Free Web NovelChapter 80: The Eye Cascade
" Everyone — "
Kei heard the Umbra High Cleric’s voice get that far .
And then his consciousness was not in the fissure anymore .
It was pulled — not drifting , not fading , but taken , wrenched inward along a line he had no say in , the glade and the bloodglow and the thin seam of trunk between his fissure and Asp’s all collapsing away at once — and Kei found himself standing in the Mind Palace , the large hall of it around him , the silence of the place absolute after the noise he had been pulled out of .
" What happened ? " Kei asked .
Epoch answered , and here in the palace the voice was fully audible , not the VDU-text of the outside world but a voice in a room .
" A mental attack was coming . I had no time to inform you . " The words fast , for Epoch — the clinical register moving at a pace it did not usually move at . " I saw the eyes forming on the Choir-Eater through the VDU and I recognized it — from the data you fed me out of the Umbral Archive . " A fractional pause . " Guess that came in handy . "
The data he had told her to file . For later . He had not known later would be this . ƒreewebɳovel.com
Kei summoned a chair — the thought of one enough , here , the hall producing it — and sat , because sitting was what the body did when the mind needed its full attention elsewhere , even a body that was not currently his to use .
" What was it ? " he asked.
" The Eye Cascade , " Epoch said . " The Choir-Eater’s mental attack . It opens the eyes and it reaches the mind — every mind in range — and each one registers it differently . There is no single effect to defend against because there is no single effect . It targets the mind and nothing else . But the attack is devastating , and the damage , in those who survive it , is long-lasting . " A beat . " You did not survive it . I removed you from it . There is a difference . "
Kei did not sit with the lore .
" What is happening outside , " he enquired . " The others . What about the others ? "
" I don’t know , " Epoch said . " I am in here , with you . But your body is still in the fissure — your eyes are open , the VDU in your left eye still feeding . I can put the outside on a screen . Do you want to see . "
" Yes . "
A screen manifested out of the hall’s nothing — vast , filling the wall that had not been a wall a moment before — and the glade resolved across it , seen through Kei’s own open , vacant eyes . His body a camera now , parked in the danger , while the part of him that could do something about it sat in a chair in a sealed room and could do nothing at all .
---
He watched the Umbra High Cleric die .
The screen caught the end of it — the Master practitioner on the forest floor , the broken ankle , the blank face , the walk toward the abstract direction that existed only behind his own eyes — and the six-meter shed segment coming down on him and crushing him to mush against the ground . Kei registered it . Filed it , the way he filed everything , even here , even now .
He looked on .
The third guillotine strike was already in motion .
The Red Widow’s third pull had begun before the cascade fired , and a pull that had begun could not be un-begun — the silken blade canted and came down obeying the one law the Eye Cascade could not reach . The cascade took minds . It did not take inertia . It did not take gravity . A blade in motion stayed in motion regardless of what the eyes did to whom , and so the guillotine descended through a glade full of unmade minds as the only thing in it still behaving by rule .
And the strike tore the rest of the structure down with it .
The remaining tightened strands , pulled past their tension by the blade’s fall , came free — and they did not come free clean . They brought their anchor-trees with them , the silk’s adhesion ripping bark and trunk , Bleed Bark and Hemoth Pine alike , some trees uprooted whole , some torn through the middle and folding . And the joined bleed bark was not spared . The strand-pull caught the inosculated portion where the two trees had grown into one , and it tore — the seam giving , the right tree’s bark breaking open , the fissures along it splitting —
— and Rapax , Doctor , the Noctis High Cleric , and the Umbra Rite Cleric were exposed , the concealment that had held them opened to the glade in a single tearing motion .
The cascade took them as they fell .
---
Each mind differently . Epoch had said it , and the screen showed it .
The Red Widow swayed her front legs upward — slow , reaching , the apex of the northern web lifting its forelimbs toward the canopy as if in prayer , the berserk hunt gone out of it , the mind behind the eye clusters reached and turned toward something that was not there . The Choir-Eater rolled sideways under the descending blade , and the guillotine that had been falling toward its body glided instead toward the Widow’s lifted front legs .
Rapax did not fall like the others .
He entered the semi-corporeal state on the way down — the Living Darkness answering — and around him a shadow domain sphere closed , a contained shell of his own domain , and the sphere did two things at once : it broke his fall , and it held the cascade out . The mind attack reached the sphere and did not cross it . Rapax landed inside his own shadow , mind intact .
And the Choir-Eater’s nearest eyes turned toward him .
Marginally . A fraction of the countless eyes shifting to the new brightness — because a shadow domain sphere was shadow, active and bright, exactly the kind of manifestation the Choir-Eater hunted , and Rapax raising it to save his mind had lit himself up in the one register the creature fed on . The attention was slight . The derived apparitions , some fully manifested and some forming and the Widow’s guillotine still swinging kept the bulk of the creature occupied . But it was attention , where a moment before there had been none , and the screen showed it land on him .
That was the trap of it , and Kei saw the shape of it from his chair .
The cascade took the mind of anyone who stayed open to it . The only defense was a shadow sphere . And a shadow sphere was food . Stay dark and lose your mind . Raise your shadow and become the meal . There was no position in the glade that was safe from both at once .
The Noctis High Cleric had chosen the sphere .
He landed safe inside it , the mind attack turned at the shell , and he came down whole and turned to read the glade —
— and a blade went up through his throat and out the top of his skull .
---
The hand behind the blade belonged to the Umbra Rite Cleric .
He had jumped down using a shadow master’s skill to land unharmed — the body protected , the skill answering the fall — but the skill had protected only the body , and on the way down the cascade had reached the mind the skill did not cover . He had landed unhurt and insane . And his eyes were bloodshot , the whites gone red , and his mouth moved without stopping .
" Die , " he said , driving the blade higher into the Noctis High Cleric’s skull . " Die , you vile Hollow Stalker . Die . "
The High Cleric’s blood came out of his nose and his ears . It welled dark into the sclera of his eyes , the whites going to black blood as the blade pushed up through what it had entered , and whatever the Umbra Rite Cleric saw in front of him — the Hollow Stalker his broken mind had put where his teammate stood — he kept killing it , kept mumbling at it , die , die , you vile stalker , the words and the blade going together .
Another pair of hands came up behind the Rite Cleric .
Two long needles , held at inclined angles , one to each side — and they went into his ears , through the eardrums , inclined inward and up , and they drilled into the brain behind them . The death was instant . The mumbling stopped between one die and the next , the Rite Cleric folding where he stood , the blade in the High Cleric’s skull going still with the hand that had driven it .
Doctor pulled the needles out .
He cleaned them — a small, unhurried motion — and looked at the two bodies at his feet, the Master who had killed and the Master who had been killed, with the same warmth he looked at everything, the gleaming quality undimmed, no register of grief or alarm anywhere in it. A thing had needed doing and he had done it, the way a man closes a book he has finished reading, and what moved behind his eyes as he looked down was not sorrow and was not horror. It was the nearest thing Doctor had to either, and it was not very near at all.
And Kei watched it through his own open eyes , from a chair , in a sealed room , and could not move a muscle that was his to move .
