After returning to Godora, the days pass slowly. I can’t help but wish I had someone like Euryphel to pass the time with.

Five days later, I’m not sure whether or not to feel surprised when one-hundred Hashat acolytes in dark robes appear on a remote beach in Godora, just as Euryphel promised. Jairinka and Ajun’ra stand beside me on a small mound of sand obscured by tall grass, tense as wound springs.

“Remember, when the monster comes, stand back and don’t do anything,” I caution.

Jairinka gives me an annoyed look, while Ajun’ra shifts her weight onto her other foot.

“Whatever you say, Corona,” Ajun’ra whispers. “We’re seeing this to the end. If you’re going to fail, we will intervene.”

I don’t plan on failing. “Very well.”

A few minutes pass. The Hashat cultists have written a series of symbols and geometric shapes in the sand in a dark, sticky crimson. Seven cultists do all of the writing, followed by underlings holding black buckets. The seven frequently dip their brushes into the buckets, the coagulated liquid proving a poor medium for writing on sand.

“Where did they get all that blood?” Jairinka asks, voice dripping with contempt.

It takes the seven cultists a full hour to finish their work, an array of different geometric nodes nested within one another and filled with illegible, cursive-like scrawl. Even from a distance, I can tell it’s unlike any language I’ve ever seen. Hashat’s creation is at once beautiful and hideous, its sinuous lines and shapes offset by ugly globs of dark tissue.

The array having been finished, the cultists mutter amongst themselves before taking their respective places along the circumference of the circle encompassing all the other shapes. The cultists hold out their arms, then each takes a dagger hidden in their robes and cuts their wrist. Blood immediately pools out, but instead of dropping to the ground, the fresh blood moves toward the center of the array, where a pit has been dug into the sand. The blood fills the pit quickly, the small trickle from each wrist compounding into a steady flow.

When the pit is full, the cultists all pull their arms back and wrap prepared bandages around their wrists to staunch the flow. The seven cultists who drew the array then come forward, walking carefully along seven paths of sand devoid of writing. As they reach the edge of the pit, the seven each pull out a small sheet of paper and chant from the page in unison. As they speak, the blood pit begins to roil, bubbles churning the surface. When the seven utter the last syllable, the blood pit explodes upward like a geyser. The blood falls back down slowly; it almost looks like someone has poured a bucket of viscous red paint over a dense column of air.

The ground subtly moves under foot. Then it moves again, with greater force. The water off the beach grows preternaturally placid and still.

“The water’s being sucked down,” Ajun’ra murmurs, her voice soft.

She’s right: the water appears still only because it is no longer moving under the force of the tides, but instead under...some other force funneling it down.

“Are you sure you can handle this?” Jairinka asks, clutching at his scabbard like the sword will do him any good.

I don’t respond.

A minute passes; by now, the water has formed into a strong whirlpool. The cultists lie prostrate around the blood array, while the seven leaders lock hands and chant in low voices around the half-empty central pit.

“Just how big is this monster?” I murmur to myself. Jairinka and Ajun’ra exchange anxious looks; I see their hearts thumping rapidly, each beat signaled by a pulse of vitality.

When all the blood oozes downward from the air into the pit, the whirlpool violently explodes outward. A nest of writhing tentacles stretches in every which direction into the air, filling the entire field of view from our vantage point. More and more tentacles erupt from the water every second, uncountable in their number.

The chanting stops. The tentacles all still for the smallest of moments, like the beast they are connected to has involuntarily shuddered. That’s when a tentacle thick as a man and several times taller than the Palace of Fortitude shoots vertically out of the tentacle mass, dwarfing the other tentacles. The smaller tentacles now look like the kind of hair that might cover a wild boar, while the enormous tentacle appears like a naked leg. Or, perhaps, like some kind of worm-like parasite lunging from an animal’s corpse.

Soon, another giant tentacle joins the first, and is in turn joined by several others. Eventually, seven tentacles wave calmly above the water like eyeless serpents. One for each of the head cultists.

One of the seven leaders removes his hand from his neighbor and holds it out high. A tentacle immediately begins to surge upward.

The Hashat cultists have absolutely surpassed my expectations: Summoning this kind of monster and finding a way to control it is impressive. Unfortunately for them, I’m here to cut the leviathan down.

The cultists suddenly freeze, their limbs locked against their will. I smile grimly, moving forward out of concealment and onto the open beach.

The monster in the water immediately begins to move its seven large tentacles as though greatly agitated. I kick off the ground and fly over the sand, stopping when I reach the blood array. I peer down at the seven cultist leaders and notice that each wears a manic grin, their eyes filled with challenge as they meet my own.

I feel a strong sense of foreboding, but glide forward toward the thrashing leviathan. The monster is a powerful flame of vitality, its many arms surging outward from some spherical core...under the water. Dealing with the tentacles is futile: I need to kill the monster, not play with it.

The size of the monster is a problem, however: I won’t be able to act effectively at a distance. Steeling myself for the chill of the ocean, I strip off my jacket and trousers, revealing a waterproof suit and an intricate harness of protective bone, then dart into the water. I use the harness to drag me forward into the murky water and close my eyes, sensing the vitality around me rather than relying on sight to make sense of the gray fathoms. The glosSword at my side hums, as though it, too, is filled with adrenaline.

Suddenly, an enormous tentacle breaks through the surface and swings down at me like a butcher’s cleaver. I dodge to the side and continue moving forward toward the tangled mass of vitality. The limb is persistent, however, and follows me like a maddened snake, striking ceaselessly from behind.

I grit my teeth in anger, unsure of how to disable the boneless limb. The entire thing is filled with muscle, proving difficult to ruin completely in one go. Even so, each time it passes by, I sever more and more of its muscle sinews. After about thirty seconds, the tentacle is noticeably less responsive.

But then it is replaced by three tentacles, all of which dart in the same snake-like matter from three different angles.

I dodge the two coming from the sides, but the third strikes me from behind. I use all my power to shield myself from the blow and try to move myself in the same direction of the force towards the leviathan. The strike is still incredibly jarring, and I instinctively begin to cough and open my eyes. Even the glosSword’s defensive aegis is unable to adequately cushion the blow.

I’ve come far enough at this point that I can clearly see the shadowy, impossibly-huge, writhing mass of the monster. A single enormous eye stares at me, unmoving, almost completely black except for a ring of solid, glowing yellow around its rim. What can only be described as an equally-large beak extends from the creature’s underside. The beak opens and closes suddenly with an audible clack, sending a powerful ripple through the water.

Hair-like tentacles stir all along the creature’s body like maggots on a corpse, some even curling over the rim of the eye.

I don’t sense any kind of malevolence, but rather, indifference. Staring into its eye that is at least twenty times larger than myself, I begin to feel a powerful, deep-rooted fear. Before this leviathan I am small and insignificant, barely able to disable a single tentacle, let alone three coming toward me at once, let alone seven cornering me from each direction.

I am struck by powerful indecision: what am I supposed to do? Me, the all-powerful decemancer, invincible against anything alive, able to sever vessels and stop hearts with a single gesture. What can I do against a city-sized–

A tentacle swats at me from the left, punching me through the water diagonally, closer to the beak. And still, I am struck by indecision.

It’s only a game, I remind myself. None of this is real. You must win.

I can’t run away. I need to face this thing, face it...and destroy it.

I sneer at the beast, then dart forward in an erratic path toward its beady black eye. As I come close, the ten-foot-long tentacles covering the monster’s surface strike from every direction. These, however, are small enough for me to deal with in one gesture, and I tear the muscles of each tentacle with impunity.

In a second, I am at the rubbery surface of the beast, but I don’t stop my forward momentum: instead, I bring my arms together, then rip them apart, like I am tearing a piece of paper. The skin parts, and I strain to kill off as much surrounding flesh as possible and dig my way in. A large tentacle is a second behind, its head trying to follow me into the lengthening wound.

I grin savagely, victoriously: the torn hole is deep enough to conceal me, and too narrow for the large tentacles to fit.

I begin to carve a path through the beast, using the glosSword as a conduit through which to channel blasts of necrotic energy, rotting away flesh and allowing me to tear it apart like wet paper. I continue like this for the better part of an hour, cutting ever deeper toward the center of the monster’s vitality. Inside the beast it is quiet and wet, suffuse with the smell of the ocean.

Eventually, I reach the thick wall of a pulsing, dark object. I can only see a small part of it at once, but I have the impression that it must be the size of a residential high rise when viewed in its entirety.

The heart.

I begin to siphon off vitality, forming it into a grand stream of energy that wraps around me like a thick web of strings. It’s more vitality than I have ever seen in one place. I wonder if I’m up to the challenge of controlling that much power at once, of condensing it into a single point. What kind of density would such a soul gem have, if it is made out of vitality so potent as to be viscous and sticky rather than mist-like?

“...We’ll just have to find out,” I grunt, closing my eyes, letting well-honed instinct and technique take over. I lose myself as if in meditation, threading the surging vitality into a hex-weave tapestry, then folding that into numerous shapes, letting the vitality flow organically. I feel it surge around me like a vortex, its manifold strands warm and comforting, like a cocoon. Like a womb.

Despite my state of intense concentration, I retain a vague awareness of my surroundings, and notice that the heart has begun to beat with greater intensity. I wonder what the creature is doing on the surface, whether it has thrashed the beach to ruin or whether it has dived back into the Jermal Trench.

And still, I pull the stringy vitality out and continue to layer it around me, slowly condensing it down, kneading it together, organizing it, crystallizing it, then crushing it. My breathing is calm and in sync with my animancy.

I lose track of time; at some point, the heartbeat begins to slow, and then finally stops with one great, last pumping heave. At that point I open my eyes, then look down, almost surprised to find a gem the size of a human skull floating between my palms.

I blink, and my surroundings shift.