"Whyhow are you here?" Felix asked.
"Our connection grows tenuous the longer you refuse to seek the Shrines, Felix Nevarre. I had given up hope on reaching you, especially after your Companion refused me," Vellus said, twitching unpleasantly. Everything about her felt disjointed and raw. She hurt to look at, but Felix couldn't even blink. "But here, deep within your core, here our connections thrive."
Pit? Felix queried, but still there was no answer. "Where am I?"
"When you cut yourself off from sensations with your Bastion, it did more than sever them. You unmoored yourselftemporarily, of course. Without your Perception, without even your core to ground you, your Self drifted into this place. An expression of that which animates you, of what moves your very soul."
Darkness that reminded him of the Void and eternal bondage to things he didn't understand. That...was not a great sign. He would have hoped for a happier scene. But Vellus gave him the clues he needed. If Bastion got him here, then it would get him out. Bracing himself for the pain, he deactivated his Bastion.
And nothing happened.
What the hell? "How do I get out? The redcloaks have Authority!" That fact burned, for all the effort he'd put into it. Only to fail. "Mypeople are in danger!"
"The forces acting on you are beyond your understanding, Felix Nevarre. Even deactivating the Skill the led you here is not enough to escape the gravity of significance that binds you." Vellus twitched, and suddenly she was closer. "I can help you fix it, however."
This sounds familiar. Felix scowled at the goddess. "For what price?"
"What is freedom, true freedom, not worth?" Vellus replied. Evasively, Felix thought, but everything about her was so alien it was hard to tell. "I will say that your plight is not your only concern. Your city is being overrun, its defenders dying by the dozen. And your friends are in dire trouble.
"I know that! That's why I need to get out of here!" Felix said. He was fighting to stay calm before the goddess' hedging. "They could be dying right now for all I know."
"I can show you."
Despite himself, that got his attention. Felix felt his stomach twist. He knew the goddess was manipulating him; everyone else had, after all. Everyone except his friends.
"Show me," he hissed.
Vellus reached her too long arm out, sideways, and plucked something. A shimmer of light rippled down a thread in two directions, toward him and off into the distance. His Affinity sang in tones so complex he couldn't follow. The light raced toward Felix, and then it all merged. He saw.
He saw a darkness gathering in the Foglands, thick and viscous as the fog that had once dominated it. The forest and mountains beyond the Walls pulsed, shaking with the approach of something terrible. Dark clouds raced across a sky that had been overcast ever since the Ravager King fell. The clouds thickened, purpling above the city, pregnant with a tempest Felix knew was almost upon them.
A golden figure shone in the darkness, and around his towering form were a legion of monsters. Blue armored hands coated in living ice ripped through the earth. They were free. Golden gauntlets followed, an elaborate armor built in an ancient Age.
A moon rose above it all, soaked in blood.
Felix fell, falling backward off the Wall, yanked through the city by Vellus' hand. He saw white armored zealots swarming like disturbed ants, weapons shining and voices raised in a fanatical chorus. They fell upon stone shaped walls around a series of warehouses. His walls.
Felix gasped, but the vision did not stop.
Redcloaks perished under the weapons of their Tin and Iron Ranks, but it wasn't enough. Their few Bronze Ranks made a dent in the tide of Acolytes, enough to make the Inquisition hesitate beyond the walls. Men, women, and children were gathered up and moved away, back into the fortified warehouses. He saw Thangle weaving elaborate illusions around the civilians, his Obfuscation at work. Hector was frantically inscribing the walls, hoping to repair them maybe, while Aenea was passing out tonics and potions as fast as she and her apprentices could manage.
But then she appeared, holding his hooked sword aloft. A red-gold aura surmounted her head, not quite a halo so much as a crown. There was the sound of rumbling stone and the titanic clatter of something being released. From the clouds overhead came a rain of light upon the encampment. It scoured the earth, burning through leather, metal, and stone.
Nothing survived.
Felix jerked back to himself, his Affinity reeled back like a snapped line. He couldn't move, but he shivered in horror all the same.
"Isis that happening now?" he demanded. If he could have, he would have grabbed the goddess' gangly body and shaken her. "Did that really happen?!"
"No. It is, however, a near certainty." Vellus tilted her shadowy head at Felix, curious. "Have you not seen the Quest notice?"
"That DuFont won?" Felix heaved a series of heavy breathes. His heart wouldn't stop racing. "Yeah I saw."
"Not that. This." Vellus waved a hand, and a blue box appeared before him. It was the same as before, except at the very bottom.
Due to conflicting levels of Contribution, Challengers have been chosen!
Each named individual can Challenge the holder of Authority. If they are defeated, the Authority falls to the Challenger!
All Challengers have three days to Challenge for Authority. After that time period lapses, no further Challengers are allowed.
Named Challengers:
Uldred Teine
Calesca Boscal
Felix Nevarre
Holy "Is this...I can Challenge DuFont?" Felix bared his flat, human teeth. "Good."
"You will never reach her, Felix Nevarre. The dregs of her army are still mighty against a lone attacker, and the defenses she can now summon will dwarf any such efforts. Even by the Fiend."
Felix looked at her. Her voice sounded..."What are you saying?"
"You have one chance to take it, to save your city and those you care for," Vellus said, flickering closer still. She was...larger than Felix had anticipated, and he realized he wasn't sure how far away the goddess truly was. "You only have to make the Choice."
"What choice?
"We are connected, Felix Nevarre. Through the Choices you've already made, time and again. The Titles you bear, the Skill's you've earned." The goddess drifted slowly closer, twitching all the while. Felix held back a gasp. She was no closer than before, but she loomed, a shadow taller than most buildings. "You only need to strengthen the Harmonic connection between us, thicken the ties that bind our causes to the Grand Harmony itself. A Choice will bind us both, and allow me to send you pieces of my power."
An Oath, he translated. Swallowing, Felix looked up at her shrouded face. "What do you get out of this?"
"An emissary. A true servant to complete the tasks I've left undone for millennia." Something like lightning flickered in her incomprehensible form, and Felix briefly tasted a coppery tang in his mouth. "This world has been too long without the gods. It cannot last, not now."
Felix hesitated. He remembered all too well the Chorister of Vellus, and farther back, the Sage of Vellus. Both driven insane by their connection to the goddess. "I've seen your emissaries. Your followers all end up crazy."
"Weakness. They are unable to retain the truth. The Grand Harmony shattered them, either all at once or in piecemeal. They were barely Chanters, but they were not Lost, or Unbound. You are all three, an existence I could not have predicted." Vellus rumbled, and this time Felix swore he could see a bleak, crimson mountain. Lightning assaulted it's peak. "You are my Chosen, ascendant. You alone shall receive my Boon."
That lightning, so familiar, coiled around Vellus' gargantuan form. The goddess flickered and twitched, growing closer and closer, while the blasted terrain he glimpsed within her did as well. She was a mountain of shadow, pressing against Felix with all the weight that implied. He panted, unable to maintain his gaze on that terrible place.
"Please." Vellus' voice was soft, whispered into the dark with a vulnerability that twisted Felix's heart. Something had broken this creature, god or not.
"I," Felix said, gathering his thoughts. Things swirled strangely, so close to the oddness of the goddess' being. "I think" he swallowed, pushing past the pressure that she exuded. "I think that I"
Distantly, Felix felt a wrenching sensation and he gasped. The goddess' pressure redoubled.
"Felix? What is your Choice?"
His thoughts felt murky, as constrained as his body. He waswhat was she asking?
"Your Choice! Do you wish to save your friends? Do you wish to save everyone?" Vellus' voice was thunder, destruction from on high that sparked Felix's primal brain.
"Yes," he croaked, unsure why he was trembling. "I will save them."
Hidden among the pressure, Felix felt cords tighten upon his soul. It was jarring compared to the immense but neutral pull in all directions. Intrusive in a way that Felix found familiar, and memories of the Maw dissolving into his Body flickered across his vision.
The strings of connection between them began to burn, blood and lightning crawling their lengths.
"No no no," Felix blinked, his eyes bulging. He pushed back the fog that clung to his senses. Felix tried to reject them, but the cords only tightened further. A vast presence pressed against him, slithering through his channels, into his core. "Not you too."
"You have Chosen, ascendant," Vellus crackled. She had expanded into his entire vision, so that crimson mountain within her was nearly life sized. "And I cannot let you waste it."
Felix screamed as azure lightning coursed through him. His screams seized in his chest, gripped by a hand bigger than entire cities. His head was forced forward, to peer into the darkness of Vellus' form.
"Behold. My prison, Felix Nevarre. Wrought for me upon my breaking, so very long ago." The mountain loomed, and a mist of bloody rain sprayed into the null space around him. It joined the lightning in tormenting his battered form. "Only the connection of those paltry few brave enough to embrace the truththe unfettered reality of their worldonly they have seen this. My choristers went mad when it took me, and even my Sages and Paragons were lost to its evil predations."
The shadow that was the world moved, leaning down until it's face was mere feet from his own. Felix could see nothing but curdling darkness, punched through by an endless storm of blood and lightning. "I am sorry for this, ascendant. You would not listen, and we have not the time. I have no other Choice. The others race against me, and our greatest failure returns."
The goddess' breath tasted of copper and burnt ozone. Blood and storm.
"I need you, Unbound. Few are they who can withstand the Ruin."
Her grip upon his soul tightened further, but Felix's screams were swallowed whole.