Arc 13. "The Flame of Dicathen."
Cecilia Vritra
I had been saved. And I had been doomed.
Before I was reborn—before my consciousness was thrown into the alien body I now occupied—God had relieved me from the weight of the Legacy.
I spoke it with certainty. It was God who ripped the Legacy's curse from my soul, its yoke from my body, and its pincers from my mind. However, right as that miracle happened, I was also claimed by something far worse: by the Devil.
I thought I had known fear in my past life on Earth.
I thought I had known fear when I constantly experienced ki backlashes—events that threatened to rip me apart, body and mind; the Legacy's whispers being the worst part of those attacks.
I thought fear was the anxiety and paranoia of being under the constant risk of being kidnapped. By Etharia's government, by Trayden's covert agents, or by whoever wanted to get their hands on the immeasurable power of the Legacy—which meant every single person who knew of it.
I thought fear was knowing I was a life-threatening danger even to the only people I had ever called my own: Grey and Nico.
And then, as my sense of self vanished more and more when I was experimented on after I was eventually captured by Trayden... I thought fear was the Legacy itself and how it became my only anchor in those cold and cruel laboratories.
The Legacy, the source of all my problems, what made my life hell, turning into the only thing that kept me sane. How ironic.
"The worst case of Stockholm syndrome ever registered"—I still remembered how the scientists whose faces I couldn't recall talked about it between them, as if I was just a specimen.
However, I was wrong. Agrona Vritra was worse than any fear I had ever felt. Worse even than the Legacy? No. Nothing was worse than the Legacy, but Agrona Vritra was a close second.
And unlike the Legacy, Agrona Vritra was physical.
Even Nico and Grey were afraid of that Devil, and now they were to go to a land called Dicathen, abandoning me behind. The High Sovereign of Alacrya, Lord of the Vritra, the "God" of this World.
It was in Agrona's ki that I felt just how sick a being that Basilisk was. Even without the Legacy, I had gained enormous amounts of "Insight"—as the people of this world called it—over ki.
So much that I was able to sense it even when there was none around me, thanks to the ki centre I had in this horned, cursed body of mine.
Back on Earth, humans had been able to use ki thanks to a metaphysical "organ" people learned to call ki centres. Every single person had one, because ki itself was the by-product of life, as I had been forced to learn during my days of captivity. They always said understanding made you stronger; now I knew that was called Insight.
And it was exactly that Insight, that knowledge, and this physical, organic ki centre that kept me alive in Taegrin Caelum as long as I remained useful to the Devil.
My thoughts were interrupted. The door of my room, dark and opulent, like those Gothic cathedrals from old Earth, opened. For an instant, I dared to hope it was Nico... or Grey.
Even if they both had changed so much, they too cast in these "Vritra-blooded" bodies, they remained Nico and Grey. Nico and Grey. Nico and Grey. I repeated their names in my head, foolishly hoping that by doing so, my wish would come true.
Please, God—my prayer was fractured by him.
"Cecilia, dear girl," Agrona Vritra's voice was exactly what religions on Earth associated with demons and devils.
Smooth and low, relaxed and charming. His voice had the pretense of bringing you peace, but peace was what Agrona Vritra drove away from your heart. The black elk-like horns of the Basilisk cast shadows on the floor of my room, and I stood there immobile like a deer caught in headlights.
"Now come, I do have something I need you for," the High Sovereign ordered, and I felt an itch in my veins that demanded I obey.
"Y-yes, Agrona..." I said, quick to follow behind the Basilisk.
—
"Do tell me, Cecilia," Agrona murmured, his measured strides echoing through the labyrinthine corridors beneath Taegrin Caelum—each passage a grotesque reflection, carved in the earth, of the High Sovereign's warped mind.
These subterranean corridors were bleak and sterile, utterly devoid of life, carved with obsidian runes and sinister trophies extolling the glory of the Vritra.
Black basalt met cold, dark steel, every passage mirroring the oppressive architecture of Taegrin Caelum's countless surface spires.
Everything within the High Sovereign's stronghold was engineered to terrorise, yet its master strode through the gloom with the effortless ease of someone wandering his own living room.
Because this was where Vritra lived best—what everything and everyone else avoided. The Lord of the Vritra trod with his hands behind his back, each movement commanding the space around his form.
The ki emanating from him was immeasurable. The bodies of pure-blood Asuras were able to produce ki themselves, unlike humans back on Earth who relied on the ki present in the ambience of my former world.
The people who had experimented on me would have gone crazy seeing something like this with their own eyes. The theories I had been forced to study, about how ki came to be on Earth, suggested that it was the product of millions of years of Earthen life, from the first unicellular being spawned billions of years ago to humankind.
It was a process that took eons, and here Agrona Vritra was producing it simply by walking.
Oh, God forgive me... I didn't want to teach him how ki works, I prayed in my mind.
"How is your ki centre faring?" Agrona asked, his tone deceptively warm. I had to consciously force myself to remember that there wasn't a single shred of warmth within him. "From what you've described, it isn't meant to function as a physical organ at all."
"You are right, Agrona, it is not," I repeated, focusing my mind on the organ in my solar plexus. "I am... feeling well about it."
More than well, in fact. Even without the Legacy, I had a larger ki pool than what I had ever had back on Earth already.
Was humankind really so pathetic? Was I—the strongest human being, praised so much by my jailers—merely a small fish in an even smaller pond?
"I have an interesting theory I want to test with you, Cecilia," Agrona said. "If ki is life force, what is the best vessel for it?"
"An Asura..." I replied, following Agrona.
"Good answer, girl," Agrona said, a hand going to his chin as he pondered something. "However, I wonder why this world never witnessed the appearance of ki. Is it because mana is fundamentally better? Possible, but that can't be it."
We continued through the bowels of Agrona Vritra's fortress, the corridors becoming darker, more ominous with every step we took. Cells were scattered all around me, whoever was once held inside long withered to nothingness.
"And yet mana and ki remain derivatives of aether," Agrona commented. "What is the reason why one is present only on Asuraloka and the other only on Earth? I fear that answer is still out of our grasp, dear girl."
Agrona raised a hand, and a dark glow that swallowed light rather than illuminating it appeared. My senses recoiled—Agrona's ki was like nothing I had ever witnessed, and I had let him get it.
"Alas, this is weak," Agrona said, looking at it. "Even a silver-core lesser is stronger than this."
The darkness disappeared as the eerie light of Taegrin Caelum's corridors returned.
"Albeit, here comes my resolution to that, Cecilia," Agrona said, continuing to walk toward the depths of his fortress.
Down and down into the depths of the earth... Taegrin Caelum was Hell, and Agrona was the Devil, its master. And yet it still mocked heaven with its hundred ominous spires on the surface.
"What is that resolution?" I asked—not because I wanted to ask, but because that was what Agrona expected, and as such that was what I needed to say. Every ounce of will that was mine was dangerous to me, to Nico, and to Grey.
In the end... truly nothing had changed from Earth; the stakes had only become so much higher.
It was only then, amidst the darkness of Taegrin Caelum's lowest levels, that I saw what stood at the far end of this tunnel: a large, ominous split gate lost in fog—Grim Mist, a decay deviant of water magic.
The split door was carved with symbols; it looked like a giant guarding and serving the darkness at the same time. It was similar to the entrance to the Obsidian Vault Grey and Nico had described to me, but I knew better.
Another of Agrona Vritra's manipulative techniques was sharing information. He had told me what these types of gates were: Ayin Gates, artifacts dating back to the time of the Ancient Wraiths: the ninth race of Asuras. They served to seal relics, mana, souls, even Insight itself.
Agrona called all the information he gave me just a way to repay my own teachings about ki, but they were just more chains. Knowledge was a weapon, and Agrona Vritra used it better than everyone.
The High Sovereign placed one greyish hand, his skin like the surface of the moon, grey and otherworldly, against the gate. Then, the split door parted, opening on itself as the Grim Mist was sucked into the chamber the Ayin Gate sealed.
The ominous door opened to a large prison chamber where I felt a vast source of ki—a source so vast that it made Agrona look like a little candle in comparison.
However, it was not true, free ki like that held in my ki centre; it was pure lifeforce, what produced said ki.
In the middle of the prison, long Blood Iron spears piercing his abdomen, was an angel. He was so incredibly beautiful that even his pitiful state stood in stark contrast to the grim darkness of Taegrin Caelum's dungeons.
His toned arms were raised, secured in that awful position by chains connected to the wall around his wrists. A cascade of long, silky hair—orange like the setting sun with a smoke tinge that shone gold—framed his face, falling like a curtain in front of it.
Agrona halted as the Ayin Gate fully opened.
"Mordain!" The High Sovereign saluted, opening his arms in mocking greeting. "Great Lord of the Asclepius Clan; I do have many news to tell you, old bird."
Who was this chained, angel-like Asura?
Mordain twitched at Agrona's words, raising his head. Two eyes, blazing like the sun, looked at Agrona with an expression of... peace. Despite everything.
"Agrona," Mordain greeted back, his voice as angelic as his looks. "Here to flaunt your ego? Flay my flock's remains before my eyes? Probe into my mind?"
The words could have seemed mocking to an outsider's perspective, but hearing his tone, he simply spoke the truth. There was no second goal veiled by his words, so different from Agrona Vritra, whose every utterance held a hundred more subtle machinations.
"Nothing like that, Mordain," Agrona Vritra replied, as if he was speaking to nothing more than one of those talking toys from Earth, programmed to give certain answers. "As I said: I bring news for you. Cecilia, girl, what do you make of my guest here?"
My eyes widened, and I shuddered as Agrona addressed me.
"H-his lifeforce..." I mumbled, trying to understand what Agrona wanted me to say. What did I make of him? That he seemed an angel—he only lacked wings, but if he was a Phoenix, then he must have had wings. "He has a vast amount of lifeforce. He could be a source of ki."
"Just what I thought," Agrona replied, turning slowly toward the chained and impaled angel. "But that will be another day. Right now, I truly desire to brief Mordain of his "son.""