The Ruler of Ruin

If I had to pick one word for Xian, I think that word would be intimidating. Most of the people I’d run into who were more imposing than me were significantly taller, like Granix. Xian had a solid two feet on me, and he looked at everything with piercing eyes, as if he were deciding how best to bisect it with his gargantuan sword. Like me, he wore dark metal armor, but his had a familiarity that revealed itself when Arx Maxima whispered into my mind that it was the breastplate of Vine, a relative of Lucifer’s, and the sword had the name of Viper.

The dark, ominous armor of the Stellarae Enclave could give anyone an ominous look, but mixed with the humongous sword, Xian’s yellow-orange eyes, and the feral, almost untamed aura about him, and I wondered if this guy ever helped anyone. Ever.

“Uhh, no. I was told if I enkindled Ultimate Freedom for you, that you would aid my cause.” I looked backwards to watch Chrys approach the conversation. Remy and Claire were also making their way to us.

“You are an enkindler? Your spear is impressive. I can feel the camaraderie between our weapons. Why is that?” Xian didn’t really demand answers, but his way of looking at someone was so blunt, so curt, that you couldn’t help but feel there was a dash of command in everything he said.

“I am an enkindler, my name is Emery. My spear is called Delirium of Ruin, and once belonged to Lucifer, first envoy of Arx Maxima, a powerful member of the Stellarae Enclave before the cataclysm. Your sword and armor were wielded by one of his relatives, known as Vine. The swords name is—” before I could say, Xian held up a hand.

“Viper,” he said, showing a ferocious smile. He had surprisingly human teeth, no accentuated canines or fangs at all. His eyes were almond shaped, and I didn’t quite know what to make of him.

“That’s right,” I nodded. “So, was I lied too? Will you join me if I can enkindle Ultimate Freedom for you?”

Chrys stepped up next to Miyuki, who remained a step behind me. She had sheathed her swords, but watched the interaction between Xian and I with amused interest. I wanted to glare at her for not helping, but she wasn’t really part of our group, she’d only been here to kill Alrik and avenge her sister, Yukiko.

“If you possess the skill to catch Ultimate Freedom, I will indeed join you. Perhaps it takes a dragon to catch the wind?” Xian asked thoughtfully, and I felt a surge of annoyance that the smiles both women behind me flashed at him. It’s not that I wanted them to smile at me like that, but it felt like a bit much. A giant lion-man with a huge sword, spouting curt philosophical nonsense and suddenly Chrys and Miyuki were blushing at him like school girls?

Not that either of them was blushing, when I looked again. Perhaps I had let the whispers of Ebon Gale seep into my mind a little too much.

“I’ll try. Chrys, why don’t you tell Xian about our goals while I see what I can do?” I handed Xian off to Chrys’s capable hands, and let my mind blank. It only took me three deep breaths to fall into the world of concepts and powers. Xian possessed three concepts currently: Sword (Viper), Chains, and Roar were enkindled to his strength, agility, and vitality respectively.

Now, I needed to find him Ultimate Freedom. I had no idea what that might even look like, or be, but as I cast my mind about the conceptual, abstract realm, not much answered my calls. There were lesser concepts, like freedom, independence, self-determination, a whole host of sapient ideas that ran when I suggested I wanted Ultimate Freedom. The more I asked, the emptier and emptier the abstract realm of concepts became.

Did I really need a huge warrior like Xian to free Etienne from Mithras?

“Ope, you’re going to have a hard time finding what you’re looking for, kiddo.” A feminine voice spoke to me from nowhere. She spoke in a folksy kind of way with a weird accent, and I had never heard the word Ope in my life, but for some reason the moment she said it, I knew it meant something like oops, with a dash of an apology thrown in.

“Why? I’ve never had an issue finding concepts before. Who, or what, are you?” I couldn’t sense any presence near me in the weird realm of concepts, it was as if every other concept had abandoned this segment of their abstract existence to avoid me. Or perhaps, to avoid the voice.

“Because there’s only one being with Ultimate Freedom. Like Ultimate Power, Omnipotence is a singular characteristic. Other entities may be nearly omniscient, or nearly omnipotent, but only one being is actually those things, and only they possess ultimate freedom. All other versions are imposters, shadows, and fragments.”

The world around me shifted, and I found myself on a wooden dock twenty feet out from shore on a large lake. Up the hill was a beautiful little cabin, and sitting at the end of the dock was a woman with hair that was every color, all at once. Her eyes were what hit me the hardest though. One blue, one red, framed by long bangs. She dipped her head in a nod, and the brim of her straw hat slid lower, hiding her eyes, before she turned her attention back to the lake. She had a fishing rod, far fancier than anything I’d ever seen, and seemed to be enjoying herself.

“Who am I? The one with Ultimate Freedom, of course,” she answered with a friendly laugh. I felt better now that she wasn’t looking at me. When her strange eyes looked at me I could feel a powerful pressure, and hordes of unwanted questions popped through my mind. What was the meaning of life? How could someone like this exist? What did she want? Why did she let me exist? Why did anything happen? I pushed the breaks on my thoughts and cleared my mind. Now wasn’t the time for a mental crisis.

“So, you’re the one who Xian wants to enkindle?” I asked.

“Yeppers,” she answered nonchalantly.

“You are the ultimate, omnipotent, omniscient power?” I asked slightly skeptically. She didn’t seem like she was even on Arx Maxima’s level, let alone more powerful.

“I am. After we made your Universe, we strolled around sometime. Not many legacies of our names survived your calamity. It bruised Kallos’s ass badly when that crazy big ship you’re bound to crashed into her from out of nowhere.”

Arx Maxima’s own recollection of the calamity played in the back of my mind. She had hypothesized she crashed into the divine itself…

“I’m sorry Arx Maxima crashed into your friend? Would you please let me enkindle your concept to Xian? I need help saving my brother from Mithras,” I didn’t want to beg, but I had come here seeking something, and she had what I needed.

“Think about what you’re asking me, kiddo. You want to give this warrior you barely know access to the powers of the almighty. No one and nothing bats in my league. You could be unleashing a scourge upon your entire… err.. Gossamyr, you call it?” The woman reeled her lure in, and cast it back out.

For a brief moment, I felt everything I knew, believed, dreamed, or had ever thought fall under the gaze of this woman. She saw me naked and revealed, all the trauma and pain, and the things I pretended weren’t wrong, that were. And she laughed, as if something were hilarious.

“Your entire system of measurement is still based on the size of my boots? That’s hilarious! Hilarious, and depressing. What a shitty system of measurement.”

“You’re Omnipotent and Omniscient, yes? Doesn’t that mean you could stop that from happening? Cut his power off if he crosses lines you don’t want? He’d only have a shadow of a shadow of your power, wouldn’t he?” That certainly seemed to be the way it worked for the rest of us. Three of my concepts were Arx Maxima, yet she was far more powerful than me. I ignored the comment about boots. Was her foot the foot?

“That’s not a bad argument, but what if I told you… I’m pretty lazy, and extremely apathetic, when it comes to ruling over the Lower Domains?”

“I’d still ask. Mithras took over my brother, and I want to free him. If Xian has the power of freedom mixed with my enkindling powers, I’d have an even better chance, right?”

The woman laughed. It wasn’t the dangerous laugh of Amaranthine, or the carefree laugh of Miyuki, or the enchanted laugh of Claire. This woman’s laugh held something else, and I couldn’t pinpoint what it was. Sadness? Pity? Condescension? Maybe it was all three.

“You could just ask me to save him,” she pointed out.

“Would you?” I asked hopefully.

“Nope,” she answered with that same laugh.

“Then, please, won’t you let me enkindle Ultimate Freedom for Xian?” I dropped to my knees, which rocked the whole dock while I pleaded and begged. Out of the corner of my eye I saw fish dart away from the dock in response to my movement and noise.

“Ugh, fine, but I’m only doing this because your Xian is a alter of my cat,” the woman sighed and set her fishing rod in a holder and stood up. I noticed a glass bottle, beaded with condensation, also lay in a holder on her strange green and gray fabric chair. She was as tall as I was but it felt like she was taller. The wind dramatically fluttered her long white scarf in the wind, and when my eyes tracked back to her face, her hair was a sole color, aqua blue.

“Let me give you some advice, kid. You need help. Your psyche is a mess, your trauma has trauma, and that’s no good for anyone. If you want to be a Big Damn Hero, or a Big Bad Evil, you need to get your ducks in a row. Not that I’m judging you about the duck incident, we’ve all got favorite foods.”

Those eyes, one aqua, one red, threatened to snuff out the candle of my life with a stray thought. Coursing behind them I could see powers beyond anything I had ever conceived of, powers that made Mithras and Amon seem like flies. Why, then, had this entity, this Goddess, taken the time to talk to me, if she found the ‘Lower Domain’, whatever that was, to be such a bother?

“My name is Telos, maybe we’ll talk again sometime, but I wouldn’t count on it. I don’t usually invite the people who scare the fish away back,” the woman laughed, and pressed two fingers from her right hand against her lips. I noticed they were clad in mesh metal gloves adorned with crystals and gems. Her left hand suddenly pushed me a step backwards, and I fell, while she blew a kiss after me.

The kiss wasn’t for me. I watched the metaphysical, possibly spiritual lip marks land on Xian’s face, where they burst into flames and spread through his essence.

I hit the real ground hard, distracted by the whole process going on with Xian, who from my position on the ground was a damned giant. Blue and red flames sheathed him as Ultimate Freedom (Telos) etched itself into his soul. If the Urmahlullu had been otherworldly and strange before, he had gained a faint glow even once the transition to Topaz faded. His hair had become half blonde, half black, and one of his eyes had inverted the black and orange. Aqua flames burned down the length of his huge sword, reforging the metal with a pattern similar to the one we had referred to as Damascus Steel in the True World.

It looked as if Telos had put lipstick on and kissed Xian’s eyes, for around each were now tattoos of her lips, the left blue, the right red.

The red flame burned over his chest plate and armor, and when it had finished, the armor went all the way along the top of his lion-back, providing protection to all four of the limbs of his lower half.

“Damn,” Remy grunted as he watched the transformation.

“You have done well, dragon. Let all know that I, Xian the Unfettered, shall be the blood brother of the Storm Dragon, Emery of Monados.”

Storm Dragon, huh? I suppose that was a better nickname than Elegant Dragon, or Ravenous Dragon. Clearly, Chrys and the others had informed him of our mission while I was chasing concepts. Maybe Xian wasn’t such a bad guy after all. His front lion legs even leaned down, and he helped me to my feet.