Infinite Realm: Monsters & Legends

Eratemus

Eratemus pushed his offensive, taking advantage of whatever it was that had happened. He was tearing the yeti’s armor from his body, breaking runes wherever he felt power. His constructs appeared and Eratemu’s formations responded. He burned through everything he had in seconds, but he was lucky to find the spatial anchors for the storages where the yeti kept his arsenal.

He summoned skeletons, powerful tools that he threw at the Ra’azel’s constructs in suicide attacks to tear them down, to rob the yeti of his advantage.

A construct whirled to life above them, and a skeletal bird from Eratemus’ storage swooped down and took it out of the air, a beam of pure white light went wide, missing its target.

As soon as the tide of constructs slowed, Eratemus’ advantage increased tenfold. His body burned from the effort, his will was thrumming inside of his head as Zenker’s skills sang, as they made the body Eratemus wore powerful enough to alter reality with a single twitch.

His armor was damaged, half the scales on Zenker’s body were missing along with the formations he had carved on them. His Soul was barely holding on to the vessel through his anchor.

He punched the yeti, cracking his helmet, and when the yet stabbed his still unbroken hand toward Eratemus’ eye, he blocked then broke that arm too.

He grabbed the yeti’s helmet and peeled it open, saw the monster hiding beneath, its ringed eyes glaring back at him.

Eratemus didn’t know what had happened, one moment they were losing, and in the next something had changed. Ra’azel had fallen out of the sky and Eratemus had seen his chance. He had to end it, he knew. He could feel something coming, a sense of great dread was approaching from high above them, and Eratemus didn’t want to wait to find out what it was. The yeti had to die. Others were affected more than he was, he didn’t know why. Perhaps some of his protections had sheltered him from the full brunt of the effect, but he knew that he was the only one that could act.

“You end, now,” Eratemus said as he pulled his hand back, as the world around him shimmered and as a peak of a mountain appeared behind him.

Eratemus couldn’t quite control what Zenker’s body did, it was more instinctual than that. Passive skills were always present, they empowered the body, but active ones happened almost when they wanted to. Not the real ones, more like an echo of them.

Now he felt his fist filled with the intent of what he was about to do, he poured what was left of his Qi into it, using {Bone Shaping} to alter the hand and grow spikes at the knuckles. Empowering his hand with the {Shaping of Inscribed Will}, he poured Soul and Death into it.

Ra’azel glared back, and then he grinned.

“Never,” he whispered. And then the world went mad.

Ra’azel knew many secrets, things that no living Soul had ever learned. He alone had dwelled into mysteries that few had ever even considered. To be a Runesmith was to know the language of reality, to write on the tapestry and have reality answer. In many ways it was similar to Skills, except there was no need for will. A rune by itself with no Soul added to it, with no will or intent, would still work, only it would be weaker.

Ra’azel had learned how to pull a piece of his Soul and imbue it, to add weight to a Rune and make it stronger. And he had learned it from the Aspects.

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Because every Aspect spends a piece of itself to command that which was part of its domain. And to be a Bondsmith was to dominate an Aspect and control it fully.

Ra’azel was a Shade, and that meant that he was a Soul attuned to the Ethereal Realm. Driven mad by the lack of an anchor to reality. Ra’azel had been imprisoned for so long that he glimpsed and crawled back to sanity through the madness. And in there, he had fashioned many wild ideas. Things that he had no desire to attempt for fear of failure.

Now, he was out of options. Robbed of access to his tools, his arms broken, and his Soul feeling drained from all the fighting.

He was a Shade, that meant that his body was quite literally his Soul. Crossing over into the Real Realm had restored his flesh, but it was just a facsimile of the real thing. Every wound he suffered damaged his Soul.

But that was just the thing. He was a Bondsmith, and his Soul was the source of his entire being. The personification of the Aspect of Ra’azel, all that he was, all that he could ever be.

Ultimately, Ra’azel had only three things at his command. His knowledge of Aspects, his knowledge of the Runes, and his undying Willpower, the desire to never give up.

As he stared into a fist raised and ready to bring his end, Ra’azel turned to one of his old ideas, a plan to escape the Ethereal Realm that he never had the need of actually using. The plan that he didn’t know would even work, or how it would affect him.

He didn’t like to take risks, it was why he was taking apart and studying the chosen. But he had no choice.

He commanded his Soul, and his body fell apart.

Nayra stumbled to her feet, her head was foggy as if she had been hit repeatedly. It was both hard to think and not. She couldn’t help but think that she was forgetting something.

She shook the sensation away and looked around. She found Eratemus, his fist raised over Ra’azel, and she stepped forward.

Eratemus’s fist punched forward, and then everything went wrong.

Selia’s head hurt, more than that, her Soul hurt. She watched the world around them and wondered where the damage that had been there just a moment went. The hole in the sky that was done by Tali’s Skill was gone, everything was wrong.

Erdania reached down to her, and pulled her to her feet.

“Selia, are you alright?” She asked. But Selia couldn’t speak.

Something inside of her Soul was burning, and it was spreading.

“Selia?” Erdania’s voice came but it was far away, as if spoken from a world away.

Selia’s legs gave out and Erdania caught her, she was yelling at her now, but Selia couldn’t think.

Her body rippled and flesh poured down her bones as if it was made out of water, her bones crumpled into dust and all that she was faded away. From her Soul something else rose, it pulled all that she was back, pushing it down and away as it stepped forward.

A new body, a new vessel manifested itself as Selia’s entire being screamed with the voice of her other half.

Eratemus’ fist snapped forward, a weight of a mountain behind it, filled with the power of Death and Soul. As it touched Ra’azel’s head, it fell apart, and his fist hit the cliff behind it, blowing apart a hole to the other side of the mountain.

Eratemus watched in confusion as what was left of the yeti’s armor fell to the ground and a white swirl of Essence remained. A Soul unprotected in the Real Realm. It expanded in an instant, as if it had been kept constrained for far too long. It engulfed him whole, and Eratemus realized just how vast the yeti’s Soul truly was.

He had dealt with many Souls over his lifetime, had caught them, put them in vessels, even carved them up. Ra’azel stood above them all. A true Shade, a Soul that had grown so large that it was a hundred times greater than any Eratemus had ever seen.

Before he could even react, a pressure smashed into him, pushing through the barriers he had put in place, breaking his protections by sheer weight of the Essence of the Soul.

And then it was Eratemus’s Soul that was under attack. The yeti’s being rushed into the place where his anchor resided, controlling the body, and Eratemus reached for his power. He manipulated his own Soul and held the yeti at bay.

His formations and arrays cracked and split apart, and the yeti kept coming. It was a losing battle, and his final countermeasures activated. His Soul was violently pulled out of the body, a barrier surrounding him and protecting him as he was about to be teleported back to his phylactery.

Zenker’s body twitched, with full speed of its stats and Eartemus’s augmentations. A hand moved in the split moment before Eratemus’s Soul was teleported away to safety.

A rune blazed, and Space shook, blocking his teleport. More runes followed, and then the Essence of pure Destruction smashed into his barrier, breaking through and hitting Eratemus.

In the confines of his true being, his Soul, he screamed as he was torn apart into nothingness.

His life had been long, filled with solitude and peace. His True Death was quick and filled with pain and violence.

Eratemus Prideborne, the Necromancer, HE WHO CRAFTS UNDER THE EMBRACE OF DEATH, ended, and all that he was passed through to whatever awaited beyond the reality of the Infinite Realm.