Kaela heard the cracking of the man’s fingers, as Carmina was not being delicate.
“That’s why I’ll give you one chance. Leave this place. Now. Never return to Caerwyn and I will spare your life.”
Kaela and Rowan turned to each other, then back at Carmina.
“No,” Kaela said. “I will take my throne back now.”
Carmina tsked.
“I was hoping you were going to say that.”
She raised her arms over her head, and the room began rumbling.
The bones of a hundred bodies that had been arranged in formations on the dais around Carmina began sliding along the floor, assembling themselves together piece by piece.
While she worked, Kaela felt hands reach out from the floor and wrap themselves around her feet, cementing her in place.
The harder she tried to fight them, the harder they held onto her. She turned to see that Rowan was going through the same thing.
Meanwhile, Carmina was chanting something in a language Kaela didn’t understand, and the bones continued sliding together.
Kaela drew Phantom Blade and tried slashing the hands holding her down, but it just passed through them.
She tried executing Phantom Step, but the hands wouldn’t let her go.
All she and Rowan could do was to stand in place and watch the monstrosity slowly form behind Carmina Velthorn. The clattering of bones coming together was unsettling, to say the least.
One of the royal guards and two Scouts entered the throne room during the long, slow process, but blood hands grabbed onto them also.
When the Scouts tried shooting arrows at Carmina, a wall of blood rose from the floor to stop them in mid-air.
The monstrosity was eight feet tall now, in a grotesque and vaguely human shape. All the bones that had been on the dais were incorporated. The next part actually made Kaela lean over and vomit onto the carpet.
All the viscera, the muscle and other tissue lying around the dais and across the throne room, pound after pound of flesh, flew through the air all at once and slammed into the beast with wet, meaty pops of sound.
At the end, a single head flew from the bench behind Kaela and onto the abomination’s shoulders. It was the former King of Caerwyn.
As Carmina’s chanting ended, his eyes opened, glowing a bright red.
And looking straight at Kaela.
Are you ready for it?
Please rate the story. As you know, it helps a lot.
I will almost certainly be wrapping up Ascension Framework with book six.
That will make this a very chonky series of over 3/4 of a million words by the time we're done.
Favorite and follow.
And, as always, thank you for reading.
This community is incredible, and I appreciate every one of you.