[ The City Without Name - Malleus Denial ]
He was augered across a gallery face, bounced over the arcade columns untill lashing, psychoactive winds grapped his limbs, hurling him on. There was cackling, sheer glee, the joy to be found in wrenching and expressing power. The Dunaan flew upwards and impacted off a cabled resin-joist, then careened off his hip against outcrops of gluey, melted statuettes keeping solemn watch along knots inset in the walls. Pursuing him with relentless, ungodly vigor were the holocron's summoned retinue: phantasmagoric spirits, in casement writhing off false-lightning and gripping ectoplasm. They came upon Seydon through eddies and vortex's of ice-wind, rearing up as they shuddered through curtains of pitch, jet shadow and curtained gloom. Fleshless hands passed like sheering saws into his flesh, leaving raised welts that quickly burst and ran hot blood mixed thickly with pus down the Dunaan's skin.
The Dead King cackling below on his clothed station wouldn't cease laughing. It was hollow, chilling, votive's of amusement entirely dry of human emotion. Seydon thought it sounded too close to Stenwulf: the same gusty hisses of breathy, cruel cheer. The holocron loosed a subsonic rattle. Shrieking air ceased wailing into his ears and dropped him.
Plummeting, the Dunaan managed to turn and land. Boots impacted through ragged, carmine rugging, cracking a spidered bowl across the sooty floor. Now the throned holocron was casting a sunrise glow of flickering colours from its psipathic casement, throwing up patterned visions on every near surface. It was all the colour of opened wounds and slit meat folds, highlights like bone and shade like spinal ichor. Across the far walls where an unholy apse stood in stark, shadowed relief, a wriggling cloak of a hundred visionary lidless eyes. Each iris reflected back an outline of a tall, craggy-brow and horned silhouette.
"I would hear you yield!"
Seydon was busied retrieving Winterfang from a collapse of jet-granite wedged across broken, rotten aisle-chairs. Undamaged, it sloughed free, flourishing in his hands. By dint of his reinforced ossification, body hardened through blacker alchemical techniques, he'd survived being collided across the Chapter House central interior. He still ached: pain was tightening muscle across his spine, turning on his right hip invited agony.
"I still have strength," The Dunaan gasped, hugging at his belly. His field tunic was redressing in red beneath his Farwalker leathers, spilling gags of liquid onto the oily earthen-tiles.
"You have nothing! Trinkets! Baubles! I am undiminished!" A blaze of scorning wind ripped from the dias and ploughed across Seydon's torso, nearly upending him across the nave. "What say you to that?!"
The man kept his silence. Sprawled onto his belly and legs, it was a long, forlorn crawl towards the resting altar. The spirit's tantrums had upset its ciborium, shredded to marrow and dust flecks. If he could but wrestle with a physical touch across the holocron, then perchance the thing calling itself 'Ragnos' could be quieted. He replaced Winterfang back to its shoulder-scabbard, flipping a pair of pivot blades free from their gauntlet catch, utilizing the daggers as brief picks. Fist over fist, he began pushing back against the wind.
"We called your kind skin-dogs," Said the spirit, taunting. "We watched you crawl on belly and chin, eking out an existence cleaning our refuse! Never losing pride! Ys! Ys was your lie!"
Gale empowered bustles of ice glittered down the nave-aisle, splashing and breaking across the Dunaan's hooded brow. A lance of electric power so broad it was as broad as a laser-battery shot smoked into him, cascading bursts of crippling, neural fire. Most washed off his armour, some piercing through minute gaps in the textile coverage, nearly burning out pain receptors and musculature. Across the Chapter House floor, the Holocron was visibly shaking with mirth.
"Just a lie for mongrels!"
Soon, Seydon had come to his knees, flexed against cutting wind barrages and spiralling lightning-screws attempting to torch him to cinders. Rave Merrill's handiwork didn't shirk, never faltered. A shard of discarded light glancing off the crystal's cased peak dug into his cheek, burning a long, scarring gash back across the tip of his ear, and popped out through his hooding. The Holocron was no longer laughing. Screams of churlish abuse spat in webbed Force-skeins. It bolstered louder, louder yet, crescendoing into a single note of such vicious threnody all light extinguished and thick blackness.
There was only Seydon's bare outline ploughing ahead through shadow, ice, and hurricane sheer-walls, and the sickly, unreal glow of the ancient micro-pyramid. One last shunt of psionic spite tried driving a mental corkscrew into the flesh behind Seydon's eyes, attempting to initiate a brain haemorrhage. The effort was so grand, the Taurannik transcripts so subtly, invisibly writ into the Dunaan's clothing lit up and branded into his flesh.
But the spells held. Seydon sped up the dias steps, overturning rock tonnes and scattered refuse out of his way. Now, he allowed himself rage. The holocron supped up its spewed shadows, its spiritual-engram receding before it could be brought to answer. Satin cloaks and burst, upholstered pillows tore away. Seydon reached, and plucked the gods-damned 'cron from its silk bedding. In his touch, Khanjar -Cruor Vult - Ragnos saw a moment to renew their contest.
A weight like mountain stone and ridge felled itself across his mind. The laughing began returning in gleeful, mocking force.
Seydon drew up one more summons of will... A trick Rosa taught him... A ram of concentrated emotion, to give a Mindcaster pause in their assault, erecting a break in the combat arrhythmia, enough to give his physicality time to bear and sunder the enemy. Rosa. He sucked agonies of separation and unknowing, pains of choice, compromise, whatever bottled rage he'd kept leashed for the sake of control.
He drove the ram forward into the holocron's pool of writhing memory-engrams. Ragnos stopped chuckling. A low moan of spiritual pain sounded in a sundered gnell. The holocron's hot breach of light dimmed... Quieted... And put itself to sleep.
The Dunaan cradled the treasure against his sorry breast and collapsed down the steps to the baptistery.
