Not even the gods could dodge lightning, so Valdemar didn’t bother.

Instead, he quickly reshaped his body before Lord Och could cast his spell. His skin had turned into an armored substance that was like thick iron, strong but inflexible. Two spikes of iron bones erupted from his shoulders and a pathway of nerves formed in his back.

Valdemar sensed Lord Och’s telekinetic might hit him at the same time as his lightning. The first time they met, the Dark Lord’s magic had powered through his apprentice’s defenses and brought him to his knees. Valdemar never stood a chance back then.

But a good spellcaster learned from his mistakes.

Lord Och’s telekinetic push bounced off his apprentice’s psychic defenses without getting past them. His lightning coiled around Valdemar's shoulder spikes and traveled down the nerve pathways prepared for it all the way to his heels. The redirected electricity harmlessly dissipated into the ground after missing his vital organs.

Valdemar had invented this defense to protect himself from the Derros’ lightning pylons after they incapacitated him in Astaphanos. He never thought he would need it to fight his own teacher, but it served him well all the same.

“An interesting innovation.” Lord Och sounded almost proud.

“Fool me once, shame on you,” Valdemar replied as he reshaped his hands’ fingers into organic barrels. “Fool me twice, shame on me.”

A volley of bone and blood bullets erupted from the summoner’s fingers.

Lord Och didn’t bother dodging. Instead, he tore off his robes as his entire skeleton turned black as onyx. Organic bullets bounced off his bones as if it were made of the thickest steel.

Exploiting the lich’s overconfidence, Valdemar tried a trick he once used against the Derros. He telekinetically commanded his own blood bullets to reshape into summoning circles and call allies when they hit Och.

Valdemar attempted to summon fire elementals and brutish gugs. He failed. Harmless flames flickered against Och’s reinforced bones, while the gugs manifested in a shower of organs and blood.

With Ktulu heavily wounded and the spatial anomaly altering reality inside the vault, Valdemar couldn’t summon safely. His allies were torn apart before they could make their way to Underland.

“Pitiful,” Lord Och said as he stomped the ground with his right foot. A row of long bone spears rose from the earth and progressed towards Valdemar like a tidal wave.

Valdemar dodged the attack and charged straight at Lord Och. His nails turned into bone knives sharp enough to cut through steel. In a minute, he closed the gap with his master and aimed straight for the head.

Lord Och deftly stepped out of the way and deflected Valdemar’s arm with a push of his right hand. “Did you mistake me for a feeble old man unwilling to get his hands dirty, my apprentice?”

The steel skeleton’s left palm hit Valdemar’s chest at a bullet’s speed. Magic rippled from the lich’s bones on contact into a mighty telekinetic blast.

If he hadn’t cast his armor spell, the blow would have no doubt blown Valdemar’s organs to smithereens. It still had enough power to propel him backward against the vault’s stone wall. Rock shattered against his back upon impact, and his iron skin peeled off to reveal the festering flesh underneath.

“You don’t live to my age without learning a few things about hand-to-hand combat!” Lord Och taunted his apprentice as eldritch flames flared to life between his fingers.

Recognizing the spell his master was about to cast, Valdemar quickly disabled his armor spell and leaped to his left as fast as he could. A stream of searing fire erupted from Lord Och’s hands. Valdemar managed to avoid the lethal hit, the stone wall of the vault melting where the flames touched it.

“Your strength is your weakness, my apprentice,” Lord Och taunted Valdemar. The air in the room simmered from the heat. “You rely so much on summoned soldiers to the point of neglecting your physical training!”

Lord Och sustained his stream of flames, forcing his apprentice to stay on the move to escape it. Valdemar reshaped the bones of his legs for the purpose of digitigrade locomotion. The sole of his feet receded as his weight shifted to his distal and intermediate phalanges.

Like a cat.

Valdemar reshaped his bones to better improve his speed. His biomancy lessons had borne fruit. He quickly outpaced Lord Och’s flames and moved swiftly enough to reach the frontier of the lich’s field of vision on the left.

Striking by surprise, Valdemar severed his bladed nails and threw them at his mentor from an angle he couldn’t predict. Lord Och didn’t even turn his head to face them. He simply interrupted his fire spell and snapped his fingers.

A cold wind blew in the underground vault.

Valdemar watched on with a shocked expression as a wall of ice rose from nowhere between teacher and apprentice. Valdemar’s projectiles went halfway through before the biting cold made their blades brittle.

It wasn’t a teleportation spell… it wasn’t even a spell from the Blood.

“The Cold,” Valdemar whispered, astonished. “The Whitemoon…”

Lord Och chuckled as the wall of ice collapsed into nothingness. “My poor Valdemar, did you truly think I would limit myself to one field of magic?”

Does he have eyes on the back of his head too? Valdemar wondered in silent frustration. The Dark Lord’s sensitivity to the Blood allowed him to sense attacks coming. I can’t surprise him. Not this way at least.

“The issue of our duel was decided before it even began, Valdemar.” Lord Och joined his hands together and started making hand signs. His shadow grew darker, as black as the Light was radiant. “I am older, wiser, more experienced.”

“Maybe,” Valdemar admitted as he reshaped his body once again. The spikes on his shoulders turned into organic barrels. “But I’m a creative soul.”

Valdemar remembered one of Lord Och’s comments; that he should be careful never to leave a piece of himself around due to his healing factor. He hadn’t fully grasped the reason for the warning, but now he did.

His consciousness was spread across all of his cells. Much like Ialdabaoth, Valdemar could become the wellspring from which new life grew.

His shoulder cannons fired bits of concentrated flesh at Lord Och. As the projectiles crossed the gap between master and apprentice, the Dark Lord’s shadow rose from the ground into a three-dimensional shape. Valdemar briefly thought his teacher had summoned a Haunter, but the shadow appeared to answer Lord Och’s thoughts directly. It transformed into a hundred black hands and stopped all projectiles with an unnatural agility.

Valdemar’s fleshy bits revealed their true nature on impact. Tentacles burst out of them like worms gnawing their way out of a fruit. Lord Och recoiled as he found himself facing floating orbs with many eyes and mouths dripping with venom.

Although they looked like independent creatures, these monsters were nothing of the sort; they were extensions of Valdemar, fingers of a different shape. He watched through their eyes and spoke through their mouths.

His creations spat acid at a surprised Lord Och. The lich’s shadowy hands protected him from most projectiles, but not all. Some droplets managed to hit his ribcage and rusted his bones.

“Refined gastric acid?” Lord Och observed. “I forgot the taste so long ago…”

“Where is she?” Valdemar hissed as he reshaped his body back to its original, human-shaped form and commanded his creations to overwhelm Lord Och. “Where is her soulstone? What have you done with it?”

“What do you think?” Lord Och’s laughter echoed in the vault, cold and sinister. “I destroyed it.”

Valdemar froze in shock and his creations echoed his anger. They snarled at Lord Och and attempted to flank him. Shadowy hands caught them before they could approach the lich, before tearing off jaws and eyes alike. The pain of his minions reverberated back to Valdemar through their psychic link and made his fingers tremble with rage.

“That’s right, my apprentice.” Lord Och smiled wickedly as lightning surged from his hands and vaporized a floating flesh orb. “I shattered her soulstone beneath my heel. I watched her spirit enter the nothing from which it came.”

“Lies!” Valdemar snarled.

“It was for your own good. That woman has led you astray.”

He’s just trying to get a psychological edge on me, Valdemar thought. He had to ignore the lich’s words and focus. For Marianne. For himself. For everyone.

While the Dark Lord was busy slaying the flesh monsters with shadows and lightning, Valdemar slammed the cold stone floor with his palms. He closed his eyes for a second and opened himself to the Blood, tapping into the flesh and soul of Underland. As he had suspected, with Crétail gone he felt like a thirsty man drinking from an inexhaustible wellspring.

Valdemar’s blood turned black as it poured out of his hands. A thin web of flesh and nerves spread all over the vault. It covered the stone ceiling, the cold hard floor, every spot it could touch. It would have touched the portal and the pillar of light keeping the Painted World afloat too, but the raging cosmic energies erupting from both evaporated Valdemar’s blackened blood before it could get anywhere close.

By the time Lord Och got rid of the last flesh minion, the entire vault was drenched in Valdemar’s blood.

Lord Och’s skill at spellcasting and knowledge of magic dwarfed Valdemar’s, but the half-Stranger could tap into a greater reservoir of power. He was an avatar of the Blood itself, one without any rival now that Crétail had become imprisoned in the Painted World. Whereas Lord Och could only tap into his own reserves, his student had access to the collective pool of all lifeforms bound by Ialdabaoth’s lineage.

The Dark Lord looked up at the vault’s ceiling with a hint of concern. Valdemar’s blood had changed colors. From the black emerged shades of red, of purple, of blue and green. Pictures of eyes and moths decorated the dome’s surface. Valdemar sensed the chaotic fabric of space slowly stabilize and bend to his will.

“A Painted Field?” the lich asked. “Good. Very good.”

“I am the Red Prince of the Blood,” Valdemar declared, his voice reverberating through the pigments of his soul. “Neither man nor Stranger. I belong to no realm and obey no laws. All bend to my will.”

“Make me,” Lord Och mocked him.

"I will."

Although the portal-powered spatial anomaly made his control fragile, the sorcerer’s Painted Field gave him a degree of mastery over reality within its confines. Valdemar drew upon his body’s reserves and manifested blades of bones.

But instead of erupting from his forearms, they fell down from the ceiling.

No sooner did Lord Och’s shadowy hands catch them that more weapons appeared all over the Painted Field’s surface. Valdemar used it as an extension of his body to manifest them everywhere his pigments touched.

“Summoning bladed weapons as projectiles… the Pleromian’s tactic,” Lord Och rasped as he recognized the spell at work. “Ah, you learned more than theoretical knowledge from that creature’s wayward soul.”

Valdemar answered his mentor with more projectiles. Hammers of flesh, whips of sinew, and blades of bones rained down from all directions and every angle he could think of. He struck from the left and the right, from above and below. He would have teleported projectiles straight inside Lord Och’s skull too if the lich’s magical defenses didn’t make it impossible.

The Dark Lord’s shadowy hands attempted to block the attacks, but there were too many of them. A deflected projectile merged back with the Painted Field and was thrown back at the lich within seconds. Lord Och let out an annoyed sigh as his shadow coiled around him in the shape of an impenetrable orb. The flesh and bone projectiles bounced off its surface, but the lich had nowhere left to run.

Valdemar couldn’t afford to drag this on. The portal’s energies started to swirl in the shape of a spiral. The chaotic power of the rift was slowly stabilizing into the shape of a corridor leading to the Light.

Lord Och’s fire spell works by summoning minor fire elementals and immediately turning them into rifts to their home plane, Valdemar thought. But he shouldn’t be able to with the spatial anomaly ongoing.

Unless… unless the fire elementals didn’t need to fully enter the material plane. Lord Och transformed them into rifts while they were halfway through the veil between realms.

If so, then I can do the same, Valdemar thought as he raised his hands in Lord Och’s direction. He telekinetically bent blood on his palms to form small summoning circles. With the right, Valdemar tried to summon a fire element; and with the left, its air counterpart.

Calling creatures from two different planes at once was extraordinarily difficult for all but the most powerful summoners, but Valdemar was overqualified.

The sorcerer sensed his summoned soldiers torn apart halfway through the veil between planes. He did not care. He focused his magic and turned the elementals into tiny rifts to their homeworlds. The summoning circles on his hands shone with overwhelming power.

The two rifts to the elemental planes opened for less than a second. That was enough.

From the elemental plane of fire came a blast of searing flames as hot as the stars’ burning heart. From the elemental plane of air burst a tornado of pressurized hydrogen. Both streams merged together into a white beam of blinding radiance.

Valdemar had to strengthen his legs with the Blood to avoid being thrown backward by the spell’s backlash. Lord Och, whose shadow dome had become both a carapace and a prison, could not dodge. The beam cleared his protection like a candle’s flame banished the darkness, continued its way beyond, and then hit the Painted Field on the other side. A good fifth of the dome crystalized around the point of impact while the death ray continued its course through the stone beyond. A chunk of the wall collapsed.

When the energy beam’s light died down, nothing but ashes remained of Lord Och.

The lich had been vaporized.

“You copied my spell.”

Valdemar flinched as Lord Och’s ashes pulled themselves back together. The lich’s raw atoms gathered into the shape of steel bones and a ghastly skull.

“No… you improved it.” The reborn Lord Och gave Valdemar a mock reverence. “My congratulations. You are truly worthy of standing among us Dark Lor—”

Valdemar incinerated the lich with a second iteration of his spell, and watched Lord Och reform just as swiftly with great dismay.

“It’s useless,” Lord Och rasped as he returned to unlife. “Your raw strength and my knowledge of magic are evenly matched, but my body is a mere projection. So long as my phylactery remains intact, I will pull myself back together. We will be locked in battle until the stars die out.”

“Fine by me,” Valdemar lied. He knew all too well that they wouldn’t have eternity before the portal stabilized the pathway.

My Painted Field should have formed a barrier between Lord Och’s body and his soul, Valdemar thought as he and the lich exchanged volleys of fire spells. Neither of them managed to slay the other. Whereas Valdemar dodged attacks well enough, Lord Och simply regenerated whenever he took damage. So why can he recreate his body so quickly?

Come to think of it, something was wrong with this situation. Lord Och’s soul needed to pass into the Light to achieve godhood. He could only do so with his phylactery close at hand.

Is it in the room? Valdemar wondered as he scanned the area. His gaze wandered to the shining radiance at the center of the room and the truth hit him like a bullet to the head.

Back when Valdemar had examined the portal more closely, he had felt a soul inside. The sacrificed people used to power the archway had vanished into the ether, but this one had mysteriously remained behind…

“It’s the portal,” Valdemar realized. “You turned the Pleromian portal into your phylactery.”

Lord Och didn’t answer, but the brief flicker in his fiery eyes confirmed his apprentice’s suspicions all the same.

That was why the Dark Lord refused to back down. He had wagered his eternal unlife in his last bid for godhood. Such was his obsession with the Light that he tied his very soul to its threshold.

Valdemar blasted his master once more and rushed at the portal. He used biomancy to stretch his left arm by more than three meters. He only had to touch the steel archway to suck Lord Och’s soul from its hiding place.

His hand turned to ashes before it could make contact. Magical energy rippled from the steel to incinerate his flesh and bones.

Valdemar gritted his teeth in frustration as his hand regenerated. Lord Och’s laughter echoed across the crumbling dome.

“My phylactery has more protective spells shielding it than this fortress has stones.” A layer of ice stronger than the thickest steel covered the lich’s bones. “Do you understand the pointlessness of your struggle now, Valdemar? The portal won’t close. It will not obey your commands. Only when the veil has thinned will my soul depart its sanctuary and pass through… with yours following, of course.”

The world became cold.

“I have humored you long enough, Valdemar. Eternity awaits us.”

White mist seeped from Lord Och’s bones and dropped the temperature tenfold. A layer of frost covered the Painted Field. Valdemar’s skin froze and turned brittle. The summoner used biomancy to increase his body’s temperature, even as the water in his eyes turned to ice.

“Ktulu,” a voice said from within his ribcage.

Valdemar’s breath of relief turned to mist when it came out of his lungs. His familiar had recovered some of its strength within his body. Its childish mind brushed against Valdemar’s thoughts with a comforting presence.

“Ktulhu ftahgna,” the tiny Stranger said.

An idea traveled through the mental link Valdemar shared with his familiar, as clear as pure water.

It is time.

“You are right.” Valdemar joined his hands in prayer with Ktulu humming to itself. He ignored the chilling cold and the Light’s radiance both. “There is no other way.”

His familiar became a conduit between his summoner and the cosmos.

“In his dead house at the bottom of the sea,” Valdemar chanted, his voice crossing the boundaries between the planes. “The Old One lies dreaming…”

It didn’t matter if Valdemar lacked the power to summon allies. The entity he contacted could reach the universe on their own, even with the spatial anomaly getting in its way.

They only needed to take notice.

“That is not dead which can eternal lie,” Valdemar finished his prayer, “and with strange aeons even death may die!”

Ktulu’s father answered the call.

Valdemar felt his brain boil in his skull as a crushing telepathic presence overwhelmed his thoughts. A cold alien mind ripped through his mental protections as if they didn’t exist.

There was no warmth nor cruelty coming from the link. The entity didn’t even acknowledge Valdemar’s existence. Humans were so small in comparison to its cosmic magnificence that as far as the creature was concerned, they did not even exist. Neither did it feel any affection for Ktulu. The entity didn’t feel emotions the way humans did, if it all.

But it answered its star-spawn’s prayer all the same.

Valdemar only saw a brief glimpse of the entity through the veil between worlds. A human mind would have imploded from trying to comprehend its eldritch geometry. The sorcerer’s half-Stranger nature preserved his sanity, though he failed to properly process the entity’s apocalyptic visage. Its form vaguely echoed that of Ktulu, but with gargantuan proportions. Its flesh existed in multiple universes at once, between the boundary of life and death.

Was it a Stranger? Or something else? This creature wasn’t affiliated with Ialdabaoth, the Whitemoon, or the Silent King, yet its power rivaled their own. The entity embodied the uncaring nature of the cosmos, the apocalyptic power of gamma rays, and the inevitability of entropic annihilation. The fate of men inspired little more than apathy in its cold alien heart.

The chaotic fabric of spacetime weakened further as the entity peered through the veil on the other side. Lord Och recoiled as if struck, his cold aura swept away by an invisible force. The Light’s radiance dimmed as a mighty interdimensional shadow covered the room.

“You mad fool, you will destroy us both!” The mocking confidence in Lord Och’s voice turned to an emotion Valdemar had never heard coming from his teacher.

Fear.

Ktulu’s father was too ancient and powerful for even Valdemar to summon properly. The stars were not right for it. Only the shadow of a colossal green hand took shape in the vault, so large that the Painted World looked no bigger than a nail in comparison. The Institute trembled with its terrible manifestation.

Lord Och unleashed a mighty thunderbolt at the monstrous fingers, the electricity shining bright as the stars. Spacetime curved the lightning around and dispersed it into nothingness. To Valdemar’s eyes, it seemed as if the spell had lost its way through mangled angles and bent lines.

“This is the last Pleromian portal left in all of Underland!” Lord Och shouted in genuine panic. Prayer was now his last refuge. “If you destroy it, you will never reach Earth! Mankind will be condemned to languish in this ruin of a planet for all eternity!”

“I remember your lesson, my teacher,” Valdemar replied. By now, he couldn’t stop the entity if he wanted to. “I will bear the weight of my dream.”

No one should sacrifice others for their dream, if they weren’t willing to die themselves for it.

“I will find another way.”

The hand of the alien god shattered the portal and switched off the Light.

Dimensions collapsed with the vault’s ceiling. Lord Och let out a scream of rage as space cracked and fell apart around him. Valdemar smiled as a surge of energy swallowed his world and blinded him with its radiance.

There was darkness, and then nothing.