Silence - Chapter 38

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Stone Shaping!

Felix dropped from the cloud of earthen Mana vapor, trailing it behind him like a cloak. Down he flew, over the stumps of severed foremast and the limp remains of void leather lines. Pirates scattered from his path, the cloud roiling and crackling as if a storm brewed within. Felix's channels screamed at him, burnt raw and aching, but he held on.

He shaped.

He came to an abrupt stop above the mainmast and from the cloud hurled massive stone chains, forged in his Mind and Spirit with stolen Mana. The chains spun outward, connected and heavy with large blocks at either end, blurring through the air and shattering pirates and ship alike where they landed.

"Impossible!" Nokk cried, just as the largest chain took him across the chest. He was flung backward into the mizzenmast, spitting up blood and slammed tight as the chain wound rapidly around the thick diameter of void bone. His head lolled, and his cutlass clattered to the ground from limp fingers.

Felix fell too, his Mana almost completely spent, and his Health not far behind. Pit squawked in terror, apparently having defeated the other pirates with little issue. "I'm...I'll be fine, Pit."

Sense images flickered through their bond, impressions of fighting off several pirates until a mast had fallen on the lot of them. A warm gratitude pulsed between them, and Pit pressed his head into Felix's cheek.

"Thank you too, lil man," Felix whispered. "But we're not done yet."

Masts were broken and sails were torn, but Felix had no idea how important the sails were to a Manaship. He'd rather be certain.

Together they made their way past the mizzenmast and to the Control Node of the ship. Pirates scrambled in all directions, none of them interested in Felix any longer, for the voidbeasts had made a return. Harrowings harried the scrambling marauders, each trying to defend themselves while escaping the destruction one mage had wrought. Felix would have laughed, had he the energy.

As they got closer to the broken Node, Felix realized he'd done a number in those last few seconds. The chains he'd shaped had torn apart the deck around the Node, collapsing a lot of the deck just below, and blocking access to the engine directly. With what Nokk had done to the Node, piercing it through, it was impossible to issue any commands as normal.

"There's no way I can vent their Mana like this," he muttered. He put his hand on the Node, but it sparked and flashed, sending feedback through his channels that made him hiss in pain. "Damn it. I guess—"

He was interrupted by a deep, terrifying bellow. Felix felt his heart clench, felt everything around him stop as they all looked in the same direction. Up.

A behemoth easily a quarter the size of the Horn itself raced down its immense face. It's reddened, blubbery flesh visibly pulsed—writhed—and a single massive mouth surmounted by crooked yellow teeth was accompanied by a thousand smaller ones, all of them opening and closing with a sense of terrible, inexhaustible hunger. It had been so long since Felix had seen it, he almost hadn't recognized it. Hadn't wanted to.

"Whalemaw," he whispered in horror. That visceral reverberation shot through his guts again, before coiling and leaping back out, toward the creature. It pivoted, minutely, it's ten thousand eyes widening in glee or fury. He had no idea which.

"Gods have mercy!"

"What is it!?"

"Abandon ship!"

FELIX! RUN!

The shout jolted him out of—of whatever that had been. The Maw was at his shoulder, screaming into his ear. Idiot! Fool! We'll be consumed! You'll die! For good this time! RUN!

"Not yet!" He grabbed at the Node again, ignoring the sparks. "Ravenous Tithe!"

He had no choice.

The ship rocked and what sails it had remaining went limp as a torrent of Mana was torn free from it. It surged up from the Control Node, stolen from the engine below and whatever unfortunate was powering it. Felix couldn't care, not anymore. He just had to take it!

Pit screeched and converged with him, in a flash of light. Yet not even his presence dented the flood.

It burned through Felix's Gates, searing his channels to charcoal with its fury. A storm unlike anything he'd ever experienced, it was lightning and hot lava, scalding acid and freezing shadow, everything all at once. Dimly, he could feel it collecting in his core like a storm, a hurricane.

Bloodline Progression is 9%

...

Bloodline Progression is 14%

It pressed at him, at his crackling core. His Skill quivered and shook from the might of it all, the potency, and that same pain of broken Skills shuddered across everything that Felix had become. For a brief moment in time, he was pain. Pain and nothing more.

Use the power, Felix Nevarre! Use it before it consumes you!

Reign of Vellus!

An orb of blue, kinetic Mana exploded around him, so powerful it shredded what remained of the quarterdeck and sent the mizzenmast tilting toward the fore. Pirates were pitched through the air, impaled with shards of bone or the shattered remnants of ballistae. Lightning followed, burning and scoring bone and flesh like, setting a dozen fires in an instant. And still he wasn't done, still his core raged.

Reign of Vellus!

Everything blew out, bones turning to shards too small to see, and pirates torn limb from limb. The sheer force of it hurled Felix up and backward, straight off the ship itself...just as the Whalemaw impacted them mouth first. It tore past like a freight train on steroids, so huge and so fast, it was more natural force than living creature. An avalanche. The Hippogriff's Fury and two other galleons went down in a violent explosion of Mana that swept into Felix even harder than his own Reign of Vellus.

He fell into the black, too overwhelmed to do anything but watch everything be destroyed. Joy or satisfaction didn't find him as he slipped into the dark, just a grim sense of finality.

It was over.

Finally.

And then he clattered head first into the bottom of a narrow hull, nearly flipping the entire vessel.

"Ho! Your a heavy one!" cried a familiar voice.

Felix blinked bleary eyes, pain radiating from every inch of his body. Things were boiling inside him, power he'd never felt before that wanted, needed, to be expressed. Working his mouth, Felix spoke brokenly. "Who are—Dahlia?"

"In the flesh," the former pirate cook said to him. She was sitting in back at the Control Node for—was he on a ship? He was. One slightly bigger than his old sloop. A cutter, according to his Eye. Felix groaned the moment he used the Skill though, his core space quivering with the effort. "I'd say it's high time we flee, agreed?"

She didn't wait for him to say anything, instead pouring her Mana into the Control Node. The cutter shot off like a rocket, speeding through the dark, away from the screaming hunger of the Whalemaw.


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Felix blinked bleary eyes up at a swaying forest of bone and leather skins. Green-gold energy flashed among them sporadically, but it was only the braided lines that reminded Felix where he was—and who he was running from.

He sat up with a panicked lurch, casting about with his senses, but there was nothing there. Nothing except a groggy Pit beside him and a Naiad at the cutter's Control Node, sweating as she piloted them away from certain destruction.

"You saved me," he said. "Thanks."

"Suppose I did," Dahlia said with a sharp-toothed smile. "You took a nasty spill of the top deck, just before that—that thing attacked." She laughed after a while, though it sounded forced. "You're lucky I was still around. Damn ship is a sight harder to move than I expected."

While Felix had laid on the deck of the cutter, Dahlia had put a sizeable distance between them and the Horn. He couldn't even see it anymore, and that was a feat considering its size. He'd meant to stand up, to take over piloting the ship, but he was so damn tired. Pit had laid across his chest the whole while, quivering with his own strain until they both had fallen into a deep slumber.

Now, however, he was awake and fear coursed through him still. Not panic anymore, but no less strong. "Dahlia, do you have a spare ship? Like a...a dinghy or one of those small skimmers?" He'd seen those hatchlings use skimmers the size of wakeboards just the day before. Was it really so recently? "Anything."

"Uh, I don't know," she said and made a vague gesture to the starboard side. "Check there, beneath the rail."

Felix ambled over, his legs stiff from his battle and rest; the slight bucking of the cutter didn't help much. He glanced over the railing, and sure enough there was a narrow craft with a single mast no thicker than his arm. It was all folded up, as for travel. He grunted.

"Doesn't look like much. How fast can it go?" he asked.

"A fair speed. Meant for small jaunts, though. Somethin' anyone could fuel themselves..." she hesitated. "How much Mana you got, exactly?"

"Enough."

"Yeah, well, don't put too much in. Sigaldry's delicate enough—was delicate—on the Fury. Get to somethin' that small and it'll burn out before too long." She sniffed. "Not that I'm against those pirates endin' the way they did, they just about abducted me to start, see? But that thing...what was it?"

Felix glanced upward and saw the Maw, floating there in its own false breeze. It met his eyes with orbs of swirling blue and green, and a worried frown.

"A Primordial," Felix said, and watched as the Maw sneered. "Or close enough."

"A Primordial! Blind gods, we're lucky to be alive!" Dahlia gasped.

"We are. And I need you to take this cutter and fly," he consulted the maps he'd memorized and pointed somewhere starboard and aft. "That way. The creature is chasing me, so staying here is no good for you."

"Chasing you? Why?"

"Doesn't matter, does it? Just get away from me and Pit, and you'll be free of its attention." Felix smiled, but worried it came as more of a grimace. "You've helped us. More than I expected. There's a settlement that way, warded, safe." She leveled a heavy look at him and he raised his arms defensively. "Safe-ish."

"And you'll take that trash and expect to outrun it? The size that monster is? Are you an idiot?"

Felix blinked at her tone. "No I just figured you'd—"

"Figured I saved ya just for you to get yourself killed? No. Not happenin'. You take this cutter and I'll have the trash."

"What? No," Felix started, but the former pirate cook whirled on him. She'd produced a cleaver from somewhere and Pit squawked in alarm.

"I'll be havin' it, aye?"

"Aye, I mean, yeah. Sure." Felix didn't put his hands down until she'd clambered over the railing and slid to the smaller craft's deck. Everything was lashed down and folded, but in a remarkably short time Dahlia had everything unfurled and chopped the ropes holding it to the side of the cutter. It dropped silently, before unfurling its triangular sail with a wash of pale Mana.

"See you around, kid! And you too, Honored Tenku," she said with a sharp grin. "Hope you don't die!"

Banking toward where he'd suggested, the cook sped off. Felix was on his way shortly thereafter. Dahlia hadn't argued too hard about stick by his side, and he was glad for it. She had left awfully quick after hearing of the Primordial, though he couldn't blame her at all. If he could escape it, he would have done so long since.

His hand on the Control Node meant the cutter passed well beyond its previous speed. Soon they were among rocky terrain again, though this time they were headed further away from both the Ten Hand's fortress and Echo's Reach. He knew the Whalemaw was coming for him sooner or later, and was willing to bet a whole long on "sooner."

"Where to go? Where is safe from this thing?" He asked. He hadn't expected an answer, but the Maw spoke up anyway.

The pirate's den is likely secure. That shield of theirs would stop this...Whalemaw cold. Not even I at my greatest strength could dare Desolation.

Felix's eyes widened as his Mind burned. Sparks of memory flashed and connected, fast as blinking, and a series of remembered voices rolled across his senses.

"Seek the tumbled rock, the Temple at the Edge. Hanging at the precipice of Desolation....Please ghost, take me from this place. Take me home, beyond the Lady's gate!"

"It is not a true Temple. The Void would never allow such a thing to exist. The divine would be sucked away into the nothingness around us."

"All of this comes from a hole in the Void, where the Ethereal Realm bubbles through into ours. There is a darkness there, something more than the Void, but as the Ethereal presses into it, things emerge....If the Desolation released things, then surely one could enter it and survive. Or so was my predecessor's theory."

"Mungle, Estrid, and Wonderment. Thank you," Felix murmured.

What are you saying? Have you gone fear-mad already? The Maw scoffed. I told you not to rouse that beast! It will devour us both!

"I have an idea," he said and banked hard to port. "You said the Desolation will protect us from the Whalemaw, right?"

If it is smart enough to avoid it, yes. But you cannot be thinking—this isn't the way to the pirate's den. The Maw narrowed its eyes at him and bared its yellowed teeth. Where are you taking me?

"I just said," Felix laughed. He felt a bit of hysteria at the edges of it, but there was nothing he could do about that. "I'd suggest not floating too far afield. Desolation's close, after all."

No. No you cannot be suggesting—!

They shot off into the dark.