Low-Fantasy Occultist

Chapter 433.5 Interlude Hone 1/Bluetear 1

Kneeling in the center of the High Council’s judgment chamber, high above Alluria’s sunlit streets, the former Archmage of War Magic concentrated on the rhythm of his own breathing.

It was the only thing he had left. The heavy, rune-etched metal wrapped around his chest and arms stung with its cold suppression, sinking through his skin and hooking into his mana coils until it reached the conceptual fabric of his existence.

Every time his heart beat, the chains tightened their metaphysical grip, forcing his vast reserves of power to stagnate. The sensation was akin to swallowing shrapnel, a deep, pervasive ache that threatened to paralyze his thoughts.

But Elias Hone had dedicated his life to mastering the art of enduring pain, and he would not give his captors the satisfaction of a grimace, much less begging for mercy.

Around him, the chamber was arranged as theatrically as possible for what was supposed to be the trial of the century, but it was more of a farce than any foolish meeting he had attended.

Semicircular tiers of dark granite rose toward the vaulted ceiling, occupied by the most influential figures in their part of the kingdom. Duke Anton sat near the center, his expression as stoic as stone, symbolizing the Crown’s unwavering justice. A Shadow lingered in the back, watching with barely contained satisfaction.

At the center sat Archmage Tholm, holding the ceremonial gavel of the High Arbiter. Horatio Bluetear stood quietly on the edge, his calm demeanor giving nothing away, but Elias knew he had to be furious.

For someone with that much power, the chains of self-imposed impotence are worse than even the ones binding me now.

"Elias Hone," Tholm’s voice echoed across the quiet expanse, showing no hint of the exasperated warmth they’d once shared. "You stand accused of high treason, the murder of your peers, and the abhorrent invocation of the Abyss within the sacred grounds of the Tower. Your actions threaten the very foundation of the realm.”

Elias lifted his head and met Tholm’s gaze. His robes were dirty, and his face bruised, but the fierce fire in his eyes burned as brightly as ever. He decided that if they wanted a show, he would give them one.

"I threatened a foundation that was already rotting from complacency," he replied, raspy but entirely too calm, given his circumstances. "You sit in your seats now, and will continue hoarding artifacts and debating theory, while the rest of the world bleeds. I am the only one who dared to find a solution. I sought to forge a sword capable of cutting the rot away. If you lack the stomach for the cost of survival, that is your failing, Tholm, not mine.”

"A sword forged in demonic filth is no sword capable of saving the realm," the Duke interjected, his tone cold and flat. "You brought a Greater Demon into the heart of my Duchy. There is no philosophical justification for unleashing the Abyss upon our people.”

"The Abyss is a tool," Hone countered, shifting his weight against the chains. The metal dug deeper into his soul, sending a fresh wave of nausea through his body, but he ignored it. "A dangerous one, yes. But fire burns the hand of the careless smith, and we do not outlaw the forge. My only crime was failing to complete the cast.”

Tholm slammed the gavel against the stone podium, silencing the outraged murmurs in the room.

"You are unrepentant," his old friend said, looking down with a mixture of pity and disgust. "The High Council finds you guilty of all charges. For crimes against the realm and the fundamental laws of magic, you are sentenced to ultimate dissolution. Your physical vessel shall be unmade, and your soul shall be stripped of its cohesiveness, scattered to the ether so that no trace of your treason remains to poison the earth, and you may not achieve any sort of rebirth.”

A heavy silence fell over the room. It was the harshest punishment the Council could give, the complete and utter erasure of a mage from the cycle of existence.

A punishment like that hadn’t been inflicted on an Archmage since Altarius the Insane, and that was in the far south. Alluria’s Magic Tower hadn't needed to go that far, even when its own masters were caught dabbling in forbidden practices.

Until now.

Hone offered a slow, blood-stained smile. He had expected nothing less once his loss became clear.

As Tholm began the complex, multi-layered incantations needed to activate the execution array built into the floor, Hone let his gaze drift across the chamber. He looked past the Archmages, past the Duke, and focused on the shadows near the back exit.

A dozen scribes and Spellblades stood at attention there, bearing witness to the proceedings. Among them was a young man in a grey tabard, indicating he was a court archivist.

He looked entirely unremarkable, looking on with appropriate solemnity.

Hone closed his eyes, drawing upon a tiny, hidden sliver of soul-force he had carefully kept beneath the threshold of the adamantine’s suppression for the past few days, enduring much pain for it.

He couldn't cast a spell or even project his voice, such was the power of the chains that held him. But he could adjust the baseline frequency of his own life force, and it wasn’t like he’d need to do much after this.

Allowing the sliver of energy to seep down through his knees and into the granite floor, he tapped a specific sequence into the stone, a cipher known only to the deepest operatives of his faction.

The root is severed. The soil is prepared. Initiate the northern harvest.

There. That was as much as he could manage.

Across the room, the young archivist kept his head still and his expression unchanged. But Elias’ trained eyes noticed the slight, almost imperceptible tightening of the man’s knuckles around his quill, indicating he had received the message.

It would be sent to reach his allies, and his death here today would not stop the upcoming war, as these fools believed, but would only serve as the catalyst for the next phase.

The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.

"May the World reclaim what you have squandered," Tholm finished, bringing the gavel down for the last time.

The runes carved into the adamantine chains flared with a blinding, white-hot glow, and the full force of the Tower’s wrath descended upon him.

The cold numbness immediately shifted into burning, overwhelming agony, and Elias threw his head back in a scream of pain as the execution array activated.

This magic was meant to disrupt the core ideas of his existence, and despite his desperate attempts to protect them, he soon felt his mana coils, the structures he had spent a lifetime refining, begin to violently unravel.

A moment later, the chains’ vibration hit a frequency that perfectly countered the pitch of his soul.

The sensation of being torn apart thread by thread was impossible to describe. His memories, ambitions, and very sense of self started to unravel, melting into raw, formless ether. The pain was beyond human understanding, a screaming void that overshadowed all reasoning.

Yet, as his vision faded into complete darkness, Elias Hone clung to his grim, victorious smile. They might scatter his soul to the winds, but the gears of the war he had set in motion were already turning. They would finish what he began.

Eventually, his body disintegrated into a cloud of fine ash, drifting harmlessly to the chamber floor, and the chains fell empty, clattering against the stone.

Horatio did not linger in the judgment chamber to watch the attendants sweep away the ashes of his former peer.

He turned and strolled through the quiet corridors of the Council’s complex, his expression remaining completely calm, an unreadable mask that kept anyone from bothering him.

Once he was out, he took a private elevator downward, bypassing the public levels of the Tower and emerging into the highly restricted medical sanctum hidden within the Tower's lower levels.

He moved past rows of empty chambers until he reached a secluded, heavily protected room at the back of the ward.

Hovering in the center was a cylindrical vat filled with a translucent fluid, and suspended within this amniotic-like alchemy was the broken form of his Vice Tower Master.

Horatio paused in front of the glass, taking a moment as he looked at his old friend.

When he spoke to the young Occultist, Nicholas, he let the boy believe that Archmage Lulantis’s betrayal was the main reason for Politod’s absence from the battle. It was a convenient lie, one that kept the Tower’s story intact.

The reality was far grimmer.

Lulantis’s betrayal was meant to kill, but Politod was a master of temporal shielding and survived the assassination attempt, even if he was wounded by it.

However, the temporary lapse in the Vice Tower Master's focus had allowed Hone’s true ally to breach the threshold.

After all, Hone hadn't just summoned a horde of mindless abyssal beasts in the Tower.

No, he had attempted to anchor a Greater Demon known in the forbidden texts as The Fear that Resides in All Hearts.

It was an entity of pure, consuming terror, a creature capable of plunging the entire Duchy into a permanent state of waking nightmare, and its mere presence near the genius loci had been enough to almost unravel the Tower.

Politod threw himself into the breach. He used his own body and soul as the physical lock to prevent the dimensional tear from growing any further, battling the Greater Demon back across the threshold while Horatio handled Hone on the seventy-seventh floor.

Oh, that didn’t lessen young Nicholas’ achievement. After all, he protected the most vulnerable part of the genius loci from the demon’s corruption, something that many Prestige mages wouldn’t have been able to do.

But he wasn’t the only hero of that night.

Looking at his oldest friend now, Horatio felt a cold edge pressing against his heart.

Ebenexer’s body was a canvas of horrific trauma. Entire sections of his skin had been transmuted into brittle, black glass by the demon's touch. His mana coils were visible through the transparent fluid, glowing with a sickly purple hue that the restorative alchemy was slowly, agonizingly trying to scrub clean, and his face was locked in a rictus of enduring pain.

He would survive, since Horatio had gotten to him in time, but it would take years of constant care before he could wield the same power he once had.

“I must thank you once more, my friend,” Horatio whispered, his voice incredibly soft in the quiet room.

Once he had completed the necessary checks to confirm the process was still active, he reached out, pressing his palm against the warm glass of the vat, and directed a stream of transmutation magic into the fluid, speeding up the healing process and transforming a small part of the brittle black glass on Politod's arm back into living tissue.

It was unfortunate that he couldn’t influence the entire body at once or risk the entire system failing, but even this much would speed up the process.

As he worked, the painful sense of powerlessness in his heart increased.

Throughout the battle with Elias Hone, Horatio had fought with a restrictive handicap.

He was the Tower Master, after all. His magic was designed to control the fundamental state of reality, and if he had unleashed his full power on the seventy-seventh floor, he would have defeated Hone in seconds.

He also would have fundamentally changed the conceptual structure of reality within the Tower, transforming the genius loci into something unrecognizable and likely causing the collapse of the upper thirty floors in the process.

Thus, he had fought a defensive duel of attrition to protect as much of the structure as possible.

Hone had mistaken that restraint for parity. The Archmage had truly been so arrogant as to believe he could stand against the pinnacle of magic, simply because he had a few others with a modicum of power with him.

Once he’d done all he safely could to help his friend, Horatio pulled his hand away from the glass, turned his back on the medical vat, and walked out of the infirmary, his face betraying no emotion.

Again, he took the elevator down, skipping the sublevels, and descended into the deepest, forgotten roots of the Tower, even below the genius loci.

Eventually, he stepped into the Nexus—a vast room of raw bedrock where the city’s main ley lines crossed the natural fabric of the world.

It was a place of raw, chaotic potential, heavily protected by layers of adamantine warding. The power within would have torn apart any mage below Prestige in an instant, and even many of those who had surpassed mortality would have struggled to do more than kneel.

Horatio shut his eyes and let the calm mask he wore for the world fade away.

Beneath that exterior was an ocean of pure, unadulterated fury.

Hone had brought the Abyss into his home. The traitor had butchered his students, shattered his halls, and turned his closest friend into a broken husk floating in a vat.

When Horatio opened his eyes, they shone with a bright gold light that lit up the dark cavern. He raised his staff and struck the base against the bedrock.

The fabric of reality in front of him ripped open silently as he forcefully broke through the boundary between the mortal world and the Abyss, opening a direct window into the Void.

Beyond the tear was a swirling, chaotic expanse of dark matter and floating obsidian landscapes that he didn’t bother trying to understand, for their laws were too alien even for him.

It was an environment deeply hostile to all, a place where nothing made sense, and humanity's deepest fears were brought to life.

Through the breach, Horatio could feel the hungry, shifting presence of a thousand abyssal predators. They sensed the opening and the sudden influx of mortal ether, and they began to swarm toward the tear, eager to pull whatever foolish mage had opened the door into their domain.

Horatio moved forward confidently, crossing the threshold and stepping into the Void.

With the fragile structure of his Tower gone and no need to suppress his aura to prevent his students from being overwhelmed by his magic, the Tower Master fully unchained himself.

A pack of Lesser Demons lunged at him, their jaws unhinged to reveal rows of razor-sharp teeth.

The fundamental laws of unreality within a hundred-yard radius of his position were instantly rewritten as Horatio looked at them. The dense, muscular flesh of the charging demons suddenly lost its biological cohesion. In the span of a heartbeat, the pack of Void-stalkers was transformed entirely into fragile glass.

They fell apart under their own momentum, breaking into millions of glittering shards that drifted away into the dark expanse.

More demons swarmed, attracted by the disturbance. A colossal, serpentine horror covered with weeping eyes burst from a nearby floating crag, spraying a torrent of highly corrosive abyssal acid at him.

Horatio swung his staff through the air, and the acid halted mid-flight as its nature reversed. The deadly liquid turned into a swarm of harmless white doves that fluttered aimlessly in the void before suffocating.

Horatio fixed his golden gaze on the serpentine horror and clenched his fist.

The false flesh within the creature transmuted into osmium. It thrashed in sudden, crushing agony, its chest cavity rupturing as the immense weight dragged it downward into the endless dark.

For hours, the Void experienced what it felt like to fear a man.

Only when the immediate area was completely empty, devoid of anything brave or foolish enough to approach the golden light, did Horatio pause. His breathing was even, and the cold sensation in his chest had finally dulled, replaced by the familiar, necessary calm needed to rule.

He turned around and stepped back through the dimensional tear, returning to the cavern beneath the Tower.