Voracious Eye Failed.
Pit hissed, and Felix felt the same. His Eye might have failed, but the miasma of Dissonance that rolled off of it was unmistakable. This close, his Perception and Affinity felt even more stifled than before, but even so, Felix was positive their connections would burn like the sun between them. They were staring at the Primordial that was controlling the entire desert's undead, the one that was hunting him specifically. And the thing was dead itself...or perhaps undead.
Is it...aware?
There were no eyes on the creature, no face or even mouth if you discounted the thousands of humanoid skulls that composed parts of its body. It had no true shape, just a mass with tangled tendrils of bone and stretched ligaments that wrapped around the huge Skyslain's Riposte and outward, to the walls around them. Like webbing or ropes, bone and scale stretched toward the distant cylindrical walls of the chamber, all of which were covered with an unbroken collection of deepest-blue Mana crystals. Much like the city outside, it was like standing on the inside of a geode.
And all the way around the Primordial, a huge, wildly complex sigaldry array hovered, climbing up the crystalline walls in fractal patterns and confusing concentric circles. A cage of light were spat from each confluence of arrays, spun around the sword and Primordial with a deftness and skill Felix couldn't even grasp the edge ofthe working was so far beyond him that even looking to closely at it sent jabs of pain through his Mind.
At the base, where the blade sunk into the greatest chunk of the Primordial, roughly a hundred small figures in crimson armor bustled about with odd contraptions of metal and wood. The Paladins were building something, and a number of them held up long rods that inscribed glowing lines of golden light into the air. They're creating an array? To do what?
Felix couldn't parse the shapes they were designing apart from a preponderance of 'light' and 'wash' sigils. The rest of it was rounded and strange, not like the several types of sigaldry he'd seen in the past.
Behind him, Felix heard the approach of the others, along with Beef's bellows-like panting. "I ran...as fast as...I could. Whatwhat did I miss?"
Felix told him in quick terms, and Beef eyed the dead Paladins around them with a distinct gleam in his eye. "Don't raise them in here. Drag them onto the stairs. There's a sensory barrier at the threshold that should hide your magic from everyone in here."
Beef did just that, turning twenty-five of the twenty-nine Paladins into his Risen. Meanwhile Felix watched the golden array build up below him. It was a measly thing compared to the mesh of magics around the Primordial and sword, but it had a presence that Felix couldn't deny. He also realized he was wrong: the array wasn't just being created, it was being re-created, because he watched as they activated their golden sigils and the crystalline room trembled. Tremors swept outward, roaring as they erupted further away, and power was siphoned out of the Primordial's cage...before the Paladin's array collapsed on itself. Armored men and women fell, some bleeding and others dead, only to be replaced by new figures that picked up their rods and began the process all over again.
"What was that?" Beef whispered. "Felt like being on a boat about to flip over."
Felix didn't stop staring at the dead Paladins, now being dragged away by others. "They're trying to...god it's stupid. They're trying to weaken the cage around the Primordial. Each of those tremors is a piece of its power escaping into the world, or maybe its just backlash from unraveling this thing."
"Why the hell would they do that? I thought you said Primordials were like, endgame big bads?" Beef brushed a lock of shaggy hair out of his eyes. "How does it benefit them?"
"I don't know," Felix admitted. "I don't understand what the Paladins are doing with sigaldry, and the cage itself is beyond me. Those lines..." Felix stared at them, the cable-thick lines of light that extended outward from the sword and beast. Many to the walls, but they all curved slightly before they impacted the crystal-lined surface, and the ones up top simply went straight up. "They're going up. But what's above us?"
Felix flared Oathbinding, Cardinal Flame, and even attempted Manasight. The world devolved into streamers of blinding light, but he pressed on, through it, sorting away the flood of water Mana and focusing on the stomach-churning pillar of blackened-green and orange-brown that was the Primordial itself.
Manasight is level 70!
He could feel his nose bleeding, and the pain in his Mind spiked harder than ever, but there was something Felix was missing. Strands of the Primordial were being teased away, not just by the Paladins and their strange attempts, but by the cage around it. Those lines of light that went up, Felix quickly realized they carried pieces of the Primordial with it, channeling it somewhere else.
Oathbinding is level 45!
Oathbinding is level 46!
Threads of Primordial power soared upward, alongside silver cords that extended deep into Felix's own chest. The Oaths of his people, of his friends, were leading in the exact same direction.
"We're under Ahkestria?" he said, the realization sending a shock of horror through him. "And this array...what was its purpose?"
Manasight is level 71!
He could recognize parts of it now that the bulk of the cage was left behind. In the cable-thick threads he identified tiny portions that were similar to the array he'd once designed to fight off a clutch of vile Urges. In comparison however, his Devour Array couldn't hold a candle to this masterwork of complexity. It was pulling something vital from the Primordial corpse, its Essence somehow being siphoned up and out...to the city.
In a flash of understanding, Felix knew its purpose.
Theurgist of the Rise is level 82!
"The cage is stealing the Primordial's Essence and...and it's feeding it to the Highest Flame," he said.
Hallow looked at him sharply through the eyes of a man he'd just killed. Beef, meanwhile, just scratched his head. "What?"
How long have they been doing this? It appeared the cage was feeding on the Primordial in order to keep it docile and "dead" or at least quiescent. Like the Essence Anchor, but instead of dumping all that power into the Void, it was using it. Or it had been, because very little Essence was being extracted now, and a great deal still lingered within the writhing mass of scales and bone. Why? Was the array failing or something else? Either way, the Paladins are clearly trying to destroy the array. Did they know it was a chain around the Primordial's neck? Or...wait.
Below them, a new array was going up, as eighteen Paladins rapidly inscribed figures in the air with golden light. Those new sigils were forming into glyphs and connecting into a new formation that finally made a bit of sense to him. Felix parsed only that it was a redirection of some sort.
"They're trying to steal the Primordial's powers?" Felix was confused. "How does that benefit them? They can't use it, or else they'll get the flesh curse too."
"It...it feels like strings snapping," Beef said beside him. He was holding his head in clear pain, and was blinking past tears. The lowest portion of the cage stripped and broke apart even more, pieces of it replaced by new, golden light. "It's so bad. Can't you hear that? The storm, Felix. It's the storm."
Oh shit.
The Highest Flame wasn't just sustaining itself on the Primordial. It was fueling the stormwall with it, too.