Free Web NovelChapter 75: Cross And Straw [24] Dead
Dead...I’m dead.
How many times had Leonidas thought this over his...unpleasant stay at this forest?
Stuck in the black ocean, falling from the sky, fighting Toothpick, then Root and Mantis. How many times had he come near to death...
Too many to count, he supposed. And yet here he was again, suspended in the air by the neck, legs dangling uselessly, the pilgrim wearing Willow’s face staring up at him with eyes that had forgotten what it meant to be anything other than hungry.
He couldn’t breathe.
That was the most immediate problem. The second most immediate problem was that his sword hand was empty, Blush having decided sometime in the last thirty seconds to be elsewhere, and his other arm was—as it had been for what felt like the majority of his time in the Labyrinth—not attached to him.
Absolutely amazing.
The Contract chains were still in him, which was the third problem, sapping his will with the patient efficiency... as his own ability did. He could feel his own sense of self getting lighter at the edges, the way a fire got lighter just before it went out entirely.
Not yet.
He focused inward, to the imaginative world, the black void where nothing existed, the place where he was and would always be, God.
He couldn’t move his arms. He couldn’t breathe. He had perhaps fifteen seconds of useful consciousness remaining, and the pilgrim was watching him run through them with satisfaction gleaming in its raven eyes.
Fifteen seconds was enough. He had done more with less.
Leonidas stopped fighting the grip. Stopped straining against the chains. Went completely, deliberately still, his legs going slack while his arm stopped fighting against the grip.
The pilgrim was taking its time. It wanted him to feel it happening. It wanted him to understand, slowly and completely, that there was nothing he could do.
I suppose that would be right.
But it was also wrong.
He stopped fighting because fighting was not the plan.
The plan was something considerably more insane.
Rani’s voice came back to him, calm and direct, a cryptic message that only he would know the meaning of. Sacrifice had a nice wife.
He had understood immediately. The Shroud. His memories, not just his own, but everything the Shroud had given him access to. The loops, Bloom’s face, Sacrifice’s warmth. The vision, the garden, the crystalline roses orbiting a pregnant woman with emerald eyes.
The pilgrim wanted his mind. It wanted to read him, devour him, wear him the way it was wearing Willow.
He was going to let it.
The trick was the destination.
Every mind had rooms. Most minds had ordinary rooms, memories, fears, desires, the accumulated furniture of a life lived at a human scale.
A wanderer could move through those rooms comfortably, could rearrange them, could make itself at home.
His mind did not have ordinary rooms.
His mind had a god’s memory in it.
The Shroud of Sacrifice, fused to his face, integrated into his very identity, carried things that had never been meant for mortal minds to hold.
He had felt it himself when Bloom had turned her emerald eyes on him mid-vision, and the strain of her presence alone had nearly combusted him.
He had felt it in every regression, the accumulated weight of a dead god’s final creation pressing against the inside of his skull.
The pilgrim was Vis-ranked. Powerful. Ancient, probably. Experienced in the particular art of consuming minds.
It had never consumed a mind that contained the memory of a God.
It had never consumed a mind that contained the memory of Bloom. freewebnovel.cσ๓
It had certainly never consumed a mind that contained Sacrifice.
The grip around his neck loosened slightly, settling into a softer rhythm, the pilgrim beginning its work.
He felt the first touch of it at the edges of his consciousness, exploratory, the way something pressed a door before deciding whether to push it open.
Leonidas took one breath and made his decision.
He opened the door.
He opened it the way you open a door when you want whatever was on the other side to see everything, all at once, with no time to prepare.
Come on in, you bastard! Come in and have a look!
The pilgrim surged forward.
He felt it enter. It wasn’t entirely painful, but it certainly wasn’t painless either. It was kind of like needles stabbing him, but these were made of hay instead.
The beast was peaking into his mind, looking for the usual things.
Fear. Weakness. The fracture points where a mind could be leveraged open, the places where identity was thin enough to replace.
But instead, it hit something.
He felt the exact moment it happened, the pilgrim’s advance hitting the Shroud’s memory the way something hits a wall it didn’t know was there.
It was like the particular shock of opening a door expecting a room and finding instead a chasm that dropped further than anything should drop, lit from below by crimson light bleeding through cracked porcelain.
The pilgrim hesitated.
It was the first time it had hesitated.
Keep looking, find what you wish to find.
He dove in after it.
His consciousness followed the pilgrim into his own memory, the dark depths of his mind unfolding like an old scroll. He was certain that he would have to face some traumatic memories...a past he would rather not visit, but Leonidas held no choice in the matter.
He knew he would also visit the good parts of his mind, the ones that contained his most treasured scenes.
His first confession, his first rejection, the old woman who had taken care of him for so long, the man who had helped him when he was on the doorstep, and most importantly, his best friend.
The man who had fought by his side, bled by his side, left his own Circle, just to support him. Leonidas would see his memories with Seridius Morgan.
Leonidas would welcome those memories with open arms, and so, he delved deeper into the black sea, following the demonic beast that had dared touch upon his safe space.
